It was only when Simon began to sew the runes of cold prote into the rabbit fur-lined gloves that he had made that he even uood that he’d o sew the runes of fire prote as well. Until that moment, his pn had been to make a set of cold-resistant armor and a fiery on, but then, as he imagined how he would use them both, he recalled the frost sword that the skeleton knight had wielded against him so many times and pictured all his carefully crafted magical furs going up in smoke as his sword caught his clothing on fire.

  The truth was he would need not just prote from both frost and fire, and he wasly sure how to do that. Well, he retty sure how to do one or the other, he corrected himself, but both… it was entirely possible that they would cel each other out or interfere in some weird way that might be even worse.

  Simon gave it a great deal of thought, but eventually, he was forced to set the gloves aside and focus on the simpler task of the armor instead. It was something that he could copy directly from the book like he had the sword schematid it was a lot less work.

  The only problem was that in the end, when he was pleted, he had no real way to test it. Sure, it had only taken two days of diligent effort with the thread to apply the mark in just the right way, but the only way to know if it succeeded would be to put it on and brave the cold. Even at night, it didn’t get particurly chilly out, and there was no way he was going to go jump in the river wearing full armor and see if he stayed warm.

  So, whether he liked it or not, he was just going to have to hope the whole thing worked a it when he walked ihe door to the level. Which meant that he would have to set aside the crude thing and finish emp the sword .

  It was an ugly thing, with crooked lines and handiwork that would never be fused with that of a skilled craftsmae that, though, he retty sure it would work once he pleted the attu ritual with blood and molten silver. But, as he prepared to do that, he realized that once he pleted the spell, it would burn forever. He had no way to stop it.

  “Make up your mind already, Simon,” he chastised himself.

  He would have liked to have bmed the head injury he sustained, but his bance had been perfect for weeks, so this wasn’t that. It was just a lot to think about. He o finish his fming sword, but that was awfully plicated, so he decided to work on the armor first, but sihat was done, he o focus on the scabbard and…

  He sighed. He wasn’t sure if he’d always been like this or if this was brain damage from his injury, but the amount of things that o be done before he opehe door seemed almost insurmountable some days.

  “I should just make a list,” he said to himself, but even as he spoke, he knew he wasn’t going to waste any time with that. He only had like three things left to do besides get good with his bow, so a list would be pointless.

  Finally, after beating himself up enough, he turo the scabbard itself. That at least came with instrus, much like the sword had. In the grimoire, the sword had required over twenty carvings, but the scabbard that would nullify its power required only six, which would have made it simple if the recipe for the ink hadn’t been so plex.

  He had no idea what the difference was. Why did it take three times as many ruo power a fming sword as it did to put it away? He had no idea, but then he’d never done anything like this before. It was magiuch sense could he expect it to make?

  He didn’t know why the fire glyph ected to the slyph, the boundary glyph, or the three unreadable ones, whereas almost everything else only ected to one or two symbols as a primitive sort of circuit, but it did.

  By trast, the clothing was the simplest of all. It mashed all of the symbols together into one bizarre spidery shape that he’d sewn into the lining.

  He sighed, finally putting everything down. Jumping from one project to the , he wasn’t going to get any work done. He o focus, and focus meant swordpy. So, Simo out into the yard without even b to put on a shirt and spent the few hours alternatiweeing up a random sele of trees and using up all his arrows, trying to arc them over his cottage.

  It was a familiar routine, and if he did it until he was pletely spent, he found he’d be able to do a much better job at trating on the important things. He wasn’t sure if this roduct of his ret recovery or just his deep-seated fear that if he stood too still for too long, then he would turn bato a statue.

  Sure, it was irrational, but that didn’t make it less real. He still had nightmares about it. Whenever his mind grew tired of reminding him that he used to have a wife and that she was dead now, of course. Those were the only two topics that seemed to be on his mind when he slept.

  He didn’t wake up screaming when he was turo sto least. Then, he only woke up and found himself practically paralyzed for several minutes as he struggled to remind himself that it wasn’t real.

  The reality was that no matter how long he practiced, the gear he needed wasn’t going to finish itself. Yet he still procrastinated because he was afraid. Of what, he wasn’t sure. Afraid that he would fail? That didn’t matter. He could just try again. Afraid that it would explode and kill him in the process? Death was the only thing in the world he wasn’t afraid of.

  What was he afraid of then, he woo himself as he went through the paces with his sword in a blinding flurry of blows and terblows.

  “That I’m missing something,” he said to himself, panting as his motion finally ceased, aood there holding the bde.

  For weeks, he’d been trying to get this thought out of his addled brain, but today of all days, it finally broke loose, and Simon stood there, slowly turning it this way and that as he studied it. Things finally made sense as he held that ugly little fear in the forefront of his mind.

  There was so much about this world that he didn’t uand, but magic was at the ter of it. He didn’t know how it worked or why it worked. What he did know was that it was exhausting if he used too much, and it seemed to mark him as evil to ahat had the ability to see magic. That pretty clearly indicated that it was at least as bad for him as smoking or something, but he had no idea how much worse it could be.

  Could making these items trigger something like what he’d seen ihedral? Was that deranged series of symbols the result of some attempt to craft gone awry? Could the st step in enting his sword do the same thing?

  Simon tried not to panic as he thought of that, but he couldn’t help but imagine one of the miscarved symbols arg and sparking until it exploded, f a huge magical rupture on his formerly small bde, allowing unknown amounts of evil in the real world. After all, Hybissian was the oh the sed sight or intuition or whatever it was, and she seemed very certain that something bad was about to happen. Maybe it was.

  “Maybe I was naive for thinking that just because I hadn’t pnned on killing anyone didn’t mean no one was going to die,” he mumbled to himself. “I mean - the instru book I’m using is a pretty evil book. Maybe the whole thing is a trap…”

  Simon turhat thought over and over in his mind and quickly realized that his real fear was that he had no idea what he was doing. He was just going through the motions without uanding them, and if this was chemistry, he probably would have blown himself up already.

  That realization was enough to make him stop what he was doing. He wasn’t going to give up on making the magic on, of course. Not yet, anyway. He might if he still couldn’t figure it out, of course, but he really wa just in case.

  What he was going to do was actually focus, though. Instead of just copying down the different symbols and hoping that was good enough, he was going to read the whole damn book all ain. He was going to uand why it was telling him to do different things, and if he couldn’t at least sort of uand it, theake a break.

  After all, he presumably had armor that would protect him from the worst cold. That meant that at this point, he could likely trudge through the blizzard and force his way through the frozen door with an axe or a little fire magic if he had to. He had a lot more trol over his fmes now than he ever did before.

  So, hoping that the old woman that was currently the bane of his existence would uand, he closed the book and reope at the beginning, so he could pour through its entire tents uninterrupted. When he’d first started studying it, he’d just leafed through it looking for the words of power before fog the st several months on the small se reted to blood magid perma entment, but this time he was going to read the whole thing from beginning to end.

  He was, after all, in no hurry. No one could force him to keep going, and near as he could tell, no one except for Hybissian and her most loyal ies wanted him gone. Some people, like Majoria, had actually fided in him that they felt safer with someone like him around.

  So, day after day, he familiarized himself with the st basics that the book mentioned as he tried to uand what terrible thing it was that he’d been about to do.

  Those days were endlessly b, of course, aook frequent breaks to practice his swordpy, but every day he made it through dozens of pages. He even took notes of some of the most important bits on the rare occasion that the grimoire would try to expirange nguage it called Valdarian.

  Three weeks ter, the town’s unofficial leader came back, of course, demanding that he honor his word, but Simon just told her, “If you’re ready to force me out, then I’m ready to fight you for the right to stay.”

  The half a dozen men she had with her drew swords then, but the stray bolt of lightning that he whispered iehat struck the grouween him and where the rest of them stood was enough to vince everyohat maybe this was a fight they didn’t want to have.

  That night they tried to burn him out, but a single whispered word, “G???e???l???t???h???i???c???” froze all of their torches to cold ash and put the thatch out where it had started to catch without even the need of rising from his bed. Later Simon heard that a few of those men had lost fingers due to frostbite, despite how carefully he had aimed his magic, but none of them tried to take revenge, and no one ever came to ask him when he was leaving again after that, giving him all the time in the world to study in peatil he finally felt he uood what was happening well enough to take the step.

  Author's Note: I have a big annou: my first self-published book is now avaible for pre-order on Amazon for 4.99; the paperback will be released on 11/29. So, if you like a packed sci-fi, sider giving it a shot. This is a book I started writing 5 years ago but only picked it back up and starter polishing it up early this year after I'd improved enough as an author to do my story justice. So, it was dreamed up before I ever discovered web novels and game lit. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it has a fun, fast paced plot, and I just wao put it out there. If you've got Kindle Unlimited you even read it for free.