The very first thing I did, before even touching the ring, was cast ethersight. While I was fairly sure that the ring didn't have any nasty traps, given that so many powerful people had been a part of the coven and that I'd been flat out told as much by a faerie, I didn't entirely trust a fae's understanding of what I'd consider to be a negative effect.

More than that, this school had a cabinet capable of unleashing attacks that could wound an aberrant version of my mother, a tree with impossibly powerful clairvoyance, and a library that warped the rules of reality and was teeming with monsters. I absolutely wouldn't put it past the school to include some sort of terrible effect in the bound item that could slowly be turned from curse to an advantage. Like something that made ether shaping way harder, but increased the gains from practicing ether shaping techniques.

I paused at the thought. I should look into those, and see if I could find anything similar. Stuck in an item that was bound to me, it would be a pretty rough trial, but if I were able to take it on and off as needed, it could be useful as a training tool.

I refocused as I muttered the last few words of the spell, sweeping my staff through the air, letting the spell fill with as much power as I could. The world around me began to glow, but I instinctively filtered out the magic of the dorms around me and focused on the ring.

It glowed brightly with complex magic that didn't fall into any of the nine tinged schools, but rather seemed to be schoolless magic, like cantrips or the wish spell.

Or affinity magic.

This had doubtless been constructed by someone with an artifice affinity, perhaps multiple in concert, which wasn't really that surprising. Complex and powerful enchantments tended to rely on that sort of thing. I didn't see any runes on the surface of the metal, so it seemed to be a different sort of artifice than the woman who'd created my hydra fang knife.

The amount of ether that the little ring contained was pretty staggering, though. The golden sheen seemed to hold a core of power in it, somewhat like the body component of a staff or wand, but it was far stronger than my tools. I hadn't gotten a chance to examine the Erudite's staff under ethersight, so I didn't have a strong reference for what the peak of mortal power looked like, but this couldn't be too far away.

It was so stuffed with power that it almost reminded me of professor Caeruleum's amulet, and they were a seventh circle caster, likely using materials rated for their relative strength. Actually, given the way that they'd managed to contain all sorts of powerful demons, I felt confident in saying their tools were also seventh circle.

This ring seemed to be operating at roughly the same level of power, maybe even slightly higher. That shot my expectations up by quite a bit – it probably wouldn't give me access to that much raw ether, as it was all tied up in powering the artifice in the ring, but that did mean whatever the ring did should be impressive. Right?

I followed the threads of magic that rushed up from the pool of power and into the disparate effects of the magic. There seemed to be five different effects, each one tied to one of the five stars in the doorway of the coven's ring sigil. Underlying all five of those passages was a sixth effect that was completely untethered which I presumed to be the binding magic.

I studied it, as well as the five effects, but I couldn't quite figure out what they did, or if they were laying any traps in the magic. The strange affinity magic was far too different from any of the spellforms that I'd studied before, and it was also entirely different from my own, or from Jackson's, whose fire affinity was the only other core affinity spell that I'd seen before.

His had been simple, barely more complex than a cantrip, while mine was deeply complex: four separate core effects and permutations that combined them, with different triggers, limitations, and reasons behind the spell all changing the initial core of the magic.

This magic was about as complex as my own, but it was wildly different. The only part of the spell that was even remotely similar to the magic contained within my core affinity spell was the magic that bound me to the ring. It didn't resemble the suffering or misfortune aspects of a curse, but rather, the third aspect of my curses, one that I hadn't been skilled enough to jump into before.

Even now, I still didn't think I was entirely ready to delve into casting it, but I did at least feel somewhat more confident about being able to understand the theory.

Still without touching the ring, I pulled out my grimoire and began to flip through the third section, studying my affinity's third type of curse: curses of sealing.

While curses of misfortune were simple, merely shifting probabilities towards negative outcomes, and curses of suffering worsened negative effects or states of being that were already present, curses of sealing were a little more… active. They prevented something from happening.

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The example spell the grimoire provided was sealing away the voice of an opera singer who killed someone for upstaging them, with the spell lasting until they were able to work through their endless need to have attention on them. They would be completely unable to speak, let alone sing. With skill in design and ether shaping, it was also possible to create a curse that would allow for speaking, but not singing, though it was much more difficult.

A voice wasn't the only thing that could be sealed, of course. Theoretically speaking, almost anything could be, but that 'theoretically' was very much a load bearing word. Trying to seal away someone's entire body, mind, and spirit might be possible, but the sheer amount of power that it would take to manage something of the sort was absurd. Sealing away someone's magic might be a bit more reasonable… But only in the same way that it was more reasonable for an ant to lift a horse, as opposed to an elephant.

All in all, the magic seemed terribly complex, even the simple voice sealing curse described in the book as complicated as a fourth circle spell, and it had some things working to reduce the cost. Namely, the reasoning of the curse.

I had already seen the importance of limitations and a break condition when casting curses of suffering or misfortune, and they were all still just as important for sealing magic. But neither of the previous sort of curses had put nearly as much weight on the reasoning. It had been alluded to with things like cursing a greedy man with bad financial luck, but not fully expounded on. For sealing magic, the reason behind the curse was important. Not a necessary part of the spell, but one of the most important aspects to determining its ether cost.

The reasoning came in two parts. First was a feeling of genuine negative emotion towards someone for the actions they had taken. Intensity was important, but so was genuineness. Working myself up into a fit over someone spilling a cup of coffee through the use of mental techniques and manipulation spells was… doable. But it wasn't genuine, true anger, or distaste, or desire for vengeance. Those made the most potent fuel.

The second was a matching of what was being sealed to fit for the cause for wanting to curse them. Sealing the voice of someone who had pickpocketed from me wasn't going to be as effective as attempting to seal away some of their finger's dexterity.

Honestly, if the spell wasn't so absurdly complex, I thought it would have been a good tool for my fight against Gerhard. I had the emotional beats to throw into it – exhaustion at being on the run for so long, anger at having to constantly be on edge, and a boundless bottle of fear at facing someone who was more powerful than me. In terms of thematic justice, what better way was there to win against someone who prized their bloodline above all than temporarily, or even permanently, sealing away the bloodline?

Unfortunately, I was guessing that particular hypothetical application of my core affinity spell would be roughly as complex as a fifth circle spell, which was still well beyond my abilities. After all, fifth circle was the minimum graduation requirement, with sixth putting you on the honors list.

I shook my head. As interesting as it was to theorize, I could do it all day. For right now, I needed to cross reference the sealing magic as it was described in my grimoire to the elements of the binding magic that were in the ring.

There was a good chance that the artificer was operating under some sort of limitation where the binding reduced the overall cost of the spells, letting this ring express as much power as it did because it would only ever do it for one person, but that's what I wanted to check.

I re-cast ethersight and got to work.

By the time it was getting past midnight, and I was only reading through the various floating blue weirlights that swirled around overhead, I shut my grimoire and let out a groan.

I couldn't find any traps hidden inside the spellwork, but that also didn't mean much. While Magyk clearly had created some common threads between the binding magic and my sealing curses, they were also different enough that I was only able to tell that it was binding magic – something that I had already known when I'd started reading.

I sucked in a deep breath and touched the ring.

Nothing happened.

I picked it up.

Nothing happened.

I took a deep breath and put the ring on.

Immediately, I felt a vast surge of ether, far more than what I'd ever been able to hold in my pool. The magic rippled up, shifting and swirling into my ether pool, forming braided cords of magic that almost remind me of completing the bloodline spellcraft ritual, which had created a permanent modification to my ether pool.

I tapped said ritual and flooded the magic with dragonfire, only for it to wash away, flowing back down the pipeline and into my flame once again. It seemed like the magic either couldn't accept my dragonfire due to not being active enough, or more likely, since it had been designed without my flame, it couldn't accept it.

I took the ring off, fearful that it would remain permanently stuck on my finger, or require me to cut the finger off first, but the ring came off easily. The magic connecting it to me faded, but didn't vanish. I was still bound to it, but without the ring on my finger, accessing the abilities it gave to me was harder, if not downright impossible.

I put the ring back on, taking it on and off a handful of times, just in case, then lifted the ring to study it as it sat on my finger. The gold that made up the symbol glimmered slightly, and four of the five tiny shards of blue ether crystal that were the five stars were glowing softly. The fifth, however, glowed far more brightly. It wasn't as bright as a weirlight, nor even a candle, but it was still much brighter than the other four.

In my spirit, it felt like that one ability was also stronger. The faerie had mentioned that the more I gave, the more I got, so I was assuming that I would need to find a way to activate the other four abilities on my own.

I reached for that ability, beginning to flow some ether through it, and heard a rumble slowly fill the room.

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