the ability to craft infinitely detailed prose without error. When touching the artifact, a spellwright did not fear misspelling even when extemporizing the most complex text.
With a savage yawp, he punched a fist of incendiary Magnus sentences against the protective shield. The spell exploded outward with enough force to knock the three humans onto their backs.
Fellwroth leaped off the table and turned.
The avatar was the first to attack. She launched herself across the stone table and thrust out her greatsword.
Extemporizing through the emerald, Fellwroth wrote a fine Magnus lace and cast it from floor to ceiling.
Deirdre’s sword point stuck into the mesh. The blade snapped a single sentence but then turned. Shock widened the girl’s eyes as a force invisible to her twisted the sword out of her hands. Her body crashed into the mesh. The spell stretched but did not break. She fell awkwardly onto her shoulder.
Fellwroth wrote a thick Magnus chain and tied it around her neck.
Gasping, the woman grabbed the spell and heaved against it. Only the divine strength in her arms kept the text from crushing her neck. But that strength would not last long.
The cave flashed brighter. Fellwroth looked up to see Shannon cast a many-bladed Numinous spell. The parrot on the linguist’s shoulder screamed.
Though impressive for a human text, the spell posed no real threat. With a wave of his hand, Fellwroth extemporized a spray of Numinous disspells that ripped Shannon’s attack into fragments.
Shannon kneeled and slammed his fist against the ground, casting a tundern spell. Like subterranean lightning, the silvery bolt shot through the stone floor. It was meant to erupt into a geyser of crushing sentences. But Fellwroth stamped his foot on the incoming spell and shattered the text as if it were made of glass.
With a short laugh, Fellwroth wrote a thin Magnus net and with a wrist flick cast the thing around Shannon’s stomach. As the spell tightened, the wizard had to turn away to vomit out the logorrhea bywords that had filled his belly.
Through the emerald’s power, Fellwroth could see that the canker curse in the wizard’s stomach had consolidated. That would not do. Fellwroth cast a net of Language Prime that scattered twenty new cankers throughout the old man’s gut.
With another flick, Fellwroth cast a Numinous censor spell around Shannon’s brain. When the text dug into the wizard’s mind, the old man collapsed and left his parrot to flap in short circles.
Something struck Fellwroth’s head. The world spun for a moment but then stopped, leaving only a ringing in his left ear. Some kind of subtextualized censoring spell? Fellwroth turned to see Nicodemus’s face twist with rage. The boy had written several white sentences around an ancient codex and was using them to float the open book beside him.
The whelp must have attempted a censoring spell in a language Fellwroth did not know. “So here you are in all your glory, Nicodemus. The heir to the Imperial family and you’ve got nothing to write but cacographic mush.”
The boy pulled back his right fist as if to make a second attempt. Amused, Fellwroth raised his palm, ready to disspell the boy’s text into nonsense.
But no spell formed in Nicodemus’s hand. The boy lunged forward and slammed his knuckles into Fellwroth’s jaw.
The brief contact with the Nicodemus’s skin showed Fellwroth a glimpse of the boy’s past—a beautiful woman with long brown hair, reading.
Not caring what private memory was now flashing through Nicodemus’s mind, Fellwroth cast a voluminous Magnus wave that knocked the boy back onto the stone table. The boy’s spellbook struck the tabletop and lay open by his hip.
“There shall be no more!” Fellwroth bellowed, and raised the emerald. “Today, Nicodemus Weal, your mind shall be splintered.”
A wafer-thin Numinous paragraph grew from the emerald to become the thinnest of blades. Fellwroth stepped forward and swung the textual sword down.
Desperately, Nicodemus lurched backward but found his hands useless on the slick tabletop.
Fellwroth’s arm flashed through the air, but when the blade was an inch from Nicodemus’s brow, a blast of crimson light burst from Boann’s ark and struck Fellwroth’s hand.
The blow was not strong, but it was enough to pry the emerald from Fellwroth’s pale fingers.
The gem dropped.
The instant Fellwroth lost contact with the emerald, the Numinous blade misspelled into dull sentence fragments that splashed harmlessly into Nicodemus’s face.
“No!” Fellwroth bellowed.
The green stone fell quietly onto the boy’s chest.
In that moment, Fellwroth recognized the emerald’s betrayal: it had somehow told Boann’s ark when and how to pull it free.
The boy’s