Quoted By:
Muttering dark calumnies under your breath, you prepare to cast again, this time intending to target the mound that is in your estimation the furthest away from the band of salt around the Strangeness. You position yourself so you can comfortably reach to the mound, without risking your dress or apron disturbing any of the other mounds you have made, or the band of salt around the afflicted cobblestones. Once you are steeled yourself again, you initialize the spell.
This time, the cast is exactly where you intended it to be … but now you are not able to get the magical reaction to reach completion. In fact, you are barely able to take it past initialization before the spell just smothers itself, not even putting a dent in the Strangeness present in the vicinity of the mound. Immediately, you get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Is it possible that you have already inured the Strangeness here against Remediation with just that one miscast? Your guess about the spell ending up in the belt of salt panned out, but you have no idea why it would go and inure this patch. Excluding the missed target, it truly felt like a successful cast. The strain was more than tolerable and while your eyes have started throwing off light, they feel only marginally warmer than they normally do.
If you had to guess, you would say that it had to do with the fact that the spell ended up with magnitudes more salt than was actually required for the cast. Given what you know, it seems like that is the only reasonable explanation … but based off of what you know about Salt-Remediation, an excess should not have been a problem for the spell. Racking your brain, you try to think of a time when father ever said anything about using too much of a working material. When you cannot come up with anything, you allow yourself to get your hopes up. Perchance it was just two bad casts – that happened to be bad in completely different ways. Now fervently hoping that you were wrong, you attempt the cast once more, on the same mound of salt that you targeted in the center of the ring.
This time, you are not even able to initialize the spell. Just about ready to start yanking your hair out in frustration, you force yourself to walk away from this latest failure. Pattern’s Perdition, how do you keep bungling these spells? You should be better than this by now!
It is not much, but at the absolute least, you have the presence of mind to not let yourself throw a tantrum here. As secluded as this spot it, you are still just out in open performing magic. If anyone was to come along and see you at work here, you wouldn’t be able to talk yourself out of it, not with your eyes all aglow. In a huff, you gather up the pound bag of salt, and head over to the shallow stone gutter where the Glyphed Gull fell after you smacked him with that rock.
