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“Need any help?” Miko asks when he sees the direction James is heading.

“No,” he replies. “Not with this, anyway. Thanks.”

“Alright,” he says. “Might go and see if I can’t bag some rabbits, Tersa asked me earlier if I could.”

“Why?” he asks.

“She said their fur would be good for her teddy bears,” he explains.

Nodding, James says, “They would at that.” Leaving Miko behind, he makes for his workshop. Good to see she’s taking a real interest in this.

Entering his workshop he begins working on the problem. It takes him the rest of the evening and almost the entire following day before he gets it to work. Ezra had sent Miko to fetch him for dinner but he didn’t even bother answering his call, so engrossed was he. She finally relented and allowed everyone else to eat and was mollified by Miko bringing him out a large platter of food to the workshop.

When exhaustion finally takes him, he falls asleep at his workbench. In the morning when he wakes up, he’s disoriented at first, not realizing where he is. Then he recognizes his workshop and resumes working.

Just before dinner of the third day, he has everything set. He’s taken one of his crystals that had been charging and places it upon the stool in the woods. The crystal has been infused with spells which he believes will hide the stool from any type of magical searches.

Holding his breath, he picks up his mirror and lets the magic flow as he concentrates on finding the stool. The mirror remains normal, the image never even so much as flickers.

Excited, he puts more and more magic into it as he steps up to more intense searching. Still, the mirror remains blank. Finally, he’s putting so much magic into it that his head begins to hurt and his vision starts growing hazy. Suddenly, the image in the mirror begins to shimmer and with a loud crack, the glass in the mirror shatters.

“Yeah!” he yells as he stands up quickly. But the intense use of the magic has weakened him greatly and his legs fail to hold him. Crashing to the floor he lies there, bruised but smiling. It worked!

The door to the workshop opens up and Fifer comes in, sword in hand. Seeing James lying on the floor and the shattered mirror on the workbench, he begins to sound the alarm.

“It’s okay,” James croaks from where he lies on the floor.

Pausing, Fifer comes closer to hear him better and asks, “What?”

“Don’t worry,” he tells him. “Everything is alright.”

“You don’t look alright,” he says, returning his sword to its sheath.

Jiron rushes into the workshop and Fifer says, “He’s okay.”

Giving James a cursory glance, he asks, “Do too much again?”

James nods as Fifer helps him to his stool before the workbench. Sitting down, he rests an arm on the top to keep himself steady. “I had to,” he explains. “I had to see if it would work even with everything I had working against it.” Giving them a smile, he adds, “And it did!”

“Congratulations,” Jiron says. “Now, let’s get you inside to rest.”

“No, no, no,” protests James. “I’m not that bad off, just give me a moment to catch my breath. I need to go see what happened to the crystal which was hiding the stool I was searching for.”

“We’ll go with you,” Fifer says.

“If you want,” he tells them. “But I’m okay.”

After resting a moment to regain some of his strength, he gets up and finds his legs are still a trifle wobbly. Jiron lends him a hand and they make their way into the forest to where the stool sits.

The crystal sitting on top of it, the one whose spells prevented him from seeing the stool in his mirror, still has a barely discernable glow within it. It would seem the effort to counter what James had been doing took almost all of its power. Had James possessed more power, then the crystal would’ve exhausted its internal supply and the spell would have failed.

James cancels the spells of concealment that are still active in the crystal and replaces them with the slow leech spell. He then takes it over to where the other crystals are sitting in the woods absorbing power. The other crystals have a deep crimson glow within