It buzzes quietly. Tencednil can hear it at normal volume as though the shadow was next to her ear.

Oh good! Two ways, then. She notes the time, sets up a Detect Magic, and starts drawing what she can see from the Message spellform. This way it should be obvious when it fades, and she can get a duration.

It lasts longer than she can concentrate on detect magic. If she recasts the spell every few minutes, she'll notice the message eventually fade away. It takes around forty minutes to end.

She spends most of the day taking further notes on the new spells, drawing things out, and coming to a better understanding of how it all works.

When the sun finally fades from the sky, she is convinced she won't need her spells any more today. That makes now the best time to push herself as far as she can, to see how many she can cast in one day. First, the one from when she woke up, and then in addition to that...

Color Spray.

Silent Image — oh, it needs a bit of fleece, it was just catching on something in her cloak. Good to know.

Color Spray.

Whatever her new weapon-spell is — Glow Metal? Like Heat Metal, but glowy? No, the blinding is important. The wizards probably have some name for it, it just might take her a while to find. 

What happens if she tries a Silent Image but pushes it around the fleece? It has the space for some extra input there, can she try feeding it some shadow instead like she practiced with Acid Splash? It doesn't fit in nicely, but if she fiddles with the spell form enough maybe she can get it to work...

The shadows flow into her silent image as she casts it. The illusion manifests a little larger than she can normally achieve. It feels like it took more from her to cast than usual.

And, more interestingly, that spell has two holes in it. The image is of the spell just as she finished casting it, because visualizing two things at once is hard, so that's definitely the shape of the spell she actually cast. It's mostly a Silent Image with some expansion to allow elaboration, but over there, where it's pulling the shadow in, that's clearly a hole. That means that's a second circle spell.

Why can she cast second circle spells. She doesn't know any second circle spells. Sorcerers are supposed to just know the spells they have. Sorcerers are not supposed to cast second circle spells before they know any! Is her sorcery just playing games with her here!

Augh!

Tencednil needs a few minutes to calm down.

Alright. Fine. Apparently she has some second circle spell casts in her, and no second circle spells, but she can do something.... metamagic-y?... to her spells which lets her feed them the surrounding shadow, and it makes them stronger. But it also makes them pretty much second circle, and so she can probably only do that a limited number of times as well, it's just going to be a different limit. That's fine. She can handle this.

Five first circle spells today so far, and one second circle. She keeps trying out the first circle spells until they run dry, then she tries going through all of them to see how they work when she adds the extra loop. Can they all take in the shadow? Do any of them react oddly to the extra power? (Not that she could necessarily tell.) Does she even have enough second circle spells to try out all four of them today?

Tencednil has eight first circle spells per day.

She has enough second circle spells left to infuse the rest of her first circle spells with shadows. None of them react oddly to the extra power, beyond being second circle.

And if she tries Silent Image again, now knowing what she's doing a little better, does she still have enough for it? That would be a fifth boosted spell. What about another after that?

She can do one more silent image. Nothing after that.

Eight first circle spells and five second circle spells, then. At least for now.

And with that, she's pretty exhausted. Casting all she has does take some energy, and when she does it all at once like this it gets obvious. Sleep now.

KORVOSAN CARRIER
WEALDAY, SARENITH 10th, 4708

BURNING BLADES FESTIVAL TO GO AHEAD DESPITE INSTABILITY

The Church of Sarenrae will be hosting a festival for Burning Blades today outside their temple in Citadel Crest. The Queen has announced funding for alchemists, who work on a cure for the blood veil. They announce offers to purchase the blood of Varisian humans, believing it will aid their progress on the cure. Those of other races and ethnicities are encouraged to donate. Monster containment was more successful than yesterday, outside of Old Korvosa, which only continues to grow worse.

She is not Varisian or human, and has more important things to do with her blood than give it to alchemists. Funding for a cure is useful, but the Queen really should just have the cure, shouldn't she? If she brought in the Urgathoans, surely she didn't just expect their disease to go uncured? She needed this anyway, and she had the chance to set up in advance! Oh well, maybe the Urgathoans didn't just go along with that.

The festival of burning blades is a little bright for her, but so is Sarenrae in general, and sometimes it's important to go. Does she need to this year? ...she didn't last year and it is sometimes important. And either having shadows to wear or going in the skin of something which looks already sun-blinded might help. Fine. 

Bank first, in case she has a letter. And to get some money for the festival.

The Bank has no mail for her at this time. She withdraws some money.

Back home to change to a color that stands out less, and then... sigh. To the festival. There's too much that matters right now, too many important things she shouldn't miss hearing, and it's been too long since she went to one.

The Temple of Sarenrae is as beautiful as ever. Built from imported white marble, it's often said to be one of the most expensive buildings in the city, whose construction was funded in large part by King Eodred Arabasti I.

Burning Blades has the unenviable duty of being the first holiday after the Breaching Festival, which it could never hope to outshine, but the Sarenites make their attempt. The festival itself spans several streets around the temple. Flaming weapons, dipped in pitch, are juggled by performers. Lots of vendors have set up shop, selling food and trinkets and other such things.

She buys some food, watches some fire dancing, and listens to the crowd.

Sarenrae is an incredibly popular goddess, and the Burning Blades festival is a claiming of her domain over fire in opposition to Asmodeus's claim to the same. It always attracts an interesting crowd of the true believers, the hopeful, the desperate, and the hecklers, who cannot be shown to be funded by the Asmodean church. Usually. Emotions run strong in the crowd, and only the incredible density of positive-channeling clerics has kept the death rate as low as it is. With the prices of Remove Disease rising as the plague continues, this will be an interesting year.

How do people seem to feel? Is there really as much unrest as bringing in the Hellknights would imply? What does the response to the Hellknights sound like?  Sarenrae's clerics are spending spells on this which could be Remove Disease, or at least they look like they might be. Not everyone can recognize what spells are what circle on sight. Are there objections to that? Do they seem natural, or mostly from Asmodean provocateurs?

The people seem to be more nervous than usual. Rumor on the street is the Hellknights are mostly being brought in to handle monsters. Areas near large sewer entrances have been hit the hardest. Old Korvosa riots, due to the closure of the wells and other unpopular anti-plague quarantine measures, but this isn't Old Korvosa. There's a few rabble-rousers going around heckling about various things, but none of them are openly Asmodean. One is yelling about "wasting spells on festivals when the city is in need" before he's led away by guardsmen.

Maybe the Hellknights are here for a real reason, then. Fighting monsters is what the Order of the Nail does, and they make sense. The first vision made less sense, but that could have been coincidence. 

Can she find anyone talking about how Old Korvosa is doing? How bad is the plague, how bad is the quarantine? Being in quarantine means there will be fewer Old Korvosans here, but surely there are some who know more than she does and want to talk about it. Where better to complain about disease than at a festival of those most visibly fighting it?

Many are worried about Old Korvosa. The blood veil is certainly less terrible than it could have been, but it's still a contagious incurable disease. Some of the wells are closed, as they are known to be poisoned, but this means importing water from other parts of the city at higher prices. The fully quarantined zones are mostly within Bridgefront and the Shingles. One can imagine why they riot; people have a terrible illness that will kill them soon without remove disease, which most of them cannot afford. Symptoms don't show immediately, so some might be healthy but still locked in with the diseased out of suspicion. Add in the agitated beasts and monsters from below... it sounds pretty bad.

It does sounds bad. The Queen will gain greatly if she can demonstrate a cure, even delayed. This is incredibly convenient if the Urgathoans were a coincidence, but if they weren't, why is this taking so long? If the cure is known and they just need to delay it for maximal impact, why spend money on actual alchemists rather than setting it aside and claiming to hire mysterious specialist research wizards? That's a lot of money which could be directed to almost any purpose they want, with no real inspection, instead spent not benefitting them at all! Actual alchemical research must be expensive.

Of course, the monsters coming from the sewers weren't in the first vision, and neither was the announcement that the guard thinks woke them. That was definitely a conspiracy action, and it seems to have been poorly thought through. It's always possible the conspiracy did set the Urgathoans up, but the fifth-circle cleric was more effective than expected, and the money lost here is in fact a loss. So it goes. Assume neither perfection nor incompetence from others, for no mortal is either.

She's gathered most of what she wants from the crowds. She'll watch a bit longer, wait to see if the clerics will be spending their slots on any of the more impressive tricks this year, but after that she's done for the day. That was quite enough sunlight for her.

Compared to the Acadamae, the Church of Sarenrae seems much less willing to spend spells on showing off. Tencednil makes it home without incident.

That's reasonable prioritization in general, the Sarenrites don't really need to impress the crowd more than they already do. Right now, it's even more reasonable, because those slots are valuable.

Anyway, she has nothing more she needs to do today, and the festival means many things are closed even if she wanted to. Some more spell testing, and then she'll sleep.

Spell testing reveals that usually, getting the extra shadow drawn into a spell requires her to manually adapt the spell matrix, which is slow. Her quick spell, which she's calling Moon's Reflection for now, is still easy, so loosely linked to her that adding the extra tweaks is barely a problem. The slower spells take more reworking, and splitting her focus between that and moving safely is difficult. The extra power is still an advantage in combat, but she'll have to account for the costs.

The third time she tries, though, she pushes harder on the magic and it slips into a strange state, shapeable almost like an illusion, but with the full power still evident in the form. Reshaping it was effortless, and it snapped out beautifully, as fast as her normal castings. She couldn't replicate the effect a second time. Once a day, maybe? Magic has its habits like that.

With her practice done, time to sleep.