Wood Sprites

Jillian harrumphed. Being a Hollywood director had been her dream for years. It had to be hard to see the possibility dangle within reach and yet know that she couldn’t claim it. She probably didn’t realize, though, that it made Louise feel so small and unsure beside her. Louise didn’t know what she wanted to be when they got old enough to do anything and everything. She did know she didn’t want to be in front of a camera, having everyone watch her, and she didn’t want to be behind the camera, having to tell everyone what to do. And that knowledge made her feel even smaller.

Hating how she felt, she focused back on searching the codex for information on the gossamer call. There was nothing on gossamers. Not on how they were controlled. Not on how they were created. She flipped through the book, pausing here and there to study the spells traced on the pages. So much to learn, so little time.

They knew that the gossamers were called with whistles. The domana triggered their magic with different words. Every written spell had an activation phrase. Sound seemed to be a basic part of magic. Each domana spell required a different finger position. Using motions and words, the elves operated their bodies like a human did a computer, selecting a spell and running it. No, not like a computer, like an instrument. The finger positions were like the fingering of a flute or guitar. The domana were producing a unique chord with each new gesture and word. Given two hands, ten fingers, two joints on the thumb, three joints on the other fingers, there was a staggering number of possible finger positions.

The written spells in the codex required phrases to trigger them. The phrases worked much like spell locks in that the main function was to keep the spell from activating until the caster wished it to activate. That each spell required a different phrase, though, seemed to indicate that there was more to it than a simple key turning in a lock. Perhaps the sound set up important resonance within the spell components. .

So much they didn’t know. Louise sighed and focused on what she did know.

The elves didn’t have slides or valves on their instruments. A whistle with multiple tones then would be fixed and played like a flute or boatswain’s call. The samples of gossamer calls they could find had featured only four tones that they’d already mapped out sine waves for. One was in the high ultrasonic range, but the others stepped down the hertz range to something audible to humans. It seemed to indicate that the gossamer’s hearing was similar to whales and open-water species of dolphins. The Earth sea mammals used low-pitched tones in the seventy-five hertz range to communicate because those sounds traveled farther. They used frequencies in the one hundred to hundred-fifty kilohertz range for echolocation. Humans could only hear up to twenty kilohertz, so it would explain why three of the tones were audible. The twins had noticed that “turn” commands used the ultrasonic tone while the other three sounds triggered “docking” and “wait” activities. Obviously the elves were using instinctual behavior for their commands.

The question remained whether the commands were actually spells printed on the whistle itself or were like the domana-caste, genetically keyed within the gossamer. Considering the limited tones of the whistle and the wide range of words used as commands for both written spells and domana spell-casting, it seemed likely that it was the latter. If that was the case, then the “magic” of the whistle was that it needed to cross great distances in order to trigger the gossamer’s genetically coded spells. Dufae actually discussed in length how the magic “jumped” distances via resonance, which allowed the domana-caste to channel the massive amounts of power from a distant location to where they needed it. He also took great care in determining the exact distance between the mouth and the hands to trigger the domana spells.

Louise flipped back to that section of the codex. Since Dufae was cut off from the Spell Stones, he had developed a set of spells to help him carry out his experiments. The twins needed a whistle that could hit all four tones with a magical spell that could amplify the reach of the instrument.

An hour later, she thought she knew how to build a gossamer call. They wouldn’t even need to use the school’s printer. Of course, until they got a working generator, there’d be no way to test it.

14: Stagecraft