required a wizard to refer directly to his spell book when casting a spell he wasn’t completely familiar with. Even more so, a simple mistake in performing a long-form casting could alter the effects of a spell.
Long-form casting was required to learn magic, if only because it was impossible for a human to shape the power into the right form within his body. Human bodies simply could not handle the extreme amounts of power that were needed to form even the smallest spell for more than a split second. The meridians of a human burned, and were eventually destroyed, when exposed to power for too long. Often referred to as burnout, one could reduce the likelihood of it happening by practicing the spell often. Practicing could ‘harden’ the meridians so they would be less likely to burn out, but in all honesty, the technique was actually scarring the channels in the body so it would not cause physical pain. It was much like someone who was injured multiple times in the same area would develop scar tissue. It wouldn't actually make the damage any less, but the flesh in that area would become less reactive to the pain of the injury.
Once a wizard knew the spell so well he didn’t need to refer to his spell book, he could remember the way the completed spell form ‘felt’ within his body, and evoke it in a fraction of the time by forcing power into that shape as it filled the meridians. It was called spell-slinging by the younger mages who had started adopting it. No matter how well it was known, humans had never been able to cast a spell without at least the last word of power to breathe life into the spell, and the final physical gesture to shape it. There was a tradeoff for the speed; slinging a spell was grossly inefficient, costing several times more power to produce the same effect as a long- form casting.
It was mostly due to the body’s inability to form the power into the right shape quickly and safely, but since he was becoming increasingly less human and more Mercanian, Endrance supposed that with the time he had imposed upon him, he’d eventually be able to figure a way around the limitation. Maybe he could even figure out how to sling a spell at full power.
The silver table had never been built in the real world, It wasn’t that he didn’t understand magic enough to build it, but rather, because he understood more than the average mage, he could not build it. In the physical world, it would be far too complicated for him to build without a hundred years of designing every miniscule facet of the surface, hundreds of thousands of gold pieces to pay for materials, and a table the size of a coliseum just to analyze one spell at a time. In his mind he could subconsciously assemble everything into a more manageable representation. It was, after all, just a construct of his mind. An overdesigned and perhaps practically useless construct, but one nonetheless.
Several of the shelves reflected off the silver surface caught his eye. They had been locked and barred, a mental representation of his desire to keep the knowledge separate from his mind. The shelves were a receptacle of the sum total of every single one of Kaelob's unsorted memories. Endrance had been completely incapacitated while absorbing the mage's mind and memories, so he was unsure what their contents were and he had been loathe to open them up and browse through them. The man had tutored him, taught him all manner of magic, and yet Kaelob had been serving his mother the whole time. What could have been going through his mind when he agreed to all of this?
The fact that he most likely knew what Valeria was plotting was the only thing keeping Endrance's thoughts coming back to possibly looking them over. When he had beaten Kaelob, he had absorbed his aura and an imprint of his mind. That meant that his impression was here in his mind somewhere, along with all the others. He could get answers from the one who had betrayed him. It was a personality