Chương 80: Chapter 76: The Shape of Sound

That night, Lira decided to sleep in the maid dormitory instead of the makeshift corner of the library she had claimed for herself. After everything that had happened, sleeping surrounded by dozens of other maids felt far more sensible than spending the night alone inside an empty building where no one would hear her scream. She knew it was probably just paranoia. Thadwick was dead, Salvek had been cast out of the palace, and Prince Kavard was supposedly confined to his quarters and under constant supervision.

Logically, she should have been safer than she had been in weeks. Logic, however, had very little influence over the instincts that kept people alive. She had survived this long by assuming that danger would appear the moment she lowered her guard. And now that Kavard had taken a personal interest in her, she had even less reason to grow complacent. If sleeping among dozens of witnesses allowed her to rest a little easier, then it was a precaution well worth taking.

Plus, she missed the comfort of a bed, if she was honest with herself. She left the dormitories at dawn the following morning, skipping breakfast entirely. A quick cleaning spell washed away the night's sweat and fatigue, allowing her to skip her bath as she hurried through the palace courtyard toward the library. Every minute before the noble children arrived was precious. Once Prince Lyth and his growing circle of companions filled the reading hall, uninterrupted study would become impossible again.

If she wanted to investigate yesterday's discovery, she had to do it now while the library still belonged to her alone. The first thing she did after unlocking the doors was enter the alcove and retrieve her notebook and her father's ledger. Sitting inside the hidden space, she carefully wrote down every word of the spell Prince Aric had cast the previous afternoon before comparing it with the magical lexicon. Paldina. Picos. Hishar. Tarasana. Kurur. Passive. Diminution. Wave. Pocket. Space.

Lira stared at the five translated words for several long moments. Earlier that month, she had attempted to create a spell capable of manipulating sound. Unfortunately, her father's lexicon contained no word that translated directly into sound. After several frustrating days of experimentation, trying words like Riad. meaning air, or Syneth. meaning interpretation, she had reluctantly abandoned the project, assuming her current vocabulary simply lacked such a concept.

Yet yesterday, Prince Aric had clearly used Hishar. while casting a spell that silenced everything within a confined area. That left only two possibilities. Either her father had made a mistake and incorrectly translated Hishar. as wave when it actually meant sound. Or the concept of sound itself was somehow related to the concept of waves. The second possibility immediately reminded her of when she first started. She had been able to use Syneth.

translated as interpretation, as an alternative for perception or even sight because she was able to relate the concepts to each other. Perception is, after all, the interpretation of sight, and sight is also the mind's interpretation of the world around us. Perhaps Hishar. worked the same way. Perhaps sound and waves weren't separate concepts in the language of magic at all. The realization made the problem far more complicated than she would have liked.

At this point, Lira understood fairly well how magic spells worked. The words of the incantation themselves possessed no power, and simply memorizing the vocabulary accomplished absolutely nothing. Magic could only be cast after something clicked inside her mind. Only when she genuinely understood how the magical concepts related to one another and to the desired outcome did the spell seem to imprint itself into place inside her mind. Spell primers bypassed that entire process.

Whenever she absorbed a spell from one of the magical books, the knowledge arrived complete. There was no gradual realization or even a surface-level understanding. The primer forced understanding directly into the caster's mind at a level deeper than active thought. She couldn't better define, using words, what the concept of fire was after her first spell. Still, she felt that her soul was intrinsically closer to the concept. It was the reason why most mages never bothered questioning why a spell worked.

They simply accepted the knowledge the primer provided and cast it exactly as they had learned it. Prince Aric had almost certainly learned his soundproofing spell that way. Whether Hishar. truly meant wave, sound, or something even broader probably didn't matter to him in the slightest. The primer had already answered the question within his soul, even if his mind never thought to ask it. Lira, unfortunately, didn't have that luxury. She was forced to discover the answer herself.

Which left her with two possible paths. The first was the simplest. She could assume her father had made an error, cross out wave, replace it with sound, and try to imprint the spell that way. It would certainly save time. It would also undermine the foundation of everything she had built over the past several months. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Until now, she had trusted her father's translations completely.

Every spell she had crafted and every magical breakthrough she had achieved rested upon the belief that his work was accurate. If she began doubting individual words whenever she was working on something new, then every future spell would carry that same uncertainty. Every translation would become questionable, and every experiment would begin with hesitation instead of confidence. No. She couldn't allow herself to go down that path. Her father had accomplished something extraordinary.

She honestly had no idea how he had done it, translating the dead language of magic from resources given to him by Lord Kelroth. It was one of the few projects that he had kept secret even from her. If there appeared to be a contradiction, then the far more likely explanation was that she simply didn't understand it well enough yet. That left only the second option. She needed to understand why sound was a wave. Well, good thing she was inside a library.

"Ladar. Linasara. Oshkan. Cognar. Turat." The familiar sensation spread through her mind as thousands of books lit up like distant stars. At first, the entire library glowed with faint pinpricks of light before the spell began filtering the results. Shelves dimmed one after another until only a handful of books remained highlighted. A few of them came from the philosophy section. Lira paged through the titles and skimmed passages discussing the nature of perception and the senses.

Even more appeared among collections of poetry, where countless authors had compared voices to rippling water or rolling waves. Beautiful metaphors, perhaps, but not what she needed. One particular book, however, pulsed far brighter than the others. It rested in the architecture subsection, on a small shelf bordering the mathematics section. Lira frowned before making her way toward the highlighted shelf. Marvels of the Lost Age of Magic. That certainly wasn't where she had expected to find an explanation of sound.

She pulled the heavy volume free and returned to the alcove.

"Pika. Linasara. Cognar. Coopar. Nagla." The spell absorbed the contents into her mind in an instant. The book was a collection of famous structures that had survived the collapse of the Old Empire. There was a fortress in the southern kingdoms where every individual brick carried a tiny preservation cantrip, allowing the walls to endure for thousands of years with almost no erosion. Another chapter described the remains of a flying city whose levitation enchantments had failed during the Cataclysm.

Instead of shattering upon impact, it had become wedged perfectly between two mountain peaks, where an entire village now occupied its broken streets. Another entry described the ancient teleportation stations, seven almost identical sites spread across three continents. The portals themselves had ceased functioning centuries ago, yet the towering ring of enchanted stone remained intact, attracting scholars and tourists alike. All of it was interesting, but none of it answered her question.

She opened the book and skipped ahead until the relevant passage appeared. Among the greatest architectural wonders of the Old Empire stood the Grand Amphitheatre of Arkon, completed nearly three thousand years before the present age. Contemporary scholars recorded that a whisper spoken from the center of its stage could be heard clearly by every spectator, even those seated upon the highest tiers. Likewise, a single coin dropped upon the marble floor produced a sound audible throughout the entire theater.

Numerous magical examinations confirmed that this phenomenon was not the result of enchantment but of architecture alone. Chief Architect Margandy explained the principle as follows:"Sound travels through the air as ripples spread across the surface of a pond after a stone is thrown. Each wave expands outward until it gradually loses its strength or encounters an obstacle. When it strikes stone or another hard surface, the wave reflects back toward its source, much as water rebounds after reaching the shore.

This reflection produces what common folk call an echo: a voice returning after shouting into a cave or a deep well."

"By carefully shaping walls, ceilings, and seating, these reflected waves may be guided, concentrated, or dispersed. Thus, an architect may strengthen a speaker's voice without magic, ensuring every listener hears every word." Lira read the passage twice, then a third time for good measure. Her eyes slowly drifted toward the small washbasin tucked into the corner of the alcove. She reached over and gently touched the surface of the still water with the tip of a finger.

Tiny circular waves spread outward from the point of contact, each ring growing wider and weaker until they disappeared against the sides of the basin. Ripples.

"So... sound is like this?" If she understood things correctly, then sound wasn't simply like a wave. It was a wave. Only instead of moving through water, it traveled through air. She frowned. How could air ripple? Water had a surface where motion was visible. Wasn't air just empty... unless it wasn't? Wind had real force that could push things around, so perhaps air was simply like a lighter, invisible water. Did that mean air had a surface where Lira could see the ripples? What was a surface in the first place?

After thinking about it for a while, she decided that a surface was the point where air met water. So the surface of the air was also where air met water, only from the other side. Curiosity overcoming common sense, she leaned over the basin and shouted.

"AAA!" The water erupted into dozens of tiny ripples. Lira blinked.

"Did..." She stared at the disturbed surface.

"... did the sound do that?" After several seconds, she shook her head. No. Her shout had also forced a gust of air from her lungs. The moving air itself could have disturbed the water just as easily. There was no way to tell which had caused the ripples. She needed a cleaner experiment, something that produced sound without blowing air. A bell. Would striking a bell beside still water cause ripples? If it did, then her father's translation was accurate, and sound really was just another kind of wave after all.