Hiya, Querencia! Pan dropping in again. Let's get to it!
"Well, when you activate it, it begins to draw power," Mr. Vaughn explained. "Not very much, mind you, since this is a small spell. Still, as long as the spell is working, it will be taking something from you. This is completely dictated by you -- you can make the spell a bit more powerful by feeding it more energy, and if you have several active spells, you can prioritize. The spell cannot take from you any more or less than you are willing to give. Does that help?"
I like that magic involves has an instinctual side to it as well as being quite a technical pursuit. It's a good balance of the precise and the mysterious.
the spell lit up before his eyes, sending him scrambling backwards
Give us more detail about what the spell actually looks like. What colour is it? How bright is the glow? Does it have a particular sound? Or even something more unusual like a scent?
He smiled at the spell, and at Mr. Vaughn’s direction, searched inside himself for where the energy was coming from. It was really quite strange, but he could understand much better now what Mr. Vaughn had meant.
Is there any kind of comparison or description that you could come up with to make this sensation easier to visualise? Is it physical? Can he feel it in his stomach, his chest? Or is it just a mental thing? I'd like to have a better idea of how it actually feels to control the energy.
she pulled him along into the guest bedroom that had become hers — he could tell by the presence of plants clustered about the room.
I love that Mia has managed to surround herself with house plants even while staying in a house that isn't hers. It's like plants are just drawn to her life moths to flame.
“Sounds pretty good, actually,” Mia said. “I… those nightmares scare me more than I care to admit to anyone.”
I still find it weird that the actual content of the nightmares hasn't come up in conversation yet. Finnley hasn't even wondered about it. I don't know if you're holding back on it for a reason, but it does seem like the kind of thing Finnley would muse about even if he felt too shy to ask Mia about it outright.
Overall, my thoughts on this chapter are pretty similar to my thoughts on the previous one. I'm still loving finding out more about the magic. I feel like you have a really good system worked out and I really want to see Finnley tearing his hair out over the arrangement of a really tough spell at some point. I feel like he might have more difficulty with the control side of things rather than the academic side, because he seems to be getting along with the magical language and diagrams pretty well.
As I mentioned in an earlier review, I feel like this whole plotline would carry more weight if Mia's nightmares felt like they'd been a consistent problem. She said in chapter twenty that she hadn't had this nightmare since she was a little kid, so it feels weird that she's talking about it now like it's something that's completely incapacitating. I mean, it can't be pleasant, but it doesn't feel like the most pressing problem a character could have in a story like this.
Still, I am beginning to wonder if this spell is going to have unforeseen complications. I sort of hope it does, because that would make the whole plotline feel like it had a stronger point to it.
Keep writing!
~Pan
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