The book keeps eleven spells. Three serve the bench, five treat what the catalogs cost,
and three produce what a preparation produces, out of a slot instead of a jar. None is
long, none is famous, and every one was written or collected by a practitioner for use
at a counter, which is why they read like receipts.
What they refuse to do is as deliberate as what they do, and the refusals are the book’s
own rules. Nothing here ends an addiction. Nothing reads what a creature has taken —
that is established by asking, as the first chapter says.
Nothing shortens the morning, which purl alone abbreviates, and only by a level. And
none of them is a cantrip: what can be had for nothing is named in the receipts where it
serves, and what these do is worth a slot.
“
I am asked why an apothecary who can cast keeps a shop at all, and the eleven workings in this
chapter are the answer read backward: everything else my trade does, magic does not do. There is
no spell here that makes a simple, none that reads a body, and none that ends a wanting, and I did
not neglect to write them. I tried, for the better part of forty years, and this chapter is what
succeeded.
— Hesper Aldwine
The eleven, by level:
Level
Spell
Classes
1
Cast It Up
Cleric, Druid, Paladin
1
Keep the Dreams
Bard, Druid, Wizard
1
Keep the Watch
Cleric, Druid, Ranger, Wizard
1
Stay the Turning
Druid, Ranger, Wizard
1
Steady Fire
Druid, Wizard
2
Hasten the Root
Druid, Ranger
2
Hold the Dose
Cleric, Druid, Paladin
2
Lay the Pain By
Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin
2
Soften the Fall
Cleric, Druid
2
Still the Wanting
Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin
3
Draw the Dose
Cleric, Druid, Paladin
The craft
The bench’s three. The second chapter names the first two
and what they were written against — the four-hour fire and the three-year root — and
the third answers time itself, which spoils more preparations than fire and digging
together.
Steady Fire
Level 1 Transmutation
Casting Time
Action or Ritual
Range
Touch
Components
V, S, M (a band of wetted clay)
Duration
8 hours
You touch one fire, lamp, stove, or still no larger than a 5-foot Cube and set its heat, anywhere from barely warm to a hard boil. For the duration the target holds exactly that heat — it consumes no fuel, needs no attention, and is not moved by wind, rain, or neglect. While within 30 feet of it, you can change the set heat as a Bonus Action.
The spell holds a fire; it does not create one, and what it holds neither spreads nor sets anything alight beyond what it was given.
Classes: Druid, Wizard
Hers, and the first. Written the winter an apprentice fell asleep at the emberfoot pot for the
third time, and taught since to every apprentice who asks — after the pot, never before it.
Stay the Turning
Level 1 Transmutation
Casting Time
Action or Ritual
Range
Touch
Components
V, S, M (a pinch of salt)
Duration
30 days
You touch up to 1 gallon of prepared food, drink, or preparation — a stoppered decoction, a jar of unguent, a basket of gathered leaf — and stop its changing. For the duration nothing in it spoils, separates, weakens, or grows.
What had already turned is not restored, and nothing is made safe that was not safe. A preparation still becoming — a tincture in its steeping month, a mash still working — stops with everything else, and takes its work up where it left off when the spell ends.
Classes: Druid, Ranger, Wizard
Older than her copy of it. She collected it from a ship’s cook, and her one amendment is the
warning about the steeping month, which she learned the expensive way.
Hasten the Root
Level 2 Transmutation
Casting Time
Action or Ritual
Range
Touch
Components
V, S, M (rainwater kept from spring)
Duration
Instantaneous
You touch one seed or seedling of a nonmagical plant, in ground that could grow it. Over the next 4 hours it grows to a usable harvest: one mature plant, bearing what a single plant of its kind bears in its season. The plant is alive and ordinary in every way but two — it sets no seed of its own, and no magic hastens it a second time.
The spell grows one plant, however it is cast, and enriches nothing around it.
Classes: Druid, Ranger
Hers, written for loomsight, and priced by it: one plant is one measure, and the spell spares
the years without changing the count. It sits deliberately between the two spells everyone offers
instead — Druidcraft opens one flower for nothing, Plant Growth brings on a countryside for a
season, and neither brings tonight’s root to tonight’s pot.
The treatment
The seventh chapter ends on four cases the Basic Rules
leave alone: the craving, the comedown, the overdose in progress, and the hands that
will not steady. These five answer them — the wanting and the hands in one working, the
comedown in another, and the overdose twice over, once held and once drawn.
Cast It Up
Level 1 Transmutation
Casting Time
Action
Range
Touch
Components
V, S
Duration
Instantaneous
You touch one creature that is willing, Incapacitated, or Unconscious, and its stomach gives up everything it holds, at once and without harm. A measure, a swallowed poison, or anything else whose effects have not yet begun comes up with the rest and never takes effect — no saving throw is made, no condition arrives, and nothing is added to any count a substance keeps.
What has already taken hold is beyond the spell, however recently it was swallowed, and nothing smoked, rubbed in, or delivered by a wound was ever in the stomach to bring up.
Classes: Cleric, Druid, Paladin
The trade’s. Every apothecary within a hundred miles has a copy, and no two of them agree
whose it was first. Hers came with the shop.
Hold the Dose
Level 2 Abjuration
Casting Time
Action
Range
Touch
Components
V, S
Duration
Concentration, up to 1 hour
You touch a creature with a substance at work in it and hold the substance still. For the duration, everything the dose is doing is suspended: its effects neither advance nor end, saving throws it would call for are not made, its clock does not run, and a creature whose breathing it has stopped neither improves nor worsens, making no death saving throws on the substance’s account.
Everything owed resumes exactly where it stopped when the spell ends. Hold the Dose cures nothing and removes nothing.
Classes: Cleric, Druid, Paladin
Hers, written the winter after a woman lived on milk poppy’s threshold because a girl of
eleven knew to hold her mouth open. The girl is named in her notes; the spell is dedicated to
nobody. What it buys is the hour, which in an overdose is frequently the whole of what was
missing.
Still the Wanting
Level 2 Enchantment
Casting Time
Action
Range
Touch
Components
V, S, M (a strip of linen tied about the wrist)
Duration
8 hours
You touch one creature and quiet, for the duration, what its body has learned to ask for. The creature ignores the Disadvantage its addiction’s degrees impose, ignores the effects of the Exhaustion level its addiction lays down, and its hands are steady. A measure merely within reach calls no saving throw from it while the spell lasts; one pressed on it directly is refused or taken as normal, though the creature makes that saving throw with Advantage.
The day counts as gone without, the count falls as it falls, and the saving throw made at the day’s end to be free of the addiction is made exactly as the creature’s degree requires, with no help from this spell.
Classes: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin
Hers, and late. Forty years of selling attendance by the fortnight taught her what it costs,
and this is for the nights nobody could sit. The wanting is quieted, not answered and not fed — a
hired quiet, her notes call it, worth what a hired sitter is worth and no more.
Soften the Fall
Level 2 Necromancy
Casting Time
Action
Range
Touch
Components
V, S
Duration
Instantaneous
You touch a creature owed Exhaustion that has not yet arrived — the levels a waking simple deferred, the cold a numbing held out, a watch kept by magic — and spread the arrival. The owed levels arrive one at each following dusk, rather than all at once, until the debt is paid.
Each level is ordinary Exhaustion when it arrives and is removed by rest in the ordinary way. Nothing is removed, nothing is added, and nothing already arrived is moved; a creature that goes on missing sleep goes on owing it.
Classes: Cleric, Druid
Written for a scholar with four nights owed at once, of exactly the kind the seventh chapter
counts. It did not save that one, who slept, woke, and accepted the next commission; it has saved
several since.
Draw the Dose
Level 3 Abjuration
Casting Time
Action
Range
Touch
Components
V, S, M (a bead of clear glass)
Duration
Instantaneous
You touch a creature and draw one substance out of it through the skin, gathering it as a single drop on the glass. Everything the substance was doing ends at once: its effects, its overdose and any saving throw still owed to it, and a breath it had stopped resumes on its own. What the dose already collected is not returned — damage stands, Exhaustion stands, and a measure taken remains taken on every count that is kept of it.
The drop is one true measure of the substance, recovered whole. The spell can’t draw drink, and it does nothing for Intoxication.
Classes: Cleric, Druid, Paladin
Hers, and the last thing she wrote. The drop on the glass is the spell’s signature — she kept
a drawer of them, each labeled with what it was and who it came out of, and the drawer is the
nearest thing the book has to a memoir. Drink it cannot draw: what a body spreads through the
whole of itself has no one thing left to take hold of, and the morning was never a dose.
The mimicry
Three spells produce what the catalog produces, at a slot’s price, with the catalog’s
own laws intact: the watch is repaid at dusk, and the laid-by pain returns whole. What
is missing from this family is missing on purpose. The steadying wants no spell of hers,
because Calm Emotions already serves and she names what serves; and the seeing she
refused to imitate.
“
There is no spell in this chapter for the seeing, and there will not be one from me. I can make a
man see what is not in the room; a conjurer at a fair does it nightly, for coppers. What veilcap
sells is that it means something, and I will not put my name to selling that.
— Hesper Aldwine
Keep the Watch
Level 1 Abjuration
Casting Time
Action or Ritual
Range
Touch
Components
V, S
Duration
8 hours
You touch one willing creature. For the duration the creature does not sleep and does not need to: it stays alert through the whole of a watch, saving throws it makes to stay awake succeed automatically, and while the spell lasts it gains no Exhaustion level for the sleep it is missing.
The missed rest is still missed, and the Exhaustion it would have cost arrives at the next dusk unless the creature has finished a Long Rest by then. A creature can benefit from Keep the Watch once between Long Rests.
Classes: Cleric, Druid, Ranger, Wizard
The sitter’s spell, written for whoever holds the fourth rung of the seventh chapter’s ladder.
The night is borrowed at dusk and repaid at dusk, and her notes record that she never once cast it
on herself two nights running.
Keep the Dreams
Level 1 Divination
Casting Time
Action or Ritual
Range
Touch
Components
V, S, M (a thread wound about a finger)
Duration
8 hours
You touch one willing creature as it settles to sleep. The creature sleeps its ordinary sleep and completes its rest as it otherwise would, and it dreams in order — and on waking it keeps the whole of the night, entire and in sequence, as firmly as anything it saw awake.
The dreams are the creature’s own, and the spell only keeps them: it does not send, summon, interpret, or answer.
Classes: Bard, Druid, Wizard
Written to settle a quarrel with a diviner, whom it did not settle. Her note beneath her fair
copy — a creature that dreamed an answer had the answer — is carved over the door of two houses
she never visited, and nobody has established how it got there.
Lay the Pain By
Level 2 Abjuration
Casting Time
Action
Range
Touch
Components
V, S
Duration
1 hour
You touch one creature and set its pain out of reach. For the duration the creature can’t be forced to make a check or saving throw to withstand pain, ignores the Disadvantage its injuries impose, and can act through what should stop it.
Nothing is healed and nothing is protected, and damage taken under the spell is taken in full. When the duration ends the pain returns, all of it, at once.
Classes: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin
Written for a sawyer, in a field, out of frostnettle’s logic and an hour’s need. She notes
that everyone it has ever been cast on has said the same word when it ended, and that the word is
not printable in a book anybody may read.