Spark

Noa had been aware of spell architecture almost as long as he could remember, because it was what his mother did. 

Some of it was what she taught him directly, sure, but more of it was just hearing her talk about it. Sometimes she'd tell him vaguely about what she'd been up to at work. Other times he'd overhear her conversations with other adults when she brought him along to a project—or a networking dinner, she brought him to those sometimes. 

So he knew a lot of bits and pieces that, now he was older, were adding up into a larger picture. 

Everyone learned magic from a very young age—first how to control magical impulses and perform minor cantrips, and then spoken spells a bit later, followed by formal spellwork classes in school. But that didn't mean most people understood how everything magical around them worked. Keeping the city's magic running smoothly was a large-scale enterprise that employed a lot of specialists—planners and engineers and maintenance workers, as well as architects and artisans and everything in between.

Noa had always wondered if he'd end up following in his mother's footsteps. Even now, with all that had happened between them, he couldn't help being interested. 

And one of the things his mother had always said was that the best way to learn about how a system worked was to see how it failed.
He traced the lights overhead with his eyes, watching the pattern of flickers. It was difficult to trace, but they were passing along in a certain direction, like the flow of magic was being disrupted.

Following that flow back upstream, he came to the westernmost corner of the library, where the card catalogue spanned an entire back wall. The spellwork seemed to run behind it. 

Noa looked around for a door or other easy passage into the wall or a panel in the floor, but found nothing obvious. But if the spells came through here, there would be a way to access the magical formulas that wrote them. 

So he fixed the location in his mind and made a beeline for the front doors. 

The street outside was noisy after the quiet of the library—perhaps even noisier than usual. But Noa set that aside for the moment, in favor of circling the building. 

Like many impressive buildings, this library had an impressive amount of space around it. In this case, that space was partly filled with a rock garden. Noa walked the perimeter of this, trying to get to the outside of the space he'd been in previously. 

He'd thought it would be difficult to find the exact spot he was thinking of. But two clues made it easy: 

First, there was a large panel installed in the middle of the wall, at easy access height. 

Second, that door was currently ajar, and its contents were flickering even more obviously than the lights inside the library had been. 

Picking his way through the ornamental stones, Noa made his way to the access point, stopping a safe distance away to see what he could.

The system was complicated. Runes upon runes—most of them standard, but so many on such a small scale that it must have been made with high-end tools. There was no way a high schooler would be able to make heads or tails of it…

…But he didn't need to, because someone had obviously tried to scrawl their own spell right on top of it. 

On top of the sculpted and engraved sigils were iridescent designs, seemingly made of some sort of metallic paint—possibly a magic alloy. He'd never seen such a thing in person, so he couldn't be sure, but a material of that quality would surely be able to interfere with public infrastructure. But those sorts of materials were both controlled and very expensive. 

And the design itself—some strange, curlicue shape, tight and exact at the bottom and then expanding upwards—didn't match the quality of the materials in neatness or exactitude. It wasn't one of the standard runes that Noa had studied in class or seen in any of his mother's projects. Its application here was slapdash at best. It looked maybe a step or two above graffiti, though it glinted beautifully in the afternoon sunlight. 

It was almost enough to distract from the fact that the latch on the side of the panel had been broken open, with part of it scattered on the ground beside it. Clearly this had been an act of sabotage, though Noa wasn't sure of the reason behind it just yet. 

At one end of the design, there was a wire. A similar iridescent shade to the rest of the material, it ran into the wall along with the other components of the spell. 

Noa bent closer, examining it closely. The iridescence rippled faintly, drawing him in—

A voice called out, "Hey, what are you doing?" 

In the same moment, there was an arcing spark, and Noa's arm was pulled by the wrist towards the panel. 

Shocked, Noa wheeled backwards, even as his arm shot forward. It brushed against the symbol for a brief moment before he yanked it back. 

There was a man in a cardigan starting to jog towards him. Noa backed up and put up his hands. 

"What's going on here?" the man demanded. 

"I—I'm not sure," Noa said, distracted by the feeling in his wrist. It was like pins and needles marching down his arm and out his fingertips. "It was like this when I got here." 

"You expect me to believe that?" 

Noa spread his hands and gestured at the opening, grateful he'd left his bag in the library with Miyori. "Does it look like I could do that? Without any equipment or anything?" 

The man gave him a narrow look, pursing his lips. 

Noa didn't let himself sweat too obviously, but he could feel his face heating up. "But I should stop snooping around. Excuse me." 

He turned and continued the long way around the building so he didn't have to pass the man, who probably worked there. 

As he went, shaking out his half-numb fingers, he traced the wall with his eyes. When he turned the corner, he thought he saw another flash of iridescence—but when he turned his head to double-check, it was gone. 

He shook his head and continued back to Miyori. There was curiosity, and then there was sticking his nose directly in trouble. He was lucky that doing the latter had only gotten him a shock this time.