The candle flame turned white.
I'd been trying for nine days to make it do that, and when it finally happened, I nearly knocked the bench over.
It was such a small thing. A candle, on a laboratory bench, inside a ring no wider than my hand. Seven tiny circles turning around the wick, building the smallest fire spell I knew, the kind first-years used to light lamps. The eighth turning around them, light one way and dark the other, the aurora rippling faintly green along the seam.
And for the first time, the eighth circle wasn't just holding itself together. It was carrying the seven.
That was what an eighth circle was for. Not a new kind of magic—the same magic, with more behind it. Everything the seven made, the ring caught as it turned, and carried round, and fed back in on the next beat, so that the spell built on itself instead of spilling away. Same mana going in. Far more coming out.
