Spell Study: Summon Creature VII

By Archmage Terrinus Aleph

This is the Seventh Circle iteration of the Summon Creature spell line, and the first that is capable of touching upon the Elemental Planes from whence to draw a Subject. The invocation itself is an arcane construct with an open-ended semantic, making the base spell highly mutable but also unpredictable.

While the caster can invoke the spell without additional control clauses, they would be victim to probability as to which of the four Elemental Planes they would draw a spirit from. As such, several volumes exist containing specific knowledge, glyphs, et cetera to give a Conjurer a greater measure of control.

These four books books common to the Island of Arelith, known colloquially as "Books of Fire," "of Water," "of Air," and "of Earth," contain magical semantics and mathematical clauses that can be appended to the spell's construction. As indicated by the septenary glyph structure in the subject Summon Creature spell, a mnemonic prefix can be safely inserted as a subtype clause.

Inserting the Primary Clause from any of these Books of [Element] as this subtype clause in the septenary glyph, the caster can easily dictate the type of Elemental summoned.

The spell's successive iterations in the Eighth and Ninth Circles contain corresponding octonary and nonary glyph structures, respectively, for the same purpose and with the same method.