Not every failed attempt—and there were many failed attempts—of editing the spell ended as violently as the first one. Only a third of them. These, though, almost never repeat themselves.
Once, the spell exploded in a blast of freezing air. Another time, it tried to engulf Cael in solid ice. The third, it almost cut off Cael's fingers with an invisible but solid force.
Twenty-six failures of varying degrees of frustration in total. But Cael felt they were teaching him something, too. The complexity of magic meta-forms was still beyond anything he could consciously understand or memorize. But each failure gave him a glimpse of that understanding.
Cael also studied the rest of the books on spellcrafting that Niko sent him. They ventured deeper into descriptions of meta-forms and tried to explain the underlying laws of their connection.