Julie could not find her magical essence the next day, or the day after. Every day she languished. Without rage or strong emotions to help call it forth, her affinity diminished.

The cycles of day and night blurred by as her stomach and body screamed for sustenance. Today, only a single sun rose, and the day whittled away until the lonely sunset. The three celestial bodies loomed bright and full in the darkened sky; when all three full moons aligned every three months, citizens of Ermaeyth marked the passing of another season. Tonight, Auqyn, Nykron, and Faellon, formed a lopsided triangle.

Fife presented the bucket, which she drank from greedily; the phantom limbs appeared shortly after. Like the previous excursion, the laced water brought her to a stupor. She managed to hold her stomach when she passed out. The following day she woke with the sun creeping into the sky, Fife hovering over her, leaning on his staff. She wiped her mouth and sat up, not bothering to ask for breakfast or a change her clothes.

And so she sat.

That night recycled the repetitive pattern: ladle, water, phantom limbs. This night, Julie didn’t drink as much even though her body protested her restraint. She traced the magical essence over her body. The difficulty lay in detecting herself, distinguishing her aura from the magic flooding the Melodic Mountains. The mountains themselves, Fife, his hut, the books with runes in his cottage, she felt each distinct essence, but not her own, and not without Fife’s special water.

Julie reached an epiphany on the third night, correlating the distinct quality of other magical objects or people to subtle flavors, then adding a ‘flavor’ to her essence. From that moment on, she could detect her essence like a second skin, real, present though most of the time she couldn’t discern it. It was natural, like breathing.

After many days of starving and becoming delirious from dehydration, Fife allowed her two days of rest. On the third day, she woke early enough for breakfast, shocking her almost as much as the Grand Maghai. After they had eaten a hearty breakfast of fruits, eggs, bacon, a grain-based porridge, and chilled goat’s milk to wash it down, Julie found herself scrubbing pots and plates in the kitchen while Fife tinkered with his latest invention. Julie shot the gnomling scathing looks, though couldn’t help but smile as he worked.

Sure, he could teach me and anyone else to use magic, but his passion for inventing seems more important than my training.

Fife’s lessons were grueling and hard for Julie to master, but she learned quickly. Much to her chagrin, she begrudgingly admitted the little creature knew what he was doing. His lessons were like his first, many bundled into one. Each lesson manifested in steps, each tethered to another through a series, until she learned them all. Judas never delved this deep into teaching, relying more on a let-me-show-you-this and try-to-remember-that mentality. That would have worked, but she lacked any ground work or understanding. Fife understood she knew almost nothing and approached her that way. Julie took into consideration that Judas had not taught anyone in a long time, and found herself currently inefficient. She fostered leniency for Judas in that regard, the warlock unaware she belonged to the annals of Rumigul, whereas Fife knew what she was.

Not exactly… she amended.

By punctual routine, Julie found herself outside, sitting in a crossed leg fashion for Fife’s theoretical period of instruction. Later would come the practical application, and it would be grueling, regardless how it manifested.

“What keeps you alive, young Starriace?” he inquired. The Grand Maghai planted the end of his rod in the ground.

“Magic, master,” she blurted. Fife smacked her on the head with his staff.

“That was for guessing. Try again, and this time, think before you speak, Starriace.”

My name is not Starriace!

Julie quietly contemplated. She had forgotten the initial reason for contemplation. Her face pinched up, concentrating. “Your heart,” she guessed again.

“True,” Fife grinned, then frowned, “and false. For your heart to beat, what must you have?”

“Blood?”

“What is in the blood, Starriace?”

“Water?”

“Homugons, Starriace!” Fife cursed as he threw up his arms. “Do you just go through life stumbling and guessing? Do you ever sit for a moment and come up with an educated answer? The answer I am looking for, young one, is air.” Julie slumped at his rebuke. Each admonition, she noticed, was short, scything, and pointed; he never expounded and dwelt on her failures despite being quick to point them out. She idly wondered if Rusem would treat her the same way. Her thoughts danced back to the ring in her pack.

“The air you breathe is as invisible as your soul, is that not so? How do we know there is air? The same as our soul, yes? We just know. Our lungs expand and contract with breath, don’t they? And the air and wind are as one, is that not so? Air may serve your purpose, just like water and fire. Fire warms you, cooks your food; water washes you, nourishes, does it not? Air keeps you alive, but it can also hide, obscure, even deflect. If I throw a rock into a strong gale, would the stone not return to me? I am sure it would, aren’t you?”

Fife paced as he usually did when lecturing.

“The point I am trying to make is that air is made up of the same thing as water and fire. What if I told you water contained individual elements that can be brought together or separated? Do you think me as crazy?”

“Master, I am not sure what to think at this point,” Julie declared. A quick rap of his rod reminded her of her stupidity.

“If my lessons mean nothing to you, then why waste my time, indeed?” He stormed off to his cottage while Julie remained motionless, unsure of what to do. She felt terrible for blurting the truth of her experiences.

What the hell is wrong with me? she wondered.

Nothing. You told the truth. Besides, he deserved it for all those times he hit you.

Each time he hit her with his staff or cut her down, she learned patience and long-suffering. The voice was right; perhaps he did deserve it. Before she could muster an apology, Fife exited his hut carrying a small, white ceramic plate. He placed it on the ground, cupped a handful of soil, and dropped the granules on the plate.

“Count,” he instructed.

“How, master?” she gawked.

“That is your exercise. Use your essence: feel, search, know. With magic it matters not large or small, it only matters.”

Shades of the Underworld.

Fife took a step and halted, “No happy-water for you either!”

Go fuck yourself, little man. With every waking second of the day, the gnomling agitated her. No, we surpassed agitated in the first few hours of my second day.

She was well beyond that now. Demanding, insensitive, boorish, impatient, and he lacked a sense of humor, setting her nerves alight.

His improper usage of Myshku is driving me madder than Mr. Pleasure could have ever hoped. She sighed and rolled her eyes. Eventually, she would learn what she needed, and then she would leave, discard him.

Not soon enough, she thought glumly.

Apor, the largest of the two suns, bathed the mountain with its pale cerulean hue and all but drowned out the pale, brilliant amaranth of Praema, the smaller sun. With the seasons rotating from autumn to winter, the world tilted in its relative positions, creating magnificent cascades of colors with each dawn and dusk. The typical blues, purples, and reds prevailed throughout the year, but in the colder months, vivid oranges, greens, and yellows came into focus. Other breathtaking colors emerged during these months: lime, cyan, emerald, aquamarine, with golds, ambers, magenta, and the ever-rare silver streak, hence their saying, the silver lining. Apor rumbled through the sky as Praema dithered, a distant thought as Julie focused on her task.

Counting the particles of sand turned out harder than Julie first imagined. His pinch held thousands of fine motes—some so small that counting seemed impossible. She stretched out with her essence, easier with Fife’s tutelage and constant use, and enveloped the plate with her essence. With slow, methodical care, she sifted through each granule. Three times she lost tally when an unexpected gust of wind scattered the piles.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The setback helped her understand Fife’s original assignment and his allocution on air. She fortified the air around the ceramic; in her mind’s eye, she created a thicker bubble of air around the platter so the thin wind couldn’t move her mounds of fine dirt.

Apor and Praema retreated and the three moons, Auqyn, Nykron, and Faellon, ascended again but not in alignment. Faellon, the first celestial body, retired for the night. Auqyn came next, followed closely by Nykron.

Praema climbed the next morning, its brilliant amaranth casting a soft, eerie fire over the land, lighting a blinding torch in the sky. A Praema-only sunrise was infrequent, and Apor lumbered not far behind. The rarest of all celestial movements occurred with Praema rising as sole occupant, where Apor slumbered beyond the horizon, a happening that occurred perhaps twice in an Age. Apor’s solo rising happened quite often, by comparison, a couple of dozen times each year.

But Julie took no notice of Praema’s and Apor’s sunrise. She did not take time to observe its brightening. Still she counted, flicking tiny, infinitely-fine grains across from one side to the other. Her thirst, a distant tickling of her throat, her faint hunger an obscure pang. The multiple days she spent without nourishment made the overnight undertaking effortless. She submerged herself, delving into acute and profound depths, the discomforts of her body diminished. Granted, she did not move mountains or destroy cities, but she worked at a finite level, nearly molecular. When drawn that deep to the origins of creation, one cannot help but withdraw. Comparatively speaking, the dirt she counted was so fine that multiple particles could fit within a single grain of coarse, desert grit.

Praema set first, by a minute margin, ahead of the larger sun, Apor, but the latter moved faster and was further away. Many times Praema soared first, but the other would catch it. A beautiful sunset of cobalt, indigo, mulberry, and orchid graced the twilight as Faellon ascended with its pale heliotrope pigment. The air cooled as Auqyn took its turn in the sky with its luminescent, pearl sheen. Faellon retreated as Nykron lurched to the sky, casting its own pale harlequin tint into the foray. Sweat beaded Julie’s brow as she continued with her computation.

The following morning, Praema and Apor rose simultaneously, and Apor reached its apex before Julie completed her task. Fife stood beside her as she sat back and breathed deeply. Her lower back ached, spasms shooting up her cramping back. Hastily, she recalled Fife’s first lesson and soothed the pain away. Able to move without grimacing, she handed him the plate.

“There are six hundred and seventy-three thou—,” she stopped as Fife dumped the soil on the ground. “What the fuck!” she shrieked, leaping to her feet. “What in the Underworld is your problem?”

“The assignment was not if you would complete it, but if you could count at all,” Fife answered. “It matters not if there are ninety thousand grains or nine million, you have proven my point by your tally, yes?” He planted the end of his stick in the ground and leaned forward. “Now, using the analogy of sand, the grains of the air will be much more finite. Think of air as dirt you are unable to see, it is still dirt, and it is still there, is it not? Now we must realize the grains of air,” he confirmed. “But that can wait till the morrow, you have earned a time of rest, have you not?” He smiled at her and held his hand out towards the cottage.

“You are the biggest asshole I have ever met,” she tersely groaned before she stormed off.

For more than a dozen sunsets Julie struggled to summate the motes of air, or as Fife liked to put it, the invisible dirt. By the second day, when she could get no closer to finding them, Fife had her begin to search her skin and find the pores in her arm where sweat gleamed. At one point, he scraped her skin roughly with the blade of a knife and had her search the dead skin cells on the end of the knife. Once she had a better understanding of her skin and pores, Fife lectured from inside the house for a change, using a slab of slate and a small white calcite stone for writing. He began with pictures and diagrams on the board, drawing circles and dots, orbits, and clarifying which were charged and which were not. By the time Fife finished his introduction, Julie swore she’d be cross-eyed for life; her head threatened to rend in half.

“I just don’t get it,” she said, for what felt like the tenth time.

“What is not to get? I showed you, yes?” Fife turned to his drawing again. “This barrier, this outer limit is the end of the home. This center part, this core, think of it as a fireplace, yes? Now, these circling motes, think of them as old people or babies. They need to keep warm, do they not? So they move around the fireplace very close. The other motes are unlike old people or babies, they don’t need to keep warm as much, so they stay further away from the fire, do you understand?”

“Look!” Julie rubbed her eyes. “I get what you’re saying, your analogies at least, but what does this have to do with anything?”

“Us, Starriace, us,” His eyes twinkled. “We are made up of these small granules.”

“So, we’re made up of sand?”

“True,” he considered, “and false. The sand and our bodies are the same and yet different, are they not? You can lick your skin, do you taste of mud? I think not! You can stomp the ground, but if you get stomped, you will bleed, would you not? But internally, farther than you can see with your eyes, things begin to look the same.”

“How do you know, master?” Julie scoffed.

“I have seen it, Starriace.” he tittered. Fife picked up the knife again, scraping her skin like he did before, then shuffled towards his table of tinkering trinkets. He rubbed the knife on a sheet of stainless glass and gathered materials from the tables and adjoining shelves. His invention comprised of four parts.

He placed the metal base on the table and connected a swiveling mirror to the contraption. From the shelf, he removed a cylindrical tube with glass at both ends, and pulled on it, elongating it like a spyglass. Now that she thought of it, the tube did look like a very small spyglass. Clamping the spyglass to the top of the base, he tilted it at an angle. Once clamped in position, he made fine adjustments. Between the tube and the base was a platform, in which he slid the glass with her skin cells between two thin metal clasps. Lastly, he attached a small ball of wire which jutted out at a forty-five-degree angle. With a rub of his fingers, a ball of yellow-white light erupted inside the wire mesh, the metal caging the flame. Fife cleared his throat with everything in place.

“This is one of my inventions,” he stated. Julie noted the pride in his voice. “This will help you understand what I am trying to teach you. The light will help us see your skin better. But it can’t be seen directly. Thus the mirror, do you see? The light is reflected, and you can see your skin through here,” he said, pointing to the top of the small metal tube.

Soon, Julie could detect her individual skin cells and understood what Fife inferred, what he referred to as skin crumbs. She spent the next two days looking through the contraption, focusing on skin cells, hair follicles, eyelashes, mire, grass and other plant life, ash, and more. While each enjoyable experience prevailed as unique, the theory became lost with each peer through the spyglass. Fife would draw diagrams of what she saw, and by the end, she had a few dozen drawings. With his instruction, the invention, and the pictures, Fife’s teachings completed a circle she would have otherwise missed.

“What do they each have in common, Starriace?”

By now, Julie understood and used Fife’s terminology. “Each is made up of many houses; each house has a hearth…”

“Very good, now we must look smaller, beyond the abilities of the eye or my inventions. We must find the granules of air.”

Despite learning the depths of magic and biology, Julie couldn’t help the growing irritation towards the Grand Maghai. He hadn’t taught her anything of value as she measured it. She wanted to know how to defend herself, to fight back, to lash out at her enemies, the power to defeat Xilor. But as the days melted to weeks, she resigned to studies and futile searching.

Daily, she applied what she had learned from Fife’s invention as she searched for the granules of air. Every sunset she came up empty and he would smile, encouraging her to search smaller on the morrow. And so the cycle continued. Apor rose and fell repetitiously; even Auqyn went through its full cycle of sky dominance—three weeks out of four—before she fathomed even the slightest inclination of an air granule. With the long-awaited reward, her work truly began.

Now that she had found what she sought, Fife taught her how to manipulate it. What Julie discovered is that she already manipulated it before, almost at a subconscious level when he instructed her to count the grains of soil. She had, in her mind’s eye, imagined the air around her plate as thicker than the air without. Once she established this connection, everything else took form with ease and she made leaps with her progress.

The glow of satisfaction warmed her just shy of a week after starting, eagerly returning to the grass outside his hut for her next lesson. Apor and Praema ruled the sky, the first glimpse of Nykron graced the western sky. Deep in concentration, she focused her thoughts and aura to her will, to bend and mold to what she wanted. Ten large stones, ranging from twice the size of her head to modest, floated around her head in orbit. That turned out to be the easy part.

When the student’s studious efforts revealed the air granules, she set to task manipulating them to levitate small objects. The key component for success involved fortifying the air beneath the object, displacing its weight coupled with using air to move it where she willed. Thrill and exhilaration rolled off her in waves. New possibilities unlocked for her with this novel ability, but when she tried to lift a boulder near the outskirts of Fife’s clearing, her hopes were quashed.

Shades! Just when I thought I was beginning to grasp his teachings, I find I haven’t attained proper mastery.

But for now, she grew content with her small, floating pebbles.

Next, she focused on influencing the temperature of the stones. She noted the rise in temperature compelled the air motes to move faster. The outside of some rocks rocketed up to sizzling hot, burning bright orange to cherry red as steam streamed off the surface. The reverse held true. After completing the first portion of her exercise, she cooled the cores, plummeting them into freezing temperatures. Once completed, she opened her eyes and waited.

“Good,” Fife said, noting she had completed the assignment. Julie diminished with the lack of praise. “Now I want you to change all the stones to different temperatures. No two can be the same, understand?”

“Yes, master,” Julie said. She rolled her eyes just before closing them, letting out a sigh of irritation. Eyes clamped shut in concentration, the rocks shifted to various temperatures. The first three pebbles changed with little effort, but with the fourth, the assignment taxed her. Frowning in concentration, her inner control remained, but the power she drew from outside her ’shell’—as Fife put it—became erratic.

The orbiting stones slowed, vibrating violently before shattering, dispersing in all directions. The Grand Maghai raised a hand, and his shield flared up, blocking the rocketing debris.

“You still need much, much more work, Starriace.”

Julie ground her teeth as he said the name. The name he insisted on calling her.

“Again,” he commanded.

Julie stomped off defiantly, the thought of slipping the ring on her finger persisted, tantalizing, persuasive.