“As long as you use that bullshit, nobody’s going to be proud of you,” Kraven assured him matter-of-factly.
He realized that he was speaking to a child and also crushing said child’s dream, but what else was he to do? He regretted only that he was the one being made to do this, instead of the white dragon he’d appointed as this youngling’s guide. Did he have to have every uncomfortable conversation around here?
“Listen, I feel a certain amount of respect for you being able to figure out something new on your own, but you need to focus your attention on your water casting. When a dragon casts non-elementally and outside of their own color, they harm the balance of the pool, and everyone around them suffers. Magic suffers. We’ve had many students who have wanted to use both fire and water magic. I’m prepared to give you all the tools you need to learn both, if your body turns out to be attuned, if you just stop doing this evil nonsense.”
Caltyr looked down at his fluffy creation. To his eyes, it looked kind of cute. It didn’t deserve to be the catalyst for such derision. He picked it up gently in his claws and tucked it away in the bag he’d slung over his midsection.
He felt cruddy, having to put his new discovery about himself away like this. But he wanted to do whatever he could to return to the position of respect he’d held before now, to not make his principal look at him as a problem rather than a promising solution.
And learning a new type of magic was just what he needed to push Sara back down to being the third best in their class.
“If you let me learn light magic instead, like Miss Tavren, I’ll stop practicing my Fleshomagic.”
“I’m going to need you to not call it that,” Kraven muttered, bewildered.
“What do you want me to call it instead?” He raised his brows hopefully at the prospect of a new name for his peculiar type of magic.
“Just… don’t refer to it at all, please.” A slow, careful smile spread across his tired features. “Or only call it that when the humans are here.”
He lowered himself cautiously back down onto his perch, laying his long neck back against the cool morning grass. “And you can have your light magic classes, if that means this will stop here.” He closed one of his eyes slowly, the eyelid dragging down his eye lazily and cautiously, while making eye contact. He kept one open, and the two of them stood there in silence again.
Caltyr realized the principal was waiting on a response from him.
“This will stop here,” he promised gravely, hiding his disappointment admirably.
“Then you may go.”
Caltyr turned away, heeding the principal’s command—this one, at least. What Kraven hadn’t seen, because of his one closed eye, was that Caltyr had been crossing his fingers during his promise; a ritual even more ancient than Kraven was that meant the promise between them was totally and completely void.
Caltyr was a dragon, after all, and his bottle cap collection was getting a little lame now that he was sixty-nine years-old. He wanted to start a new hoard; why not collect three whole types of magic, two through school and the other through private practice?
Forbidden hoards were way more fun than regular hoards, Caltyr told himself as he uncrossed his scaly fingers and sauntered away, his long azure tail flicking behind him.
*
For the next several months, Caltyr learned about light magic from Miss Tavren, who did a rather poor job of hiding how very much she suddenly hated his guts. The look on her face when she had been informed she would be his primary caretaker was not one of excitement or pride like it had been when she’d heard she would be helping him excel with his water magic.
And to make matters worse, he did not excel at light magic.
The first few months of learning to harness any form of mana was trying, and very, very boring. The first few lessons were all foundational and all about teasing one’s natural abilities to the surface without letting them explode or spill over, hurting the others around them.
It was admirable how many of their lessons focused on the greater good and the health and safety of others, given how many stories he’d heard about his ancestors conquering cities and even continents without regard to anyone else’s petty feelings. They were a lot like pirates, a pretend game he and his friends had played often on the schoolyard.
Or they had, before he’d decided it would be a good idea to share the darkest thing about himself for all to see.
He was focused now on showing everyone how kind and gooey his insides were, contrary to how he had seemed that day. That had been most of what drew him to light magic, the purest and goodest element of all—or, that was the way he saw it.
Perhaps that was because of the tiniest, babiest inkling of a crush he had on Miss Tavren.
But only partly. He truly did strive to become a better person to counteract the sweltering, fleshy pit forming in his soul. According to what he had been taught, the tornado of mana roaring inside him would dull and slow down with each new type of mana added, which caused him to wonder exactly what his innards looked like right now.
Especially since he had still been practicing his unnamed secret magic when everyone else was away or asleep at night, the kind he was no longer permitted to refer to. Was the magical tornado in his soul permeated with flesh ribbons, twirling like pasta around a fork, getting stuck in the tines and not letting his light magic filter through?
Today’s lesson was trying to conjure just a single speck of light. He had gotten through his reading on what exactly light was, electromagnetic radiation, and had spent the afternoon trying to think soul-irradiating thoughts.
Or, as Miss Tavren called it, meditating.
There were five other dragons in his beginner light class, and only one had been present for his months-ago demonstration. The lack of overlap had allowed him some modicum of a clean slate.
That said, what did a clean slate matter if he couldn’t even stand out among his peers, dooming him to mediocrity? They were preparing for war, not a Sunday roast. Excelling in magic class was the only thing that mattered.
“Now that your minds have been sufficiently prepared, and your souls too, let’s try having you cast something.”
The ivory dragon pulled herself out from behind the desk she was seated at. She dwarfed the desk many times over. It was comical seeing her try to write on it, or even standing next to it, as she was doing now.
She took her two sets of long, slender fingers and cupped them against each other, pulling them away from one another to reveal a floating ball of light. It looked like the sun in several ways, but it was perfectly round and glowed with the purest beams of silver rather than gold.
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Caltyr marveled at the ease with which she had summoned it. He felt his heart squeeze in his chest, responding to her sheer ability.
“Why don’t you try starting us off, Sara?”
Sara beamed at Miss Tarven. As luck would have it, she was the one who had also been there at his show-and-tell, and now she was here trying to learn a third type of magic to hold over his head.
She didn’t even know that he was also wielding three types of mana, and it got harder and harder each day not to bark it in her face, especially when she would stick her long, wagging tongue out at him and tell her friends how much better at stuff she was than him.
Part of him thought the elders were being hypocritical, fostering Sara’s ambition as she took on not two but three different types of magic. The fact that it was the element of light that she was trying to pick up next had him thinking this was no mere coincidence.
The elders kept saying it was because of her strength of character whenever someone brought the disparity up, but where did that leave him and his character?
“Okay!” she exclaimed, running excitedly out from where she was seated, the swiftness of her movement causing her pages to turn as she left her desk.
She stood at attention in front of the teacher like a ruler, her striking blue and yellow scales facing Caltyr. He could see from where he was how brilliantly they shined in the light, but they imbued him with something other than wonder. Jealousy?
Seeing her getting such positive attention from Miss Tavren for her desire to expand her knowledge, while he got terse conversations and fleeting glances, drove a knife into his pride.
Or maybe it was more than his pride. He wrapped his tail around himself and hoped silently for her to fail whatever task the ivory dragon was about to assign her.
“I want you to try to conjure any shape of light between your hands, just like this,” she said, eliciting a small gasp from the dragon mouths in the crowd. None of them besides the one white dragon in the class had managed to produce any shape of light, spherical or otherwise.
“I can try,” Sara stated, suddenly somewhat uneasy about the whole thing, because it meant she could fail at something spectacularly and publicly.
“Don’t be worried,” whispered the teacher softly, “I’ll be right here to talk you through it.”
Sara nodded and brought her hands up to her chest, bending her much smaller fingers into the same parallel position her mentor had hers in.
“Breathe in and out. Now, I want you to imagine a bright sun sitting at your core, warming your insides. Always remember when you begin casting in any element that for dragons, magic begins from within.”
The younger dragon nodded and, determined to succeed, closed her golden eyes. She pictured a thousand suns lighting her up from the inside out, illuminating her ribcage, the insides of her stomach, shining so brightly she was like a draconic lamp.
“Now move that light energy through your arms and up to your hands, and then your wrists. Picture the light swirling around between your palms, fast.”
A tiny little lightning bolt arced from one of her scaled hands to the other
“That’s lightning, Sara. The two are quite alike, so work on pulling them apart. Find the differences between the light and the lightning. Ask only the light to appear from inside its shell, your body.”
Caltyr’s claws dug into the underside of his desk as he watched the bolt swerve back upward and begin twirling in on itself, forming what looked almost like what Miss Tavren had cast.
“Faster than that, Sara. Light is going at, well, the speed of light. You need to match it. Do you think you can do that?”
Sara didn't want to hamper her concentration with a nod. She focused instead on listening, forcing the string to weave around and around faster than she thought possible. Slowly, shakily, it stabilized into a solid ball of light.
"Yes!" Miss Tarven exclaimed, dissipating her own sphere to clap excitedly. “Stay like that for a moment. Class, I want you to reference Sara’s mana and try to conjure your own light. Any shape will do! Remember, it is so much faster than you think it is.”
“She’s right,” Sara agreed with a strained lilt to her voice. Even the split second it took to speak shook her focus, and the tiny sun flickered, slowing dramatically.
I want you to reference Sara’s mana, Caltyr mumbled saltily in his brain. He tugged the tips of his nails out of the puncture holes he didn’t realize he’d been making in his desk. How hard could summoning light really be if Sara was already doing it? She had joined the class weeks after he did.
Which was all the more reason that he needed to succeed today.
Caltyr held his hands apart like he was making a flesh burger, and closed his eyes. He pictured his mana cyclone lighting up and burning so brightly it gave Sara a sunburn. The brightness rose from the bottom of the halo of wind and up to the top, winding filaments of pure energy in tight circles.
Then, he pushed those same filaments out through his arms. He tried to go faster than he was used to; water went at such a relaxed, flowy pace in comparison.
“You’re doing it!” Miss Tavren chirped excitedly.
Caltyr cracked open one of his eyes. There was nothing between his chitinous hands. The ivory dragon was speaking to somebody else, the only other ivory dragon in the class. She was spinning a neat, silvery cube around herself rather than just holding it out in front of her. This was the first time he’d seen her accomplish the feat while keeping the shape consistent.
He began to smack his hands together and clap for her, partly to ignore the searing shame creeping through him. But he wasn’t about to give up. As soon as he could force the light to appear outside himself, they were all going down.
His classmates joined him in clapping, even Sara, who sacrificed her orb to do so.
“Let’s end here for the day so we can end on a high note,” Miss Tavren said, even though that would mean dismissing them ten minutes early.
Caltyr didn’t need the formality of a dedicated class to practice, anyway. The fields on the outskirts of their small city were open and waiting.
On his way out of the room, he heard the sound of sniggering, female and high-pitched.
“Did you see that? Caltyr looked like he was about to pop a vein!”
One of the sniggering voices cascaded into a full-blown giggle.
“He should really just stop trying. What does he think he’s gonna do, get better than me?”
Caltyr rolled his eyes so hard they almost disconnected from their stems. He had to rub them a little after that. He could tell the second voice was Sara’s, and he made a show of pointedly ignoring her as he sauntered past, headed for the exit that let him out closest to where they spent their recesses.
He tried not to engage when Sara was being like this. Any time spent arguing would be a waste, when he could just use it on improving his casting instead.
“Yeah, and what’s he doing trying to make light happen anyway? Everyone knows there’s no light in there, just rotting mouse flesh.”
Sara guffawed and began to chitter and laugh. “Even Miss Tavren knows he’s pure evil. She never spends any one-on-one time with him because she senses it too.”
Caltyr stopped in his tracks.
The scales on either side of his face fanned out, and the scales all down his back rose up. He whirled around and loosed a roar that shot frosty cold across the grain of the hardwood floor.
He’d never been able to use ice magic before, so he would be impressed with himself if he weren’t so pissed. The splintering ice that coated the ground made a high-pitched, metallic-sounding hum that matched the hum of his anger.
“Don’t you dare. I clapped for Malika before anybody, don’t get it twisted. I’m not evil, I just can’t stand you.”
Sara and her cronies stood there in stunned silence for a few seconds, and then it was Sara who stepped forward and broke it. “Everyone knows the strongest dragon is the most correct dragon, and I say you’re evil.”
Caltyr seethed through his nostrils. Strength of character, his entire draconic asshole. “Strongest? Hah! I say I’m not evil, and I’m every bit as strong as you are.” He narrowed his eyes. “Meet me out by the claw rock tomorrow at recess, and we’ll see who’s strongest. Use your best element, because I’ll be using mine.
“Fine!” She stepped forward and shattered some of the thin veil of ice beneath her front foot. “This has been a long time coming, so I’m looking forward to it. But don’t go crying to Miss Tavren about it when I win.”
Caltyr sneered. “Maybe you should spend less time gossiping and more time practicing, and you might have a chance against me.”
The azure dragon turned and left while he was still ahead, leaving the gaggle of girls to waste more of their time.
He had practice to get to. And if he could summon ice when he was angry, it was within his reach when he was looking to kick some insolent dragon arse too.