Sunday, Oct. 4th, morning

Our apartment

I went to bed on Saturday night in a good mood and hoping to sleep in the next morning. I awoke to Joel knocking on my door. “Hey Mark, Ms. Yali is here. Do you want to join the lesson?” It was 8:30; so much for sleeping in. When I agreed in a still-sleepy voice, he added, “Be quick if you’re going to shower first.”

Ten or so minutes later when I got downstairs, Ms. Yali was working with Joel with the globes to check his ability to pull from the power stone without using his own energy. As I arrived, she chided him, “You really need to practice more.”

She asked me to do the same test. It looked clear to me, and she confirmed it. “Have you’ve been practicing borrowing Joel’s power stone?”

“A few times, but mostly just power from the environment. And I’ve been practicing the candlelight spell when I’m bored.”

“Very good. When you can, please help Joel practice, and to learn the ancient script.”

I shrugged. “If Joel wants to, sure. This is fun stuff.”

After that, Yali walked Joel through some exercises in the teacher’s book, to help him work on the transfer of power. Once he started working on that, she explained to me that we would be working on a separate exercise. Being able to channel a tiny amount of power cleanly to something like the candlelight spell or the globe was one thing, but it wouldn’t let you use a significant amount of power.

The goal was to be able to feel when I started pulling on my own energy without the aid of the globe. To do this, she taught me a new spell. It was modern magic to lift things vertically - and conventionally useless from what she said, as there were traditional forms of levitation that were far more efficient. Unlike the candlelight spell, there was no graphical version – just a short incantation to read out of Kelder’s, printed in the same ancient style of Old Imperial script.

Just as with the text around the prior spell, I could read it phonetically although I had no idea what it meant. Before she had me do it out loud, she took out a 10 mil coin – roughly the size of a quarter, but thicker, and set it on the table. “One of the things about modern magic is that the effect is always directly proportional to the amount of energy put in, just like in your physics class. So, by using a known weight and this otherwise inefficient spell, we can approximate how much magic you’re using if we know how heavy the object you’re lifting. Very much like your physics class.”

I nodded.

"Okay, Mark, ready to try? Read the incantation and focus on lifting the coin."

I nodded, eyeing the coin nervously.

"Don't worry if you can't get it on the first try," Ms. Yali added. "Oh, and you can point at it if you want – it's not required, but it might help you focus."

"How high should I lift it?" I asked.

"Let's say... about half a meter. Once it's there, try to keep it steady. Remember how you concentrated with the candlelight spell? Same idea here."

She paused, her expression growing serious. "One more thing – if you feel any discomfort at all, stop immediately. Got it?"

"Got it," I said, and took a deep breath.

I read the incantation and was amazed to see the coin lift rapidly. I stopped it when it reached my best guess of a half meter and held it there for a few seconds. I could just barely sense the lines of magic flowing from me to it, and as I held it, I started to feel an ache someplace I couldn’t place – like the start of an upset stomach but not so clearly localized. She’d said to stop if there was any discomfort, so I did, and the coin fell to the table with a rather satisfying clink.

“You felt something?” she asked, and when I nodded, she went on. “Good. I was visualizing the flow of energy there, and you dropped it just as it started to use some life-attuned energy. You’re quite sensitive for someone who’s just starting off.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

She had me repeat the test while holding and drawing power from the block of magical ore. I was able to hold it up a lot longer before the same feeling crept up on me. This time the falling coin landed edge on, slid off the table, and was headed for the couch before Dormer stopped it with his boot.

“When Joel isn’t using the globes,” said Yali, “you can do the same thing by trying to get a brighter light from the globe and holding over time. To be reasonably safe with spells beyond the easiest, you need to be able to pick up the signal from your body before Joel can see any color different in the globe.”

Yali suggested I take a break while she checked on Joel’s progress, and after that called me back over.

"Alright, you two," Ms. Yali said, flipping through the teacher's manual. "We need to keep working on your channeling."

She showed us a page with various exercises. "These will help build your magical muscles, so to speak."

Joel leaned in, squinting at the diagrams. "Why is this so important?"

"Well," Ms. Yali explained, "how much magic you can channel is crucial. It's one of the two main factors that determine the power of your spells."

"What's the other factor?" I asked, curiosity piqued.

"We'll get to that in a moment," she said with a slight smile. "For now, Joel, our main goal is to get you to the point where you can maintain your protective spells using just the power stone."

“Now, Mark – you asked about the other factor, and that’s the available sources of power. For Joel, we’re skipping a lot of steps by giving him the power stone, but that could be ambient magic or magical ore.”

“Ambient magic is pretty weak, isn’t it?” I asked.

“It’s enough for the sort of day-to-day magic everyone learns. For someone serious about magic, it is more limited. One can learn to pull in magic from another source and hold it, separate from their life energy, but that takes a lot of sensitivity and practice.”

My eyes lit up at the idea, since it would let me do things straight out of D&D. “Is that something I could learn?”

Yali started to shake her head and then stopped halfway through. “It’s not something I’ll have time to teach you, but you could try if you found another teacher. It’s not impossible to learn on your own, but there are dangers to it.”

That sounds like a challenge to me. I decided that after exams, I was going to dig around in the library or see what the magical research club could tell me.

Yali kept working with us on drills until the early afternoon, when Dormer suggested that we end the day’s class and get some lunch, so that we could start studying for exams in the afternoon. At that mention of exams, Yali decided to teach us both a spell that she’d found helpful as a student. It would bring down one’s heart and breathing rate to normal, to help with nerves. I’d never had a problem with that during exams, but it seemed worth learning.

Joel got it on his first try from the graphic; just like the candlelight spell I could not fix the image in my mind, and without text, I had no way to get it to work. Joel seemed pleased with that, probably because of how much easier the energy manipulation had been for me.

“Is there a spoken version of this?” I asked.

“There isn’t, but it’s adapted from an old military spell called The Archer’s Prayer. It’s not in Kelder’s, but it shouldn’t be hard to find.”

After she left, Dormer offered to pay for lunch, and with no better ideas, the three of us found ourselves back at the Haven.

Monday, Oct. 5th, morning homeroom

Classroom 2-C

I got into school early again on Monday to go by the library, as time was running short to have my papers finished – the big one for advanced honors world history, but smaller ones would be due for both our regular history of Feldaren class and our English class with Mr. Kirill. I was not especially happy about the latter – the books we’d read in the last month had been, to put it mildly, a snooze, and several of the topics involved comparing them to works we hadn’t read from the prior year. The one we’d just started seemed a bit better – it was a farcical look at life in the post-Slave-War army and reminded me a bit of some old TV shows with their dark humor. The one suggested topic mentioning it required contrasting it to a book from the prior year, which sounded like it might be another war story at least.

After finding that book, I set about digging for primary sources for my Feldaren history paper, and almost made myself late for physics class.

On the way to homeroom, Joel and I stopped by our folders. Each of us had a note in it. When we got to homeroom, I read it, and after a moment, confirmed that Joel’s was similar except addressed to him. Mine read,

Mark - Please see me at the faculty office after dismissal today and bring Joel along with you. The Dean asked me

to give you both an orientation on our exam structure.

– G. Calliot

“Oh, good, we’re not in trouble,” I said.

“Hmm, are the exams really going to be that different from our prior school?” asked Joel.

Jack, who’d been talking to Kai about something else up until then, turned back around to Joel and said, “Ugh, why did you have to bring up exams?”

Kai, shaking his head, turned towards us as well and said, “Don’t listen to Jack, we’ve only got two weeks left to study,” and then after looking at the letters we were holding, we ended hearing from him just how hard the comprehensive exams were going to be.