“Welcome everyone!” professor Toadweather said brightly. “It is now… time!”

She threw her hands up and cheered, and the frog let out a loud croak.

“Okie dokie,” she said. “Lets get serious. Conjuration.”

She clapped, and papers appeared on all of our laps.

“That’s the idea, basically,” she said. “Conjuration. You create things from nothing, right?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ve only got summon gadhar, but that isn’t creating a winged hound each time I cast it. It calls it from Etherius.”

Professor Toadweather pointed at me.

“Exactly! Usually. But yes! Exactly. With most conjuration spells, you’re not just making things. Usually, you’re calling them from Etherius. Etherius is endless, but it’s made of dozens of planes and sub-planes and demiplanes and connection planes.”

“You keep saying usually,” a dwarven woman said. “Why is that?”

“Well, because… It depends! Teleportation works by moving you through Etherius, until you arrive at the spell’s endpoint. That isn’t summoning. And there are a few spells – not a lot, but a few – that actually turn your ether into the item directly, effectively creating it from nothing. But usually, conjuration spells call something from Etherius. Like how I stuffed the papers into an Etherius locker, then teleported them onto your lap.”

A bit of chalk started floating into the air and writing on the board. I expected a cantrip, like with professor Caeruleum, but instead a map started to take form.

“There are, generally speaking, five planar clusters that people refer to when speaking about the planes,” professor Toadweather explained. “Now, I encourage you to remember that Etherius is infinite, and all of these clusters are also infinite. But categories are helpful, as long as you don’t take them as absolutes.”

The chalk tapped the sphere that was mostly overlapping the Earth.

“The faerie kingdoms. Now, there are lots of these, and most connect. A clever planeswalker could exit this castle in the faerie planes and be in Hydref in a day’s walk. Assuming a beastie doesn’t eat them. Which is very possible. You’d be moving through a few faerie planes to get there, but they’re all closely interlinked.”

She tapped a second sphere, which had almost as much overlap as the faerie sphere.

“The elemental planes. These are funky. Lots of living elements live here. There are planes that are full of nothing but rocks, seemingly forever. Planes with endless swords. A lot of random junk gets classified as elementals, because boxes aren’t real. But if it’s full of inanimate items, or items we typically think of as inanimate that are now animate, it usually gets lumped into elemental stuff.”

She tapped a sphere above the earth, then a sphere below.

“The heavenly realms, and the endless hells. Most of that yummy divine magic comes from the faith and fear we send pouring into these realms.”

“Does that mean demons use divinities?” a girl asked, raising her hand.

“Yes! Or no! Most have bloodlines – innate powers given by virtue of birth or elaborate awakening rituals. But everything in Etherius uses bloodline magic. But when a being establishes a realm of their own and learns to tap into that faith magic, they become a god or dark god. They then usually dole out that power to followers or friends. Most demon lords do have divine powers, or dark divine powers if you insist there’s a difference, but most weak demons have no more divine power than a weak human. But only the weakest possible demons don’t have bloodline powers.”

Professor Toadweather clapped, and tapped the giant circle encompassing all the others.

“Anyways! Back to the final plane: the ethereal plane. This is what teleportation spells move you through. It’s where all other planes, including our own, are located. They’re all different spots. Some differentiate the ethereal and the deep ethereal, with ethereal being the bits of ethereal inside a plane, and deep ethereal being what lies in between planes, but I never found that especially helpful.”

“What about planes like the plane of the healing springs?” someone asked from behind me.

“Usually classified as a divine plane, but some call it elemental,” professor Toadweather said. “Now time for me to ask a question: why are demons such a difficult threat to deal with?”

“Because aberrants spawn them?” I guessed. The professor made a so-so gesture.

“Any liquored up conjurer with a second circle spell can summon the basest of demons,” she said. “Aberrants… Yes, they’re threatening, and are one of the root causes for the demon wastes, the other being natural portals. But why can’t we just kill the demons?”

“We do?” the treefolk said. “A lot.”

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“And yet it doesn’t work. Why?”

There was a moment of silence, and the professor nodded.

“Good! Bluffing about your knowledge is a good skill to have, but if you actually want to learn, admitting when you don’t know is twice as useful. The answer’s simple enough: they can’t die.”

“Demons aren’t immortal,” I said, leaning in and shaking my head. “Even gods can die.”

“And you’ve hit the hammer on the nail! Gods are linked to their realm. All things are. Including demons. When an outsider is summoned into our world and slain, its essence merely returns to the world it is from, and it reforms,” professor Toadweather explained. “And for all that aberrants are strange, they are summoning demons. The turbulent ether alters animals to create monsters.”

“Does this apply if someone walks through a natural rift or portal?” the tree-folk asked.

“Astute question,” the professor beamed. “No, it does not. This is the reason that demonic cults exist, as well as churches, though some call that blaspheming to insinuate. The deities gain power from the followers and their sacrifices. They are given some small power in exchange. But most importantly for the average demon cult, they attempt to summon whichever demon lord and minions, so the demons can conquer and take with no risk to themselves.”

I was suddenly very relieved that Jackson hadn’t decided to take this course in an attempt to learn to summon Effervesce’s servants. I didn’t think professor Toadweather’s casual heresy, blaspheming, and apostasy would sit well with him.

“What about dragons?” the woman behind me asked.

“What about dragons?” the professor asked, sounding confused.

“They can die,” the woman said. “But they’ve got bloodlines.”

“Not everything with a bloodline is extraplanar,” the professor explained patiently. More patiently than I would have. “A bloodline is just an innate magical power bestowed by virtue of birth. Monster abilities, like a dragon’s breath or a basilisk’s eyes, are bloodline powers. But so are most demons, angels, and fae, though sapients often blend in other forms of power like life enforcement, destinies, or divinities.”

“But dragons have bloodlines. My great aunt was a dragon, and I have her bloodline amplifying every single spell I cast. Why can they be killed by people like… mortals?”

I resisted the urge to smack my head against the chair as the professor tried to explain, again. The woman’s scent had about as much dragon in it as a roadside pebble did. She did have a little bit of a magical bear bloodline, but even it was so tiny as to be useless for anything but a tiny bit of strength and improved sleep quality.

After the third try, professor Toadweather apparently gave up, and erased the chalk drawing of the planes before drawing a cantrip.

“This is summon stone,” she announced, throwing her hands out as if it was a grand prize we’d all won. “The perfect cantrip to begin teaching you all how to summon. It summons a smooth river stone, sized just right for your hands, from where an elemental plane of water meets a plane of earth.”

She slowly demonstrated the cantrip, and the stone appeared. She placed it atop her frog’s head like a crown, then summoned a second, which she placed atop the first. She was going slow, to make the motions and words clear, but within a minute, she’d stacked five stones atop his head.

Exactly as the minute turned over, the first stone vanished, returning to Etherius, and the rest all clattered to the ground around the frog. Professor Toadweather clapped, then gestured to us.

“Okay! Now I want all of you to try. Spread out through the ballroom, and work to summon the stone…”

I picked a spot a little bit away from the others and began practicing. Even on my very first attempt, the lesson professor Caeruleum had tried to hammer in became apparent.

Compared to learning the umbrella cantrip, summon stone was… difficult. It was vaguely like summon gadhar, but notably different as well.

Summon stone, being a cantrip, was much more basic than the second circle summoning gadhar, but basic didn’t mean easy. It was like I’d memorized all of the right notes for a song, and now I had to learn my scales. I had some advantages – I knew how to hold the metaphorical instrument and produce sound – but not enough of an advantage to make it easy.

Professor Toadweather flitted around the room, offering advice and suggestions on improving the cantrip, and by the end of the period, everyone had managed to cast it at least a few times.

My first few attempts failed, but after a dozen or so, I managed to cast the spell. My attempts at that point were clunky, draining far too much ether to be worth the effect of summoning a single stone, but with the professor’s instructions, I managed to refine the spell. By the end of the period, I could smoothly call a riverstone each time, with the ether cost still being a touch high, but nowhere near what it had started as.

As the period was drawing to a close, however, the professor drew us back to our seats in front of the blackboard.

“Now, normally I won’t do this,” she informed us, “but today is something of a special occasion. From the hats and belts many of you have on, I assume you had to use the cabinet to fit in?”

There was a general round of nods and mutters of agreement, and the professor nodded slowly, as if she were the wisest of sages. Then she patted her frog gently, and he opened his mouth, ribbeting.

The inside of his mouth was a yawning chasm, a portal through Etherius itself. The scent of the void between stars filled my nose, and then…

The frog spat out a bundle of books, wrapped in brown paper and twine. Professor Toadweather threw out her hand, like a street performer doing a trick.

“Tada! Books. Stolen fresh from the library’s depths, just for you all, my cheerful little students, as a part of this course. Spell guides for the grow or shrink spell. You have six days before it has to be returned to the library.”

My eyes widened, and I scrambled to grab one of the books from the pile. The treefolk next to me unrooted and moved forward as quickly as he could.

Professor Toadweather giggled.

“It seems the two of you understand. Now go! Class dismissed.”

The world spun wildly as a spell gripped hold of me, and then I was standing at the entrance to the woods with my fellow students, normal sized once again, clutching the book to my chest.

“Why’d you two mortals go feral?” the girl who thought she had a dragon bloodline asked.

I edged away, not wanting to spend ages explaining, and thanked the gods when the treefolk started to explain. I used the moment to escape and head back to my rooms, where I ran into Salem, Jackson, and Yushin.

“Hey, there you are!” Jackson said. “We were going to go out into the city to get dinner as friends!”

“An’ to discuss stratagy for gettin’ books durin’ our upcoming class, but six a’ one,” Salem said.

I hesitated, and Yuhsin spoke.

“We can wait for you to get ready. We will be going to a small restaurant far from the main roads, which will keep it reasonably priced.”

This was the first week of school, and I’d survived without an incident worse than changing one of my classes, so I relented.

“Give me a bit, and I’ll be happy to join you.”