And there was only the white void beaming blinding lights into the foyer, purging every shadow, heating the wooden flooring; the place was lit silent, serene, and still. His parents stood before him, blurred, speaking to a figure to whom he paid no attention, as he made a few steps without progressing or regressing, stomping on the floor making irregular, silly noises. They asked him to enter the room by himself.

Dust mites were dancing between the strips of flickering paleness. A modernist painting on the wall, drawn by some western Rationalist era artist that he would have absolutely no way of knowing the name of, but he did recognize the depicted figure: Sisaran, with that giant Roman corinthian column, standing barefoot on the rocky hill, working towards his perpetual climb. The walls were all too far away, the bookshelf looked as if it had leaned in to eavesdrop on the incoming conversation, and the brown desk made out of faux wood was abnormally huge. Behind the desk sat a man, with the mould of a generic middle-aged man flashing a generic smile speaking in a generic tone, whose generic facial features he could barely register as though a layer of misted glass had materialised out of thin air before him.

"Horsethaker Shang? Is it?" The man asked.

He nodded. The man gestured for him to sit.

"Sorcerer's tongue? Or shall we continue in Anglo-English?" The man asked.

He shrugged at the question.

"How old are you?" The man asked.

He really would prefer not to speak.

"How old are you?" The man repeated the answered question, his voice was still dulcet and affable, but the repetition had already made the authoritative implication perfectly clear. In broad daylight, an aura of discreteness superimposed itself on top of the man's smile.

"Sorry... seventeen." He lied.

"Your parents intend for you to be schooled here." And the man made no attempt to correct his lie. "Have you been told about our academy before?"

"A bit."

"What were you told?"

He was told this morning before stepping into his parents' car, when the sunlight was reflecting off the ignition key casting shimmering white dots on the front seat's leather backrest, that he was not here to make his application nor was he here to give an interview, that his enrollment was already set and his tuition already paid, and that whatever was happening right now, the conversing and the questioning, should not be happening.

"Well, it's just some casual questions." The man said. "I would very much like to know what my new student's perception of the school is, that's all."

"It's high in the air."

"Hmm umm. Aeroland, they were called."

I wasn't born yesterday. "It's big. Like a city."

"Now that you mention it, yeah, it is kinda like a city. This place still impresses me after decades of working here. It is interconnected, intricately complex, and best of all, reasonable; things are how they are for a reason, cause and effect, and that aspect of it always speaks to me in a profound way. I believe you have your staff with you."

He handed the man his staff. A piece of burnt red cottonwood with no ornament, gangly and twisted, tar-black from head to end. He could remember its texture grinding against one's palm and the sound it would make if one gripped it too tightly without even laying a hand on it. Many lonesome nights he spent polishing, improving, and pampering the old thing; when the night grew cold, the staff smelled like coal, he suspected it was the mana leaking out of its cracks.

The man scrutinised the piece to the fullest degree, but instead of handing the staff back he simply laid it between them, patronisingly.

"A name for it?"

Naming one's staff was a mostly abandoned practice that served no purpose whatsoever in the modern days, but the man looked exactly like the type of geezer that would hold onto dead traditions dearly while berating the new as "the degradation of magic" or something alike, so he decided to come up with a name on the spot. These people like witches, right? Those fictional characters practice in absolute defiance against the natural laws of magic, those that can work something out of nothing, those that refute causation and reaction. The thing does look like a crone's boney hands...

"Witches' Claws." Whatever makes you happy.

"Great name! How long did that take you..."

It took me two seconds. Why?

"...assuming you crafted it yourself?"

"Oh... sorry, I thought you were asking about something else... a month or two..."

"Looks about right. Quite a rough job. Bad choice of vessel wood as well. Bombax Ceiba, terrible quality and easy to break. Nicely crafted, though, props to you, I do wonder why it was burnt."

The man was insulting the wood of his hometown; common Bombax represents both heroism and the universal, humanistic longing for a better life. "Lightning struck it down. My father gave me a branch of it."

"Fascinating... it doesn't fail, I assume?"

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

"Under normal circumstances, no."

"Fault tolerance?"

"None."

"That much confidence in yourself?"

"I don't know how to build fault tolerance... sorry."

"Efficiency accelerant?"

What a crock this man is. He thought to himself. Spitting one proper noun after another just to see which one would catch me with my pants down, how ignoble of an effort it was; unfortunately, I know them all.

"Sorry, I don't know how to build that, either."

"Not within a primary student's arsenal of knowledge, that's quite alright..." the man muttered, "color-coded yourself yet?"

"Red."

The man pulled out a notepad, flipped to a blank page, and handed it to him with a fountain pen. "Draw a diagram of Spark for me, will you? Or do you need a reference?"

"No... I remember Spark."

Though Spark had an infuriatingly rudimentary diagram, it was still an eight-graph spell, and precisely because of how simple it was, making any mistakes or asking for any reference would put him in an extraordinarily bad light. The pen in his hand was shaking, the noise it made scratching the paper deafened the ears. He slowly drew out what he had in his head in about fifteen minutes of utter silence.

"Huh..." The man scrutinised his labour. "About ninety percent... eighty-five, you could do better than that?"

"I was rushing it." The only printable words he could muster.

"That's alright. That's what school is for; that's what education is for. A thing you will master in time, I assure you. Suspend it."

"It's a spellbook?"

"Quite a shoddy one at that, but nonetheless, it suffices. Float it."

He grabbed his staff from the desk and channelled the mana in his vein into the notepad. After a few seconds of awkward air, the notepad was suspended a few inches above the desktop.

"That needs to be instantaneous." The man whispered, possibly to himself. Then he stood up and went open the window. "Cast it."

"Sorry?"

"Cast Spark. I want to see how fast you can sing hymns. Aim it out the window though, I wouldn't want to make a trip to the extinguisher outside." The man laughed, as if what was said could somehow be considered a joke. "Your materials."

A pouch of materials was handed to him: a burnt match, a small pinch of lime powder, and three pieces of gravel. He poured its contents out to his one hand and gripped his staff as tightly as he could with his other.

This is a humiliation session, a perfunctory interview with the sole purpose of embarrassing me into being obedient to the school, or whatever authoritative figures, in the days to come.

He stood up, pointing the staff out the window. The tingly sensation of apprehension and excitement. The hymn for Spark was eight lines long in Sorcerer's tongue, and though he remembered every one of its words, successfully casting a spell required not only the memorization but also the mastering of a particular, rapid, and rigorous method of throat singing. He closed his eyes to help concentrate on the prose, and for that brief moment, as he felt the sweat glands all over him fire off like tiny explosions underwater, he forgot about the humiliation and the annoyances.

And the silver come raining down raining down raining down as the fire seizes

And the cold wind blew overhead overhead overhead in the black sky

In the mountain cyclopean rocks stand tall and the cliffs leer and they leer, they leer

In the cavehole children's dark shades erect and the soil gazes and it gazes, it gazes

With hope to siege the chill to wipe one of fear for their tremble bodies and molds

Love thy love thy love cast unto thy children to purge the sickness to purge the cold

Even the poor imitation of Motherly love requires a source requires a trigger from the dome

And thus asked the one could never ask for what one had never asked for: a lick of Spark.

His mumbling echoed through the room, stirring the quietude. The air around him fluctuated, and the violent page-flipping of the notepad that sounded like a human's scream grew louder by the second; then came a flash of crimson red, scorchingly hot, bursting from the head of his staff and ejected into the bright white void out the window. A sizzling noise pursued as the room calmed, the air settled, the notepad landed, the content in his hand dispersed, and a wisp of silver smoke curled into the air from the tip of his staff. He breathed a sigh of relief and exultation.

"Good." The nonchalant tone in the man's voice insinuated quite the opposite connotation. "Eighty-eight percent efficiency, if you had drawn the diagram better it certainly could be higher... ten seconds, not bad but, there are spaces for improvement. We usually want students to be able to cast Spark in like six or seven..."

He just nodded along with the words, still indulging himself with the residual pleasure.

"No worries though, so long as you are putting in the sweat and blood, you will master it, just like every other skill you want to master." The man laughed. "Horsethaker Shang, Huasia international student, secular citizen, red primary wizard, fifteen of age... Alright! We are all set! Here is your uniform."

A cheap oversized blazer, a white-collar sleeve shirt, and a pair of grey canvas pants. Red tie.

"We expect students to follow the dress code in academic environments, to keep up our school's spirit, I suppose. Here is your name card." A cheap piece of plastic that bent to the fold. His profile picture on the card showed an apathetic face, and the name "Horsethaker Shang," written in sorcerer's tongue, sat right next to it.

"You seem upset."

He wasn't, but now the man had brought it up, he was, indeed, upset. This meeting was expected to be short, concise, and no-hassle. They would shake their hands perfunctorily towards the end, and he would sit back out there, letting his parents converse with this loathsome being, and however long that would take them he wouldn't care because the white lights and the droning silence would entrance him, and the delays or the boredom would bother him not; but now, the end of this meeting strayed further and further away from him as the man continuously probed him with moronic questions and nauseatingly superficial friendliness: the snake had my tuition already! He can stop being a disgusting salesman now for crying out loud!

"Something wrong? Spout the concern I can disabuse you of them."

"No... sorry, just, a bit nervous."

"Ah, that's normal for anyone, coming into a new environment." A wave of stentorian laughter. "Our goal has been, and always will be, to guide the next generation to their greatness. The autonomous, individualistic, advanced pedagogy we had adapted and perfected here in this school gives every student a chance to truly shine their own light, and that's the thing, you work hard, you will succeed, you slack off, you won't. A simple rule of reap and sow, cause and effect, the cornerstone of any sound economic or political structure, whether that be one under the ruling of those Eurasian kings, or one that our great and exceptional democratic state Martina champions. In our school, there will be nothing stopping you from becoming what you want to become."

Flowery words that invoked nothing.

"Have a great school year, Horsethaker Shang. We will see you around." The man stood up and offered a handshake. He took it. The grip on his hand was firm. "Get yourself some garments. It gets pretty windy up here."

The man walked him out of the office and, after a few words of exchange, re-entered the office with his parents, shutting the door behind them. They would talk for a very long time, and then his parents would take him home, and tomorrow he would move into the school, and whatever else that would come after concerned him not one bit as he sat on the bench in that foyer, looking at the serene white lights coming through the window; he was glad that once again, equanimity had him in its arms.