"The Academy must be getting desperate if you're the best tutor they could find," my new student said.

I didn't disagree, but that didn't mean the man had to be a jerk about it. "The Academy's a little shorthanded thanks to that rampaging demon from a few weeks back," I said. "Both because everyone's suddenly very interested in learning self-defense magic, and because a decent chunk of the people who were good at self-defense magic died."

"Weren't good enough, then," the grumpy, ancient man said.

"I take it your emotional attunement is being a dick, then?" I deadpanned. I was half-certain that I'd been assigned the ornery old man just because my teacher wanted to spite me.

"What did you say?" he asked.

I blinked. "Emotional attunement. The emotion that you use to power your magic. This is first-year stuff. How can you—"

"Not that, you idiot. I've sneezed out more knowledge of magic than you've learned in your life. How did you just address me?"

"I... didn't?" I asked.

He scoffed. "Young people these days. When speaking to your senior, address him by his full title."

I rolled my eyes. "Alright. Fine. Grandmaster Water Magic Lord, I take it your emotional attunement is being a dick?"

He scowled. "My full title is Grandmaster Water Magic Lord Sage Unmatched Crusader Knight."

"Fine. GWMLSUCK, you're a dick."

GWMLSUCK bristled. "Your disrespect—"

"—is a part of the teaching process," I interrupted. "Look, I'm no master fire mage, but I know basic magical theory. Each emotion corresponds to a specific school of magic. Happiness for light, sorrow for cold, passion for heat." Self-hatred to make yourself feel small, too, although I felt no particular need to share my own brand of magic with someone who went by GWMLSUCK.

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"And you think disrespecting me will make me more passionate about your imbecilic lessons?" the GWMLSUCK said.

"I think that it'll make you angry," I countered, "and that anger is a type of passion."

The GWMLSUCK fell quiet. "Using anger to fuel spells is in the domain of fell magic," he finally said.

"Yeah, well, a bunch of fell mages just kicked our collective butts." I shrugged. "Desperate times call for desperate measures, GWMLSUCK."

"Stop calling me that," he snapped. "It makes me so... so..."

"Yes?" I asked, patiently waiting.

He paused, then shook his head.

"You're right. You're an arrogant little pebble, and you make me want to blow my top off. But nothing's happening. I don't have the faintest attunement to anger, no matter how hard I try."

That was what I'd been worried about. You could have all the emotions in the world, but unless you had the right attunement, you couldn't convert them into magic—and I hadn't the foggiest idea where attunements came from. It was classified knowledge, kept only to the highest-ranked witches, and there was no way anyone would tell a neophyte spellcaster like me how to—

"There are four things you need to create an emotional attunement," the GWMLSUCK began.

I blinked in surprise, but the GWMLSUCK wasn't paying attention to me. "You need to feel the emotion yourself. You need to lose the emotion yourself. You need to cause the emotion in others. And you need to take that emotion from others."

A chill ran down my spine.

"I've felt anger in my life," he said, "and I've certainly angered others. So for me to lack that attunement... it means that either I've been perpetually angry my entire life, or there's never been a time when I've helped someone else calm down." For a moment, the old man looked terribly lost and terribly vulnerable. "And I don't want either of those to be true."

I was hardly listening to the old man's words.

Because I was a witch who used self-hatred.

For me to have an emotional attunement, it meant that I had to have caused that emotion in someone else.

My head swam. Who could it have been? Who had I hurt inadvertently so badly that it made them turn their anger inwards on themself? Who...

"I don't know why I expected a youth like you to help," the old man said. He stood. "This lesson is over. I will be contacting the Academy for a replacement immediately."

"That... may be for the best. For both of us," I muttered, dazed.

And then I realized who it was. Who was responsible for the magic I held.

And I knew how to make amends.