After a week of studying the Fold relic, I started to dream of lightning.

It always seemed to be striking me. Sometimes from the sky, sometimes from the hand of a Reeve. Once, lightning even fired out from Adrian’s eyes, when an otherwise normal dream was corrupted by the storm.

Studying the relic was almost all I did. Crouching on the cold library floor until the early hours, often in the dark, I got used to the pain, and the memory of the pain. I got used to the cold and the touch of burned parchment. Every time I relived the memory, I glimpsed a more of the design, slowly building up a picture of what the cantogram had to be. After two weeks of work I finally managed it.

A jagged ring. Ten intersecting lines. A half-circle on the outside, and another mirroring it on the inside. The whole thing was finished with a spiral of marks that might have been language. This was the design that let a sorcerer harness lightning, without knowing the aspect.

The first time I drew it, it didn’t seem to do anything. My ink was good. My penmanship was good. But the canto just sat there on the paper. It took a while to realize I needed to force maja through it. That attempt ended with the paper burning up in blue sparks and red flames.

The actual cantogram was inert on its own, even when drawn in maja ink. Instead, it acted as a focus, or a lens. Any maja I pushed through it became sparks. I didn’t know its real name, but I was calling the Storm’s Gate canto.

I ruined two more strips of paper before I decided that paper was too fragile a medium.

I remembered that in the memory of the relic, the Reeve had used it in the form of foil designs embedded in her fingertips. After that, I started working on my skin.

The first two fingers of my left hand was covered in minor burns, attesting to my partial success. I was being more careful with my third.

My hands shook as I tried to paint the tip of my ring finger. The lines were so fine that I had to be aware of the topology of my skin, the ridges and whirls. If I hit a ridge at the wrong angle, the ink would spill down the valley, creating a hair-thin black line that ruined the diagram. If my skin had any oil or sweat, those parts would resist the ink, leaving a gap. The shaking of my hands on top of that made it even more difficult. It was more delicate than calligraphy and demanded more accuracy than dictation, and the shaking was making it almost impossible.

My first attempt working on skin with my pen hadn’t worked. A pen apparently wasn’t the thing for drawing cantograms on the human body. Just like I hadn’t been able to finger-paint my way to magical success on paper, cantograms drawn on skin with a pen wouldn’t take.

After a few experiments I’d found that a brush was better. Cantograms were like a ritual in their own right. The right tool, the right materials, and the correct gestures were all important.

I finished the jagged ring and moved on to the straight lines, dipping my brush then dragging the point across my skin.

I needed better materials. My brush was a tapered clump of hair tied into a reed. My ink was the soot from burned leaves, watery from how far I’d tried to stretch the pigment. I longed for a humble ink pot. Even the cheapest, coarsest ink stone would have been a blessing. If a spirit had appeared and offered me one wish in that moment, it would probably have been for a writing set.

I had some coins now, looted from the corpse of the Moonrise Behr, but the market wasn’t for another two weeks. I didn’t even know how far my ducs would go. Were they enough for an inkwell imported from the cities? For a roll of paper? For something to eat that wasn’t stew or oat cakes? They were silver, so my instinct told me they were worth a lot, but I didn’t know anything about the restricted economy here on the mountain. The stall owners were hardly putting price labels out.

I followed the straight lines with the half circle, one outside, and one inside.

As I worked I tried to imagine what they meant. Were the half circles the sky and the ground, the lines the lightning? Or were they more functional than symbolic? What did the complex curl of marks mean?

I’d tried to deconstruct my safer cantograms, Winter’s Hearth and Sky’s Appetite, but it was like trying to learn a language by reading a book written in it. Partial cantos didn’t work. Cantos with extra marks didn’t work. If there was any kind of basic unit of the cantogram, the equivalent of a single letter, then I couldn’t find it by trial and error.

After the half circles I moved onto the characters. Ticks, whirls, and dots. They looked more like punctuation than real characters. I finished the last line with as little flourish as possible, then dropped the brush in the cup. I leaned back against the wall. I needed a moment just to let my mind wander, resting after the minutes of intense concentration.

I closed my eyes, feeling for nearby maja. I was in one of the vacant cells. The door was shut, and nobody knew where I was. I could still vividly remember when I’d hurt Adrian experimenting with the Force aspect, and I didn’t want a repeat of that.

I could feel Adrian in the barracks common room now, the sun-baked stone of his maja instantly recognizable. Sal, Alexa, and Terese were there too, though I could barely feel Terese’s naturally quiet presence. There was no one else nearby.

I gave myself another minute, then stood up. I held out my arm, felt for my core, and pulled a thread of maja up into my hand. I gritted my teeth. The last two times this had hurt. Trying not to flinch, I forced the maja out through my finger.

My fingertip sparked. A line of bright blue light flickered out from the fingertip. It extended an inch into the air in front of me, then curled back to land right back where it had started. It felt exactly like something had bit me. It’d come and gone so fast it’d barely been there at all. But the sting was there.

I flinched, squeezing my hand into a fist.

I checked the cantogram. The energy hadn’t yet burned the ink away, though it would after a few more tries.

It was on the edge of working, the spark just had nowhere to go. It didn’t want to just fly from my hand like an arrow. It wanted somewhere to land.

I moved closer to the door, holding my hand an inch away from the wood.

This time when I pushed maja, the spark leaped to the door, licking the wood before vanishing. No pain. It hadn’t burned me this time.

I crouched down to examine where the spark had landed.

There was a small black dot of charred wood.

I’d done it. I’d thrown lightning from my hands. It wasn’t quite the spectacular storm the Reeve in the Fold relic had conjured, but I wasn’t a Reeve. I was an initiate with a depleted core. But I’d accomplished it in principle. The only thing lacking was the power to fuel it with.

As I stood at the door admiring my destructive power, I felt a flare of maja from the barracks common room. Rough stone, too hot to touch with bare skin. It felt like Adrian was doing magic.

The flare came again twice in short succession and I realized he was sending our study group’s prearranged signal. It was still only the fourth day, two days early for the meeting. What did he want?

I forced myself to my feet, picked up my ink cup, and moved the rock I was using to block the door. Once outside, I headed for the common room.

Half the group was already there. Adrian was standing in the middle of the room while Sal Merchamp, Alexa and Terese stood around him. As I stepped inside Jason came in through the opposite side door.

“This is early,” I said. “What’s happening?”

“Adrian’s pretending to be you,” Sal answered.

I looked from her to Adrian.

“Did you read something?” I asked.

“No,” Adrian said. “At least, that wasn’t why I called everyone. I’ve learned something and I want to share it.”

“What is it, a rude joke?” I asked

“It’s a magic thing,” he said archly.

I was suspicious. The idea that Adrian had learned something on his own made me want to check that I wasn’t dreaming again, but he seemed to believe it.

The sixth day group had turned into a kind of study club. If any of us learned anything, we did our best to teach the others. Mostly, that had just been me trying to convey the Wheel and Thought aspects. Nobody else cared much for cantograms, even Jason, who I would have expected to be predisposed to them. I hadn’t had the equipment to teach Wheel, and nobody else had been able to pick up Thought. Tom had worked out Lectuous’s riddle on his own, startling us all, but for him the answer hadn’t had any magical implications. When he tried to apply it to his maja, it just fell flat.

If Adrian had been working on something, he hadn’t told me about it. I didn’t think I’d even seen him in the library before. Maybe he’d been watching the other students. That was a valid path of study for the less academically inclined.

I made eye contact with him and got a small smile.

“I might have something to teach as well,” Jason said, coming up to stand next to him. “After Adrian, of course.”

Adrian gazed at him bemusedly, then ignored him.

“It’s a new way to use Force aspect,” he said to the group.

“I didn’t think you could use Force,” I said.

I’d hit him with Force aspect before. Once by accident, once in anger, and several times after that for purely educational purposes. He’d never been able to learn it. At least, he’d never been able to throw any around.

Sal had learned her own version of it, able to create Force as a kind of strong, persistent wind. I wasn’t sure about the others. After what I’d done to the soldiers, they were reluctant to let me show them. Sal had been trying to pass the lesson on, but I didn’t know if anyone had taken her up on it, or if anyone had succeeded.

“I can’t use it like you,” Adrian said. “I can’t get it to go outward. But I’ve learned how to use it through my body.”

“Internal aspect manipulation?” I asked.

“Yes,” Adrian said. “Sure.”

“I was warned off that once,” I said.

Another student told me that it was an advanced skill, at least. I’d seen the damage Force could do outside, and it didn’t take much imagination to guess how badly using it internally could go. The image of trying to throw a Force-empowered punch and accidentally blowing my arm off forced its way into my mind. It wasn’t something I’d dared to try.

“It’s meant to be an advanced technique,” Jason added. He sounded skeptical, which I resented despite being skeptical myself.

“Is it?” Adrian asked. “Maybe I’m some kind of genius.”

“That might be the case,” Jason replied.

Adrian ignored him, looking around. “Who can use the Force aspect?”

“Me,” Sal said.

Terese raised her hand, which surprised me.

“I can, kind of,” Alexa said. “I can only move small things, though.”

“Anything should work. As long as you’ve got it,” Adrian said. “The trick is to let the aspect flood into your maja, then instead of letting it fly out like it wants to, you trap it in your body. The aspect settles where you put it. When your body moves, it uses the strength of the Force.”

To demonstrate, he picked up one of Terese’s torches. He held it out in one hand. His maja surged, a warm light in the cool space, then instead of flooding out, the energy vanished.

He closed his hand and the branch cracked into two. Splintered pieces fell to the floor. He looked around at us like he was expecting applause.

“That took an hour to make,” Terese said timidly.

Snapping a branch wasn’t exactly punching through stone or bending iron bars, but it wasn’t something a person could do with the strength of one hand alone. He’d obviously used something beyond ordinary human strength.

“It’s not just for breaking things,” he said. “You can use the same technique to swing a staff, throw a stone, or jump a wall.” He shot Sal a significant look for the last part.

There were flares of maja around the room as a couple of the others tried it.

I turned to watch them, sure that I was about to see an outbreak of violent accidents.

Sal’s maja flared first. She stood with a look of concentration on her face for several seconds, then what felt like a gust of wind blew out from her, rustling my hair and setting the fragments of wood on the floor rolling around.

“No, I lost it,” she said. “Hold on. I can get it.”

Terese tried next. I barely felt anything as she called on her maja. She closed her eyes, standing with a look of concentration on her face, then her maja surged. A sudden blast of Force flew out from her, hitting the water barrel and sending it crashing against the far wall. Water exploded up and outward, and when it came to rest it was leaking through half a dozen cracks. Everyone flinched, but no one looked more shocked than Terese. She stood with her eyes wide, looking at the destruction.

I raised my voice. “Maybe we should practice outside?”

Adrian nodded enthusiastically and headed for the door. The rest of the group filed out after him.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

When I got outside, Sal was standing with her eyes closed, shaking slightly with her arm held out. Alexa seemed to have given up and was floating a small stone around her head. Terese was standing by the door with her hands clasped. She still looked terrified by what she’d done in the common room.

I walked a little way away and tried it myself. Pulling maja from my core into a specific body part was easy, I’d learned that early and used it often. Painting maja with the memory of Force was second nature as well, but as soon as I aspected the maja it instantly wanted to escape.

I couldn’t keep control of it. I held out my hand and let it out. It brushed the grass and shook some nearby bushes as it dissipated. It was like trying to hold a breath past the point where it could be held. Pushing it out was a reflex.

I turned to look at Adrian. He was demonstrating again. He crouched, his maja swelled, and then he jumped. The leap carried him onto the barracks roof, where he hit the tiles, rolled gracelessly, and thudded back onto the ground.

It seemed easy for him. I hadn’t seen him use any external maja, and now he’d picked up internal manipulation like it was nothing.

I wondered if he even could use external maja. If something was stopping him, if he was physically unable to, then keeping maja inside his body would be much easier for him. There wouldn’t be the constant pressure to release it.

Nobody else managed to pick up his technique. Jason left without even trying, as far as I could tell.

After realizing that learning it wouldn’t be as easy as Adrian had suggested, the members of the group filtered off one by one.

Adrian’s excitement bled away as they trickled away. I wasn’t that surprised. We’d been here less than a season. It seemed like too much for a bunch of initiates six weeks into their study.

Adrian had still managed it, though.

“How did you figure this out?” I asked when we were the only ones left outside.

“It just came to me, I guess,” he said.

“You just an epiphany?”

“If that means what I think, then yes. I guess I might have overheard it somewhere.”

The technique did seem obvious in retrospect, keep the maja internal to use it internally, but I hadn’t dared to try to work it out using trial and error. Maybe he really was a genius. Or maybe he was too ignorant to know that it was dangerous.

“Did you manage it?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s like the others. It just flies out.”

“Let me try something,” he said. “Get your maja out.”

I gave him a long look, then shut my eyes. I felt for my core, then pulled maja into my arm.

“I’m ready,” I said.

I felt his hands touching my arm just below the shoulder. Then there was a sharp change in his presence. In a second, the baked stone sensation was gone, replaced by a sensation of relentless drumming, hail on a wooden roof, or sling stones walls.

A shock of pain ran over my arm, sharp pressure, like I’d reached under a rock and the rock had dropped.

“Now,” Adrian said.

I almost pulled away on instinct, but I overrode the urge and did as he said. I thought back to my memory of Force and pushed it onto the energy pooling in my arm.

I felt the maja spasm. It jerked around, trying to escape, but everywhere it went the doors were closed. It settled instead, buzzing in place between my shoulder and wrist.

“There. Can you feel it?” he asked,

“I think so.”

“Try using it.”

I opened my eyes and looked around for something to test with. There was an apple-sized stone near my feet. I picked it up, wound back, and tossed it across the field. The rock left my hand like a crossbow bolt. it crossed a hundred feet in less than a second, before cracking into pieces against the wall of the washhouse.

I turned to stare at Adrian. He smiled at me.

My arm felt dead. My arm felt suddenly weak, with an ache that felt like I’d been holding a book above my head for an hour, but it hadn’t exploded off my shoulder. I didn’t even feel like I’d pulled a muscle.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

He shrugged one shoulder. “It just kind of came to me.”

“And what was that strange maja?”

“Strange maja?”

“It was like drumming, or hailstones.”

His eyes went momentarily wide, before his expression flattened out. “Couldn’t say.”

I frowned at him. Assuming he survived the academy, he was going to make a terrible Reeve. He couldn’t even lie well.

“Is someone teaching you?” I asked.

He shook his head, looking down at the floor.

“You can’t tell me?” I asked. He didn’t reply. “Have you been sworn to secrecy? Why can’t you say?”

“It’s not safe for me to say,” he said. “Not safe for me.”

He looked up and met my eyes. What couldn’t he tell me? Was he getting tuition from someone outside the academy, somehow? Or tuition from a Master that he shouldn’t be getting? Was there a traitor to Antorx hiding somewhere on the mountain? I was desperate to know, but out of everything he said, I believed that telling me would put him in danger.

“Will they help me?” I asked.

Adrian looked up. There was a strange look in his eyes, like he was assessing me.

“Maybe,” he said. “I’ll speak to you about it later, okay?”

“Yes, alright.”

“If you can hold your maja like that on your own, you can use the technique,” he said. “Maybe feeling it once will help you get back there?”

“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t feel like trying again now. I wanted to needle him with questions until he gave in.

I followed him in silence, instead. He seemed lost in thought, and I didn’t want to put him in danger by pushing it too hard.

When we got back to our cell, I found Jason leaning against the wall outside the door. He’d left while the rest of us had been trying internal Force. I wondered if he’d been doing the same thing somewhere on his own.

“Dorian,” he said, standing up. “I was hoping to bend your ear for a minute.”

“Enjoy that,” Adrian said to me. He opened the door to the cell and disappeared inside.

I approached Jason, stopping just outside the door.

“I know it’s not time for the meeting, but I didn’t want to delay this,” he said. “I understand that you’re a skilled reader of Old Irisian?”

“Yes.”

I hadn’t exactly berated him for mis-translating Tom’s assignment two weeks ago, but I’d mentioned it, and he’d seemed to take it as a personal insult.

“I was hoping you would help me with my assignment,” he went on. “You see, I have to translate an Old Irisian poem.”

He was already pulling a scroll out of his robe as he spoke. He unrolled it and held it out.

I took it, interested despite also being a little annoyed.

It was a simple poem. I didn’t recognize it from the canon of surviving Old Irisian poetry, meaning it was either something minor, or it’d been made up on the spot by the Master who’d assigned it.

At first reading, it was almost painfully easy to translate.

On the highest land,

Where rock meets rock,

A glowing spring has formed,

Where a lucky one may suck.

The last part was a little off. Suck was the literal translation, but if I had time I’d have liked to search for a modern Irisian phrase more in keeping with the rhyme. Maybe sup, or slake.

There were other complexities. The phrase the writer had used for highest land had connotations of a plateau. And the word used for ‘rock’ was the adjective form. Maybe it was an adnoun. The word they’d used for ‘glowing’ was actually closer to the meaning of luminous, which related to Old Irisian descriptions of magic.

“I’m sure you can handle it without issue?” Jason said.

“Yes. No issues,” I said.

“Wonderful. I’ll leave it with you. Please don’t jeopardize your own task to complete it, but if you could have it ready for the meeting I would be very grateful.”

“Sure,” I said, still looking at the note.

Jason left quietly. I went through the door into the cell. Adrian was sitting on his bed shaving the bumps off a wooden stick with a piece of flint. Didn’t he ever accumulate?

“What did he want?” he asked.

“Help with a translation.”

“Right. I don’t like him.”

I shrugged, sitting on my bed. I didn’t mind doing this for him. It reminded me of the kind of tasks Scribe Bevin would give me when I was first learning Old Irisian. It was quiet, comfortable, nostalgic work. I pulled out the charcoal pencil I’d found on the Behr and started making notes on the scroll.

Adrian broke the silence after a few minutes.

“You’re from East Wilds aren’t you?” he asked.

“Not quite. Kirkswill. Our closest city is Basfield.”

“Did you ever go to temple?”

“Once or twice in my life,” I said. “My mother didn’t hold with it. And Scribe Bevin warned me off it. He thought the Antorxians had spies in the Abbey. He said someone with the mage talent studying religion scared the Antorxians almost as much as one studying magic.”

Not that there’d even been a real Abbey presence in Kirkswill. The temple had been a converted barn, where a single slightly addled old man preached the Antorx-audited tenets of the greater spirits to enthusiastic but largely oblivious farmers.

“At our abbey we followed Horis,” Adrian said, twisting to lie down on his bed. “I was the only one there with the mage talent, I think, but they taught us that he heard every prayer. The Antorxians weren’t scared, though. When they came they looked bored. One of the clerics, Senior Toran, tried to hide me, but of course that didn’t work. I understand why, now. If I can feel you across the building, of course they could sense me hiding under the stairs.”

“And Horis just washed his hands of you, I imagine.”

Adrian was silent and I looked up to find him glaring at me.

“Fine, sorry,” I said.

“You’re more the type to worship Ixilthan, I suppose,” he said.

“I don’t believe in worshiping any spirit,” I said. “They don’t care about us. Even the supposedly benevolent ones are only that way by coincidence.”

“Some of them care. They’re just not all-powerful.”

I didn’t reply, letting the conversation die out. Spirits weren’t human and didn’t think like humans. Even the greater spirits, called gods by some, adhered to concepts in a way that didn’t align with common sense, morality, or practicality. They didn’t necessarily even align with our concept of reality.

The example Scribe Bevin had given me was from a period before the Antorxian conquests, when the goddess Adjira had been invoked by a faction of religious zealots trying to assassinate the Losirisian royal family for crimes against morality. At the same time, the inquisitors of the Royal Guard were also invoking Adjira, also successfully. One greater spirit of justice supporting two different sides, each with irreconcilable views on what justice was. If Adjira had stood in judgment and decided one way or the other, that would have been something, but apparently in her view both were just causes worthy of aid.

I thought it was illuminating that in the Varian cultures Adjira was called Adjita Gallowsqueen, the goddess of unforgiving punishment, but try telling the Abbey that. Either the greater spirits were too broad and complex to fit into a single human concept, or they were too alien to even be described.

I finished making my notes on the scroll.

On the uppermost plateau,

Where a rock thing meets a rock thing(?),

A magical spring has formed,

Where a lucky one may drink.

It had lost a lot of its poetic rhythm in the translation, not my best work, and there would probably better replacements for some of the lines if I dared to be less than completely literal.

As I reread the passage looking for connotations, my attention caught on ‘uppermost plateau’ again. That could be read as uppermost terrace. That got me thinking about it in the context of the academy grounds, and realized I had a better option than ‘rock thing’.

On the highest terrace,

Where stone walls meet,

A maja spring has formed,

Where a lucky one may drink.

Was this a set of directions?

I looked over at Adrian. He was either lost in thought or asleep. Probably asleep.

I looked at the translation again, put my sandals back on, and slipped quietly out of the room.