As Jeb slept, he dreamed. In the midst of the dream, he suddenly became aware of the feeling of his fingers and toes. He even felt his hair, which had started to grow long enough to brush the tips of his ears. Despite that, he still knew without a doubt that he was dreaming.
Swirling infinities in colors that he could not name rushed around him. A song wove around him, shaping into a river that reformed into a bird taking flight. When he took a step, the entire scene moved around him, as though he were the center of the universe.
That thought jolted him, and suddenly Jeb broke out of the stream he was moving in. Just for a moment, he felt a searing deep within his soul, as though he were once more making a choice that went against the natural order of things. That’s ridiculous, though, he thought, I haven’t made any choices. I’m dreaming.
Forming a thought seemed to break the dream realm he was in slightly more. Like a window cracking in front of him, the infinities seemed to split away, fracturing into potentials and realities. Jeb felt a pressure begin to form behind his eyes, and his head started to throb. Just as the pain became blinding, it ceased.
His eyes cleared, and the scene was gone. No, that isn’t right, Jeb thought, looking around. The scene was still there, it was simply frozen and limited to his normal perceptions.
The infinities were gone, replaced by something unfathomably large. In front of him, Jeb saw the figure of Magic.
It had changed since the last time he had shared a dream with it. Now, it seemed to have crystallized, as though its shape were set. “Child of man,” it said, tone sweeter than any song he could ever play, “what are you doing here?”
“I don’t really know,” Jeb replied honestly.
Magic nodded, and Jeb saw that his first impressions had been wrong. Magic had not crystallized, he was simply seeing its Essence for a moment. Despite the fact that it was a being of nearly infinite potential, Magic was of a single Essence.
Quicksilver burned a metallic grey when his Essence was amplified. Water glowed blue. Magic simply was. Regardless of the form that it took, however briefly and lightly it took it, it remained Magic.
Seeing that helped keep Jeb from assigning any meaning to the fact that Magic was changing shape far more than it had the previous times Jeb had seen it. He wasn’t sure why Magic’s form was so much more mercurial than before, but he did his best to ignore it, focusing on what it was trying to say to him.
“Child of Man,” it said, tone somehow gentle, “do you know what you have done by accepting your Class?”
“Once again, not really,” Jeb admitted.
It seemed somehow dissatisfied with that answer, and Jeb felt his mind sinking back beneath the gentle lull of dreams. The infinities faded away as he sank deep into the depths of a dream.
The bell tolled out five times. Jeb sat up, feeling more invigorated than his usual. When he remembered that he had been sleeping for nearly half a day, he nodded. His mind and soul were acclimating to the new Statistics, and thinking felt easier. It felt almost as though there had been a sheet muffling everything that he thought, and now the sheet had been lifted.
When he opened a door, he saw a note from Dean Aquam.
Jeb, The Headmistress accepted your proposal. Come to the Ritual Grounds at your earliest convenience. Do not worry about alerting the rest of the faculty, we are alerted whenever a student attempts to enter them.
Jeb watched the note fade away like dew before the morning sun. Shrugging, he made his way to the cafeteria to have a breakfast. The room was deserted when he entered, food sitting prepared beside unmanned stations.
I wonder where everyone is, Jeb thought, preparing a plate of food. He hadn’t realized how much background noise there was in the cafeteria as people cooked and plated food. Without any of it, each scraping of his fork on the plate seemed to echo in the empty room.
He ate slower than usual, savoring each bite and texture. When Jeb finished his meal, he cleaned up his place as normal.
“Let’s see,” he mused aloud, “is there anything else that I should do before Tiering Up? I don’t have any courses right now, but I should probably check in on the Fireleaf. Oh!” a sudden realization struck him “I was told to bring my lute last time. I should probably grab that again.”
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Mind set, he debated between going to his room and going to the field first. Despite the fact that he had been separated from the lute for terms at a time, though, Jeb still felt most comfortable with it resting on his back. This past term he had taken to playing Lute Enforcement each night before he went to sleep. At this point, he wasn’t sure if he could hurt the instrument even if he tried.
Then again, Jeb thought, walking back to the dormitory, I suppose that my ability to cause damage with Magic has probably improved again with how much my Statistics increased. Back in his room, he moved to the lute without a thought, putting on the strap and leaning it against his back. A tension that he hadn’t noticed suddenly faded away, and Jeb walked to his small farm a little bit calmer.
When he made it to the field, Jeb tried to activate his Magical Vision. The Attunement of the plants remained what they had been, primarily Fire. However, Jeb felt a new lens slip into place in his vision.
The field burned with Fire Essence. It seemed to travel between the plot as a wave, growing in strength as it passed by each small sprout. When the tide of Fire reached the edge of his field, it spilled over slightly, pushing a small amount of Fire Essence into the surrounding air, where it was quickly broken apart by the Essence in the air. The rest of the wave moved back over the plants, once more growing in intensity.
Jeb stood entranced as he watched the Essence moving in the Fireleaf. When he managed to pull his attention away from the wave of Fire, he saw that there were more Essences that he had missed. For all that Jeb still thought that Leaf Essence was a ridiculous concept, he saw each plant start to collect it as small buds started to form on their stems. Underneath all that, the soil in the ground itself collected Essence. He watched the Enchantments he had placed at the edges of the field pull in Essence of their own.
Interesting, I hadn’t seen any mentions of the Enchantments affecting Essences, Jeb thought, frowning slightly. As he looked around, he could not find any places where the Essence and the Mana Attunement differed too greatly. Of course, that was probably because his ability to discern specific Essences was not well developed in the least. If Jeb was honest with himself, he was not particularly skilled at distinguishing shades of Attunement.
By the time that he managed to pull his attention away from the new Magics he could see, the sun had started to fall from the sky. Noon was a few hours past, he realized with a start. What he had meant to treat as a slight detour before gaining his new Class had taken much more of his time than he had planned.
Now feeling slightly behind, Jeb started to jog towards the Ritual Grounds. As he moved, he began to wonder how he could potentially work an Enchantment or Alchemical into his lute. It felt a little strange that as he continued to gain new Magics, he did not attach them to the objects Bound to him. He remembered that he had been cautioned against Enchanting the lute, but he could not remember why. Before he figured out what the reason was, Jeb found that his way was suddenly blocked.
Between one step and the next, a wall of stone suddenly filled the entire hallway. The halls remained somewhat unreal, as though Jeb could ignore them if he really wanted to. His sense of self preservation had kept him from exploring what existed behind the walls so far, but he had known it was only a matter of time before he gave into the impulse. Jeb had done his best to remove the temptation by avoiding asking anyone what was behind the walls of the Academy. He knew that any answer he was given would not satisfy and would only drive him to find out sooner. Suddenly prevented from using the halls by a stone wall that made him feel half dreamed, Jeb looked at the walls again.
Maybe now is the time to find out what’s behind them, he thought. If there was something preventing him from getting to the Ritual Grounds, he would have to get around it. As he began to push against the hallway, Jeb focused on how much he did not believe that the walls were real. They started to pull away from his hand, and Jeb felt his fingers start to slip through the soft material that felt like jelly.
Just before they breached the backside of the wall, though, the stone in front of him suddenly disappeared. In its place, Headmistress Petra came rushing, yanking Jeb’s hand out of the hallway.
“What were you thinking?” she demanded, tone like a landslide.
“In retrospect,” Jeb said, “I probably should have realized that you were the cause of a stone wall in the Academy hallway.”
“Yes. You should have.” The Headmistress was clearly not pleased that Jeb had tried to circumvent a barrier she had placed.
The two stood in silence for a few moments, both clearly waiting for the other to speak. As the silence grew, Jeb considered what he could say to excuse his behavior. For whatever reason, he did not think that saying “I was already curious what lay behind the walls, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to find out,” would do him any favors. Try as he might, though, he could not think of any better excuse.
Just as he was about to say as much, if only to break the silence, Petra sighed. “I suppose that I should have expected this behavior from you, given the reports I have received.” Something in her tone made it clear that Jeb shouldn’t ask what reports she’d gotten, even though he was curious.
She turned back towards the direction she’d come from and started to walk. Jeb followed the leader of the Academy through the halls, noting the way that they slowly shifted to a solid stone as she stayed inside of them. Before he could ask about that, the hallway ended and Jeb stepped out into the grove he had stood in the last time he had changed his Class. All the Deans he had seen before were assembled again, along with most of the Professors that Jeb had taken courses from and a number of others that he did not recognize at all.
Professor Quicksilver waved, grinning wildly. Professor Bearson waved as well, large hand peeking out of his thick robe for just a moment.
“Do you remember the process?” Headmistress Petra asked. Jeb nodded, stepping into the middle of the ring. Even though there were at least twenty people watching him, he did not feel nervous. Amidst his surprise at his new Class, Jeb had not connected a lot of what had happened when he received his last Class. In the past terms, however, he had spent some time going over the events. Something that stuck out to him was the fact that no one seemed to know what his Class was or what Class Quests he had before he told them.
Taking a deep breath, Jeb focused on his Level, willing it to increase again. He felt his knees bend as his body and soul separated for a moment.