Much as Jeb wanted to drop everything and work on preparing his Skills to join Magic, he knew that doing so would rely more on the gradual shifting of his beliefs than any singular working of will. So, each morning Jeb repeated a variation on the same mantra, “As a Wizard, all that I do is Magic, and so every Skill I have is innately Magical”. Whenever he needed to use one of his Skills, he did his best to also call Magic to the forefront, trying to force himself to see any process of creation or change as fundamentally Magical. Jeb knew that he would miss the slow and subtle changes if he checked his soul too frequently, so he resisted the urge to check daily. Compromising with himself, he delved into his soul at the beginning of each term break.
As it turned out, doctoral students were actually expected to take their term breaks to rest. Jeb learned that three terms later, when Dean Aquam came in on Jeb flipping through a treatise describing Druidic Magic.
“What are you reading?” Dean Aquam asked, tone sounding genuinely curious.
Jeb held up the tome, showing the title to the Dean. “A lot of the books I’ve read cite this as having a more in-depth treatment of Druidic Magic, so it seemed like a good idea to read it. It took Margaret a while to find a copy of it, though.”
“What brings your interest in Druidic Magic?”
Jeb set the book down and looked up at the Dean in confusion. “Druids are the School of Magic most associated with teleportation, at least as far as I can tell. It seems as though every High Tier Druid is capable of more than a few different ways to teleport.”
Dean Aquam picked the book up and shook his head. “Jeb, you know that it is term break, correct?”
Jeb nodded. “Term break is great, because it means that there’s nothing else in my schedule but research. I get far more done.”
“What is the second word in term break?”
Jeb cocked his head. “Break?” he asked hesitantly.
“And what are you not taking?”
“A break?”
The Dean nodded and Jeb began to protest. “Wait, you’ve never had an issue with me working during term breaks before!”
“Most of the time you were working on a project unrelated to your academic work. During your time as an undergraduate, for instance, you learned to Brew or Weave.”
“But I’ve been working through term breaks since beginning my doctorate!” Jeb continued.
Dean Aquam let out an embarrassed cough. “Yes, well, we do tend to extend some grace to students in their first few terms as Researchers. However, when they fail to understand the purpose of breaks,” he looked at Jeb meaningfully, “we remind them of their importance.”
“So what should I do over break?” Jeb asked, a note of pleading in his voice.
Dean Aquam shrugged. “That is entirely up to you. Given that you can teleport, however, I would recommend visiting your family. Taking time away from your studies gives your mind time to think of the broader implications of your research.”
Seeing Jeb’s blank look, the Dean continued, “it can become easy to hyperfixate on a single aspect of your project while working on it day in and out. By taking a break, you can evaluate whether your time might be better spent pursuing another avenue of inquiry.”
“That does make sense,” Jeb conceded, thinking about how his research the past two terms had been almost exclusively on Druids generally, rather than their specific connection to teleportation Magics.
“Well then,” Dean Aquam nodded, “I hope that I will not see you in the Stacks before next term.” He gave Jeb a mock-stern expression. The joke was revealed when the Dean winked before turning to walk away.
Looking around the Stacks, Jeb realized that there was nothing really keeping him from leaving immediately. That being said, he was in no real rush to leave either. Being told that he was not allowed to be productive was a strangely freeing and paralyzing proposition. When he realized that he had been standing in the same place staring off into the distance for a few minutes, Jeb gave himself a rueful smile and collected a few items before going home for the remainder of break.
Back at home, he shared the Alchemical Brews he had been working on. They were met with general murmurings of approval from his family, which warmed Jeb just as much as the Firewhiskey he had just finished aging, if not a little more. With no research to occupy his time, Jeb focused more of his efforts on combining his less Magical Skills with each other.
Back at the Academy for the start of a new term, Jeb realized even more that the Dean had been correct. As interesting as his project on teleportation was, it was not what Jeb wanted to be his thesis.
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“Oh?” Dean Aquam asked as Jeb brought up the idea of changing his thesis project. “Do you have something else in mind?”
Jeb nodded hesitantly. “As you know, my only Class Skill is Magic, and it appears to consume all of my other Magical Skills. I believe that puts me in a unique position to be able to speak to the interplay between different Schools of Magic. Unlike the existing Theoreticians, I am not constrained by viewing the world primarily through the lens of a single School.”
Dean Aquam handed over the signed sheets of paper for a change in thesis project. Seeing Jeb’s surprise that the forms had already been filled out, he chuckled, “a number of us had been placing bets on how many terms it would take you to suggest this project.”
“Who won?” Jeb asked, taking the pages.
Dean Aquam gave him a knowing look but did not respond.
Jeb went back to the Stacks to return most of the books he had checked out and requested another cartload from Margaret. She seemed slightly put out by the timing of Jeb’s request, and he briefly wondered whether she had been among the betting pool. He pushed the thought away. It was somewhat uncomfortable to Jeb that people bet on his actions, and the less time that he dwelled on the thought, the better.
When Margaret returned with the stack of books, Jeb saw a number of names that were familiar to him. The lectures he had gone to referenced specific people’s theories of Magic in how they pertained to the talk at hand. Jeb noticed that there were at least two tomes dedicated to theories for each School of Magic, with one glaring exception. There were no tomes about Druidic Magic.
A part of Jeb was disappointed by that revelation; it had hoped that this new avenue of research might open the restricted section of the library. It was a small part of Jeb, however. The rest of him was excited to finally read the sources that so many speakers had referenced.
By the end of the term, Jeb felt like he had a solid foundation of the state of the field. In what should have been an unsurprising revelation, most theories of Magic, or at least most books of theories of Magic, focused on a single question: which Magic is the fundamental? That is, nearly every author felt confident stating as a fact that there was one School that the others sprang from. Most every author, unsurprisingly, pointed to the School they were Attuned to as that School. The first book Jeb read claimed that Glyphs were the fundamental Magic, and he had been fairly convinced. That conviction wavered when he read a tome describing the way that Ritual was clearly the first Magic humans had done. In the end, Jeb supposed that it did not really matter what different authors said. What mattered were his own conclusions.
As the terms turned to years, Jeb worked to connect the different Schools of Magic. He began with the first two Schools he had tried to merge: Glyph and Bardic Magics. Diving down deep into Theoretical works on each School and recreating a number of experiments, Jeb slowly came to one important revelation.
Glyph Magic was inherently derivative of Bardic Songs. Each Glyph was, at its core, a Song locked into a single instant and shape. What they lost in duration and flexibility, they made up for in stability. Jeb showed his results to Aquam, who happily took Jeb’s pages and passed them to Professors in the two departments.
Copies of the paper came back to Jeb covered in ink that were filled with praise and criticism in equal measure. To his relief, none of the criticisms attacked his methods or derivations. However, more than a few pointed out a crucial error in his conclusion. There were, indeed, Song effects that could not be reproduced by Glyphs. However, it was equally true that there were Glyph effects which could not be reproduced by Songs.
In fact, Jeb realized that both Songs or Glyphs could be derived from the other as a starting point. In doing so, however, new effects emerged in the field of Magic. It was as though imagining a pile of sand.
A single grain of sand behaved completely like a solid. It could be crushed, but it did not change its shape. A pile of sand, however, behaved in a way that could not be predicted by looking at a single grain. Visualizing both fields as both the grain and the pile made Jeb’s head hurt, but something about it resonated as fundamentally right. The revised draft: “From Glyphs, Song; From Songs, Glyphs”, was met with far less criticism, though it was clear that the paper was still controversial.
As Jeb had worked on the paper, he thought about the fact that he had created Glyph effects in his Songs by weaving them. On a whim, Jeb tried Weaving some of the fire thread he had made into the shape of Least Create Fire. The moment that he finished Weaving, it caught flame.
Jeb leapt back in surprise, but the thread did not seem to be consumed. Instead, it just burned. Watching for a few hours, Jeb saw that the thread was slowly dissipating. Relieved, Jeb moved on to the next combination he had worked on before coming to the Academy: Glyphs and Enchantments.
He thought back fondly to the time he had accidentally Attuned wood to Water by inscribing a Glyph. Unsurprisingly, he found that he was able to derive Enchantments from Glyphs. Enchantments were formalized Glyphs, affixed to a permanent medium.
Remembering the mistake he had made the last time he derived one School from another, he found that the reverse was also true. Jeb could construct a Glyph entirely out of Enchanting runes, and the Glyph functioned. Seeing that he could go from Glyphs to Songs or Glyphs to Enchantments, Jeb started working on deriving Songs or Enchantments from each other.
Two terms later, Jeb gave up on the effort. Try as he might, there was no way he could find to turn the two Schools into each other without first deriving Glyph Magic. Even the tomes which claimed one School or the other as fundamental were no help, as they all inevitably either used Glyphs as intermediates or had a critical flaw in their reasoning. When Dean Aquam asked the departments for comments on his second doctoral paper, Jeb was unsurprised to find that he had not made any critical errors. There were sections that he needed to revise to become clearer, but that was only to be expected.
The knowledge that not every School could be derived from every other School made Jeb nervous to approach the next School. After a term break spent thinking on the problem, Jeb decided to approach a related issue: he could not derive fundamental truths of Ritual Magic alone. Rituals were, after all, fundamentally linked to the participation of multiple people at once. As he thought on the issue in his plot of land, Jeb became more and more aware of the bees buzzing around him.