I waited on one of the benches at the playground. The playgrounds quadrilateral structure and walls composed by arches reminded me of something I couldn’t remember.
Yep. That was definitely a phrase. I couldn’t do anything about it if I was plainly not able to recall it.
Instead of practicing spellcasting, something I had plenty of mastery with, I focused on expanding my mana pool through meditation. Not only was this harder to detect than my spellcasting practice, therefore no one would shout at me because of it, but it was also an activity I had been slacking with.
Centering oneself in one activity would make you inevitably good at it, but you ended up being an immobile cannon in a moving battlefield. Whilst the motive behind the warlike analogy was beyond me, I knew the meaning behind it. I should diversify my choices.
I was the apex arcanist by nature (that didn’t mean I was exempted from training), but I had other qualities. Not only I had another superb affinity I had left to the side, ready to sow at any moment, there was also mana pool size and sorcery which could be useful in the future.
Emphasis on could.
The school day lasted for six hours on a twenty-hour day. This meant I was three tenths of the day at school. Supposing I sleep everyday for eight hours (I wouldn’t like to screw my child body with sleep deprivation), I had four tenths less of a day. Ignoring breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the moment, I still had a thirty percent of the day as free time. Which realistically was more like around twenty percent or four hours.
Marissa and I were spending less time at my home as we would be at school always together, but let’s leave one hour of playing time with her. Three hours of daily training felt right. Not too much, not too little.
I hadn’t factored in the fifth day of the week and weekends. Which would be half day of free time, or probably less as Marissa would likely bother me when we didn’t have school. Perhaps I could trick Marissa somedays to practice with me, but it wouldn’t be a consistent timetable or period, for that matter.
It was incredible how her mana pool was still bigger than mine when I had the impression she hadn’t meditated at all.
Meditation would probably be after school time or when Marissa left me as, honestly, it was really relaxing. Sure, my body would be numb after one hour of total stillness, but I would be rested both in body and mind.
My timetable was makeshift and subject to change, but I was pretty happy with this first sketch. It could always be destroyed by some life-changing event as skipping years, but at least, I knew the next school years had the same schedule as freshman year.
I felt a hand in my shoulder. I jumped in the air. I fell off the bench. I tried to cast Slow Fall but the few hundreds of a second weren’t enough. My back impacted on the ground.
What was happening today with all these jumpscares?
“Oh, are you alright, sweety?” Mother, who was the one who surprised me, rushed to my side.
“I… I am.” I responded, still shocked. “My buttocks feel numb. That’s all.” I caressed my butt.
“That’s why I said you shouldn’t sneak behind him, Liliana. He was meditating.” Father added with a sigh. “Hmm…”
Father looked at the bench and then where I had fallen. He inspected the place carefully before he began talking.
“Did you try to cast a spell?” He asked, continuing with his observation.
“Spellcast, but yes.” I shook the dust off my body. “I tried to cast Slow Fall before I fell. Keyword, tried.”
“Did you know you could’ve just stopped your fall with your hands instead of spellcasting?” Father said with a smirk. Mother masked her mouth with her hands, but I knew she was laughing behind them.
“It was a subconscious act.” I explained them. “I almost got it.” But he did have a point. When had my subconscious transitioned from muscular spasms to save my body to instead trying to use magic to solve my every problem?
Hmm, that felt like a whole subject worth of academic research.
“Almost.” Father reiterated lost in thought. “Well, if you are almost able to spellcast a basic three-star spell in such a low amount of time, then you teacher was right about your magical prowess.”
Those words alleviated my mood. “What did you decide in the end?”
“Professor Accord convinced us not only you were in a need of change, but also Marissa.” It was my mother who talked, stepping in before Father could say anything. “We decided to at least wait until the end of the week, and if the probation time isn’t enough, then the second week would be used to figure out which year you should be placed in.”
“So… Will I be changed to another year?” I asked even if already knew the answer.
“At minimum one upper year, in theory.” Mother resumed.
Oh, that was what I had been waiting for! No more Miss Salore. Gods, how can I hate someone this much even if I met her only for a few days?
But that was only a plus, what truly mattered to me was my education. I was prepared to receive an even worse teacher if that meant being able to have more knowledge at my disposition.
My celebration was interrupted by a doubt which germinated in my mind. “What about Marissa? Will we go to the same classes?”
“Hmm…” My father responded with a simple grunt.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
It was my mother who explained. “We asked the professor about this too. In the case that she is incapable of meeting the standards, she won’t be able to skip a year.”
I was sure Marissa would be able to skip the freshman year and maybe even two. We read the spellbook and the compendium many times together, and those were advanced subjects. Skipping more? That didn’t sound plausible. I was not capacitated to have a good guess as I didn’t know what would be taught each year, though. Abandoning my first and only friend, or having an advanced and better-suited education?
A difficult choice, but I had standards. I promised myself to act as a child before a mage, and a child wouldn’t let go their friends. Still, there was no rush of any kind apart from my boredom and endless thirst of knowledge.
That didn’t mean I would simply allow Marissa to not try skipping more than one year. No, no, no. I would teach her everything I could to make it possible.
“I will try to make her able to follow my pace. Marissa is smart.” Smart, but lazy.
“I know, I know.” Mother embraced me and undid my hair while patting me. “Oh, my little cute Edrie.”
Whilst my father had smirked at the thought of spellcasting instead of manually eviting my fall, he now visually and audibly laughed at the display of affection of my mother.
***
“Hmm…” Marissa grunted at my side. She held the pencil tightly, making me wonder if she would break it.
We were now at class, Miss Salore explained the lesson to the other students, meanwhile Marissa and I were making a simple test. It didn’t seem like it was handcrafted for us, but a recycled exam.
Personally, it was a rather easy task to do. It wasn’t a true test either, just a long and thorough exercise. While I was seeing the steam coming off from Marissa’s ears, I knew she would be making it in the end. Maybe not a perfect score, but she should be able to do half of the test rather quickly.
We may be ten-ish at the moment, but for the long-lived ellari, we were nothing more than toddlers. Toddlers with magical powers, but hey, you wouldn’t find me complaining. The subjects were rather easy, and not all of them entered on the exercise.
At the freshman year we had these subjects: Language, Arts and Crafts, Physical Education, Mathematics, and Magical Training. Few and rather easy subjects to study. Expected for toddlers. What I wanted to focus on was that the exercise could only ask questions on Language and Mathematics.
While Mathematics were absurdly simple to me, I innately knew how to do them, Ellari Language was a bit more complicated. The field of mathematics seemed as if it was universal, no matter the world you were on. Language, on the other hand, was as malleable and consistent as a cloud.
Thankfully, Language was easy as the ellari language had solid rules defining the foundation. This presented both a problem and a solution. Solution: it was rather easy to learn the language. Problem: you could be asked thirty different grammatical rules in an exam.
That was in theory of course. They wouldn’t ask that to such young children as us. For starters, I was surprised everyone in the class knew how to talk perfectly. Ellari aging was weird, we were like overgrown babies at the age of ten but we could talk, walk, and do magic without a problem.
“Hmmm.” After a couple of minutes of silence, Marissa grunted once more as wrote an answer. She read it multiple times as it didn’t convince her.
We were lucky that History and Science were advanced subjects not suitable for children, because then Marissa would have no chance of skipping freshman year.
I would like to explain the inner workings of the ellari language, but I actually didn’t understand them. Sort of? I meant, I did know how to speak, write, and talk ellari, but that was a totally different matter from explaining it.
Either way, as expected from a children’s test, the questions weren’t complicated. They didn’t ask rhetorical figures of the poetic language, or something like that. The questions were as such: Is this phrase well written? Write four words of this semantic field. Write the antonyms of this words. Et cetera.
Math was a whole lot simpler. Addition and subtraction. That’s it. We were toddlers, what did you expect? Sure, we use a specific field of mathematics for spellcasting, but it was something managed rather automatically and instinctively. I was sure spellcasting and mathematics will be more related in the future. But at the moment we weren’t even doing multiplications.
The whole equations I used when applying manathics to my spellcasting was something optional, that not even Marissa wanted to try out. I actually didn’t have a solid grasp on the subject either, as father wouldn’t explain it to me, but it did help me sketch the first spellcasts of a new spell.
It would be hypocritical of me to smack talk how easy the exercise was and then commit a single error. So, I did the typical thing of re-reading the titles to see if I understood them wrong and checked every single solution.
I really wanted to get a perfect score. Looking at the contents of the test, it was exaggerated to do so. If I were an elementary teacher, I would want every student to be able to resolve the exercises. But alas, I have no idea of how to educate children.
Halfway into my fifth revision, the bell sound. Not to mark playground time, but the end of school day. We gave Miss Salore our prints, Marissa looked at me with puppy eyes.
“How did it go?” I asked even if the visual clues were enough.
“Good?” She responded as we walked down the corridors.
“Really?” I frown my brows.
Or what little eyebrows I had because ellari tended to have them extremely thin even on adults. We compensated it by having them rather long than wide, but even then, our brows were miniscule. Some ellari’s brows hanged on the side of their faces, others grew by the side, and others were strong enough to continuously grow in the air.
“I answered all of the questions.” Marissa admitted.
“Well, that’s a good start.” I comforted her.
“And I think I did all the math well.” She furthered out. “But I didn’t understand Language.”
“Oh? I found it rather easy.” I looked at her as we crossed the hall and left the school.
“Yes. Some were easy.” Marissa sighed. Huh, I was typically the one who sighed. “But I didn’t understand some questions. I mean, what’s a semantic field supposed to mean?”
Of course, how could I have been so blind? I already knew what a semantic field meant beforehand, but no one had explained it to Marissa because she had just started school. I was a fool.
I proceeded to explain it to her. “A semantic field are words that have relations between one with the other.”
She squinted her eyes at me, showing that she didn’t understand what I had said.
“For example: Table, chair, and closet are part of the semantic field of furniture, and apple, banana, and strawberry are all fruits. But an apple and a chair have no correlation.” I noticed my error of using some complicated words instead of more simple ones to ease my explanation, but Marissa seemed to understand it either way.
“I think I got it.” She affirmed. “Slow Fall and Mana Pond are in the semantic field of arcane spells, while Slow Fall and Breeze are air spells.”
“Yes! That’s basically it.” While the examples used showed our unorthodox education, she got the idea quickly. “And whilst cushion and chair wouldn’t pertain to the semantic field of furniture together, they would do so in the semantic field of seats.”
“So…” Marissa continued. “Breeze and Mana Pond, while they are not part of the semantic field of elements, they are still part of the spells one.”
I was actually dumbfounded by her. I hadn’t yet explained how a word could be in various semantic field at the same time, and she found it by herself.
“Edrie, are you there?” She waved her hand in front of me.
“Yes, yes.” I moved her hand away. “You are right. I’m just astonished how you understood it so fast.”
“It’s because I’m smart.” Marissa put her hands on her hips and puffed up her chest as to show off.
“Yes, you are.” I subconsciously patted her hair. This was mother’s fault as she patted me at the first opportunity she had. Though it came out with a hinge of sarcasm, I was sincere with my words. At least Marissa didn’t appear to hate it as she hadn’t stopped me yet.