Wesley waited for him outside the annex as Florian had asked. He wore the same robes as always; none of them owned any other clothes, at least from what Florian gathered. The short man waved at him.

“Disciple Cale!” he called.

Florian shook his head, sighing. “Wesley, if we’re going to be friends, you need to stop calling me ‘Disciple.’ It’s so over-dramatic, and as long as Theo isn’t around to hear it, you’ll be just fine,” he scolded the shocked Wesley.

“T-T-Theo?”

“That’s his name, isn’t it?”

Florian let Wesley marinate on it, guiding the other man away from the annex. The sun had set now, the only light around them coming from the waning Moon and the occasional torch here and there. Off in the distance, Florian heard the scraping of spears against scales and of claws against steel. Florian breathed deeply, the smoky air sitting heavily in his lungs. He pictured the dead lumberjack, his pale and lifeless green eye staring at him. Blaming him.

Shivers ran down his spine and he felt unwell. Wesley shook him from his stupor. “What’s wrong, Disciple Cale?”

Florian glared at the man, glad to have something to direct his ire towards. “My name is Florian. Not Disciple Cale.”

Wesley shriveled underneath his gaze, mumbling an apology. Satisfied, Florian opted to move away from the walls and toward the keep’s immaculate gardens. He hoped they’d be empty given the time of day, or rather, night. It was only the Warriors that would be fool enough to be awake.

Finding a nice little patch of empty grass underneath a large oak – whose shadow plunged the area into darkness – Florian invited Wesley to sit in front of him. “Are you well enough to meditate?”

Florian saw Wesley’s silhouette nod. “My head’s a little funny still, but I think I can give it a go.”

“Great. So explain to me, in detail, what exactly you did the last time you meditated.”

Wesley thought about it, not answering the question for a handful of seconds. “Well, I did what you told me to, pulling the mana into my body and cycling it through my veins as I breathed.”

“Is that all you did?”

“Well, I guess I did the normal stuff, too,” Wesley said, sounding unsure of himself. But this was news to Florian. He had thought the ‘normal stuff’ was the whole hug-from-the-universe thing.

“What’s the normal stuff?”

“You know, I tried to draw power from the Universe as I interacted with it, forcing the Universe to accept my command over it. It’s that whole thought exercise Master had us do,” Wesley explained. That was decidedly not how Theo had taught Florian, though it may well have been something the wizard had simply skipped in his early teachings.

“Try doing what I told you again, but this time just let the mana flow through you. You don’t need to have it do anything except for going in and out of your body. I’ll go ahead and do what you did, and then we can see what works better,” Florian proposed, the other man nodding in acceptance. Already in a comfortable sitting position, it didn’t take long for Florian to find the mana around him.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Then, as he breathed the little cerulean motes in and began to absorb whatever energy they contained – which was very difficult to imagine – he felt what began as a tingle throughout his entire body: that same pins-and-needles feeling when a leg fell asleep. And then, in short order, it morphed into something else entirely.

He felt like boiling water roared through his blood, heat torching every bit of his body. He quickly stopped trying to absorb them, the heat receding as the mana left his body a touch dimmer than before. Beads of sweat raced down his forehead, forcing him to wipe them from his eyes. Breathing heavily, Florian laid against the tree behind him, waiting for Wesley to finish his own meditations.

It took the mousy-haired man a touch longer than normal, making it to something around what felt like ten minutes. Wesley opened his eyes wide, grinning even as he massaged his temples. “It worked!” he cried with excitement.

And it really looked like it did. Florian didn’t quite grasp the theory behind it, but it was fairly obvious that Wesley had benefited from following Florian’s original method. Whether Theo knew about this and intentionally kept it from them or he was more ignorant than he made himself out to be, Florian knew that he finally had something on that jackass of a wizard.

“Please, don’t tell anyone about this,” Florian asked in hushed tones, just in case someone was around to hear them.

“Why?”

Well, for Florian, it was simple. He didn’t like being under the thumb of Theo, dancing to whatever the wizard’s whims were. It was clear that agreements had little value to the man, a lesson Florian had learned the hard way. A part of him knew that he could speed along the process of the other disciples getting to “an acceptable” level, but another part of him doubted that Theo would keep up his end of the bargain. No, this was Florian’s.

“We need to give it some time and compare its long-term effects before we tell everyone else,” Florian said, his reasoning being completely made-up. Something told him Wesley wouldn’t agree with his actual logic. But Wesley bought the excuse, which was all he needed.

“Ah, I understand. Then should I just do what I’ve been normally doing during class?”

“If you could.” Florian wasn’t sure how much others could see the mana that the people around them manipulated, but this was a surprising ace in the hole he didn’t want to give up just yet.

“Done. We’ll just continue to do this at night, then?”

“Yes.”

And that was the end of it, Florian and Wesley getting up from their spots on the grass and leaving back to the annex without so much as a further word. It was clear that much like him, Wesley had a lot to think about too.

As they exited the garden to round the keep and find the annex, they briefly came closer again to the wall, where the sounds of fighting had grown louder, the screams of people and beast mixing together. Florian shook the images from his mind and walked faster, almost not noticing the shadowy group of six robe-wearing people trying to sneak into the annex at the same time they were.

A glint from one of their eyes alerted Florian to their presence, though, and Florian focused his attention on them as he pulled Wesley behind a nearby tent. They wore the same clothes they did, indicating that they were probably also Theo’s disciples. What they were doing in the dead of night was a mystery to him, but he thought he noticed a particularly bulky figure among them, the robes stretched thin around their shoulders. Florian had seen them before, and he thought back to the lessons. There were a few stockier individuals among the disciples, so Florian couldn’t narrow his list beyond three or four people of the three dozen that made up their class.

He knew it was probably hypocritical, but them skulking around in the middle of the night was shady. And then they disappeared into the annex, their identities remaining a question mark. Florian sat down behind the tent, pulling out a bit of Hellwolf jerky. Wesley sat down next to him, a confused expression on his dimly lit face. They’d have to wait a bit before entering to avoid the same suspicion he had of them, so Florian just settled in for the long haul.