Alistar also tended to direct basic combustion spells with movements of his hands, though his tweaking of the candle lighting spell wasn’t something he felt he should share with his teacher. Mr. Albeck had been very stubborn about their curriculum and insisted that they not stray from the simple, everyday magics that were prevalent throughout society, promising to move on to more advanced material once Alistar was older. Countless of these simple spells existed, which made Alistar anxious about whether he would ever get to learn more advanced magic in the year and a half that he had left before he planned to return to Crystellum.
“It might just be a basic spell, but you’ve gotten to the point where you don’t need to move at all in order to cast it. This is rare, even for full-fledged mages, though not so much for arcanites. Much of their spellwork is done while multitasking, after all.” Next, Mr. Albeck pointed at the ground. “Now, draw about a pitcher’s worth of water from the soil.”
“Can I use the snow?”
His teacher nodded.
Alistar invested a slight amount of magic to carry out the request, heating the snow beneath him with a subtle blanket of his inner energies. A short while later and a sizeable sphere of undisturbed water sat floating in front of him, which he was then asked to manipulate into different shapes. Following this, he was told to return the water to a spherical shape and then freeze it, after which he had to revert it back to liquid form. All of these tasks were completed with a single casting, up until he was asked to manipulate the water into different shapes and then freeze them.
“Is…did I make a mistake?” He could have shown better results if he hadn’t been diverting a bit of focus towards maintaining his swordsman’s aura, but he was confident that his previous results weren’t beneath his teacher’s expectations.
Mr. Albeck frowned at the sword of ice that Alistar had subconsciously created, pensive for a few moments before he picked it up and turned it back into water.
Suddenly short on breath and feeling a bit ill, Alistar raised an eyebrow at his teacher. He momentarily lost control of his swordsman’s aura, though he was warmed by a constant gust of hot wind that Mr. Albeck casually sent his way.
“You did fine.” Without explaining the cause for his frown, the magus said, “Reading about it is one thing, but experiencing the backlash of having someone forcefully take control of your magics can be quite damaging, sometimes crippling. I saw fit to make the demonstration because we’re only dealing with basic magics here, but if you had cast a more complex spell then the consequences could have been quite severe.”
So the backlash does exist. This fact had always confused Alistar, since he and Lessa had exchanged control of small amounts of water on many occasions, usually at the behest of their friends. When he brought this up to his teacher, Mr. Albeck let out a knowing chuckle.
“The youngest Silvus girl? I suppose that makes sense. You two seem to get along very well, so it’s not surprising that your magics are in sync.”
Alistar blushed. “We’re in sync? Is that common?”
“Somewhat. Essentially, a combination of mirrored emotions and aligned intentions makes it easier for you to work with one another in a magical sense. There are many spells that require multiple people to cast, tasks made much easier when the casters are in sync.”
“Mirrored emotions…aligned intentions…” As Alistar pondered the meaning behind his teacher’s words, a sudden thought caused him to brighten up. “So both of our intentions were to move the water, and our emotions were also the same.” Since he had clarified that he had romantic feelings for Lessa, then didn’t the fact that they were in sync mean that she also had feelings for him?
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“You seem to understand. Don’t go getting ahead of yourself, though. For now, just focus on the lesson.”
He was forced to reactivate his swordsman’s aura when Mr. Albeck cancelled out whatever spell he had been using to keep him warm.
“Next, we’ll test your basic mending spell. Give yourself a little nick somewhere and then mend it. Or, if you’d prefer, I can cut my arm—”
Alistar elongated a bit of the swordsman’s aura that covered his right index finger, thinking back to the time that Tramon had strung him up from the tree out front of his home with that damned enchanted rope. It had been nearly half a year since then, and he had since undergone hundreds of hours of similar training. Using this technique, he drew a deep cut on his left forearm, wincing before returning the swordsman’s aura to its original distribution. Searing pain made it so that the injury was glaringly apparent, much of his wrist and forearm already covered in healthy streams of blood. He healed the wound with hurried hands, looking down at the little bits of bloodstained snow with a frown. He had always cut foreign objects with his technique, so he had slightly misjudged the dimensions of the energy that he’d rearranged along his finger and as a result had cut quite deep into his forearm. Shaking the numbness from his limb, he looked at his teacher with a bit of embarrassment.
“Just now, I might have miscalculated things a bit.”
Paying him no mind, Mr. Albeck grasped his wrist and inspected the recently-afflicted area with a penetrating gaze. “A basic mending spell shouldn’t be able to heal something like that. What you did just now is more in line with an advanced mending spell.”
“Truly?”
“Your affinity with healing arts is very high. I suppose it’s time to start teaching you more spells in this area.” Following a brief silence, the magus added, “Of all the people I’ve met in my life, your mother was the most gifted when it came to casting healing spells. If she’d continued to attend the arcannia, I wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance of earning the highest achievements in the healing arts for our year. You really do take after her, you know.”
Alistar put on a big smile, warmed by thoughts of his mother. He also felt a touch of pride in hearing that his mending spell had reached the advanced level, as he had long suspected this to be the case. He and his friends were quite merciless towards one another these days when it came to their sparring matches, and by this point he had healed his fair share of broken or fractured bones along with countless cuts and abrasions.
He suppressed an eye roll as he subconsciously balled up his left hand, recalling when Jaden had broken three of his fingers with an overpowered strike. Thinking on it, Jaden was usually the culprit when it came to sparring injuries, which was something that Alistar planned to address later in the afternoon.
Following the mending spell, Mr. Albeck had Alistar alternate his eye colour between all of the standard shades. After this, he created a small sheet of particularly slippery ice and had Alistar try to steady himself on it with the basic stability spell that he had recently learned, a neat trick that created friction at his feet so that it was easy to balance himself on unsure surfaces.
Next he was to fan his teacher with a light wind with the basic version of the spell that the mages of Crystellum used to circulate air throughout the vast network of tunnels, which wasn’t too difficult despite the fact that he had only begun to practice the technique a couple of weeks ago. Lastly, he was told to completely hide his aura using a well-known method that Mr. Albeck had learned at the arcannia when he was a boy, a type of concealment spell that most mages learned at some point in their studies.
While Alistar was capable of masking the signals that his energies gave off when perceived by others, this was only possible thanks to the many limiters that covered his wrists and fingers along with the constant maintenance of the ocular alteration spell that kept his eyes wholly silver. Without these things, it would be impossible for him to mask such a vivid energy signal with his current capabilities, especially since talented magi would still be able to detect him even with the successful implementation of said spell. Only those that had learned the high magic version of the concealment spell could truly go undetected by all but the most seasoned magi, though he was still many years away from achieving such a feat.
All in all, he passed the review with flying colours. As usual, his teacher piled on the praise, though Alistar didn’t let these words go to his head as he was still far from satisfied with his own progress. After all, a talented apprentice mage was still inferior to an ordinary mage, let alone an arcanite. He had seen with his own eyes on the day that the count of Melsian had visited Crystellum that the man had many arcanites in his employ, so the chances that Alistar would run into a battle mage when he returned to the mines were fairly high.