Moods lightened as they hiked up the Great Staircase. The world around them got brighter as they went up, and soon they could see the dappled morning light, filtered through leaves and boughs. Birds started to chirp and sing, and Reg started spotting squirrels and some horned opossums. The Tree felt like it was coming back to life around them.
A few people ahead of Reg, Fenjor was boasting about how well he’d shot his arrows at the abomination. Others were chiming in with more and more extravagant boasts about how cool-headed and effective they’d been during the brief skirmish. Reg doubted the boasts; almost all of the arrows fired by the trainees had fallen short.
Reg turned slightly to talk to Jashal, “I think the mist has driven me totally insane: I can’t believe I’m looking forward to Instructor Brilleye’s class when we get back.”
Jashal laughed, “I hear that. She’s still a cankerous goblin, but, by the heart, I want to learn to shoot like that. The full guards are on a whole ‘nother branch compared to us.”
“Too true. We have time at least. Trunk’s truth, I’m looking forward to every class. They feel more useful now. Except The World Below: that one is just a pure waste of time.”
“What do you mean? You don’t got a thirst to learn about how mountainous regions limited government authority two millennia ago? Or how waterways expanded ‘economically viable shipping ranges?’” Jashal said the last in a passable imitation of Instructor Silliuk’s snooty tone.
Reg shook his head, “Can’t say that I was thinking about any of that when the twist was charging down the hill. Val was saying that it was probably a twist based on a ‘knight’ on a ‘horse,’ but even that doesn’t feel that useful. Didn’t seem like we’d want to challenge it to a joust.”
“Well, when we make it to full guards, I wouldn’t mind running into one of those things once or twice. When the guard sells the metal, they’ll get to keep a fourth of the rings. If you’re lucky, you can serve for five years and then retire with a fortune.”
“What would you do with that many rings?”
Jashal paused thoughtfully, “First thing, I’d buy a nice place for my gramma. Someplace in the city, out of the twigs. And not in the slums neither. After that, I dunno. Get some nice shirts and all that, maybe. Enjoy the town. You?”
“Sounds flourishing. I’m not actually sure what I’d do. I think I’d want to stick with the guard, but if I left, maybe starting a ranch and herding. How much do you think that much metal would actually be worth?” Reg said.
“Dunno. Figure it’s worth a chunk, but I only know prices for worked stuff. I bet it’s pricey to have someone carve metal into useful shapes. Not like there are metal druids, right?”
“Right.”
Jashal and Reg spent a good portion of the rest of the hike speculating how much the twist’s metal would be worth in practice and chatting about all of the fancy things they’d do if they were wealthy.
After their return from the below, Reg could tell that everyone was approaching class with a bit more urgency. There was a huge gap between all of them and the full guards, and people were determined to cross it.
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For the first time, Professor Ashsprocket took the Evocation class outside. He took them to a range similar to the archery one, but without targets. Instead, the far end of the range had a massive tightly packed-together mound of branches and decomposing fungus. The mound was pock-marked with divots from small explosions and scarred by burns. Portions of it looked like they’d melted and dripped down.
“Now, after your hard practice, we’re ready to move beyond sparks.” Professor Ashsprocket said while smiling broadly at the class. “We’ll be throwing our first darts today.”
There was a muted cheer, but most students were simply listening with excitement. They’d been practicing with sparks for so long: focusing them, covering a staff with them, forming them into simple shapes, conjuring them quickly, and more. Professor Ashsprocket had been unsparing with his drills.
Reg stood off to one side, listening carefully. Professor Ashsprocket had given him another exercise to try today: consuming a psychoactive mushroom-based potion and visualizing himself as a flower sharing its pollen with a visiting bee. He didn’t have much hope for this one; he’d been trying different exercises in Evocation every period, and nothing had worked to light up his doll’s eyes. It was hard to continue to put effort into each strange drill — he felt like he was just broken magically and that nothing would work — but he tried every exercise with the tenacity of a spider trying to track down a lost goat.
Professor Ashsprocket spent a long time going over the proper formation, visualization, and chanted evocation to construct a dart, before beginning a lecture on throwing: “Proper throwing technique is an essential part of many effective evocations. It is a simple and effective delivery method that doesn’t suffer from the added complexity of trying to impart velocity, trajectory, and seeking on to an already complex spell. Similarly, it doesn’t add the complexity inherent in imbuing a physical object with a spell.
“Are you all familiar with Bajal Leafcry? The player for the Ironwood Beetles? He’s clearly the most dominant player in the league.” After saying this, Professor Ashsprocket paused with a smile to listen to the boos and complaints from the class.
Jashal immediately yelled out, “Oh come on, Numen’s been tops in scoring for three seasons now.”
“Numen? Numen?!?” Belladonna sounded offended. “Scoring doesn’t mean anything if you can’t bring home the crown! Vladok has four Ivy Crowns over the past ten seasons. Numen has yet to claim even one.”
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“The Leaping Griffon only have those Crowns because of injuries. They’re false as stone.” Dahlia, a short elf with an incredibly strong upper-branch drawl, responded. “Leafcry might not be the best, but he’s far better than Vladok!”
There were more shouts and arguments before Professor Ashsprocket raised a hand asking for silence. Laughing, he continued, “He’s clearly one of the best players in the league. He’s a relatively weak evoker, but his accuracy and pace of delivery are top fork. That all goes back down to practice with the actual mechanics of throwing. Captain Merrin tells me that accuracy and speed are similarly important to the work that you’ll be doing in the below.
“We’ll eventually cover imparting some extra velocity to our darts, but the trajectory still comes from solid throwing technique. This is one of the reasons that so many in the guard focus on imbuing their arrows and spears rather than relying on fully magical attacks. We’ll cover weapon imbuing soon — it’s a more complex skill and it builds on the skills that you’ll be practicing today and has some important limits that we’ll cover later”
Professor Ashsprocket continued his lecture, discussing how to throw through the legs and hips rather than just the arms. Despite his relatively short arms, Professor Ashsprocket was still able to hurl scarlet darts towards the mound with quite a bit of speed. His small dart screamed through the air, and hit the mound hard. They penetrated deep, leaving small holes behind them. He had the class throw wicker balls downrange for several minutes, giving him a chance to correct poor throwing technique, before allowing the class to start conjuring darts to throw.
Performance was mixed. Cracic, an annoying elf with intense eyebrows, had clearly played a lot of throwball. His were consistently strong, and while his sickly green darts sputtered and lost structural integrity as they flew, they held together enough to hit the mound.
The rest of the class had less success. Yeva’s cyan darts shone brightly to start, but dissipated well before hitting the mound. Belladonna and Jashal both struggled to get darts to form at all. Dahlia had a dart she was carefully forming between her hands explode with a shockingly loud bang.
Reg sat down to one side and concentrated on being a flower. The psychoactive potion that Professor Ashsprocket gave him helped the visualization; he could feel his roots growing into the bark and the nourishing sunlight on his petals. But, as always, the exercise had no effect. The eyes of his doll stayed dull.
The class felt like it went by in a blink. At the end, Professor Ashsprocket called for Reg to stay back to chat. “Regulus, have you heard about the checkpoint exams in a moon?”
“Yes, professor. Instructor Brilleye mentioned them, but I haven’t heard anything from the other classes.”
Professor Ashsprocket cleared his throat before saying, “I have tough news about the checkpoint exam for evocation. I know you’ve been working hard, but the minimum bar will be conjuring and holding a handful of sparks. I want to make it clear it’s not an arbitrary requirement; every full guard needs to be able to imbue their weapon, and that level of facility with sparks is a prerequisite. I still think that we can get through your block before then! I have lots more ideas to try. But I didn’t want it to be a surprise for you.”
Reg nodded and said, “I understand, Professor.” He didn’t trust himself to say much more than that without his voice breaking. It was good to know that the deadline existed, but it felt far too soon. If his magical ability was truly crippled, was that just going to be the day that he had to leave the guard and figure out something else? He mulled on what else he could do to get around his presumed block, but nothing came to mind other than continuing the way that he had been and hoping for a miracle.
Reg still felt glum at dinner that night. He sat down at his normal table with Val, Jashal, Annise, and Yeva and quietly dug into his bowl of chicken and mushroom stew.
He jumped when Annise slugged him in the shoulder and looked at her, confused. She smiled and said, “Reg, you’d better be coming to the game this weekend.”
Reg shrugged and laughed, “The game that you keep saying you’re going to lose because you only have three good players? That game? The one that you keep saying will be a travesty against everything that good throwball should be?”
“Yes, that game! We’re going to get trounced, but that doesn’t mean you all get to skip. Val, I’m putting you in charge of dragging him there. No letting him hide off in the library practicing with that doll.”
Val nodded, “Bartholomew and I are on it. I’m excited! This will be the first throwball game I’ve ever seen.”
Annise looked shocked. She sputtered for a few seconds, “The first?! Val, you poor creature. I never realized. Is that why you didn’t want to join the team? I’ve seen you in Advanced Magical Topics, you’d be great! You’d make a perfect bastion, staying back and controlling the backline with grasping vines and walls of bark. You could be a real defensive stalwart.”
Walls of bark. Why did that seem important?
Val giggled, “Maybe someday. I’m looking forward to watching though, it’ll be flourishing!”
Jashal leaned over and said, “So, you all doing a 1-3-1? Or trying something more modern?”
Annise said, “1-3-1. We’re really not good yet, so I didn’t want to complicate things. We’re all familiar with the 1-3-1 and we don’t have much time to practice.”
Surrounded by friends, Reg felt his glum mood lightening. He caught Annise’s eye, “I’ve got a question that’s way more important than any discussion of formation or tactics: what’s your team name? We need to start practicing our cheers, don’t we?”
“The Primal Panthers.” Annise said, sounding a bit embarrassed. “I didn’t choose it! I wanted something classier, but nobody liked ‘The Rampant Rocs’ or ‘The Wandering Wyverns.’ ‘The Primal Panthers’ sounds like something that an eight-year old boy would come up.”
Yeva shook her head, “Do all the misty names need to sound like that? They all sound a bit silly. Why not ‘Flame’ or ‘Unbowed’ or something simple like that?”
The table threw out more names -- ‘Harassing Harpies,’ ‘Somnabulant Salamanders,’ ‘Basking Behirs,’ ‘Jungle Jackalopes,’ and more. Reg was proud of ‘The Pouncing Portia,’ but nobody else appreciated it. They just didn’t appreciate good spiderflesh. He missed Ankie and hoped that she was doing well with Barkle. He resolved to write a letter home to check in on how things were going—he felt guilty that he hadn’t written home yet.
Reg stayed at the dinner table later than normal, laughing with everyone at the increasingly absurd throwball team names: ‘Blustering Bears,’ ‘Slimy Squirrels’ (with Val offended on Bartholomew’s behalf), or ‘Callipygian Chimera-cats’ (which Annise had to explain). Val, Jashal, and Reg eventually headed off to the library to finish up some work for Tactics.
After the library, as he lay in bed that night, Reg held up the doll and tried once more to make its eyes light up. He focused on letting go, and letting the energy that Professor Ashsprocket said he held in his core flow free. He focused on his family, and how freeing his magic would let him protect them. He focused on letting the doll pull away his energy. He focused and focused.
Nothing changed.