Solaria
Please, someone kill me. Just have a space shattering event and save me from this eternal cycle of torture we call existence. May a lightning strike me and burn my soul, so it may never again discover conscience again.
“What does the teacher mean with intent?” asked in a hushed tone my personalized torture device, “Does it have something to do with mana?” further clarified the bane of my existence.
“Maybe if you just listened to the professor for five more seconds you would hear it, Lunario” I said, putting the most amount possible of hate, scorn, vitriol and despair in each word, especially at that cursed name of his. His oblivious face following that made it so much more painful. “But I didn’t hear him and was asking you” he responds, tilting his head almost as if trying to understand what I didn’t understand of his question. I say almost because I am yet to verify that he could have thoughts. “Agh, mana is the way we express intent, how we make the exterior world conform to us, instead of the other way around” I answer, hoping he would do something with that information.
He keeps staring at me.
“Aren’t you going to write it down, mister Lunario?” I ask with as sarcastically as my limited body can handle. “Oh, I think I dropped my notebook when bumping into someone” he answers, not a shadow of shame coloring his face. “I’m pretty sure you weren’t holding anything when we bumped” I answer, with curiosity painting my tone. He thinks for a second before responding: “Oh, I probably dropped bumping into another person before meeting you.”
“ANOTHER PERSON? HOW OFTEN DO YOU BUMP INTO PEOPLE?” I shout, in utter shock and disbelief. “Solaria was it, right? Can you please keep it down in my class or I will be forced to kick you out.” responds the professor of magic theory, making my face go red. ‘All this cannot possibly be just me being unlucky. I am not religious, but please, may whatever twisted creature that is playing with my life, find a spark of forgiveness in your heart and end this’ I thought.
“Hey, I know you are excited to learn magic, but let’s try not to bother other people” the creation of evil says, making it clear that my prayer went unheard. Luckily all this first class teaches is the basics of magic, that I did bother Auvrey to explain all about, so I wasn’t losing much. You use mana, push and pull on stuff, the more detailed it is, the harder it gets, never hit a head with any amount of intent ever, yada yada yada. Things everyone knew at this point… Well, almost everyone.
“And this is all for today, enjoy the rest of the classes” the professor said, with the same monotone and lifeless voice used for the entire class. Leaving the class as soon as possible in the hope that I can lose Lunario, maybe he would trip and get lost?
“What class do we have now?” is what I hear, from the voice that I was starting to associate with the pain of breaking bones. “Practical application of magic” I respond distracted, all the while fantasizing of how breaking my own bones would make me hear something different.
Getting there was easy, as I had already memorized where every classroom was in my excitement to learn magic and as I was getting there, I couldn’t hold my anticipation to start actually doing magic. I did my best to seem like a proper adult, so I just entered the class. Even with all of my body wanting to jump up and down like a child. Yes, I did feel proud to accomplish that.
As most of my classmates were still trying to figure out their way into here, I took the time to look around class, seeing a standard sitting arrangement with a palm wide pendulum made out of wood and string at every table, with two people already in the classroom talking quietly. One was what seemed like a good natured old lady with a professor vibe that made you want to steal her and keep that cute thing in a jar of cookies, while the other is a spindly man with a face so harsh and eyes so devoid of emotion it seemed he put fire to a home of abandoned puppies because one of them pissed in his garden. I sure do hope one of these is our professor and the other was just supposed to be in arms reach for anyone who heard Lunario’s voice too many times. They noticed us coming in, the old lady beaming with a happiness that should not be allowed.
“Here, come in, make yourselves comfortable” said the ray of sunshine, while death’s boyfriend just looked at us, like he was deciding what temperature to boil us alive in. ‘Sure am’ I thought, going to a chair in the middle of the class and staying there. Lunario got the clue and sat on the chair at the side. I then proceeded to abandon the chair and went to sit at the front row, hoping he would stay put. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to care, so he leaves the chair he had chosen and sits at my side. Well, worth a shot.
As everyone finishes pouring in, the class begins. The old lady starts with the administrative stuff, classes per semester, what are we going to learn, all that boring filler that enters one ear and portals to the other. I guess I missed her name, but I’m sure that will be fine. I perk up when I hear her say a name that I doubt I could ever learn to pronounce, sounding foreigner.
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“...so do not be afraid of him, he will just be staying in the class just watching as is required for any practical magic class. So, with everything out of the way, I will be starting our class with the current exercise. Do you see the groves on this pendulum?” She says, picking up the one in the teachers table, showing little marks on the bottom support, meant to show how far the pendulum swings, then pulling a pin and letting it start swinging. “The more time passes, the less far it will swing” I feel a sensation I had felt before, but never quite managed to figure it out, she continues talking: “So you will try to make a bubble of time on and speed time up inside it.” The pendulum starts going faster and faster, as I continue to feel a kind of “push” at something. No, it wasn’t a thing, and it wasn't nothing either... it seems that I have no words to describe what was happening. The clock went so fast that with each swing losing a bit of energy, it eventually stopped still.
“Your first time will not be able to speed it up so much, so keep it swinging and anyone who can make theirs be one grove more than this one in front of the class can say they casted time magic.” She said enthusiastically, switching to a serious tone and complementing: “It is the third time I say this, but keep your casting as far as possible from any heads, I don’t want to see anyone dropping dead on the first day of school.” ‘Oh, no’ I thought, if there is a person stupid enough to do that, it is the one to my right. Everyone started to take the pins that hold the pendulum and try to do… something, I guess. I on the other hand had a life to save.
“Lunario, please tell me you heard the last thing the professor said” I plead to the maybe corpse to be, which looks at me with a face of ‘smiling at a joke he was still trying to get’. “Don’t hit any head with magic, yeah, I got that, but I think everyone is overreacting, how bad could it be?” he answers and I know for sure he would be dead by now without intervention. I may hate this guy's guts, but not enough to want him dead. “Listen carefully as just today it was explained why twice and you should have known it by heart before you could even write your own name, every being can detect any mana that is acting in your head, following me so far?” I ask just to be sure. “I’m following,” he answers. I would have liked for him to repeat it to me, but I will take his word for it. “So, every creature with a brain bigger than a peanut throws all the mana that they can at the source with any sign of tampering, killing whatever was trying to mess with its brain while also probably going into a coma at the effort. So, please, whatever you do, do not hit any brain with mana.”
I think I have for the first time ever seen understanding washing across his face. Followed by a bit of confusion, almost like he tried it before. “I don’t want to hear it” I cut him off before he opened his mouth to speak, as I was almost sure he would be confessing that he passed in front of a spell, making me his accomplice to a murder. I would help save his life, but going to prison together was a bit much, even for the seemingly bottomless well of empathy that I was.
I change sight to my pendulum, trying to replicate whatever feeling I felt when the professor casted the spell. I concentrate and try aimlessly to make something for a few seconds when I start to smell burning. ‘I must be doing something, maybe the smell of burning is a sign I am doing it’ but the thought trails off. ‘How would the smell of burning wood play into this?’ I look to my right (where the smell was coming from) and somehow I see Lunario’s pendulum burning.
“HOW IN THE ACTUAL FUCK DID YOU PUT FIRE IN A FUCKING PENDULUM?” I scream in confusion, bafflement and disbelief all fucking orders of magnitude higher than I thought possible for a body to hold. I see the professor rush to help, with the mister drinks babies blood for lunch looking even more ‘I am going to kill someone’, which I thought was impossible, but he stops in his track seeing me with what I can only guess is my ‘I am going to kill someone, or the person who killed that someone if they got that someone first’ face. My brain struggles to try to understand how something like that would happen, considering all possible and impossible theories, because I sure knew I could not stop myself from killing him before he told me the answer.
The professor, unabated with the sheer impossible level of stupidity that was happening, reaches the table and picks up a portion of the non-thing thingy and makes it… bubble up? As I try to find words, I see her… ‘push’ at that bubble with much more force than before and the fire speeds up so much it vanishes, having spent all the oxygen inside the small bubble. She did such a complex cast in an instant, conjuring a bubble just the size of the flame and pushed the space inside like a madman pushing a boulder down a hill. I stopped planning how to kill Lunario and focused on the thing in front of me.
Of course I was failing to understand it thinking it was a ‘thing’, what I felt changing isn’t a thing with properties itself, but what gave properties to things. Time didn’t exist, it was a relation of everything with each other. I… ‘grabbed’ at that fundamental relation between the pendulum and everything else and felt like I was holding a boulder in a mountain’s ledge, where I could try to pull it up, but remembering the feeling I got from the professor’s tries and pushed it down the mountain. The analogy my brain was trying to develop to try to understand it started to crack, as while pushing was so much easier than pulling, as soon as I stopped pushing the boulder stopped. I had so much of a sensation that it… ‘wanted’ to keep going but it just couldn’t.
I continued to push, way too slow in the beginning, like trying to learn for the first time to do something with muscles so atrophied that nothing worked too well. I got going, finally getting in a bit of a rhythm, starting to feel that pressure I felt. But it was so much weaker. I knew I had such an enormous gap to cross if I wanted to get close to what the professor made when demonstrating to class, forget about getting close to the ridiculous speed when she was dealing with the fire. I kept pushing, testing the edges of my magic. After the 50 minutes pushing, the professor asked everyone to stop to see what we had accomplished. I was two notches out of seven ahead of the non speed-up pendulum. Meaning that even without a single spell the pendulum lost about 30% of its travel distance and mine with all my might made it lose only 50%, which apparently was enough for that old lady to congratulate me or something.
And I was exhausted in a way I never felt before. I still had to kill Lunario, right? For what reason was it, though? Well, I could just leave it for tomorrow, after a good bath.