“Metrology,” Willow asked as Mary wove a spell-form in the air, whispering the concept under her breath. The spell manifested as a shining green star, hardly larger than the head of a pin.

“Metrology assistance requested in room fifteen,” she intoned, then broke the spell-form. The star moved quickly away, disappearing as it passed through the thick wooden door as if it were nothing. Of course, Willow realized, nurses would have some way to communicate to each other through the vast hospital building.

They sat awkwardly across the table from each other. Willow kept looking at the device, then searching the instructions upside-down as if she could find something that might explain what had happened.

“Should we… continue with the rest of the examination,” Willow asked as Mary began to tap her foot.

“Honestly? I have no idea. The next part is asking you to demonstrate magic, but I’m afraid of messing up this measurement if we have you do any magic.”

“Right,” Willow said, and at that moment a knock came at the wooden door.

“Enter,” Mary called out, and the door swung open to reveal a young man who couldn’t have been much older than Willow. He was dressed in a loose-fitting shirt and pants cinched with a thin leather belt at the waist. He had some kind of device in his hands—flat and almost crystalline.

“You requested metrology assistance,” the young man said, and Mary waved him in. He quickly crossed the room and placed the device, which looked like a small plate, beside the obsidian crystal and began tapping on the surface.

“You look harried,” Mary said with the hint of a smile in her voice.

“Been running around all morning. No one knows how to use the new devices, they keep getting errors.”

“Well, same here,” Mary said. “Sorry to inconvenience you.”

He waved the apology off. “I’m getting paid, aren’t I? Came back early from break, I suppose I should have expected to do some work.”

“Do you specialize in… metrology,” Willow asked, and the young man nodded.

“You don’t want to be a mage?”

“Oh, you’re a mage if you graduate no matter what you specialize in, but if what you’re talking about is throwing fire and raising the earth, then no. I’m much more comfortable with inscribing and metrology, thank you very much. Leave that other stuff to the daredevils.”

His face relaxed and he let out a short laugh. “Happy day; it saved your essence. That means you won’t have to come back tomorrow to repeat the test. You don’t know how many times I’ve been yelled at for making people come back.”

“Alright,” he said, then gestured at Willow’s hand. “I’ll do the test this time, your nurse will take over once we don’t need the device anymore. Put your…”

He was staring at her hand—no, at her wrist. Willow shrugged and her shirtsleeve fell down another inch to cover her skeletal arm.

“I um…,” he seemed to have lost his train of thought. “Sorry. What I meant to say was: put your hand back on the device and we’ll restart the test.”

Willow placed her hand without comment. She supposed she’d have to get used to people gawking, but she wasn’t used to it yet.

“Alright,” he said, and tapped on the small plate instead of the device. “Here it goes. You’ll feel a bit strange when it injects your essence.”

And again, she felt it. The pressure against her palm, the almost imperceptible trickle of her own essence back into her body. His eyebrows drew together in confusion.

“Huh, resistance is super high. This must have been what happened earlier, the device just crapped out. I’ll increase it.”

“What does that—,” Willow asked, but where before there had been a gentle push against her palm, now it felt as though she were balancing the haft of a spear on her hand. Her face twisted in discomfort and she grunted.

“Different people have different amounts of resistance,” he said, and shook his head. “But this is like pushing essence into a rock. You don’t have anything on your hand?”

“No,” Willow said.

“Glove or metal of any kind? Did you put any kind of balm on before coming in?”

“Want to check,” Willow snapped, and the assistant startled.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Um, no. I don’t think I need to,” he said, and tapped the plate again. This time when the pressure increased, it was like trying to hold back a dam with just her hand. But she did feel the essence slowly work its way back into her body, rejoining the flowing mass.

“Ah, we’ve got flow,” he said, and then they waited. For an incredibly uncomfortable amount of time. Willow held onto the device with all her newfound strength, willing herself not to let go and mess the test up. If this was what it took to get her into the Arcanum, then she’d do it.

Suddenly the pressure cut off all at once and she gasped in relief. Mary looked from Willow to the young man, but he looked anything but relieved.

“And,” Mary asked, her pen poised above the sheet she’d been tracking Willow’s measurements on.

He gritted his teeth. “You messed up the test. You shouldn’t have done the spell demonstration while you were waiting for me.”

“Spell demonstration? We didn’t do the spell demonstration,” Mary said, and looked at Willow. Willow felt like she’d been wrung out and her right arm ached something fierce from all the essence that had been pumped back into it.

“You did. Or what, did you think you’d get some practice in before the demo,” he turned to look at Willow.

“I did no such thing,” Willow said, and disengaged her fingers from the crystal. They came away tacky with sweat and her new joints creaked.

“Well you did something, because I’m getting zero here and the only way that happens is if you do magic before the test. If you’re not topped all the way up before we begin.”

“I assure you, I haven’t done any magic this morning,” Willow said between clenched teeth, but he waved her off and turned to Mary.

“Record ‘undetermined’ for the regeneration rate. Keep the volume calculation blank, we’ll have to retest sometime in the future.”

“Retest,” Willow said, not quite believing what she was hearing. “What does that mean? Do I not get into the Arcanum until you retest?”

“What? No, we just have to retest later for your specific measurements. You should still be given admittance assuming you’re able to produce a spell, which, obviously, you are able to do.”

From the way Willow’s arm thrummed from the passage of her own essence, she wasn’t sure.

“Fine.”

“Alright, well,” he said, and got up from the table, his little circular crystal plate in hand. He glanced down at the surface, then moved his finger across the glass in a few downward strokes.

“Have to reset the push force,” he said, and looked uneasy for a moment. As he turned to leave, she could just hear him mutter “—super high.”

It was just Willow and Mary in the room then, and Mary cleared her throat, as if to dispel the ghost of the young metrologist’s passing.

“Well, he was a bit of an asshole, wasn’t he,” she said, and the unexpected brashness of the statement made Willow laugh. Mary joined in, and Willow found that once she’d dried her eyes, she did feel much better.

“It’s almost over,” Mary said, looking at her sheet. “Just the spell demonstration. There are a few different effects you can elect to produce—”

“They’re limited,” Willow blurted out, anxiety twisting her stomach again, and Mary looked up.

“It’s quite a long list,” she said, and returned to the sheet. “Psychokinesis, fireball, condense water, incorporealize, magelight—”

“Magelight,” Willow said, and Mary took the interruption in stride. She made a mark on the sheet, then leaned back in her chair.

“Alright, whenever you’re ready.”

Willow let out a long breath. She could still feel the extra essence thrumming in her arm, making her hand twitch and jump every few seconds, although the pressure from it was lessening as time went on. She targeted the essence mentally, visualizing it as an arm the shape of her own but blown up to twice its size, and moved her hands in the spell-form.

“Blazing light,” she said, and felt the extra essence transform within her own body. It seemed to take on the concept much easier than normal, and she wondered for a moment if storing and then injecting herself with essence might help her become more effective at casting.

“Blazing light,” she said a second time, and the essence flowed outwards through her fingertips into her cupped hands. It was flowing freer too, as if it wasn’t subject to the same sluggishness her essence normally behaved with. This could really be the answer.

“Blazing light,” she said with confidence, and the essence condensed within her hands to a pinprick of shining light brighter than any she’d ever made before. She smiled, beholding this most successful spell.

“Alright, now the steadfast layer,” Mary said, and Willow jerked her gaze up.

“What?”

Just like that, the small spell evaporated, boiling off into the ether. She tried to assert control over it but the injected essence slipped through her fingers. It was much less bound to her will than her normal essence was, which made it useless for spellcasting.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I just meant that you need the steadfast layer to complete the magelight spell. Don’t worry, you can try again.”

Willow let out a sigh of despair. “No,” she said, barely able to keep herself from crying at her own failure.

She’d only ever mastered the first half of the most introductory spell in the book.