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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 151, The Rayedhcraft School
🕑 Added 2022-11-29 02:09:45 +0000 UTC~~~~
A few days passed.
Mizuki was thankful that she wasn’t bound to secrecy anymore, and talked all about their adventure to anyone who would listen. They even had someone from one of the Dondrian newspapers come to visit them, which had resulted in an interview over tea. Mizuki normally didn’t read newspapers, but she’d gone out of her way to pick one up, and then ended up having to pick another one up when the story wasn’t in the first paper. The interview had felt like it had lasted a long time, and was reduced down to a single quote from Hannah, which was a disappointment.
She had cut out the paper and framed it anyway, just to have something to hang on the wall.
“I feel like it should be a bigger deal,” said Mizuki.
“It’s been a front page story multiple times,” said Alfric. “Everything with Cate is being reported on.”
“But I mean … us being there,” said Mizuki.
“It would be a bad thing if it were a big story,” said Hannah. “That would mean that someone was takin’ umbrage, which, I think I should remind you, isn’t somethin’ that anyone wants.”
“Also why did Hannah get the quote?” asked Mizuki. “I wanted the quote. Also, I kind of thought they’d print the whole thing.”
“You should read more newspapers,” said Alfric.
“Hannah got the quote because it was the best,” said Isra. “She’s a cleric, she’s trained. We never had a chance.”
“I wasn’t trained for that,” said Hannah. “But I was trained on talkin’ to people and gettin’ to the point, rather than meanderin’ through the finer details of a thing.”
“I thought ‘I got screamed at by a dragon’ would have been a great quote,” said Mizuki.
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” said Alfric. “There will be other news stories about our exploits, surely.”
“I’m somewhat hoping that we’re on an even keel after this,” said Verity.
But they settled in, and things were more or less the same as they’d been, which was a good way for things to be. The garden was mostly the same as it had been, slightly wild but nothing that an afternoon couldn’t fix, and with a bounty that quickly got integrated into lunches and dinners. Tabbins, Mizuki’s cat, seemed no worse for their absence, though Marsh had been by to feed him, and that was all that Tabbins seemed to care about. Nothing all that much had actually changed in Pucklechurch, save for the church having gotten two new clerics. One was a cleric of Oeyr, to replace Lin — whose name was more or less mud, his absence not appreciated — while the other was a replacement for Hannah. That was its own thing, which Mizuki didn’t find all that interesting.
She had bigger things on her plate. Her first day at the Rayedhcraft School of Wizardry was the day after temple day.
“Do I look good?” Mizuki asked Alfric. She had woken up early, so early that only Alfric was awake. She’d come into his room to get his opinion, but also because she was nervous about the whole thing.
“You always look good,” said Alfric. “And you’re going to do fine. Most of the first year is boring stuff, you said.”
“No, wait, go back,” said Mizuki. “Tell me again how good I look.” She smiled at him.
“Well, there was that time you dressed up in dungeon gear, and then you looked like you were about five years old,” said Alfric.
“You laugh,” said Mizuki. “But that’s exactly what I’m worried will happen here.”
She looked down at her robe. It was black with maroon stripes, stitched at the waist to give her a little bit of figure, and with deep pockets that weren’t filled with anything yet. She wore a black cap too, one which Verity had called a beret and Hannah had called a bonnet, but which Mizuki knew as a toronimi. She’d made sure that her hair was in place, put on just enough makeup to make her look good but not like she was trying to look good, and had looked at herself in the mirror more than was really necessary, making her feel like she was being vain rather than properly preparing for school. Verity had been her tailor, helping to take everything in and making sure that it wasn’t absolutely formless, as robes could sometimes be. There wasn’t a ‘uniform’ for wizards, nor for the school, but there were expectations about what a wizard would wear, and at Rayedhcraft those just starting out were quite heavily expected to wear black ‘trainer’ robes in order to show that they were serious about the whole thing.
Wizards were, to borrow Isra’s phrasing, social animals. They learned together, worked together, and often lived together. Wizards could copy each other’s designs, though not without some work, and their creations could work together if need be, though usually it was better for a single wizard to take on the bulk of the work.
Mizuki didn’t really want to be that kind of wizard. Partly that was because wizards were a bit dull, at least in her opinion. She hadn’t been around wizards all that much, just Josen and Kell, and while Kell wasn’t dull, the times when he talked about wizard stuff were interesting only because of his enthusiasm for it. Wizards mostly talked about math, though Kell had assured her that it wasn’t math math, it was more about taking account of the specifics of a construction, and tolerable so long as you could do basic sums. Besides that, wizards did share, so if you saw a complicated thing, all you needed was the power to create it for your own and the precision to not make any major mistakes.
Mizuki wasn’t sure about all that. She had mostly been interested in having a backup when the magic went ‘flat’, a replacement for sorcery or a way to empower sorcery.
She made herself a quick breakfast, plus enough for everyone else, thick yellow goat’s butter over some bread that Hannah had made, some cherry jam, hard-boiled eggs with salt and pepper, and a slab of pork. She left a brief note on a slate in the kitchen that if anyone wanted more than that, there was cheese in the chiller and some fruit on the counter. She almost left a recipe, but stopped short, lest she be late for her much-delayed start of school.
Transit was through a temporary measure, a parting gift from Ria to account for the disruption to Mizuki’s schedule, since their long-term solution was going to take a bit of effort, and it spared Mizuki from depending on Isra’s movement lutes.
Mizuki went out into the backyard, checked that she had her bag, and that it had everything she needed in it, took a deep breath, and exploded into stardust.
The actual trip, as stardust, felt like nothing, but Ria had demonstrated the entad, and it looked spectacular both coming and going. The body became tiny shimmering pieces of rock, which launched at screaming speeds and a loud bang, and then you were through the air, on a long arc through the sky that ended with you at your destination some ten to fifteen minutes later, reconstituted with no sensation of any time passing.
It was unfortunately much cooler from the outside than the inside. The landing was a rain of multicolored meteors that bounced harmlessly against the ground like a gentle hail, followed by all the various pieces slotting back into place. This, Mizuki got some sense of, like she was being unscrambled. It caused a bit of commotion in the center of the Rayedhcraft, but she gave a friendly wave, and it was still early enough that most of the students hadn’t shown up yet.
Mizuki was getting that butterfly feeling in her stomach, the kind that came with meeting a new guy, a feeling of possibility and wonder. She hadn’t had much luck with boys though, and while Hannah insisted that it really wasn’t a matter of ‘luck’, that was still how it felt to Mizuki. She tried not to think of Rayedhcraft as being someone she’d met who was giving her the keen eye, but if she squinted, that was exactly what it was. She wasn’t exactly a normal wizard-in-training, and a large part of the reason that she was going to Rayedhcraft at all was because they wanted a sorc.
Mizuki was early to her first class — an introductory one, which she’d missed the introduction for. She’d hoped to talk to the professor and explain herself, beyond what he’d have learned from Professor Arturo, who was Mizuki’s sponsor. The professor was late though, and Mizuki grew more nervous the more people filtered into the room. There were at least a hundred other students, all of them in their own robes, chattering with each other. That was a lot of people. The entirety of Pucklechurch’s school, all grades, wasn’t that much more than all the people crowded into the tiered seating. People were pulling out paper and pens, and Mizuki did that too, thankful that she could at least pretend that she knew what she was doing.
Professor Limpet came in only after the last of the students had trickled in, and immediately began writing on the giant blackboard. She did this with magic, though the actual mechanism wasn’t all that clear to Mizuki. The writing was done in the air, the chalk making exaggerated marks that were clearly visible from a distance.
Mizuki couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and dutifully wrote it down on her paper, checking the desks of those next to her.
When the lecture actually began, some five minutes later, Mizuki was even more lost.
“Control development is one of the fundamental aspects of applied wizardry and the key way in which a wizard can distinguish himself,” she said, pointing at the blackboard. There seemed to be quite a bit of shorthand, and ‘CD’ in large letters had arrows leading off of it. “A wizard is not doomed to failure without CD, but those without it are pushed into small corners of the profession. With that said, time and effort are finite, and at a certain point a wizard with impeccable focus on CD will be left leaning on others like a crutch. While it’s commonly posited that CD is the primary gate to wizardry as a profession, it is equally true that there are other, less obvious and less severe gates. Likewise, CD can be divided into ‘natural’ and ‘learned’, and the relative success of some notable wizards who didn’t have the aptitude is proof that aptitude alone does not make a wizard — something which sets it apart from other practices which wizardry is often compared to.”
Mizuki felt like the professor was looking at her, if only for a moment. It might have been meaningful, if Mizuki knew what the lecture was even about.
It did make more sense as time went on, but when the three hours were up, Mizuki mostly felt hungry. The lecture was on wizardry as a profession, seen as being an interlocking set of skills, practices, and systems, but some of it Mizuki didn’t understand, and other parts of it just felt like more complicated restatement of things that she already knew. There was a bit of history mixed in with the more dry things, which did the bare minimum to make the whole thing more palatable.
“Sorry,” Mizuki said to the boy next to her once they were done. “Is that about how it normally goes?”
“Just about,” he said. “Usually Limpet has all the stuff up on the board when we come in, even if she's late.” He paused. “Are you … new?”
“Yup!” said Mizuki. “I was supposed to start at the normal time, but I’m a week behind now, playing catch up.”
“It’s a long-haul profession,” the boy nodded. “A week or two will make almost no difference at all.” He looked at her. “Why were you starting late?”
“Oh,” said Mizuki. “It’s a long story. But if you have notes and other stuff, I do need someone to help catch me up?” she gave him a hopeful look.
“Sure,” he replied. “It’s lunch, do you have lunch plans?”
“I was going to check out the cafeteria, yeah,” said Mizuki. “I’ve heard it’s good. Lots of seafood?”
The boy nodded, and since Mizuki didn’t actually know where the cafeteria was, she followed after him.
His name was Landro, and he was Chelxican — not just by ethnicity, but from the province that had once been the Kingdom of Chelxic, now part of Inter’s northeastern coast. He had an accent, more than Mizuki was used to, and light brown skin. There weren’t a lot of Chelxic people in Greater Plenarch, mostly owing to how people had settled, but according to Landro, a school like Rayedhcraft was always a place to meet people from all over.
“One of the professors is from a floating island on the opposite side of the world,” said Landro. “Really, there are people from all over, at least that I’ve seen so far.”
“Why here?” asked Mizuki. “Why not Dondrian?”
“Depends on the person,” said Landro. “There’s more room to breathe in Plenarch, I guess.”
“And … can you give me the short version of what you learned in the last week?” asked Mizuki.
“I can try,” said Landro. They were eating shrimp with pasta, which was apparently what had been prepared in quantity that day. The shrimp were enormous, and they’d only gotten one each, but that was proving to be plenty. Vegetables were served off to the side, lightly and quickly pickled. “Most of Limpet’s class has been like that, everything very high level, very basic, hours spent on describing what being a wizard is like without actually getting into any magic at all. She’s been walking us through these diagrams and explanations pretty slowly. There hasn’t been anything practical, and but it’s been good from a career perspective, I guess.”
Mizuki frowned at that. It definitely wasn’t what she wanted out of the school.
“After this, if you’ve got the same schedule as I do, which you probably do, there will be drawing practice,” said Landro.
Mizuki nodded. She was relieved that they would at least be together, so she’d know someone, but the more she looked at Landro, the more she wondered how old he was. Mizuki was pretty old to be starting school to become a wizard: Kell was younger than her and already accomplished, and Josen was a reasonably proficient dungeoneer while being four years below her. With Landro it was hard to tell his age. He was short, without a beard, and had a wide nose. She was guessing that he was sixteen, which was also a little old to be starting, but not quite someone she’d be comfortable calling a child. The youngest the Rayedhcraft admitted were twelve, and Mizuki was thankful that she hadn’t seen many students who were visibly that age.
“You’ll be given a mana stone and then, I guess, spend three hours trying to draw from it,” said Landro. He shrugged. “No one has been able to do it yet, and won’t for the next two months, at least from what Professor Marks says.” He leaned forward. “They’re trying to be nice about it, but we’re not real wizards yet. More than a half of the class will drop out when they find they don’t have the aptitude.”
“That was mostly what the class was about, right?” asked Mizuki. “Aptitude?”
“Um,” said Landro. “Not really? It was more about, uh, all the things that make up practical wizardry, the ways that wizards separate themselves out into useful functions and interact with each other, I guess. Limpet is doing a drill-down approach, she’s said, where she’s giving the overview first and then diving into specific pieces at the same level of understanding as for the higher levels. But it’s a very wizardly way of doing it.”
“It is?” asked Mizuki. She frowned. “How so?”
“Wizards think in terms of pieces,” said Landro. “At least, that’s what Limpet said. You get an understanding of a specific part of a thing, work on its internals, then it gets, uh, ‘abstracted’ so you stop worrying about what it looks like from the outside and start worrying about what it looks like from the outside. You think about a blacksmith, right, and all the processes that go on, heating the metal in the forge, hammering it in place, whatever. A wizard planning out how a blacksmith shop works would probably start by thinking about inputs and output — high-powered heating elemetal, the ingots, water, stuff like that. And then each individual step, they’d think about by itself, taking everything around it as a given. The blacksmith isn’t thinking about the miner, right? And he’s not thinking about the person who’ll eventually be using the hammer.”
“Okay,” Mizuki said slowly. “I mean, I’ve known a few blacksmiths, and they do think about the materials they’re getting, and they think about what their stuff will be put toward.”
“Sure,” said Landro. “It was a long lecture. There was a lot about when it’s okay to treat things like their source and destination don’t matter, and what happens when things that shouldn’t matter do. I got the sense that it was one of those subjects that we’re going to spend a full week on later.”
“Hmm,” said Mizuki. She wasn’t sure that she liked that. It felt so unbearably slow. But being a wizard was about being slow, at least in the beginning.
“Can I ask … aren’t you kind of old to just be starting?” asked Landro.
Mizuki stared at him. “Old?” she asked. “I mean — how old do you think I am?”
Landro looked as though he thought this might be a trap. “Thirty?” he asked.
“I’m twenty-two,” said Mizuki. It was maybe the first time in her life that she’d ever been mistaken for being older than she was.
“That’s still pretty old though,” said Landro.
Mizuki shrugged. The question was making her feel bad. She did want to be a wizard, even without Kell around to help her out and encourage it, but she was out of place at Rayedhcraft, at least among the wizards who would wash out before the third moon had made its orbit.
“Hey, I didn’t mean — it’s just weird, that’s all,” said Landro.
“It’s not really that weird,” said Mizuki. “And it doesn’t help to say that it’s weird.”
“Most likely neither of us are going to make it,” said Landro. “I’m here for six months unless I have the aptitude. Right? I mean, would you stick around if you had no magical talent?”
“I guess not,” said Mizuki. She wasn’t sure whether she should mention that she was a sorcerer.
“I do think it’s neat to go to school late in life,” said Landro. “My mom always felt like she was too old learn a new skill, but she wasn’t very happy being a wortier.”
Oof. If there was one thing he could have said that would make her feel even older and more out of place, it was a comparison to his mother. “I think I’m going to do more or less the same thing I was doing, actually,” said Mizuki. “Just … with more magic.”
“Oh?” he asked. “And … what do you do?”
“I’m a dungeoneer,” said Mizuki with a beaming smile. She was waiting for him to say ‘You?’, and ready to pounce on that if need be.
“Wow,” he said. He drew back a bit. “That’s so cool.”
“It really is,” said Mizuki. “I’m doing this, and also part of a dungeoneering party.” She wasn’t sure when the next dungeon would be, but they were all still together, and there were new possibilities on the horizon — which was sure something, for one of the world’s oldest professions.
“Don’t they, you know, wander?” asked Landro. He was giving her a very gratifying look, like he was actually impressed with her. If she was going to be seen as a mom, then at least she’d be a cool mom.
“We have entad travel,” said Mizuki. “We’ve gotten a lot from the dungeons we’ve done. And if I can add wizardry to my repertoire, all the better.” She said ‘repertoire’ like Verity did, a little bit of Dondrian accent seeping in, since it seemed like a very Verity sort of word.
“That’s so cool,” Landro repeated.
She was waiting for him to ask what her role in the dungeons was, because she was obviously not a frontline fighter, and then it occurred to her that this was, as described, a wizardly way of looking at things, slotting people into particular roles and duties and overall trying to divide things up. With sorcery, Mizuki’s role changed a lot depending on what the dungeon had available and whether she was able to go all-out or was just fighting for every scrap of magic that the others were casting off.
“My friends and I did a dungeon before I came here,” said Landro. “Sort of a going away thing? It was awful really, we hated it. I got an entad, but it doesn’t do much, just a piece of paper that folds and unfolds itself into shapes. Not worth it at all for just a trinket. We’d thought that it would be easy, that dungeoneering was the simple life, like farming, but it turns out that it’s actually horrible.” He smiled at her. “So I have a lot of respect for people who make it their job.”
“Er, farming is also a lot of difficult work that takes a load of expert knowledge,” said Mizuki. She’d spent a good portion of her time on various farms, playing with the farm kids, and especially the Pedder’s pig farm. “I think most professions are probably like that, once you get to know them. I’ve got no idea what most people actually do with their day, but there’s probably more to it.” She paused for a minute. “And I guess wizards are like that too, where you can describe them in a sentence or two, but each word in that sentence can be its own sentence, and you really do need a full course from a professor just to go over the basics.”
They talked some more, both about the course and some about Landro’s home city, and then a bell chimed, which made the dining hall start to empty itself.
Their lecture had been in a large room with tiered seating and a huge blackboard in front of it, but the second half of the day was in a large open room — it reminded Mizuki of a ballroom — which had pillows and mats laid out in a loose grid. People sat either on small seats with no backs or cross-legged on the pillows, and each of them had a small rock, semi-translucent, black with a bluish tint to it.
Landro found his own spot, and Mizuki just stood for a moment, feeling awkward and unsure. She didn’t have a rock. People seemed to have pulled theirs from either their bags or from a cubby, and they were already getting to work, which seemed to mostly consist of placing a hand on their rock and then staring at it intently.
A gray-haired man came up to her after not too long though, Professor Hollingsworth, with gray robes that draped across the floor.
“You must be Mizuki,” he said, taking her hand. His other hand had a letter in it, and when their handshake was done, he brought it up. “You were delayed due to …” He was obviously reading the letter for the first time, and trailed off, a frown deepening on his face. “That … is quite something.”
“Yeah,” said Mizuki. She shrugged.
“Well,” he said, smiling once again. “The first third of the class is independent, so I can take that time to get you up to speed, if you’d like. Otherwise, the second third will be guided practice, done as a group, and you’ll learn the various meditations and methods then. The final third involves the teachers going around to help with specific questions and look at matters of technique, but at this stage there will be nothing to critique, especially for you, so you can knock off early, if you’d like. Strictly speaking, these three hours of the day aren't mandatory, and you’re expected to practice on your own outside of this structured time.”
“Alright,” said Mizuki. “I’m … not really sure what it is I’m supposed to be doing here, or what the practice is.”
“It’s simple in theory,” said Hollingsworth. “You will bond to a specific mana stone with a drop of your blood, then touch or hold it and attempt to coerce some of its natural energy to do something. The stones are small, twenty pounds, not enough that you could seriously injure yourself, but for most, it’s at least two months before you can do anything at all.”
“This is, uh, control development?” asked Mizuki.
“Mmm, no,” said Hollingsworth. “It’s a question of terminology, but this is a precursor to control development. I won’t give you the whole talk, you’re an older student, I’m sure you’ve had to overcome adversity in your life, but the first step into wizardry is quite challenging, both mentally and emotionally. You’re expected to spend time with your stone every day, running through the exercises, and at least the first month of that, you’ll see absolutely nothing in the way of results. You’ll ‘brush’ the mana, and it will work one time out of a thousand, and you’ll feel as though you’re getting no better at a positive result, always one time out of a thousand even after you know what it feels like, what you’re looking for. The knowledge that some people simply don’t have the aptitude will weigh on you, and you might think that the reason for what feels like failure is that you’re simply incapable. It will be almost a comfort to say to yourself ‘this is too hard, my failures are too frequent, and I will never get it’. You’ll want to give up. It will be exceptionally boring, grueling, and seemingly unfair. But this is the path to wizardry, and every wizard you see has walked it.”
“Huh,” said Mizuki. “That’s the short version?” She smiled, and was relieved to see him smile back. “It’s a test of patience, right, listening to you go on like that? You have people wash out because they don’t want to sit through two hours of you going on like that?”
He genuinely did seem to find it funny, and was laughing hard enough that she felt the need to keep going, but then he started to cough, and she relented, worried that maybe he was older than he looked. She’d never seen someone get hurt laughing, but she’d heard that it could happen.
“Now then,” Professor Hollingsworth said once he’d calmed down. “We start with some simple exercises. There are twenty of them, all different, but all looking for similar things, at least at this stage.” He handed her a stone, which seemed to be conjured from nowhere. Mizuki took it, and was surprised by just how heavy it was, at least thirty pounds. She set it on the ground, like she’d seen the others do. “The first things to do is to feed it a drop of your blood, which will give it some sympathy to you.” He pulled a tiny knife with a cap from his pocket and handed it to Mizuki. The wooden handle was thick, but once its stubby sheath was removed, the blade was miniscule, only big enough to poke through the skin and draw blood, nothing more.
When Mizuki went to prick her finger, Hollinsworth’s eyes grew wide and he rushed to stop her. “No, dear, sorry, that’s my fault, there’s a technique to it. You find a finger that’s least important, usually the ring finger, and go in from the side rather than the pad of the fingertip itself. There are bandages, if you need one after, though with a knife like that, it should be small enough.”
“Do we do this every time?” asked Mizuki.
“No,” said Hollingsworth, shaking his head. “Just once, per stone, and with a certain understanding and skill you won’t need that. It’s — ah, not incredibly important, not unless you have some desire to understand the fundamental truths of wizardry.”
“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I just want to throw fireballs.”
He laughed again, and Mizuki was left feeling a little awkward while she waited for him to finish.
Mizuki pricked herself on the side of her ring finger, squeezing the wound to produce a single drop which landed on the mana stone. It sizzled a bit, and the red blood sank straight into the blue stone, making a small purple splotch.
The actual exercises took some explaining, and most of them were so simple that Mizuki almost wondered whether it was a trick.
“Hold one hand on the stone, and with the other, pass your hand over it in a sweeping motion,” said Hollingsworth. “This is the ‘brush’, and for a long time, it was the only exercise that wizards practiced. Over time, we’ve added more, though mostly for the sake of variety.”
Mizuki did as instructed. She could see the way that stone affected the aether, a slight emanation that was leaking out into the world, the same that was coming from every single one of the dozens of stones around the class. She could equally see that her hand passing through that emanation did absolutely nothing. The emanation didn’t change, and she felt nothing with her hand.
“Nothing?” Hollingsworth asked.
“No,” said Mizuki. “But … that’s expected, right?”
“Right,” said Hollingsworth. He smiled at her. “Usually on the first day I have the class do this all at the same time, and I watch as they come to terms with the fact that exactly nothing has happened. Every now and then someone gets it on their first try, but then it might be another few days before they feel it again.” He gestured to the room. “Day in, day out, they’ll be going through the exercises, feeling for the disruption to the invisible energies. Once you can do it reliably, which will take at least a month if you do have the aptitude, then we’ll get you some glasses so you can see it, and following that, you’ll get started on shaping the mana, accessing it remotely, no longer using your hands.”
“I can actually see it already,” said Mizuki, looking down at the stone. “I don’t know if the letter mentioned it, but I’m a sorcerer.” She’d stopped herself from saying ‘sorc’ at the last moment.
Hollingsworth’s entire demeanor changed, his jovial nature peeled off. “Fascinating. Is that why Professor Arturo is advocating for you? I had wondered, he normally doesn’t concern himself with the incoming students, not until they’ve had their proving, and usually not for years after that.” He looked Mizuki over. “You look so much the part of a wizard I would never have guessed. And … you can see? Without the glass?”
“Yes,” said Mizuki. She felt a bit uncomfortable.
“We don’t normally give people the glass until they can affect the mana with some reliability,” said Hollingsworth. “It’ll be quite interesting to know whether it hampers you, being able to see it. You’ll have to let me know. Now if you’ll excuse me, I can see my assistant needs some help. We’ll begin the group portion soon, and I’ll go over the individual exercises at that time.”
Mizuki sat down with her rock. She’d had a fantasy for quite some time now that she would just get it, right from the start, that she would be one of those rare and lucky few for whom the rocks responded right away. After all, she was a shaper of the aether already, and could see whether others could not, and it wouldn’t have been crazy.
Instead, Mizuki spent the next three hours with the stupid rock, doing the stupid exercises, and feeling nothing. Being able to actually see the emanations felt awful, because she could watch as her hand passed right through them, doing nothing. It would have been easy to affect them through sorcery, but she was certain that wasn’t what was desired here. She thought she felt movement only once, but she didn’t see movement, and it was definitely possible that her brain was playing tricks on her.
During the group section of the class, they all did things together, with Hollingsworth giving instruction so they could all follow along with him and get the finer points of the techniques down, not that it seemed to matter all that much. Mizuki’s favorite one was the one where they leaned in close and screamed at their rock, but most of them involved hands in one way or another, patting the rock, clawing through the air above the rock, and the classic brush.
At the end of the three hours, Mizuki felt as though she had learned absolutely nothing and entirely wasted her time, and also as though she was perhaps not cut out to be a wizard.
“How’d it go?” asked Landro.
“Fine,” said Mizuki. “I … didn’t get much, I don’t think.”
“Same,” he said with a shrug. “That’s the path, I guess.”
“Have you ever felt it?” asked Mizuki.
“Once,” said Landro. “I don’t know what I did right though, and it didn’t help me to do it again. It was good though. It let me know what to watch for, and it was proof that there wasn’t something wrong with me, or wrong with the rock.”
“So we just struggle?” asked Mizuki. “We beat our heads against the wall until something gives?”
“I guess,” shrugged Landro. “I’m sure if there was a better way, they’d tell us to use it. You’ll get it though.”
“Thanks,” said Mizuki. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Do you have plans?” asked Landro.
“I’m going back to Pucklechurch,” said Mizuki. “And we’ve got stuff to do there.”
“Ah,” said Landro. “Then yeah, tomorrow.”
Mizuki burst into stardust as soon as she was out of the hall, and took a great sigh of relief once she was in the backyard once more. It had been six hours, seven including the time she’d spent standing around and lunch, and she was feeling drained. Wizardry was one of those things that was worth it in the end, not one of those things where you got a pretty big benefit up-front. Woodworking, by contrast, at least from what she knew through Alfric, paid off pretty much right away, each individual skill letting you immediately do more things, and the smallest bit of woodworking could still help you to fix things or make a cutting board or something.
Mizuki went in through the back doors, dropped her bag onto the ground — she’d brought her rock home with her, to practice, though she wasn’t sure she was going to. The house was dark and quiet, and the party channel had been pretty dead all day.
<I’m home, where is everyone?> Mizuki asked.
<Dining room,> said Alfric.
When Mizuki went through the door, she was greeted by cheers and party horns. All four of them were around the table, along with a special guest: Alfric’s dog Emperor, who’d been dyed purple for the occasion.
“Congratulations on your first day!” said Alfric.
“I made a cake,” said Hannah. It was very obviously the only thing on the table, but she pointed at it anyway. “Chocolate, from Dondrian, mixed into the batter and the frosting, then put some shavings on top.”
“This is the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me,” said Mizuki. She almost felt like crying.
“It was Alfric’s idea,” said Isra.
“Of course it was,” said Mizuki.
“I wrote a song for you,” said Verity. “A going-to-wizard-school song. But we can wait on that. I’m afraid it turned out a bit … ribald.”
“I’ll have some cake, and then I’d love to hear it,” said Mizuki. She took a seat, and felt the tension melt out of her.
“Can you tell us how it went?” asked Alfric as Hannah cut into the moist cake and began putting slices onto plates — six plates, Mizuki noted, which included one for Emperor, since the dog was magical and could eat anything. The dog was staring at the cake with the focus of a hunter who had a doe in his sights.
Mizuki thought about Alfric’s question, and what she knew of wizardry so far. There was a lot to learn, and an arduous road ahead, but she had friends at home, and it was good to know she had their support. She’d lost sight of that after three hours with her stupid rock.
“I think I can handle it,” said Mizuki. “It’s not playing to my strengths, but … I’m going to be a wizard.”
Comments
fbt
very nice chapter, ty!
L
Yer a wizard, 'izuki.
