78 – Enchantment

Early morning. Alexandra was hopping on her right foot with a pastry in each hand.

Fucking quest.

She made it to the west wing, saw the door to her classroom, and kept hopping by the door. The Iron ranks filing in turned their heads as they walked, watching her.

Two hundred more.

Flakes of crust were breaking off the pastries with each landing. She’d grabbed them from the dining hall to make it through the class.

The professor arrived soon after. Red robes, red hair. Ruby rank.

She stopped at the threshold and looked at her. Alexandra almost lost balance when she saw her.

“Do you need time?” the professor asked.

“Almost done.”

“Hmm.”

She entered the classroom. Alexandra hopped twelve times more before following her in.

The room was built like an amphitheater, tiered rows curving up until the students at the back were almost level with the ceiling beams. It hosted at least a hundred students, who were all looking at her.

She made herself small and found an empty seat on the far-left side of the first row.

Alexandra put her pastries on the desk and summoned her journal.

Hop on one foot three thousand times without stopping (3000/3000) -> Quest Completed: +10 exp, +1 DEX

Daily Quest Streak: 25 -> 26

The professor set her satchel on the desk, and the room went quiet on its own.

“Good morning.” She looked up. “I’m Bird.”

Her eyes passed over the room and stopped on Alexandra for just a moment. Then moved on.

“Enchantment. Who can tell me what it is?”

Hands went up. Bird didn’t call anyone out.

“It’s the imposition of your will onto an object or a space.” She moved to the board. Wrote one word. Consent. “And that is where most of you will fail.”

She turned around.

“Enchantments are not curses. You are not subverting your target’s mana. You are entering a negotiation.” A pause. “This course is taught to all Iron ranks to weed out those who cannot go into it with the right mindset.”

She reached into her satchel and set a plain wooden disk on the desk.

“By the end of this term, you will make this object want something.” She looked at the room. “Want something. Not do something. Those are not the same.”

Alexandra took a bite of her pastry.

A few hands were raised.

“I will be taking questions later.” She grabbed the wooden disk from the desk. “I know what you want to ask. How can we negotiate with an inanimate object? With a space?”

The classroom was completely silent.

Bird did something, and the disk started gently spinning. She let it go. It hovered in the air in front of her.

“The answer is mana,” she said. “It’s always mana. Ambient mana, to be exact.”

Alexandra nodded. This was in line with what Sera had taught her.

“Most people would say that enchantments use ambient mana as a fuel. This explanation is good enough for laymen, but it’s far from accurate.” Bird turned to the board again and drew a circle. “This is the disk.” She looked back. “How does ambient mana flow through it?”

Nobody answered.

“It’s simple,” Bird said. She drew arrows along the circle’s edge, all moving in the same direction. “Ambient mana flows. That’s the first thing to understand. It isn’t static.”

“When a spell is applied to an object, the caster overrides that flow with their own mana.” She drew a straight line through the center of the circle. “You’ve all done this.”

A few heads nodded.

“Enchantment is different.” She erased the line. “You are not overriding. You are redirecting. You find where the mana wants to go, and you give it a better destination. A purpose.”

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She picked up the disk from where it still hovered. Set it flat on her palm.

“The disk wants nothing. It’s wood. But the mana moving through it has properties. Tendencies. I will teach you how to read them and how to affect them.” She paused. “That is the negotiation. Not with the object. With the mana itself.”

The room was silent. Everyone was taking notes.

Alexandra had stopped eating.

“Forcing ambient mana produces unstable enchantments,” Bird continued. “They hold, sometimes for years, but they will break. The mana remembers what it was doing before you interrupted it. It was doing it for a reason.” She set the disk back down on the desk. “A true enchantment makes it so the mana never knows anything changed.”

She paused.

“This is why it takes so long to form a competent enchanter,” she said. “It takes time to learn to read mana well enough to negotiate with it.”

Alexandra thought about Willow.

She’d always assumed enchantments were boring versions of magic. Precise formulas, equations, closer to engineering than wonder.

But that was elegant. That was actually elegant.

Bird moved back to the board. She drew the circle again, this time with the arrows flowing in two separate currents.

“Different materials carry different mana flows. Wood, metal, stone, each have their own patterns. The environment also plays a role, even more so for enchanted spaces.” She looked at the class. “Today you will learn one of them.”

She held up the disk.

“Wood. Chestnut wood. It’s the best material to get started. The flow is simple, without being trivial.”

Bird opened her satchel, and a disk floated out. Then another. Then another, until she’d produced more than a hundred.

She let them go. They spread across the room in a slow wave, dropping onto each desk with a soft knock. Alexandra caught hers before it landed.

Same wood. Same size. Unenchanted, as far as she could tell.