20 – The Primordials

Ari didn’t manage to catch up to Lyra because the other girl was moving too quickly.

The next class for the day was Intro to Magical Creatures with Professor Alaric Woden, and it was at a different building, a brick annex behind the greenhouse.

They had to cut across the courtyard to get there, and while they did, Arielle called Lyra’s name several times until Lyra finally yelled back, “I’m fine!” before she dashed away.

Arielle stopped walking.

She was fine?

She hadn’t seemed fine back in the classroom. She had been crying. Or maybe Ari had misread the situation. Maybe she just had something in her eyes.

But then why was she running? What was she in such a hurry for?

Also, now that she thought about it, Celie sometimes lied about being fine. She would say she was fine, and Ari would believe her, only for her to admit a few minutes later that she was still angry.

Was Lyra mad at her? Why?

She hadn’t even said anything to her this time. All she’d done was smile.

How did that earn her ire?

Or was she generally upset for not getting the spell correctly? Ari could understand the feeling. She could help Lyra too, if Lyra would only slow down.

There were still a few minutes left for the next class to start, and Ari had wanted to spend that time checking if the book Elric sent had arrived, but now she wanted to get to the bottom of whatever was bothering her roommate. Should she catch up to her and clarify what ‘I’m fine’ means?

Or was it better to give her space?

Celie had wanted space sometimes, and during that time, Ari was not supposed to talk to her. Was that a similar scenario here? Or did Ari need to apologize?

She worried her bottom lip and thought about what to do, as the other students streamed past her.

But then a boy passing by told her, “If you don’t get there on time, Woden is going to have you clean the greenhouse for a week.”

It didn’t sound like a bad punishment, but perhaps it was worse than it sounded. Either way, she didn’t want to make the wrong impression on her first day.

Ari was one of the last people to make it to the class. This classroom was a lot smaller than the one in the Luxarium, with a more traditional setup, including a blackboard.

A low wall combined with a glass panel separated the room from the greenhouse, and plants decorated every corner, with a crawling vine accenting the brick walls.

The professor was a diminutive man, with black, silky hair braided hastily down his back and glasses that looked more like goggles and made his eyes huger than they were.

Instead of a robe, he wore an apron and had his shirt pulled up to reveal an inked symbol on his forearm, similar to what Giovanni had had.

His goggled-eyes zeroed in on Arielle as she arrived, and she felt like she was looking at two blue fish in a bowl.

“Ah,” he greeted. “You are the new young genius who has joined us.”

“Yes,” Ari said.

“Lovely. It’s refreshing that you don’t feign humility. Have a seat in the front for now.”

Ari typically liked seats in the middle of the room, because of the symmetry, but she didn’t want to defy the professor on their first day.

She took the seat closest to the door, waiting for everything to settle.

“Okay, class,” Professor Woden said as he clapped. “Last session, I asked you to pick your groups for the end-of-term project, and I approved them last night. Today, we’re going to be picking our topics. So, let’s get into the groups first. [Vivus].”

With a wave of the hand, something utterly amazing happened.

The legs of the desks and chairs around her began to bend and flex, stretching as though they were alive. Then the furniture galloped like tiny little horses, arranging themselves in circles, while the students held on, some of them cursing and some of them giggling.

Disappointingly, Ari’s seat did not move. The magic that had been woven around the classroom hadn’t reached her for whatever reason, but she barely noticed as she focused on the essences.

Ari studied the glyphs, the vitae floating in a spiral around a vertical line, combined with calor-linked chains and Luxa double-bonded particles. A Massa circle surrounded it to set the boundary.

It was a fairly complicated-looking spell, but that only made Ari more excited to study it. She wondered what the equation was. She counted the essences and wondered if she could work the spell script backwards to figure it out. Most likely.

“Arielle?”

Her head snapped over to the professor, who was staring at her as though waiting for an answer.

“Did you hear what I said?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I said you can join any group you want,” he said. “The groups are an even number, so whichever group you pick will just have to have one extra person.”

“Oh.” The seats had stopped moving now, and five groups had formed circles behind her. She glanced from group to group, wondering who to pick.

Instinctively, she wanted to pick Lyra’s group, but when she looked over there, Lyra looked away. She also gave her a subtle head shake, which likely meant that she didn’t want to be chosen.

If Ari was reading correctly, Lyra wanted to be left alone for now.

Maybe Lyra didn’t want to be her friend at all. Maybe Ari should branch out and search for other people she might have an easier companionship with.

However, none of the other groups looked appealing, mostly because she didn’t know anything about them. One group contained the boy who had told her ‘good luck’, but it also had Faulkey, who was glaring at her quite fiercely.

The rest of the students looked at her blankly, and she was paralyzed by indecision.

This was a surprisingly hard choice.

“You can sit with us,” said the boy who’d been unable to do the spell in their last class. Riorke. He didn’t look any friendlier than the rest of the students, especially with his hair shorn close to his scalp and a frown on fierce, sharp features.

He looked older than the rest, more soldier than boy, but he did wave her over, pushing his seat to the side, so that there was space. “Come quickly. You’re holding the class up.”

Arielle still hadn’t quite made her decision, but she didn’t want to be the reason that class couldn’t continue. She gathered her things and was about to get up, but there was no need.

Her desk came alive, too.

“Ee!” The sound squeaked out of her as her desk ran toward Riorke, to the amusement of her classmates.

The experience wasn’t as jostling as she’d expected, the rhythmic clip-clop sound vaguely enjoyable.

She giggled at the ludicrousness of it. She was riding a small desk horse. She couldn’t wait to tell Celie and Brom. They would likely find this funny too.

As she settled in next to him, Riorke analyzed her with a dark gaze.

“I’m Riorke, by the way,” he said. “These other simpletons are Lacey, Cedric, Cuthbert, and Godfrey.”

“Your name is Lacey?” she asked the dark-haired boy, the same one who had told her about Woden punishing latecomers. He was also the same one who’d been talking to Riorke in the last class.

“Last I checked, yes,” he said.

“I thought that sort of name was reserved for women.”

“My mother doesn’t believe in reserving things for women, or men. All five of my sisters have manly names, and my brother and I have lady-like ones. My sisters donned armor and attended warrior classes with me, and I wore a dress and attended etiquette classes with them. At least until I was twelve, and learned to pick better hiding spots.”

Arielle digested that and searched for a relevant response. “Your childhood sounds very unusual. In the schoolyard, you would have gotten mocked and bullied for wearing a dress.”

“Oh, I was, but on the bright side, I have perfect posture now, and can waltz like you wouldn’t believe.”

“That’s good. At least, something good came out of it.”

“Aren’t you a little small to be a Mossborne?” Riorke asked.

“Yes,” Ari responded. “My grandmother says that my mother must have bedded a swan on the day of my conception, and gave birth to a bird egg instead of a human. My father has a different theory. He thinks the Great and Merciful Sentinel had caught a cold and sneezed while placing my growth charm. However, I think they’re both wrong, as swan-human sexual relations are so far impossible, and the Great and Merciful Sentinel does not catch colds.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

They stared blankly at her, and she believed she’d said something wrong again, but suddenly, Lacey chuckled.

“I think I’m going to like you a lot, Arielle,” he said.

“You are?” She was surprised.

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I think I might.”

She smiled. Wow. She’d made a friend. And she had no clue how she’d done it.

She couldn’t ask either because Professor Woden chose that moment to start talking.

“Alright, now that everyone’s acquainted, we can move on to the next step. As you know, these five groups are going to be studying the Primordials. You know what that is, Arielle?”

She nodded. They’d learned about it at the schoolyard, the five ancient beings that were credited as being the origin of the essences.

The Calor Flamerider

The Massa Stonechild.

The Vitae Lifetree.

The Luxa Truthsinger.

The Vacu Unmaker.

The Great Balancer who was technically not a primordial, merely the first mythical mage who sacrificed himself to keep them in check.

Of course, whether or not any of this was true was anyone’s guess. Her mother thought the primordials existed, but her grandmother said the they were false gods created by humans to explain the existence of essences.

“Now,” Woden continued. “To successfully advance to the next quarter, each group must complete a presentation on one primordial, presenting the answers to the question, ‘who and what are they at their core?’”

“But we already know who and what they are,” Riorke responded.

“No,” he said. “I want you to look deeper. We have a well-stocked library on the top floor of the Luxarium, and I will also be allowing exeats and field trips when necessary for further study. We can visit the temples, sacred sites, or anywhere you think you can get the information from. But to pass the class, you need to tell me something about your chosen primordial that has never been known before.”