Chapter 3 – Academic Life II

Professor Viridian nodded along as Mirian and Valen reported what they had seen. “How strange,” he agreed. “I’ll look into it.”

When they left, though, Valen said, “He didn’t believe us.”

Mirian was confused. “But he said… I think he did. And why wouldn’t he, anyways, there’s a lot of dangerous stuff in that wing!”

Valen gave an exaggerated sigh. “You need to stop paying attention to what people say and pay more attention to how they say it.” Ah, there was the Valen that Mirian knew. But before she could come up with a retort, Valen was off, heading a different direction. Mirian opened her mouth to say something rude, then closed it, and headed toward Enchantments. She had an exam, and no time to waste.

Enchantments was in one of the older buildings. It had a complete facade of worked granite, and looked its age. Walking through its halls, Mirian felt like she was one of those ancient arcane pioneers who had risked everything to further the knowledge of humanity. The polished marble floor was worn down with the footsteps of all the students that had preceded her, and it made her feel important, like she was in history.

Well, it usually did. Today, her stomach was in a knot because the enchantments exam was today, and it was purely practical. Classic spellcasting–the kind that didn’t involve a fancy new spell engine–was a complex thing. First, they needed to draw from their auric mana using an arcane catalyst. Humans, after all, were not magical creatures. Try as they might, there was no way to access their mana without an object already designed for it. Primitive people had used the magical organs they took from the myrvites they hunted. A chimera’s skull, for example, was a great arcane catalyst, but then that involved killing a chimera, and that was dangerous as hell. A wyvern’s wing was also a great catalyst, but getting that was also dangerous, and then you needed the whole wing, which was just unwieldy. So after many years of wizards pondering and sorcerers blowing themselves up trying out new and exciting magical materials, society had figured out how to distill the alchemical substances that tapped into an aura.

For this exam, Mirian wielded a scribe’s pen. The brass and silver upper shell of it contained dried and powdered cockatrice heart, which was the arcane catalyst. Try as they might, no one had been able to synthesize the magichemicals that made the arcane catalyst work.

It was possible to shape raw mana, but incredibly difficult. The resulting spell was usually just a concentrated blast of energy, and not even a very powerful one. To actually work as an effective spell, the mana had to pass through shaper-glyphs. The scribe’s pen had replaceable shaper-glyphs where a normal pen’s nib was.

Mirian then had to use these glyphs to… make more glyphs. A complete set of glyphs could form a spell when mana was channeled through them, but this class was all about making the glyphs in the first place. A lot of magic was like that: A lot of tedious work. That was Enchanting 310, and Professor Eld was, in a word, a hardass. His exams were brutal, and he routinely failed students who underperformed. Worse, unlike the other enchantment professors, he only let students use the basic glyphs on their pen nibs. When questioned on this, he went on a rant about “strong fundamentals!” and “kids these days want everything handed to them!” Mirian just kept her head down and did her best.

Near the end of the hour, though, she was only on her eighteenth glyph out of the twenty-four required, and disaster struck: The girl next to her mischanneled her mana, causing a wave of force to burst across the table, sending her pen flying. This interrupted her mid-glyph, and the magical inks she was using splattered, starting a small fire.

Mirian hastily blew it out, then scrambled to retrieve her pen.

As she got up, Professor Eld loomed over her, his beady eyes glaring.

“Sorry. Sorry! The force wave knocked it out of my hand and I was mid-glyph and–”

“I don’t want excuses,” he snapped. “Do you think it matters if you’re sorry if your idiocy blows up a spellbook and kills someone? Do you think your employer cares why your incompetence burned down his factory? Be glad I’m not failing you on the spot.”

Humiliated, Mirian slunk back to her seat. She didn’t say anything to the girl next to her, but she wanted to punch her.

When Mirian was young, she’d had a nasty temper. It didn’t take much to set her off, either. She got in fights at playgrounds, around the neighborhood, at school–everywhere. Her parents had been patient, and also relentless. They taught her breathing exercises, meditation, and more, repeated the rules over and over and over, until Mirian was sick of it. But it had worked: she was very good now about not hurting anyone, and even as the thought came to her, she heard her father’s voice: No violence.

So she took a deep breath and continued.

Glyph eighteen was ruined, so she skipped it and worked on the next one.

She was just finishing glyph twenty when the sand in the timer up front finished dropping, and a magical chime rang out in the room.

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“Time. Time!” said Professor Eld. “Pens down, now. Now! I see a scribe’s pen moving, that’s an automatic fail.”