Chapter 8 – New Quarter

The break passed far too quickly, and soon enough, Mirian found herself walking to class with Lily. By now, the weather had finally turned, so a light snowfall had coated Torrviol in a beautiful blanket of white. Lily, who had grown up with snow, found it annoying. Mirian, who had only ever seen it in the mountains of her home province, couldn’t stop appreciating the beauty of it. The way the snow muted the sounds of the morning, the way it turned the pre-dawn world gray and smooth.

She tried explaining this to Lily, unsuccessfully.

“It just means more ice to slip on,” Lily said.

“But just—just look at it!” Mirian said. “The world all… matches. It’s organized. Clean. I know, I know that beneath it all, there’s still all the mud and trash, and I know it gets all gross later, but the first snowfall… it’s so nice. And it’s spooky, but in a good way.”

“Did I mention my enchanted glasses can’t see ice as well as eyes can?”

“Oh. Really? Well, sorry.”

“I should just get ice-climbing boots with the metal spikes and just eat all the dress-code violation demerits.”

Mirian laughed at that.

Lily went off to Advanced Spell Empowerment. She’d passed the prerequisite examination, which they’d both rejoiced about during the break. Mirian went off to Artifice Design 426. This was a far less lecture-heavy class. That also, thankfully, meant fewer students.

Professor Torres had brought a spellrod to the class. “Artifice has come to be synonymous with spell engines, but it actually precedes spellbooks. Our first project will be designing a spell-rod. This one is five hundred years old,” she said, as way of introduction.

The class murmured about that. It looked new. The rod was mostly solid brass, with thin tubes and lacquered pieces twisting around the outside like a musical instrument. The head of it was a polished green stone, with a quartz tip at the end.

“Rods are still used extensively in Persama. This one is from before the dissolution of the old empire, which might give pause to your idea that time is a forward march of progress. All that is done can be undone, but this is not a history class. Nevertheless, a spellrod employs an important principal: It is flexible. Wands only have a single pathway and cast a single spell. A rod can achieve the same efficiencies, but can contain dozens of spells if designed properly. I don’t expect anyone in the class to produce this kind of mastery, but you will need to draw heavily from what you know about alchemistry and enchantment.”

Professor Torres then launched into an explanation of the inner workings of the spellrod, complete with an illusionary diagram that shimmered in the air by the podium. Each rotating ring on the spellrod moved around a chain of glyphs and connecting gold mana channels around. With clever design, the artisan had made it so that each combination of rotations led to a different spell. This spellrod had 80 spells it could cast, which was impressive.

Mirian blinked. One of the books she’d seen in the library talked about the concept. As she wrote her notes, she tried to remember the title.

“…the design re-uses glyphs and channels constantly, and requires a great deal of planning to pull off. It’s also much easier to use than a spellbook since it only requires channeling mana through a single conduit in the handle. However, it also requires a great deal more memorization. Unlike a modern spell engine, rods generally do not have an instruction manual that explains which glyphs to press. Your project will need at least nine possible spells.”

The rest of the lecture covered some of the theory behind effective design and the material physics. Then, they started working on designs, with Torres roaming about giving suggestions.

Her next class with Professor Eld went about as well as the first. Eld’s contempt for his audience always came across in his lectures. Unlike Torres, he wasn’t going to give interesting projects, only rote practice and a lot of scathing comments. Mirian bore it, because she needed to. Eld was an ass, but glyphs were the foundation of the arcane professions.

Mirian’s third class of the day was with Professor Atger, a man who looked like he’d stepped out of a board room. His silvered hair was freshly combed, and unlike the other professors who wore their normal clothes under the Academy jacket, he wore a full dress uniform.

In his introduction, he mentioned he had, in fact, worked on spell engines for one of the factories, designing one of the components of the spellforge in Palendurio. This didn’t seem like that big an accomplishment to Mirian. The first capitol of Baracuel did, after all, have hundreds if not thousands of spellforges in it.

His lectures on spell engine alchemistry were straight from the textbook, though. Mirian was a bit disappointed. Did he really have nothing to add from his experience working for one of the companies?

After the lecture, though, she ran into Nicolus. Again, there were three girls practically mobbing him, but he said something and walked right toward her, motioning that Mirian should join him. “Our one class together, Nurea says. We’ll need to study for this one,” he said. “He’s reading—”

“—straight from the textbook,” Mirian finished.

“And the textbook is shit,” Nicolus said. “Not my opinion, by the way, that’s the opinion of Professor Torres, and she ought to know.”

“Huh. Yeah, she would. How did you find that out?”

“One of my cousins on my father’s side works in the administrative office in the Artificer’s Tower, two doors down from her office. They talk.”

“That’s lucky.”

“Sort of,” Nicolus said. “You shake enough trees, you’re bound to get fruit eventually. I happen to have a family of tree-shakers. Does Secondday and Fourthday after five o’clock work for you?”

This book’s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Mirian checked her notebook. “Yeah.”

“Hah! You even have a schedule in there. Right, same place. Nurea already has a list of books to look at. We’ll divy ‘em up and explain them to each other. I’ve also got one more joining us, real smart kid. Now I’ve gotta run.” Nicolus sighed, and gestured behind him. “Drama.”

The geology classes of the Academy didn’t have their own special building, just a section of one. Class was just southeast of the Kiroscent Dome, and just north of the Market Forum where Torrviol stopped being an academy and started being a small but prosperous town.

The professor of Geoarcanology, Marcel Holvatti, looked a lot like a clone of Atger, only slightly paler and with more of a hunched posture. He also had thick glasses, and casually wore a hand-lens that dangled off a lanyard around his neck.

The spell engine he used was an older one, but the illusions of geologic rock layers and short animations showing how rock layers got formed were clear and informative.

The lecture felt more like a business presentation than anything academic, with Professor Holvatti constantly mentioning ‘return on investment’ and ‘energy return ratios.’ Apparently, he had been a part of Baracuel’s Bureau of Industry after several expeditions to Persama. Still, the information was simple and concise, and Mirian found it all interesting. Apparently, myrvite fossils had only formed during a specific period of time, after something called the “Inundation Period” (she’d have to look that up later), but before any bacteria or decomposers had evolved to deal with the magical volatility of myrvites. And apparently, Persama had not always been so desert-y. Holvatti mentioned finding huge palm leaf imprints in the rock, and fossils of jungle raptors and jaguars now only found in Tlaxhuaco. That was interesting to imagine. She drew a little picture of a jaguar looking confused in a desert.

Mirian was glad that the class felt straightforward enough. It needed quite a bit of trigonometry, but only some basic calculus, and most of it was just conceptual, which was easy for her.

Her last class of the day was Artifice Physics, which was back in the Artificer’s Tower. Based on her silvering hair, Professor Endresen seemed about as old as the other two professors, but she carried herself very differently. When she spoke about researching arcane energy flows, it was with an unrestrained passion, like if she wasn’t speaking to students in a lecture hall she might be out in the Market Forum explaining it to the crowd, whether they were willing or not. Her pale skin and accented Friian placed her firmly in the far north of Baracuel.