by V. St. Clair
And here I thought they at least respected me…
But no, apparently they all hated him and he was too stupid to even realize it.
“What? No quippy remarks to make about how we’re all daft old men and women who can’t see how you’re actually a Heaven-sent gift to magekind?” Master Antwar prodded, looking grimly satisfied for finally having brought him low with shame and self-loathing.
“No, sir,” he answered quietly, making an enormous effort to tamp down the painful, choking sensation in his throat that threatened to betray him. “Would you like an update of my progress, sir?”
“By all means, dazzle me.” Antwar waved him on with one hand, still clearly annoyed and expecting some kind of sarcastic rebuttal.
“I decided that my original goal of using a complex alignment was too ambitious, at least until I’ve cracked the code for making prolonged water-based casting viable,” he explained emotionlessly, gesturing to the topmost sheet of paper on the nearest desk. “I backed up and decided to try something simple, like Boil.”
The Prism Master was scanning his drawings and formulas silently while he spoke.
“I’ve triple-checked my work, so I’m fairly confident I’m using the right alignment, including the inverter to account for the additional refraction of the water, but now I’m beginning to think there’s an issue with diffusivity; the green bands are scattering too much for me to properly focus them and cast effectively. At best I can get the water to bubble once or twice, but then it disperses.”
Master Antwar looked impressed against his will, though Asher took no real joy from it just now.
“That you got it to bubble at all is a testament to your progress. Few people have managed even that.”
Asher shrugged and said, “A spell that only sort-of works for a moment or two is hardly anything to write home about. I need to start working on a way to focus the color bands within the water if there’s any hope of making this sustainable.”
“Do you have any ideas on how you intend to get around that not-so-minor hurdle?” the Prism Master asked with professional interest.
“A few, though I’m not really pleased with any of them right now. I’d have to strip down one of the current methods for focusing and build some sort of hybrid spell.”
“Maybe something with fluorescent transference would be useful…” Master Antwar thought out loud.
I tried that two weeks ago and it was utterly useless.
“I’ll look into it, sir,” Asher answered politely.
It was perhaps this that made his mentor finally consider that what he’d said before had been devastating to hear, because Master Antwar looked slightly uncomfortable as he said, “Not a lot of progress since our last meeting, but since you backtracked on your previous alignment and started over I’m not surprised. I’ll leave you to it, unless there’s anything else you wanted to show me?”
“No, not today.”
“All right.” The Prism Master walked to the door and had his hand on the knob when he stopped and turned back. “Asher…about what I said a few minutes ago…I was perhaps a bit more frank and, well—harsh than I should have been.”
“I appreciated your candor, sir,” he replied, returning to his chair and staring down at his notes without really seeing them.
“All the same, I apologize for the way I approached it.”
Oh sure, because if you’d found a nicer way to tell me that no one wants me here and they all think I’m a blight on the school, it would have been much better…
“No need to apologize, sir. It’s good to know where I stand with you, and the other Masters.”
He could feel Master Antwar watching him for another few moments, while he picked up a pencil and pretended to take notes on something, but eventually his mentor left and shut the door behind him.
Finally alone, Asher set his pencil down and closed his eyes, leaning back in his chair once more and staring up at the ceiling.
…appalling lack of human decency…
He inhaled deeply through his nose and exhaled through his mouth to try and regain focus. He had work to do—a lot of it—before their next review in another two weeks, or he might be on tenterhooks for getting his sponsorship revoked for poor performance alone.
…self-ingratiating, obnoxious little snip…
This wasn’t productive. Letting his chair fall forward with a snap as the front legs hit the floor, he stared down at his notes for a long moment and tried to focus, though for some reason the only thing that really registered in his brain was the pounding of his pulse. He had thought that he had an idea, a really innovative one, for the diffusion problem involving a compound of blue- and orange-tinted prisms, but now he began to doubt himself. Maybe it was a stupid thought after all, and since blue and orange prisms at the mastery-level were very expensive, if he bought them and turned out to be wrong, he’d get an earful about wasting high-priced materials. It was why most mastery-level prism-users stuck with clear or violet prisms, as the other tints became more expensive.
…no one else wants you…
He stood up abruptly, abandoning hope of getting any real work done and deciding to do something equally important, unless he wanted to get into another argument with the Prism Master during his next review. He looked around at the piles of paper littering the room and sighed, walking around them and approaching the desk that would normally be designated for the teacher of the class, though this one was, of course, not being used. On top of the desk was an empty brazier, common throughout the classrooms in case there was anything the Masters wanted to burn, or magic that required fire as a catalyst or accelerant.
Asher picked up the nearby glass bottle of oil and removed the stopper, sloshing the pale liquid into the bowl and using his clear prism to ignite it. The flames roared up so fast that he had to step back for fear of losing his eyebrows, and he felt the heat of it warming his face as the smoke drifted upward to the ventilation slots in the ceiling, which kept a slight negative pressure on the classrooms to prevent anyone from suffocating from smoke accumulation.
He contemplated the stacks of paper nearest him. Should he go through it page by page and determine what needed to be kept and what could be discarded? It was always hard for him to decide what to throw away, since he tended to remember everything he wrote down—which was partly why he wrote it down in the first place, to commit it to memory—but there was always the chance he would forget something in his previous work, and it would be nice to reference it…
To the hells with it. Burn it all.
He had to admit, the room was much more spacious without all that paper in it, though by the time he’d finished burning all of the last seven months of work, he’d had to empty the brazier five times to get rid of all the ash. Now the room was entirely empty of his presence except for the worktable he was currently sitting at, which had three sheets of his most recent notes, as well as a wooden stand containing a deep glass bowl that was currently half-full of water. A wire prism-holder was attached to the bottom of the bowl, which currently housed a mastery-level clear crystal prism that Asher had cast Light on.
The prism was like a miniature sun, throwing a million slices of multi-colored light around the room, including into the glass bowl directly above it. Equipping a violet prism in his eyepiece, Asher took a deep breath and submerged his head in the bowl of water for the third time, opening his eyes and quickly locating the light source below him. He looked through his left eye at the violet prism and immediately found the Boil alignment he had discovered for underwater use, frowning at the thick bands of light that would be much narrower and more focused in air. Turning all of his willpower on it, he cast Boil.
It hadn’t taken him long to realize that he had picked a stupid spell to start with, given that he would be submerging his head in the very water he was attempting to boil, but since it would take another week or two to abandon this spell in favor of discovering a new one, he didn’t want to have another week
of poor progress to report to Antwar.
Especially not now that I know how close I am to being forced out of Mizzenwald entirely.
Since he hadn’t made much headway with sustaining the Boil spell underwater, he wasn’t terribly concerned with burning himself, though he was prepared to pull his head out of the water immediately if that changed.
This time he felt the water grow pleasantly warm, then uncomfortably warm. A few bubbles began trickling upwards past his face…
Tricia was suddenly staring at him through the side of the glass, her face oddly distorted by the concavity of the bowl.
“AGH!” Asher shouted in surprise, air bubbles obscuring his vision as they floated past, and he frantically pulled his head out of the water as a cloud of steam rose up from the liquid below.
He coughed and wiped the water from his eyes as Tricia said, “I didn’t mean to scare you; I didn’t know what you were doing.”
His first thought was to wonder how she got in here without tripping any of the wards, but then he realized he had forgotten to put them back in place after Antwar had left the room. His second thought was that the surprise visit somehow made him able to produce steam for the first time and nearly scald his face, which shouldn’t have been possible since it disrupted his focus. That was a thought for later…
“Trish, hello.” He recovered from his initial shock at seeing her in his office, since normally Maralynn was the only one who visited him here. “I was submerging my head into hopefully-boiling water in the name of research, of course.” He smiled at her.
“Oh good,” she chuckled. “For a moment I thought you were trying to drown yourself, and I thought your review with Master Antwar must have gone really badly.”
Asher’s smile faltered for a moment as he said, “Actually, it did, but that’s another story entirely.”
“Oh,” Tricia covered her mouth with her hand, looking horrified at joking about something that he obviously found unpleasant. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know, or I wouldn’t have teased you about it.”
“It’s fine,” he waved off the apology, determined to be cheerful. He hated when people dragged out their whining for everyone to see. “When have I ever let a negative review get in my way?”
She looked like she wasn’t sure she believed him just yet, and then glanced around the room and added, “Where are all your notes? It’s so clean in here…at first I thought I had the wrong room. Maralynn always jokes that it looks like a dumpster in your workroom.”
“I got rid of them,” he answered neutrally, looking around for a change of subject. “So, what brings you to visit me at this time of…” he glanced at his chrono, “…evening?”
Wow, I missed dinner and no one even came looking for me. Good to be popular.
Tricia frowned at the attempt to switch topics and said, “But that was all the work you’ve been doing for months and months! You can’t have just…thrown it all away…”
“I really don’t need the notes anymore; once I write something down, it tends to get committed to memory. Antwar just asked me to do some housekeeping, so I cleaned up.”
She looked slightly less aghast at that, and finally said, “Well, if you’re sure you’ll remember all that stuff. I was looking for you at dinner because you said you might be able to help me with Charms again after, only you never showed up so I wanted to see if we should reschedule.”
Oh right, I vaguely remember something about that...
“Sorry, I was so caught up in this that I completely forgot about dinner and everything else. Of course I can help you; did you bring your assignment?”
“If I hadn’t, this would have been a pointless visit, wouldn’t it?” she gestured down at the bag she had brought with her, opening the flap and extracting her Charms book, along with her half-finished essay.
Asher pushed the bowl of water on its stand out of the way so that she could set her things on the table and open her book. Tricia started explaining her problem as he scanned her essay silently.
“We’re supposed to be explaining why some binders are more effective than others,” she began, twirling a lock of blond hair around her finger and watching him read her work. “For the most part it’s simple: dead skin or fingernails are the least effective binders because they aren’t very well-connected to a person’s Source; hair is better but still not great, then living skin and tissue—though who would use either is beyond me,” she paused long enough to grimace at the thought of peeling off healthy skin to stick to a charm. “Then blood, which is a very good binder…then bone, which is the best.” She stopped again.
“Yes?” Asher had finished skimming her essay and set it down now, raising an eyebrow at her because he wasn’t certain what the question was just yet. He was in mastery-level Charms this year, though Tricia had always struggled with it and was still in level-three.
“Why is bone better than blood, as a binder?” she stopped fidgeting with her hair and met his gaze. “They both come from inside the body; they’re both very closely connected to a person’s Source…”
Understanding her problem now, Asher brightened slightly and interrupted.
“I think it’s a question of permanence, though our texts never implicitly say that,” he explained. “Blood is very intimately entwined with our being, but it’s constantly being made, broken down, and remade by our bodies. In a matter of weeks the body can entirely replace its plasma and blood cells, if you believe our Healing textbooks. Bone is different though: if I saw off part of my arm, it’s never growing back. Sure, I could reattach it with magic, but that’s still using the existing bone and such.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” Tricia frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose that’s why they advise against using bone as a binder in general—aside from the fact that it’s very painful and difficult to scrape a piece off for a charm.”
“Indeed,” Asher agreed. “Dirqua sprung that question on us during my level-three class as well; I could never tell if it was because he wasn’t sure of the answer himself and wanted to get fresh perspective, or if it was just a test of our creativity.”
Tricia looked rueful as she said, “Well it’s no big secret that I’m not the creative genius that you are, or I’d be better at things like Charms, and in our challenge arenas.”
It was true that Tricia was much more slow and calculating with her magic than Asher, who was excellent at thinking on his feet, but he hated to see her beat herself up over it.
“You aren’t bad at magic—you’re actually quite good at it,” he countered. “You’re just more methodical about it than I am, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
Tricia looked up at him, clearly surprised by the compliment.
I guess I do tease her a lot, especially in the arenas.
“You seem to be good at everything though, without even really trying.” For some reason her cheeks turned pink as she said this.
Still feeling moody from his last encounter with the Prism Master, Asher rattled off, “For all the good it does me. I’m the reason you all got a six in the last arena instead of a nine.”
Tricia couldn’t have looked more stunned if she’d been slapped in the face. Rearing her head back reflexively she asked, “Why do you say that?”
Scowling at his own candor, Asher sighed and explained, “Willow told me after he dismissed the rest of you; that’s why he wanted to talk to me. He also wanted to tell me that he thinks I’m almost morally bankrupt and that he is in utter despair for me.”
“What?!” Now Tricia looked furious on his behalf, which was surprising but mildly gratifying.
Nice to know the entire school doesn’t agree with the Masters.
“Why would he say that to you? You’re the most magically-gifted person on our team and you get us out of loads of trouble!”
Asher shrugged and said, “Apparently I don’t take it seriously enough for the Masters’ liking. They want me to try harder and to stop letting Michael die, because that makes me a b
ad person or something. I swear, I could carry that guy on my back for the entire challenge and he’d still find a way to off himself—choking on a fly or something.”
Tricia stifled a laugh at the thought of that, but then became serious once more.
“You aren’t a bad person. You save Michael whenever you can—”
“Not all the time,” Asher admitted, not sure why he was being so honest with Tricia right now. Aside from challenge arenas and Wands class, they didn’t spend an enormous amount of time together. Asher and Aleric were usually hanging out with a more popular group of people or working on their projects.
“Well, even so, it shouldn’t be your job to babysit Michael during our challenge arenas,” she recovered immediately. “He’s the same age as you, and he should learn to take care of himself. You already have your hands full making sure Maralynn doesn’t get hurt, and you even help me out occasionally…” she trailed off, looking embarrassed. “Thanks for carrying me through that field of glass, by the way.”
He passed over the comment about Mara, not wanting to discuss those particular feelings with Tricia.
“No problem, we’re teammates.” He shrugged. “Besides, usually you don’t need my help in the arenas.”
“Well, Willow still shouldn’t have said you were a bad person just because you give him sass sometimes.”
Still brooding over it, Asher frowned and said, “Maybe I am. Antwar was telling me mere hours ago that if I become any more obnoxious he’s going to revoke his sponsorship, and that the other Masters have already said they want nothing to do with me, so it would make this my last year at Mizzenwald for sure.”
“That can’t be true,” Tricia looked aghast, reaching out and touching his hand before flinching and retracting it, as though she’d done something scandalous.
“It is, hence me losing myself in my work and missing dinner,” Asher admitted. “If enough people tell me I’m awful, should I start believing them?”