4 Ches

  My afternoon today at the Tower of the Order for classes was quite different from the last time I was there for my meetings with Malverk all those years ago. It wasn’t really like I had spent much time there, though; that had just been for a simple consultation and purchase of my diary.

  I wonder how he’s doing, I didn’t see him around today anyway.

  Seraphina took me shopping the day before, but frankly, it wasn’t like I couldn’t have just done it on my own. It helped sell the story to my family, and so she took me out to the market in the afternoon. I didn’t actually need anything special for the course, just basic stationery like parchment and ink. Not even special ink, either, like what might be used for scroll making. Seraphina was quite willing to tell me about how different types of blood mixed with the ink could be used to enhance her scrolls, and how she had included instructions for draining the various bodily fluids for some of the exotic creatures she had an interest in for the lizardfolk.

  The tower itself was fairly impressive, a fairly wide four-story-tall tower illuminated with magical flames. The first floor, as far as I had gone before, was dedicated mostly to meeting rooms and related business for the guild. The other three were split between offices, classrooms, and workshops. The basement was an impressively secured vault to store the various valuable reagents and magic items the guild kept on hand, warded so heavily even I wasn’t able to meaningfully penetrate far into it.

  I spent my time up on the second floor for the lesson, in the small lecture hall where the class was held. Four hours in the afternoon, just after lunchtime. Our teacher was one Alexeia Liadon, an elven novice wizard. She was able to cast spells though, albeit rudimentary ones, proven quite early on when a few of my classmates jeered at her to give a demonstration.

  Not that we would be doing such ourselves anytime soon, according to the syllabus we received. The class itself was fairly introductory, focused more on the role of magic in general life and throughout history, as well as covering the types of magic. It should at least make for some interesting learning, some I’d already covered with Orsik, but that was academic in focus. He also hadn’t really tried to teach me magic fundamentally.

  Information about what it does, or various events involving it? Sure, that was stuff we were quite willing to talk about. Anything related to me actually using it though, and he’d clam up. It also didn’t help that a lot of stuff about magic wasn’t actually that well documented by historians, which was something Orsik went on about in relation to all sorts of events. Take the war going on up north in the Silver Marches. Nobody was really aware of what the spell being used to cover the sun was, and the only people who would be weren’t the types to just spread that information around.

  Was it some sort of absurdly powerful darkness spell? A weather control spell? Some sort of illusion made manifest? The end result might have been fairly similar between those options, but the actual methodology was unknown.

  15 Ches

  I may have overestimated the class, both the teacher and the intended subject. Alexeia might have been trying, but she really had no idea how to wrangle thirty different eight or nine-year-olds. Plenty of whispering and gossip between kids who already knew each other, or some who didn’t. What I overheard half the time wasn’t even related to the class.

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  She tried her best, of course, but she wasn’t a great orator and had a tendency to just write a bunch on the blackboard up front for us to copy down, rather than trying to engage with us. It ended up closer to a boring lecture and note-taking than a proper class to teach us. Naturally, that wasn’t really all that effective for a lot of the class. Kids this young weren’t actually all that interested in the use of conjuration magic for the production of alchemical reagents using extraplanar elementals. Most of us barely even knew what an elemental was, or what the word extraplanar meant.

  I did, of course. It was pretty easy reading that I would have done years ago with Orsik. Most of the information so far had been at that level. I still paid attention, given how I was having to pay so much for the course, but I doubted most of the content would matter till later on. Alexeia had at least established why the topics mattered.

  Most wizard spells were written down, or at least recorded, and the formatting and patterns all mattered. It built upon itself, fundamental principles applying to spells both basic and complex. A fire spell that ignited a campfire wouldn’t be fundamentally different from one you would use to blow up a building. At the same time, two different spellcasters could approach starting that campfire with different methodologies. A lot of those methodologies would be inspired by the works of other wizards, or reference ancient languages or civilizations.

  So learning the backgrounds of that sort of thing was important and fundamental for most wizards. If only the others could actually pay attention to her droning on about it. Alexeia was either covering topics too advanced for most of the class to actually comprehend, or she had dumbed things down so far that it wasn’t exactly useful to us.

  That’s another thing, I’ve remembered how much I actually hate other children. Not that the friend group I hang out with is that bad, but at times it’s much more that they are Pelsot’s friends, or even Jespa’s. Most of them I’m not particularly close to, but it’s a way for us to be vaguely supervised while out of the house for the day. There’s a reason I spend more time at the library or the workshop than playing with them. Now I’m stuck sitting around a bunch of them for four hours.

  At least it isn’t Winslow, I guess.

  The class itself is a bit of a mix of people, though. Most of the kids I’d hung out with before tended towards the lower end of the economic spectrum, with their parents being labourers or at least working in the Docks. I was probably the lowest rung in that regard for the class.

  Most seemed to be of some degree of nobility or upper class. Felaru Wands, for example, was from a branch of the Wands house, one of the noble houses that specifically specialized in the trade and training of magical means, and was there to live up to the family legacy. Then you’d have people like Heleni Piiradost, a second daughter who was hoping to be able to go independent, making a living from being a wizard given that she was not likely to inherit much from her family.

  Then there was the sort of middle class. Telli was the son of someone high up in the Vintners', Distillers', & Brewers' Guild and was interested in experimenting in integrating magic in the brewing or storage processes they used. Lisbet was the daughter of the mayor of a small village, who had scrounged up enough coin to come to the big city with big dreams to learn all she could before returning home to help out.

  It was pretty obvious who fell into which group. The nobles were often dressed better, wore some sort of perfume, and would sit more in the back of the class. The rest of us tended towards simpler garments and sat further in the front.

  Thankfully, there hadn’t been much forced interaction between people, and no group projects thus far. People would chat amongst themselves in their cliques. I mostly just took some notes and idly used my bugs to explore the tower. There wasn’t actually much, the basement was warded against vermin.