“What…How can you…No. No, absolutely not,” the professor at the front of the class sputtered as he tried to understand a particularly adamant student’s point.

  Like most of the classes at the academy, the room was built in the lecture hall fashion with graduating steps climbing ever higher as they approached the back of the hall. The desks in this hall are far more understated than those in my classes with lab components, as ENC 2142: Enchantment and Runic Integration by Parts only has a lecture component. Professor Maxin, a faethian and stout man with arms as big around as tree trunks, stoked his beard as he tried to puzzle out what in the world the student was talking about.

  “Can you repeat the question, Mr. Roth?” the professor asked.

  The young man who had asked the inane question looked around at his friends as if he were now unsure of the answer. From my seat in the back of the room, I watch him like a vulture; he is the kind of classmate that I like the least.

  “Yes, of course, professor,” the young Mr. Roth said as everyone looked on, watching him try to rephrase his statement to make himself sound less assured. “I merely wanted to ask if it would be unwise to use such a wand in a closed environment,” he said. “There would be dangers with using a flame conjuration in a place where the oxygen might be burned up.”

  That hadn’t been how he had asked it. Not twenty seconds ago, the young man had called out to the professor in the middle of the lecture, sat back in his seat with crossed arms, and interrupted the story the professor had been spinning of spelunking in unexplored caverns during his youth. The story about burning away giant roach monsters he found within crypts with a wand that produced gouts of flame was actually quite interesting, which is why, after the smug Mr. Roth interrupted the story to try and point out how smart he was, I feel no pity for the way the professor was about to embarrass him.

  Mr. Roth’s precise words had been, “Wouldn’t using a burning wand in an enclosed space have made you suffocate? Seems risky to me.”

  At the front of the room, Professor Maxim was writing a simple chemical equation on the board. It was a simple equation that everyone in the room was well acquainted with.

  “This,” the professor said, tapping the equation on the board, “is a combustion reaction. When people think about fire, this is usually what they are thinking about: the energetic release caused by carbohydrates reacting with ambient oxygen. This reaction gives off a significant amount of free energy in the form of excited gas molecules, namely carbon dioxide and water. Were I using a combustion wand in those caves, I may very well have accidentally burned up the breathable air. Though even if that were the case, moving to another environment would likely have solved the issue.”

  The professor underlined the equation. “We are now speaking about particle conjuration. A wand of fire’s purpose is to conjure fire. It does not conjure a fuel source to be burned, and without a fuel source, a combustion reaction cannot take place, can it, Mr. Roth?”

  “No, I suppose that it can’t, professor,” the young man said, slouching in his seat.

  “Precisely. This is a very important point, one that I expect all of you to endeavor to understand.” The professor tapped the underlined equation once more. “This is not fire. What fire is, is the end product of the reaction and not the reaction itself. Fire is a combination of super-heated water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hot uncombusted materials. In fact, without the heated material contaminants, you would not even be able to see fire at all. A wand that is built to transform mana into fire-affixed mana and then is channeled to turn that mana into physical material does not cause a combustion reaction. It conjures the thing itself. Does that answer your question, Mr. Roth?”

  “It does, professor.”

  The professor at the front of the class nods to himself before he begins to write again on a different part of the board, his story about adventuring in his youth forgotten. I fall back into my routine, notetaking as the lecture proceeds.

  I am of two minds about my academy classes. On one hand, the subjects are exhilarating. The way that the various professors speak about harnessing magic and bending the world to an enchanter’s will, as if it were the simplest thing in the world, fills me with excitement. What we have been learning about for the last week and a half in this course, in particular, has gotten me thinking even during my off-hours. Only now, after I have a greater understanding of physics and chemistry, do I realise how big of a deal magic being able to conjure physical matter is. By all understanding of the material world, the energy required to make even a stone appear should be immense, but even the newest essentia magician with a stone essentia might be able to manage it.

  It all comes down to the concept of will, and concepts in general. My understanding of the subject begins to hit a wall, as the truly advanced courses in physics and magical theory are for higher years, but I understand it as this. Of the five basic forces in the universe, will is the most powerful, edging out electromagnetism by a good margin. However, it has an inverse relation with itself, growing weaker the more centralized it is, whereas the other forces would only grow stronger. This has something to do with the force of will originating from the divine realm instead of the material realm, as the other forces do, but there, my understanding reaches its limit.

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  What Professor Maxim spoke about, and was in fact the first thing that he opened the lecture on conjuration with, was that will particles naturally want to meet with a concept. Particles like hologons and spectrons have a desire to be aspected; mana does not like to exist without an aspect, a concept like fire, earth, life, or shadow. The transformers that enchanters use in their various works play on this principle, using a systemic approach to strip will particles of the aspects they already have before introducing them to a different affixed form of mana. The particles then grab onto the concept like their lives depend on it, becoming whatever it is they meet. Most wands are simply that, enchantments that turn ambient air mana into a differently affixed kind of mana with a bundle of runes on the end that kicks the affixed mana into incarnating.

  Stone mana wants to become a stone; it wants to embody its concept. A wand of stone will merely take air mana, strip it of the air concept, introduce that stripped mana to a length of material already infused with stone mana, and run the mana to a set of runes that tells it to incarnate as the materia of its concept. All in all, such a wand is not doing anything that unique. If stone mana is left to sit around, it will naturally turn into stone on its own.

  The matter of making wands is only one small part of what I have been learning at this academy, but it is one with a near infinite potential. What if I made a unique wand that would incarnate each of the mana affixes that I possess? Using it for fire would be mostly pointless, as I can naturally produce more fire than any wand I can make would be able to handle, but what about my more exotic affixes? What would a wand that could incarnate Vacuum-affixed mana do? What about one that could produce Chemic Pestilence? The thoughts are dangerous, but gods help me, they are interesting.

  “I think you could make better wands than these,” Galea says from where she hovers next to me.

  I glance at the little dragon as I continue to meticulously take notes. It isn’t so difficult to split my attention in order to do so. “Of course I could, but it would be expensive,” I reply to her. “A wand of cold could be useful to freeze things like food, but it is a non-incarnate type of mana. You can’t turn the mana into “cold” itself.”

  “But you can make cold dragonfire,” she says. “That is something.”

  “It is,” I agree. The more I learn, the more questions I have. Most of my different kinds of mana work well in conjunction with dragonfire, but some don’t seem to do much. It makes me wonder what exactly dragonfire itself is. I can take the fire affix out of it by introducing a cold affix, but I haven’t been able to create it without any affix at all. The professor up front seems content with his explanation of what fire is, but that can’t be true for dragonfire. Spending nearly a month in a coffin of blades would have had some very interesting side-effects if I were producing a gas the entire time with the sky-affixed dragonfire. But if I wasn’t producing a gas with the dragonfire, why was it helping me to breathe?

  There is a serene comfort in the endless questions. Unlike the other sciences, anything that touches upon magic is open to an endless stream of new questions and points to investigate. Still in my first semester here, I know that the next year of hard study has an incredible amount left to teach me, and I doubt that it will stop there.

  As the class ends and people begin to file from the lecture hall, a faethian woman tries to slyly slip her foot into my path to trip me and make me fall down the stairs. I notice her leg immediately as she tries to keep her head turned away. For an instant, I consider kicking through her leg and maybe even snapping it. I might feel satisfied, at least for a moment, but it would only spur others on.

  This girl isn’t the only one. I have noticed it ever since coming to the city, but at the academy, the air of alienation is more prevalent. I had hoped that by being in these classes, by chatting politely with other students when they asked a question or tried to initiate a conversation, the feeling might go away. If anything, it has only grown worse. I am a stranger here in more ways than one, and people, especially other students, resent me for it. So far, I haven’t found any of my professors carrying the same attitude, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

  Gracefully, I step over the offending leg sticking out to trip me as if it wasn’t even there. I hear a snort of dissatisfaction as I continue past, but I ignore it. Maybe once I had hoped to come to an academy like this to make friends and enjoy my life here as I took classes, but those kinds of dreams died in Danfalla. I am here now. I am studying and finding the subjects incredibly interesting. I have a good friend back home who is doing the same, and two more in Jasper and Gaz. That is enough for me. I don’t need the faethians to like me. I really don’t.

  My mind buzzes with thoughts and plans on various enchantments that I can look forward to completing as I continue my studies, as I make my way back home. Wands are just one area that I can dabble in. I plan to go to Tabriss in the not-so-distant future, so perhaps there are things that would be worth conjuring there. Is there fresh water in Tabriss? It might be worth looking into.

  As is my usual routine on Secondday, I stop by a foodstand on the way home, one of the few that is open so late at night. I have just finished nibbling away at the skewered meat of my second kabab when I make it up the flight of stairs leading to the penthouse and stop dead. A shadow looms in the hallway in front of me, waiting just outside my door.

  Fire sparks to life in the palm of my hand, illuminating the dark passage in flickering shadows as the orange light dances across my fingers. A man sits in front of my door in a dark, wooden chair, one leg folded over the other as he reads a book. He is dressed in a fine black suit that glitters silver against the light. I recognize the half-elven man as soon as I see him. He was one of the judges who proctored my entrance exam into the university.

  He smiles winningly at me and stands, the book he was reading disappearing into the inner pocket of his suit as he does so. “Good evening, Ms. Devardem,” he says, running a hand through his hair to smooth it. The man clasps both of his hands behind his back and simply stands there, allowing me to approach him.

  “Good evening, Mr. Mox,” I say, allowing an orb of burning sand to spiral up from my palm to illuminate the hallway. “What can I do for you?” My presence reaches out, moving through the hallway and the building alike to sense anyone nearby. The man in front of me is alone, and I am not sure what to make of that. “If you wanted to wait on me, I’m sure my roommate would have allowed you to wait inside.”

  Treston Mox’s smile only grows wider at that. “No one home, I’m afraid. In any case, waiting has not been such an inconvenience. On the topic of doing something for me, I think you will find the offer that I have come here with worth your time. I have something that I need taken care of, and I believe you may be uniquely suited to help me with it. Can we speak inside?”

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