“Now, you get to practice yourself. We’ll focus on the basic fire rune today,” Ferne said. She had spent the past half an hour explaining and describing the common curves and angles that formed many runes. Her head snapped up. “Not with real mana, wipe that off!”
Fek pouted, but swiped his hand over the glowing line he had already drawn into the air.
“You’ll find blackboards at the edge of the stage. I’ll draw the example for you. Keep trying and once you think you have it, call me to check.”
I grabbed a chalk from the pile. Fek took two boards and waved one at me, grinning happily, so I picked up another chalk for him. The guy really left me no options, did he?
Ferne drew a big symbol on a large blackboard on the wall. She stepped away to inspect it, then brushed off a part and drew it again. The curves and straight lines of the symbol made it look like a letter that had grown wild, got away from some scribe who’d stopped holding back and decided to put some extra wiggles on it.
“Note the proportions here,” Ferne said, pointing at the bottom left corner of the rune, where the line ran straight. “It has to be two thirds of the length of the curve. No more, no less.”
It looked longer to me. I closed one eye and peered at the symbol on the wall, holding the chalk above my blackboard.
“If you can’t estimate the length, draw the curve using your middle finger and the straight line with your pinky, that’s usually pretty close,” she continued.
I looked at my hand. This was stupid. How could it be that exact?
“It can’t be that exact,” Fek said, drawing the symbol in a single motion. Even I saw it wasn’t even remotely like the one Ferne had done.
“Rather good. Have you written much?” Ferne said, holding my blackboard.
“Not for a while,” I said.
“Hmh,” she said, handing me back the blackboard. “Watch out for the top hook. I always get that wrong if I try to go too fast. It veers more to the left than you’d think.”
She walked away to inspect some other student’s rune. We had been drawing for at least half an hour already. Fek finished his sixteenth attempt of the rune. He had already shown five of them to Ferne.
She had started to look pretty desperate by the last one, so I grabbed on to Fek’s hand when he again tried to raise it. “Let me see first.”
“Sure, but I’m pretty sure I got it now, I’ve been—“
“The straight bit is too short.”
“What! I was sure I got it right.”
“Did you measure it?”
“No.”
I sighed. If he could channel so much mana as he seemed to be able to, what would happen if he drew the rune wrong? Would it be even worse than if someone else did it? Fek looked at me innocently, as if he wasn’t going to burn this whole lecture hall down the moment I looked away.
“I don’t want you blowing me up. Focus, Fek, focus,” I said, pushing the board back into his hands.
He grinned, wiping away the rune. Both sleeves of his robe were white and gray from the chalk.
I spent the next minutes making him correct the lines. The infuriating part was that he could have probably done it half an hour ago, if he stopped trying to wing it and did it properly.
“Teaching others is the best way of learning something,” Ferne said from behind me, making me jump in my chair.
Fek slammed the door closed and hooted. “Never got that one right before. Thanks, Lina!”
I seethed. The woman had made me explain the way I measured the proportions to everyone. They had listened quietly, not snickering or rolling their eyes. Somehow, it made it even worse.
At the end, she had made me draw the rune from memory and told me I only needed to learn two more to earn the first credit from the class.
“Don’t mention it. Only fair after you helped me with the channeling,” I said. I realized it was true and stood a bit straighter, breathing a sigh of relief.
“Nah, don’t you mention it!” he said. “Where are you heading next?”
“According to the schedule, I should read a book,” I said, grimacing. I didn’t know how to write so make the text look like the writer was scoffing and rolling his eyes, but Falar had somehow managed.
“Uh, that’s the worst,” Fek said. “Except Fendribalis’ Scriptures, those are pretty cool.”
“For real?”
“For sure. There’s all kinds of crazy stuff in that one! Did you know that pure undead are full of hate if they aren’t controlled? Why are they so angry if the Null is just the lack of everything? Well, Fendribalis says it’s because everything wants to turn to nothing and nothing’s lack of want acts as want for nothing, when surrounded by something!”
“What?” I said.
“As I said, pretty cool! Min says so too.”
“She says it’s cool?”
“I have mentioned her writings are intellectually stimulating,” Minnelil said, walking down the stairs to the opposite side of the walkway where we had come up. She was far away, but people said elves had good hearing. Never try to pickpocket one, they also said. “Besides, the Null is not the lack of everything, it’s the active state of nothingness,” she continued.
“Fendribalis disagrees,” Fek said.
“I said stimulating, not correct.”
I shook my head, puffing out a breath of air. I hadn’t read a book in a year. I had stolen issues of the Tenorsbridge Janitor Mail every once in a while to keep up what was going on in the city, but they had written mostly about rumors and gossip. Nothing about the active state of nothingness.
“Ah, but more importantly, are you both fine?” Minnelil said, pushing a hand under her cowl and pulling out a thick braid of brown hair. She played with it, fingers pulling at the individual strands of hair, gaze shifting and sliding away from me.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was just a fight.”
She hesitated, pulling a tuft of hair from the braid, making it start to unthread. “I should have acted sooner. I’m sorry,” she said suddenly.
“It was just a fight,” I repeated. “My fight. It was neither of your business.” I sighed and smoothed my face. “I mean… you wouldn’t have needed to. Thanks.” I nodded firmly, looking first to her, then to Fek. “I owe you one.”
“Nah, the bastards would have come for me soon enough!” Fek said happily.
“Please, try to be more careful,” Minnelil said, frowning at Fek. “You’re enough trouble without getting into fights.”
They had both completely ignored what I said.
I had meant it, put special emphasis on me owing them. What was wrong with people around here? I rubbed at my face hard. The wind rushed past the walkway, whistling and shrieking.
“Whoa, I have to go!” Fek shouted. “My next lecture is on the other side.”
Minnelil sighed as Fek started running, waving his hand at us in goodbye. “Typical. Such a gifted boy. We have to help him as well as we can.”
I glanced at her. “Why?”
“What why?” she said, looking after Fek and grimacing as he slid down a flight of icy stairs, arms swinging.
“What is he to you? You got put in the same room, but that doesn’t mean you’re responsible for him. Do they pay you to tutor him, too?”
“No, but… what?”
She was looking at me like I was insane. Asked her if snow was hot. “Forget it,” I said, turning around. “I’m going to go read a book.”
“Lina, wait,” she said, but I ignored her. The stairs were laced with ice, but I crushed the glistening sheet under my heels, stomping down hard on each step. The planks shuddered and rattled. I gritted my teeth, stomping harder so as not to hear if Minnelil tried to call after me.
My heart thundered in my chest. This place, these people, would kill me. Teachers throwing me into the center of attention, people sleeping in the same room, floating skulls offering good night kisses. I was boiling over. I half-wished I would run into Lombarte, so I could beat him to a pulp, or the other way around. Whatever. Anything to overpower the ache in my chest when Fek said don’t worry, Minnelil “having to” help him.
He would get himself killed, she would regret getting involved.
Goddamn idiots.
I slammed the door of the dorm closed as hard as I could behind me.
The pressure around my temples vanished, but I gagged as the invisible collar tightened itself around my neck. It had to be tighter than it had been yesterday. How fast was it going to get me? How soon would I need to get rid of it?
Read a book. I rummaged around the box the skeleton had brought me. The books were all thicker than each other, bound in leather. Back in Tenorsbridge, I could have eaten for a month just by selling these. And they had just handed them to me like it was nothing.
Scriptures on Death, a Treatise on the Principles of Nothing and the Cold was engraved on the cover of the book in black letters.
I had to admit it sounded more interesting than weeks and weeks of regurgitated gossip about the Janitors or who Astaroth Sulphurspew had been seen having coffee with. I flipped through the book, glancing at random pages.
I stopped. At the top of the page was a single large word, starting a new chapter. The word was Pressure.
The door opened, and the pressure flickered around my temples.
“Oh, hi!” Grit said, stepping in. “I didn’t see you at lunch. What are you reading?”
“What?” I asked. I snapped my head up, looking around in confusion.
“Scriptures? Ugh,” she said.
“Um, yeah,” I said. “Sorry, I was focusing.”
She leaned over me, looking over my shoulder. “Don’t tell me you’re into it, too? Fek always goes on about that book.”
I bristled at her hovering over me. The heat rolling off her body, the white hair hanging down to the table. I slid off the chair, leaving the book. “It talked about a thing that felt familiar.”
“Minnelil says it’s mostly bogus. I don’t get most of the chapters, so she’s probably right.” She grinned and walked to the chest at the end of her bed. “I came to pick up my notes for the next lecture. Jextor is talking about something, so it’s going to be at least as incomprehensible as that book.”
I dug out the schedule and looked at what Falar had planned for me next. “Great,” I said, groaning.
“You’re coming with?”
“Unfortunately.”
The wind howled outside the door. It screamed even louder than I remembered. “Is it really always like this?” I asked.
“Lately it’s been worse than usually,” Grit said, holding a hand before her face. The wind whipped her hair around her head. “The wind shouldn’t be able to get close to the walls, and it feels colder than it ever has.”
“Hmh,” I said. Didn’t know what else to say. I climbed after her, letting her lead the way. Maybe one day I would figure out how to get around the walkways and find the different rooms by myself, but I was grateful to follow her for now.
I was still thinking about what I had read from the Scriptures. The book was written like a bad poem, a drunk minstrel improvising ghost stories in the corner of a tavern. But underneath the hyperbolic language, the message made sense to me. Mana was the life force, running through the world. It made things even more alive, made fire burn hotter, water run faster. My face tingle.
What Fendribalis called Nothing, was the opposite. Lack of movement and vivaciousness. So still and cold, it caused other things to grind to a halt around it. Even time couldn’t keep going. The same nothing that had never existed, still didn’t, and never and always would.
When I had got that far in the book, Grit had interrupted me. I let my thoughts float freely as I walked after her, stepping on the icy stairs of the Academy. The pressure flowed all around me, making the air heavy.
I tested it, relaxing myself into into it. What I interpreted as pressure, could be the weight of nothing pressing down, stillness leaning on this world, on me.
“What are you thinking?” Grit asked.
I blinked and let out a long breath. “I have no idea. That book is messing with my brain.”
“Yeah, it does that. I finally finished reading it, so I guess I should try to get it over with on the next exam night. I’m not looking forward to it.”
“Oh, damn, right,” I said. Falar’s schedule had exams marked down for every Sunday. “What are those? I mean, I know what exams are, but what are they about, here?”
“It depends. Sometimes practical, sometimes written. You can mostly choose.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. But you’ll need enough credits each semester and to have passed some key challenges to move forward. They won’t let you take some of the more difficult and interesting classes otherwise.”
“Huh,” I said. “I guess it makes sense?”
Grit stopped to breathe after reaching the top of the stairs. We had finally reached another new lecture hall, almost up to the ceiling of the building. “Yeah, the advanced exams can be dangerous. Many people never move forward, even fewer graduate as fully-fledged necromancers. But even if you learn only channeling and some basic runes, it’s going to guarantee an easy life, outside.”
I stepped to stand next to her. People passed by us, walking in through the door. “They let people just hang around here and leave if they don’t feel like it anymore?”
“Sure. Everyone has to pay the tuition each year, so it’s less trouble for them if the same ones stay. And when they leave, there’s always a queue of people wanting in.”
“They are just too lazy to run this place properly,” I said, shaking my head.
“That might be it, to be fair. Come on, let’s go so we can get seats. Jextor’s lectures usually get full, for all the wrong reasons.”