by V. St. Clair
Aleric’s mother was better, but still not exactly the warm, loving type.
Not that I have much room to talk…look at what my mother became.
He shook the thought from his head. He tried not to think about his mother, and whether she was still alive or had passed on without him even knowing. After she tried to drown him, he and Torin had run away from their old life and never looked back, out of concern for his safety.
“Anything else noteworthy happen while you were home?” Asher prompted, regretting entering into this line of conversation at all. It was dead depressing for both of them.
“Not really…” Aleric said, though his body language gave up the lie. “Just more about my many inadequacies as compared to other people.”
That old blight must have been comparing him to me again, unfavorably.
Asher assumed that Cowen Frost used him to goad his son deliberately, precisely because he knew it was such an effective way of hurting him. It made Asher hate the old man even more.
“He only insults you because he’s a hateful man who is jealous because you’re magically awesome and he has no Foci, and because you’re built like a statue and he’s thin and wiry like me.”
Aleric brightened fractionally at that, appreciating the levity.
“That must be what it is,” he sighed. “Still, I wish he could find it in his barren, cold heart to throw a compliment my way every year or so…maybe on my birthday or something.”
Asher frowned consolingly and said, “Yeah, that would be nice. Hey, if you ever want to hear great things about yourself, ask literally anyone at Mizzenwald. Heck, my father would probably be thrilled to tell you how much more likeable you are than me.”
Aleric raised a skeptical eyebrow and said, “Your father has always been proud to have you as a son.”
Scowling, Asher said, “I think he’s training his pen of unclaimed familiars to attack me and eat me someday. He thinks I’m useless.”
His friend rolled his eyes and said, “He told me just last night that if I saw you before he did, that I was to tell you that you did good work in the arena against all those monsters, and that he was proud of you.”
Asher’s eyes widened in surprise at the unexpected praise, then he mentally cursed himself for feeling secretly pleased at the compliment from his father.
“When did you see him last night?”
“Before I went home; I ran into him while walking around the grounds. I don’t know why you have such a hard time getting along with Torin; he’s one of the most supportive fathers I know.”
Asher grimaced and reflected that it was a shame that Torin saved all of his sarcasm and impatience for his son so he could be pleasant to everyone else. If he was being honest with himself, he knew it was partly—or mostly—his fault for being obnoxious, the same reason why the Masters disliked him, but he still didn’t know what to do about it just yet.
“He thinks I’m an annoying teenager, and I think he meddles too much in my business at school,” Asher said neutrally. “Sometimes the Masters talk to him about me, about problems they have with me or arguments we’re embroiled in, and I find that incredibly unpleasant.”
Aleric spared him a grimace of sympathy and said, “I can imagine. I’d be furious if the Masters talked to my father about school business.”
Master Laurren was apparently a fast eater, because he stood up from the breakfast table and excused himself from the dining hall before most people had finished eating. Asher watched him go, eventually turning back to his porridge without any real interest in finishing it. He and Aleric both brooded silently over their own thoughts, even after other friends of theirs joined them at the table and tried to make conversation. After a few lackluster answers, the others gave up and continued talking amongst themselves.
“I’ll see you in class,” Asher told his friend, sparing a general wave for the others at their table and setting off in search of Master Laurren. He was itching to do something useful, anything to bring him out of this morning funk and give him something to look forward to today.
He arrived at the pentagonal foyer near the main entrance before realizing that he had absolutely no idea where this Master Laurren would be teaching, or where his office was located. He looked towards the eastern stairwell, mapping the school in his head.
Maybe the empty room near where Willow teaches Wands, though that’s not really big enough to be an office…or on the west end of the second floor by Scriptures?
There weren’t a huge number of empty classrooms left in the school, especially ones with offices nearby. Typically the Masters kept their personal spaces near their classrooms, to make their office hours more convenient and consolidate everything in one place, but maybe Laurren didn’t have that option.
Thankfully, Master Reede was walking through the Pentagon at that moment, his long blond hair pulled back in a knot behind his head today.
And people say I need a haircut, Asher smirked at the thought. Reede has longer hair than most women.
Asher had always appreciated the Master of Conjury’s dry humor, though most students found it intimidating, for some reason unable to tell when he was joking and when he was serious.
“Master Reede,” Asher hailed him, getting his attention just before he could exit the school to wherever he was headed.
“What horrible thing have I done to draw your attention, Masters?” he greeted Asher drily—with Reede, how else?—looking casually amused.
“More a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he explained with a smile. “I was wondering if you could tell me where Laurren’s office is located. I wanted to talk to him.”
“Ah,” for some reason Master Reede brightened as he said this, getting an almost evil smile as he asked, “Going to see if he’s worth your time?”
Since that was exactly what Asher was planning to do, he didn’t have a sarcastic retort ready.
I’ve been around these people too long…they know me too well.
He settled on the truth.
“That was my plan, yes.”
“Excellent,” Reede perked up, pointing behind Asher towards the rear exit to the school, which led to Prisms, Elixirs, and Conjury. “He’ll be teaching in the basement.”
Asher’s eyes widened.
“The basement?” he asked with interest. “We have a basement here?”
The Master of Conjury laughed and said, “Of course we do, it just hasn’t been used in years. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He began walking towards the northern hallway, and Asher followed, surprised by his helpfulness.
“I can’t believe you all couldn’t find him space in the castle itself. It’s got seven floors for crying out loud—and sure, most of them are dormitories—but you can’t tell me there aren’t two decent-sized empty rooms around here somewhere.”
Reede smirked and said, “He asked to be in the basements, actually.”
“Oh?” Asher asked with real interest. “He’s the creepy, dead-things-in-jars, windowless-office type?”
“Not at all,” the Master explained after sparing him a bemused glance. “He has instruments and experiments that have a minor chance of triggering a magical explosion, and the insulation provided by the surrounding earth will help absorb the impact of such an event without bringing down the school.”
I must study with that man, Asher decided instantly. Anyone who was playing with things that might blow up part of the school was someone worth knowing. Shame, that Aleric was missing out.
They exited the school near the courtyard where Master Reede taught Conjury and turned left instead. Asher immediately noticed the cellar doors attached to the main building, and felt like an idiot for never registering what they were before now.
“There aren’t many rooms for you to get lost in down there, so this is where I leave you,” Reede explained, stopping in place and folding his arms across his chest as though preparing to wait for Asher to return.
“Thanks, sir, though
I’m a little surprised at you being so helpful,” he admitted. “Normally you’d point me in the wrong direction on purpose, or tell me he’s in the attic or something, just for kicks.”
“Oh, I have a particular interest in your conversation with Laurren,” Reede said cryptically.
Surprised, Asher asked, “Why is that?”
“I’ve got a bet going with some of the others,” he explained smugly. “I don’t think you’ll last ten minutes with Laurren; Sark things you won’t last five. Willow gives you slightly better odds…”
“There is something seriously wrong with all of you,” Asher interrupted in a flat tone, pursing his lips in annoyance and opening the doors of the cellar without further ado.
“We’ll soon find out,” Reede’s voice trailed off after him as he descended into the darkness.
It wasn’t until the doors shut behind him that Asher realized it wasn’t pitch-black on the stairwell headed downwards; little mage-lights dotted the walls along the way to prevent him from falling. It still felt a little eerie being down here all by himself in the bowels of the school.
Thinking on what Reede had just told him, Asher continued downwards.
The Masters need to find a better hobby than making bets about students.
He wondered why they thought he’d have a hard time with Master Laurren. Kilgore had obviously told them that Asher would be approaching the man, considering enrollment in his class. Perhaps the others had already warned Master Laurren about him and set him up for failure from the start…he would certainly have some unpleasant things to say to them if that was the case.
I deserve the chance to mess things up for myself. It’s not fair for the others to do it for me.
At the bottom of the stairs the floor leveled out to reveal a single hallway that dead-ended into a large classroom. There was one closed door on both walls between Asher and the room at the end.
Maybe Laurren’s just a really unfriendly person, or he’s stone-serious and doesn’t understand sarcasm, so the other Masters just assume that we won’t get along…
That was certainly a possibility, though most of the Masters had that odd quality about them that enabled them to appreciate sarcasm as an art form. Well, except maybe Sark, who Asher firmly believed excelled at nothing but having the baldest, shiniest head in all of Mizzenwald. The others were simply annoyed by Asher, or tolerably amused at best. Sark might actually hate him.
Asher was at the end of the hall, peeking into the well-lit classroom and admiring the oddness of it. The desks and chairs were all shoved up against the walls, leaving most of the floor space clear. In the center of the room was an actual fire pit, built right into the stone floor, and Asher couldn’t see a flue anywhere in sight.
If he lights a fire down here, everyone will asphyxiate before they have the chance to blow up…
Unless he had some way of magically removing the smoke? It was one of many things Asher intended to learn from the man, becoming more convinced with each passing minute that this was definitely a class he needed to be a part of.
Laurren himself was at the opposite end of the room, arranging a series of magical instruments that looked expensive, few of which Asher had ever seen before. Wondering if he would be annoyed by the interruption, Asher raised his hand and knocked on the open door to announce his presence.
Master Laurren turned to look at him with those strangely-colored eyes and said, “Ah, you must be Asher.”
Stunned that the man already knew his name, he blurted out, “The others warned you I was coming, I see.”
“No, they didn’t,” Laurren said lightly, studying Asher’s features carefully as though looking for something in particular.
“Fine, then they told you all about the bad little boy who doesn’t follow the rules or suck up to them like everyone else,” Asher said dismissively, scowling.
“No one has said a word to me about you in particular,” he assured him, still in that mild-mannered tone.
Confused, Asher raised an eyebrow and said, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why? Are you so important that everyone must be talking about you at all times?” Master Laurren asked with genuine interest.
Well, he definitely understands sarcasm…
“That’s not what I meant,” Asher explained, folding his arms in front of him. “I mean that there’s no way you can know who I am if no one told you about me.”
“Then it must have been a lucky guess,” Laurren said with a faint smile, turning back to his work and balancing an Absorber on its end in the corner.
Mildly annoyed by the non-answer, but intrigued in spite of himself, Asher said, “Fine, then how did you know who I was before we’d ever been introduced?”
“You’ve just declared that it’s impossible for me to have any information about you, so it must be true.”
Asher scowled, though the man wasn’t looking at him and couldn’t see it.
“I don’t like when people skirt around answers. You might think it makes you look enigmatic and witty, but really it’s just a pain in the rear end.”
Master Laurren was still smiling as he turned so that Asher could see him in profile.
“I don’t think I really need help in looking strange,” he admitted, motioning towards his eyes as though it was possible Asher hadn’t noticed the color by now.
“Did you do that to yourself on purpose?” Asher blurted out, trying to figure out whether he liked or hated this new Master.
“The eyes?” Laurren asked, not sounding at all offended by the question. “No, sadly, it is the result of an experiment gone wrong.”
This was surprising, because for something to go so badly wrong that it changed his eye color to that unnatural hue, it should have also probably killed him, or at least crippled him magically.
“What happened?”
“That’s a very personal question,” the Master answered, considering Asher once more with his scrutinizing stare.
“Okay then, what was your major in school? Or is that too offensive to answer as well?”
Master Laurren smiled benignly and said, “Prisms, like yourself.”
Stunned at finding another natural prism-user at Mizzenwald, it took Asher a moment to notice the obvious.
“But you aren’t wearing a circlet,” he pointed out when he cottoned onto it.
“That is correct,” he confirmed pleasantly.
Does this man ever explain himself properly?
“Why aren’t you wearing a circlet?” he tried again, annoyed.
“Does it matter?”
Asher opened his mouth to answer but closed it upon reconsidering. This man was testing him in some way, testing to see if he was worthy of his time, the same reason that Asher had come down here in the first place.
“How did you know who I was when I knocked on the door?” he changed tracks abruptly.
Laurren smiled, so this must have been the right thing to do.
“Someone must have told me.”
“You said they didn’t,” Asher countered.
“I must have been lying.”
“No, you weren’t,” he insisted flatly, beginning to understand the game.
Master Laurren continued to smile in faint amusement and said, “Minutes ago, you said it was impossible for me to know who you were if no one told me about you.”
“I changed my mind,” Asher said bluntly.
The man teaches Abnormal Magic, and I walk in here making absolute statements. He’s been trying to get me to think abstractly and open my mind to new possibilities since I walked in the door.
“The magic around this school whispered your name when I arrived. They said you would be the first student I encountered.”
Asher had absolutely no idea what to say to this alarming announcement, delivered in such an even tone of voice.
“Okay…now you might be lying,” he said at last.
“Why is that?”
“Because you just claimed
that ambient magic somehow speaks to you, and that it told you we would meet.”
“Didn’t we?”
Asher frowned, not sure what to make of this development. It was true that the man knew who he was at first sight, and unless he was lying about someone else warning him about Asher in advance, there weren’t a lot of ways to explain his prescience…
“Very few people can claim a direct communication with the Magic—capital M—, even fewer that can interpret it directly into translatable words and ideas.”
Master Laurren nodded and said, “The odds are astronomically against it, in fact. I believe there have only been two documented cases in the last century of such a thing.”
“And yet you claim such an enviable link?”
It seemed absolutely insane, but Asher forced himself to consider the possibility. If the man was truly a prism-user by nature, that meant his mind danced that careful line between genius and insanity to begin with, which would naturally make him more sensitive to magic. Add that to his weird aura, the unnatural eyes, and an experiment gone wrong…
“Did you gain this extraordinary ability around the same time you damaged your eyes?” he asked carefully.
“As it happens, I did,” Master Laurren confirmed, looking pleased with his uptake.
“Okay, so the Magic here said we’d meet. If I believe what you’re telling me, then answer me this: does the Magic sound like words in your head when it speaks to you, or do you hear the words audibly, or how does that whole communication thing work?”
Laurren pursed his lips thoughtfully and said, “It’s hard to explain. I don’t hear it audibly, or even as real words. It’s more…thoughts and ideas that appear in my mind, and I see things and understand things—or fragments of it, usually—for no rational reason.”
Asher frowned and considered this. For some reason he believed the man, though he had no idea why. The vague explanation was somehow more convincing than if he had given a definitive answer.
“Is it happening all the time, or only occasionally?”
“No, thankfully, or it would be a nightmare inside my head,” Laurren made a face at the thought. “In fact, it’s quite rare that the Magic feels the need to contact me directly. It usually only happens when something very important is going on.”
