Book 4 Chapter 45: The Next Generation

++Vornholt is mad. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she definitely lived up to her reputation as a magician. I’m not saying she lacks talent. That just doesn’t make her any less of a nutter.++

- A remark overheard from a student of the Vornholt Institute.

For the first month of the Vornholt Institute’s activity, there was an endless influx of students. It was already admitted to full capacity right away, but we wasted no time in expanding it to accommodate the newly risen talent pool as yet more letters came in requesting entry. There would be a point where it was not worth filling our ranks out even more, but only when we ran out of true geniuses.

Now that the Institute was open, and its education was being judged on its own merit, we had new Professors applying to join and bolster our staff, making it all the easier to meet an ever-growing strain. I would quite like to have continued going until we boasted half again, or even double the number of students than was standard, hoarding as much of Garamon’s magical prodigies as we could.

Unfortunately, this growth began to slow within two weeks, and by the end of the Institute’s first month spent open it had become little more than a trickle.

I was not expecting this, and the bafflement only made it all sting more. I stormed over to Bogern’s office without delay to confront him about the fact.

“You are failing at your task,” I told him angrily. “Why are students no longer applying for this Institute? What did you do?”

I could tell the words enraged him, but he kept his temper carefully hidden. It was rather nice to be powerful enough that other people had to tiptoe around me.

“This has nothing to do with me,” he said evenly. “But I do have an idea of what’s causing it. You’re not going to like it.”

I bit my tongue and stayed silent, gesturing for him to speak.

“Do you know what the Winzorth Institute has that we don’t?” he asked.

“What?”

“Everything, more or less. We have the vague promise of more open magical education and innovation, and the speeches and marketing have gone down well, but to be frank that sort of messaging works best on the ignorant masses, not potential magicians. We have one singular advantage over the Winzorth Institute. One.”

“Me,” I guessed.

“You,” he confirmed. “The great Isabel Vornholt, a girl so talented her magical power is greater than any two other prodigies put together when you equalise for age. But you’ve not been showing up here since opening day. See where I’m going with this?”

I had to stop myself from grinding my teeth. Harder than steel though they were, they could still be eroded by my own bite strength and enamel.

“I do,” I said at last. “You wish to use me as some form of advertisement.”

“You can phrase it like that if you want,” he sighed. “Look, you’re a rational person. Nobody will deny that. I know you can see the logic here. Do you really think we’ll be competing with the Winzorth Institute if we don’t leverage your reputation?”

The trouble with being surrounded by magicians, I had found, was that they always had a very good argument to back up their annoying and unpleasant suggestions.

“We cannot just parade me around lessons though,” I noted. “What are you…oh.”

I understood a moment before he grinned and told me. “How prepared are you to give your first lesson?” he asked.

***

I do not like teaching. Many are surprised to hear this, given how many apprentices I have taken on over the millennia. The fact is that this has always been a necessary evil for me.

Magic is the most powerful, enlightening and significant thing any human can possibly do. The study of magic is the act of making oneself better. More intelligent, more of an agent in the cosmos. In short, more of a human.

This is what forces my hand in educating others. I could never forgive myself if I let my extraordinary knowledge and genius remain trapped in my own head without sharing it, and yet the act of sharing it is one of the least pleasant things I can think of. Other people are tedious enough at the best of times, but when I am trying to make them understand the arcane?

They are all just so…slow.

And this class was not looking any more promising than most. I entered the lecture hall at the head of it, finding that the students had already been assembled. They were all first-years, mostly fourteen or fifteen. Not all would have been to an Institute just yet, but I knew that practically each one had a strong foundational training in magic already. Most came from prominent magician families, after all, and the few nobles or middle-class students had parents who would have forked over any sum to capitalise on their talents from as early as possible.

No doubt they were an impressive sight for most. Three rows of them, each row holding a score, each seated in platformed benches made from carved ebony and decorated with silver filigree. They sat beneath great murals depicting the most prominent magicians of history and gazed ahead with an intense focus, notebooks out and half of them leaning forwards like wild dogs preparing to pounce on a kill.

The author posts this chapter on www., while this page reproduces it without their approval.

Well, that was the right attitude at least. No magician should ever be less than fanatical about acquiring more knowledge.

“I am Isabel Vornholt,” I declared as I took my position at the front. “I know that all of you know who I am, so I will not bother explaining it in detail. I am here to do my best in educating all of you on the arcane, and seeing if I cannot fill in the gaping intellectual pits that are your shrivelled brains. Are there any questions?”

As is so often the case when dealing with the chronically stupid, these imbeciles decided to interpret my basic observation of fact as an insult. I saw all of them stiffen and lean back, lips curling and hands shaking with upset. None dared to say anything of course—oh the joys of power.

“Good,” I nodded. “We will be performing this lecture on casting.” I started pacing. “Each of you is, I hope, familiar with the basics of binding and weaving mana?”

It was not a rhetorical question, I truly was concerned. Fortunately none of them revealed an even greater ineptitude than I had already known to fear.

“Good. We will skip the very basics then. Moving onto…I shall call it; ‘intermediate advancement’, observe the following spell.”

I could have made the required spell matrix faster than a human’s reaction time. Oddly enough my own improved reflexes had not actually made me any faster with magic, nor even more precise. The senses of my physical body were simply too dull and slow to contribute at all to so fine a craft as that.

Fortunately, I did not need inhuman reflexes to work this matrix up in mere moments. A magic missile formed to hover in the air before me, one layer hard and unyielding aether, the one below it a blend of raw mana so volatile that it detonated like ten times its volume of dynamite upon exposure to the air. The aether shell was in place to ensure it remained suspended in a vacuum before impact.

“Everyone shield your eyes with a filter no less intense than you would use to stare directly at the sun,” I told the room. A moment passed and they had all done it. Not quite as slow as I was fearing, good.

With the safety procedure seen to, I conjured up two more patches of aether; one ten paces ahead of me, the other right in front of my pupils in a great plane. The latter was not nearly as durable, but transparent enough to grant them a clear view.

I threw my magic missile at the first block of aether and watched as it exploded. Raw explosive materials are rather inefficient at destroying hard targets of course, but I had only made this aether with a fraction of its potential strength. It came apart into a spray of debris that tore through the room at what I calculated to be several hundred miles per hour.

Privately, I was satisfied to find my new eyes tracking several of the chunks without too much effort, though given the distance they were flying that was not so surprising. Once it had all finished breaking against walls, ceiling and barrier, I dismissed the remaining aether and turned to the class.

“Now,” I told them all. “How did I do that?”

They looked at me blankly, and I found myself getting annoyed.

“Magic is about more than just memorising specific spells and combinations of power. It is about looking at the world and understanding it. If none of you can see a simple spell like that and tell me how it was done, then none of you understand the arcane.”

That got a bit more engagement, and I was soon pelted with possible explanations. I shot them all down, one after another.

“Wrong,” I sighed, as one boy suggested that I had deliberately pumped kinetic energy into liquid aether to produce a vapour-explosion.

“Wrong,” I growled, as another asked whether I had compressed a mass of springy aether to release its kinetic energy when the shell broke.

“WRONG!” I yelled, as one idiot dared to suggest that I had hidden a bundle of dynamite in the shell.

“Clearly none of you understand the first thing about magic,” I sighed. “Listen carefully.” And I told them, explaining just what happened when a person made improperly-formed aether, how unstable the stuff could be, and how, with some careful measuring and practice, this instability could be maximized to make the natural deterioration happen so fast as to essentially turn the substance into a mana-based explosive compound that would fling countless megajoules of energy into the world in a scant handful of milliseconds.

And then I gazed at the mix of annoyance and uncomprehension, and felt myself close to giving up.

“This is not that complex!” I snapped. “It is simple magical theory.”

“Yeah,” one of the students at the front snapped back, a girl to my surprise. “And we’d be learning simple magical theory in any other of the world’s Institutes. This one is supposed to be special, more practical, expanding frontiers and all that. And apparently the world’s greatest prodigy is just doing what everyone else does?”

I saw nods of agreements, heard murmurs, and felt acid rising in the back of my throat as the irritation shot through me.

I inhaled, exhaled, cooled myself.

“You are all idiots,” I said simply. The room exploded with protests and roars—perhaps it was my age or my gender, but something about me left these pupils far more willing to lose their tempers than I would have expected given the disparity in our stations. I weathered the abuse and waited for them all to run out of steam.

“You are all idiots,” I repeated. “Because you claim to want to pioneer magical theory but then insist on avoiding all the basic studies that will allow you to do so. You seem to think the difference between the Vornholt Institute and the Winzorth Institute is that what we do is more ‘fun’, is that right?”

I swept my gaze around the room, and was satisfied to see how embarrassed most of the students suddenly seemed.

“You are correct in that this will not be all fun and games,” I continued. “But do not think that it is going to be anything like the Winzorth Institute either. I meant every word when I promised to expand the study of magic. In fact…” I hesitated, finding even myself uncertain about this next leap. “...In fact, our next study shall be on divine magic.”

“That’s just a waste of time!” someone yelled. “Divine magic is the stuff of…well, the Gods.”

“And who told you that?” I asked him, then addressed the whole room. “A thousand years ago, flight was the stuff of the Gods. A thousand years before that, magic itself was unpredictable and unfathomable. The history of magic has been an endless struggle on the part of humanity against things the whole world told us we cannot possibly master. Are any of you cowardly enough to sit still and assume that this most recent wall is the one that will prove truly unassailable?”

Somewhere along the way I had stopped being angry and started to become hurt. Fearful, even, at watching these children squander their potential just because they were told to, of falling into the same trap as all the adults who had taught them.

But to my relief, I saw that most of the class were now looking thoughtful at my words.

“Now then,” I said at last. “Since I finally seem to have all of your attention and interest, let us look into the nature of what I did to make that mana so volatile…and why it does not actually work with divine magic.”