Chapter 7: Dinner and first

  Orientation ended with the same quiet authority with which it had begun. The principal stepped off the dais without fanfare, and the hall gradually dissolved into the kind of noise that only a few hundred teenagers, freshly released from formal sitting, could make. Voices rose as the older students began to catch up with each other.

  Theo remained seated for a moment longer than everyone else.

  He sat with his hands folded in his lap and watched the tide of students pour out through the hall's many exits. He had found, over the course of his sixteen years, that waiting for a crowd to thin was almost always more efficient than joining it. Even if it technically wasn’t more efficient, it was certainly more enjoyable than trying to shove his way out of the crowd.

  When the stream of people had thinned to a manageable density, Theo stood and walked out behind the stragglers.

  A warden stationed near the eastern exit was directing many of the lost first-years towards the cafeteria. Theo followed the direction of the pointed finger and the increasingly loud noise that came from deeper in the keep.

  He smelled the cafeteria before he saw it.

  The scent hit him at the end of a long corridor, roasted bread, rosemary, and beneath it all a warm undercurrent of stewed meat that reminded him, sharply and without warning, of his mother's kitchen on a cold evening. Realizing that he had stopped, Theo resumed walking towards the cafeteria. He had not, he realized, eaten anything since his mother's cinnamon rolls that morning. That felt like it had happened in a different life.

  The cafeteria, when he finally stepped into it, was enormous.

  The word that came to Theo's mind was arena, though that felt slightly dramatic. Long tables carved from the same dark stone as the rest of the keep filled the floor in orderly rows that were rapidly becoming more chaotic as many of the first-years were struggling to decide where to sit. The ceiling, which looked like a moving water color painting of the night sky, vaulted overhead, supported by thick opalescent pillars that faded into the deep blue of the ceiling. Lanterns floated at varying heights above the tables, casting warm amber light that made the stone feel much more inviting. Along the far wall, behind a long counter made of smooth pale quartz, food was being served.

  The extravagance aside, noise was what Theo noticed most.

  It was an extraordinary noise. Not the quiet, cultivated kind of noise you might expect from an institution of supposed intellectual refinement. It was the robust, cheerful, slightly dangerous noise of several hundred hungry adolescents released into proximity with free food. Voices overlapped. Something metal clattered on stone and multiple people began to clap. A group near the window appeared to be arguing about the wetness of water and conducted it entirely through the medium of pointing at bread rolls.

  "Right," Theo said to no one in particular and stepped inside.

  He joined the queue for food, which moved with surprising efficiency given its length. The counter was staffed by very professional looking chefs each working on some variety of a dish.

  When Theo reached the front of the line, he was presented with more choices than he had anticipated. There was a thick vegetable soup with bread rolls still steaming from the oven, a roasted bird of some variety over herbed root vegetables, something that looked alarmingly like an omelette but was the size of a dinner plate, a selection of cold foods that Theo couldn't immediately identify, and a dessert station at the end that was drawing more attention than was probably warranted.

  He ended up taking the soup, two bread rolls, and the roasted bird, probably because he was hungry enough that sensible portioning felt less important than it usually did.

  Finding a seat was its own challenge. The tables were filling quickly. Theo swept his gaze across the room and identified, near the wall furthest from the main entrance, a table that had the least amount of people sitting at it. He navigated toward it, excused himself past two students who were conducting their conversation at a volume normally reserved for outdoor sporting events, and settled into a seat near the end of a table where only two other people were currently sitting.

  One of them glanced up when he sat.

  She was a girl about his age, dark-skinned with close-cropped hair and the kind of alert expression that suggested she was cataloguing everything around her without appearing to do so. She had already finished her soup and was chewing thoughtfully on a chunk of bread. A leather notebook sat open beside her plate with notes written in a hand so small that Theo couldn't read them from where he was sitting.

  The other person, seated across from her, was a boy with the sort of coloring that suggested he came from somewhere significantly further north than Theo's forest. He was pale and golden haired with striking green eyes that seemed cut from emerald but had the general air of someone who had arrived at the cafeteria primarily for the food and had not yet formed opinions about anything else. He was eating an omelette. It was a very large omelet. It was a massive omelet.

  Neither of them said anything to Theo as he sat down and instead just nodded.

  Theo found this refreshing and began to eat his soup.

  He was approximately four spoonfuls in when a tray landed on the table with a crash that rattled his bowl and sent a small wave of soup toward the rim. Theo looked up.

  The person who had set down the tray with what Theo assumed was enthusiasm and not malice was a boy about his height dressed in very finely embroidered robes and had dark curly hair that was currently escaping in several directions from what appeared to have once been an attempt at taming it. He had a broad grin and the energy of someone who had not found orientation the least bit exciting.

  "Is this the quiet corner?" the boy said, looking around like a dog on zoomies. And looking at Theo he said, "Do you mind if I sit here? I tried sitting down at a larger table. But turns out it was full of older students and they yelled at me to leave and then I tried to sit down at a different table but it was also full of upperclassmen so now I’m here."

  "It's a communal table," Theo said.

  "Brilliant," the boy said, and sat. "Greg," he added, pointing at himself. "Greg Callow. I'm from Callowhaven. Which is a city, in case you've never heard of it, which most people haven't, which is one of the reasons I wanted to leave. The other reasons are too numerous to count and possibly too embarrassing. What's your name?"

  "Theo," Theo said.

  "Just Theo?"

  "Theodore, but I wouldn't recommend it."

  "Theo it is." Greg looked around the table. "And you two?"

  The girl with the notebook looked up briefly. "Sable," she said, and returned to her notes despite not having attended a class yet.

  The northern-looking boy swallowed a portion of the omelette. "Sven," he said. "Sven Jansen."

  Greg looked satisfied with this inventory and began eating with the same gusto he seemed to apply to everything. For a few minutes, the four of them ate in a silence that was, relative to the rest of the cafeteria, almost peaceful.

  It didn't last, of course.

  "What do you think the first class is going to be like?" Greg asked, directing this at the table generally. "Because I heard from one of the second years at the dessert station that the first semester is basically all mana control. Which makes sense, obviously, you can't do anything with mana until you can actually use it, but I keep wondering how they're going to teach it. Like, mana is supposed to be in us, right? I can’t feel it but i guess you have to feel it first, and everyone feels it differently, so how do they start teaching how to move it"

  "They don't," Sable said, without looking up.

  "They don't standardize it?"

  "Not according to the textbook." She tapped her notebook with her pen. "The leading guide on mana instruction holds that the primary task is to meditate and feel the mana inside. Only then do they introduce practicing methods to move it around"

  Theo looked at her with new attention. "Where did you read that?"

  "The Fundamentals of Mana Perception, with excerpts from Misophonia.”

  Theo blinked. “”From who?"

  Sable finally looked up fully. It was the first time she had given any of them her complete attention. "Surely you’ve read something by Misophonia? Most of his works have been lost but he’s written a lot on mana control and Ideals. So if you’ve read anything about that then they probably used him a little."

  "I have, I had to read a book by him for my Exam," Theo said. Then, because it seemed relevant, "During the Exam."

  There was a short pause.

  "During the Exam," Sable repeated.

  "It was a quest," Theo said, and because the explanation felt insufficient, "I didn't really have a choice."

  Sable looked at him for another moment, then wrote something in her notebook. "Interesting," she said.

  Greg was looking back and forth between them. "I have no idea what any of that means but it sounds impressive." He pointed his fork at Theo. "So, where are you from?”

  "I'm just from the forest in the outer rings," Theo said honestly.

  “Nice,” Sven observed, while eating more omelette. It was the most he had said so far, and it was delivered with the same mild equanimity that seemed to characterize his entire personality.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Theo had no particular response to that, so he ate his bread roll instead.

  Dinner continued. Around them, the cafeteria noise gradually shifted in character as the initial frenzy of hunger was addressed and the room settled into the longer, more leisurely noise of people who had eaten and were now being social. At some point near the end of the meal, the dessert station was declared open, and a significant portion of the room mobilized in its direction with a speed that suggested this had been the event the evening was building toward. There were small tarts with some kind of berry filling, a custard in individual pots, and something layered and golden that Theo couldn't identify from a distance but that smelled excellent.

  When he finally made it through the line he collected a berry tart and walked back to his table.

  Greg was still talking. Sable was still occasionally correcting him or adding clarifications while maintaining focus on her notes. Sven had obtained a dessert by some process Theo had not observed and appeared entirely content. The noise was still loud, still constant, still nothing like the forest or the library he had grown up in. But it was already becoming more and more familiar to him.

  He ate his tart and said his goodbyes before he began to walk back to his room.

  The notification came while he was getting ready for bed.

  [SCHEDULE ASSIGNED: FIRST YEAR THEORETICAL TRACK]

  [MANA AND MAGE FUNDAMENTALS I - ROOM 148, FLOOR ONE, INSTRUCTOR: PROFESSOR LOGUS, TIME: EIGHTH MORNING BELL]

  [HISTORY OF MAGIC I - ROOM 143, FLOOR ONE, INSTRUCTOR: PROFESSOR CRAYTON, TIME: FIRST BELL]

  Theo stared at it for a moment before setting an alarm in time so he would have enough time for a healthy breakfast

  He slept better than he expected.

  The alarm for his room, Theo discovered, was not obnoxious at all but a sound more like a low harmonic tone that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. It wasn't unpleasant. It was, in fact, the most reasonable way anyone had ever told him to wake up, and he was grateful for it.

  He dressed, oriented himself using the map on the system, and made his way to the cafeteria to eat and made it to class with approximately four minutes to spare.

  The class was not what Theo had expected from a classroom in a mage school built inside a dungeon. He had been expecting, he supposed, something dramatic. Dramatic seemed to be the operating aesthetic for most of what he had seen so far.

  Instead, it was a quiet, slightly oval room with somewhat high ceilings and warm light. The stone walls were smooth, free of the usual carved intricacies, and faintly warm to the touch in a way that suggested something running through them. The seats were arranged in a loose arc facing a central space where Theo assumed the professor would be lecturing if it weren’t for the mediation mats lying around. A board seemingly made of the same material as the walls of the room occupied one wall, with only the professor's name written down. Professor Logus. The room held about twenty students when Theo arrived, a number that grew to what he estimated was twentyeight by the time the last student rushed in.

  He chose a seat in the back of the arc. Not the front, because the front was too visible. But the back so that no one was behind him.

  Greg arrived two minutes after him and dropped into the adjacent seat with the confidence of someone who had already decided they were friends. Sable was next to him and was already seated and had been since before Theo arrived. Sven came in with thirty seconds to spare and found a seat on the other end of the arc without appearing hurried about it.

  Professor Logus entered exactly at the start of class.

  She was a compact woman with a precise gray bun that had no stray hairs and the kind of face that seemed both sharp and soft at the same time. She wore robes of the school's deep blue, though hers were unembellished in a way that felt like a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. She carried nothing. No papers. No books. She walked to the center of the room's open space and stood there, and the room went quiet without her doing anything to produce that effect.

  “Everyone come and sit at a mat.”

  When everyone had shuffled down from their seats she continued.

  "We are not learning theory of mana propagation, mana compression, or mana architecture today. We are not learning the history of any school of magic, the categorical differences between elemental and unattuned mana, or the correct way to perform a spell. That is all coming. None of it is coming today, or this week."

  Someone near the back shifted slightly. Professor Logus did not look at them.

  "What we are doing, for the first semester of your education here, is considerably simpler and considerably harder than any of that. You are going to learn to feel mana without reaching for it. You are going to learn to hold it without gripping it. And then you are going to learn to let it do what you ask of it rather than what you command it to do." She paused. "The distinction between asking and commanding will become clear to most of you within the first week. For those of you to whom it doesn't become clear, we will address that individually. I hope I won’t have to seek you out."

  She moved to one end of the room and began to walk its length slowly, looking at students without stopping.

  "Your aptitudes are on file," she said. "I have reviewed them. I will not be sharing them or discussing them in a group setting. What I will say is that aptitudes are, in my professional experience, one of the least interesting things about any student. Aptitudes tell you where you are. They say very little about where you'll end up. What matters in this room, for this semester, is your capacity for patience." She stopped briefly. "Most of you have less of it than you think."

  Theo found this, privately, reassuring. Patience was something he had considerable practice with, primarily because he had grown up in a forest with limited entertainment options. He hoped he wasn’t fooling himself though.

  "We'll start with awareness," Professor Logus said. "Close your eyes if it helps. Some of you will find it does. Some of you will find it too distracting."

  The room settled. Most people closed their eyes. Theo did, and then opened them slightly, because fully closed felt too removed, and he wanted to observe. He settled on the sort of half-focus where he could see the room but wasn't really looking at it.

  "Mana is already present in your body," the professor said. "It has been since before you took your entrance exam. It moves through you the way blood does, except you've never been taught to notice it. What I want you to do now is not reach for it. But to think of it less like a tool you're picking up and more like a muscle you're only now choosing to pay attention to." She paused. "Start there."

  The room was very quiet.

  Theo sat with the instruction. He thought, as he sometimes did when trying to think about nothing, of the mornings in his forest, which were better for this exercise than almost anything else in his experience. The stillness before his siblings woke up. The light piercing through the trees. He thought of the book, and the library, and the odd peace he had felt in his examscape. And somewhere in the vicinity of that memory, under it rather than above it, he felt something.

  It was not dramatic. It was not a surge of power or a sudden illumination. It was more like noticing warmth from a fire that had been burning for some time in an adjacent room. Present. Quiet. Not his to control yet, but unambiguously there.

  He exhaled slowly.

  A few seats away, someone made a small, startled sound.

  "Don't grab it," Professor Logus said immediately, as though she had been watching for exactly this. "Whatever you found, just look at it. Let it know you can see it. That's enough for now."

  The class continued for another hour. It was, externally, among the quietest hours Theo had ever spent in a room with twenty-eight other people. Internally, he suspected, it was among the busiest. Professor Logus moved through the arc periodically, stopping to offer a quiet correction here, a redirecting question there. At one point, she spent several minutes with a student near the end of the arc who appeared to be becoming frustrated, speaking to them in tones too low for the rest of the class to hear.

  Roughly three-quarters through the class period, she stopped in the center of the arc and said, "Before we close, I want to address something related to what we're going to be building towards, which is ideal selection."

  The room's attention, which had been directed inward, immediately turned towards her.

  "You will all choose your main ideal before the end of first semester. Some of you will know what you want before the semester ends. Some of you won't know until the last possible moment, and that is not a failing. What I want to address now is that the theoretical track exists precisely because ideal selection done correctly requires self-knowledge, and self-knowledge, as it turns out, requires time."

  She looked at a student near the front who had his arm stretched so much that it looked taffy. "Mr. Hest?."

  The student in question straightened. He was a lean boy and his robes were perfectly cut. His expression was of someone who had made a decision and wanted confirmation of it.

  "I already know my ideal," Hest said.

  The room was quiet in a new way.

  "Do you," Professor Logus said.

  "Yes," he said. "I’m going to choose Precision. My family has three generations of enchanters, all using precision."

  Logus said calmly. "Yes. I've met them." She walked toward him until she was standing in the open space directly before his seat. "What does precision mean to you, Mr. Hest? Not what it means for your future work, but you. What does it mean when it describes a life?"

  He opened his mouth. Closed it. He had, Theo thought, prepared for her to just accept his statement at once.

  "Take your time," Logus said, without impatience.

  "It means," Hest said slowly, "doing things correctly. Not allowing for error where error is avoidable. Getting things right."

  "Getting them right for whom?"

  Another pause. Longer this time. "For… my work."

  "Is the work for you, or are you for the work?"

  The silence in the room had taken on a particular texture. Theo noticed that even Greg had stopped fidgeting.

  "I don’t really think of it as work, I’ve loved watching my parents work their art and their art demands precision, but it doesn’t just pertain to their work. My household runs on it. I’m fairly certain my mother counts the grains of oatmeal before she makes it. Living like that is not difficult at all for me" Hest confidently.

  "That," Logus said quietly, "was a surprisingly good answer. I won’t stop you from choosing it at the end of this week if you so wish. That is when we will be having those I’ve deemed ready to choose, select their ideal.”

  He looked at her. He was quiet for a long enough stretch that Theo began to wonder if he was going to decline.

  “Alright”

  Professor Logus nodded and said,” meet me after class so we can discuss what to do.”

  "For your homework this week," Logus said, moving back to the center of the room with the ease of someone who had concluded a detour and was returning to the main path, "I want each of you to practice mana awareness twice a day. Morning and evening. Fifteen minutes each. Do not try to move it. Do not try to use it. Find it and observe it. If you can't find it, note what's getting in the way. Come to the next class with an observation and a page on what you want your ideal to be."

  She looked around the arc one final time.

  "That's all. Class dismissed."

  The room began to shuffle itself into an exit configuration with the inevitable noise that accompanied any group of humans reengaging with movement after a period of enforced stillness. Theo stayed seated for a moment, as was his habit and waited for the crowd to thin.

  He had found it. Whatever it was, the warmth in the adjacent room, the thing that wasn't quite sound but wasn't sound. He hadn’t expected mana to feel so familiar.

  He thought about Hest. About ideals. About the instruction not to choose yet. He wondered what he should choose. Perhaps knowledge, something to do with books. Afterall, his examscape was a library.

  He thought about the library in the examscape. The way it had felt, before he had known what it was, like returning to a place he had never actually left.

  "That was good," Greg said, appearing beside him, standing and collecting his things with an energy that had somehow not diminished over the course of an hour of enforced stillness. "I mean, I didn't feel anything, but not feeling it was interesting?"

  "Really?" Theo said.

  "Did you feel it?"

  Theo thought about the warmth. The quiet power underneath his thoughts. "A little," he said.

  Greg sighed and said. "It’s always the quiet ones who do well… Anyways, lets go to lunch that was surprisingly draining.”

  Theo just nodded and followed him out.

  The corridor outside was filled with the ambient noise of a school day beginning in earnest. Students branching off toward different classes, different halls, different tracks. The keep hummed around them, its dungeon-deep walls carrying that particular quality of absorbed sound that Theo had noticed when he first entered.

  He was hungry and thinking about writing a letter to his mother, and wondering if the restriction on ideal selection could really last until the end of the year, and thinking about the warmth that was still distantly present even when he wasn't paying attention