MAGUS INFINITE

His question remained in the air for a moment. I was racking my brain to see if I had the answer, and a girl, I don’t know her name, but I heard her say she came from the coast to the east, stood up, and said magic was the shaping of Anima by will.

I frowned a little; this was a textbook answer. You could find it on page one of most Initiate texts. Master Halloway nodded like she had said something about the weather.

"Fine. Now someone tell me why you’re all going to be very bad at it for the next four years."

Nobody answered, as some of us stared at each other, I noticed that Bari was awake, and he nodded at me while I looked away. Master Halloway waited, and he seemed very comfortable waiting for as long as possible.

After a few uncomfortable seconds, he sighed, "Because you all want to cast... You’ve come here to do things. That’s very good, even admirable. Here is the difficulty." He tapped the lantern that he had brought with him. "Cheap iron lantern, ordinary flame. Every one of you can see it. Now... what is it doing?"

This action drew the attention of the class, and someone at the front said it was burning rather cheekily; another called out that the lantern was giving light.

"Both true, and both useless." He pulled a stool over with a gesture and sat down on it heavily while rain hammered the windows. "You have given me the whole thing that a lantern does, and yet you are falling into the mistakes that mortals make when they look at the world. You will spend your careers being shown the world, whether it is a spell, a phenomenon, a Tribulation... a demon, and every single one of you will want to grasp the whole thing at once, after all, grasping the whole thing at once feels like being clever. But I am here to tell you that this is a mistake, and it is the single most common reason mages plateau, and it is why there are ten thousand Acolytes for every Adept."

He held up one finger, and I noticed now that there was ink on the finger.

"The first rule of enquiry. Never study a whole. Isolate the smallest part that is still true on its own, and exhaust it before you look at anything else."

Those words drew my attention, and I hurriedly wrote them down; it seemed very important.

"Watch," Halloway called out, and without even casting any spell, he began to take the fire apart.

Now I understood that he was using his Fire Resonance to take apart this small flame, and at that time, for over the two hours that this lecture took place, this demonstration took over my life, because I had never seen magic in this manner... such total control over it was deeply fascinating.

You should understand, a few months back, I had burned my mother when I woke up from one of the nightmares that I could not remember. She had come into the room, and I hugged her tight as I screamed and cried, and she held me for more than an hour before I fell back to sleep. Only later did I understand that my palms on her back had burned through her clothes, and she did not make a sound; she just held me tight.

I wanted to learn about the world and the powers that flowed through my body, and Master Halloway was showing me the path.

He isolated the light of the flame and asked what light alone would prove, and made us design a test for it. We were trying to figure out what he meant by this and how fire could be fire without light.

This demonstration broke the minds of most of us in the class, although some looked bored, as if they had learned of this before now; however, what Master Halloway did next drew even the attention of these spoiled brats.

He removed the heat from the fire, and the flame stood there pale and cold and somehow... wrong, as half of us flinched while others screamed in horror, but I found myself leaning forward to look... There were several of us who did this, and one of them was a very pretty girl. Ah, Dara.

Master Halloway had somehow isolated the hunger of the flame, the portion of flame that consumes, and asked us what a flame that did not consume would even be, and a boy behind me said, "Then it wouldn’t be a flame, sir," and Master Halloway smiled, "Wouldn’t it? Write that down. Someone will build a Law out of that question one day, and it will not be you, because you have already decided."

I did not know then that a Sovereign would say almost exactly that sentence to me in a burning crater a hundred deaths later. Fire is not consumed by burning.

By the end of the lesson, we had produced nothing. No spell, no result. Most of the noble brats had been aggrieved about it, and Master Halloway packed his satchel and said,

"You will be tempted, always, to look at the whole and feel that you nearly understand it, as mages, this is the greatest trap for our powers, and I am here to tell you that this feeling is a liar. Take one part, name it honestly, exhaust it. Then take the next. It is slow, and it is unglamorous, but it will work... it is the only method that has ever worked. Anything faster is a story you’re telling yourself."

Then he looked at me. I have no idea why me, and added, "And the naming matters, Elric. If you cannot name something accurately, you do not understand it... You are only fond of it."

∞

I opened my eyes, and a small laugh escaped my mouth that echoed in the small space... I had been gathering these Lightning Law Shards for a while now, and somehow I had been trying to grasp the whole thing, a small part of me had believed that if they became complete, a new Law would just be born... I had been trying to grasp the whole, and this instinct was a lie.

Every shard was a different face of lightning, and I was going to take them all apart and figure out how lightning worked on the deepest fundamental level; else how could I ever be called a Sovereign of Lightning.

Above me, something that seemed to be the size of a house came through a metallic wall with a loud crash, as a shrill howl that came from the depth of nightmares echoed through space,

"ELRIC!"

Hmm, the demon has discovered that I was missing. I paused, then closed my eyes, delving into the room with the lightning shards. Let the demon rage; I had better things to do.

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