Flinging Rocks at Bureaucrats in a Magical Academy

The half-broken stair board groaned under Fabrisse’s feet as he descended. Their cottage was small and sun-softened, and it looked even more cluttered since the lower floor doubled as kitchen, living room, and informal herb-drying station, depending on the week.

His mother stood near the hearth, sleeves rolled up, wand tucked behind her ear like a pencil. A practical woman with flour-dusted hands and calloused fingers, she looked more like a baker than a mage. Only the droplets of condensed water hovering above the sink betrayed her training.

Madlen Arelin-Kestovar—once a Rank II Thaumaturge, now just ‘Madlen’ to most of the village—turned at the sound of his steps. Her short, wind-frizzled hair was pinned back in a careless twist, and her eyes that had seen too many things to be surprised by anything anymore.

“Did you come down because of the yelling, or because you finally remembered I exist?” she asked as a small arc of water twisted itself into the kettle.

“G-good morning, Mom.” Fabrisse rubbed the back of his head.

“Go greet your guests. They’re in the garden.”

“They?” Fabrisse had rarely had a visitor, let alone two. It didn’t feel like a good sign.

Maybe someone from the Synod has finally decided ‘enough’s enough’ and come to revoke my credentials. Or better, offer me a desk job.

He pulled on his outer robe, which had somehow migrated to the coat hook overnight, and tried to smooth it down despite its lifelong vendetta against wrinkle-free fabric. As he passed the kitchen, his mother handed him a mug without looking, one of the bulkier ones that said Thaumaturgy Happens flaking off in cracked blue ink.

As Fabrisse made it halfway to the back door, his mother’s voice floated after him.

“Are you doing well at school?”

He paused.

There it was. Her version of Has something happened?

He swallowed and kept his back turned.

“I’m doing fine,” he said. A speck of amber floated on his fingertip, and he curled his hand into a fist to stop any more shameful spark from overflowing.

He stepped outside before she could ask anything else, but the weight of her question clung to him like humidity. The truth was, in about four months, he’d have to break the news. His grant would run out, and she would have to start paying tuition. His father’s promised promotion had been ‘pending review’ for three years now, and his mother only took local work—simple contracts, mostly for wards, storage runes, the occasional water purification request from a neighbor with a sick pet or a picky cousin. She didn’t charge much. She never did.

They didn’t talk about money in the house, but Fabrisse knew what the silence around the ledger meant.

He couldn’t ask her to pay for a semester.

He had to win that grant.

And yet, he had no idea how. He wasn’t strong, wasn’t fast, wasn’t born with some instinctive connection to the deeper aetheric strata.

But was that really true?

He reached up, briefly pressing a thumb against the cloth-wrapped shape tucked beneath his collarbone. The glow of the glyph answered him.

He had the Eidralith now.

It spilled the secret on the fifth element of the world to him just yesterday. He had a chance to finally do something magical with his life.

Fabrisse pressed a thumb into the ridge of his opposite palm, grounding himself by counting five shallow breaths. It was the only ritual he’d never forgotten—touch, count, exhale, repeat. Then he stepped into the garden, mug in hand, no longer dreading what sort of ‘guest’ warranted Mom’s urgent tone.

He spotted her immediately: a young blond woman standing taller than most girls he knew, with the kind of posture that suggested she’d never been told to shrink herself. She didn’t need to, not with a figure that drew attention more for its confident composure than its curves—though she had those, too, generous in a way that seemed completely at ease with itself. Her boots were far too clean for someone standing ankle-deep in their overgrown herb patch, and the gleam in her eye suggested she knew it, and that it was entirely on purpose.

She wore an oversized mage-tunic, cropped short in front but trailing long at the back like a cape that got stitched on upside down. Her attire was covered in patches and hand-drawn glyphs in fading metallic ink. Her left shoulder was always falling off, and she never fixed it. Atop her head, there was a single petal clinging to a quill which had been jabbed through the bun that sat atop the ribbon that was, for reasons unknown, both decorative and structurally load-bearing.

That was Liene, Lorvan’s little sister. She was only a year older than Fabrisse, which would make her exactly ten years younger than Lorvan, a fact he weaponized frequently, often beginning with ‘When I was your age, I’d already inscribed my first Will-binding on a live Flamus conduit without assistance.’ Liene, by contrast, had a remarkable knack for doing exactly enough to pass every course. She skipped class liberally, turned in homework with the enthusiasm of a damp sock, and coasted on charm and just-adequate scores. Still, she’d managed to rack up enough credits to hopefully graduate next year, when she turned twenty-one—which, to Lorvan’s enduring frustration, technically meant she was on track.

“Hi, Fabriiii~,” Liene sang.

“L-Liene! How are you here?”

“That’s a silly question,” she punctuated the word ‘silly’ with an equally silly grin.

He hadn’t seen her for a couple months because she was on a Synod-sanctioned research field trip—possibly an idea by Lorvan to get her to study properly. Fabrisse was unsure if it’d worked.

Back when his friend Tommaso was still around full-time, Fabrisse, Tommaso, and Liene Lugano had been known—affectionately or otherwise—as the Troublemaking Trio. A firestarter, a pie thief, and a pebble enthusiast. Tommaso had the ideas (loud), Liene had the timing (perfect), and Fabrisse, more often than not, just wanted to pick interesting rocks in peace and got roped into whatever ‘harmless chaos’ the other two called character-building. If trouble had a trajectory, he was usually standing at the end of it holding a field manual and an apology scroll.

He had only been able to pick rocks in peace for a couple months after both of them had left for different reasons. He missed them plenty, but he couldn’t deny the silence was comforting in its own way.

Then came the second blow.

“I knew I would find you here,” said Lorvan Lugano, standing near the back fence like some brooding gargoyle cursed to inspect mediocre garden plots for eternity. His arms were crossed, his hair somehow impervious to the humidity, and his expression suggested he was already disappointed. “I came to see how you’ve been handling the . . . incident.”

A grumbling gargoyle and his gremlin sister had come to check up on him. The day was off to a good start already.

“You didn’t say you were bringing her,” Fabrisse said, pointing his mug vaguely at the girl now crouched near the rosemary, already poking at the runes his mother used to keep the humidity steady.

“She insisted,” Lorvan said, in the same tone one might use for ‘she threatened to disembowel the postal gryphon if I said no.’ “And aren’t you two close?”

They weren’t as close after Fabrisse got himself a (now-ex) girlfriend, but they were pretty much glued by the hips (Lorvan’s words) before.

“Hi again,” she said as she skipped over to him. “You’ve gotten shorter.” She was only half a head taller than him, but he wasn’t short himself. Okay, maybe he was just a bit short. That was only because the height standards had gotten ridiculous over the last couple spans.

“I have not.”

“Then I’ve gotten taller.”

“You—”

“Where are your freckles? Did they sleep in until noon?” She pinched his cheek before he could dodge.

Fabrisse swatted her hand away. “They’ve been fading.”

“Hmph.” She tilted her head, studying his face like she was trying to redraw it from memory. “That’s unfair. They used to be cute.”

“Used to be?”

“They made you look like a crumblecake that blended in a sea of merryberry pie.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I mean, I miss them. Got it? Got it? Like . . . I ‘miss’ them?” She snorted at her own joke, before that snort turned into a full-fledged laugh. She was close now, far too close for someone who claimed to miss freckles and not the person beneath them.

That stung him a bit. He liked the freckles too, but they weren’t Stupenstones. He couldn’t add more freckles to his cheeks just by picking them up at the riverside.

“Miss Lugano.” Lorvan cleared his throat. “This isn’t a social visit. Give Mr. Kestovar some space. He doesn’t need a second concussion in two days.”

She made a pouty face. “You’re so dramatic. His skull’s probably gotten thicker.”

Lorvan ignored that. “Why don’t you help Mrs. Areline-Kestovar with the wards? I noticed the eastern hedge sigils are mismatched. You’re always saying my runework is outdated. Prove it.”

Her eyes lit up at the challenge. “You just want me out of earshot.”

“Correct.”

With a twirl of her braid, she turned on her heel and headed toward the hedge. “Fine. But if I fix three or more, you’re buying me cherry spirals for a week.”

“Just go,” Lorvan said, already turning toward Fabrisse with a look that could peel paint.

“That was . . . a lot,” Fabrisse mumbled once she walked off, more to himself than anyone else.

As soon as her footsteps faded into the foliage, Lorvan dropped his arms and stepped closer.

“Well?” he said. “How does your head feel?”

“Normal. I mean, I think so.”

“Good. The Synod wants you back. And once you’re back, you have to remain within Synod grounds.”

“Well, I’m glad I got home in time, then.” Ah. So he had been right. They hadn’t meant to let him leave—he’d just done it before anyone could issue a proper directive.

“You could’ve been in great trouble.”

“Does that mean I’m not in great trouble?” Fabrisse asked.

Lorvan sighed, and proceeded to not answer that question. “Now . . . are you going to tell me what actually happened, or do I need to recite the full list of possible disciplinary actions first?”

“But I haven’t done anything wrong. The Eidralith flew at me; I didn’t fly at it!” Fabrisse was already folding his arms like a wronged bureaucrat.

Lorvan gave him a long, searching look. “Let’s sit,” he said.

They made their way to the old bench beneath the pearbark tree, the one with three legs and a fourth made of stacked bricks that no one ever bothered to fix.

After they sat down, Lorvan let the silence stretch for a few beats. “Have you seen or heard anything since it happened?”

Fabrisse hesitated. The glyph flickered at the edge of his vision, like a stubborn eyelash on the wrong layer of reality.

He didn’t answer right away.

The thing was, Lorvan had been nothing but kind to him. Except, of course, when he wasn’t. But even his unkindness had a sort of steady purpose to it, like weathering or pruning. And when everyone else at the Synod had turned weirdly hushed or suspicious, Lorvan had still made the effort to visit. That had to count for something.

“I . . . see things,” Fabrisse admitted at last. “Floating texts. They never leave my field of vision. It’s like a magical apparition that thinks I’m in a training simulation, if that makes sense.”

In the distance, the sound of muffled humming floated from the hedge line. Liene was supposed to be inspecting the eastern wardline, but she had since discovered a weatherworn birdhouse dangling off a hook and was now holding it upside-down, peering inside like she expected it to contain answers.

Lorvan nodded. “Go on.”

“It knows my name, calls me a ‘Calibrator’, and keeps using capital letters where it shouldn’t. There’s a sheet with numbers too, on what it calls a ‘Profile’. I apparently have two in Aetheric Resonance Control and an inherited residual rock affinity.”

Liene tucked the birdhouse under her arm like a satchel and wandered toward the eastern boundary again, only to stop abruptly and crouch beside a cluster of dandelions. She poked at one with her quill, then made a series of unpredictable gestures at it before producing a strip of parchment and scrawling something down.

Lorvan stayed silent for a moment before saying, “That rules out simple head trauma.”

Fabrisse glanced at him sidelong. “You believe me?”

“Unfortunately,” Lorvan muttered. “I heard that Thaumarch Iriadel saw great progress after being chosen by the Eidralith, but he never told anyone how it blessed him. It could very well be that it gave him something only he could see.” He paused. Then his voice dropped. “Don’t tell anyone else about this.”

“Even Liene?”

“Especially Liene.”

“Why not?”

Liene slipped, fell on her face, and dropped the birdhouse.

“Because you don’t know what it is yet,” Lorvan said. “And until you do, everyone else will want a piece of it. The professors will treat you like a case study. The Synod will try to recruit you or dissect you. Even your friends won’t look at you the same.”

“I don’t exactly have a long list of friends,” Fabrisse muttered. He had about three in the Synod: his roommate Greg, Liene, and his friend from the same commune, Tommaso, who had already graduated and moved on with his life.

“All the more reason to keep what few you have,” Lorvan said, sharper than before. “Power you can’t explain is the most dangerous kind. We need to find out how you can use it first.”

“Then can I tell you?”

“You’ve already decided to.”

Fabrisse exhaled slowly, watching a dragonfly drift past the overgrown basil. “I need your help.”

“With what?”

Fabrisse ran his thumb along the edge of the mug, the ceramic warm against his fingers.

“With learning how to use this thing. With figuring out how I can gain real power from it. Not just flares and sparks. Real power.”

Lorvan finally turned to him, and for the first time all morning, there was a shift in his expression—an iota of satisfaction breaking through the perennial scowl.

“Good,” he said. “Let’s start with this. What do you mean ‘numbers on a sheet’?”