NOVEL WEB Ch. 29
“How many of these quartz can you name?” Min’s voice was as calm as ever, but it came from just behind Fabrisse’s left shoulder, which made it feel more like a challenge than a question.
Fabrisse turned slowly toward the row of open sample drawers with labeled mounts upon where each stone rested angling toward the glyphlamp above.
Common quartz, yes—but not trivial. They had been arranged deliberately.
He stepped forward and listed them from left to right. “Clear quartz. Milky quartz. Citrine. Smoky quartz. Rose quartz. Amethyst. Chalcedony, which technically isn’t pure quartz, but—”
“That will do,” Min said, already moving to the next shelf.
Fabrisse followed, emboldened. “Clear’s the best conductor. Smoky holds minor enchantments well, if stabilized. Amethyst’s good for emotion-linked resonance, but not for durability. Rose is almost never used unless it’s ceremonial or aesthetic. Citrine’s too bright for containment spells, but some people still use it for weak solar alignment.”
Min didn’t interrupt.
Fabrisse pointed at the pale, clouded specimen in the final tray. “That one—milky quartz. It’s nearly inert, so it doesn’t hold charge long. Doesn’t fracture evenly either. Most discard it.”
Min glanced at him. “And?”
Fabrisse blinked. “And . . . it’s sometimes used in dampening rings? As a buffer?”
A small pause. Then Min gave the faintest nod. “Correct. Though only if you need to suppress low-level glyph flares. Otherwise, it’s filler. Often overlooked, that quartz, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless.” He moved to close the drawer with silent fingers. “Nothing here is useless. Especially not the parts that don’t shine.”
Fabrisse wasn’t sure if that was still about rocks.
Min gestured to the opposite side of the room, where a wider cabinet had already been unlocked. “You’ll start with identification. Then classification. Then interaction. The point is not to memorize what quartz is. The point is to learn what quartz can do when it’s not behaving.”
Fabrisse stepped forward. The hat Konan had given him still sat on his head, faintly warm from spell-thread, faintly ridiculous. Soft-billed field cap woven from ash-thread and spell-fiber, it looked like the sort of thing a hedge mage might wear to check the mail. But he didn’t take it off.
Not when Konan had stamped a rune on the underside of the brim, neatly pressed with a heated sigil ring. It looked official enough: a curling spiral intersected with a horizontal bar and three tick-marks around the edge, like a poorly drawn snail trying to do math. Fabrisse hadn’t noticed any difference. The hat was still just a tad too warm, and it made his ears itch sometimes. But he never said anything.
Classification, as it turned out, was exactly as boring as it sounded.
They moved through two full cabinets of specimens, each with a tag, a tray, a label, and—if Min was feeling generous—a single-sentence note on regional variation. There were columns for grain texture, columns for saturation offset, columns for fracture type. Fabrisse swore one of the charts included ‘visual stubbornness’ as a metric.
Most students would’ve glazed over after the third drawer. Some probably had. He’d heard the jokes that Stone Thaumaturgy is just fancy rock-licking. Half the students who signed up for it dropped after the first term. They wanted results. They wanted to hold a stone and feel the magic thrum. Cast something. Channel something. Make something move.
But that wasn’t the point.
Stone, by nature, did not move. It endured.
He’d read it somewhere: ‘Stone resists shaping not because it lacks potential, but because it remembers what it already is.’
And that was the challenge. Earth-aligned materials were notoriously difficult to manipulate aetherically—not because they lacked resonance, but because most of them had already been shaped by aetheric events. If a stone had been through fire, or lightning, or sacred burial, or centuries of weather pressure, its inner resonance was already saturated. You couldn’t just shove more magic into it. That would be like trying to sketch over a sculpture.
So most of the research done here, to Fabrisse’s understanding, was about interpreting residual patterns, mapping out embedded aetheric histories, and finding out the practical use of elements without altering its properties.
Min hadn’t explained any of this directly. His instruction was minimalist to the point of deliberate silence.
After an hour of classification, Min stopped in front of a small side table, apart from the labeled drawers, where a single, unmarked stone rested on a velvet pad. There wasn’t a tag or any charts. There was only the stone.
Min said quietly, “Pick it up.”
Fabrisse approached. The stone was dull gray and unpolished. At first glance, it looked like a weathered river rock.
Min added. “Use your own observation. Tell me what you think it is, and what it remembers.”
This was probably not a trick question. It was a rite of passage.
Fabrisse lifts the stone. It was heavier than it looked. Not magically so, just . . . old with the kind of weight that comes from time. He closed his fingers around it, kept his focus, and breathed in.
He started to describe it tentatively, about the grain type, density, mild layering like basalt, but then paused.
There was a rhythmic silence under his palm, like a memory that didn’t want to speak until you'd proven you’d listen.
[Minor Aetheric Echo Detected: Embedded Residual | Category: Unreleased Impact | Emotional Trace: Contained Regret]
[SYSTEM NOTE: You are learning to listen.]
“I felt emotional traces. Someone used this,” he said quietly. “As part of a structure, judging from its density. It saw something fall. Something collapsed, maybe. And whoever placed it here . . . maybe they hoped it would hold. But it didn’t. This is Phyllite, I think, but for it to be used in structures . . . it had to be recent. Possibly . . . five decades prior?”
Then Min’s voice came from behind. “Phyllite. Inner Sanctum yield. You were off by a decade, but close on origin. It was recovered from the western corner of an old dormitory that partially collapsed. No enchantments were used in the structure. The regret you’re sensing isn’t from the stone itself.”
Fabrisse looked up, confused.
“It’s from the one who laid it,” Min said. “An apprentice who helped build the foundation years before the collapse. The regret was probably imbued in as he inspected the site again.”
[PHASE 2 COMPLETE: Calibrate Localized Resonance Anchor]
Location: Terra-Resonant Archive
Objective: Synchronize with Earth-aligned Thaumaturgic Locus — Success
Reward Unlocked: +1 SYN
[You have demonstrated natural attunement. Calibration completed passively.]
[SYSTEM NOTE: Most students require focused guidance to complete this step. You did not.]
[OBSERVATION: You were so still, the Archive categorized you as a shelf.]
[Proceed to Step 3: Echo Recognition and Response — Incomplete]
Huh? I forgot about the quest for a moment and still completed it. It felt a bit weird to be rewarded with stats he hadn’t even unlocked, but a gain is a gain.
He wasn’t used to magic unfolding through quiet. But for the first time in a long while, he didn’t feel behind. He felt steady.
“You haven’t been able to tell a sample’s age with your senses yet,” Min said, “but you have keen deduction skills.” He paused, tone still even. “I heard you’re the one bound with the Eidralith.”
Fabrisse stiffened. “Y–yeah,” he said.
Min didn’t blink. “There’s a reason for everything. Maybe the Eidralith rewards keen senses.”
But I wasn’t doing anything during the Vothiculum, Fabrisse thought. He wasn’t reaching, or casting, or summoning anything. He was just picking rocks.
He waited for more questions—some probing analysis, some distant curiosity—but Min only sauntered toward the next cabinet.
“Let’s move on,” he said. “For our next step—”
Came the knocking on the door. Three even raps—measured, but not timid.
Min craned his neck slightly toward the sound, brows tugging just a fraction together. “Two visitors in a day?” he murmured. Then, in a slightly raised voice, he added, “Enter.”
The door opened, and then she stepped in.
Severa Montreal.