Flinging Rocks at Bureaucrats in a Magical Academy

Lorvan stood at the far end, his coat unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up to his forearms, a half-drafted codex hovering mid-air in front of him. Its pages were still transparent with unassigned threads.

“You’re late,” he said.

“Good afternoon, Mentor.” Veliane bowed lightly. “I assume we weren’t expected at any specific time.”

Lorvan gestured to a floating slate beside him. “I expected you when the formatting glyph reached this point.”

Fabrisse squinted at the floating script. “That looks like a doodle.”

“That doodle is a temporal binding mark,” Lorvan replied. “And yes, you’re helping with symbol pairings. Veist, you’re taking the first quadrant.”

Veliane stepped into place without hesitation.

Fabrisse trailed after her, resisting the urge to wipe his hands on his coat. “Any particular style you want me to follow?”

“You’re not doing the sketches, Kestovar.” Lorvan glanced at him.

Lorvan glanced at him, then at the codex. “You’re on annotation duty. Keep the internal glyph harmonics noted by quadrant, and flag any thread that hums out of alignment.”

Fabrisse narrowed his eyes. “That’s it?”

“That’s the spine of the whole weave,” Lorvan said. “If the spine collapses, the structure frays. You’re not ready to draft yet.”

He knew what this was. Annotation duty was a common first-step task. It required no talent in pattern-weaving, no real instinct for glyph aesthetics, only attentiveness, patience, and the ability to track harmonic changes across pages. It was beneath Veliane, and well within reach for someone like him.

It was also Lorvan’s way of roping him in. He had been listening to Professor Langley’s advice.

He could see it now: this wasn’t a favor. This was a lesson. Lorvan was placing him just close enough to watch Veliane at work, just close enough to the weave’s spine that, if he paid attention, the structure might start making sense.

But Fabrisse didn’t have an eye for these kinds of patterns. Not abstract ones. Not yet. If they’d been carved into stone or buried under sediment, maybe. If they’d come with echo impressions or fault lines or mineral drift.

These threads weren’t anchored in anything physical. They just floated, inkless and humming with invisible order.

“I’ll try not to mess it up,” he muttered, rolling his sleeves and stepping to the monitoring console.

“You won’t,” Lorvan said. “Because you’re going to observe, record, and not improvise.”

“Right. Absolutely zero improvisation.”

“You can improvise next year,” Veliane murmured, already inscribing a ribbon of luminous thread across her quadrant.

Fabrisse hovered over the annotation slate, eyes tracking the glyph harmonics as Veliane sketched a new arc line across the second symbol group. The glow twisted in response to her wrist movement precisely, but somehow still gracefully.

And then it . . . stuttered.

A half-beat delay in the fourth harmonic ring. The codex’s ambient hum ticked half a pitch downward, only for a moment.

Veliane didn’t notice. She’d already begun binding the next thread set.

Fabrisse paused, stylus halfway to the slate.

He furrowed his brow. He recognized the glyph she’d just anchored. It was part of the older Trinate Form series. It was technically valid and functionally stable. But not for the variant alignment Lorvan had set up at the start of the codex.

He hesitated. It would sound ridiculous if he called it out and it turned out to be nothing. Veliane was probably the best glyphweaver in their whole year. She was in the year below Severa, but she could even be better than Severa at this. Who was he to say anything?

But he remembered it from theory lectures. He did remember. One of the first harmonics lessons: pattern sequences nested within resonance arcs. If she kept going like that—

“Um,” he said, awkwardly clearing his throat. “No—wait. I think—”

Veliane didn’t look over. Lorvan did.

“That symbol,” Fabrisse said, tapping the projection. “The alignment’s off for a longitudinal weave. That’s a Trinate Core from a lateral stream. It’s going to pull—uh—slightly backward, not forward. Like counterweighting a pendulum.”

Veliane’s stylus halted.

Lorvan walked over and studied the thread, then reached forward and ran a finger lightly through the air above the codex. The glyph hummed again and pitched lower, exactly where Fabrisse had heard it dip.

“He’s right,” Lorvan said.

Veliane turned to him with eyes widened and mouth slightly ajar, but quickly regained composure. “I forgot Trinate doesn’t scale cleanly across overlay symmetry. You have good eyes, Kestovar.”

“Everyone forgets theory when they’re five glyphs in,” Lorvan said before turning to Fabrisse. “Good catch. Your theory is still solid.”

“T-thanks.” Fabrisse could feel his cheeks warming. This was the only reason he was still here. The only reason Lorvan hadn’t quietly let him fade into the Synod’s archival floor. Maybe, after graduation, he could go into theoretical research. Maybe someone had to write the rules that the prodigies forgot.

His own glyph jumped at him.

[Mastery Training: Arcform Sense—Progress to Rank I: 96%]

Huh?

Veliane had returned to work. But as she resumed, she glanced his way once.

Fabrisse turned back to the annotation slate, heart still thudding a little louder than the codex hum. He added a small note beside the corrected glyph:

↳ Lateral-trinate pairing: destabilizes forward-anchored harmonics in dual-axis configurations. Confirmed audible dip.

A line of text shimmered faintly in the corner of his vision.

[Pattern Recognition Skill — Unlocked]

Skill Name: Arcform Sense (Rank I)

Type: Concordance (Meta)

Category: Passive / Utility

Description: You can now identify glyph misalignments, clashing threads, or symbols that do not line up properly in complex spell patterns.

You can now identify the trajectory of arcs with 3% greater accuracy.

Bonus: Minor boost to collaborative codex efforts. Reveals hidden symmetry in 2-thread overlaps.

He filed the notice away with a quiet breath. This spell helps me identify the trajectory of arcs better? This doesn’t just help me with glyphweaving. It can also help me throw rocks better.

“Are you staring at something?” Veliane suddenly asked, not looking at him. Lorvan turned to look.

Fabrisse jolted. “N-not really. I was just spacing out.”

“An annotator is not a spectator, Kestovar,” Lorvan warned. “You need to keep your concentration level up.”

“Yes, Mentor.” That was bad. He made a mental note not to read the information given on the glyphs in too much detail when others were present.

“Do you want to finish the third quadrant?” Veliane continued asking.

Fabrisse blinked. “What?”

“The third quadrant.” Her tone was level, but he could’ve sworn there was the faintest edge of amusement beneath it. “I’ll spot you. You call the sequence.”

Lorvan didn’t say anything. That was the strange part. He just turned a page on the codex and let it happen.

Fabrisse exhaled. “Okay. But I’m still not improvising.”

Veliane didn’t smile. But her stylus did pause for just a beat, like punctuation on a shared joke.

“Next year, then,” she said.

Fabrisse only nodded. He tapped the corner of his slate four times before continuing.