Flinging Rocks at Bureaucrats in a Magical Academy

“Invocation for Gentle Currents, Mark II,” Fabrisse announced with all the pomp of a court herald and none of the authority. Mark II didn’t mean that he could cast a higher-level spell, it just meant that this low-level spell had been updated to a newer version.

“You didn’t bring any scrolls.” Dubbie looked up at him from her perch on a slanted boulder, her cloak bundled tightly around her knees. They had moved to the windward side of Reflection Knoll, where the hill thinned into a patchy ridgeline, offering a clearer view of the valley below—and, more importantly to Fabrisse, slightly better airflow. A proper breeze was essential for an air invocation, especially for those with limited innate resonance.“That’s correct.”

“So you’re just going to guess a Mark II pattern?”

“I will reconstruct it from my attentive studies.”

Dubbie narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t know what a Mark II pattern is supposed to look like, but that sounds like a very bad idea.”

Fabrisse rolled his shoulders. “It’s only bad if I mess up the phrasing, the gesture rhythm, the resonance timing, or the symbolic intention. Which I won’t.”

Dubbie watched him sketch a rough glyph shape into the air with his hands, then mutter under his breath and pause.

“Well?” Dubbie asked.

“I’m assembling a resonance trap,” he said as he crouched to scrape a shallow divot into the dirt. “A physical invocation vessel for symbolic anchoring.”

Resonance traps were a fallback technique. He’d learned them not because they were elegant, but because they were for people who couldn’t do it the normal way—who couldn’t stir the aether with raw emotion or command it with a strong enough internal pulse. When you couldn’t feel your way into resonance, you could try to build it.

Instead of channeling grief, fury, joy, or anything powerful enough to spark aetheric sympathy, you constructed a symbolic offering. It was the equivalent of saying to the aether: notice me, master.

He began stuffing the small dip with dry grass, a few stray leaf bits, and, for flair, the singular flower he’d picked earlier. It looked less like a magical focus and more like something a squirrel might reject for being too unstable.

He sat back, gestured grandly, and declared, “There. A ritual bowl for a god of drafts.”

The breeze promptly blew the whole thing away.

Fabrisse froze.

The System chimed in:

[TRACE ELEMENT DETECTED: Air]
— Air: Registered (3/5 elements held)
— Begin resonance period: Awaiting Aetheric Impression.
[WARNING: ‘Air’ has already been held in aetheric connection. Attempt to ‘contain’ Air may cause self-concept dissonance.]

He stared blankly. Then read the warning aloud.

Dubbie blinked. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. But it sounds metaphysically threatening.” He scratched his head. “Self-concept dissonance? From trying to hold a breeze? That’s absurd. I didn’t try to stuff the wind in a bottle, I just offered it a basket.”

[CLARIFICATION: Air prefers freedom. You are not the container. You are the current.]

A clarification. Right. Lorvan had said once that Resonance Traps didn’t work well with Air-based Thaumaturgy, and Fabrisse had known at the time that it wasn’t entirely true. Air rejected stillness, yes; it recoiled from confinement and resisted fixed forms. But the textbooks were clear: if the structure was delicate enough, and if the offering was porous, suggestive rather than prescriptive, you could invite air.

It just took precision, the kind of deft symbolic layering that only came from repetition and a feel for nuance that Fabrisse obviously did not possess.

But what else can I do? Maybe I can make a mini air-shield. A Stillbrace. I’ve succeeded at that before. But that would be even harder than this. With this, you just need to arrange your offerings and realign your timing.

He reached into his satchel and pulled out a spare flask—glass, tightly stoppered, usually reserved for rare brews or weird slimes.

Dubbie narrowed her eyes. “What are you doing?”

“I just want to see.” He uncorked his own flask with a pop, then stopped, frowning. “Right. Can’t waste the water. That’s still part of the quest.” He turned to Dubbie. “Can I borrow your flask?”

“For what? You already drank my tea.”

“It’s for magic,” he said.

Dubbie sighed, fished her backup flask from her cloak, and tossed it to him.

Fabrisse caught it, uncorked it, and dramatically held the empty container into the breeze like a child catching fireflies. He even waved it a little for good measure, then slapped the stopper back on with quiet satisfaction.

No self-concept dissonance happened. At least nothing he could tell.

But it wasn’t like he had achieved resonance either.

He set the flask down beside him, stood, dusted his hands, and cleared his throat.

“Attempt number two.” He stepped back to the spot where his flower trap had failed and raised his arms like a conductor. “Invocation for Gentle Currents, Mark II—again. This time with feeling.”

The wind rustled politely.

He tried the same gesture rhythm, this time with more fluid motion. He inhaled on the third sweep, stepped clockwise, whispered a different mnemonic about sky-silken threads and floating breath, and even added a ripple-tone hum he’d once heard Headmaster Draeth use during a lecture.

Still nothing.

Then the glyph lit again.

[REPEAT NOTICE: Attempt to ‘contain’ Air may cause self-concept dissonance.]

[REMINDER: You are not the container. You are the current.]

Fabrisse made a soft noise halfway between a groan and a whimper, and sat down hard beside the empty divot again, huffing dramatically. “The glyph told me I shouldn’t be containing the air. But it wasn’t like it’s forbidden or anything.”

Dubbie shook her head. “Air doesn’t dislike you. It just doesn’t want to be held. You’re doing too much.”

“I’ve seen Headmaster Draeth do it. He just barked a phrase, jabbed his fingers, and the whole room exhaled. It tossed everything around like leaves. That’s how air magic’s supposed to look.”

Dubbie stayed quiet.

He turned his head slightly, chin on his knee. “Maybe that’s the problem. Air responds to dominance. That’s what they always say: speak with conviction, and the wind will obey. But I’m not that. I don’t have that much magic in me. I don’t even want to shout orders at a breeze.”

Dubbie said, more quietly now. “If you don’t have enough resonance to forcefully control it, why don’t you move with its groove?”

Fabrisse lifted his head.

Move with its groove.

That wasn’t helpful. What did that mean, exactly? Groove implied rhythm, implied tempo, but not structure. There was no defined sequence, no glyph cadence. How was he supposed to align to a groove he couldn’t hear?

The wind brushed past his cheek, light as breath. The breeze was irregular: faster just past the ridgeline, but oddly consistent against his chest. It should have diffused after the third treebreak, but it didn’t. Fabrisse mentally logged the inconsistency. Maybe Air really didn’t follow formal structures so much as localized tendencies.

For a moment, he stood there, arms loose at his sides, listening not just with his ears, but with that uncertain part of him that always felt left behind in class.

Movement. The most important component is movement.

He didn’t know if this would work. He just knew it didn’t feel wrong.

So he took a step.

Then another.

The wind pressed faintly against his cheek. Then drifted off. Then it came back again.

He stepped forward, spread his arms, and broke into a sprint.

“Fabri—?” Dubbie sat up, startled, as he tore down the ridgeline, cloak flying like a sail behind him.

His feet pounded the hill.

It rushed past him, with him, curling over his shoulders like a delighted whisper. For the first time that night, it wasn’t something to chase or capture. It was something that had always been there, just waiting for him to run.

A shimmer of sky-blue and pale citrine light unfurled from his arms like ribbons caught on a breeze. They whorled and coiled behind him in effortless spirals.

Fabrisse laughed.

Something lifted in his chest. Something lifted his body, literally.

Then, the glyph appeared.

[Aetheric Impression Registered.]
[RESONANCE ACHIEVED: Rank II Spell – Motion-Type]
[EMOTIONAL CATALYST: Unrestrained Joy]
[SYSTEM NOTE: Congratulations. You did not become the wind. But you remembered what it’s like to move.]

He stumbled to a breathless halt near the bottom of the hill, heart hammering, skin tingling with leftover spark. The stars above tilted slightly as he grinned into the breeze, a trailing curl of light still spinning off one wrist like it hadn’t noticed he’d stopped.

Rank II. It wasn’t usual for him to cast a Rank II spontaneously, and they definitely didn’t feel this smooth. That was one of the better spells he’d been able to produce.

“Joy.” He let the word linger on the tip of his tongue. He had been able to cast joy before; on occasions when his family had made unannounced visits and during his hanging out with his close friends. However, it wasn’t like he wanted to produce aetheric resonance using joy. He felt happy at the time, and the aetheric sparks around him turned sky-blue. That was it. He had yet to relive those moments to be able to cast joy again when it mattered; like in controlled test environments.

Things also just happened this time. Fabrisse didn’t think he made the wind do anything unnatural. The air probably decided to move along with him, which was probably what had made him feel lighter back when he was running.

As the wind curled around his shoulders and his grin finally settled into something dazed and breathless, Fabrisse turned—still giddy—and looked back up the hill.

There she was.

Dubbie stood at the top, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open. Her cloak flapped awkwardly in the breeze as she slowly began picking her way down the slope.

“You—” she started, pointing at him like she was trying to accuse him of a crime she hadn’t fully understood. “You looked like . . . like one of those professional sprinters from the ancient arena circuits. Just—arms out, knees up, magic trailing off your sleeves like . . . like streamers!”

Fabrisse gasped, still catching his breath. “I did?”

“Yeah. A ridiculously sparkly track runner. With wind coming out your armpits or something.”

“So I looked pretty cool. Enough for some girls to swoon.”

“Possible, from the smell of your armpits.”

“You didn’t have to say that.” Fabrisse bent slightly at the waist, hands on his knees. His hair was tousled, cheeks flushed, the faint remnants of sky-blue light still glimmering along the seams of his sleeves like they hadn’t quite let go of him yet.

Dubbie yawned as she approached him. “Do Fire next. Hurry. I’m getting sleepy.”

“Right.” He fumbled for the glyph interface and pulled up the overlay.

[TIME REMAINING: 44 minutes]