Chương 12: 12 Loop 0, Part 12

Of every class on my schedule, I hated Alteration most, and not for the reason most people probably assumed. It wasn't the teacher. Mela hated me, and I hated her right back. The feeling was mutual, but she wasn't the problem. Problems could be ignored. Ignoring her cost me nothing. No, the real issue was that the entire Hessa-damned curriculum was a monument to wasted time.

An entire school of magic dedicated to changing the fundamental properties of anything you could point a wand at, and they spent every single class talking about theory. Mela spent hours rambling about Molecular restructuring, or Temporal philosophy, or Grand unified frameworks. Not once, in our time here, had anyone in this classroom cast a single spell. It was enough to make me want to scream, and I didn't get angry easily.

The Alteration Tower was MIRKS's tallest academic building, perched at the campus edge where the wind never stopped howling and the open-air sections made every lesson feel like it was being taught on the deck of an airship. There was tiered seating faced a demonstration platform where enchanted targets stood at the front, spells locked in place, never once reshaped. Each one was equipped with warded stones that produced glowing shields, humming barriers, and active enchantments we were never allowed to modify.

Practice dummies lined the far wall, each one layered with combat spells meant to be redirected and repurposed through Alteration. All of it useful in theory, and theory was all we ever got. The bright spot would have been a class dedicated to sitting there doing nothing, but Professor Mela never let me. I glided to my seat on [Stride], three inches off the ground, my shoes still humming. Every head in the room turned. Professor Marin Mela was at the front of the class. She didn't turn around.

The silence had already told her everything she needed to know.

"Mr. Yarrow. You appear to be levitating." She caught my face in a mirror just beyond her desk, an old teacher's trick for managing a classroom.

"My legs weren't working today," I said.

"And your solution was a sloppy enchantment."

"My solution was not falling down on my face repeatedly." She finally turned around. She glanced at my shoes, then up at my face. Her expression didn't change. A reaction would have been easier to take. Mela had a flat mouth and eyes that narrowed by degrees, and she could make you feel like a disappointment without ever raising her voice. You'd think that would be the least attractive part of her, but her frayed and greying hair looked like a spiders nest. She looked back down at my shoes.

"Enchantment? This is Alteration class." She said it with acid satisfaction.

"Strike one, Mr. Yarrow." Finn slid into the seat next to me. Sara was already at her desk with materials arranged with the precision of a military operation. She had her notes sorted by topic with color-coded tabs, cross-referenced to the textbook pages, and annotated in the margins with an [Auto-Quill] that transcribed Mela's lectures in real time while Sara added her own commentary underneath in a different color ink. She had a spell doing the work for her and she still took her own notes on top of it.

I approved of the [Auto-Quill] as a good first step on the enlightened path of Laziness, but taking a second set? Really? I didn't get why she did that. I pulled a book from my bag that Finn had brought me and opened it under my desk. Practical Applications of Enchantment was everything Mela's class should have been and never was. Well, the Enchantment version of it, anyway. It was straightforward. It was specific. The table of contents listed spells.

You found them on a page and it told you what the magic did and how to use it. The book taught casting instead of theory. I'd found it while doing research in the Archives, and it was one of the best books I'd ever read. The only book I'd read in this tower that respected what magic could do. Granted, it spent a good twenty pages on sports enchantments, but no book could be perfect. Mela began her lesson. With [Subtitle] active, the words popped up in my vision whether I wanted them to or not.

Thankfully, I was good at multitasking.

"Today we continue our discussion on Alteration's theoretical horizon. Specifically, temporal manipulation." More theory, then. Temporal manipulation was the crown jewel, the subject every lecture circled back to. Someday we would bend time itself. Today we would turn to page 412. The school loved the ceiling of what it might one day do and never once looked at the floor of what it actually managed. On most days that was nothing.

"Alteration," Mela continued, her voice gaining the warmth she reserved only for the content of her class, "is the discipline most scholars believe could achieve true time manipulation. Not the personal frame adjustments some of you have encountered in combat training, but genuine temporal restructuring. Changing what has already occurred." I turned a page. A stone enchanted with the [Warmth] spell will hold warmth indefinitely if the persuasion is sound. The caster does not force heat into the stone.

The caster asks the stone to remember what its previous encounters with warmth felt like, and the stone, being stone, remembers everything. The incantation is [Warmth]. The fragment slid through my mind sideways, absorbed without effort. I turned the page.

"The theoretical basis is sound," Mela said.

"Alteration changes what exists. Time is a state that exists. Therefore, in principle, the state of a previous moment could be restored through sufficiently advanced Alteration. The practical barriers are, of course, enormous." The body was standing again in my vision. The chamber at the bottom of the Archives. Corwen's wand moved and the grey man's head was rolling and the body was still upright, one hand raised, making his point to nobody. The image burned and burned and burned. I blinked. Turned another page.

A leather boot enchanted with [Featherweight] can be further enchanted to repel water, cushion impact, or resist wear. Each enchantment is a separate spell targeting the same object. Layering requires understanding what the object already holds. A boot that believes it is light will resist being told it is heavy. The enchanter's task is persuasion. To cast [Featherweight], one points their wand at an enchantable object and says the incantation. This story originates from Royal Road.

Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Some scholars," Mela was saying, her voice dropping low enough that [Subtitle] had to work for it, "suspect Queen Therumia herself achieved some form of temporal dominion. The evidence is circumstantial, but persistent. Her Lost Library contained references to events decades before they occurred. She made strategic decisions that anticipated threats no intelligence network could have predicted." She paused. Let the silence do the work. She was good at this part.

Selling the frontier, the dream, like a Frollart dangling cheese in front of a crowd. There was a reason I hated this class. Everyone else treated Alteration like a free period, something to sit through and do nothing. I probably should have liked it for the same reason. But Alteration could have been the best school of magic. Instead it was all work, no play. The opposite of a lazy man's dream. I kept reading. A door enchanted to lock at sunset will do so every night without further casting.

A floor enchanted to clean itself will reject debris with quiet persistence. The object does not forget. The object does not tire. This is the enchanter's covenant: spend the effort once, and the world maintains itself. The locked door in the Archives. My uncle going through it. Theodore Vex waiting downstairs. The body standing for half a second. The head hitting the ground. I closed my eyes. A brush of nausea swept through me. Then her shadow fell across my desk.

"What," she said, looking down, "is that?" The distance between my face and hers was about two feet. She leaned closer.

"A book," I said. She ripped it from my hands. Turned it over and read the cover aloud: "Practical Applications of Enchantment." The book had given me somewhere to put my eyes that wasn't the inside of my own skull, and even it hadn't worked very well.

"Enchantment." She said the word like she'd bitten into a rotten apple.

"I am teaching you about Therumia's temporal legacy, about the most ambitious frontier in magical history, and you are reading an enchantment manual. In my classroom, Mr. Yarrow, we do not sully our hands with the weaker magics." I didn't say anything. I didn't have anything to say. Nothing would fix this hole in me. I just sat there.

"Thirteen months," Mela said.

"Thirteen months you've sat in my classroom and treated this discipline like it was beneath you. Alteration exists to you only so you can tweak your enchanted shoes and your little comfort spells and your closed-eyelid tricks. You have more raw talent than students twice your level and you waste it. You actively, deliberately waste it, and then you come into my classroom with the audacity to sit reading another school of magic. I have had it with you." I stared at her. She didn't look away.

Her eyes were looking for the usual Lazlo, the smirk, the dry line that would escalate. She didn't find it, and she wasn't going to.

"Perhaps if you spent less time enchanting objects to avoid walking and more time engaging with the actual curriculum, you'd produce something worth the mana you waste." Finn was staring at me. Not at Mela. At me. That quick sidelong glance, the one where he read me like a healer checking vital signs. My breathing, my posture, my pupils. Whatever he saw made him open his mouth. Don't, Finn. Just let her go. I don't care.

"Professor," Finn said, "his legs aren't working. The shoes weren't a statement. Honest, they're A medical necessity."

"Mr. Merick. I did not ask for your diagnosis."

"You're yelling at someone who can't stand up."

"I am addressing a student who is reading contraband material during my lecture. If you would like to join him in that conversation, by all means, continue." Finn stopped, but he didn't look away from me either. The worry on his face had hardened into a decision. It was the look he wore right before he asked a question I didn't want to answer, and he was going to ask it later. Then things got worse. A voice from the back, a student I didn't know, called out: "Yarrow isn't a waste of magic, professor, that's rude.

He handled those shadow wolves on yesterday when nobody else could. Four of them, by himself. [Light] and then [Enlarge], an Alteration spell. That's a practical application if I've ever seen one. It's not like he needs this class."

"That," Mela said, turning on the student with a speed that made most of the room flinch, "is not the point." But the damage was done. I could see it in her face. Anger had curdled into resentment. She was furious at me for solving her problem, for making the faculty's response to Monday look inadequate. This was why I didn't put effort into things. It just backfired, and then I had to live with the consequences.

"He was the only one who knew what to do, Professor." Sara, two rows over, didn't even turn around.

"Shadow constructs are weak to light. You taught us that last year. Basic elemental theory. Yarrow applied your lessons. No one else did." She paused.

"I'd think the Alteration department would appreciate practical competence." Sara had thrown the word practical back at her, and it landed like a second book on Mela's desk.

"Miss Voss. When I want observations about my performance from a second-year student, I will ask for them. Until then, I suggest you return your attention to the material in front of you."

"All I'm doing is defending a classmate who is being publicly criticized for competence. Something you were calling him a failure for not a minute ago." Mela looked astound the room. She was losing this battle. She knew it. Why it was even a battle, I didn't know.

"Kitchen duty," she said.

"All three of you. Tomorrow. The whole day." Finn's mouth dropped open. I didn't blink.

"You report to the dining hall at six in the morning and remain until breakfast is over. Between classes you will return for lunch and dinner service. Peeling, chopping, and scrubbing duty, whatever the kitchen staff requires. Without magic." She set the book on her desk, spine up, cover facing the class like a trophy. Then she returned to the board and resumed her lecture on Therumia's temporal legacy as if nothing had happened. Finn was staring at me. I could feel it.

Class ended, but I didn't remember the last forty minutes of it. The Alteration Tower's stairwell was an open spiral, stone steps worn smooth by generations of students who'd walked them properly, unlike me with my less-than-functioning legs. Wind came through the open archways on every landing, carrying the smell of wet grass and distant sounds of people on the Green below.

The steps were narrow enough that two people couldn't walk side by side without one of them brushing the outer wall, and the drop through the center of the spiral went all the way down to the ground floor. The builders had either never met a student or hated people on principle. We were halfway down, Finn walking, me floating, Sara a few steps ahead with her bag over one shoulder. Finn pushed past me, took the stairs two at a time, stopped on the next landing, and blocked my path.

He put one hand on the stone railing and the other on the wall.

"What was that?" he said.

"Kitchen duty. You heard her. It's going to suck."

"Not the punishment, you idiot. You. What was that in there?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"She screamed at you for two minutes and you sat there like a statue. You didn't say a word. You let her go on, didn't crack a joke, didn't even roll your eyes. The bench may as well have been holding you up."

"Maybe I'm maturing."

"You're not maturing. You fell off a bench this morning and cast a spell so you didn't have to walk. The Lazlo I know would have had three jokes ready before she even finished her first sentence, and you had nothing." He paused.

"What's going on?" He cast [Scan]. Frowned when he found nothing wrong. Nothing he could heal, anyway.

"Something happened last night," he said.

"Something you're not telling me."

"Nothing happened."

"You're lying."

"I'm always lying, Finn. It's part of my charm."

"Lazlo." He said it flat and serious, a tone he saved for when he meant it.

"I'm fine," I said, and pushed past him. My shoulder brushed his and I floated to the next step down.

"It was a bad night, okay?" He didn't follow. He just stood there on the landing with the wind pulling at his robes and watched me float down the stairs. I could feel, as much as see, his eyes on me the whole way. I wanted to tell him. The weight of it was right there, pressing against the back of my teeth. It would be easy. Four words would do it: my uncle killed someone. But telling Finn meant making Finn carry it. Finn would carry it because that's who Finn was.

He wouldn't tell my secrets, and it would eat away at him the same way it was eating away at me. I couldn't do that to him. Sara was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She didn't say a thing. She gave me a grim smile, looked up at Finn, and then turned and walked toward the Green, and I floated after her.