The Priesthood

By spending the rest of what was left of the day reading one of the books, Kanrel felt more knowledgeable about coding. He could actually understand it, but that was because he now had the ability to practice it.

If he had read these books before, most of it would have been forgotten information, with just a few pieces of useful information remaining somewhere in the back of his head.

But by the second day of reading, he started to wonder if any of these given methods would be the "correct" one for him. Perhaps there was another way of doing things, something more streamlined than just imagining a pair of hands or whatever to do all the work for him.

He basically wanted to skip a step.

The imagined hand is better as a tool of explanation for something that one can’t see with their eyes, but for someone who has to actually use this invisible power we call magic, it might actually be just a hindrance.

By far, the fifth book was the most useful to him in this regard. It held many views on this topic of "skipping a step", and it elaborated on the thoughts and theories that Kanrel had.

On the third day, he read the books he had borrowed and made notes on the parts he found to be most interesting or most useful for his journey of improvement. Thus, he returned to the Laboratory for the Study of Magical Energy. He entered the same hall that he had shared with Ewen Oidus, but she was not there today; in fact, no one was.

Her notes were scattered on the tables and chairs and even on the floors of the side of the hall she had used. The chair that he had used for his tests was standing proudly in the middle of his side of the hall. The poor chair had a long day ahead of itself...

Kanrel found a second chair so that he could place his notebook on it with a pencil and some ink. Before arriving, he had already had something to eat, which might’ve been a poor decision, but time would tell.

Before starting his experiments with lifting a chair, he first had to figure out how to burn vomit without burning the whole hall. So he went out to get a bucket of water, just in case.

And when he felt ready, he began to wonder about the qualities of fire—the very existence of fire. He knew that fire would need air and something flammable as fuel, so he ripped a page from his notebook and set it on the floor.

He then thought of a code, a sequence of things that needed to happen so that a piece of paper might catch fire; he would need a spark... So he chose a small area of the piece of paper on which he would focus his efforts.

He just had to heat the piece of paper until it caught fire. This he tried to achieve without thinking of a pair of hands setting it on fire with something like flint and steel. He wanted to skip this one step.

What if it just burst into flames? Not through this invisible action but instead according to Kanrel’s will. It didn’t have to happen instantly; it could be gradual and slow. So he tried just that.

Minutes went by, but nothing happened. So he tried again, this time with an altered code. Minutes went by again. Yet nothing.

He felt sweat going down his brow; it took a lot of effort; conjuring itself wasn’t so laborious, but withstanding this feeling of disgust... was horrid. He felt sick, like he suddenly had a fever.

He had to take a break. So he stopped for a while, went to the piece of paper, and lifted it into the air.

In an instant, the piece of paper burst into flames, covering his whole body, and panic rose. He found the bucket he had brought in and poured its contents over himself. He then rolled on the wet floor to make sure that not even a spark would be left.

Soon he was lying on the ground, breathing heavily after such a scare. Moments ago, he was wondering if he might die, but now a question had conquered his mind: what caused such a thing?

Why would the piece of paper burst into flames after he touched it?

He got up, recorded his findings, and formed a theory: could it be that even though there was air around the piece of paper, it couldn't, for one reason or another, access that air so that it would burn?

His clothes were slightly burned and wet; there was a puddle of water on the floor; and there was a burned smell in the room. The discomfort of these things didn’t matter to him, for he had to try again.

He went and got himself another bucket of water, then repeated his previous experiment with fire the same way he had done it before, using the exact same code. He then braced himself and lifted the piece of paper; lo and behold, once again it burst into flames.

Again, Kanrel poured the water over himself and rolled on the floor. He recorded the events as they happened and then got another bucket of water and ripped another empty page from his notebook.

Put it on a dry section of the floor and tried a different code; this one was much more complicated than the other. He wanted to do another action at the same time with the same code.

He wanted to feed air into the piece of paper so that it would catch fire. In a way, he knew how to do that; it wouldn’t be more complicated than lifting a chair, but it would require a lot more delicacy than that.

This also gave him the possibility of trying to push a thing, in this case, air, in a desired direction toward the piece of paper without imagining a pair of hands doing the pushing for him.

In his head, this sounded easy enough, but in reality, it took hours, at least a hundred tries, and many different codes. Not to forget the buckets of water and an equal number of pages from his notebook.

But when he finally found success, it felt like another defeat. There was no victory when he managed to safely burn the piece of paper by using the code he managed to create, not even the fact that he had succeeded in "skipping a step".

His celebration was simple: he wrote down his findings. How long did it take, what were the steps, and what was the code? Then he tried again; maybe he could do it more quickly. Maybe he could shorten his code.

He stopped only when he heard a voice coming from the door—a knock.

"Excuse me, may I enter?" The voice was a familiar one, and Kanrel was sure that he had heard it before. So he turned and observed who it was that had interrupted him.

He recognized the individual; it was another novice like him who had now awakened with new-found powers. But there wasn’t a name that Kanrel could recall; this wasn’t the fault of the girl standing by the door but his own, as he had not given any thought to the other novices before.

"So you’ve awakened." He said this and gestured for the girl to enter, which she did.

"I heard that you were the first one to awaken." The girl said after navigating her way to him, "I was surprised, I think."

"And were there others who had awakened? I must confess that I’ve been preoccupied and not paid any attention to that."

"A few… You don’t remember my name, do you?" She asked suddenly.

Kanrel thought for a moment. He really tried to remember her name; he did remember the first time he saw her on his first day in the academy, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember her name, so he shook his head.

"My name is Yvie Sondrar," she said, offering her hand to him.

Kanrel looked at her hand and wondered if she would have offered it to him before the awakening of their powers; he then took it, and they shook their hands and said, "Kanrel Iduldian, a pleasure, or something like that."

After that, she didn’t excuse herself; instead, she spent a considerable amount of time observing Kanrel, who now returned to his original reason for being here: lifting a chair while skipping a step.

She must have had many questions about Kanrel’s physical appearance, like why his clothes were kind of wet and burned, why the floor was wet, and why there was so much ash around. Why was there a chair in the middle, and why was he staring at it so intently?

He chose to ignore her and instead focused on the chair. He already knew enough about the chair, but now he wanted to approach the lifting of it in a different way, of course using that which he had learned through trial and error while trying to move air to burn an innocent piece of paper.

Gravity is the reason why the chair is where it is and not somewhere else, like floating near the ceiling or slightly above the floor. With the air, he had created a slight wind toward the piece of paper; for this, he had to block certain areas from the wind to have the desired route for the wind.

Perhaps he could form an area of gravity above the chair so that it would be attracted to it, like a magnet to metal. But to his mind, this didn’t seem like the most efficient way of doing things.

Instead, there were the properties of the chair. A chair is quite heavy; is this not the reason why it stays where it is, as an unmoving object? So he began to create a code so that he could alter the weight of the object that he wanted to lift.

It would become a weightless object; this wouldn’t lift it, so he could then simply lift it with air.

In a way, he made something more complicated than it needed to be, but it did have the desired effect.

Kanrel managed to alter the weight of the object; he then pushed air under the chair so that it pushed against the bottom of it, causing the chair to lift at ease. It had become much easier than it had been before.

Now the chair was suspended above the floor by ten or so centimeters. The air no longer pushed it upward, but he let the altered property of the chair remain.

He wondered how long it would last until the chair fell. He returned to his notebook and wrote down his observations and the code he had used; he also wrote down the idea he had about creating a zone of gravitation.

"This is what you’ve been doing the past few days?" Yviev asked suddenly; there was no wonder in her voice, as this would have been one of the

moments where it would naturally be in anyone's voice.

"Yes, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way for me to use magic, the best way to think of magic, and the best way to code the things I want to achieve with magic. Another priest advised me to try magic in practice as, in her words, it would help me figure things out."

"And there really wasn’t anything better to do, and I would have to wait for others to awaken for lectures to resume."

"And how does it feel?" She then asked another question.

Kanrel set his pencil down and turned toward the girl, saying, "Like shit. It all feels disgusting, worse than the feeling of first waking up or the feeling of first encountering this whole complex and its magical energy."

"Try it, and you will know what I mean." Kanrel picked up his notebook and quickly wrote down the first code he had successfully used to lift the chair. He ripped out the page and gave it to her.

Yviev took the offered page and read it through a couple of times. In the meantime, Kanrel gave the chair its original weight back; it hit the floor with a loud sound but was fine. Poor chair. He then crossed his arms and observed the girl for the first time.

She was quite pretty, or so he had thought of her before; her hair was short and dark, her eyes bright and blue, and she used to smile a lot. That was what made her so beautiful before. Now she looked wrong; she looked like something had been taken from her. It was as if her soul was no longer there. But Kanrel figured that most would still find her beautiful; perhaps she was more daunting now, and fewer would approach her with a specific intent in mind.

This made Kanrel wonder what he himself looked like now. Then again, he never really was one to smile, so maybe there isn’t much of a difference.

After a while, Yviev focused on the chair. He could see first the focus on her face, then the disgust, and soon after the moment when she couldn’t help but release vomit on the ground. The chair had not even budged; instead, it stood its ground, as if taunting the girl to try again.

"Don’t worry, apparently that is quite common and something that you’ll get used to," Kanrel said. Finally, he got to use his code for setting things on fire on the first thing he wanted to set on fire. Even this moment had become valuable for his studies, so he set the vomit on fire, took notes on his observations, and came up with an improved code that could be specifically used for vomit, just in time for Yviev’s second try to lift a chair.