Flinging Rocks at Bureaucrats in a Magical Academy

“Your dog’s dead, Kestovar! Kill the demon now!” Lorvan Lugano shouted as his student held his hand aloft, face twisted in some vague approximation of anguish.

Fabrisse Kestovar needed to grieve the dead dog. That was the whole point of this spellcasting challenge: remember his sad story, conjure grief, channel it into his finger, and unleash the Invocation of Mourning on the demon ahead.

But he had already failed at recollecting his memory.

Focus on the story, Fabrisse thought. Focus on the dog.

Bunsen was a good dog. Loyal and fiery-tempered, though not especially bright. He liked burnt sausages, hated thunder, and once peed on the Headmaster’s boots in front of a visiting dignitary. That was a good day.

They were walking home from the bakery, Fabrisse remembered, the one with the honey crullers and the squeaky floorboard near the till. There’d been steam rising from the alchemy carts, just like always. Then—

Wait, he paused. Where did his sad story start? Was it the bakery this time? Or the river path?

He squinted. The memory was fogging up again. Let’s start from the top. Bunsen was a good dog, but he’s dying. He has to die near the bakery this time. Do not let him die near the river path.

“Incoming!” Lorvan shouted. That was the cue; he had to fire the spell.

Fabrisse’s stance wasn’t stellar, but it was serviceable. His weight stayed centered, wrist angled just so, and his grief-evoking phrases were muttered at the required decibel for proper silent mourning. Still, his fingertip gave off a sickly mauve glow. As with everything mauve, it was ugly.

“Come on! Time your emotional climax right! Do you want the demon to eat both of us?” Lorvan’s shout grew more exasperated.

“Y-yes! I mean no. No for the question.” Fabrisse straightened himself again and realigned his finger with the demon standing still from afar. That demon hadn’t moved for half an hour, but he couldn’t land a hit.

“Replay your tragic memory! Show some commitment! Has your dog died yet?”

Fabrisse flinched. “Yes, Mentor! It’s very dead! It was run over by a—uh, tragic alchemy cart! I rode that cart myself!”

“Chant your mnemonic!” Lorvan roared.

Fabrisse inhaled shakily, chewed the inside of his cheek, and muttered under his breath, trying to recall the words he’d scribbled into the margin of his practice journal last night between bouts of rock collecting. Page 7, second column, under ‘Grief (Synthetic).’ Mnemonics were color-coded by emotional register. Except he ran out of blue ink.

“My heart is heavy, my tail no longer wags,
Dog is gone, beneath the funeral flags.
His bark is silent, his bowl stays dry,

He had already made a grave mistake with his mnemonic. It implied he was a dog.

He lifted his finger again, channeling as much manufactured anguish as he could muster. He pointed it at the demon and released the Invocation.

A ripple of mauve light lanced out, then it dissipated into thin air. Not even a whimper of thaumaturgic contact with the demon.

A single strand of straw fell from the unmoving demon. The demon was made of straw. It was a scarecrow.

“You messed up your story again.” Lorvan sighed as he walked over to the dummy, picked up the straw, and stuck it back onto the figure’s head.

“It’s hard to imagine a dead dog I don’t have!” Fabrisse protested.

“Well then, why are you studying Thaumaturgy?”

Fabrisse didn’t have an answer for that.

Thaumaturgy, the trademark magic exclusive to the Order of the Twelvefold Flames, was a peculiar school of magic. They even had a word for the study of the study of thaumaturgy—Thaumism.

Thaumaturges didn’t ‘cast spells.’ They attuned to the Aether through emotion.

Aether was the true source of magic, and it wasn’t inert. It responded to emotion. The thaumaturge’s role was to align with this invisible current.

For this particular exercise, Fabrisse had to channel his grief to coax the Invocation of Mourning. His assignment: emote deeply enough to bind the scarecrow demon staked to the practice field.

Unfortunately, grief was a particularly hard emotion to surface for him. He had no tragic villain origin story, no slain parents, no burned-down village. His childhood had been frustratingly adequate. The most grief he’d felt was during this very exercise, having to imagine a ridiculous story about a dog he never had just to try and produce a thaumaturgic spark.

Emotional control was one of the maddening paradoxes of thaumaturgy: you had to feel enough to power the spell, but not so much that you lost the spell’s shape. Some students felt too many emotions at once. Others had to fake it. Simply put, feeling emotions alone wasn’t enough to turn it into magic.

Fabrisse winced. Lorvan’s boots crunched closer on the gravel path behind him.

“Kestovar. You’ve passed Emotional Construction Theory with a 44 out of 50. Surely you have enough capabilities to transform that into practice?” Lorvan asked in a voice so sour that it sounded like he swallowed a lemon.

Mentor Lorvan was, by most objective measures, handsome, in the way a chrysanthemum was handsome: composed, symmetrical, and touched by a certain aloof grace. The man was elegant and slightly funereal in every task he performed. It was widely acknowledged that he had received more than a few courtship offers over the years—some from within the Synod, others delivered by winged note. None had succeeded.

His personality was not that of a chrysanthemum. At least, not during training. More of a gargoyle that’d skipped breakfast.

Fabrisse had turned him this way, anyway. His mentor hadn’t been grouchy back when he didn’t fail exams.

Fabrisse glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t think so, no. I mean, I felt something. A . . . tug.”

“A tug.” Lorvan folded his arms. “Are you using the same story?”

“I changed the name of the dog,” Fabrisse offered. “He was Buttons last time.”

“Fabrisse.” Lorvan walked up to him now, standing at his side and gesturing toward the scarecrow with one hand. “You must learn to interact with the scenarios in your head. Not just recite them. You are both observer and architect, the conductor of the emotional cadence. Act like one.”

He tapped Fabrisse lightly on the temple. “If you reach the moment of the dog’s death and don’t feel any ache, then you must rewrite. Right then. You don’t press forward with a dead scene and expect it to perform resurrection.”

“But I can’t fake pain,” Fabrisse said, extending his palms. “I either feel it or I don’t.”

Lorvan raised his voice. “And I can’t fake you a passing grade. Do you want to fail the fifth time and set a new record?”

Fabrisse felt a weird sense of prideful embarrassment as he became the only one to have failed Basic Thaumaturgy II for the fourth consecutive year. His grasp of spell matrices was tenuous at best, and every time someone mentioned ‘ritual focus,’ his mind wandered to pastry.

When Fabrisse first joined the Unified Synod of Thaumaturgic Study, he had expected to learn chants, not write plays inside his head. He hadn’t felt many strong emotions in his life, so it wasn’t natural for him to align himself with any emotional conjuring. Nonetheless, even the dead-eyed ones from wealthy districts with emotional palettes limited to ‘mild condescension’ and ‘garden variety spite’ could embellish their way into grief or rage with enough melodramatic flair to pass a practical.

Fabrisse, by contrast, couldn’t even fake it convincingly. His innate resonance—his baseline sensitivity to thaumaturgic fields—was supposed to be intermediate according to his scouting report. Except . . . it wasn’t. If he had possessed intermediate resonance at some point, he must’ve flushed it all out of his system during all those nights sneaking out, doing things that were decidedly not Thaumaturgic training.

Which now made him Lorvan’s problem.

Fabrisse plopped onto the yellowing grass with the grace of a sandbag rolling downhill. Lorvan followed suit with a long, pained exhale.

They sat in silence for another minute before Lorvan muttered, “The Grand Gathering is tomorrow. And if, by some godforsaken lottery of fate, you are called up for a surprise demonstration in front of the Archmagi—”

Fabrisse groaned. “Please no.” He was starting to feel real grief now. Maybe he should’ve imagined himself demonstrating in front of the Archmagi instead during training earlier, naked, nervous, and wielding a celery stalk instead of a wand.

“—then you will say, clearly and with dignity, ‘I have forgotten my robe at home.’ And then, ideally, you’ll attempt something from Mark VII. Something truly, absurdly out of your league, so I can leap in and say you were being ambitious. Misguided, yes, but bold. It might even win you pity points.”

“Mhm,” Fabrisse nodded absently.

“I recognize that tone, Kestovar. It usually precedes poor decisions. What are you—” Lorvan turned.

Fabrisse was no longer looking at him. His eyes had locked onto a distant figure passing along the edge of the training field. More accurately, they were locked onto the cloth-covered tray the figure carried, which exhaled steam and sugary promise into the morning air.

“Pastries,” Fabrisse whispered, voice reverent. Sugar restored balance. Sugar meant things were going to follow a known pattern again. “I haven’t tried the new batch they started hiding in the scullery.”

“Kestovar.”

The student was already beginning to rise with the cautious stealth of a man about to commit a petty but spiritually vital crime.

Lorvan groaned into his hand. “And don’t be late again! Or try to sneak in halfway through the opening ritual and pretend you’ve been there all along, you hear me?”

“I’ll try!” Fabrisse gave him a half-hearted bow and was gone, vanishing into a soft jog with the focus of a predator zeroed in on custard prey. He even managed to make a nearby pebble levitate for half a second as he zoomed past.

“Stones.” Lorvan sighed. “The other third-years are all ready to fire thaumaturgic missiles, and my student can levitate stones.”