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What Every Student Should Know
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Genisis had lived as a servant at the castle her whole life. She had no mother or father that she could remember. She had other maids and servant as friends, but she always felt slightly apart from them. The older maids would whisper behind their hands when she walked by, and the younger ones were never interested in her. While they used to bicker and squabble over bits of food she would be polishing the Cherry Room table over and over because it was engraved with hundreds of letters, and she longed to read. Still, one of the strangest things she noticed, was that she was never picked on, as outsiders oftentimes are. She thought herself to be extremely lucky.
One night, maybe nine years ago, she was blessed with a small dose of insomnia. She had decided to go for a walk. She loved the castle at night, she had discovered. Everything was quiet and peaceful. She found that the darkness could free her. She could go anywhere, do anything she wanted for a change. And so she went out the next night, and the next. She learned to move silently, to shrink into a shadow. Her senses had sharpened, and she had become invisible. Her adventures had taken her many places. One of her favorites was the castle library, she could read into the night. One night she had decided that she just couldn’t live if she didn’t go out to the royal corridors. And so she did. After climbing through dozens of hidden passages she sat on the ledge over the princes chamber. She had watched him sleep. She remembered that he didn’t look intelligent even as he slept, and she had wondered (crawling back down a stone shoot) what it would be like to have him for a king. She hadn’t looked forward to it.
It was because of the prince that her wanderings had become so difficult. The prince had been slain, and it was his own fault, in her opinion, for being stupid enough to be killed. Beheaded in his sleep, didn’t he even have the sense to wake up? Now the castle was patrolled at night, security was locked down. Normally she wouldn’t have gone out under such circumstances, she would have stayed in her tiny servant quarters, but she had far greater ambition than just walking now. Not long ago, during her wanderings she had ventured past a classroom, one she hadn’t seen before. She had paused to listen, half wondering why she had never seen this classroom before. She had stayed there for a moment, her ear pressed to the door, and realized that it was a class for aspiring mages. She had noticed that the teacher was Master Asher, the head mage at the castle. He was respected and feared, it had surprised her that he taught young mages. She had planned on tiptoeing away, but something held her there. She had listened with rapt attention as Asher’s voice explained simple incantations.
“The only kind of magic,” he had boomed, “that you can do without a staff is elemental magic. It is the only kind of magic that we will practice for a long time. Staff magic is highly advanced, you will not learn it until you are older, and your skills have been sharpened. The first thing I will teach you, is a simple frost spell. Hold your hands together, tightly now! And concentrate your whole mind on how frost feels, what it looks like, what it smells like, what would it taste like? Now when you have your mind completely channeled pull your hands apart quickly.”
Genisis, and she hadn’t known why, was following his instructions. She had tried to keep thoughts like ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘Genisis, you are not a mage!’ out of her head as she thought only of frost. She had watched her hands as she pulled them apart. They had left-behind them a stream of pearly white, sparkling frost. She had sat staring at where it had been for a long time after it had disappeared. A sound down the hall startled her and startled her and she had made her way back up to her quarters making sparkling frost dance over everything around her.
She returned every night after that.
This night was no different. She sank down to the floor next to the slightly cracked door to listen to the class. She had gotten there late because of the heightened security, the class was half over and she tried to catch the middle of Asher’s speech about Ice Novas.
“…Makes and excellent weapon. In fact there isn’t much other use for an Ice Nova, except as a weapon. Channel your energy. Your Nova will be as big as the energy you put into it, now concentrate! Make a small Nova at the end of the room.”
A few moments passed and Genisis heard explosions of ice at the end of the classroom. She cursed herself for missing the explanation of the hand gestures for the Nova, she would have dearly loved to try one. The rest of the class passed uneventfully. She began to walk the opposite direction of the doors and as soon as she had turned the corner she could hear the footsteps of students leaving. She looked back in their direction.
“Back again Genisis?”
Genisis gasped as she jumped and turned around, none other than Master Asher was standing around the corner and positively beaming at her.
“I—I was just—just…” but she couldn’t think of a story to explain why she, a servant, would be up past midnight walking through this particular corridor.
“Come, I would like to see your Ice Nova.” And Genisis followed (now feeling thoroughly terrified and bewildered) him into the classroom. She noticed how long his gray-silver hair was, it flowed all the way down his back over his sweeping black robes.
As Genisis stepped into the classroom she almost forgot how terrified she was. It was an incredible room. She had grown too accustomed to the gray and brown of the castle, because this room almost hurt her eyes. The floor was covered in a rich purple carpet. The rounded high ceiling was completely hidden by leafy vines. The walls were all covered in cupboards and cabinets in all sizes, all the walls except the back wall, which was covered with a strange looking mirror. She loved it.
“Well lets see it then.” Said Asher turning to look at Genisis. “My Nova?” asked Genisis, startled back into reality, “I’m sorry, I ah—I missed the hand motions.”
He showed her the small circle made with both hands. He was now eyeing her with an inquisitive glare.
She looked towards the end of the end of the room with the mirror, she was sure the students had been firing at it. She looked back at Asher, he nodded. So she channeled her energy quickly and made the small hand motion. A bright ball of blue shot out of her hands like a bullet toward the mirror and exploded with an earth shattering bang. I bright blue ring of magic and ice exploded in all directions before it vanished. She supposed she had put a little too much behind it because her Nova had been louder than all the other Nova’s combined. Ice had shattered from her Nova, but now, looking at the floor under the mirror, she saw none. She decided that the mirror was not all that it seemed, as it twinkled innocently at her.
“That was much more impressive than my other students Novas.” Asher was looking into the mirror at her reflection. Genisis didn’t know how to answer, so she just looked back at her own reflection. She looked rather white and scared, her blond hair looked slightly messy. She tried to smooth it out. She didn’t know what to think. Was she about to be punished, for surely she broken more than a dozen laws. One of them being that maids were not allowed to do magic, but then, most couldn’t even if they had tried. But what did this mean?
“Genisis, this might seem strange to you, but I must ask you, if you could please come back and let me teach you every night after my regular class.”
Of all the things Genisis expected to hear this wasn’t one of them.
“ But, Master, I am only a maid, I—you…” She stammered, turning to look at him. “You want to teach me?”
“Genisis, you must know by now that you are more than a maid. You are a mage. I have been at this castle a long time, and I can remember things that, well…. I remember, don’t forget that, and soon you will too,” he finished enigmatically.
“Master I…,” she looked up at him, suddenly filled with resolution. She felt stronger. “I will come back.”