Harvest 12, 855
Buu ground his teeth in frustration as the pounding ache behind his eyes intensified. The hard stone floor of Aru’s study bit at his bones through the protection of a giant blue carpet, sending his thoughts even farther from the work in front of him. With a grunt of frustration, he wrenched his focus back to the pages of his textbook.
He had made it, through great effort, to page four, but the jumping, unorganized letters of each word had him ready to pull out his hair. He read each sentence thrice: once to untangle the words, once to string them together into a sentence, and another to translate the barrage of unfamiliar academic terms. He knew it would drive him mad if he tried for much longer.
Beside him, Tuag released a bored sigh, curling his lip slightly as Buu glanced over, a half-hearted reminder of the violence he could bring to bear, Buu nodded, acknowledging the long, exposed fangs, and Tuag’s eyes fell closed again. Buu didn’t think the beast actually slept, but the grimm seemed to understand that appearing to made him less threatening to the soldiers and staff that might make their lives difficult if given the chance.
Looking across the professor’s generous living quarters, Buu spotted Aru half-hidden behind a tower of metal wire and glass bottles, carefully measuring a thick, yellow liquid from one bottle to the other. She tied her hair up in a pair of severe braids when she worked with her alchemy lab, and the tension gave her a look of permanent surprise. Buu waited until both beakers had been set down before speaking.
“Aru, none of this makes any sense. How am I supposed to learn magic from…” Buu riffled the pages of the book.
From the corner of his eye, Buu spotted Idah roll her eyes at him. She sat at a small desk by the fire, working on her own notes without any apparent difficulty. Not fair.
“It’s not about learning to do magic, it’s about getting a better understanding of it. Then you can learn to do it, or in your case, control it,” Aru said, an edge of annoyance in her voice as she squinted at a strange, sliding instrument.
“But it doesn’t make any sense! I don’t even understand what I’m supposed to understand. There’s a Hocus, which is a tenth of a Thaum, and a Thaum is the magic required to boil a pot of water, but how am I supposed to find how many Hocuses it takes to make the illusion of a butterfly? Or how long that illusion will last? Will it even last?”
Buu flopped onto his back with a groan of annoyance. He’d been feeling the rush from his use of magic the day before, but his headache seemed to be inviting back other symptoms along with it. Grinding his eyes closed, he tried to ignore the gnawing fatigue dragging at his body and the chill that the fire couldn’t dislodge no matter how close he sat to it.
Aru sighed, resting her hands against her desk and looking him in the eye for the first time since his arrival to her office. She composed her face with the same mix of compassion and annoyance that many of the Red Birch villagers had often shared.
“The term is Hoci — and magic is like a kind of energy. It has its own momentum, like when you push a ball. The ball keeps rolling for a bit once you stop pushing it. All the math and numbers are there to help you know exactly how hard to push the ball in order for it to get where it needs to go without using more energy than you have to.”
“How many Thaums would it take to get the sun to rise? Professor Ryoh said that’s because of magic. Has anyone worked out how long it would take for it to wear off if we all stopped believing it would happen?”
The thought had worn at Buu since his lesson. If the sun only worked because people thought it would, then that meant it could stop. If there was no sun, it would be night all the time, and the idea of a moon in the sky all day and all night made Buu’s hair stand on end. He repressed a shudder as Sister Moon’s wrathful face loomed in his memory, inches from his eyes.
By the fire, Idah snickered to herself, drawing a baleful look from her aunt. As Buu glanced over, he caught the end of another well-practiced eye roll.
“Let me guess,” Aru sighed, “once again the esteemed prodigy thinks she knows better than fifty years of magical precedent?”
Idah shrugged, smirking. “Well if they weren’t wrong all the time…”
“This is why none of your other teachers like you. Arrogance is not a flattering trait on anyone, least of all a child.”
Idah stretched, a grin blossoming across her face. “They don’t like me because I released those illusionary squirrels in the artifice lab.”
“Real squirrels,” Aru chided. Her voice had iron in it, but a smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth.
Buu had been too busy for home sickness since arriving at the university, but watching Idah and Aru banter made his heart ache for his uncle. They didn’t always see eye to eye, but Buu would have given anything in that moment to have Uncle Kavir’s steady, familiar presence at his side, instead of the temperamental grimm.
“Only one of them was real,” Idah laughed and Aru finally cracked into a smile.
“You almost gave poor Professor Buryn a heart attack!”
“He deserved it — smelly old codger.”
Buu cleared his throat, eager to distract himself from thoughts of home and all things familiar. “If the scholars are wrong, what does make the sun rise?” he asked.
Idah gave her aunt a wink as the older woman shook her head in amusement. When her bright eyes turned back to Buu, Idah’s face grew more serious as her thoughts settled into academia. The fire snapped and popped to fill the moment of thoughtful quiet. Finally, she shrugged.
“How should I know? But it doesn’t make sense for it to be magic. Why would everyone everywhere suddenly start believing that a giant ball of fire was going to fly across the sky every day? It makes way more sense if it was here all along.
“Don’t get me wrong, I think it could be affected by a big enough working, but I don’t think anyone’s ever coordinated one that huge. A whole city of mages would have to believe all in the same thing at the same moment to make anything interesting happen on that scale.”
Idah waved her arms as she spoke, gesturing to the world beyond the windows to better showcase just how much willpower would be needed to perform magic on the scale of the sun. Tipping too far back in her chair, she flailed to regain her balance, losing the air of scholarship she had been play-acting.
“If you’re so smart,” Aru said, shaking her head with a smile, “you tutor Buu. I’m already behind on my research thanks to all this military nonsense.”
Aru’s version of helping him study had mostly involved letting him use her space. Idah, on the other hand, might actually help him to understand. If nothing else, she didn’t seem chronically distracted.
Idah didn’t seem enthusiastic about the idea. She flopped her head backwards, staring at the wall behind her and released a dramatic, noisy breath.
“I do have my own work to do, you know. What’s in it for me?”
Aru didn’t look up from her notebook as she answered, “Allowance supplement. Two silver a week.”
Head snapping up, Idah’s face broke into a grin and she winked at Buu. He smiled back uncertainly, not sure if they were celebrating a strategic victory, or a pleasant surprise. Standing, Idah stretched, reaching up on her tippy toes.
“Fine, if you insist.” Idah turned to Buu, offering him her hand. “My first order as your tutor is to take a walk with me. You’ve been glaring a hole into that book for over an hour. You need a break.”