Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotionally Incompetent

She stood just inside the gate, silent enough that her presence hadn’t even registered on the perimeter alarm thread.

He flinched slightly. “How long have you been standing there?”

She tilted her head a fraction. “Mentor Lugano requires your assistance.” She hadn’t answered his question, which just made him more aware of how sweaty his palms were and how ridiculous he must’ve looked lobbing pebbles at a scarecrow like he was trying to offend it into submission.

“And he sent you?”

“He asked his mentees. I volunteered.”

Sometimes Fabrisse forgot that Veliane was also a mentee of Lorvan. She was sharp and poised, articulate in five languages and a terror in structured invocation trials. People said she’d written her own echo-thread parsing method in her first year in the Synod, which would mean she was only fifteen at that time, and no one had disproved it. It was incredible how she started studying four years later than other people and had progressed so quickly she was now only a class below Severa.

And she was Lorvan’s student.

Just like him.

The comparison made his stomach twist.

What must that feel like? To mentor someone like Veliane Veist—an Exemplar in training, already halfway to crafting a codex before her certification exams—and then pivot immediately into tutoring him?

He’d seen the teaching sequence chart once by accident. Veliane had Lorvan for Structured Resonance on Tuesdays. Fabrisse came right after her on Wednesdays.

Fabrisse kicked the nearest pebble with the toe of his boot and immediately regretted it. He would have to walk a further distance to retrieve it.

“Well,” he said, brushing dust from his sleeve, “what does he need?”

Veliane rubbed her cheek with the back of her thumb. That was one of the few weird ticks Fabrisse had observed from her. “Assistance,” she replied. “We are to assist him with some codex-crafting.”

“We? As in you and me?” Fabrisse felt a slight flush on his own cheeks.

“Yes. Do you want to grab a pie before this? I don’t think there’s any mingleberry left, but we can get mulberry.”

He wanted to say yes. He wanted to say yes so much. But the better part of him was sniffing out all the weirdness.

She hasn’t once talked to me since the failed confession, and now just after I’ve bound with the Eidralith, she’s offering me pie?

“That’d be fine,” he replied, still. Why did I say that?

“Nice,” she said with a small smile. Her smile was so elegant, like the curve of a sealing rune.

Okay, maybe that smile is the reason why . . . ᴛʜɪs ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ɪs ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ʙʏ novelfire(.)net

“Can I get a cup of water first?” He asked. The System had urged him to drink more.

“How about tea?”

“That’s fine,” he nodded.

I asked for water though . . .

The moment Fabrisse walked out of the training field, he received a notification.