Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotionally Incompetent

The man named Sven took his time ambling over. Fabrisse noticed the way passersby cut aside and paused their conversations without being asked. Some looked at his face, others at the staff, but none ignored him. Fabrisse couldn’t tell which drew the attention more: the man himself or the staff. Either he was the sort of person others found attractive, or the staff announced him so loudly that people assumed he must be. He didn’t know if Sven was conventionally attractive, as his definition of such things rarely matched what others claimed. What he did know was that Sven was well-kept and his posture was loose, and that probably translated to appeal.

As Severa passed, Sven said something low in her direction. She slowed just enough to tilt her head before continuing on. Even Severa has time to incline her ear for him?

It took him another good second to reach Fabrisse and Liene. “Evening,” Sven flashed them an effortless smile.

“Evening!” Liene chimed back.

“You mentioned the bullfighting season starting up again,” Sven said, sliding into the space of her excitement as though it were his own. “I hear they’ve brought in a fresh Anbalican breed. Twice the size, but twice the temper.”

Liene’s eyes lit up. “Yes! Finally, someone who appreciates that! Everyone else just tells me it’s barbaric. The bulls are padded with aetheric dampeners to prevent injuries anyway. It’s not like anyone’s getting gored for real.”

“Precisely,” Sven said. “They really miss the discipline behind the show.”

Fabrisse had already clocked out. The words blurred into background chatter, the kind that might as well have been about bulls, or duck racing, or anything else he didn’t care for. His mind was already on the cave, specifically the eastern channel he had never managed to map. Even at noon it was too dark, not just from the lack of sun but because the passage ran so deep inside the rock so the stone layers stacked on themselves until they swallowed every trace of daylight.

“So, what do we think?” Liene was saying. Fabrisse had no idea what they were discussing.

Sven turned his head toward Fabrisse with that same easy smile. “What do you think? Kestovar, right?”

He hadn’t caught a word of what they’d been debating. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

Liene stared at him. “The cave, Fabri. How long we’re spending in there. I said ninety minutes, Sven said we’ll play it by ear depending on you.”

“Oh,” Fabrisse said.

“And then,” Liene added, undeterred, “there’s a new eatery opening by the Synod gates. Cheese pies with six kinds of cheese. We could celebrate after.”

“I’m Svevtoslav Kovrin, but you can call me Sven. I think we’ve met before,” Sven said then, turning his attention back to Fabrisse as if the thought had just landed. “Eastern Training Field, wasn’t it? Not the Target Field; further out, past the ridgeline. You were practicing rock throwing.”

“We have?” Fabrisse asked.

“Yeah. You were on the training field with Veist. You were on fire, and super determined too.”

Sven had probably seen him just as he had seen Sven, but he wouldn’t call that a ‘meeting’. However, one thing that was even more noteworthy than that was . . .

“You know Veist?” Fabrisse asked.

Sven’s smile edged wider. “Many do. Though, if she took the time to work with you in private, that says something. She doesn’t often give anyone that sort of audience.”

Across from him, Liene went quiet.

Sven was right. Everyone knew Veliane Veist. House Veist had been rich since before anyone kept proper records. They made their riches from something about river routes and tariffs, or maybe ships. Fabrisse didn’t know the details, only that their money had multiplied long before canals were mapped or taxed, and that even now, the name meant old wealth. He hadn’t heard much about them during his time in the Synod, though. Maybe they’d gone quiet because they no longer needed to announce themselves.

Sven tipped his staff against his shoulder. “Well, best we don’t waste daylight talking about it. Cave first, history later.”

The cave protruded like a swollen wound on the valley hillside. Its edges jutted unevenly, slabs of rock pushed out possibly because the earth itself had split under pressure. A crust of pale lichen webbed across the rim, tracing faint circles like scar tissue rather than softening the impression. The mouth was wide enough for three to walk abreast, though the slant of the ceiling forced a stoop on anyone taller than Liene.

Sven strolled forward. At the mouth of the cave, he paused just long enough to glance at the creek spilling down the slope nearby. He swept his hand once, and the water bent toward him, strands breaking free in smooth arcs before knotting into spheres that hung in the air. They bobbed like funny-looking lanterns.

He intoned his mnemonics,

“Catch, hold, brighten, show.”

Each word fell in time with the gestures of his hand. The water gathered, staying firm, taking on light before drifting forward. He extended his staff hand and the orbs began to glow with an unwavering radiance. The light refracted and multiplied until each sphere shone with fractured rainbows.

Fabrisse hadn’t seen many people manage water and light together so neatly. It was the sort of thing that made sense in theory—combine resonance fields, anchor one spell through the medium of another—but in practice most magus-students fumbled the balance. I guess that’s just the difference between a student and a certified Magus.

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Liene gave a low whistle. “Show-off.”

Sven only smiled, stepping inside first as the lighted orbs glided ahead to mark their path.

Fabrisse noted the efficiency as they walked inside. Sven had conjured more than enough illumination for all three of them. Even so, Liene lifted her hand and coaxed a small glow to hover near Fabrisse’s shoulder. It trailed him like a tame firefly, close enough that the faint warmth prickled against the side of his neck. The glow never touched him, yet he felt a ghost-tickle curling behind his ears anyway.

He didn’t swat it away.

Fabrisse led them down the turns and slopes that had been fixed into his head without hesitation. Within minutes they had reached the eastern quarter, a section he’d never been able to light well enough on his own.

Now, under the drifting glow of Sven’s spheres, the ground revealed more than he’d expected. Not the usual rubble or eroded bands, but a scatter of stones lying with a kind of deliberate placement, as if something in the rock had once pressed itself onto them and left its memory behind.

Imprinted rocks.

He recognized it the way one recognizes a signature: not by the obvious face-value patterns but by the subtler tells: the faint glossy sheen along broken edges, where resonance still clung in a thin film, and the way the grain inside the stone seemed to ripple against its natural bedding. Normal stones fractured straight through; imprinted ones bent light as if unwilling to be ordinary.

His eyes twinkled.

“There might be a goldmine in here,” he whispered to himself.

“I didn’t know gold is black,” Liene muttered, also to herself.