Page 39 of Demon of Dreams

I yearned to live in a world where magic was real. To be taken away from the dull and painful reality of my life. Or, if that couldn’t happen, to have some of that magical power back in the real world. To be able to stand up for myself. To fight back when my dad got angry. To take control of my life.

I knew it couldn’t really happen. I gave up on youthful wishes long ago. Life was what it was, and you had to take the hand you’d been dealt and make the best of it, even if the best meant just surviving, just living through another day.

And suddenly, years after I’d surrendered any hope that my life would change, here I was at a magical university, finding out all the things I’d dreamed of were real. Well…maybe not dragons, but magic, at the very least. I bit down hard on my lip to keep back the tears that threatened to spill from my eyes.

What would a place like this have meant to a twelve-year-old Cory? Even if he couldn’t come here yet. Just knowing it existed, knowing there was a way out…

I pressed my lips tight and closed my eyes firmly until I was sure I could open them without crying. That was definitely not the first impression I was hoping to make on my peers here. I exhaled slowly and opened my eyes, letting them flick back to the board. I guess Professor Kazansky had meant ‘Influencing Your Light’literally. My attention snapped back to her as she spoke.

“Your first practical assessment this semester will ask you to move your output further from and closer to yourself and other objects. Who can tell me one of the primary differences between manipulating size versus motion?”

The girl with black hair who’d glared at me earlier raised her hand, and Professor Kazansky called on her. “Yes, Rekha?”

“The difficulty of controlling the output increases exponentially rather than linearly as distance from the body grows,” she said, “requiring more precise control of the flows called from the network, and therefore more strength.”

“Indeed,” Kazansky said, and the girl smiled, pleased with herself.

The ball of light disappeared from above Professor Kazansky’s hand, only to reappear four feet away from me, hovering at the back of the room, above the head of a girl with two long, brown braids sitting on my right.

“That,” Kazansky said, indicating the ball of light with a nod, “is much more difficult thanthis.” The light reappeared above her palm. “Last semester, you worked to sense and control filaments from the network close to your own body. As Rekha says, you will find it considerably more difficult to maintain that control at a distance, enabling your light to appear at a remove from your body. And increasing and decreasing that distance while displaying your light continuously will tax each of you beyond your current capabilities.”

She paused to allow her light to zoom back to its place at the back of the classroom, speeding across the room like a dragonfly. The class watched, rapt, as it completed a pirouette and three little loops, then swooped and spun its way around the room like a figure skater before returning to hover above Kazansky’s hand.

“Out,” she said, closing her hand into a fist. The light disappeared, and a tiny part of me sighed in regret.

She smiled at the class. “This semester will be more challenging than your last in multiple ways. Not only will your spellwork grow more complex, but as you will have noted on your schedules, your lab time is dedicated to an exploration of the havens, to help you choose the one you’ll apply to in May. So, you’ll have to practice most of your casting on your own time.”

She lifted her hand again, but instead of a globe of light appearing, she snapped and said, “Erase.” She didn’t look over her shoulder at all, but behind her, an eraser rose in the air and swiped over the words she’d chalked onto the board behind her. No sooner had the writing disappeared than a piece of chalk winged its way up the board and wrote, ‘Yang and Leizenbock’s Principles of Matrix Manipulation,’ before enumerating four points below it.

Wow. Ididhave a lot of catching up to do. Everyone around me began copying what the chalk scrawled across the board, and with a jolt, I realized that I’d better do the same. It was time to stop being wonderstruck.

I grabbed the pen Felix had given me and began copying. It felt a little funny, using such mundane implements to write aboutmagic, but then again, it wasn’t likeIhad any idea how to make a piece of chalk write on its own.

But maybe, if I worked hard, I’d learn.

I grinned, and got to work.

9

CORY

After Spellwork II, I followed Ash and Felix to our next class, Environmental Magic: Theory and Practice, taught by an imposing and theatrical man named Professor Gallo. He wore a green cloak, and made me introduce myself after the bell finished booming again.

Then he began pontificating on the pointlessness of allowing students to begin studying at Vesperwood mid-year, which made me feel even worse.

“You’ve no foundation upon which to build! This may be everyone’s first experience with the life-sustaining study of our magical environs, but how can you be expected to understand what I teach when you’ve missed the most basic foundations of magic covered in the first semester? How can you be expected to apply any of the valuable knowledge I impart in this course when you’ve missed the bedrock principles?”

I wasn’t sure if that was a rhetorical question or not, so I settled for a concerned look and a nod that I hoped conveyed that I shared his deep misgivings on this matter.

“You, young man, have a lot of catching up to do,” he intoned.

He seemed to want me to respond, so I offered a hesitant, “I’ll do my best.”

That only made his face sour. “Let’s hope that you do,” he said, before turning away and scrawling a list on the blackboard entitled, ‘The Elementals.’ No fancy, levitating chalk for him.

“Now, you all likely endured some reductionist, materialistic ‘chemistry’ class in your secondary education,” he said when he was done writing. You could hear the air quotes around the word ‘chemistry.’ “Mundane ‘scientists’ professing to be able to explain the world with their little graphs and equations.” He cut his hand through the air suddenly in a slicing gesture. “Let! That! All! Go!”

He glared around the room imperiously, as if expecting some sort of reaction. A dramatic, “No, not my periodic table!” or wringing of hands over our attachment to Mole Day. Everyone just stared back at him blankly. After an awkward fifteen seconds of silence, he evidently decided we were sufficiently impressed and began speaking again, pacing back and forth in front of the board.

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