“This,” Zidanya is saying as I stare at the tabletop, “is the universe.”

I’m frowning, but it’s a fun frown, an I-have-a-puzzle-to-work-on frown, and I hope that comes across. “I know the glyph in the center. The Void glyph?”

“Just so. All came from the void, or from the Void.” She gives it a clear this is capitalized intonation on the repetition.

“Theology, or science?”

“The other or the one.” I think that’s approval in her tone of voice. “Just as all came from the Void, so too shall all return to the Void; or, as all came from the void, so shall all become void at the end of time.”

“The straight line theory of entropy. Big bang, one continuous timeline, eventually an exhausted universe. Or, uh, some sort of divine philosophy, as the alternative, but they’re equivalent?”

“Just so.” A finger traces a straight down from the bottom point of the elongated Void-rune diamond shape and then around in a circle. It passes through the three symbols - they’re not full glyphs, just a couple of lines - before coming back into the Void glyph through the same point. “The universe. Classically, one enters at Firmament, then Fire, then Earth, and returns, either to Firmament once more or to Void.

“Each element is associated with a form of transmutation, though some call it a form of creation, with destruction the domain of Void. Each element is associated with a form of life, of energy, and of matter, and each with a form of transmission, to send and receive.” She draws some more symbols, none of which mean anything to me. “Ah, just to be sure. You are aware that all things - light, sound, odor, all things - which we sense are things, though light is more complex?”

“Yeah.” I stare down at the symbols. Firmament is a circle, Earth a line, and Fire a pair of lines perpendicular to the Earth line. “Particle and wave both; photons are an adventure.”

Zidanya makes a hrgmmph sound, halfway between a hum and a grunt. “Firmament is the creation which adds, the transmutation of less into more. Earth, the transmutation into other, or the creation that differentiates. Fire, that of more into less, the creation which removes or reduces.” She taps the symbols as she talks. There’s a whole spray of iconography in an arc around each of them, and she’s indicating them as she goes, but they don’t actually mean anything to me.

“That… makes a lot of sense, in a sort of arbitrary way.”

“Fire is the life of illness, invisible and destructive, but also the life which breaks down food into that which is healthful and the life that fertilizes the soil, and that which teems and warms. Firmament is the life that lives in the deeps and the life which is strange to us, and Earth that which walks and flies upon the surface, and the kith and kindred.” She taps another set of icons. “In terms of energy -”

“What about life that’s just mana, or imprints? I know there are ghosts.”

“Firmament,” she says, firmly. “Are not they strange to you?”

“Not any stranger than magic in general, honestly.”

That makes her pause, and then she continues as though I hadn’t interrupted. “Fire is energy as process, Earth as storage, Firmament as wildness. Matter is somewhat likewise, for energy and matter are a coin’s sides, ever spinning in motion; Fire’s matter is that which flows, Earth that which is still, and Firmament that which flees.”

“Liquids, solids, gases and plasma, by implication? What about the edge cases?”

Zidanya runs a finger between two glyphs. “These things are not exclusive. It is a child’s trick, or a trick for children to make a solution in salts that partakes of both the form of flow and the form of stillness; there is no contradiction between those. Though…” She hums quietly for a moment. “That which partakes of both the form of stillness and the form of that which flees, I am not familiar with.”

“Got it. And, um.” I think back to what she said earlier for a moment. “Transmission?”

“Indeed.” I risk a look upwards, and she’s smiling; my eyes are back on the tabletop before I can get too distracted by the way she’s standing, leaning over the table with her body angled towards me. “I should like to have you try answering.”’

“Hm.” I run my fingers along the rim of icons. “So, my first thought is that transmission is about motion, I just don’t see a good way to get three really different things out of motion, if we’re interpreting it as kinetic energy.” Tap, tap, I notice myself fidget but that’s fine. “Yeah, I don’t like that. Maybe something about the different ways of attenuation? You’ve got things that spread out and attenuate because they’re unfocused beams, you’ve got things that spread out because of motion itself, and things that attenuate because they transmit via hitting the next thing? But actually, I think maybe it would make more sense if Firmament is light, Fire is heat, and Earth is matter? Because I think you can get basically everything from there. On the other hand, if it’s, like, phases, Earth could be the stuff that doesn’t transmit, Fire the stuff that -”

“Enough.” Zidanya is laughing quietly, and I wind myself down. “So many notions! That second-to-last of which you listed. Light, heat, and matter.”

“Sorry about the rambling. When the critical thing that you train for is to see all of the patterns, you wind up seeing a bunch that don’t actually exist. Well, that’s why the other critical thing we train for is to not see patterns that aren’t there, but that’s actually harder-”

“Adam, if you are to apologize, find a matter worth apologizing over.”

I catch a glimpse of her smirk, and then I’m staring at the tabletop again, frowning. “So how does this actually help me?”

“Surely you’ve noticed differences in how your Motes or those orbs of yours with the aberrant glyphwork - that paired glyph you spoke of, it’s this, yes?”

I swallow convulsively and determinedly don’t meet her eyes. “Yeah.”

She waits to see if I’m going to say anything else, and when I don’t, she continues on as though nothing is wrong. “The universe is a cycle. Like to like shall in one manner behave, shall result in one path; forwards in the cycle, back, these are different.”

“How can you even tell? Like, your Guide spell is whatever it is. Dispel and Disenchant are, like, um.” I realize that I’m just fumbling for words and stop, collecting myself for a moment. “They both make things less, so Fire fits that. They both destroy rather than create or transmute, really, unless I’m missing something, so Void? I’m missing something, aren’t I.” I don’t phrase the last one as a question.

“You are.”

“The most obvious thing I could be missing is… well, okay, if the enchantments or runes or whatever I’m affecting aren’t destroyed, they’re just transmuted into raw mana that then boils away or whatever?”

“And how might you expect them to compare to Phantasmal Guide?”

“Wait, I’m right about that? They’re associated with Fire?”

“Perhaps.” Zidanya is non-committal. “Perhaps they can be associated with any of the four, should you believe it to be so. Speak to me of my Guide.”

I think for a moment, scratching my chin. “It’s firm. It partakes of stillness; when it moved me, it wasn’t moving me, um.” The memory of how it feels intrudes, and I don’t exactly shove it away, just try to not get too distracted. “It wasn’t moving me, it was providing a path of least resistance by being firm against my other options. Life, not relevant. Maybe on creation or transmutation it’s Fire, because it reduced my options? Transmission…” I hum to myself. “Not light and not heat, but maybe also not matter, because there’s no physical thing, it’s pure force?”

“One might consider acting on matter to be matter.”

“But it’s also motion. Particles touching other particles are stopped by motion, kind of thing?”

“An interesting perspective!” I look up to see Zidanya’s wide smile. “So what say you, then?”

“A matter of perspective?” The word is jarring something in me. “Like, maybe it’s not an objective thing at all. Maybe it… has both of them, in some way?”

“Partaking of both Earth and Fire. One might target one or the other, with a spell; and were I actively maintaining it, I might shift your targeting from the other to the one.”

“So, what if someone is just… totally, completely certain about something wrong? Like, what if I was casting Guide, and I was one hundred percent convinced it was, I don’t know. Void? Because it’s the destruction of your other choices?”

“Should you manage such a thing, I’d be gladdened to see it.” Zidanya doesn’t miss a beat. “It might work; I should expect it to affect the mind or the soul, though interacting with the soul should suggest… hm?”

“Firmament?” I say it tentatively, then nod, more confident. “Firmament. Right?”

“This is the first stage of study.” Zidanya stands up, and I stare at the tabletop as I hear her start to pace. “I studied this for some years, when I was a child; I learned the Four as I learned to read, and every magic or thing in the world that I saw, I thought on the nature of, how one might see it as constructed from the Four. The Gods, too, and the Demons. This is the universe, in the form I most prefer to wield and to think on; and to understand the universe is the first step to acting upon the universe.” She pauses, and I’m about to ask another question, but she suddenly adds, “I must point out, in case it is less than obvious, this is not the only system for glyphs. But it is the one this Temple uses, and it is the only one I know of which uses no God for intercession and still describes all things.”

I chew on that for a moment. “OK. What’s the second stage?”

“Motes.” I blink in surprise and turn to look at her, and she smiles at me, a smile that has me instinctively wanting to scuttle back away from her. “One for a warmup, and then three for a demonstration?” She doesn’t make any gestures or say anything, but I can taste something in my teeth as she invokes a Skill of some sort. I almost go for Insight, but I restrain myself.

“I don’t think -” I instinctively reach for [Imbue Mote], pulling together an as-yet undecided little automaton as a spinning ball of fire the size of my thumb drifts lazily towards me. I push my mana through the Skill and send Dispel at it without thinking, and watch them both disappear with a quiet pop.

“Three,” Zidanya says, still with that unsettling smile.

I don’t argue. Well, I don’t waste time arguing; I think I say something, but what I’m focused on is pulling three Motes out, barely regenerating enough mana after the second to pull out the third. The first comes at me at a decent clip and pops, but the other two aren’t as kind; one of them blurs as it streaks towards me, and I manage to - barely - intercept it, but the third bobbles and weaves, and I only have a Mote out, not an orb.

It hurts briefly, which is some consolation. It hurts a lot, like jamming the broken fingers of a hand into a wall. It’s a surprise and feels like a betrayal, but it lasts only a split second, and I give one pained whimper and then shake my head.

“Your people did that to kids?”

“If we wished to train in the magical arts, to study with the Runewrights. For spell slingers, System-bound, no, but for we few...”

She’s nodding, nodding like there’s nothing wrong with using pain as a teaching tool on children, nodding like she hadn’t just so recently been furious about how my own people - I took a deep breath, then nodded back. “Well, that’s pretty fucked up, but okay.”

“Twas good training!”

“I’m sure it was.” I do my best to do a sort of dismissive tone, which is maybe a little much. She shakes her head, but she’s not glaring, and I do feel every bit of the dismissive emotions towards her it was good training that I’m trying to project. “I’m guessing you’re going to want to do that with me a bunch?”

“Ah, eh.” She flops gracelessly into a chair, head tilted back to stare at the ceiling. I mimic her; it’s a wood panel sort of construction, and my eyes trace the grain and appreciate the dark red-brown of the stain. “Useful, but not the most vital? We’ve so much to cover, Adam. With what you have, you’ve a strong hand for counter-spelling and dispels, and we’ve Amber to break them and myself fain to mire them. For three, it’s as strong as we could wish.”

“So you think I should… be focusing on just the spell control side of things?” I frown. I don’t know why I don’t like it. It’s not like I was particularly happy to be killing things, when I arrived; I took every opportunity I could not to, even though that meant doing something I was far less competent at. “It makes sense,” I admit. “There’s basically no amount of killing I could do that you and Amber can’t do faster, unless I pull out all the stops.”

“I’ve seen no such glyphs?” It’s a leading question.

“Didn’t show you them.” I’m leaning back and staring at the ceiling, not particularly wanting to see her face. “I got, uh, Creator of Forbidden Magics for some of them. A few flavors of what Amber called propagating death curse.”

“Twelve.” I blink at the studied nonchalance in her voice and the seeming non-sequitur. “I’d been twelve years out of the womb,” she clarifies, seeing my confusion, “when I earned that Title. Each of us who went into the world knew how to end it, if only to recognize it and stop it.” She waves a hand towards the table. “So! An it please you to show me those glyphs as well, we’ll go over the counterspells for them, the System spell Counterspell that is, and the glyph-work for them; and then -” I groan, but I’m grinning. This, after all, is magic.