For lunch we had meat, bread rolls, and a mix of fruits. It was all really tasty! At the end of the meal, Zalli joined us again, but just long enough to say “Bye.” Apparently, she was already late for a meeting with the governor of the ded-du-j-dedjuh… Dedjuh or something hex, and so she had to leave. She told me to practice with the aura stones and said she’d teach me more on her way back.

“Ok, Chalia, now that you’ve had the morning to learn a little about auras, I have set up a tutor to help you with magic this afternoon,” Selaena said before leading me through the halls to one of the special practice rooms.

“Lessenna!” Selaena calls out.

“TEACHER!” Another girl screams out, running out of the practice room and almost tackling Selaena.

“Lessenna!” Selaena calls out, in between a few coughs, “I’m a mage! A pure mage!”

“I’ve missed you so much! You should visit me!” Lessenna replies, ignoring Selaena’s pain.

“I’ve missed you, too,” Selaena says, patting her on the shoulder.

“Do you want to spar? I’ve gotten so much stronger! Wanna see?” Lessenna says, clasping her hands and looking up at Selaena.

“I would love to, girl,” Selaena says, giving her a hug, but that’ll have to wait until later. I, uh, got hurt again, and so Master is drilling all the mana out of me until I’m able ‘to channel strategic spells in my sleep,’ so I’m afraid I don’t have much mana to spare.”

“Aww, but I’m so close to rank B now!” Lessenna exclaims.

“Wait until you hear what I called you here for, though! Meet Chalia, our resident dragon-kin!”

*Gasps*

I don’t know which of us was more surprised! Lessenna was somewhat short, had very dark skin, and had long, straight, black hair with a few braids; but that wasn’t the amazing part—her eyes were a bright silver. There was that, and when she saw me, her eyes got real big, and she looked so happy and pretty I almost forgot to breathe!

“What’s your name?” she finally asks after recovering a bit.

“Chalia!” I say proudly, before backing up and moving next to Selaena. I need to be careful—I don’t even know her!

“Chalia, is it?” she asks, patting my head. “Nice to meet you! My name is Lessenna, and I’m here to, uh…” She says, before looking over to Selaena.

“Lessenna is here to help you learn about spell casting!” Selaena says.

“Oh.” That’s what I was learning when I opened this hole in the air and Headmaster and someone else really strong had to work together to keep me from going somewhere dangerous. I’m not really excited.

“C’mon! Spellcasting’s fun! Let’s get started!” She says, pulling me into the practice room.

Behind me Selaena says, “Have fun you guys!”

I’m stuck here. Don’t leave me!

“Alright, Chalia,” Lessenna says, then looks over at me, pausing for a moment. I’m scared! Last time was so scary and hard! “Well, actually, I’m here to practice, so feel free to just take a seat!”

“O-ok,” I say before walking over to a bench in the room.

*Clank, clank, clank*

Lessenna takes three metal bars and drops them on the floor. The bars are weird, though. They have lots of different colors in them!

“Disintegrate!” she says, and the bars fall apart into piles of colorful powder!

“Separate!” She waves her hands, and the piles of powder separate into different piles, but each pile is a different color!

“Melt! Form! Harden!” The piles melt, form into metal darts, and harden.

“STEEL HAILFIRE!” She yells—and that’s when I saw it. Her silver eyes changed color slightly, so they were circles of rainbow silver, and all around her it was like a gray mist appeared, filling the room. The metal darts on the floor rose up as she lifted a fist straight out in front of her, and the darts formed into a colorful screen. She then opened her hand and all of the hundreds of darts flew, some slow, and some fast. Some glowed brightly, while others seemed to disappear! They all flew into a reinforced stone target and completely crushed it into dust!

But that wasn’t all! “Disintegrate! Float! Lock! Spread!” The darts turned back into powder, rose out of the stone dust, and then split into even parts and flew to fifteen other stone targets.

“Charge!” She started glowing brighter and brighter with yellow magic. “Detonate!”

A lightning bolt flew from her finger, split into exactly fifteen parts, and struck each of the tagets, causing the powder surrounding the targets to explode with really loud “Booms.”

“Extract! Condense! Shape! Harden!”

A bunch of powder flew back from the blackened remains of the targets and then were pulled together, melted, and formed back into two colorful metallic bars, one less than she started with.

Woah. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I’m standing up, just staring at the targets, metal bars, and Lessenna. I just stand and stare until all the ambient mana has dispersed.

“Watcha think, Chalia?” She asks. “Want to learn how to do that, yourself?”

“That was so cool!”

“Yep! And that is only a part of what you can do with magical casting! Come over here for a moment.”

I walk over to her.

“Take this bar of metal,” she says, holding out a gray bar.

“It’s heavy!” I say, taking it from her.

“Of course, silly, it’s solid ingot of iron! Now close your eyes and feel the bar, both with your hands and with your magical senses.”

Besides being heavy, it’s also smooth. When I try to feel for magic, I don’t notice anything.

“Keep sensing. Do you see it? No? Ok, then push a little mana into, but just a little!”

I try taking a small amount of mana and putting it into the bar.

“Good! Now keep looking. You want to look for these little gray motes.”

I’m looking, but I don’t see them!

“They are really small, but this is an important step! Relax, take deep breaths, and keep sensing. Thinking about the physical traits at the same time will help. It will translate into colors, sort of.”

Colors? Like glowy things? I keep sensing, but look for anything that seems to glow, but the whole bar seems to be glowing! I try to sense closer, and find that the glow is actually made of a bunch of dots!

“I think I found them!” I say excitedly.

“Good! Now I want you to take one mote, and make it move from the rest, just like if it was your own mana.”

I try to get it to move, and it does! It’s really hard though!

“Think about how it feels. Keep moving it around and try to memorize its characteristics. Is it heavy or light? How smoothly does it move? Does it feel bright or dark?”

“Oooh, it is like an aura?”

“An aura? Hmm, maybe? I don’t know a whole lot about auras, but maybe it’s something like that,” she replies.

I’ll try to memorize its aura. Let’s see… It’s like heavy 6? Or 7? I don’t know, but it feels heavy. Also it feels smooth and bright. Maybe it’s flexible?

I keep try to think about all the different things it feels like. Sometimes the mote would disappear, but Lessenna said that’s normal and I should just find another one. As I was doing this, I started being able to move the motes faster and faster!

“Ok! You’re a natural at this! Next, see if you can move two motes at once!”

I try to add another mote and make them move at the same time. I do it, but it’s really hard again.

“You’re doing great!” Lessenna encourages me. “Try thinking of the two motes as being connected. The are different from each other, but they come from the same place and share the same characteristics, so they are almost the same!”

It’s kind of weird, but I try it. “Think about them being connected,” I say in my mind. I try again, and it gets a little bit easier.

I keep practicing and getting better and controlling more motes together at once, until finally I just can’t concentrate anymore, and stop getting better.

“Alright Chalia! You can open your eyes now!”

I open my eyes and look at the ingot, and you know what? It looks like half of it melted but became hard again before it could drip out of my hand!

“See that?” Lessenna asks. “You just did that!”

“Huh? What?” I don’t think I heard that correctly.

“You just melted part of the metal bar! Good job!”

“But I didn’t cast anything?” I didn’t say any fancy words or throw magic or anything, so how could I have melted the bar?

“Let me tell you a little secret. Remember when I took those metal bars, changed them into darts, and threw them all at the target? I actually didn’t have to chant to do any that! The lightning bolt was the only spell I had to chant.

“It’s not actually a big secret to really high rank mages, but most people don’t actually know about how to do what I just did. Its just about using mana manipulation and combining some really simple spells. The reason I said names like I was doing normal casting, though, is that I can use that to distract enemies from other secret attacks!”

Oooh, Lessenna, you’re so cool! I want to be like that!

“That’ll be all for today, though. I can see you have burnt through most of your mana. You worked really hard though, so let’s get some ice cream!”

“Oooh, I like ice cream, I shout.” I have had it a few times, and I really like it!

The rest of the day was really nice and relaxing. Lessenna took me to the market and got us both ice cream cones, and we ate them on our way to a nearby park. We talked for awhile about a bunch of random stuff such as magic, school, Selaena, and what it’s like to live in the guild. She then had me rest my head on her lap, and eventually I fell asleep.

*** *** ***

Chalia.

Chalia.

Good morning “Chalia!”

“Mmm.” I finally open my eyes to see Auris, who was gently shaking my shoulder to wake me up.

“Time to get up! Selaena told me to get up fed and ready for an exciting day!”

“Ok,” I say, crawling out of my bed and getting my balance.

After getting washed and dressed, Auris and I head down to get some food.

Woah, there are a lot of people here today! Whenever I’ve eaten here before, there were only a few people, and the tables were so far apart that there was a whole bunch of space between us and everyone else.

“Come this way,” Auris says, grabbing my hand and bringing me to a table kind of in the middle, but a bit to one side.

“Selaena!” I say after a gasp. I feel like I haven’t been able to see her in a long time!

All the closest tables went quiet. What happened? Was that a bad thing to do? Oh, no! They are all looking at me, and it’s really scary.

But then… *Ooomph*

“Chalia! I’m glad to see you made it!” Selaena says, lifting me onto the bench beside her and giving me a hug. “Don’t worry about all those other guys. They are just curious about you. “Oh, my! Are you shaking? I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to scare you at all. Look here, you’ve met some of the people here before, right? Here is Mr. Schraeder, the manager of our guild’s hall.”

“Hello Ms. Chalia, It is nice to see you again!” he said with a nod.

“And you met Mr. Lidwell before getting your guild badge. Also, Master Loroven here to my left. You may not have had a chance for proper introductions, but he is my boss and a really strong and nice person, so you don’t need to worry about a-ny-thing with him around! Ok?”

“Mhmm,” I say, nodding and squeezing next to her.

“So, how’s our little dragon doing now?” This Master Loroven asked, turning towards me.

His eyes. His eyes are so very deep—it’s like it has galaxies, and yet nothing! They are warm, and scary, too!

“Ahh, you are making fast progress,” He said. "Both aura-work and magecraft. On auras, though, you must focus on your strengths. It matters not now, but you will understand when you grow a bit more. Nevertheless, it is good to see you doing well.” He said with a smile.

Then Master Loroven turned to where Auris was still standing, and asked, “It seems something is perplexing you, child. What is it?”

“I-It’s nothing, sir. Please d-don’t trouble yourself with su-such a small thing.”

“Nonsense!” He replied. “Do you think that I am so accomplished as to be above guiding all but my apprentice? Let us hear it, what is your question?”

“W-well, t-the other day Zalli was teaching Chalia a-and said that Chalia has an aura g-gland but her sensitivity to aura d-differences was actually low…”

“Ah, I see. That should be strange, but there is actually a very good reason for that. Look at a dragon. Do they have aura glands?”

“Y-yes?” Auris asked.

“Indeed.” Spawns have very small ones, and dragons have rather large ones. Now for a tricky one: How many auras do dragons use?”

“Four?” She asked.

“Close, but for one exception,” he said.

At this point the whole cafeteria was quiet, except for the sounds coming from the kitchen.

“A-awakened?”

“Indeed,” He answered, “except for awakened.”

A gasp went through the cafeteria, and a few voices asked questions like “They are real? Weren’t they just legends? Is it true?” and a bunch of others were just really excited or surprised-looking.

“But for the question,” Master Loroven continued, “even the awakened only have one more aura. They are specialists by nature. After all, Why would you need a strength-buffing aura, when your muscle is already many times stronger than other creatures besides you? Most dragons are overbearing in nature, and by that token, their aura glands are specialized, as well, and so a draconic aura gland does not tend to be suitable for a very wide range of purposes. Instead, they focus on putting out a few auras so strong that other auras are rendered unnecessary.”

“T-thank you for your explanation.” Auris said again, with difficulty.

“You are welcome. However, feel free to ask what is really weighing on your mind. I am willing to listen.”

Auris went super stiff for a little while, before slowly relaxing again and going back to her usual quiet self.

Meanwhile, one of the other workers from the kitchen brought me a plate. I was still wondering what was going to happen today, but Selaena pushed the fork into my hand, smiled, and pointed at the really good-smelling food. So, let’s eat!