“The candlelight is fire!” James shouted. His words reverberated through the arena, and even the candles themselves seemed to hold their breath.

  Fiyero clapped his hands. Each extinguished flame sprang back to life, and the arena was once again filled with light.

  “Elaborate,” he said.

  James racked his brain. He knew the answer, he was certain of it, but he wanted to make sure he said it right.

  “When we look at a candle,” he began slowly, “we normally only think of the flame and the wax. The flame is obviously fire, and we tend to think of the candlelight as separate. It is light, not fire. But that’s not really true. I mean, it is, but it’s fire, too. It’s not just a byproduct of the fire, it still is the fire.”

  By the end of James’s explanation, Fiyero was smiling. “Quite so, young man! Very well done.”

  James let out a breath. He hadn’t expected this process to be so nerve-racking! Honestly, he’d expected to learn the skill the way a Pokemon learned a TM — poof! Learned.

  This felt good, though. It felt earned. He was already seeing fire in a while new light (haha) and he was ready to put that understanding to use.

  James beamed at Fiyero, soaking in the compliment. “Now that we’ve gotten the hard part out of the way, let’s get to the spell!”

  The old man laughed. “Oh! Ohoho! Ahahah. Oh dear,” he chortled. “You thought that was the hard part?” He wiped a tear from his eye. “Gaining the affinity is just the beginning, my boy! You know just enough for me to show you the way fire mana interacts with the world. You still need to learn to shape it, and to see it for yourself!”

  James gulped. Still, that all sounded better than a pop quiz he hadn’t studied for. Anything was better than the ominous darkening of the room, which he didn’t mind admitting was intimidating.

  Fiyero muttered some magic words and twisted his hands in an incomprehensible design. Then he clapped them together — and the room went dark once more. The difference, this time, was a series of red lines that criss-crossed around the room. It was like that meme of a guy standing in front of a board with red yarn strung from picture to picture to news article, but if it had been turned three dimensional.

  Each red string gave off a hint of light, so James could still see the arena. It was beautiful and incredible, like an abstract painting. It felt like what he saw with his eyes was only the surface, but with his soul he could see beneath the surface.

  It was blinding. He cried out and covered his face, but it did no good. He could not cover the eyes of his soul.

  “What you see before you is the mana from each of the candles in this room,” Fiyero explained. He clapped his hands again and the lines extinguished, all except one candle at James’s side. With the other flames gone, the sense of overwhelming beauty faded.

  On its own, the red line looked short and unimpressive. It stood straight up where the flame would be and ended only a foot away from the wick.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “What I am showing you now is only the most basic representation, like when a child draws a stick figure instead of a man.” There was a smile in Fiyero’s voice. His tone was lightly mocking, but in a friendly way. He was having fun, maybe a little at James’s expense but also for his betterment.

  How long had it been since Fiyero had had a student? Was he able to feel the passage of time? If not consciously, was there a part of him that could sense how long it had been?

  James knew better, now, than to ask that question. Not only would it distract from the goal, it was ultimately, as Fiyero would say, immaterial.

  What mattered was that after the display, James felt again like he had a deeper understanding of fire. It was like learning algebra and finally saying, “Oh, divide on both sides of the equation!” and it was the same statement which had been reiterated throughout the week, but suddenly with feeling and an understanding that went deeper than the words.

  Candlelight was fire. Fire reacted to fire, one flame extending and brightening the next. It was all connected. Alone, a flame was weaker, smaller — but still fire. Still powerful and free, dancing on its wick, creating its candlelight. In a way, saying that candlelight was fire was like saying that fire was fire.

  “I understand,” James said.

  “Then we can begin.” Fiyero walked to the center of the arena and took a seat on the floor.

  James picked up his candle and followed. Once he, too, was seated, Fiyero lit a second candle and demonstrated as he spoke.

  “Every fire spell begins the same way. The first step is to see the mana in the world; the second is to touch it.” Fiyero reached out to the thin red line above his candle, hooked a finger around it, and tugged. The flame at the base of the line bent. He released it, and the flame straightened. “You try.”

  James hooked a finger around the red line, but when he tried to tug on it, he passed right through it.

  Fiyero tsked. “You are not believing it,” he said. “You know that you can touch a flame — perhaps you have done so in the past and learned a quick lesson. But you were not able to bend that flame then, so you do not believe you can bend it now.”

  James tried again with the same result. He huffed. “How do I believe it now?” he asked. “Twice I’ve proven I can’t touch it.”

  Fiyero shook his head. “Peace,” he said. “There is no rush. Affinity is something which must, at heart, be understood, which is why you were pressed into answering. This, and every step after it, you may take your time. You may fail. You may fail again and again, until at last you succeed.”

  James took a deep breath, and then another. Fiyero’s words were calming, and they helped enormously. It was difficult enough to believe something which he knew to be physically impossible, made worse by a sense of pressure that if he didn’t get it right immediately, he would be expelled from the school. Knowing that he could take his time, he was able to relax.

  Before James tried again, he tried to imagine it. He visualized the red strand in his mind. He saw himself tugging on it, pulling it slightly to the side like Fiyero had done, then releasing it back to its natural state. He tried to change his mindset. It wasn’t the flame he was touching, which would burn him, it was the fire, and the fire was more than the flame, and the fire wanted to listen to him. James kept talking about flames as though they danced — why not consider himself their dance partner?

  When he was ready, he reached out, hooked his finger around the string, and tugged.

  To his absolute surprise, it worked.

  “I did it!” he said. “I did it!”

  “Well done!” Fiyero beamed. “Do it again, one hundred more times, before we move on. It must become second nature to you.”

  James’s jaw slackened. “One— one hundred?!”

  Fiyero shrugged and spread his palms wide. “We have the time, my boy. Remember, this place is hardly real.”

  James winced. Was Fiyero still mad about that? Was he making this more difficult than it had to be, out of spite?

  No… he didn’t know the man very well, but such a thing seemed out of character for the teacher. It must really be necessary.

  “Okie doke…” James said. “One down, one hundred more to go.” He reached out to hook his finger through the little red string — and passed right through. “Dammit!”

  This was going to be harder than he thought.