After only ten successes, James was sure he wasn’t going to make it to one hundred. After twenty, he began to think it was possible. After fifty, he realized that it was easy. For the final twenty, he was even able to hold a conversation with Fiyero as he worked.
“Good!” Fiyero clapped his hands when James successfully completed his one-hundredth’s attempt.
Fiyero enjoyed clapping his hands, James realized. Maybe it was the sharp noise, which delineated this moment from the previous, or the way it brought attention directly to him.
“The next step,” Fiyero said, “is to weave many threads together.” The old wizard conjured up a few more candles, so there was a circle of five, merrily burning. He hooked one candle-thread in each of four fingers on one hand, then used the other hand to weave the fifth between them. That fifth thread dove in and out of the first four until all five threads were tangled into the shape of a ball.
Fiyero then whispered a word of power, and the ball burst into flames. He threw it like a baseball into one of the marble pillars, and it splashed harmlessly against the stone.
“You see?” he asked. “Fireball.”
James stared, dumbstruck. “No, I don’t see! That was like ten steps all rolled into one! What!”
Fiyero laughed. “Alright, alright. To begin, gather four candlelights in your left hand…”
Fiyero walked James through every step of the process, calmly coaching him through every frustration. James would get part-way through the weaving, and one strand would slip through his fingers to dissolve the whole thing. He wanted to cry out in frustration and let the whole thing go — but Fiyero always had the right words, or a well-timed joke, to keep him going. He showed him not just how to restart the process, but how to salvage a fireball which seemed to be lost halfway through. Some mistakes were terminal, but not all, and eventually James too was able to see the difference.
By the time he finished his first fireball, James knew every inch of it. He was intimately familiar with every thread, which each tangle and turn of it. He could close his eyes and picture it perfectly. Hell, James had never been much of an artist but he felt as though he could sketch a picture of the fireball’s threads, he knew them so well.
“Now,” Fiyero said, “the word of power here is Fireball.”
James blinked. “Did you just say Fireball? The magic word for Fireball is Fireball?”
“No.” Fiyero gave him a strange look. “The magic word is Fireball.”
James listened carefully. He could sort of make out a difference in intonation that time? But it didn’t quite make sense. When Fiyero had first cast a demonstrative fireball, the magic word he’d spoken had sounded like gibberish to James’s ears. He’d thought there must be a special magic language, like a Grimoran version of Latin, that was reserved for spell words.
James tried again. “Fireball.” The cluster of mana strands in his hand burst into flames. They should have burned him — he should have been surprised when they didn’t — but he knew this fireball. It was his fireball. Of course it wouldn’t hurt him.
He threw it like a baseball at the nearest pillar. The fireball fell short by several feet and splashed impressively on the ground.
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Fiyero clapped. “Well done!” he praised. “Your aim could use some work, but the fireball itself performed wonderfully.”
James rolled his eyes. “Thanks.” He considered the process. Now that he’d seen it performed all the way through, he understood why the casting of the spell appeared to be complex hand movements. It was complex hand movements, only because one hand was weaving one mana thread into the others.
He chuckled. “Magic is kind of like knitting, isn’t it?”
Fiyero cocked his head. “What is knitting?”
James did his best to describe it. To be honest, he’d given knitting as much thought as penguins, in that he knew it existed and had seen it once, but he was certainly no expert.
The longer his explanation went on, the darker Fiyero’s glower became.
“This is nothing like knitting,” he scoffed. “We are not making mana scarves or fire sweaters.”
James couldn’t help but tease him. “Why not? A fire scarf sounds pretty badass.”
Fiyero spluttered. There was no good response to that; it was simply too outrageous. “Make one hundred fireballs,” he commanded instead. “Then we will be finished, and you will understand the difference.”
James’s first fireball collapsed before it was finished. The second blew up in his face as soon as he said the word. Fiyero kept frustratingly silent when James asked for help — except when he really did forget the next step, and the old man had an uncanny sense for when he genuinely needed help and when he was whining.
After the third exploded prematurely, James released the threads and laid back, allowing the cool stone floor to ease his tension.
“Do those count?” he quipped. He didn’t need to see the shake of Fiyero’s head, to know the answer.
“Using the book was supposed to make learning the spell easier,” James griped. “So far I feel like I’ve put just as much work in as anyone else would have to.”
“Do you?” Fiyero asked. He laid down as well, with his hands making a pillow behind his head. “In the corporeal world, what do you think would happen to a mage whose spell blew up in their face?”
James hesitated. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he said, but he was hesitant. Fiyero wouldn’t be asking, if that was the case. “My flames don’t hurt me.”
“Ahh. Your flames don’t hurt you. But when your spell unravels, they are not your flames, are they? They are, once again, their own.”
James gulped. If that was the case, he would have burned his eyebrows off many times over. He would have melted the skin off his palms. “How does anybody learn?” he asked. “I don’t think I could master this if I was hurting myself like that.”
Fiyero shrugged. “You would find a way, if it mattered to you. Many students practice with cotton thread until their weaving is perfect. There are some difficulties there — cotton does not follow the same principles as mana — but there are ways to make it a good enough parallel to be effective. Then, knowing the weave, they do not fail unless they let their fear take hold.” His voice grew somber. “Fear is the mind-killer. It is insidious. It tells you that what you know to be true, might not be. It whispers that what you know yourself to be capable of, you might not be. Fear implies that the worst that could happen, is what will happen to you. Some fear is useful. It keeps your mind sharp, so you are not caught off guard by a danger you could have prepared for. Too much, though, can destroy you from the inside out.”
James thought back to his own experiences on Earth. A healthy amount of fear bred competence. It taught an electrician to check equipment dead before he worked on it. Too much, though, would paralyze him. It would scream that any amount of current was deadly in the right context, and it would make that work impossible.
“I understand fear,” he finally said. “That’s what makes learning this way easier, isn’t it? It’s not faster — well, I mean, it is, since time isn’t passing in the rea— in the corporeal world. But I meant, I still have to put the time and effort in. I still have to understand and do the work to make it feel natural. The difference is, I can make mistakes. I can weave a fireball wrong without hurting myself. I can learn without fear.”
“Just so,” Fiyero replied. He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.
“This is better, you know, than what I expected.” James gazed up at the sky. It was pretty. A constant state of blue with fluffy white clouds, which moved just quickly enough to hold his gaze. “I thought the System would teach me the spell the way it taught me Mana Bolt. I even thought that was what I wanted it to do. But this… I have no idea how Mana Bolt works, but I understand Fireball. That makes a difference. It makes me… I don’t know. Trust it more.”
Fiyero didn’t respond. Maybe he didn’t want to. Maybe he didn’t have anything to say.
It didn’t matter. James sat up. “Okay. One hundred fireballs.”
