“Magic is infinite in variation, each person a special instrument with a special tune only they can play. This makes teaching difficult. You cannot teach them their instrument by showing them your own. You can only play the music and invite them to join in with you.”

  - Baromah the Wise

  Raziel and Miles ate lunch in silence. Hoeru sat close by, not eating, with his back turned to them. The chill air didn’t seem to bother Hoeru but both Miles and Raziel had to grit their teeth with every gust of mountain wind. Sumi sat with her back to Hoeru’s watching them and seeming every bit as immune to the cold as Hoeru. She ate small bites of fruit and cheese with curiosity, savoring everything as if she wasn’t sure why they were doing it and was trying to sort out some secret meaning behind this “eating” business. Ichiro sat nearby, mechanically emptying his own plate. Ichiro always ate an alarming amount of food. Presumably he had to if he wanted to fuel his enormous body but if there was any joy in it, he never expressed it.

  Raziel had intended to ask about Hoeru and Miles’ morning training but, the moment he took his first bite, food became his entire world. The only time he’d felt hunger like this was after undergoing magical healing.

  He ate and ate and ate, and never quite seemed full. When he’d sat down the plate of meats and cheeses, fruit and bread, that Ichiro had handed him seemed insurmountable. But by the time his plate was empty Raziel felt like he could eat half again as much. Maybe this was how Ichiro felt. Raziel wasn’t sure he’d tasted a single thing he’d eaten.

  “So what did you do for training this morning?” Raziel asked when he was finally able to think again. He pressed his finger to the few remaining crumbs and bringing them to his mouth.

  “Ichiro had us sparring,” Miles said. That explained his dirty uniform. Raziel couldn’t help noticing that Hoeru’s white and blue clothes were still pristine.

  “That wasn’t Hoeru’s training. He was just helping with Miles’.” Ichiro said. The muscular elf reached for their plates.

  “What was yours?” Raziel asked, reluctantly parting with his plate. There were still some crumbs that he wanted but he wasn’t willing to make an issue of it. Hoeru didn’t turn around to answer.

  “Not eating,” he said.

  Raziel and Miles exchanged a look at that. Raziel felt a surge of gratitude for his own food and shame at not having realized. He’d assumed that Hoeru had just wolfed down his food before he and Miles returned. Hoeru had an appetite to rival Ichiro’s despite being maybe a third of the elf’s size. Raziel had never known him to go more than a few hours without eating something, even if he had to catch it himself. That Hoeru had to do something that difficult for him made Raziel’s struggle to wash a few statues seem all the more pathetic.

  After Ichiro collected their plates and set them aside, he threw a few more logs on the cook-fire, which struck Raziel as odd. They were done eating. There wouldn’t be a need to make more food for hours. Ichiro wasn’t much for explaining himself though and Raziel wasn’t going to complain about a warmer fire.

  “So what’s next?” Raziel asked when he could not stand to wait any longer.

  “Aura training,” Ichiro said. Miles winced.

  “What’s aura training?” Raziel asked.

  Ichiro didn’t answer right away. He took his time making sure that the logs in the fire were just so, adjusting them with his bare hands, heedless of the heat, before standing and moving towards the pond that surrounded the tree. He pointed at the water.

  “The first step is to get in.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  Raziel shrugged and went to the waters edge. He was a little worried about swimming when he felt so heavy but he was fairly sure the arm wraps weren’t actually making him heavier. He didn’t think he would sink any faster than he normally would.

  So he jumped.

  And the moment his feet left the ground, a thought occurred to him about how long the water in his bucket had stayed cold.

  And how every cup of water he’d had since he’d come to the school had come from the pond and had been cold enough to hurt his teeth.

  It didn’t feel like getting jumping into water. It felt more like jumping into a pool full of knives. The shock of cold that slammed through Raziel’s body didn’t just hurt. It blasted through him, raking at his skin and filled him with more energy than he could ever have expected. All that energy was directed at one goal.

  Get out.

  Faster than he would have believed himself capable, Raziel was back out of the water and huddled as close to the fire as he could get without actually hugging the burning logs.

  Ichiro turned to Miles and Hoeru, his face placid.

  “Who’s next?”

  Neither Miles nor Hoeru seemed excited by the opportunity. They stared at each other for a long time before, Miles, with great trepidation and the determined expression of a man about put a particularly valued body part into a bee hive, walked up to the edge of the pond.

  Miles did it the slow way. He started with dipping his toes in. Then he went on to sliding his calves in. He had to take his legs all the way out and rub feeling back into his toes before he could convince himself to move up to his thighs. Past that was the most difficult part. He screamed a little getting through that but once it was done it was just a few quick breaths and he was under.

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  And then in a blink of an eye he was shivering next to Raziel beside the fire.

  Ichiro turned his look on Hoeru.

  Hoeru glared, slunk to the edge, crouched, and with obvious distaste, slipped headfirst into the water. He didn’t burst up out of the water like Miles and Raziel had. Instead he just came sliding out and crawled to the fire like an unhappy dog. He even shook the water off, drawing angry hissing from the fire as well as Raziel and Miles.

  “W-what w-w-was the p-point of that?” Raziel asked.

  “I told you. That’s the first step. The next step is to stay in as long as you can.”

  “Why?” Hoeru asked irritably.

  “T-t-t-to l-learn to control our a-a-auras,” Miles answered.

  “I d-don’t even know w-what that means.”

  “Aura is the word for an individual’s internal magic,” Ichiro interjected before Miles could stutter out an answer. Before Raziel could tell Ichiro he knew that, the elf continued. “It makes you stronger, faster. And…”

  Ichiro calmly walked over and stepped into the water leaving barely a ripple. A moment later his bald head popped back up above the surface and he began to tread water. He didn’t look cold. In fact, steam came off his head like he was in a warm bath.

  “It makes you tougher, harder to harm, and more resistant to things like heat or cold.”

  “H-how long can you s-stay in t-there?” Raziel asked, awed.

  “As long as I want to.”

  Just to prove his point, Ichiro treaded water for a minute longer before climbing up out of the water. He didn’t shake or shiver. Instead, he closed his eyes, breathed in, breathed out, and all of the water fell away from his body. He stood before them as dry as if he had never been in the pond at all.

  “Mastering your aura is a lifelong process. To master one’s aura is to master one’s self. And as you continue to grow throughout your life, your aura will grow with you. It is not a task you can complete. There will always be a greater height, another plateau, one more reward just out of reach. But through this self mastery, there is great power to be gained.”

  “But… How do we use it?” Raziel asked.

  “You’ve already used it. You’ve used your magic to make yourself stronger in battle. You did it against Daichi.”

  “But…” Raziel trailed off. He wasn’t even sure he could do magic anymore. He’d tried and nothing had come.

  Ichiro stepped over to Raziel. He knelt down and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Listen to me. I know what you are considering. I know how you have been taught to do magic. And let me promise you, this is possible. If I could tell you how this works I would. But magic is unique and special to every person. I can only guide you to the water. It is up to you to learn to drink.”

  Raziel heard everything that Ichiro said. And none of it made any sense. He understood the words but they felt like Ichiro was telling him to flap his arms hard enough and he’d be able to fly. But he wasn’t about to let that stop him from trying.

  So, Raziel dove back into the water. Moments later he was shivering next to the fire again. His mind raced trying to understand what he was supposed to do.

  The next hour was painful to say the least. The three of them would, when they could stand it, return to the pond, and each time they would burst back out of it, shaking with failure. Raziel forced himself into the water the most but Miles was not far behind him in attempts. But try as they might, neither of them seemed to be making any progress.

  Hoeru did better than either of them by far. Despite his obvious disdain for the exercise, he could stay in the pond for almost half a minute at a time. Even so, he only got in at all when Ichiro stared at him long enough to prompt him to move.

  Sumi sat nearby, watching them with fascination, but she never tried to go into the water herself. Instead, she seemed content to observe and see what they would do next.

  Doing this required using magic. Raziel understood that much. But how? Raziel sat by the fire, doing his best to ignore the occasional gusts of wind and the way the water clung to him, leeching away even the memory of warmth. When he reached out for magic there was nothing he could grab onto. He knew there was magic all around him. He could sense it everywhere, pulsing and coursing through the air and the ground. But he couldn’t seem to influence it at all. It was like sitting next to a river with a bucket he could not move and trying to will the river to flow into the bucket.

  Without that outside magic, Raziel didn’t know how to use his own. He reached into himself, searched for his magic but all he could find inside was dry and hard, like sun baked dirt. It was a terrifying sensation. As though everything he was had been used up. He needed the magic from the outside to free up what he had within himself.

  They tried, again and again. It never got any easier to bear. If anything, it burned deeper and it took longer for the fire to push out the cold.

  After almost three hours, Miles got a strange look on his face. Hoeru was nearly dry, it had been so long since he had gotten back into the pond and Raziel was hungry again from all the shaking his body was doing. Raziel wouldn’t have noticed the change in Miles if he hadn’t felt something from him. It was a ripple in the magic between them, like the first warm breeze of summer. Miles’ eyes were focused but not on anything that Raziel could see.

  Miles rose, leaving his forgotten glasses on the ground. His motions were slow but smooth, his eyes remaining fixed on a point in the air. He slipped into the water, going all the way under. When Miles head came up he looked strange. It wasn’t just that he was missing his glasses or that his usually ruffled hair plastered down. His eyes remained fixed on that distant, invisible point in the air before him. And he stayed in the water.

  Then Miles smiled and Raziel felt it when that sense of warmth radiating off of Miles flickered and faded. Miles eyes went wide and he screamed and started flailing to get to the edge of the water. Raziel helped him out and over to the fire.

  “It worked! You did it!”

  “J-just for a bit, yeah.”

  “That’s awesome! What did you do?”

  “I used my aura,” Miles asked confused. Raziel felt himself wilt just a little at the answer. He knew what Miles would say but he had to ask anyway.

  “But how did you use it?”

  “I don’t know how to-“

  “Explain it. Of course not,” Raziel said, cutting him off with a frustrated groan.

  “This is all pointless,” Hoeru muttered.

  “Pointless? Miles just did it?”

  “And? What’s he gained? Is he stronger now?” Hoeru said. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded exhausted. Worst of all, Raziel didn’t have an answer.

  He wanted to defend Miles, maybe make up for what he’d said earlier. More than that though, he wanted to understand what was going through Hoeru’s head. This didn’t seem like mere irritability from hunger. Hoeru had always been apart from everyone else but Raziel always understood him. For the first time since Peritura Raziel really understood that his friend was in deep pain.

  “I don’t know if I’m any stronger now,” Miles said when Raziel failed to answer. “But I know I’ve never done anything like this before. I can’t keep being who I was. I can’t keep being afraid forever.”

  Hoeru’s eyes widened at that. The expression on his face flickered though surprise, anger, before settling to something rueful and disappointed.

  “Hoeru, what’s wrong?” Raziel asked. The changeling looked away, first down at the ground then he turned away completely.

  “I’m gonna go for a walk. I need to do something else.”

  “Hoeru-“

  “We’ll talk later. Not now. I can’t right now.”

  Hoeru was walking away before Raziel could say any more. Miles didn’t say anymore, just stared into the fire. Even Sumi stayed where she was, though she watched Hoeru walk out of the school with pain and concern in her eyes.