Chapter 54 - Languages with Professor Lionel Logue

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Felix Sutter: Poor boy living in Sacramento, recently found out magic existed. Hard worker, knows the price of everything.

Erik Morsin: Heir to the Duchy of the Emerald Isle. Just wants to play his violin.

Sora Park: Erik’s loyal friend. Loves flying. An absolute broombrain.

Vivian Merryweather: An expert on all things color, fashion, and of the heart. Gets seasick easily.

Alexandria Renard: Wants to be the next Morgana Le Fay. Can’t speak louder than a whisper. 

Hazel Winslow: Ran away from an abusive cult. Awoke as a natural mind mage.

Emily Brown: The sick girl. I had to do an INSANE amount of research for her condition... I'll do a prize of some sort for whoever can figure it out first, it's going to be a subplot mystery.

Odric Martin: Accident prone. Prophesied to die… eventually.

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 Only Steward Ronan survived.
Clever, silver-haired, hands stained with ink and compromise.
Bjorn offered him two paths:
One, paved in gold -
A share of the wealth, a future for his blood,
And a name among nobles.
The other, soaked in crimson -
His kin hung from rafters like game in winter, and his own death slow and loud.
Ronan chose survival.
He bent the knee, and kissed the ash.

The Saga of Bjorn, Verse 21

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“By the way, what did you guys do during theory class?” Felix asked as they left the natural world classroom.

Erik shrugged.

“Our own thing. Someone decided it was lovely weather for flying, and missed the bells.”

His pointed look at Sora was completely unnecessary. Felix already knew which one of their group would go flying and be late to a class as a result.

“The stupid staircase was too narrow for me to fly up.” Sora sulked. “Plus, I was practicing for my elective.”

“No flying inside!” Both Vivian and Alex chorused.

“Jinx!” They shouted, pointing at each other.

“Double jinx!” Vivian shouted.

 Alex whipped out her wand. “Proper jinx!”

Vivian pouted.

“I said mine first, I win.” She said.

“Win what?” Hazel asked.

“Win.” Sora said, like that explained everything. 

“Children.” Hazel muttered with disgust.

“Like you’re not one of us!” Felix retorted.

Hazel sniffed disdainfully, but seemed inordinately pleased by the remark, walking a little straighter and with a small spring in her step.

“And I’m thinking of forming a coven with all of you. Odin help me, where’s my good sense?” Erik bemoaned, entreating the ceiling.

“In Kraken house. Where you didn’t go.” Vivian said triumphantly, like she was ramming a knife home.

“You’re one to talk, Ms. ‘I look so much better in phoenix colors’!” Alexandria whispered.

The five of them - occasionally six, with Hazel chiming in - bickered and chatted all the way to their languages classroom.

They settled in, scattered around the room, and were soon joined by Odric, Emily, and Hana Chanteraine, who settled in by the window and stared outside. Her eyes flickered around, tracking what Felix figured were probably birds, but he couldn’t see from his angle.

“I’ve heard the professor’s a little… odd.” Vivian whispered in conspiratorial tones. “We should have our notes ready.”

He could be walking into a prank, but Vivian hadn’t steered him wrong yet, and it wasn’t like it was bad advice to be ready.

It was a good thing too. The door opened, and someone Felix assumed was the professor came in. It was a little hard to tell though, Vivian was spot on about him being ‘odd’.

“I am Professor Logue. This is languages class. It’s easily the most important class you’ll have here in Camelot.”

The professor was lecturing to his wand, that was being held in his fingers. The man never looked up, never asked for their names, nothing. He was simply circling the room, lecturing intently to his wand. 

“Two points to everyone here. Minus five to anyone who’s late. Why languages? Why not charms? Rituals? It’s because of spellbooks. They’re magical, truly magical, and while people will incessantly complain about how they have a tendency to wander off if not well treated, there is an excellent upside to it all. Namely, they protect themselves. They do not fade with age. They’ll escape out of a burning library. You find an ancient book of spells or rituals? It’s not going to be written in English. You’ll be lucky if it’s written in Latin. No, far more likely that it’ll be written in one of the many, many Egyptian dialects. Or you’ll get the Akkadian Spellbook. There’s so many copies of the exact same spellbook floating around that we know Babylon had a standardized education and strongly encouraged the manufacture of that particular spellbook. However, that’s not the class. We are here, today, to discuss Egyptian."

Felix started, and realized he’d been so fascinated, so engrossed in the lecture, that he’d completely forgotten to take notes! He tried to quickly write down what had been said, but the professor was relentless with his lecture.

Fine. Benefit of a coven, maybe one of the others would have the notes.

“Egyptian is the language of choice because of how long it stood. There are reasons why we primarily see texts of European and Middle East languages here in Logres, and very few Far East texts make their way here, and vice-versa. That is a lecture for another day. People think of Egyptian as a single language, it wasn’t. There were six. Archaic, Old, Middle, Late, Demotic, and Coptic. Now, this class will primarily focus on the Middle and Late Egyptian periods, but those divisions are more academic in nature, not practical. See, it wasn’t like everyone woke up one day and said ‘you know what? This old language is a crock, let’s make a new one’. No, languages are living, breathing things, and the words, runes, and meanings have shifted over time. Of course, this is a deadly, dangerous thing. A perfectly functioning runic array written down in Old Egyptian in 2500 BC might use symbols whose meaning changed over the years, and by 2000 BC, the intrinsic meaning of the symbol has shifted enough that the former protective array is, at best, utter nonsense, and at worst, will kill you. The last one is unlikely. My personal field of expertise is the study of individual hieroglyphs, and how their meaning has changed over time. It’s a large part of why this class is needed. Not only do you need to translate the meaning of spells, rituals, etc., but you then need to know how to check if the spell is still useful. The languages are dead now and the meaning of the runes are mostly fixed, but the people writing down what they knew didn’t know that at the time. A strong understanding of runes, their secondary meanings, and how to link them all together is critical for enchanting, wards, runes, and a large number of other fields. We will be covering approximately 400 different hieroglyphs in this class, which is enough to give you a bare bones understanding, but you will need additional resources when you’re doing this in the real world. I recommend my studies, which a copy can be found in the library. Now, the…”

Felix found himself falling behind, and the professor did not stop. He was slower than Hurricane Thistledown, but had no check at all to see if the students were keeping up. It was the last class of the day, and Felix was finding himself dragging. 

Then Hana raised her hand. Felix wasn’t exactly looking around the room, too absorbed in his notes, but he’d half-realized that the girl wasn’t writing down a single thing, instead looking around the room and occasionally doodling.

The professor ignored her hand, and Felix continued to take notes. Eventually, she spoke up, and it was like Felix’s whole world tilted.

He couldn’t say what word she said, only that it was more like a musical note than any language he’d heard. It was the question a bee hums into the heart of a flower, the inquiry whispered by dew as it meets dawn. It was a riddle the river repeated to stone that it polished, the soft interrogation of moss upon forgotten steps. It was a query woven in spider-silk and moonlight, and curiosity that the wind asks of every leaf it touched.

To say it dazed Felix was an understatement. It took a sledgehammer to his mind and understanding, just as it hit the rest of the class and the professor, who paused in his ceaseless circling.

Felix was still wrestling with the whole everything when a spray of water hit his face. He blinked, sputtered, and was snapped out of his daze. Most of the others had already come back to their senses, revived by the professor.

“Good. Stay.” The professor said, and repeated the process twice more, reviving the rest of the students. Felix looked in dismay at his soggy notes and soaked uniform, and resisted the urge to cry.

His work! All his hard work! Ruined! He had one uniform, he hadn’t thought he’d need to get it washed so early! Ugh, this was terrible. At least his bag wasn’t soaked. 

“Chanteraine has clearly grasped part of the true language of ideas, and we were all lucky enough to hear a single word. Ms, you’re excused, you should be in private tutoring for your ability. Where was I? Ah yes. Grammar. While…”

Like nothing had happened, the professor went back to staring at his wand while circling around the room. Hana looked around, followed nothing across the ceiling, then packed her bags up. With a dreamy look on her face, she went to the door, only pausing to let the professor go past on his endless circling. She bowed to him, then skipped out the door… leaving her neatly packed bags behind.

“Honestly.” Vivian huffed, but it was too late to say anything more. The professor’s speech was going full tilt, and Felix bent over, putting pen to notebook.

“... and the unfortunate interruption in the middle means we’re done now. Homework, trace out the first 20 runes in the book 10 times. See you tomorrow.” The professor never looked up from his wand, and his parting words were timed exactly. He left the room at the same time he spoke the last words, right as the bells rang. His pace of walking and talking had never varied once the entire time.

“That just happened.” Sora said, blinking in disbelief.

“Does anyone have notes from the first half of the lecture?” Felix asked. Nobody needed him to clarify when the first and the second half were.

“I do.” Erik almost looked embarrassed.

“Let’s head down and find a meeting room?” Alexandria whispered, then shot a poisonous glare over her shoulder. “Except for the dunderheads who got detention on the first day.”

Vivian started to cry, and a panicked look overtook Alex’s face.

“Wait, no, shit, I’m sorry!” She whispered, running over to the other girl and hugging her.

“We should probably go.” Erik said. Hazel was already briskly escaping the scene of the crime, Emily and Odric hot on her heels.

Felix escaped with them, leaving the crying girls behind.