Chapter 51 - Divination with Professor Dorian Dawnrover

AN: Song made it to rank 80! Just 30 more before you all get 5 bonus chapters!

People voted, people discussed, and after a lot of studying, checking, and what have you, I've decided to run 4 Song chapters - 1 Elaine chapter a week for now. When the current Elaine story ends, I'll adjust back to 5 Song chapters a week, unless or until I get more Elaine Ideas. We'll see how it goes!

I want to thank IFR, Supp Mr Mike, NightSky, Fala, Newbie, and Redenife for writing such wonderful reviews for Song! Thank you! I know there's a number of others who wrote reviews who aren't getting a shoutout, but at a certain point the names would all blur together. I'll try to thank you in later weeks :)

Onto another week of five chapters! I hope I can maintain this pace. I'm getting to a transitionary part of the book, and struggling a bit with it. Hopefully my notes will help me out, but right now I'm pulling a CLASSIC 'look at all the things that happen in such a short timeframe!' move, and I'm not thrilled with it. I managed my pacing well in Dragoneye Moons. At the same time, this is a liminal place, and there's LOTS going on as our intrepid heros are thrown into a new world.

Either way, enjoy!

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Characters - 

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

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

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Maeve Morsin, last ember of her house, walked unaware into the wolf’s den.
She bore the Ring of Warding, a relic of her line, bound to her very flesh.
But no ward could match the will of Bjorn.
With blade kissed in silence, her hand was taken -
A flash of steel, a scream swallowed by runes.
The ring fell, and her protective magics with it.

The Saga of Bjorn, Verse 25

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Felix and Alex tromped down into the dungeons together. The girl made sure she was always a step or two ahead of Felix.

He had a few questions about the subject, none of which were covered in his textbook. He was getting the sneaking suspicion that they fell into the category of ‘dumb questions that everyone knew’, but couldn’t let them go.

“So, er, with divination, is it possible to look into the future?” He asked.

“That’s a super difficult question.” Alex whispered. “For me and you? No. You need to have a particular combination of cores and soulbindings to open the third eye, and even then there’s a lot of imprecision and fuzziness to it all.” She frowned. “I don’t know why that is, maybe we should ask.”

Felix nodded.

“I’d love to foresee some lottery numbers.” He said wistfully.

Alex barked a harsh laugh.

“You and me both. Make you a deal, either one of us pulls it off, we’ll split it.” She turned around, kept walking backwards, and offered her hand. Felix hesitated a moment, then shook it.

“Sure. Why not everyone else?” He asked.

“Because you’re here, and they’re not.” She answered with a whispered laugh.

The two of them lined up outside the door to divination, along with a number of other students. Felix found himself the target of a number of dirty looks, except for one dreamy girl whose eyes seemed to be tracing things that didn’t exist.

Or, Felix amended to himself, that were invisible. Magic world, right?

The looks prompted him to discreetly check his breath. Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.

No wonder Alex was keeping her distance. He was practically radiating stink from lunch. What a great impression to give to everyone. Plus, he stood out extra-hard with the Dragon house uniform being an entirely different cut from the flowing robes everyone else wore.

“Excuse me.” A hoarse voice spoke up from around waist level. Felix started as he looked back, and stepped back against the wall, his eyes opened wide.

He was used to seeing people with all sorts of problems. People who got sick and couldn’t afford treatment often ended up in the same trailer park he lived in. He’d seen Mrs. Smith smoking a pack of cigarettes out on her chair every day, until one day she was there in the morning, stone-cold with a half-smoked cigarette still stubbornly clinging to her mouth.

They had nothing on the man coming through. It was like every injury he’d ever seen put on one person. 

He had no legs, and only one mangled hand was pushing his wheelchair along. Tiny runes were carved along every inch of the wheelchair. A blindfold was wrapped around his face, and scars criss-crossed every inch visible of the man’s flesh. A dark purple thing seemed to be attached to his bald head, and his ears resembled cauliflower.

“Pardon me.” He hoarsely repeated himself as he slowly passed his way through the crowd of students. There were a few horrified gasps and one scream as he slowly made his way through. The door to the divination classroom magically opened up as he neared, and Felix had a sudden moment of horrified realization.

This was their professor.

There was a frozen moment after he entered, then the professor called out to them.

“Well? What are you all waiting for? Come in, I don’t bite… I don’t have enough teeth left to get a solid grip.”

His words were followed by a hacking, bitter laugh.

“Wait. What am I doing here. Shit, I’m at the wrong class!” Alexandria tore down the hallway a second later.

A pale-faced Felix followed the rest of the students in, and he cursed his bad luck at being at the end of the line. Everyone else had piled in near the back of the room, leaving only the front left. Normally, Felix was a big fan of sitting at the front of the room, but this time…

The room was dark, dingy, and he could absolutely believe it had been a prison cell before getting reluctantly converted to a classroom by the lowest bidder.

“Bones.” The professor called out, then started coughing.

“I am present.” The elegant girl called out in a voice laced with steel.

“Chanteraine…” The professor continued roll call without moving from his spot at the front of the room, frequently hacking away.

“You are all here to learn divination.” The professor softly started his lecture, and Felix had a white-hot flash of panic as he realized he didn’t have any of his supplies out. He frantically grabbed his supplies, minorly relieved that the other students were also a step behind.

“Past. Present. Future. Divination is the subtle art of gathering information, through wand and ritual. The present is quite easy, and what we will spend most of our time learning. The past is a little trickier. The spells are harder, the rituals demand more. And the future? Look at me.” The professor sharply demanded, and Felix jumped with the rest of the class. The lecture was interrupted by another round of coughing. “Look at my body. That’s simply the external. My innards are just as ruined. My magic is feeble, my core is on the verge of being cracked. Such-” He went into another coughing fit. “Such is the price of knowing the future. Of changing what has been foreseen.” He shook his head slowly. “There is free will. The future is mutable, even when known. But, alas, it takes a terrible price. Heed me well, nereids and ravens, Squirrels and doves, snakes and salmon. Knowledge of the future is cursed. Either you must witness tragedy and allow it to pass, or divert it. You will be lucky, should such a diversion land on your body and magic. Far - far too often, it is another one of your friends, who you will put in the line of danger.”

Fat tears were soaking through the professor’s blindfold and making tracks down his face.

“The same warning goes to the rest of you. Beware, friendship with a true seer. For when they foolishly meddle, you might find yourself the lightning rod of fate and destiny, charred to the bone.”

To Felix’s horror, he realized the professor had a small blackened lump on a necklace, and he suddenly didn’t think he was talking metaphorically at all.

The professor let the silence stretch on, then suddenly seemed to come back to himself. His lecture was constantly punctuated with coughs.

“My apologies, where were we? Ah yes. Divination! The present is what’s most used, and possibly what’s most useful. Any spell that deals with information, generally the obtaining of it, is divination. This is exceptionally useful in the medical fields, where healers will use diagnostic spells to work out what is wrong with a patient. There are all manner of spells to return all sorts of information. The library infamously has the book-locating spells pinned down. Our first dozen lessons will be working up the theory and spellwork to be able to cast those spells, which will let you find any other spell. Where it gets interesting is information denial. Privacy spells. The chameleon spell. Invisibility necklaces. All of these technically fall under the umbrella of divination. By the same token, sensory spells fall under divination. There is some argument if sense-improving rituals are divination, and my personal take on it is yes, they are. However, given their nature as a deeply involved ritual, I would suggest consulting with your professor in that topic…”

Felix reluctantly had to admit that, as horriffying as Professor Dawnrover was, and as broken up as the lecture was, it was pretty good. As the Kirin house motto said, knowledge was power, and an entire branch of magic dedicated to finding things out seemed quite useful.

The lecture seemed to be wrapping up with enough time for a practical demonstration, and Felix put his hand up.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Sutter?” The professor asked.

“Does divination cover finding things? Like lost money?” He asked, completely unashamed of his example. If money was an exception, better to find out now.

Professor Dawnrover’s wheezing laugh was partly an answer.

“That’d fall under dowsing, which we will eventually get to.” He said. “Now, if you will all come up and collect a mirror.”

Felix was first in line, but the collection was fairly sad. He grabbed a small, clouded mirror with only one large crack through it - the best of the bunch - and sat back down at his seat. The rest of the students got theirs, with Sora at the very end of the line getting a mirror that had to have magic keeping it together, the entire thing had more cracks than a spiderweb.

“This is a tool, not a focus.” The professor explained. “You activate it with willpower, not with your magic.”

“Who doesn’t know that?” Lance sneered from somewhere in the back, to some titters from the kids sitting near him.

Felix didn’t make any comments about how useful this sort of thing was going to be for him. How could he will the glass to show him? Or was he asking it to clear? He knew he should raise his hand and ask, but didn’t want to invite scorn and ridicule down.

He held onto the mirror and stared at it, thinking different things at it. Clear. Defog. Become a mirror. Show me!

At the last one, half the mirror cleared up, only to show a mop of dark hair. Felix tilted his head, only to see the hair tilt.

Wait… was he seeing his own hair?

Felix held up a hand and waved it around himself. He was quite pleased when his hand showed up on the mirror while he was holding it behind his head. He’d done it!

“Excellent, excellent, most of you seem to have gotten it.” The professor devolved into a hacking cough. “You’ve now all performed your first divination. Or, for those of you more fortunate among us, your tenth. Please take out your scrying bowls. The rest of the class will be dedicated to learning how to properly fill and maintain your bowls. Next class, we will begin the basics of scrying. While I’m thinking of next class, I’ll forget if I don’t tell you now. Homework will be 2000 words on the theory of sensory charms. Now, the water needed for scrying is quite important…”

Felix’s pen flew across the page as he took notes, a little surprised that there hadn’t been a ‘this class is the most important one’ speech. The ability to find what he needed seemed like a critical component to any other class. Mind magic was all very well and good, but finding a book on mind magic to practice it in the first place seemed more important. The same could be said for the rest of the classes. Knowing the spell and knowing how and where to apply it sounded more important than the actual mechanics of it, and -

An idea that his old teachers had occasionally talked about suddenly clicked. All the classes built on each other. It was far clearer in magic, where the disciplines were closely interrelated, than Math being related to English, or History’s crossover with Science. There wasn’t any in those classes.

Felix paused, and mentally corrected himself.

There weren’t any obvious connections, but the teachers had all spent years saying the same thing. Maybe he was just missing it.

Happy at the realization, it took Felix half a second to realize he wasn’t writing down all the needed properties of scrying water, and he knew it would be on the test.