Fabrisse Book 2 (Chapter 13)

“This is a Hearth-Laughed Brick,” Min Hajin said as he returned the brick to Fabrisse. It turned out that Fabrisse hadn’t yet had the skills nor the knowledge to assess this brick, according to Min, who’d spent half an hour on assessment. Fabrisse couldn’t even feel its emotional imprint from touching the object. No joy; no ale craving; nothing.

“Why couldn’t I feel anything?” Fabrisse asked.

Min glanced at him. “Did you feel any change in heat?”

“A bit.”

“Then you knew something changed. Just not what.”

Fabrisse nodded, more slowly than he meant to.

“Sometimes they won’t come, the emotions, if your emotional aptitude isn’t at the right level,” Min said. “This one holds the memories of events, not just people. Tricky work.”

That still didn’t explain why Min had deemed Fabrisse not yet capable of conducting assessment. He knew how to work the instruments, but Min Hajin hadn’t been there to see if. What if he didn’t do it right the last time and returned the wrong results to Severa? There was no way to tell now.

[Sidequest Completed: “Hearth-Laughed Brick”]

Reward: +2 EMO

Bonus Objective: Make a new friend in the process.

Reward: + 2 Emotional Thaumaturgy Mastery Points

Oh. There are mastery points for emotional spells too. The Invocation of Grief doesn’t require any elemental affinity, so it makes sense.

“So you have passed the Synaptic test,” Min said as he returned to his chair.

“Yes.”

“Participation in the Wing is not required during exam month,” he shuffled through his paperwork and pulled a palm-sized slab of schist from under a stack, running a steel pick along its grain to flake off a thin, glittering sheet. “But the earlier you can commit, the earlier you can start field work.”

“You think I’m ready for field work now?” Fabrisse’s eyes lit up.

“After learning Aetheric Grain Analysis, you can accompany Exemplar Kann. She is in need of someone with the time, and the commitment,” Min Hajin said, with a heavy emphasis on ‘commitment’. “Can you make time to learn Aetheric Grain Analysis today?”

“I’m sorry,” Fabrisse said, rubbing the back of his head. “I still have tutoring sessions.”

“Understood.”

It would be a dream come true for him to go on field excursions, doing what he assumed to be spending hours staring at rocks. He’d be on the official payroll. However, he’d done mental calculations. Passing his classes and aiming for at least a partial grant would make much more sense financially.

It’s just until after the exams. Then I can make time again, he told himself.

“Thank you for your help,” Fabrisse gave Min a curt bow. “Now if you excuse me, I’ll be heading to my tutoring session.”

As Fabrisse turned to leave, he could hear Min’s final words, “Remember why you started this in the first place. Then you’ll find your answer.”

***

[Intermediate Synaptic Threading—Progress to Understanding: 78%]

[Training Completed: +48 EXP]

[Progress to Level 7: 3748/4550]

Fabrisse plopped down on the stone floor. His wrists ached from repetition, but the corner of his mouth tugged up anyway. He’d almost gotten it. The aetheric release now came so close to matching the exact beat of his physical movement that sometimes, it landed perfectly. 

“Good work today, Kestovar,” Professor Kaldrin said, striding past the practice circle to retrieve his timer. “Once you’re finished with this, you’re ready to learn the needed Air spells to pass the final test. If you learn them quickly enough, you can take to the fields and gain some hands-on experience.”

“Has Miss Moose told you about the field trips?”

“Yes. I think it’s a good idea for you. I can sanction the trips for you if needed.”

Fabrisse tilted his head, the question sitting just behind his teeth. Why was Kaldrin teaching Air thaumaturgy at all? The first time Fabrisse had seen him in action, the man had clearly wielded emotional spells, and more importantly, Darkness spells. 

“What’s your specialty, Professor?” He asked.

“Darkness,” Kaldrin said without pause, then added just as quickly, “I don’t like to use them, and you also shouldn’t learn them.”

“Then how come you’ve learned those Darkness spells?” The chains; the dark hands—they were all high level casting.

“For research. I practice thaumaturgy for further learning instead of learning to further my thaumaturgy practice. Many Pre-Order artifacts react to darkness spells.”

“Why so?”

“We don’t know yet.” Kaldrin said, eyes narrowing at some private thought “But many Pre-Order artifacts seem . . . too compatible with Darkness thaumaturgy to be a coincidence. My team suspects some of them, perhaps the Eidralith itself, were not just tools, but implements in ancient rituals. I can’t say much more than that, though.”

That sounded ominous and more vague than Fabrisse would’ve liked.

Kaldrin closed the timer with a click and glanced back at him. “Anything you’ve forgotten to ask before we wrap this up, Kestovar?”

The two words hit like a spark in dry tinder. 

Forgot. Wrap.

Oh no. Liene’s gift. I’ve totally forgotten to unwrap it.

“I—uh—need to go home,” Fabrisse blurted, already from the floor.

Kaldrin didn’t stop him.

***

It was no surprise what lay beneath the wrapping. The moment his fingers worked the ribbon loose and peeled back the careful folds, the weight and dimensions confirmed it: a notebook. That was fine. Liene knew he liked notebooks.

The surprise came when he opened it.

The first page wasn’t blank. It was already inked with her handwriting, the kind he could recognise in a crowd: slanted a touch too far forward, hurried in the curves, but anchored by decisive strokes. Not messy, exactly, but impatient. 

At the top, in neat print, was a short letter:

Hi Fabri :D

I wanted to give you something tangible, maybe a little sentimental, but then I thought you’d prefer something practical. You’ve been studying hard, and you’ll be graduating in a year. Maybe you’ll go on to be a great thaumaturge, the kind all the big institutions chase across the major cities. If that happens, I hope we can still make time to see each other now and then.

I’ve written down a little something that might help when the time comes. It isn’t much, but maybe it’ll be useful. Happy birthday, Stoneboy.

He flipped the page. The first page read, ‘Basic Air Thaumaturgy, Tier I Skills’, and details of how to achieve those skills. The material looked familiar at first—skills straight from the standard textbooks, the ones every student could recite by rote.

But then he noticed what wasn’t in the textbooks.

In the margins, in her sharp, leaning hand, she’d written the things only practice could teach: the tiny adjustments of breath that steadied a shaky casting; the trick of using one’s off-hand to anchor a resonance when the dominant hand faltered; the unofficial, alternative gestures that cut a spell’s fatigue in half if you dared to bend formality.

Little shortcuts, little cheats.

She favoured bullet points and margin arrows over needless artistic touches, which was uncharacteristic for her, but maybe she had been in a hurry to jot down all the content in a short amount of time. Her indexing system was adequate, if a little arbitrary. He would have liked more colour-coding.

Then he flipped to the next page, and the next, and the next. It wasn’t a handful of tips. It was over a hundred pages (or at least what he thought was a hundred pages), each crammed with diagrams, notation, and short, functional descriptions. Every skill she had learned over the years. How she had trained to master it. Adjustments for different ranks. Cross-references to variations he’d never heard anyone mention aloud.

By the twentieth page, he had to stop, thumb resting at the edge of the paper, because the sheer scope of it hit him: this wasn’t just a gift. This was her entire craft, distilled and handed over without hesitation.

He didn’t know how long it must have taken her to write all this, but it seemed like a lot of work. People didn’t normally do that.

He shut the notebook carefully. His chest felt tight, though not in a bad way—more like when he held too much aether at once, and had to find a place to put it down.

Pie, he decided, he would return her goodwill with pie. She liked slenderberry pie. And maybe a wheel of cheese, the fancy kind wrapped in wax. That seemed proportional.

“Who gives someone an already written notebook as a gift?”

Fabrisse glanced up. Greg was leaning in the doorway, watching him with a mildly amused look he always wore when Fabrisse got too sentimental over rocks.

“She does,” Fabrisse said.

Greg’s eyebrow ticked up. “Is this from the same blond girl?”

“Yes.”

Greg considered that for a beat, then said, “She doesn’t know how to best use her time.”

“It’s useful.”

“For you. Not for her.”

“Don’t you have lectures to attend?”

“That’s why I’m standing at the doorway and not near my desk.” And with that, Greg left.

Fabrisse suddenly remembered that he had to tell Greg something. Something vaguely jousting related. But he couldn’t recall how in the Flamus Greg would have anything to do with jousting.

He shrugged. If he couldn’t remember it, it was probably unimportant.