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Fire
Tuesday Eliza had Elemental Magic. She had greatly improved in this class over the course of the semester. The students had spent the last few months working with the element of Fire. They conjured flames in the palms of their hands and each week learned techniques to fine-tune the magic that could be accessed by producing fire. The month before Eliza started, students had already covered creating warmth, conjuring a flame, making the flame dimmer or brighter, increasing or decreasing the heat intensity, and producing blue and green flames. Then, wisely, they learned how to put out a fire.
In the weeks since Eliza joined the class, she studiously caught up to her classmates and continued to learn new skills, such as creating a fireball and throwing it at a target or creating a stream of fire that could be dragged around the body into a steady ring of fire around oneself.
“This is particularly useful since dark creatures and animated corpses can be kept safely at a distance using this magic. Since we teach necromancy at this school, I think it’s good to also teach you to combat the pawns of the puppeteer,” explained the teacher, Professor Soother, with a smile.
This week, they were using the power of flame to brand wood. It was a little tricky. At first, they were to use their hand to burn a handprint onto a plank of wood. The students were told they would eventually progress to creating a simple design and branding the wood from a distance. Eliza could not fathom that they would be able to cover all this in just one lesson. She and all her classmates were already struggling. They could call forth the fire to brand the wood with their hand, but not without accidentally lighting the plank on fire. They were outside in the gardens, having had to leave the classroom when it was time to play with fire.
“By the time the cold sets in this winter, we should have moved past the basics of raw flame and progressed into the finer points of fire magic that will not cause so many bangs and smoke,” called out Professor Soother. She was a beautiful woman, perhaps in her fifties, built like a weightlifter. She had thick upper arms and a slim waist. Strong though she appeared, she was also sweet and understanding. Eliza wondered whether it was a natural talent with fire, or a commentary on Professor Soother’s excellent teaching that meant that she and her fellow students rarely had to do any extra homework after one of these lessons.
“Shoot.” Eliza tutted, as once again her hand contacted the wood and immediately caused the plank to burst into flame. Professor Soother was wandering between them all, watching as they made their attempts. Eliza tried again, thinking this time if she warmed her hand and only touched the wood briefly, whipping her hand away before the plank could catch fire, she might be successful. For a second, she really thought she had it, but with a gasp of pain, she looked down at her hand and found it entirely covered in angry red blisters that pulsed painfully. The wood had a black imprint of her hand, but even this was glowing red with embers—something they were told did not count as a success.
Hearing Eliza cry out in pain, Professor Soother approached and took Eliza’s hand into her own. Eliza’s hand looked tiny and fragile in Professor Soother’s large, rough one. Eliza winced when the professor raised a finger toward the blistered palm, but her touch was gentle. Professor Soother’s whispered words were whisked away in the wind and Eliza felt the pain drain away. The professor’s finger traced the palm of Eliza’s hand gently. Eliza looked down to see what Professor Soother had done. The palm was not as it had been before, pink and smooth, but bore the scars of many healed blisters. It was rough but completely painless.
“Thank you,” Eliza said, breathless.
Professor Soother did not answer but held her arms up to capture the attention of the rest of the class.
“You are all forgetting everything we have done leading up to this day. Do you think it is a coincidence that we are doing this now, and not before any of our previous lessons? You need the power to increase or decrease the intensity of the fire, you need to produce heat without flame, you must control the fire so that when you touch the wood you can snuff out its attempt at kindling. You must combine all that I have taught you. And remember—we do not concentrate heat in our hands, we are merely conductors! Allow the energy to flow through you, do not allow it to build up with no release. Again!”
This time students advanced more quickly. Eliza focused not on her hand but on the wood beneath it and called forth a light steady heat. She increased it until she saw the handprint beginning to appear in the wood and then she called the magic back out from the plank to prevent it from catching. There it was; a perfect impression of her hand.
By the end of the lesson, they had all successfully decorated wooden boards with smiling faces, images of animals, their names, and whatever symbols they were able to imagine. There were a lot of excited voices talking loudly as they made their way back inside. So much so that Professor Kent popped his head out of a classroom and asked for the Elemental Magic group to “Please remember you are in a school not a playground!”