Solo The Other Side of the Table

[Alses]

Timestamp: 44th Day of Autumn, 513 A.V.

Location: The Dusk Tower

Tempestuous and dark, even for a waning autumn, Lhavit languished in the grip of a wailing storm. Dawn had come and gone a while ago, completely obscured by the louring clouds that seemed intent on obscuring the splendour of the heavens and wiping the skyglass crown of the city from its granite moorings.

Multicoloured lightning flashed and danced through the buttressed battlements of the clouds, a clear signal and warning of the wild djed that had been churned up into the skies by the unsettled weather, fuelling the ferocity of the storm that had blown in during the night, sucking up moisture-rich air from the sea just beyond Lhavit and warmer, djed-rich air from the Unforgiving sprawling all around the city, combining the two in a coruscating crucible and dumping the resultant fury on the serene city.

Just the backdrop for examinations, therefore – although this time, Alses was on the other side of the table. Even so, she was just as full of nerves as she had been when she faced panels of po-faced instructors in her own tests, decidedly new to the whole world of setting questions and assessing people, judging character and aptitude against pre-set criteria.

She could see its usefulness, but that didn’t stop her from worrying about it, almost as much as the examinees would be worrying about their tests scheduled for today.

All across the city, Alses knew, and especially here, in the Towers Respite, where Dusk Tower students clustered thick and heavy, worried pupils, aurists-in-training all, would be waking up, blanching at the obscured dawn and the foul conditions outside, bellies filled with gleeful, malicious butterflies and heads with numinous, foggy knowledge, swirling and swirling and never quite settling until their hearts filled with lead-heavy dread.

The baths that morning had been sour with the scent of fear, even in the private section. Alses had gotten thoroughly fed up, over the preceding few weeks, of having a continual stream of doe-eyed students coming up to her at all hours asking for help with this aspect or that of their studies. Mostly webwork integration, come to think of it, her own specialty, the most finicky method of harvesting auristic impressions, but also the most elegant and precise.

She’d made a mental note to devote more teaching time, next year, to that particular method. If the waves of students coming up to her, caps metaphorically in hand, asking for help and advice was any clue, then people found the material difficult and the Tower – including her - had not spent enough time making sure every apprentice was confident with its usage.

Still, for now, her focus had to be on the upcoming examinations, the panels on which she sat, her questions and tasks that had been devised and painstakingly prepared over the preceding weeks, all narrowing down to this point.

Alses would have been lying to herself – something she rarely did, at least when it was just her and the silver thread of her thoughts in the dark – if she’d tried to convince herself she was confident or happy about this latest addition to her responsibilities, but it had been borne in on her in no uncertain terms that, since she was the most powerful aurist in the Tower and an instructor to boot, it was part of her job to help test those less skilled.

This whole ‘instructing’ lark was turning out to be much more involved than she’d first suspected.

Ah well; no use complaining. She had a job to do, and in a few bells it would all be over anyway.

At least they’d not asked her to do invigilation – keeping an eye on hundreds of students writing theory in one of the more cavernous halls of the Tower. She could think of very few things more boring than that.


A


Tyrian silk quickly darkened to near-blackness under the onslaught of the rain as Alses took the plunge and crossed the threshold of the Towers Respite, emerging onto one of the grander boulevards that led away from the palatial structure and towards her destination. Tahala’s soft ‘good luck’, murmured to every student as they left, echoed in her ears – the woman knew, Alses was sure of it, just how nervous she was.

The Dusk Tower towered in front of her in short order, a pillar of shifting and glowing mother-of-pearl that shone and shimmered with its own secretive light, reflecting and multiplying the soft calias phosphorescence of the vegetation all around until it blazed a cool purple-blue, lighting up the clouds as its pinnacles pierced the louring layer of thick water vapour. Water cascaded down its shining sides, swelling the ornamental waterfalls and ponds that danced across the grandly formal gardens to near-bursting and the House Guard looked wet and miserable in their skyglass plate.

Their thoughts sang sweetly to her as she passed between them, longing memories and anticipations of the bright-burning braziers in the guardhouse and the baths cut into the living rock beneath the Dusk Tower, where sulphurous steam warmed chilled bodies before the plunge into mineral-rich water brought up by the artifices of Lucis & Lucis brought instant and total bliss, soothing sore muscles and easing the chafe of hard skyglass on yielding flesh.

Alses had to hide a smile as she hurried between them and into the over-warm atrium of the Dusk Tower, making a beeline for the largest of the fireplaces, most of a downed tree being greedily eaten up by the flames.

She moved as close as she dared to the inferno, noting with a wry smile that the lacquer varnish on several of the armchairs was melting from the force of the heat, and delighted in the warmth boiling off the flames, turning and turning in the flamethrower-glare, steam rising in wisps from her robes and her hair, lightening with every passing tick and chime.

“Instructor Alses,” came a quiet, cultured voice, one that surprised her and nearly sent her pitching into the fireplace itself, her muscles bunching in reflex to the tide of adrenaline unleashed by her once-idling brain. She managed to recover herself without incident, though, after a moment of undignified windmilling, steadying herself on the marble mantel even as she turned to look at the interloper.

A monocle flashed and flared, blinding white, reflecting and concentrating the light of the fire, before her sudden companion tilted his head and the glare subsided, revealing a twinkling blue eye.

Eye singular – the other was covered by a fine leather eyepatch. Alses started, stared, and then tried not to look like she was staring, before giving up and having a good ogle.

“Had your look?” came the voice again, not hostile, not…anything, really. Apart from expectant, perhaps.

A slender finger tapped the eyepatch. “Overgiving accident,” came the laconic explanation. “I was lucky just to lose the one eye, really. The name’s Lionel. Lionel Oshkosh, originally of Syliras, at your service.” A faint smile. “Looking forward to the exams?” he asked, and the tone of his voice told her that he knew jolly well she wasn’t.

“Always terrifying the first time,” he confided, after a brief pause, and to her surprise she felt a warm hand on one shoulder, a contact that quickly vanished as she stiffened. “Trust me, it’s not nearly so bad as you think, and even if you do end up freezing, the others will rally round. Tower looks after its own.”

[Alses]

The Tower might have looked after its own, but that didn’t make the prospect of examination any rosier. Her newly-acquired shadow – Lionel – shimmered alongside her, pacing with easy familiarity through the halls and corridors of the place, the pair of them pacing towards the same destination high on the western face of the colossus, a small room that was more usually used as one of the many dayrooms, usually with an instructor and apprentice pair having private one-to-one lessons there.

Now, though, it had been repurposed to an examination room by the simple expedient of adding a long, intimidating table and getting rid of most of the rest of the furniture.

It could have been worse, Alses supposed – the wood-panelled room was in actuality quite cosy and welcoming, and – her only requirement as to the fabric of the chamber, when she’d been consulted – a fire burned merrily in a large grate, keeping the place warm and snug despite the autumnal chill growing stronger with every passing day.

“Tea?” came the question, breaking her reverie as she rocked on the threshold. At the sudden, unexpected sound, she snapped back to reality, a blush tinting her fire-opal cheeks as her eyes sought out the origin of the sound – some of the other instructors, clustered around a silver teapot and positively inhaling the liquid.

Her sensitive nostrils quivered and tingled as she inhaled – a fine jasmine tea, if she wasn’t mistaken from the distinctive fragrance. A little light and airy for her own preferences in autumn, but the Dusk Tower tended to buy the best; it was sure to be nice, if without the kick she liked with her autumn teas.

“Yes, please,” she replied gratefully, thankful for the courtesy and the little ritual to calm her nerves. A cup of tea in her hands, even though she’d not physically drink it, would still give her something to do with her hands. And perhaps it’d stop the damnable shaking.

Hands clasping a fine bone-china cup – wafer-thin, translucent save for the swirls and curls of gilding that made the Dusk Tower’s intricate crest – Alses settled bonelessly into a plush chair and let the desultory conversation of the other two wash over her in a soothing wave.

The jasmine tea was very fine, just as she’d expected, light and airy and floral in its taste, without any sort of substantial kick, nothing to burn comfortingly in her stomach. Regretfully, Alses untangled the shifting strands of her auristic attention from the cup in her hands, winding her power out into the wider world, diffusing the manifold strands into their more usual resting states, continually feeding little titbits - rather than a flood – to her, forever skimming across the obscured surface of the world rather than getting drowned in the storied mysteries every single part of the world held.

“Hm?” someone had been speaking to her, whilst she was over-focused on her tea and gloomily contemplating the events about to transpire. Less than half a bell to go now, by her own impeccable reckoning of the sun.

“I asked, Alses, have you finished your preparations? You said you needed five chimes or so before we began to…prepare something?” there was a gentle curiosity in the voice, and a harder fire of interest beaming out from Lionel’s piercing eye – both of them wanted to know what she was going to do.

“Give us a tick,” she murmured, casually tipping the tea into one of the potted plants ranged around the room, ignoring the subtle wincing flare that bloomed in her two fellow examiners’ auras – a waste of good tea, undoubtedly, but there was no sense in making what she was about to do even more difficult than it had to be.

Her colleagues looked on with interest as Alses gathered her power, an action so habitual, so easy, now, that it was almost unconscious and effortless, torrents of djed rushing up to her command, directed and twisted and ravelled, controlled and expressed completely under her control, weaving and dancing as a littoral latticework of light that slid smoothly through the ambient currents of the world, homing in on the innocuous, empty teacup and its mundane, static aura.

In her mind’s eye, Alses took hold of her plentiful reserves, gathering and winnowing pure magic that gleamed like solar gold, compressing it with shaping caresses into a tight sphere that expanded into a torrential wave as she hurled it upwards, outwards, catching the principal djed conduits of her soul and buoying their expansion, buoying the radiant expression of her own aura with a sudden, powerful glut of magic from deep within.

Rich and heady, it tasted of chocolate and devotion on the tongue, a brilliant symphony singing in her head and a lightshow to put even the very best of fireworks to shame. Chocolate on her tongue, the scent of roses filling her nose as she breathed, ears dinning to half-remembered hymns of praise - a rippling litany from the Canticles of Syna, she was sure – Alses set to work in earnest on the numinous plane, fingers of fire and light and shaped thought pinching and pricking at the waves of magic she sent off into the world, teasing and pulling at the dull, mundane, pedestrian aura of the teacup and weaving its essential character into something more…interesting.

It fought her, of course, the radiation thrown off by whatever vital kink served it as a soul battling her own, vastly more powerful impositions – but she was just that, vastly more powerful, the reaching tendrilled waves of her power woven with skill and panache in an interlocking lacework filigree, a network that overwhelmed what was natural and right, replacing it with what Alses wanted people to see.

Her lips curled up in triumph and amusement as the last flicker of resistance gave way under her relentless, gentle pressure, the essential nature of the teacup hidden and obscured, woven and twisted, shifted into a chameleon chimaera of itself, made to dance to her tune by her overwhelming presence.

When she was finished, the teacup was a rose – at least, to every method of using auristics Alses could think of; only her eyes, gazing on the naked object itself, told the truth of the tale, and just then one of the servants padded in with her other request – a length of thick, black cloth – which she tossed over the delicate object, hiding it from normal view.

“How long will that last?” Lionel breathed, fresh respect evident in his eyes. Alses couldn’t stop a proud smile breaking out over her face; it had been a master’s art and a master’s wit that let her do it, and very few others in the Tower would have been able to pull off a similar feat.

“It should be perfect for about a bell,” she remarked. “The…the principles behind overwhelming an aura are poorly-understood, but it was only a teacup. Much less resistance to the technique than if I’d gone for something alive, or sentient,” she explained briefly. “After that, the teacup’s essential nature will slowly start to assert itself, auristically-speaking, and the illusion will get less and less convincing until even a novice could tell we had a teacup, rather than a rose, underneath the cover."

“You’re not expecting them to identify that it’s been changed, are you?” came the slightly apprehensive question. “I can’t tell it’s anything other than a rose; the students certainly won’t be able to.”

Alses, for her part, laughed. “Oh, no. It’s for the critical thinking aspect of the examination; you’ll see.”

Lionel nodded. “And we’re looking forward to it now, believe me.” The final member of their trio agreed enthusiastically, nodding her head so vigorously her tightly-coiled blonde ringlets – a rarity in Lhavit – bounced and danced wildly.

“Just a few final things before we bring in our first student, then...”

[Alses]

“We’ll just run through the standard procedure for the examination, for the benefit of Alses, since she’s not done this before, all right?” A reassuring smile was sent Alses’ way from her fellow instructor – Malia - and Lionel nodded easygoing assent to the proposal.

“First, we’ll bring the student in and ask a few basic questions, tell them a little about ourselves. This is to set the student a little more at ease and give us time to examine their aura thoroughly. We call it getting a feel for them – Lionel, stop snickering, or so help me…”

Obediently, theatrically raising his arms in surrender, Lionel subsided, although a wicked smile still tugged at the corners of his mouth, refusing to go away even though he’d schooled the rest of his features to studious blankness.

“To continue,” she said, doing just that and still glaring at Lionel, “We start with relatively simple questions – identification of objects, that sort of thing, which we’ve all prepared items for, to get a basic idea of their general style. If you spot a weakness, feel free to quiz them further – we always schedule in plenty of extra time for just that sort of problem.”

Alses nodded, feeling something was expected of her at this juncture, and made a ‘continue, please’ gesture.

“We slowly ratchet the difficulty up to the pre-defined ceiling – we’re not doing an expert or master’s examination, so nothing too hard, Alses – and keep asking auristics-based questions until the student stops us or they overgive. After that, it’s ethics and general questions, and that’s the end of the whole ordeal.” A bright, reassuring smile.

“Aside from the marking, of course. Nothing to worry about, really.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Alses echoed, slightly queasy with nerves. To calm herself, she looked down at a slightly-crumpled sheet of paper, on which she’d written several questions and points, as a rough-and-ready aide memoire of sorts.

There followed a period of settlement as everyone adjusted themselves back into their respective chairs, ordered papers and drank deeply of the refreshments provided – it would be a long, long day, after all, and in examination time the Dusk Tower was no respecter of the city’s pattern of rest and work blocks; the students had to be examined, after all, and if the Tower fell behind the shortfall had to be made up somewhere. Rest blocks were the first casualties, alas.

The doors clicked open quietly, on whispering hinges, glistening oil making their glide smooth and almost silent, even to Alses’ preternaturally-sharp senses.

Framed in the arch of the frame, the student they were supposed to examine, inspect and evaluate. Not shaking like a leaf with nerves, which was a good start – at least, not outwardly – and with clear eyes that met her own, no mean feat, without flinching or looking away.

“Good morning.” That was Lionel, his voice precise and cultured, warm without being overly-friendly. This was an examination, after all – a certain level of formality, it had been impressed upon Alses, was to be maintained. “It’s-” a shuffling of papers, a momentary dance of fingers and pages “-Celeste, isn’t it?”

A gracious incline of a perfectly-coiffed head, blonde strands glowing in the warm, even light. “Yes, Instructor. I’m here for my examination?” There was a rising inflection to the end of her sentence, a lilting uplift that turned the announcement into a question – so not as confident as she appeared, then.

Good.

A smile shimmered in the dancing aura of the third examiner, she of the blonde ringlets and the helpful run-through earlier, helping to relax the newest member of the teaching staff. “So it would appear,” came the wry remark. “Come in, shut the door behind you and take a seat, do.”

A swish of dark robes, a flash of silver jewellery that sent Alses’ dormant power racing – she’d been told that recently there had been a spate of students using Glyphed amulets to bolster their skills above the norm, for just a little while – but it was mundane and dark, in the event, plebeian against the scintillating aura of the novice aurist behind it, not a hint of the cinnamon coruscation that would have set her on-guard for anything sorcerous, any hint of world magic subtly influencing the plangent notes of Mizahar itself.

Just a pendant, then, worn for beauty or sentiment, or perhaps even luck. No harm in that; no harm at all.

“Now, we should probably introduce ourselves. I’m Instructor Malia, to my right is Instructor Alses, and on her right is Instructor Lionel. We’ll be assessing the progress you’ve made in the Tower so far, is that understood? Please answer all questions as promptly and as completely as possible, within reason and your own limits. We’re not trying to trip you up or make you fail, simply looking to assess your ability and the knowledge you’ve retained so far, is that understood?”

Another nod, eyes darting between all three of them, lingering on Alses’ radiant form but dancing across the others as well, a flickering cherry-red tongue darting out to moisten lips before a meek: “Yes, Instructor,” rippled forth.

Malia nodded magisterially. “Take a seat,” she commanded; the student sat, obedient to the quiet, assured command, waiting with alacrity for the first question.

“Now…” Malia flourished a long, slender implement, little more than a flanged hook on the end of a spire of silvery metal, and Alses had to cover a smile. The tool was very familiar to her, a frequent guest in the Tower’s palatial Family drawing rooms; it was an old artifact, a frivolity, enchanted with a touch of Projection and mostly used for popping the corks from wine and champagne bottles in an appropriately dramatic fashion.

“Tell me, Celeste, about this item, if you would.”

Alses sighed and settled back into her chair, the aged wood groaning quietly under her weight, contemplating through slightly narrowed eyes the student almost directly opposite her.

For reasons best known to themselves, the other two, the more experienced, assured instructors in the Tower, had decided to flank her, presenting her as the centrepiece rather than allowing the shining Synaborn to fade quietly off to one side, part of the background.

The thought put the quirk of a smile on her face – who was she kidding? The Ethaefal were the focus of attention in a room – in any room – in Lhavit; how could it be otherwise? Best to have her shining and glorious in the foreground, attracting all the attention, whilst the others worked quietly and unobtrusively, unbothered and unobserved, in her shadow.

[Alses]

The world exploded into light, chasing away every shadow, every creeping bit of darkness – magic brought a radiant glow out of everything, cradling and cocooning her in its comforting embrace as she lazily directed a fraction of her banked power upwards and outwards, a lash of arcane might to drive the engines of synchrony deep in her brain, arcane constructs forged and refined in the crucible of harsh experience until they were so finely tuned they often reacted without her own conscious direction. Indeed, so responsive to her needs were they, spooling up from her habitual resting, skimming, superficial dance to much more demanding states as the situation and her own insatiable curiosity demanded, that auristics was as much instinct as conscious direction, these days.

Not that that was a bad thing, especially on those days of introspection where Alses continually assessed and reassessed herself, her purpose on Mizahar, and just what she was worth to the Lady of Infinite Energies on high. Needless to say, those days were usually the dull and overcast ones, where the city wore a cloak of mist and weeping rain and Syna’s rays could not strike through in full and joyous majesty to energise and banish such buzzing thoughts from a melancholic Synaborn’s head.

During those times, light – any light, even that evolving from emotions and souls – was welcome.

In the cosy examination room, the solid, physical wooden panelling erupted into ephemera, flashing into light as her powers took hold and twisted, expanded her perceptions. Lignin burst into a static lifeweave, beautiful mahogany shades curled and scaled close around a core of brilliant green, a creeping and organic network crawling over the walls.

More interesting by far than the general environment, though, were the auras of the sentients – her colleagues and the student examinee, flashing and flaring, singing in the vaults of her mind, dancing a toccata across her tingling skin and altogether far more interesting, far more changeable, than the static and unchanging auras of the environment.

Alses felt the inrush of air as Celeste inhaled, hijacked senses ghosting over the swell of her breasts as her chest rose, saw the flowering of resolution in her conscious mind, the fluttering, thrilling spires of lemon-yellow worry bend and break under the hammer of calm that descended, a mantling shroud that pressed and compressed all worry, all concern, a cleansing wave – to switch metaphors – that purged and purified.

Celeste’s magic was slow and hesitant – but that was all right. There was plenty of time, after all; the room was comfortable, the chairs soft and the fire warm – acres of empty duration stretched ahead, just waiting to be filled with this civilised and pleasant inquisition. Twice, Alses saw, she almost lost her grip on the magic welling up inside her, but each time managed to regain her equipoise and continue to gently propitiate her powers.

She had a light touch, that much was certain – perhaps too light, almost hesitant, even, as though afraid of the very powers she was cultivating - but at length the magic was within her grasp: indeed, swelling all around it, a shimmering symphony of opalescent light that danced in a perpetual tiara about her brain and sent questing tendrils out to wrap around the object in question.

Integration took another few heartbeats – in that time, Alses blinked herself back to shallow mundanity with a brief, vicious twist, examining the student through fresh eyes. Her brow was ever-so-slightly furrowed in concentration, and a single bead of perspiration glimmered on pearly skin. She was biting her lip, too, and her hands bunched in her robe, dark folds of material scrunched tight about her small fingers.

A quick glance at the clock, and Alses was surprised – had it really only been two chimes? It had felt much longer, just watching and waiting in the colour-drenched world. Still, the clock had to be right – internal time was notoriously subjective, even for an Ethaefal, but the clockwork machinations of the gadgeteers never lied.

Or at least, not by very much. They hadn’t the imagination, or indeed the desire.

More colour-dripped time passed; her two compatriots were stone statues in their seats, and so she was as well, although she desperately wished to simply relax and loll bonelessly, let the leather and plush upholstery cradle her weight.

Damn all formality.

Slowly, slowly, achingly slowly, words the colour and texture of thick toffee, dripping ropes of caramel uncertainty and unease, poured forth in a glutinous wave. It was only with difficulty that Alses was able to discern the actual words and their superficial meaning, so garlanded with auristic impression were they, so rich with subtext and nuanced connotation.

“Magical,” rippled out into the world, slow as molasses. “It’s magical.”

A shifting twist of the auristics, a rocking tremor that rippled across the sparkling, churning engines purring and straining away in Celeste’s brain, and comprehension, sudden and fragile, rippled out. Alses, watching closely, felt a flicker of surprise and respect – she was good. Or she would be, with a little more training, a little more experience.

“It tastes of…” a giggle, dancing a fandango out into the world and tickling the sensitive skin on the nape of her neck; Alses squirmed and fought to keep from joining in the momentary laughter, “…alcohol? Wine and that sparkly stuff from Riverfall, and darker, smokier things I can’t…I can’t recognize.”

Her shoulders slumped, her aura fragmented and diminished – classical signs of someone thinking about, or contemplating the possibility of, failure. The three of them, instructors all, shared a brief, split-second glance, a silent accord that congratulation of some sort was probably called for.

As the asker, it fell to Malia to deliver the good news, although Alses followed Lionel’s example in doing what felt natural and right in delivering an encouraging smile and a small nod.

“Very good, Celeste. Not many at your level manage to pull out the alcohol. Now, what do you think it might be used for?” That came from Lionel, suddenly, with a swiftness and a sharpness that surprised Alses.

“Uh…” it surprised their examinee, too – the long placeholder sound as thoughts scrambled for the emergency exit in her brain and she frantically tried to piece together something coherent. Lionel simply watched, calm and collected – Malia was the one taking notes, her quill skating elegantly across a crisp sheet of paper that had materialised in front of her.

Lionel’s question needed Celeste to dig deeper – what sort of magic was in the pop-wand? And once she’d found that, there had to be integration and extrapolation, pulling in independent thought and mundane skills to the arcane examination.

Lionel, Alses realised, was being the nasty examiner, to Malia’s nice, leaving her free to choose her own path.

‘The question, then,’ she mused, in the humming and flashing cathedral control centre of her mind, as Celeste grappled with Lionel’s conundrum, ‘Is whether we should be nasty…or nice. Which to choose…’

[Alses]

Lionel got the answer he wanted out of her eventually, although it took considerable cajoling and a gentle leading down the intellectual path. Still, Celeste had achieved the answer eventually, which was presumably good enough.

And now, it was her turn; she felt, metaphorically rather than literally, all eyes turning to her, the sentient auras shifting and narrowing to needling, inquisitive points as attention was refocused on the shining figure, the centrepiece and lynchpin.

Alses swallowed a sudden lump in her bone-dry throat as Celeste’s regard fell upon her, expectant. Waiting. Afraid – more afraid than she’d been of the others. She smiled, but it had the opposite effect of what she’d wanted; the girl’s aura shivered and collapsed further in on itself – was she so fearful?

‘Or,’ came a sudden, sly thought, ‘Are we so well-known we inspire awe, now?’ Quickly, despite the seductive whisper of the thought, she dismissed it as fantasy. There were other masters in the Dusk Tower, after all. Not many, true, and she was, arguably, the most powerful of them all – but then, whilst raw power and skill might have been hers, she didn’t have the years of experience and refinement the others did.

None of which helped her with the current dilemma of what to ask the girl, whether to be nice or nasty or to take the middle road between the two, chameleon-like, adapting and shifting and changing to expectations. A torrent of questions poured through her brain – theoretical and practical both, esoteric and obvious, difficult and easy and running the gamut of everything in between, almost too fast for her to snatch anything but the occasional word from the tumbling tumult.

Just as Malia was about to prompt her, Alses’ cherry-red tongue darted out, moistening her lips as she opened her mouth and began to speak. Celeste leaned forward in her chair, subconsciously eager and anticipatory, waiting for the question.

“Tell me, Celeste-” Alses was momentarily proud of herself for remembering the girl’s name, always a difficult proposition for her, “-all about me. Auristically speaking, and as much as you can, anyway.”

The girl hadn’t been expecting that; it showed bright and clear and worrisome in her aura. Alses sat back, letting her take her time, meditating quietly on the beat of her eternal heart and taking full and total control of her aura with an experienced hand. She gathered in the disparate weaving strands of it, every last shimmering filament, pinching and winnowing the glowing threads, weaving them in recursive nets that collapsed under their own pressure back towards her core, shrinking her normally complex, flamboyant aura of purple and gold and dancing bronze.

Shrinking it and shrinking it with surpassing skill and preternatural finesse, weaving opposing strands together with infinite elegance so that they dissolved into nothingness, cancelled one another out, dimming the glow filament by shining filament until the blaze dimmed to a shimmer, then to a skeletal filigree fantasia, and then at the last to nothing, all the glimmer and all the flamboyant fireworks display of a thousand fading lives around her patchwork soul compressed and curled inside her shining skin, hidden away.

It was an unpleasant feeling, a continual prickling tingle as the essential energy of her soul squirrelcaged around inside the physical and arcane confines she’d suddenly imposed on it. Walls of translucent glass turned to perfectly reflective mirrors, bouncing everything back, turning it in on itself until recursive patterns built and built in spiky instability and then collapsed, the whole of the unnatural barrier maintained by a mastery of auristics that few could ever hope to achieve.
Through it all, Alses still managed a smile for Celeste, watching and waiting for the response.

Chimes ticked past, the only sound in the room the snap and crackle of the fire and the muffled ticking beats of the clock. Malia and Lionel both sat, still as statues, flanking the suddenly-blank Alses, whilst Celeste for her part tried and tried to tease out the secrets Alses was broadcasting – or rather, suddenly not broadcasting – to the world in general.

Her attempts were laughable, at least to Alses – clumsy and obvious tendrils of power, a synchronicity that was so easily disrupted by a stray ripple of power, a bit of personal obfuscation that skittered her attention off in every direction except the desired one, bending the djed of the world around in a protective bubble that confounded reaching, investigatory attempts again and again and again.

After perhaps five chimes, when lines were beginning to draw themselves deeply on Celeste’s face and desperation was colouring her aura in hadean, reckless shades, Alses took pity – at least a little – on the girl and relaxed her stranglehold, letting tiny, weak prominences of her aura surge forth.

And surge really was the word – she had to fight, hard, to prevent those tiny, engineered fissures from bursting wider, uncontrollably, under the lash of her pent-up aura, all the normally-radiant, harmless energy bundled up inside her and fighting to escape. She was the master in the end, however; her arcane constructs, her abstract conceptions crystallised by elegant application of internal djed, held against the tide and Celeste saw only what Alses wished her to see.

“You’re calm,” came the answer, at length – or at least, part of it. “Really calm – I can barely see your aura at all.”

Alses had to smother a laugh at the faces the student was pulling, squinting and scrunching her face up as she wrestled with her magic and the challenge Alses was presenting; she wasn’t about to make it easy, after all – there were standards and (though she’d never have admitted it to anyone else) her own evergreen pride to consider.

“Continue,” she murmured, after a pause, voice detached and distant, most of her brain occupied with the clash on the numinous plane, down in the depths of Mizahar that so very few ever saw.

All the bright colours of magic lay at her disposal – the question was, which command should she give? What should the artist unseen paint for her, to deceive and delight in equal measure and, in this case, further the learning of another?

The answer came unbidden and quickly, and put a gentle and soft smile on her face, widened the fissures through which her aura leaked in paltry droplets and tinted the whole world with the gentle yellow of amusement and joy. She wove symphony and tactility along with the visual cues, too, a conductor of the senses orchestrating a grand composition, all the hues and variations on laughter and happiness that Alses could dredge up from her own experiences, twisted and ravelled through the djed channels inside of her until her whole being, all of her aura, was perfused with those imaginings.

Reality to all but another master, and therefore useful.

“Happiness,” came the response, the rejoinder, too swift and sure for Alses’ liking. "You're enjoying this, or finding it funny." Chagrin prickled at Alses' consciousness; she’d got caught up in the manipulation of her aura, it was too simple and too bland, too easy to dissect out the primary emotion from the artificially-suppressed melange that would usually have obfuscated it a little more.

Still, the girl was doing what she’d been asked to, and Alses couldn’t find fault with that. It was her own fault, after all, that it had been so easy.

[Alses]

Alses had changed her emotions several more times, prompting confusion and an attempt to adapt to the changing nature of her aura from Celeste. By the time Alses had finished putting the girl through her paces of reading a person, as much as someone merely competent in the discipline could, at any rate, the girl was perspiring freely, even though the room was at a comfortable temperature.

At the last, in a mildly cruel twist, Alses had directed attention not only at herself but the other two as well, asking the hapless student to analyse all three of them at once, a prospect at the very outer edge of the envelope as far as this level of auristics was concerned.

It was managed – with some cajoling and a weather eye on the diminishing reserves not only of Celeste herself but the rest of the examining group, since it wouldn’t do to have an instructor overgive during an examination.

There were procedures to be followed in the event, of course, and Alses had been fully briefed on what would occur should the unthinkable happen, but every resource was to be devoted to prevention rather than damage-control. Fortunately, auristics offered a lot of theoretical approaches and conundra, too, as well as demonstrations of more practical skill, and the Tower valued both quite highly.

Thus, if magical reserves dropped unacceptably low – for anyone – it was a simple matter to move from practical magic to theory and ethics, with the student, crucially, none the wiser for any potential disasters averted.

The next was a glyphic conundrum – although it disappointed Alses’ hungry power, dancing and coursing down and through the spiralling, dizzying conduits that the glyphs imposed on the world. The problem – if such it could be called, anyway - came when, frustrated by the lack of a clear path, her power simply made one with the merest flick of interested thought, overtopping the shining, baffling walls in her mind’s eye and surging, untrammelled and unhampered, to the mystery at the centre of the suddenly hopelessly-inadequate glyphs, gleefully feeding back the information to her waiting brain.

She’d brushed aside glyphs and puzzles that would have taken her half a bell, at least, to penetrate as though they were cobwebs, and with about as much thought.

It wasn’t an entirely welcome realisation, the implications…unpleasant. Just how deep could she read someone, well, she knew that – all the way down to the depths, if she wanted, skimming close to the blazing soulcore and drinking in everything there was to know about someone – but how many she could do it to at once, safely…that was something she wasn’t entirely sure of.

Given how easy it had been to brush away obfuscation, though, she had a sneaking suspicion it would be a good deal more than she’d hitherto expected. An experiment of her own, something to try another day, perhaps.

When she was feeling brave and reckless.

Not the goal for today; she wasn’t the focus of the exercise after all. ‘The arrogance of the Ethafeal,’ Alses thought ruefully, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips at the stray thought – how did the others manage to stay so focused? Remarkable.

Not so easy for the student, though, that smugly-humming little puzzle, hiding a pile of chocolates that set the mouth a-watering – an inconvenient and annoying physical reaction that Alses did her level best to stamp down on.

Celeste gave it her all, that much was certain, reserves draining and draining as she poured herself into the puzzle. Where simple observation failed, in went dancing, jinking silver threads of djed, teasing and pressing and insinuating themselves as best as she was able to let them – and that had been an unusual lesson for Alses to learn, that her unconscious djed often understood the how of something better than her conscious mind and all the abstract reasoning she could bring to bear on the problem.

In the event, though, Celeste’s powers weren’t up to the stubborn and unyielding resistance effected by the glyphs; her magic splintered into a thousand crazed tendrils with no purpose and direction before pulling back to the bright blaze they’d originated from, leaving the poor girl shivering and disoriented, confused and chilled from vast expenditure of magic.

There was a reason the kitchens worked overtime during exam periods; they provided the often-substantial restoratives that many an aspiring aurist needed after being grilled by the instructors in all they’d learned and seen.

“If you could turn around for a moment, Celeste?” Alses requested, reaching below the table for where she’d stashed teacup and velvet shroud even as the girl obeyed with alacrity and some small surprise, doubtless wondering what the next task would entail. It was the work of a moment to set things up to her satisfaction, arranging the soft folds of the shroud to obscure the shape of the teacup.

On either side of her, the other examiners leaned in, interested – properly intrigued, not just the polite interest they usually exhibited for the students’ benefit. With a smile, Alses gestured to the pile of black fabric in front of them both, her gesture grandly theatrical.

“Please tell me what’s beneath the cover,” she commanded pleasantly, although the subtle harmonics of her voice and her expression made it clear that it wasn’t a request of any sort. “Use whatever methods you like.”

Straight away, perhaps predictably, the girl went for auristics, eyelids slamming shut – part to help with meditation, part with tiredness from past exertions – and breathing slowing. A fresh wave of pearly perspiration shimmered into existence on her forehead as the magically near-exhausted Dusk Tower apprentice attempted to put her power to use once more.

Oh, and how she struggled, a titanic clash in her head between fatigue and carelessness and a desire to do well, to pass the examination and to not disappoint the radiant Ethaefal sat directly across from her.

Alses covered a small, private smile as the girl’s trembling, collapsing powers latched onto the altered aura of her teacup and then almost instantly faded away, accompanied by a triumphal announcement of:

“It’s a rose!”

How sweet it was – how forbidden sweet – to take delight in the draining uncertainty, the dread she could elicit so easily! So heady, so close, ripe and trembling, ready for the taking. If this was power, she could see why so many were so eager to take it – come to that, she had a slightly worrying insight into the twisted workings of Elena Lariat’s mind.

Alses arched a perfect eyebrow, watching Celeste’s triumphant smile turn to ash and run off her face. “Sure about that?” she asked silkily.

[Alses]

Celeste’s eyes narrowed at Alses’ lazy, probing question, and with a strained sigh she sank back into the numinous aether that wrapped and coloured all of Mizahar, trying once again to pierce the altered aura of the teacup – but such was not to be. The questioning had drained her down to the dregs, and as she continued to struggle Alses kept a weather eye on that vital energy.

Soon, very soon, Alses noticed the dipping, the guttering and failing of Celeste’s reserves; so did the others. Just like with her own examination, devised by Chiona Dusk to assess her suitability for personal apprenticeship, not quite a year ago, they were pushing Celeste, watching the blaze of her magic drop lower and lower, seeing her complexion pale and wax to sallowness, perspiration darken the shoulders of her robes and curl her hair into rattails.

Would she stop in time, that was the key; would she recognize the approach of her own hard limits, the point beyond which magic became a poison rather than a panacea? Alses and the others were all leaning forward, interested, observing, assessing, waiting, hoping for that realisation.

“Enough!” came the cry, hoarse and despairing. “I can’t-”

“Quite so.” Alses let her measured tones cut across the exhausted student, hiding the exultation inside. That part of the training, at least, the Dusk Tower had got right.

Thank Syna. Thank Zintila, and thank any benevolent and listening deity.

“That was part of your test, Celeste,” Malia added, reassuringly, voice low and soothing. Even Lionel joined in; Alses sat back and let them take the lead, explaining to the girl about just what the Dusk Tower looked for, why it was so important that she’d stopped when she did.

Alses was jolted out of her momentary reverie, however, when the girl unexpectedly addressed a question to her; she blinked and shook her head to clear it of the encroaching introspection.

“So it is a rose, then?” Celeste’s question had a faintly accusatory bite to it; Alses savoured that wounded pride for just a moment before taking hold of the cloth and whipping it back with a theatrical flourish, revealing the delicate porcelain-work of the cup to a student’s astonished eyes.

“How…”

“It’s a master’s work,” Lionel explained. “Instructor Alses’ work, in fact.”

Alses nodded, sensing the turning, both metaphorical and literal, of the entire room towards her. “It’s difficult and finicky, but we can make the world lie for us, even to another aurist. Our aura is so great, my power such that I can overwhelm the auras of objects like this teacup and make them dance to my tune.” She smiled, gently. “You know, you didn’t have to use your auristics, Celeste. The logical thing to do would have been to just take the shroud off and use your eyes.”

Celeste blinked, nonplussed, for several long moments; Alses watched, to see how she would react.

“But…this was a Dusk Tower examination…” she said, tailing off as Alses’ steady gaze didn’t waver.

“And?” she asked with a faint shrug. “Auristics is just one part of what you learn here – or what we try and get you to learn here, at any rate. Critical thinking, logical appraisal – I even said you could use any method.” Celeste looked crestfallen again, and perhaps even slightly afraid, yet again.

“No matter, no matter,” Alses announced briskly, moving them all on from the display, covering the rose-teacup with the shroud again and pushing it to one side, removing it from play and from the probing senses of a curious student. She leaned forward, steepling her fingers.

“Ethics, Miss Celeste, ethics! Tell us, when would you use your magic in conversation?”

“Uh…” again, Celeste’s brain scrambled for the exit, mouth working silently as her brain tried to work on the problem suddenly put before her.

“Have you been using your powers on us whilst we’ve been examining you?” asked Malia, breaking the question down; the help seemed to relax Celeste, and the fearful tangling dance of her aura slowed as she exhaled a long, shuddering breath and sat back in her formal chair.

“No lies,” Lionel quietly reminded her. “Instructor Alses is very good at spotting them.”

Celeste flushed, dull red, and squirmed slightly – or was that her aura, shifting and changing queasily as she realised just how outclassed she was?

Aura, Alses decided, after a brief burst of greater scrutiny, hurling more djed to brighten and resolve the picture for an instant before letting the engines of synchrony in her head slow back to their resting drive, a sharp spike in magic that let her take a snapshot, a split-tick painting of the world in all its secretive majesty and analyse it at her leisure rather than getting lost in the beauty all around.

“…yes, I have,” she admitted, the blush intensifying.

“Excellent!” Alses interjected, trying her own hand at reinforcement and cheering. “We’d expect nothing less; you should always be examining your teachers and your colleagues. Never know when you might catch one of them out, or learn something new, and it’s good practice, take it from us. That said…d’you think it’s right?”

“R-right that we probe one another, you mean?” Celeste clarified, a frown marring her forehead as she thought, sought explication.

“Yes. What if we have secrets we don’t want you privy to? What if your colleagues and friends have something they don’t want you to know and your mischievous auristics manages to ferret it out? Was it right that you were attempting to break their defences?”

Celeste squirmed under the combined regard of the examining panel. “I can’t turn it off,” she said plaintively. “It’s always there, at least a little – I can’t help some of what I see!”

“But what about actively trying?” Alses pressed. “Should you do that to fellow aurists? Should you do it to the common citizen?”

“I…don’t think it’s wrong,” Celeste intoned carefully, after a certain amount of internal struggle. “The others would be trying to do the same to me, and the common citizen – to borrow your phrase, my lady – would, as well, if they had our skills. Everyone tries to get one up on everyone else, aurists just have an extra weapon in their arsenal.”

Alses nodded, thoughtful – there wasn’t any ‘right answer’ to the vast majority of the ethics questions, after all, and seeing others’ perspectives on things was always edifying.

“So, do you use your power when you talk to non-aurists, then?”

[Alses]

Alses grinned at Celeste’s answer – the girl had obviously put some thought into it, on the quiet. She’d do well, the radiant Ethaefal felt, in the politics of the shining city or, indeed, as a member of its merchant classes, journeying out into the world to make their mark and their fortunes, to spread the word of shining Lhavit and all its glories.

Always providing she kept studying, kept improving, and didn’t fall by the wayside like so many others did, stymied by the manifold intricacies of the craft and all the subtleties inherent in its deeper mysteries.

“Do you have any hobbies, Celeste?” Alses asked, suddenly, a new avenue of inquiry opening itself up before her.

The girl looked at her, nonplussed, for a few seconds. “Uhh…well, I like to play the violin?” she murmured, unsure, suddenly cast all at sea by the unexpected question.

“Is that a question?” Alses asked in return. “I have no idea.”

Celeste blushed at the gentle reprimand, restating with rather more authority and finality: “I like to play the violin.”

Alses let her face split into a wide, white grin at that. “Excellent!” she effused; the sudden force of her reaction seemed to push the girl back into her chair; Alses felt two smiles – hastily covered up – from the instructors on either side.

“So, this violin playing, tell me…do you belong to some sort of group?”

An owlish blink. “I practise with some friends at the Ethereal Opera,” she admitted, doubtless wondering where her questioner was taking things.

“Enjoy it?”

Another confused nod; Lionel swooped in to save them both.

“If I may clarify my colleague’s questioning,” he murmured, flashing the pair of them a winning smile, his one good eye positively beaming reassurance with its fine twinkle. It was time for Alses to take a back seat to him, for now, to watch and listen and understand the techniques, what worked and what she might adapt herself the next time something like this came up in her life.
She gave him a subtle nod, just to reinforce it, and when that was coupled with the twist of Celeste in her seat to more fully face him, he continued:

“Why do you think the Dusk Tower encourages its students to pursue hobbies, most especially the more social ones? What benefit is there for an aspiring wizard or sorceress-” he nodded to Alses briefly at that, acknowledging her favourite term “-to have a hobby, an interest outside of magic?”

Framed like that, Celeste relaxed. “It builds relationships,” she answered easily, the information drawn straight from some rote-remembered teaching. “Relationships that anchor the mage to the world and provide psychological traction in the event of stress or overgiving, and also helping to reduce the incidences of both.” A pause for breath, a slight readjustment of her clothes, displacement activity as she puzzled through the question posed.

Lionel waited patiently, face open and accepting, drawing by the weight of his silence – an interesting technique – more out of the girl opposite.

“It’s also useful for building ties to communities as a whole. If we love something – or even like it – then it’s much less likely we’ll go on a rampage and destroy it all.”

That was, indeed, accepted wisdom in Lhavit – although Alses remembered with frightening clarity the djed-madness of the Dawn Tower and all the ruin it had caused. Then again, some of the reimancers had managed to escape the madness, the euphoria of such abundant djed just there for the taking.

She’d not asked anyone how they’d been spared when the rest fell to insanity; perhaps a regard for fellow citizens, and for the city, put the brakes on a little, so to speak. Who could say? A fruitless line of inquiry, especially without a Storm-veteran reimancer present, and one that was taking her attention away from Lionel’s skilful teaching and examination of the girl.

With some mental effort, the absent-minded Ethaefal brought her wandering brain back to bear on the examination in hand, on the cross-examination. Yes, that was what it was called – Alses was reasonably sure, at any rate, the cross-purposes firing of questions from Lionel and then Malia and then Lionel again, all leading up to a pinnacle of cogitation, of the correct answer every student dreamed of.

Question followed question, now, a rapid toccata of words and responses, a dance of minds in a comfortable Dusk Tower chamber.

“Where will I find the oldest impressions in a static aura?”

‘The centre,’ Alses thought, a split-second before Celeste’s own reply echoed it.

“Ever cheated at cards with your skills?”

‘Don’t lie, my girl,’ came Alses’ thought, sharp and nasty, her powers waking from idle prowling to a pinpoint lance, laying the student’s aura bare and slipping under, over and through the childish, fumbling, subconscious attempts at obfuscation with barely a whisper of black-velvet power. Subtlety and finesse, the Dusk Tower way; she wouldn’t even notice, not even if she was hunting for it.

“S-sometimes. But we don’t play for kina!” Celeste was quick to add, perhaps fearing…what, precisely? The Dusk Tower didn’t frown on flutters and wagers, at least as far as Alses was aware. Perhaps it was more general than that, some greater symptom of the Lhavitian education system, or maybe it was some obscure way of making her seem better than she was.

In any case, there was a slight apple-green tremolo winding its way through her shivering aura, faint and old and suppressed so far down as to be a very old recollection; perhaps she’d cheated and used her magic in a game for money once, but it had been long ago.

No sense in bringing it up; she decided to be kind and let it slip into oblivion, unremarked.

“What do you play for?”

“Practice, ma'am, getting better at reading one another, and hiding my own feelings from others.” She flushed, dully. “None of us are very good at it yet.”

Malia smiled happily. “Still, shows initiative. Good show, Celeste.”

There were more questions, more and more and more, but they became more and more trivial as time passed; the examination was definitely in its closing phases, winding up until, at the last, Malia clapped her hands together with an air of finality and declared:

“If my colleagues agree, I think we’re done here?” Her gaze drifted across Alses – who nodded – and Lionel, whose affirmative response was a cheery boom.

“Excellent. Thank you for your attention, Celeste; you may go now. Enjoy the rest of your free day; you’ve earned it, to be sure!”

Alses watched disbelief and relief wash in equal measure over the girl’s face as Malia’s words sank in. Celeste rose as though on a cloud, her steps light and floating, her gaze distant and distracted even as she swept the requisite bow and tripped out of the room.

The air changed; relaxation and lassitude became the order of the day as everyone leaned back in their chairs, the groan of wood and plushly upholstered chairs underpinning the movement, the crackling fusillade of bone providing a sharp counterpoint as Lionel stretched and Malia lolled bonelessly.

“First is always the hardest, Alses. Well done on making it through; it gets easier, I promise.”

“You asked some nasty and unorthodox questions,” Malia added, although her tone wasn’t accusative in any way – almost admiring, in an odd way. “Gave me an easy ride with the softer questions.”

Lionel nodded. “Perhaps for the next one, you should think of some easier questions as well? Knowing when to switch between one and the other, depending on student and ability, is one of the key parts of examining large groups of people.” He nodded again, for emphasis. “Now all we have to do is document our thoughts on the girl and whether we think she can pass to the next step of the course or not.” A sudden, boyish grin, wryly twisted at the edges. “Brushes out, everyone; we’ve a long day in front of us, and the sooner we get it done, the sooner we can be away.”

“May Tanroa’s river flow swiftly,” Alses agreed, inking her quill and beginning to write her impressions of the girl, ready to circulate and debate with the others. It was…interesting, this sort of teaching work, strange to be sitting on the other side of the desk and deciding the fates of others, but…interesting, all the same.

She could grow to like it. Given time, of which she had an infinite supply.

END

[Elysium]

Alses

Experience
Teaching +5
Investigation +2
Intelligence +1
Rhetoric +3

Lore
Auristics: How to Overwhelm an Aura
Teaching: How to Conduct an Examination
Celeste, the Timid Aurist
Rhetoric: Leading Questions
Instructors Lionel and Malia of Dusk Tower

Notes
Well done, as always. I very much appreciated Alses' trial and error in how to examine a student. I think she was rather hard on poor Celeste, but it helped to manifest her true potential! If you have any questions, please let me know!