The very same day the letter from Cookie Sandwich arrived, Valar planned to send one back to Kilras. Studying at the prestigious academy proved to be useful once again, as sending a letter back was as simple as walking to the front desk of the entrance building with letter in hand. Unfortunately, Mary wasn’t manning the desk; Karen was.

  “You want to send mail all the way to Kilras?” her annoying voice rang in the spacious hall, grating on the ears of Valar and other visitors alike.

  “Yes, please,” he gave the woman a polite smile, secretly wondering where her brazen attitude originated from. Perhaps she was just born that way? No, I refuse to believe anyone is born this annoying… Maybe the bun of hair on the back of her head is constricting blood flow?

  “I can’t do that. You haven’t specified the caravan company to transport the letter in the address information!”

  Valar rubbed his face, trying to hide how badly he wanted to start yelling at the woman. And why was he so ready to start raging at the woman? Well, the reason was simple: He had already fixed the address information on top of the letter… Twice.

  He took a calming breath, then spoke. “I apologize, Mrs. Braxton, but you didn’t advise me to add that detail. How would I do so, if I may ask?”

  Karen harrumphed. “Well… do you know which caravan company you want to deliver the letter?”

  “Sorry, but I have no clue. I don’t even know the names of the companies that are available.”

  The middle-aged woman let out a long-suffering sigh, straightening her blouse as she grabbed something from below the desk. “I swear, young people these days… My children knew every company at the age of five.”

  She handed Valar a paper with several names listed on it with the company logos drawn next to them. He recognized a few, but the rest were new to him.

  Valar pointed at one of the logos, a soaring hawk on a blue background. It was the company that he had worked for with team Cookie Sandwich when they had traveled to Lyndale. “Does Skyport transport letters to Kilras?”

  “No, they don’t travel there at all,” Karen shook her head. “Look, kid, the companies you can choose from are the three at the very top of the list. I don’t know how you haven’t figured these things out; your parents should’ve taught you these things years ago!”

  “I’m an orphan," Valar’s muttered response made the woman freeze for a brief second. Surprisingly enough, her piercing gaze softened marginally.

  “My condolences, Valar, was it?” she asked, leaning over the desk to point at the paper. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

  The strict woman spent the following fifteen minutes or so assisting Valar in the art of sending mail to another city. They picked a company to deliver his mail, specified the address to Rodrick Steelheart instead of their team—apparently that helped the postal system find his team easier—and finalized the process of mailing the letter. Karen was by no means kind to him; her voice still grated on his ears and she was still quite condescending, but that didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

  “Thank you, Karen,” Valar bowed his head slightly, turning to walk away and back to his dorm. “Sending that letter was really important to me.”

  The clerk scoffed dismissively, but as Valar started walking, she called after him. “Valar?”

  He turned back to face the woman with one eyebrow raised. “Yes?”

  “I was just wondering… My sister runs an orphanage in the artist’s district, and I’m going to visit them after work. Can I tell them about you? I’m sure they would love to hear about a bronze rank student who grew up like them, just to give them a little hope of something better?”

  That made him stop in his tracks. To… give them a little hope?

  Valar thought back to his time in the Lyndale orphanage for unawakened children, a frown forming on his face. He didn’t hold any love for the orphanage he had grown up in, and neither did he appreciate the system in general, but the children were different. The ones Karen was going to talk to weren’t the same boys and girls that had ostracized him for the past ten years. He didn’t know them at all, but he did know what their life was like. Giving them a story of someone who’s like them: someone who’s at least seemingly doing well for himself. Would I keep something like that from orphans like me?

  “Sure,” he forced a smile onto his face, and gave the woman a small nod. “Maybe I’ll even visit some day.”

  Hopefully that day isn’t coming too soon, though.

  …

  The following two months were spent much like the previous day and week. Valar spent each week’s first day at Felicia’s office, getting tutored by her on his keystone rune. That lesson was followed by a therapy session every other week, and Valar found himself improving on the mental front day by day. Especially the session on his ascension to bronze rank helped, as that topic had been one that bothered him greatly. The pain originating from his wounded soul slowly receded into the background, and he could finally find himself actually enjoying his time at the academy.

  Valar saw either Zeke or Elizabeth—sometimes both—almost daily. Zeke didn’t tend to join him and Elizabeth in the library, as in his humble opinion, books were boring and unenergetic. Still, he and Valar chatted during meals and even toured the city a couple of times. Strangely enough, Zeke asked Valar for his shoe size one day, but as he didn’t know it, they measured it. The abstract mage didn’t explain his curiosity, but Valar just chalked it up to the young man’s particular brand of weirdness.

  Communication with his team, while slow and cumbersome, was a nice spice to his life every two and a half weeks or so. A letter would arrive at his doorstep, detailing the team’s perilous journeys and insulting Arthur in increasingly creative ways. Valar would send back a letter of his own, telling the team about his progress in school and therapy with Felicia.

  The days rolled past him quickly, but that was fine. Valar’s pace towards mastery of the bronze rank rune of life was fast and consistent. If he had been competing against a savant, he would’ve lost, but the gap wasn’t anything massive.

  …

  The fateful day arrived sooner than his tutor expected. Two months and one week after they began their training, Valar arrived at Felicia's office with a grin on his face. They had moved on to drawing the rune in the air after only three weeks or so, and he had been relatively close to finishing it even a week ago.

  This is the day; I can feel it!

  The bronze rank keystone rune of life magic was a complex one. Whereas the iron rank one had consisted of a single leaf, the three leaves and branch of the bronze rank rune made the process of drawing it into existence much more difficult. Still, it was by no means impossible.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Valar quickly progressed through the structure of the branch itself, moving onto the first leaf. Its stem and structure were easy enough as well, but as he moved to the second leaf, a focused frown appeared on his face. Unfortunately, the third leaf was too much for the young mage.

  “Shit…” Valar cursed as he made a mistake, forced to disperse the rune just a couple lines before completion. “I was so close too.”

  Felicia chuckled before moving to brew some tea for the pair. “That was close, alright. I think we can get you to draw the rune successfully within the day. Do you want to do that first? Providing you get it done, we’ll need to have a discussion on spell choices before you continue your progress.”

  He nodded excitedly, moving to sit on the comfortable sofa. “I think that would be best! I don’t think I can focus on anything else until the rune is complete.”

  “Alright then, do your thing,” the blonde healer sat down to wait for the tea to steep, smiling at him. “I’ll tell you to stop if you make any mistakes.”

  Valar nodded, then focused back on the rune in his mind.

  Taking a deep breath, he delved back into his mind and started drawing the rune in the air.

  The branch…

  “Stop!”

  Valar’s eyes flashed open. He looked at Felicia with such confusion that the tutor couldn’t hold back a small giggle. “Your face… But seriously, there’s an issue in how you draw the branch.”

  Valar’s eyebrows tried their darndest to pierce the ceiling above. “But how is that even possible? You okay’d the branch part weeks ago!”

  “You changed it,” Felicia shrugged. “Be it consciously or without noticing it, you made alterations to the rune. If you were a savant or highly experienced with the concepts hidden within the rune, that wouldn’t be much of an issue. Even if the rune was technically ‘wrong’, I think it would work just fine. Take that Morell wind mage for an example; I’m pretty sure he could alter his keystone rune just fine, and his spells would only become more efficient with his mana.”

  “Well that’s just unfair,” he muttered under his breath, getting another chuckle out of the more advanced bronze ranker.

  “True, true… But both you and I know that we wouldn’t want to be savants like him. I’ve treated several savants whose names I won’t mention, and they’re often very troubled individuals. I suspect that Aron Morell fits that expectation pretty well.”

  Despite his rapidly growing frustration, he couldn’t really argue against his tutor’s point. From the very first time he had heard about savants, he had already known that he didn’t want to be one. Sure, he would learn magic faster, but why even learn magic when you couldn’t enjoy the fruits of your labour? There were exceptions, of course; savants who could thrive within normal society without any major issues were rare, but they did exist.

  “Yeah…” Valar let out a long-suffering sigh. “What did I do wrong?”

  “That’s the better line of questioning!” Felicia clapped with a teasing glint in her eyes. “You draw the branch as if it was static and unable to grow, but that isn’t true. You’re leaving out an important detail of life itself!”

  His eyes widened with shock. “That… makes a surprising amount of sense.”

  After over two months of work, the final piece of the puzzle clicked in place. The next time Valar started drawing the rune, Felicia didn’t stop him, because why would she? There was nothing to fix, after all.

  Drawing runes wasn’t all about the act of scribbling magic doodles on your skin. Sure, the end result often looked like it, but if you merely drew the rune without trying to visualize its meaning, all that work was essentially wasted. Runes acted more like complex descriptions of concepts, brought to the forefront of the mind of the mage who drew them. That made understanding the underlying concepts behind the shapes vitally important.

  Life wasn’t just a branch of a tree with three leaves, but much more. That small branch contained the condensed sum of knowledge a bronze rank life mage should have of the concept in its entirety. It needed to include visualizations of all the smaller concepts within, but as it was only one rune, those visualizations needed to be represented through simple lines within the larger whole.

  Tutoring Valar, Felicia had compared the act of memorizing a rune to the practice of building a ‘mind palace’, commonly taught at academies in north-eastern Khatesh. At Valar’s questioning on why he should ever do things like some Khateshi slaver, she had reminded him that he shouldn’t act with such prejudice towards the neighbouring country—a hard task for someone who had been taught to hate the country with all his heart during his time at the orphanage.

  But if both the iron and bronze rank versions of the rune depicted life, was the difference between the two truly so massive? The definite answer was yes.

  The iron rank rune contained a very surface-level understanding of the concept that basically any person could comprehend. An affinityless baker could draw the rune correctly if they spent enough time on it, and although they couldn’t do anything with it because they lacked the affinity, they could at least understand its meaning. That understanding became extremely difficult to attain without the ability to shape life mana when you stepped into the bronze rank.

  Instead of some surface-level insights, Felicia’s and Valar’s training had consisted of deep discussions on the concept between attempts at drawing the rune in his notebook and the air. They had discussed the topics of growth, cycle of life, beasts, plants, sapient races, and so on in great detail. Still, in the midst of his own progress and growth, he had made the mistake of excluding it from his keystone rune. A stupid mistake, but one that is easy enough to fix. This is the attempt, I can feel it…

  First was the branch. The gnarled branch was by no means simple, holding concepts like beginning, growth, support and storage within its linework. Then, he moved on to the leaves.

  The first leaf, a big one in the shape of a five-pointed star, represented the unlimited potential of life. To Valar, this particular leaf had been the easiest one to learn by far. It represented his own thoughts and philosophy well, so his understanding of it had grown faster than the other two.

  The second leaf, a jagged and seemingly random creation most closely resembling a hexagon, represented the diversity and chaos of life. Those concepts could be found in every single living being, be it plant, beast, human or devil. The individuals of those species differed from each other in increasingly chaotic and random ways, making it abundantly clear that predicting the cycle of life perfectly was essentially impossible. This one had been somewhat difficult for Valar, as he hadn’t seen much of the world, but he had eventually managed to grasp it through discussions and reminiscing about his brief adventures outside of the big cities.

  The third and final leaf had been the hardest for Valar, and that sentiment was shared by almost every life mage in the kingdom—or so Felicia said. The small, withering leaf that drooped towards the ground depicted a concept that was often forgotten, but it was as important, if not even more so, than the other two.

  Life was fleeting. Life was frail. Life could end at any moment, and you just had to accept that. Valar had not wanted to accept that.

  In some ways, he still didn’t. He didn’t want to think so, and fought against that thought with his whole being. Still, he understood that his life was frail. He understood that it was under threat, and he just needed to fight on—to avoid the fate of the third leaf.

  When Valar finally finished the third leaf, almost five minutes had passed. Felicia sat opposite him, gazing intently at the leaf green rune floating in the air, and as Valar closed the final line, a smile formed on her face. “Good job. That’s the keystone rune done!”

  Valar slumped down, sinking into the plush sofa. He sighed, wiping at his sweaty forehead with one hand while the other hand fell down to rest on the decorative pillow to his side. “That… was a lot. I feel drained.”

  “Drained but happy, or drained and sad?” Felicia asked with a grin on her face.

  He chuckled lightly, closing his eyes to rest them. “The first one. I could’ve never guessed that learning the bronze rank keystone would be so, so hard…”

  They sat in silence for a while. Felicia wanted to let Valar bask in the good feeling of accomplishing something hard, something he had been working towards, and moving towards other topics too soon could diminish that feeling. So she sat, sipping her tea as Valar looked at the rune, relaxing on the sofa.

  The one to break the silence was Valar himself, although he only did so a good five minutes later. “So what’s next?”

  The blonde woman put her cup of tea down back on the table and brushed a stray lock of hair off her face. “Repetition is the mother of all learning. You’ll have to draw that rune again and again for a couple days at the very least to familiarize yourself with it, or drawing it will be as slow as it was today for a long time. Five minute spellcasts for a simple healing spell wouldn’t be good, would they?”

  “Yes, yes, I know that…” he grumbled. “I want to know what I should do after that!”

  “That’s what our next discussion will be about,” Felicia said. “I’m a tutor, and my job is to guide you to become a bronze rank life mage. To do that, you’ll have to learn spells, so let’s have a discussion on spells. What are you planning to learn?”

  It was time to see what his therapist thought about the whole body enhancement and berserker healing ‘idea’...

  He suspected that she wouldn’t be pleased.