Chapter 4: Gold Star

"Okay, so what are my options?"

"Well," she said, "you could learn about the Eastern healing arts. The first step is to sense and guide your own chi. I will be honest, you will need to use an app to translate the book I have from Chinese."

"Let’s call that Plan B."

"Thank goodness. Okay, I could start you on the basic elemental disciplines: fire, air, water, earth, and force. That’s a ladder. Each rung is substantially more difficult, but it’s a rewarding discipline."

I pictured myself with a bald head and a blue arrow on it.

"Maybe," I said hesitantly.

"Thaumaturgy," she said. "That’s the study of the relationship between different spell effects and the different parts of a spell. It’s a little technical, but most witches start off only being able to affect things that they touch. With this, you could learn to affect things that you can see."

That sounded useful.

"Oh, real quick," she added, "you could learn alchemy—make potions for yourself and others. You could learn to control your astral self and sort of fly around in your dreams, though I do not recommend that one. Or you could learn to cast basic illusions. Or write runes, I suppose."

"Illusions? Like, anything I can think of?"

"Yes, but they will only be real to one person at a time in the beginning. And the easiest person to affect, in the beginning, will be yourself."

"Is there any way I could possibly learn Thaumaturgy and Illusion?"

"Now you’re thinking like a real witch!" cried Elsie. "Of course! You see the power of combination, and that’s why you need a teacher. Just tracking down all the books... well, even for me, finding all the books to get the right combination of techniques to do the really cool things you read about? Not really feasible."

"Okay," I said. "So what you’re saying is, without Thaumaturgy but with Pyromancy, I could only set fire to things I was currently touching?"

"You got it."

"And how doable is it to learn this stuff?"

"Oh," Elsie said casually, "it depends. You gained Aura Sight by making a permanent change to your soul and ruining the rest of your life, all by yourself, in a handful of seconds. On the other hand, Thaumaturgy—the line-of-sight version—you can learn by understanding the relationships between things. It’s really quite a beautiful field. Anyway, that requires a different way of thinking, so it depends on you and how long it takes you to learn to think about things as being related by virtue of being visible to one another. So, it’s a conceptual limitation. But without the conceptual basis, the words and symbols won’t work."

"Okay," I said. "Was there anything else?"

"I've obviously already mentioned some of my personal favorites that aren't negotiable. You will be trying to learn the basics of divination, you must learn to expel foreign spirits, and you must learn to use your aura vision—maybe even get the second sight fully functional... Anyway, that’s basically it." She looked a little scattered. "Go ahead and take a look at this blackboard and just focus."

"I have no idea what those are," I said.

Elsie nodded. "Maybe not, but I have a feeling you’ll intuit something. Just bear with me."

I focused. The symbols were almost familiar; I thought I’d seen some of them on astrology charts, perhaps slightly differently formed. Something caught my eye—motion. What's with the spiral? I thought, and focused on it. The chalk circle began to rotate counterclockwise, the spiral in the middle whirling slowly, in and out of focus. I took my eyes off it for an instant and glanced back. The position had changed.

"Very good," said the witch slowly, a long, drawn-out note of approval in her voice. "That is an illusion glyph, from the discipline of Conjuration. It’s not just your soul leading the spell through; it’s also your mind being naturally attuned to that sort of processing. There’s a feedback loop between the symbols and the mind. What I’m getting at is, congratulations, we’re going to teach you illusion."

She smiled. “The first type is called a ‘figment’.”

"A figment of my imagination?" I asked.

"A figment is an illusion without a basis in reality," said the witch. "For this reason, it can be as big as you want. It could be as loud as you want. It could be anything you want."

"Are there any limitations?"

"Your ability to focus on it. If you had weak visual memory, this would not have resonated with you, so I suspect you’ll be fine."

"Okay," I said simply. I was feeling strangely confident. "So how do we do it?"

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"You are the first student I’ve ever had," she admitted, "so we’re going to do it the hard way first, because I’m going to have to ask around about all the easier ways."

She searched around in her drawers and retrieved a pair of wooden dowels. They were dark wood and appeared to have been carved with a soldering iron; every line was silhouetted with charcoal.

"What you do is you hold this one, and I'll hold its twin," she said. "I will cast the magic with my right hand. Are you right-handed?"

"No."

"Well, sorry, it sucks to be you. I can’t cast magic left-handed nearly as well, so you’re going to have to learn with your non-dominant hand. Maybe that’ll be good for you in the long run," she said, though she didn’t sound convinced. "I will find a better solution." She was emphatic about it.

She handed over the rod, which I took in my right hand. My fingers began to feel odd, moving around with unaccustomed surety.

"Feeling dextrous?" Elsie asked. She snorted at her own joke: "That was a pun. Ha ha ha. Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and show you the basic spell. It won’t take too long."

She wiggled her fingers. "Nothing up my sleeve," she said, and pointed at me. My vision blinked—a haze of visual static, just white and gray.

"Hey!" I complained, alarmed. I let go of the rod, and the spell vanished instantly.

"See? Nothing to be afraid of. Traditional tutelage methods are all based around the safety of the student and proper consent and all that, if for no other reason than because witches are the only ones you can stick a curse to just by wanting it to happen. I’m really not trying to hurt you," she said. She sounded very, very sincere about it. "I promise, this is the best way I know. Did you feel your fingers moving?"

I nodded.

"Okay, well, those gestures are stand-ins for symbols. They aren’t arbitrary; they have a purpose. They are tied into some deep realities of our universe, and all that is over my head. So we’re going to do it again, and then I want you to try it without me holding the other rod, and we’ll go from there."

As it turned out, making arcane signs with your non-dominant hand was easier than it sounded. Which made some sense; after all, sign language is performed with both hands, so it would be really unfortunate if humans were not capable of that sort of thing.

As she explained it, casting any illusion had something to do with the concept of line of sight magic anyway because it was ... vision based ... so since she'd seen me take an interest in tha,t she'd try to give me the basics on both at once. Bundle them up. And I'd skipped a bunch of normal steps by my horrible decision to eat the strawberries, such as being able to take in magic from my surroundings, or control it in any way being usually precursor steps to my aura vision. Which ... I'd have to learn those anyway. In fact, I could learn something about them while learning the figment spell.

"There are tests for aptitude, just like in primary school," she'd said. "I'll give you a gold star when you're safe for solo work on each category, and we'll get you a bit safer in no time."

A bit safer was just not quite the quality of assurance I'd hoped for, but you take what you can get.

In the end, creating a figment was surprisingly straightforward. The hand motions, Elsie explained, were symbolic of a few things. My thoughts (that was a couple of symbols), through my sight, to your sight (that was what felt like a fairly long sentence, assuming each symbol was a word, or a short sentence if each was a letter). Elsie was evasive when I asked what the symbols meant. "It's probably not relevant right now, anyway," she said, so I didn't get a very good grounding.

I was determined that I would know at some point, but as my first figment became a temporary, personal reality for me and I looked at the miniature piggy in my palm, I couldn't complain about her teaching methods. Maybe it was like trying to find the square root: difficult, time-consuming, and not usually worth it. Our geometry teacher had forced us to learn it the long way because, in real life, she said, we wouldn't get to have calculators with us on the job.

Perhaps if your job is to be a high school math student, that would be true, I had reflected rebelliously, my phone and its calculator resting in my pocket.

"So," I asked Mrs. Elsie, "do I get that gold star?"

She squinted, and something about her changed. Her aura—usually difficult to discern because it was just so pervasive it pretty much filled up her house—was normally turbulent, but it stilled and took on that sort of crystalline quality, like looking at an ice cube you've just poured water on. She was examining my aura.

Or lack thereof.

"That," she said, "is a stable figment. You cast it on yourself, which means you're using self-directed thaumaturgy, sort of the same thing as laying on hands. That's instinctive for most people. And it's nice and stable, so you've got a good visual memory and you're good at paying attention. That's good. You've now used your innate magic—that's 'vis,' if you want to be technical—to do real spellcraft. And you've only been my student for, like, three hours."

Oh no.

"I'm late," I said.

"I'm sorry," she said. "You really, really need to stay here. I'm trying to protect you. When we do our ritual, what's going to happen is you're going to float out of your body in a contained environment where you won't get lost or blow away or be eaten. I am going to help you tether yourself, on purpose, back to your body a few times until you know how to do it. Until then... it would be as easy as... well, you've seen those high schoolers—"

"I am a high schooler."

"Really? Shoot. ANYWAY, you've seen those high school boys, then, who run up and hip-check one another into the wall or whatnot?"

"Sure," I allowed. "But what does this have to do with me not getting to go home?"

"As you are right now," she said, "any of a lot of types of spiritual predators could just run over and hip-check you right out of your body and walk away with it."

"Shit."

The piggie in my hand, golden-furred with the little brown stripes and dots I'd seen on the internet once, vanished a moment later, between one instant and the next, leaving my hand cold and empty and stupidly supporting nothing in midair. I dropped it.

"I'm going to be in trouble," I told her. "Grounded, if nothing else."

"I'm sorry. Tell me the tradeoff isn't worth it."

I thought about it. I hadn’t seen any otherworldly horrors. But my vision was screwed up, and she could cast spells. Magic was real. And I knew bupkis about it, so ignoring the expert seemed like a bad play. I’d have to stay. Better safe than sorry.

"I can't."