The sorcerer and Jasper descended back down the stairs, Jasper clutching a mess of salves and aloe to his face. The compound helped his burn, although he would’ve preferred some magic to just fix the problem.

“An embarrassing mistake. A few days ago, I realized all my divinations stopped dead on this day– a total lack of foresight from this point. It’s common for diviners to experience such a thing. It means they’ll die.”

“And you sat in bed waiting to shoot Death?” Jasper raised an eyebrow. Which hurt.

“Well, what would you do?” The sorcerer was a tidy man, with a beard tied into braids by golden rings, and flowing black hair peppered with gray and white. He wore tight robes of red and black. “I was not going to be taken without a fight.”

“So, why are you so certain I’m not going to kill you?” Jasper said, and then hurriedly added. “I’m not. But.”

“I would’ve seen the act of killing. I did not. Which leads me to conclude…” The sorcerer stepped around the table and reached for a small wooden box. Snapping it open, he examined something within. “You are blessed by an incredibly powerful ward against all manner of divination.”

Well, so much for pretending to be a clueless kid from the country…

“I have an incredibly long list of incredibly basic questions.” Jasper said bluntly. “And I need you answer them without asking me why.”

“And what do I get out of this?” The sorcerer paused to inspect a strange instrument. Beads of water moved across a flat pan of brass, suspended above several small, triangular crystals. The droplets were constantly skittering and rolling in random-seeming patterns across the surface.

“I mean, I was just going to pay you.” Jasper said irritably. And it probably would have worked– it couldn’t be more than a talent or two to get a basic primer on Classes.

“Ah, but you’re far too interesting now for me to settle for a weak price like that. No, I demand some insight into your fascinating situation.”

Jasper was afraid of that.

“I can…” He froze up, drumming his fingers on the table. How much can I say? Definitely not that I’m tangled up with the Midlund gods.

“I…”

There was no point in trying to be totally cagey. The sorcerer already knew something was off about him; the best Jasper could hope for was to conceal that he was directly an agent– willing or not– of the Midlunds’ gods.

Fuck it.

“I’m not from this world.”

“I KNEW IT!” The sorcerer spun around on the spot, snapping his fingers and pointing at Jasper. “Yesssss….” He hissed through his teeth.

“I…” And Jasper really, truly had no idea how to respond to that.

“That was a Breach a few days ago, wasn’t it? That was you coming through.” He grinned, looking ready to bust out and dance in his pointy slippers then and there. “Ah, ah, ah.”

Oh great. He laughs like the fucking Count and he could kill me at any second… Jasper’s fingers were curled at the edge of the table so hard the knuckles were white.

“Oh, and they said I was…”

“If you say they called you mad, I’m leaving.”

“Worse than mad.” A ferocious grin sat on his face. “But I was right. There was a human diaspora outside the Seven Realms.”

Diaspora… The scattering of a destroyed people… “So other mages think there are only humans here, in Ardaen, and…”

“Highfont, Ardaen, the Midlunds, the Drakesea. The Lands of Frenzy. The Lands of Mist. The Lands of Throne.” The sorcerer recited. “All that was left to humanity after ancient wars shattered our ancestral power.”

“Well, my world is called Earth. And I’ll tell you more…” Jasper sighed internally. “If you tell me what I need to know.”

“Ask away.” The sorcerer said with a smile, settling back into an armchair and steepling his finger. “My expertise is in history and the interdimensional veil, but I am schooled in all the common fields of study.”

“I need to know about Classes. Everything about Classes.”

That brought the sorcerer up short. “You… don’t have classes where you’re from?”

“I get my answers first.” Jasper said firmly. “Then you.”

“Right, right.” A pause. “To begin with, let us consider the nature of the soul–”

“No,” Jasper said firmly. “I need the practical side of things. How do I get a class, what determines the kind of class, how does it grow? Can I get two? That sort of thing.”

“Ah.” A tight frown pinched at the sorcerer’s mouth. “Practicality. Yes.”

“The gods give you a class.” He said. “They do so to shape you into being more like them– so the rules of each class reflect the gods who bestowed it.”

“In the Ardish lands…” He gestured to a small shelf, where icons of gods sat alongside tall candles. “Classes are given based on accomplishment. The easiest way to gain a class is to kill a Spirit Beast and deliver its Shard to an altar. But if that’s not to your tastes, each god offers their own trials you can complete.”

“Like reciting the Histories?” Jasper remembered Amun mentioning those– guessing they were how Jasper had earned his class.

“The Histories are an extraordinarily long series of poems that contain the stories of the Diaspora. Reciting them properly is a trial offered by Aphon, the god of Sun, charisma, and artistry.”

“So once someone has a Class, what next?” Jasper asked.

“Each Ardish class has attached skills. Normally, when a skill hits a Milestone of ten levels, you are given the choice to either improve your body or gain a Talent. When it hits twenty levels, you choose between a Spirit Shard and an improved Talent.”

“But when you raise a Class Skill by ten levels, you always gain a Class Talent.”

“What happens if I raise one to thirty?” Jasper cut in.

“Difficult to say. Raising a skill past twenty five requires a moment of breakthrough, a true inspiration into the skill you’re practicing. Each such breakthrough allows you to gain another five levels. So the benefits of reaching level thirty are poorly documented, and forty almost unknown.”

Jasper nodded, slowly, taking in the information.

“Can I take two classes?”

“Under the Ardish system, it’s impossible. But there are people who achieve classes of their own design, without the aid of gods. They were known to create multiple classes for themselves…”

So it was possible…

And it sounded like having a foot in both systems would let him do it.

“Now, your turn. Tell me about your world’s magic.”

“We don’t–” Jasper almost said they didn’t have any. But then…

How else could he describe a million things about his world, Earth, to an outsider who’d never known electric lights or modern plumbing. There was a deep, scratching itch in Jasper’s mind, the nagging lack of a thousand comforts he’d taken for granted.

So he told the story of the electric light, trapped lightning. He talked about television, telephones, the Internet. Sadly, Jasper didn’t know enough about any of those things to actually explain how to make one. But maybe that was for the best– the sorcerer leaned in, deeply curious, his dark eyes sparkling as he drank up the knowledge of Earth.

Until Jasper came to a stop.

“Okay, that’s more than enough. My turn again.”

“Indeed. What is it you wish to know?”

“How do I do magic.”

“Ahhh.” The sorcerer smiled. “How about I show you.”

— — —

The sorcerer took him to a small courtyard outside, and unrolled a long strip of oiled leather. Within were numerous small bands holding strange objects.

A flower that seemed to be made of solid water– not ice, just unmoving water.

A long curved tooth cracked with fiery veins.

A blue square of crystal that contained a single golden letter.

And so on.

Instantly, Jasper recognized there was something similar with these eclectic things and the die he’d found back in the jungle. They had a strange magnetism, as if each one had a story to tell…

“Spirit Shards.” The sorcerer explained. “My personal collection. Lay your hand over one and search for your mana. Find it below your heart. Let the strands of energy from mana and shard connect.”

Jasper nodded and knelt, reaching for the water-flower. It felt cool and smooth in his hand, not quite solid, not quite liquid. A strange vibration spread through his palm and up his arm, reaching partway towards his heart in a strand of warmth and electricity.

He found a similar sensation stirring just beneath his heart.

A deep well of unburning fire within his body.

To his delight, Jasper found he could mentally reach into that well of power, taking from it, drawing forth golden-bright strands of his own magic. He guided one down his arm to join with the power from the Shard…

There was a sudden jolt as the two connected– it felt like spotting a hidden image in a puzzle, or tripping down a stair. Reality had adjusted in an almost violent way.

Silver-blue runes began to bloom over his vision. They formed into circles, and circles within circles. As he turned his head the spiraling complexity of the silver letters spun, like tumblers in a massive lock, or gears in an arcane machine. Branching threads reached out, touching nearby objects, outlining them, then retreated back into honeycomb structures of hexagons that drifted at the edges of his sight…

“Now, push. Feed the Shard what it needs and focus on your target.” The sorcerer placed a single black candle in front of Jasper, and stepped back.

Jasper did as he was instructed. The Shard and his mana-source had made contact, creating a dry river. Now he poured energy down that connection– flooding the banks.

The runes began to light up, flashing, beginning to shrink down and concentrate over the candle as he held it in his gaze.

And then there was a breaking point.

A flash.

And water formed above the candle, a bright, bubbling sphere of crystal-clear water. It drifted above the ground in defiance of gravity. All the runes had been drawn into it, its surface flashing with silver-blue letters and designs.

For a single moment Jasper managed to hold the spell…

And then it crashed down.

“Good. What you experienced was the most basic level of casting. An unshaped, single-Shard working.” The sorcerer knelt down beside him, touching the water-flower. Jasper could almost see the power reaching up his arm– as the sorcerer made connection with the Shard, there was a sudden wind that bristled through his long black hair, lifting it.

Ice formed in the air. Six distinct shards.

“A true magician can change the effect a Shard gives, within reason…” The ice melted down into droplets, and the droplets formed a floating ring. “This is shaped casting.”

The ring contracted into a single point of water, and with a wave of his hand, the sorcerer sent it flying across the courtyard.

“There is another dimension.” His fingers curled over Jasper’s hands, and he set them down over two shards. The fiery tooth and the blue crystal. “You can interlink Shards to gain more specific effects. This one is Fire, this one is Striking, so together…”

“The spell you nearly killed me with?”

“Indeed. Which is why I’ll be standing behind you for this one.”

Jasper nodded his head, closed his eyes for a moment, and breathed out. This was what he’d wanted all along. This was real magic–

Magic he could learn.

Magic he could master.

He opened his eyes and focused on the candle. Two threads of energy were reaching down either arm, and he tried to connect to them both, to feed each a thread of his internal mana. The feeling was like trying to sing two songs at once. Each interfered with the other– the moment his focus went one way, the other began to fray and break apart.

“A circle, not two lines.”

Jasper bit his tongue, and tried again. This time he drew out a single strand of energy and tried to thread it through both Shards, which meant reaching out of his body and through the gap of air between them. It was a different kind of difficult. Once the mana left his flesh, it began to sputter and dissolve, breaking off constant branching paths like a lightning bolt, wasting a little of his energy as each one ran into a dead end and broke up into sparks.

But slowly, painfully, he drew the line to the second shard and connected the circuit.

The runes were different this time. Some were burning brands that seared his vision and hurt his eyes, while others were cold, complicated equations that ran down his gaze in strings of azure numbers.

He focused on the candle.

A point of light began to form at the point between his eyes. It grew in intensity, a tiny star, and then shot forward–

All of half a foot, before limply arcing down and striking the ground instead.

In the background, he could hear the sorcerer cracking up.