Alisa walked to her first battle magic preparatory class with mild trepidation and quiet dread. They'd already been removed from any lessons that required finesse or care, those teachers had either been reassigned or sent off to other schools or academies. Theirs, being one with the reputation for being the best, was going to be entirely converted into a dragon mage training facility.

Never had Alisa more despised the cruelty of fate. She and her mother had both worked tirelessly for years to afford her the chance to attend Renand Academy in particular. If she'd gone to any lesser school ... this wouldn't be happening. She'd be quietly continuing to learn normal magic under perhaps sub-par teachers, but she wouldn't be drafted into the Traitor's dragon army.

If, if, if.

So many events had to have gone exactly right, exactly wrong, for this outcome to have come about. Alisa knew dozens of people who'd been rejected from Renand Academy for not meeting the stringent scholastic standards, who'd envied her place and despised her relatively low birth.

Now she'd eagerly trade places with them in a heartbeat. And she knew nearly all of them would be just as eager to trade with her. Dragon mages were spoken of with fear, reverence, and a sort of distant awe. Even mages of incredible talent and high birth had no guarantee of a chance to bond a dragon. Huge amounts of money could sometimes be enough to buy one for independent use, or bribe your way into the program, but until the Traitor's unprecedented announcement no country or kingdom had ever fielded more than a hundred dragon mages. Now, the Traitor was about to more than quintuple the standing force of available high-power war mages.

This invasion was going to be brutal, messy, and long-running. If he thought he had time to spend years training new dragon mages and still need them when they were ready, this was no simple border skirmish.

He was planning conquest on an unforeseeable scale. The world would be forever changed by this upcoming conflict.

And Alisa would have a front-row seat whether she wanted it or not.

"Pick a spot and take a seat," the battle magic instructor, a newcomer to the academy, said. His name was Lane Ryvas and he had a thick dark beard somewhere right on the line between well-trimmed and unkempt, defying categorization. His face was lean and scarred, his fingers marred with thin white lines from where mis-cast spells had detonated. His bond mark was drawn defiantly on his left cheek, distractingly blatant. Alisa looked around but saw no sign of his partner. Had he outlived his bonded co-caster, or were they trained at solo work?

Apart from stories of the infamous and short-lived attempts at using mage-bonding techniques for weddings, Alisa didn’t actually know much about how it worked. She’d always been aiming for the careful, precise art of studying and recombining powerscripts in new ways. Spells could either be drawn in the air by hand to cast immediately, or inscribed into physical objects and assigned a trigger for delay casting.

Magic itself, before it coalesced into a finished spell, was notoriously fragile. A mage could sneeze and ruin the whole thing.

So when Lane Ryvas had them draw an empty spell and fire it at the wall, Alisa didn't understand the purpose. Even with dragon-tainted magic, she could draw a circle in her sleep. Her fingers moved with perfect precision, magic flowing out heavily in their wake. Though she was still too young to attain true mage sight, the invisible power still gave off a sort of emanation to her, a seventh sense connection to the spell just beyond actual sensation. Of course, now that she was a dragon mage, the power also gave off a faint heat shimmer, making it easy to make out which students were succeeding and which failing.

She completed the circle and tapped the spell firmly, firing it off toward the wall. Without any elemental attunement or designated physical form, it shouldn't do anything but break apart on contacting its target. She didn’t see the point.

But as she watched its progress, she realized something was different.

She'd tossed her spell at the perfect angle for it to arc down and impact the far wall of the academy, right in the vicinity of her now-expended trap. She'd secretly hoped to hit it right on, but that wasn't what happened. She overshot her mark and the spell went flying off over the wall and toward the city beyond.

Normally, spells trended downward. Gravity was less effective on them, but it wasn't entirely ineffective. If she drew a spell and didn't cast it, it would hover in front of her for a few minutes, slowly descending until it splashed away on the ground. Moving spells were impacted more strongly. The parabolic arc of various elemental and physical spell types' interactions with gravity had been a whole class, involving a lot of math. But when it came right down to it, it meant if you were casting traditionally by throwing a spell at a target, you had to aim higher to hit a more distant target.

"Lesson one!" Lane Ryvas shouted, once the students had time to take in the results of their volley. "Dragon magic is hot. It floats. If you leave it unattended, it's not going to fall, it's going to drift. If you aim at something distant, aim low. I know you've all got a lifetime of bad habits to break, which is why this is where we start. Once your dragons are hatched and fully bonded, we'll start work on joint-casting, which will become your primary focus in years two and three. For now, keep casting until you can hit the wall. Blanks only!"

Alisa's first attempt at correction drove her spell directly into the ground before it'd gone two strides. Her next made it a little further, and the one after that overshot and soared off over the city.

Beside her, Sadie flung out blanks as fast as she could draw them, sending a wide scatter across the lawn, the sky … and the wall. She wasn’t the first to hit it, but still well in advance of Alisa. She tried not to get distracted by her friend’s dramatic antics, focusing on mental calculation and re-obtaining the instinct for casting to get the spell where she wanted it. She mentally targeted various patches of the ground or sky, some closer, some more distant, and tried to hit those in sequence rather than just the wall. She needed to know the arcs for close, distant, and midrange shots.

It quickly became apparent that casting at any distance would require drawing the spell as high in the air as possible, otherwise it would be difficult to give it enough downward force to still hit its target without hitting the ground first. Drawing around chest or face level was standard, but Alisa started drawing above her head and aiming for specific buildings past the gates. The blank spells wouldn’t disrupt anything, so she felt no guilt.

“Alright, stop.” Lane Ryvas waited for the last few spells to be finished and cast, then nodded. “How many of you managed to hit the wall?”

Alisa started to raise her hand, then frowned. Had she actually hit it? She couldn’t remember. She’d gotten so caught up in testing her range, she had completely forgotten the assigned purpose of the exercise. Maybe half the class had succeeded, so she didn’t feel too bad leaving her hand down.

“Good. Now, I want you to align the blank to Stone, without giving it form, and try again.”

Aligning a spell without giving it form was a tricky and largely useless exercise, but came up commonly enough in theory and spellcrafting texts that Alisa was intimately familiar with the procedure.

Of course, that was before dragon magic tainted her, and the next ten minutes were spent in increasing frustration as she tried to draw a simple alignment circle with no success. Her usual spellwork was close and tight, drawn with one finger in tight loops, muscle memory long trained to the exacting movements.

With her thick, lumpy, hot dragon power, the entire thing filled in almost at once, making it a solid blob that was impossible to work with. She broke it apart and started over, drawing progressively larger circles until she could finally get one big enough to fit the stone alignment into without it deforming completely.

She flicked it off toward the wall without compensating for height at all, just to set a baseline. Stone-aligned spells were heavier and needed to be fired higher; but with dragon fire already giving it unnatural lift, she wasn’t sure how those would interact.

The spell impacted the ground well before reaching the wall, but much further distant than an ordinary stone spell would. Maybe 40% of the usual drag?

Another eight shots to establish range, and she could hit the wall every time. She started trying to target closer and more specific spots, but before she could master the technique Lane Ryvas had them stop again.

“Stone is one of the most useful alignments for dragon mages. As you’ve seen, it completely counteracts the innate lift of dragon spells, and allows for a more traditional casting arc. Now, I need a volunteer, who is confident in their ability to cast a fully-manifested stone aligned spell. Anyone?”

Alisa shook her head. Before, she could have. Now, no chance. She’d need years to regain confidence in her spellcasting, if she ever managed it at all. Even a basic attunement had taken far too long.

Francine raised her hand, slowly and dramatically. Lane Ryvas waved her forward.

“Stand here opposite me. You’re going to cast a basic stone spell at me, without any modifications for lift. Aim at my face. Don’t overshoot.”

Francine nodded. “Of course, sir. I understand.”

“Begin when ready.”

Francine took a slow deep breath, held it with chin upraised, then began to draw with wide confident sweeps of her hand. Double circle, stone align, diamond manifest, triple elongation. Alisa raised her eyebrows at that. Francine wasn’t going for a basic sphere, but a shaped bolt.

Lane Ryvas only looked on with a calm half smile.

Francine finished with a flourish, and the spell shimmered and coalesced. The power stretched and formed into a perfect faceted stone, deep red-brown in colour, narrowing to blade-sharp points at both ends, perhaps two hands long and as big around as a closed fist.

“Is this acceptable?” Francine asked, hovering her finger behind the spell without casting.

“Yes. Proceed.”

Francine jabbed the spell hard, sending it slamming into the teacher’s chest. Where it exploded into countless droplets.

Francine frowned. So did Alisa. That wasn’t what earth spike ought to do.

The teacher calmly brushed the remnants of the attack off his padded jacket. “Can anyone explain this result?”

Alisa stared at the pebbled remains of the spell. If his shield was strong enough to break it, it should have shattered into splinters, not round globs. This looked more like a water spell than a stone one. But it was very clearly stone.

“The dragon’s fire interacts with all spell alignments,” said Ened, one of the more advanced boys in the class. He’d regularly led the scoring, surpassing Alisa more than half the time.

Of course, the moment he said it, she felt stupid for overlooking it. Naturally it was the interaction. What had she been thinking?

“So what do you suppose happens when you align a spell to fire?”

If dragon magic’s innate fire nature reduced a stone spell’s drag so significantly, then it would greatly accelerate a fire spell’s lift.

Alisa raised her hand. “It would become practically impossible to aim at targets more than, mmm, a few hundred strides distant at most.”

“Try it.”

Alisa frowned and looked around. “Me? Or everyone?”

Lane Ryvas nodded to her, so she began casting. She botched it the first three times, even drawing large, and Francine’s smirk grew wider and wider as she watched her longtime rival fail in front of the entire class.

Alisa grit her teeth and tried not to think about everyone staring, but completed the shift on her fourth try.

“Where do you want me to aim?”

“At the wall.”

She flicked the spell towards its target, half expecting it to fly straight upwards. Instead, it flew toward the wall, rising veered off to the right in a looping arc, flying higher and more erratically in tighter and tighter circles until it exploded midair in a shower of tiny sparkles that faded before reaching the ground.

“Again.”

She cast a second time, only taking two tries to manage this time. She thought it would arc the same, but instead the spell performed a wobbly corkscrew shortly after leaving her hand, then hit the ground in a brief flare of heat that left the grass looking a little wilted but otherwise did no damage to the yard.

“As you can see, fire interacts poorly with dragon magic. They fight each other for supremacy, resulting in unpredictable spells that are impossible to rely on. Fire is volatile and impetuous. Dragons are unyielding and imperious. The two do not meld smoothly, despite what instinct would tell you.”

The class ended then, and Alisa couldn’t help the tiny hint of curiosity that had begun to take root in her heart. She may not be able to do normal magic, but who’s to say there was no space for innovation in dragon magic?

It wasn’t enough to fully dispel her despair or the emptiness that still consumed her whenever she stopped paying attention, but even a tiny hope helped make the days a little less unbearable.