“ Catxocotl, Faelystoma Salamandridae - A relatively new species; is it a fish is it an amphibian? Or is it both? Don’t let its appearance deceive you, this species belongs to the family of salamanders alongside its cousins the fire salamanders. This shy creature can be found in cave ecosystems more so those on aerlands or any habitat with an abundance of both Aer and Aqer mana. Its abilities have yet to be documented but it is alleged that it has some form of lightning attack and can glide through the air like fish in water…”-from Philiarz Warnerskemander’s Bestiary for Adventurers: ‘Exotic Beasties and Where to Find Them

Arthur was excitedly, restless that night. It was understandable; the revelation about ships sailing through the sky was something that tickled at his inner child. He fantasized soaring through the clouds, and the wind beating in his face and chasing the blush of a dusky sun, as it shied away from the night. In due time.

And while he was rather skeptical about ingredients obtained from overgrown lizards, they were somewhat a novel taste for him as he had dinner for the first time.

‘Yap, they taste like gator and beef,’ were his thoughts on the matter.

It finally hit him that he'd slept and eaten in a world far away from home. Perhaps, an entirely different universe. It felt like moving to another town, after living all two decades of your life in one place but it had to be done.

Nevertheless, his homesickness was many times over; occasionally wistful, for no apparent reason he found it hard to breathe. That the gaps in his memory prevented a full blown case of melancholia left him torn. He didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

As for the following days, Arthur was caught up in a storm of scholarly activities. Aeskyre outlined the literature that Arthur would read to bolster his magic capability and acquire bearings about his new world. He was taken through a comprehensive lesson plan of not only magic, but geography, history and politics of Eryth.

It felt like sitting in a freshman class all over again. The draconic woman was such a stickler for perfection, something about her prerogative to impart only the best and nothing less. He learned soon enough.

Aeskyre especially stressed the importance of cultivating political awareness in a world where might, made right. There was no use becoming an outstanding mage if one was just going to get killed from offending some noble mage.

Thus, Arthur had to grasp his Ps and Qs regarding the political landscape and noble etiquette. Powerful magic users, like some who ascribed to military doctrines were members of nobility.

In some kingdoms entire families were built upon the purity of their member’s bloodlines. It was also common to find political marriages between families whose heirs had complementing affinities for certain magics.

The more Arthur used the monocle for his studies, the more he acclimated to Erythean languages. Besides Erythean Common, he studied Aelvani script for the half-elves and the trade pidgin for dwarven aership sailors which would no doubt come in handy.

Trade pidgin was the mainstay of dwarves who controlled much of the Aership traffic through their outposts and it was a cross between trying to speak German with a Cockney accent.

A derivation of Erythian Common, trade pidgin helped those not acquainted with the language attune to their own languages to the World which Inadvertently translated for them as they learnt more words.

He also completely tripped over his Aelvani. The pronunciation of Aelvani was akin to auditioning for all the voice roles in a chorale and then some. To the Elves and their kin, the rest of the races might have as well been tone deaf. Yet Aeskyre, also his self professed language tutor, was having a laugh at his expense. The woman could speak any of the language as if she was born into it.

Well, she was cheating by using her air magic. But that was an altogether different level of magical talent that Arthur could not hope to ape.Perhaps a little leeway for non-elven races was in order; they didn't have an extra pair of secondary lungs to spare did they?

It was tenable if he ever met an elf in the wider world, he was better off knowing a smidgen of the language than none at all. However, Aeskyre told him he was more likely to interact with half-elves than full blooded elves because they seldom left their arbors. Also, as long as he could pick up a few words, whatever auto translation feature the World used would kick in.

But all that was dependent on whether he made an effort to at least learn a bit of the language. Honestly, how much of a language could be considered a bit? What parameters did the all-knowing World use to gauge whether an individual met a certain threshold? Those were questions that Arthur didn’t find answers to. Even his tutor had no idea; which aggravated her to no end.

Erythean history was rather lore heavy; he had to pore tomes upon tomes of the subject. In the end he only confined his studies to the history of magic and magitech which was relevant to him at the time—as long as whatever content he had at hand was enough to get by, it was enough.

There was no way he was going to read too deep to the point of prompting a [Historian] or [Anthropologist] class from the World. From the history of Eryth, he learnt about the many wars that birthed and ended kingdoms and empires and rewrote the maps, both figuratively and literally.

Whatever little he was able to glean from the little context he had about Eryth, unsettled him to no end. Sure a little culture shock was a long time in coming but the history of Eryth was like something out of a grim dark novel. The most powerful beings, at the top of the known hierarchy, not counting Elder races like dragons and fae-folk of course, were the archmages.

[Archmages] were well, like if a person walked around with a thermonuclear warhead in their backpack. They might have well been natural disasters if they could reorder the terrain with their spells.

Fortunately, Arthur didn't have to worry about finding himself caught up in a pissing contest between such entities because there were accords that were put in place to prevent such incidents. How they were enforced, Aeskyre snorted and told him to go find himself.

‘Great…she gives homework too?’

Archmages were also, pretty much the old Gandalf the White types of characters with a predisposition to holing up in their labs and whichever academic institution of magecraft they were affiliated with. So chances of Arthur stumbling upon a magical tiff that could pretty much decimate an entire city were few and far between.

After deciding that he had enough context to at least play the rest by ear without committing a faux pas in Erythean common sense, he left the history to the history buffs.

“So how big is Eryth exactly? Has anyone ever seen the entirety of it?” Arthur asked on one of those days he was studying geography. He was getting well on with his studies and had enough content to engage in intellectual conversations from time to time—with a dragon.

“I have no inkling of how big it is,” the draconic woman shrugged indifferently. “I can only say there are more lands that have yet to see civilization and conquest than there are sapient known races to populate them. Even dragons and other elder races have yet to grasp the number of leagues from one end to the other.”

‘ No magical satellites then. What a bummer. Hells, how do they even navigate?’ he mulled. The answer he got to his question involved was that before the coming of Aerships, charted lands were limited to areas where [ Cartographers] dared to tread. Distances had also been arbitrary even though there was an established method of measurement.

‘I hope it's a metric system.’

According to Aeskyre, polities closely guarded their maps as it exposed important tactical information. Anything within the public domain was stripped of its distinctive features, leaving only known landmarks that people could navigate by.

Arthur would have thought that with the amount of land left unexplored, it would have just been sensible to cut a swathe for themselves. But no, someone had to covet another's. So yes, he could expect war over territory somewhere.

So, geographically, the known lands included Alkerd, the central continent; it was an accepted fact that it was the melting pot of many races among the known continents. Then there was Oriendal, the Eastern continent, Occidania, the western one. The Sterlian Archipelago was a smattering of self-governing southern island nations, easily as big as some kingdoms such that the main Islands are essentially sub-continents.

Last, was the cold and tundra-like northern continent, Boreus whose information on its lands was barely there, just a past-time of [Bards] and fish wives’ tales. Arthur imagined a magical ecosystem like Antarctica just waiting to be discovered.

“[Gossip], is a class?” Arthur deadpanned.

“Hmm? Indeed, there is a class called [Gossip]. It is as much an essential class as a [Bard] or a [Town Crier]. That is how communication and news gets around in some towns and villages.

“The connotation that the class [Gossip] carries is just a stereotype because most of them are women. Though I don’t get why you are so worked up about the geography of Eryth. I can see the allure of determining exactly where each place is nonetheless.

“But how do you pass urgent messages, Magical smoke and magical drums?” Arthur chuckled.

“ You really think our realm is behind yours [Lost Worlder]?” Aeskyre snorted, narrowing her slit pupiled eyes. She eyed him with the contempt of a cat. “ Tell me, what does a world that smells of smoke and burning and other types of unnatural stench have to offer? You barely had magic before you arrived.” She sounded incensed.

Arthur opened his mouth, finger raised in retort ready to expound about the glory of technology. He was ready to whip out his phone and speak of the wonders of talking to someone on the other side of a planet or seeing events as they happened while you were in another timezone, but the glint in Aeskyre’s eyes looked like a storm was ready to break over his head. Thus he kept mum.

Aeskyre’s countenance softened somewhat. She gazed at the human who was dumbfounded and sighed inwardly. Perhaps she was too hard on him. Half a century of isolation and her social graces had regressed so much. She came down and stifled the sense of draconic pride that roared in her simulacrum, she cleared her throat and answered him. She did not, however, provide him with an apology, it was beneath her bearing as a dragon.

“I haven't much to tell you about how Eryth stays abreast of events, vast as its lands are. [Message], [Farspeak], [Far Scry]; such are the magics that have been used. Some have been lost to time, but these three have endured. The latter two are common enough.” she said. Arthur leaned in to listen.

“ Magic, like a tool, advances and regresses as the eons wax and wane. I would say, in my time such and such a thing happened via a correspondence of mine. Thus, I can tell you for a fact that a Mageborn today might struggle to learn [Message] because of the complexity of its spell matrices. “

Aeskyre managed to turn a potentially awkward situation into a lecture on communication magic. She started by saying how the range of [Message] spells was abysmal, that mages had to find a workaround by building an entity geared towards connecting people by bouncing messages from output to outpost.

Thus that was how the resourceful Mages Guild came to be. For those who couldn't bring themselves to learn the annoying art of compressing words into a few motes of mana and giving them an orientation to someone’s mana signature, the Mages Guild could get rid of the headache for a price.

They virtually had a monopoly over long distance communication. Outside of the Adventurers and Mages Guilds and the personages who employ some of their own [Communication Mage], individuals who could send their own [Message] that spanned more than a handful of towns were uncommon.

Living in a world without communication, despite the presence of magic, seemed like a contradiction. It just turned out, like technology, magic had some limits too. Or a wall civilization had to cross to advance to the next level.

“ Last time I heard, they billed [Message] spells per character. Mmh, I have to get in touch with my contact at the Mages Guild to see if things have changed over the half a century”

‘Did you care to think perhaps they might be dead?’ Arthur left unspoken. ‘Last time you heard? How long was the last time? You're feeding me outdated information’ Arthur felt like going bald there and then.

“I tire of wyvern steak.”

“Hmm, what was that?”

“Nothing…”

“I can sense some frustration roiling off you from the way your mana is agitated. Tell me, how far are you into your aership construction Oh human of steel and smoke?”

‘You just derive satisfaction from deliberately annoying the hell out of me’

“Yea, you got me,” Arthur said, rubbing his nape. His neck had a kink from poring over books all day. “I made notes on the most important things that make an aership tick but it is simply too much to go through.” he groaned.

The information in the books had glaring holes in them and compounded with the difficulty of learning dwarven script, he could not make heads or tails of where uncommon metals and magitech were used. Also, there was the fact that he was just one person. Despite his enthusiasm, he could only do so much with two hands and one head.

It also seemed that, the language that was used to make sense of the universe, mathematics was everywhere. For instance, there was no magicking away calculations about the efficiency of mana sails and ratios of surface area to mana conversion. Matrices were in spellcraft and it followed that they would be there in enhancing an magitect as well.

Designing a ship might have seemed like throwing some curves and squares. After all, a ship was just one big boat, how hard could it be? Arthur couldn’t have been more wrong.

While the dwarven aerships did look like carracks, galleys and caravels from his medieval Earth, they were far from being crude wooden tubs made from 14th century technology. Dwarven magic engineering did not do things by halves as Arthur would later come to find out.

“I think you’re biting off more than you can chew,” a lounging Aeskyre replied. “You have been cooped up in here for a while and I can’t bear to have you ramble my ears off. What do you say we get started on the practical side of your magic studies?”

Having said that, Aeskyre took Arthur to another section of the caverns that housed training grounds. The grounds were as large as the main hall where Aeskyre kept her hoard of precious metals and other artifacts. It had an open view of the sky, warded against the weather and wyvern attacks by ancient magic left over from its previous residents.

Arrayed along its bleachers were an arsenal of wooden weapons on racks t and training dummies made of some type of wood that was oddly enduring despite the scuffs and wear from whoever had occupied the place last. Even the sand spread underfoot looked pristine, devoid from signs of disturbance.

Standing in the middle of the training field, Aeskyre walked Arthur through the process of casting his first spell.

“It’s been five days since you were bequeathed your spells. That has to be enough time to have picked up more and a handful of levels, no?”

“Yea, I’ve become a level 5 [Mage]. Also I have added a couple of spells to my repertoire, for each of the affinity I possess. How do levels and skills work anyway?”

“ The World rewards effort.” was Aeskyre’s preamble. “ After every 5 levels the World bestows one a skill or more depending on the sweat of one’s brow. However, that only lasts the first 20 levels.

Beyond that, it becomes exponentially difficult to level and acquire new skills.At this point, the only way to break into the next level will have to be borne of creativity and novel use of the skills that the class has already provided to you—”

Aeskyre defined the boundaries styming one’s advance in the class as bottlenecks. One encountered them at the end of every tier. There were nine known tiers in existence but she insisted that he only concern himself with the first six. When entering the next tier, there was the possibility that an existing class might evolve into a more powerful class barring the person’s preferences.

It was therefore common to find people who had two or at most, three classes leveling concurrently so that during tiering up, the World might deem them worthy of synergizing their classes via a class consolidation.

The resulting class was relatively powerful compared to the classes that formed it but not without its limitations. Timing the classes right, since tiering up seemed to occur after every five levels for common classes and ten for those specialized in certain areas was an uphill task.

“Heh, I could see that coming”

“You need not worry about it, the higher you level and tier up the more the World might just reveal itself to you. Let’s get started on these spells of yours then. Can you tell what spells you have?”

“[Thunder Bolt], [Wind Shield], and [Water Vortex].”

“Hmm, passable,” she harrumphed. “ You have some diversity for defensive and offensive spells. That Locus affinity should complement your arsenal nicely—

So then, begin with casting your spells without calling out aid from the World. I want you to break down the spell into its constituent parts. For example, when you think of a thunderbolt in nature, it is easy to think recall its effects as loud sound and a flash of lightning—”

“However, unless you comprehend how it forms naturally, you will not be able to envision how you are supposed to form the spell matrix. Then again a derivative affinity, Fulmen affinity spells like [Thunder Bolt] require a lot of finesse to use. Unlike Aer and Aqer based spells, they can injure first time casters who use the spell willy nilly and those around them—”

Arthur imagined a million volts of the stuff frying him to cinders. Expecting that, Aeskyre reveals the upside of such spells.

“Once you get past that, lightning magic provides some powerful spells for the amount of mana it consumes. So tell me, how do we go about casting [Thunder Bolt]? Assume I am a mageborn who has yet to awaken to their affinity and explain the process.”

‘Way to put me on the spot,’ Arthur gulped. He clenched his fists to stop them from shaking as he thought about what he knew about lightning. Once he’d calmed down and formulated his response to his magic tutor, he exhaled, resolute that he had the right idea.

“Mmh, alright,” Arthur said as he tapped his bottom lip, “In nature, a lightning bolt forms when there is an imbalance between storm clouds and the ground or between storm clouds. This imbalance is caused when the water droplets contained in warm air in the middle of a storm cloud bump into and move away from ice crystals that form in cold air. This causes rubbing motions that cause an imbalance of opposing charges between the hot air and the cold air therefore causing an electrical discharge that is lightning—”

“The resultant lightning bolt causes explosive heating up of the air causing the sound we hear as thunder. Therefore, to cast a thunderbolt, we acknowledge that the lightning bolt comes first and the thunder that we hear will just be a byproduct of the spell. I assume we use mana to recreate the conditions in between the storm cloud and the ground where the caster is the storm cloud and the target is the ground ?”

Clearing her throat, she prompted Arthur, “Away with it then, let’s see you apply yourself. Your targets are those dummies, ” she pointed at the dummies that were about 120 paces away from where they stood. By his estimate, a distance of 120 paces was roughly 100 metres.

So Arthur stood, facing the training dummies and pointed a finger gun in their direction. He closed his eyes, cut out his awareness from everything around him and pictured the process that formed an imbalance of charges between his index finger and his target.

Then he felt for the incorporeal power that suffused the air and himself and reached for his mana well just like the primer on magic showed him to, then he willed it to take the shape. Opening his eyes, he muttered, “[Thunder Bolt!].

Aeskyre’s draconic eyes traced the flow of energy, from Eryth into Arthur’s mana well and then through his mana veins to this index finger where the spell formed. Though Arthur could not see it, Aeskyre saw the formation of the spell matrix in the shape of a mandala of interlocking fractals through her draconic sight.

The formation only existed only as long as Arthur’s blink before a bolt of lightning crackled into existence in front of him, zig zagging through the distance and striking the training dummy dead centre.

A peal of thunder roared through the training field shortly after. Looking at the target of his assault, one of the training dummies had been clipped at the shoulder, smoke still wafted off the cinder scorched mark as the dummy rocked. An ear splitting grin adorned Arthur’s face.

“That was quick,” Aeskye commented, Arthur’s grin fell.

‘Here it comes.’

“I want you to keep casting that spell until it becomes muscle memory. Those should be easy seeing how you cast [Thunderbolt] on your first try. Use both hands to cast your spells while at it too, with your amount of mana, you should be nothing less than a dual caster.”

‘And there it is. Easy she says…does she even know how hard it was to give imbue will between two streams of mana? Forming an anti-electroshock layer was no joke.’ he sighed.

On said day, Arthur knew Aeskyre’s other side. She was a taskmistress when it came to practical training. When Arthur went to sleep that night, he was sore and exhausted in places he’d never thought possible.