The Sunday following Alan’s first real magical test, as Aquillus had put it, Alan met with Marissa for their usual practicing in the Rosewoods. They had been limited lately because of Alan’s detention at the Evanescent Threads after school, so Sunday was the only opportunity for the next few sessions. Marissa had somehow gotten hold of a few sweet rolls even with the bakery having very limited opening hours. Perks of being friendly with the baker, Alan assumed.

Marissa’s expression was as carefree and happy as ever, which made Alan happier than he managed to express. Marissa spewed out her usual stream of words about some recent event, and even though Alan could barely keep up with her, he nodded and agreed whenever he thought it was appropriate, which was enough for Marissa. After having worked on their meditation for a while, they chatted about school and friends and anything Marissa could think of for the remaining daylight, and headed home as dusk arrived.

“How is Sara doing?” Alan asked awkwardly, after a brief lull in the conversation while they were walking.

“Mom is… tired, lately.” Marissa slowly replied, her energetic expression slowly fading, replaced by an uncharacteristic worry. “She doesn’t smile as much anymore,” Marissa said after thinking about it for a while more. “I think she’s sad that dad is gone.”

“Are you sad that he is gone, too?” Alan had to ask, with a slight tremble in his voice.

“I.. I don’t know.” Marissa had a complicated expression, clearly trying to sort through her feelings. “He was mean to me and mom, sometimes, but only when he got angry. When he was happy, he was really nice to us. But he was angry a lot, and sometimes it wasn’t even our fault.”

Marissa was struggling to find the words, but she didn’t give up. “Dad said I wasn’t allowed to talk about when he was mad at us. He said that would just make him mad again. But now he’s gone.” After having worked hard on expressing herself, Marissa went quiet for a time as they walked onwards.

“It’s okay,” Alan said eventually. “You don’t need to know how you feel about it right now. You can figure it out later.” Alan wasn’t the best at comforting, he knew, but tried anyway. “If you need help with anything, just tell me, ok?” He tried his best at a warm smile, but ended somewhere closer to worried.

“Sure, I will,” Marissa replied, some happiness having made its way back into her voice.

They walked on in silence after that. Alan wanted to ask more, and to help more, somehow, but decided that Marissa needed time to sort through her emotions on her own, and decide for herself if she wanted his help with anything. Marissa gave him a tight hug as they arrived at her house, before running in and shouting out her arrival. Alan couldn’t hide his smile as he listened to the energetic girl, and slowly made his way home.

The next week passed by in a flash to Alan. He had to retake his test on interacting with Royals, but managed to pass on the second try. He spent the evenings working with his mother, until his punishment was officially over by Thursday. He had been wary of Marissa’s mood, but that turned out to be unnecessary. She was just as active as ever in between classes, and had been increasingly pulling Catherine away from her reading. Catherine made some token attempts at withstanding Marissa aggressively including her in the different chat circles, but often ended up quite involved in whatever they were conversing about.

Alan had spent time pushing his aura further out, and was steadily gaining ground. Additionally, he had continued to produce small amounts of hydrogen when he had some time to himself, still wary of incidents, but slowly increasing his confidence in the process. He visited Jack again on friday afternoon, wanting to discuss the procession of priests he had seen the previous week.

Both Jack and Braum had the same impression of the priests, namely that they cared little for normal folks, preferring the company of the rich and powerful. They had never heard about prophecies that warned the general population of dangerous events, and thus were sceptical to the entire prophecy-business.

Elianna, on the other hand, was an ardent supporter of the priests, and defended them valiantly when her brother or father tried to talk ill about them. She told Alan that she’d once been cured of a horrible and painful disease by a young female priest. Elianna insisted that the priest had been the epitome of beauty, and descended from an actual angel, and that she had ventured all the way to their home out of the goodness of her heart and her love for the common people. Braum’s almost concealed frown suggested there was another version of the story, but he didn’t raise any objections in the end, and Alan refrained from asking.

Sylvi, being the most diplomatically inclined in the family, tried to relieve the tension that quickly rised when discussions about the Church began. She kept to the line that faith was a personal thing, and thus everyone practiced it differently, even among the priesthood. Therefore, she argued, discussing the Church as an institution should be separated from discussing the individual people that were a part of it. All men and women were fallible, even if they were guided by a higher power, Sylvi reminded them, and it was her opinion that the good deeds done by the priesthood outweighed the bad, though there was always room for improvements.

When Saturday arrived again, Alan once more found himself in Aquillus’ office, working under the mana bombardment to replicate a wooden fire using only his mana. He had tried to question Aquillus about the safety of their experiment, but his questions were waved aside with a simple “I know what I’m doing.”

After the first hour of working under pressure, Alan felt safe enough in his hydrogen creation procedure to try scaling it up. He decided to move away from the batch processes he had been doing previously, and instead went for a continuous creation and ignition process. He started out creating only a few thousand atoms of hydrogen, but instead of stopping there, he continuously created more each second.

As he ignited the hydrogen, he could sense the short lifetime of the particles he created. They went into being right above his right hand, then the first reaction formed a hydrogen atom from a proton and an electron. From there, two hydrogen atoms reacted with each other to form hydrogen gas, and the last reaction he could sense was the ignition, where the temperature quickly increased, and the molecules reacted with oxygen in the air. It all happened within the span of a second, but Alan could separate the individual steps by having them happen at different distances from his hand.

As he got the entire reaction chain under control, he increased the number of particles he created quickly. After a while, he noticed a very dim glow emitting from his controlled reaction. He separated the reaction where he combined the electrons and protons from the ignition, and as he continued to increase his output, he noticed two distinct colors. The combination reaction emitted a clear red light, while the burning reaction created a dim blue color hard to discern against the background light.

“What are you doing?! That’s not even close to the orange fire you’re supposed to replicate!” Aquillus suddenly shouted, distracting Alan from his focused work. As Alan lost his fine control over the reaction, a bright white light suddenly filled his vision.

As quickly as it came, the white light was gone, but it took some time before Alan got a grip on the situation. The first thing he noticed was ringing in his ears. He also felt pain, mostly in his hand, but also in his back. He was lying down, on top of something hard. He was on top of pieces of his chair, he realized with a start. As he raised his head to look around, he took in the state of Aquillus’ office.

It was a mess. Everything had been violently pushed away from the middle of the room, close to where Alan had been sitting. Aquillus was breathing heavily in a corner, smearing something on his hands.

“What.. what happened?” Alan managed to croak out, after failing to get up from the floor. His right hand had failed to support him, though the expected pain was strangely muted.

“You lost control,” Aquillus said, then proceeded to cough heavily into a rag before continuing. “And loosing control is one thing, but you were already creating something entirely different from the fire you were supposed to create!” He was shouting at the end, visibly angry.

“How could you just continue like that, knowing it was a failure? Do you have no idea how dangerous it is to just create whatever fits your fancy? Magic isn’t a game, boy! We’re lucky to still be alive!” Aquillus was shaking with rage at the end, glaring at Alan as he finally managed to pick himself up from the floor. Alan wasn’t about to take that blame lying down.

“You picked the time to start working with fire magic, you neglected to inform me of the dangers of this experiment of yours, and you failed to stop my magic before an accident occured. How can you blame me for failing to do something I’ve never done before?! You should have been prepared for that, and taken the necessary precautions to stop anything going wrong!” Alan was shouting at the end too, surprising himself with the anger.

“YOU INSOLENT WELP! GET OUT!”

Alan scrambled for the door, as he noticed the heat in the room literally increasing from Aquillus’ rage, and their auras started fighting. Alan wondered if this was the first time someone had actually wanted him dead. He wasn’t about to wait around to find out how far Aquillus was willing to go in his anger, though, so made it through the door as fast as his feet could carry him.

Once outside, and sufficiently far away from Aqillus’ lab, Alan stopped in the shade of a large building and took stock of the situation. He had started noticing pain in his hand now, and studying it closer, it looked like several bones were probably fractured. Other than that, the skin also looked discolored, but he couldn’t really tell what caused it. He guessed that he had manifested antimatter particles by accident, but he didn’t really know. It all happened so fast, and he had trouble remembering exactly how it went wrong.

Alan decided that he had to go to the hospital to get his hand checked. The only issue with that plan, however, was that hospitals didn’t really exist. After some internal debate, he decided to go to the closest church. That was where sick people went to get their illnesses looked at after all, at least those who could not afford to get the priests to come to them.

Finding his way through the winding streets of Patros, Alan soon stumbled into a sizable open area known as Victory Square. The cobblestone, which could be found in several of the cities larger streets, had varying colors and were relatively clean throughout the square. A pillar in the center held a large statue of a mighty man clad in heavy armor, adorned with a golden crown at the top of his head, which served as a memorial to the King who had first united Alamar. Victory Square was, to Alan’s annoyance, triangular, and at one side was the church Alan had deemed to be closest. It wasn’t really a church though, describing it as a grand cathedral was more fitting. It was raised high above the surrounding buildings, with clock towers extending some 50 meters into the air, Alan guessed. He was no expert on architecture, though, so all he could really say on the construction styre was that it somehow resembled Notre Dame in both style and size.

There was a queue in front of one of the entrances, where he could see several people with various visible injuries, and some who didn’t seem injured at all. Alan got in line, careful to keep his distance from anyone without visible injuries, as one of the things he really feared in this world were unknown diseases. The line was surprisingly fast moving, with an acolyte coming out to bring in another patient about every two or three minutes. The acolytes were all dressed in loose fitting white robes, and Alan had trouble differentiating between them.

As the queue shrunk in front of Alan, he began wondering what was in store for him on the inside. Was faith a requirement for getting healing? What could they actually repair in terms of damage to tissue, bones, nerves, and similar? He had a suspicion that he had somehow damaged the nerves in his right hand, since the pain still hadn’t hit him nearly as much as he expected. As he neared the entrance, the walls of the cathedral loomed above him in an awe inspiring fashion. He looked up at the facade again, and noticed what looked like tiny windows hidden away in the curves of the structure. There was a face visible in one of them, looking down at the crowd in the square. As Alan tried to get a better look, he was approached by an acolyte.

“Good day to you, child. If you’d just follow me, we’ll find someone to take a look at that hand of yours.” A young man stood in front of Alan, clad in white like the others. He had a lean looking face, with a warm smile.

“Thank you very much,” Alan mumbled his words slightly, still stuck on the face he had glimpsed in the window. He quickly took off after the acolyte when he noticed how far behind he was falling. The acolytes were apparently friendly, but busy, and executed their tasks in a hurry.

As Alan entered through the relatively small entrance for the sickly, he soon found himself in a long, well lit corridor, with doors on either side that were all shut, except for one at the end on the left. He was efficiently guided to that door, and told to enter on his own.

Inside he was met with a small office, surprisingly similar to a doctor’s office from Earth. There was a bed on one side, a desk littered with paper and writing supplies, a few candle lights scattered about here and there, and a solid lantern hanging down in the middle of the room. Another white clad man was sitting at the desk, writing on what Alan assumed to be a report of some kind, presumably on the last patient treated. The priest, Alan assumed he was one, didn’t look up to greet him as he entered, so Alan stood waiting in the middle of the room for a few minutes, until the priest finally put down his quill and looked up.

“So, what can I help you with, boy?” The priest looked him over quickly, his eyes resting for a while on Alan’s right hand, before he started writing on an empty sheet of paper.

“Ehh.. Good day, priest? I would like you to have a look at my hand, if you have time, Sir.” Alan said, hesitantly. He really had no idea how to address the presumably holy person in front of him, or really how to behave at all. Luckily for him, he was only twelve years old in this world, and so would probably be forgiven for lacking social decorum in many situations. Not with the Royals though, Alan mused.

The priest finally got up from his seat, and motioned for Alan to sit at the bed as he came over. “Explain how it happened,” he calmly said, as he gently took Alan’s hand into his own and inspected it.

“It was, oww, a magical accident, Sir. I’m training to enter the Mage Academy, and things kinda spiralled out of control today.” The priest prodded the hand here and there while Alan talked, prompting a few noises of uncomfort.

“A magical accident, was it?” There was scepticism clear in his voice as the priest looked at Alan inquisitively. “What’s your name, son?”

“Alexander Moltus, Sir,” Alan quickly answered, not understanding the look the priest gave him.

“Must have been quite the accident then, to have a noble walking around in such tattered and ruined clothing.”

Alan finally took a good look at the clothes he was wearing, and realised the confusion in the eyes of the priest. He looked like he was wearing rags. In fact, he was wearing rags. It did not make a lot of sense to him, how he could be relatively unharmed over all, but still have destroyed most of his clothes in the accident. Another question for Aquillus, should he be allowed back for more training.

“It was, Sir.” Alan answered simply, not wanting to go into detail if he could avoid it.

“Secretive sort, huh? Very well. Don’t worry, we’ll have this fixed in no time.” The priest said, then closed his eyes and held Alan’s hand in both of his. He then began a chant of sorts, phrased like a polite request to the gods. He was very specific in what he asked for, the restoration of normal function to the hand damaged in a magical accident. Alan reacted to the fact that the word healing was not mentioned in his chant, even though it was the most common word for what the priest was now doing.

About halfway through the chant, a tingling began in Alan’s right hand. It grew to a horrible itch as the chant ended, and the priest had to physically stop Alan from trying to scratch his hand. The itching lasted for a few minutes after the chant had ended, and the priest patiently held Alan’s hand in his own, while stopping any of Alan’s attempts at removing it from him.

When the itching finally ended, the priest let go of the hand, gave it a brief look while nodding to himself, before going back to his desk and picking up his pen again.

Alan was left speechless, staring down at the perfectly normal looking hand, opening and closing it without feeling any lingering pain or discomfort.

“How did… How did you do that?” Alan finally managed to ask, still in the middle of checking every inch of his hand for any sign of the previous damage.

“Faith, Alan. I humbly asked my God for help, and fully believed him capable of restoring the hand to its previous state.” The answer was brief, and somewhat dismissive, and he never looked up from his paperwork.

“But… but I thought that you couldn’t control mana inside the mana barrier of another person?” Alan finally managed to pick out one of the myriads of questions he wanted.

“Correct. I didn’t control any mana, however, my God did.” The priest was still writing away on his newest report.

“What do you mean ‘your god’, do you not believe him to be the only god?” Alan wondered, letting his questions flow with no filter to stop them. The priest finally looked up from his writing, an annoyed frown on his face.

“I know that he’s not the only god, and I call him ‘my God’, because he is the one I have chosen to serve. If there’s nothing else you need help with, I suggest you leave through the door behind you. Payment is not necessary today, but a small donation to the Church will always be warmly received.” The priest went back to his work, and uttered his next words clearly. “Goodbye, young mister Moltus. Be more careful in future magical experiments, please.”

Alan took that as his cue to leave, slightly embarrassed that he hadn’t restrained his curiosity better. He left a few copper coins in a basket marked ‘donations’ hidden away in a small alcove next to the entrance, and got a smile from an elder woman sitting nearby and seemingly keeping watch, also clad in white.

Alan left the cathedral with what felt like a healthy body, and a conflicted mind. He had two hypotheses warring for supremacy in his mind. The first, which he really hoped was the correct one, was that there were at least two kinds of magic, one based on mana, and one divine in nature, but that there still were no gods directly involved. This way, he could rationalize to himself that the priest that had just demonstrated that one could circumvent the mana control issue, was just practicing a secret and different type of magic, and not actually conversing with gods.

The other hypothesis was that gods were actually real, interacting beings. The idea that a god had healed his hand today, at the request of a seemingly uncaring priest, was scary. Would he revert his healing if Alan did something considered blasphemy? Was smiting a thing? How involved were gods in the politics of the world? Where did the gods come from, and how much of the Church’s work was done on the direct requests of gods? And how did the entire healing thing actually work? Was divine magic completely different to mana based magic? What would happen if two gods were at odds with one another?

Alan had so many questions, and so few people to ask. Well, he could always enter the cathedral proper through the main gates and follow a sermon, but he abstained from participation in the end. He admitted to himself that it was mostly because he still feared what he might learn.

The next week passed by slowly, for once, which gave Alan all the more time to regret his outburst to Aquillus after the accident. On one side, he felt that he had been right in berating his teacher for his view on safety, but on the other hand, he really felt like he needed the help to get on with his magical training. He didn’t dare experiment on his own, in fear of what might happen if he lost control again.

That meant more aura training instead, in addition to his railgun practice which involved electricity control. Now that he knew, or at least suspected, that he was actually creating the charges and not just moving them, he was a lot more careful about training with the railgun, but he felt like he had much better control of the magic when it happened inside the metal than outside. He also came to the conclusion that magic probably was very much affected by his own state of mind, so he did his best to get his mind calm and clear through meditation exercises before performing his electricity magic.

When Saturday finally arrived, Alan anxiously made his way to Aquillus’ office on the Academy grounds. When Aquillus finally opened the door after the fifth knock, he glared at Alan for good while before letting him in. Aquillus didn’t utter a single word during the entire session, and Alan held his tongue as well. The mana bombardment simply began when Aquillus felt ready, and stopped whenever he felt like Alan was doing something wrong.

Alan was back to working with miniscule amounts of particles, so Aquillus’ interruptions seemed completely random to Alan, as he never came close to creating anything visible to the naked eye. He decided that his next milestone would be creating sodium from mana, as that was what gave wood fire its orange color. The stern look on Aquillus face told Alan that only a replication of wood fire would be acceptable.

Alan spent the first half of the session trying to create sodium atoms, and the next half trying to create them reliably. He promised himself he would go much slower moving forward, and restricted the amount of particles to only a few thousand. At some point, Aquillus had had enough of the training, and simply stopped the mana bombardment, and grunted as he nodded towards the door. Alan left, not having said a word himself. He felt childishly stubborn for refusing to be the first to break the silence, but he also felt like the safety of what they were doing was the sole responsibility of his teacher, and that his teacher hadn’t shown any remorse for his lapse in judgement.

The next few sessions with Aquillus went much the same way. At some point, a stick had been introduced to Alan in the middle of the session, taking him in the arm by complete surprise. It didn’t hurt all that much, but Alan had, as Aquillus expected, lost control immediately. Before another accident happened, however, the magic was interrupted as Aquillus stopped his mana bombardment and their auras once more intersected. Alan took this as proof that Aquillus had understood his responsibility for the last accident, and was now fully prepared for a lapse in control, at least when he could reliably induce it with his random violence.

In the weeks that followed, Alan felt like he existed in a sort of trance-like state. The days were mostly uneventful, school was more of a distraction than anything useful. Alan had taken to drawing out the periodic table in his spare time, trying to remember the different combinations of protons and neutrons that made stable elements.

His interactions with people at school fell to a minimum, not that it had ever been very far from that. But even in his withdrawn state, he noticed a sort of gloom slowly seeping into the conversations around him as the weeks passed. Word about the prophecy had gotten around to everyone quickly enough, though no one seemed to actually know what it had warned about. Even Marissa and Catherine seemed affected by it, though they didn’t drag him into a discussion on the topic.

It only took five more sessions with Aquillus after the stick was introduced, before Alan managed to keep in control whenever he was hit during their training. He still struggled to continue his magic when a strike was particularly painful, but he at least managed to stop whatever he was doing before it exploded in his hand. How exactly Aquillus managed to gauge when Alan lost control and when he managed to keep it, Alan couldn’t say, but when he started to reliably keep in control after being hit, Aquillus’ constant glaring finally began to lessen a bit.

It wasn’t until the beginning of autumn when Alan finally felt he had the necessary control to up the number of particles enough to create a visible flame.

“YES, FINALLY!” Aquillus shouted in triumph at the sight, immediately interfering and putting the session on hold.

“I always knew you had it in you, son,” he said in a lower voice shortly after, clearly trying to reign in his excitement. Alan could even detect a small smile showing, which had to be the first he had seen on Aquillus in several months. “But you really held me on the edge there, you know, hiding your talent for so long. I was almost about to give up completely, and annul the whole marriage.”

It was unclear to Alan if the comment was meant as a joke or not, but a part of him immediately regretted the display of progress. If he could have escaped the intended marriage by simply waiting a few more weeks... He would have lost his teacher too, he surmised, and his only safe training environment, though calling it safe was stretching it far. Things are probably better this way, for the time being, Alan thought with mild disappointment.

Aquillus had him demonstrate the candle sized flame a few more times, only for seconds at a time, before he was satisfied for the day. He congratulated Alan on his achievement, insisting that the rest of the path to the academy was all practice from there on out.

“You’ve passed the hurdle now, son. Now all that is left is a straight shot to the finish line. And once you’re in the academy, you’ll have specializations to choose, field exercises to join, and generally be so busy that time will pass by faster than the arrow flies. Before you know it, you’ll be a full fledged mage, ready to carry on the legacy of Ildmane. Naturally, you’ll still have much to learn, if you’re ever going to step into the ranks of the truly worthy mages, but we’ll take this one step at a time.” Aquillus finished his graduation like speech on a low note, with a long look in his eyes.

“Thank you for your patience with me, Mister Ildmane,” Alan finally said, trying to put more respect into his voice than he felt. His teacher had been anything but professional in the last few weeks, but he had at least put in the time for their sessions, and hadn’t actually given up on Alan even if he claimed he was close. “I’ll see you next week, teacher.” Alan left quickly after his last sentence, fearing Aquillus might pick up on the tinge of sarcasm. No more was said before he was out of earshot, though, which he took as a good sign.