“No, listen, it doesn’t matter if you can burn it or not,” I said.

“But rock does not burn, how could I set it aflame?” said a Roja tribesman.

“Like I’ve said before, magic is based on the abstract world, not the physical one,” I said.

“But I don’t understand!” he said again. “It is a rock. If I throw it in the fire, it will not burn. How can you expect me to set it on fire?”

“You’re not setting it on fire,” I said, “you’re extracting the element of fire from inside the rock.”

“There is no fire inside the rock!” he said.

“I know there isn’t,” I said.

“Then why are you making me take it out?” he said.

“Because it’s not literally made of fire, it’s just an abstract way of classifying everything in existence!” I said.

I spent some more time trying to get that tribesman to cast fire elemental magic. Most of the Roja tribesman struggled with fire elemental magic. I looked around. Most of the tribesmen were standing in front of rocks, trying to cast fire magic on them. A few of them were standing by wooden logs, trying to cast earth elemental magic, while a couple sat by a pool of water, trying desperately to cast air magic.

It had been a couple of weeks since I began trying to teach them magic. The toughest part so far had been convincing them to stop venerating elves, and especially to stop using chants to cast magic. I didn’t help the situation by literally calling forth rain, but there had been one massive breakthrough that really helped shake things up.

“How are you doing Kelser?” I said as I walked over to the red-haired boy. “Need any help?”

“Hi Cas,” he said as he grinned widely. “Just a second.” His grin turned to a frown though, as he stared at his task. A small pebble lay balanced on top of a large rock. Kelser breathed deeply as he once again stretched out his hands and gathered his energy. After a few moments of intense focus, he let out his breath, and let his short hands fall back to his sides. “Yeah, I think I need some help after all.”

I nodded and started offering him some tips for motion magic. Kelser listened intently, asking questions from time to time. The grumpy kid who didn’t trust us at first, was long gone. That said, his grumpiness had actually been a great help.

Kelser had been the first Roja tribesman who stopped chanting and stopped praising us after before every spell. He’d been the first to cast every type of elemental spell, and the only one who was working on motion magic right now. Even elder Kezler was stuck trying to cast fire elemental magic on a stone.

A lot of tribesmen, especially the youngest ones, had followed Kesler’s lead and ditched their old attitudes towards us. Kesler was the only one who called us by our first names, though I think that might have been because the others realized we were much older than them. I mean, Noel was much older than them, but she said I was basically the same age as her, and I didn’t want to say she was much older than me, and I didn’t want to clarify how I was actually a human reincarnated from another world, because the explanation was long and complicated and also none of their business!

“You okay?” asked Kesler.

“What? Oh yeah, sorry, I was thinking about something annoying,” I said. “Now where were we? Oh yeah, motion magic is based on…”

After another evening spent practicing magic, the exhausted tribesmen walked back to their cave. Noel and I followed behind them, talking about the problems we’d faced today and how to overcome them tomorrow. It kind of reminded me of the little meetings I’d have with the other teaching assistants back in college. Man, that felt like a lifetime ago.

“I think the problem is they’ve had a lot more experience with fire than our Jora tribe did,” I said.

Noel nodded. “The tough part is differentiating between the element of fire and fire itself. Remember how, when you were explaining it to our tribe, your translation magic translated ‘fire’ and ‘blessing’ differently? It made it easy for us to think of the element of fire as being something different from fire itself, since fire itself was being translated as blessing.”

“Right, I almost forgot about that. Maybe we should analyze their language or something,” I said.

“There you go, making things more complicated than they need to be,” said Noel. “We don’t have to analyze their language, we have to find a way to separate the element of fire from fire itself.”

“But how do we do that?” I asked.

“By coming up with a different name for it,” she said.

A different name for the element of fire? Was that really the best way to go about it? “Maybe all we need is time,” I said, “Kesler understood it, after all, so shouldn’t the rest of them get it eventually?”

Noel frowned. “Who knows how long that’ll take.”

I slowly nodded. Noel was getting impatient. She’d wanted to go searching for the human Jora tribe since the day elder Kezler mentioned them. She would have gone off on her own, even if I’d insisted on helping the Roja tribe, if elder Kezler hadn’t told her more about the human Jora tribe.

The human Jora tribe were hunter-gatherers, just like the elfin Jora. However, they were even more nomadic than our Jora tribe was. They moved from place to place every few days, and claimed a very large swathe of territory up North. Trying to find them by running into their territory might take months, if we were unlucky.

Instead, elder Kezler agreed to take us to the summer solstice festival celebrated by most of the tribes in the area. The festival was meant to honor the great elves who taught magic to humanity, and was usually led by the human Jora tribe’s leaders. The summer solstice was in a few weeks, but the location for the festival was pretty far from the cave. Noel wanted to go early, since the Jora tribe, who are in charge of the festival, will probably get there early too. Spending too much time training the Roja in magic might make us late.

“Fine,” I said, “let’s try both. Let’s analyze their language a little and then we can come up with a way to differentiate between fire and the fire element. Once they’re able to separate the abstract from the real, other types of magic should become easier too.”

We went inside the cave and called over Kelser. After explaining what we were trying to do, Kelser agreed to help us. He did say he wasn’t sure what we were trying to do, but he trusted us enough to go along with whatever. Man, kids really do trust people easily, don’t they?

We told Kelser to repeat a few sentences whenever I raised my finger. Then we turned off our translation magic and I gave him the signal. Noel hadn’t experienced different languages before, since all the elves of the Plains of Serenity used the same language, so she had to focus intently. She asked me something absentmindedly, and only realized I couldn’t understand her when I replied to her in German.

Why German? Well, have you heard the language? If someone starts speaking to you in German, you notice it!

Anyway, after several rounds of repeating the same sentence, I turned on my translation magic and told Kelser to say something else. We repeated the process several times, sometimes making Kelser say things very slowly, sometimes asking him to enunciate each syllable.

“Alright,” I said, “this is really strange.”

“What do you mean?” said Noel as she also turned on her translation magic.

“Their language is completely different from yours,” I said.

“That makes sense. They live really far away, don’t they?” she said.

I frowned. “Yes, but then why can they do magic?”

“What do you mean?” asked Kelser this time.

“Your magic,” I said, “the one you showed us before. The one with long chants and lots of praying. How could that have developed if you couldn’t understand the elves’ language?”

“Maybe they learned each others’ language?” said Noel.

“But your languages are different,” I said, “I mean, really, really different. Your elfin language was monosyllabic and had very different sounds, but their language is a root-based or introflective language. And with the amount of influence the elves seemed to have had on their society, it wouldn’t be strange for the humans to have taken some elements of your language. Even their word for elf doesn’t seem to be connected to any word in your language.”

“Well, if they didn’t learn each others’ language,” said Noel, “which is all I understood from your complicated explanation—”

“Sorry about that.”

“We’ll work on it later,” continued Noel. “But if they didn’t learn the language, they must have communicated with signs or something.”

“But think about how hard it was for us to teach them magic today!” I said, “how could anyone have taught someone magic without speaking being able to understand them? Especially for a system of magic that was based on spoken chants!”

Kelser frowned. “You’re right. It sounds impossible.”

“But then how did they learn magic?” asked Noel.

I tapped my fingers on the side of my leg. We were sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cave. The night was dark and we could barely make out the torches by the entrance to the cave. I didn’t have any answers so I stayed silent. I went to sleep still rolling that question around my head like a piece of hard candy.

How did these humans learn magic?