Kel awoke in a state of confusion. This was not his cozy room at the Rootwater - by comparison, this room was huge. He suddenly remembered everything from the day before, wracked with guilt over the fight with Valir. And then he had met Maximilian, who had been completely different from that he expected. He must have been tired - he had slept for at least five hours. His new patron was so strange. The lazy way she had performed her banishing. And then she had danced. If he hadn’t seen her open the portal to her mansion herself, if he hadn’t witnessed her heal Jasper in a manner that should have been impossible, he wouldn’t have believed who she was. But then there was that raw sense of power, the utter confidence in her every movement. More than that, there was an aura of danger surrounding her that he had never felt from anyone else.

Kel, her voice whispered in his ear. He jumped nearly three feet from his prone position on the bed. It had been as if she were right there beside him. Time to wake up, assuming you slept. Come to the ballroom - it’s time to begin your training.

He didn’t dare make her wait.

A large table had been set in the middle on the side of the ballroom, facing the large glass walls. It was covered from end to end with a dizzying array of cheeses, bread, fruit, and meats. The arbitor of light and darkness was sitting at a large table that had been assembled in the hall, stuffing her face with some form of pasty. Kel felt his mouth water looking at the spread.

“First, we eat!” she said, her mouth still full.

As Kel sat down and began to fill his plate, she swallowed and spoke more clearly. “We can go over the basics while we eat ,a working breakfast.” Kel nodded, agreeing whole-heartedly. He didn’t care as long as it meant he could eat.

“So the first rule of magic is that it is dangerous.”

“Caaron told me.”

“Did he, now? And yet you summoned a demon. As I told you before, you will heed my warnings or you will die. There isn’t even a chance of survival as a mage otherwise. Not with what you will be learning. If you forget a word or fudge a pronunciation, if your concentration wavers, if your finger slips during an incantation - all of these mistakes could be deadly. I don’t know how you worked a summoning, but you’re lucky you aren’t dead or worse.”

Kel wasn’t sure what could be worse than being dead, but he didn’t want to find out.

“Bottom line - magic will fuck. You. Up.” She gestured with the pasty for emphasis, some of the filling spilling from the bitten end and onto the table. If Maximilian noticed, she didn’t let on.

Satisfied that her point had been made, the sorceress took another bite and chewed heartily before washing it down with a gulp of wake-brew. Her face took on a bright countenance and she rose suddenly, leaving the half-eaten pasty forgotten on the table. “So let’s begin,” she said in a cheerful voice that was the polar opposite of her dire warning.

“Yes, Magus.”

“Please,” she said with a wink, “call me Max.”

They talked as they walked, Max occasionally taking a bite out of an apple as she lectured.

“What you know of magic are cantrips; surface level scratchings on the fabric of a force that you barely understand.” Kel started to protest.

“I’m not saying you aren’t more learned than most of the yokels out there, or that Caaron taught you poorly.I just mean that these are tools disguised as building blocks. Your fundamentals truly begin here.”

She immediately launched into a list of requirements, which he assumed she had avoided yesterday for fear of overwhelming him. “…Memorize the phases of the moons. You also will need to understand and eventually memorize the elemental correlations and the entirety of the zodiac.”

“I doubt you will have time to learn all of this,” the sorceress pondered, talking though a bite of apple.

“Well, what happens if I don’t?”

“I turn you out of my house and you go on your way”.

Kel felt his stomach drop. “What happens if I do?”

“I turn you out of my house and you go on your way.” She tossed the apple core somewhere into the shadows, where it bounced off something with a quiet thunk.

Now he was just confused. “Wait…really?”

“Yes. The difference is that with the second option, I send a letter of recommendation ahead of you so that the Academy will welcome you with open arms.”

Kel felt palpable relief. “You don’t have to worry about that. I will devote myself to my studies.”

She raised an eyebrow as they paused at the door of the mansion. “See that you do.” She pushed the door open to a golden twilight that was eerily reminiscent of the previous day. “So how do you perform magic?”

Kel thought about it for a moment. “Well, I study.”

“Exactly. You recite some words out of a book, follow some instructions, and then something happens. But I mean real magic, spells that fly out of your heart.”

“I…I don’t know.”

“And that’s the problem - you know how to use spells, but you don’t know how to create. That’s what I’m going to teach you.”

They meandered past the fountain. The color of the water had not been a trick of the light; it spouted from the top and cascaded down into a bright violet pool.

Maximillian continued at a loping pace. “So the first step - where do we get our power? Where does magic come from? Do you know?”

“Caaron told me that magic comes from all around us. That it’s in the air we breathe, in the food we eat. In our blood and bones, even.”

She looked at him searchingly. “Yes, there is the magic of our world, lesser and diminished as it is. The simple act of healing, a body stitching itself back together over time, is evidence of this. But there are more powerful sources, as you yourself should well understand now.

“The black book?”

She nodded. “The demon world. A twisted version of our own, home to tricksters and devils who revel in despair. This is where we get necromancy and other, darker arts from.”

“What’s darker than necromancy?” he asked?

“Don’t worry about it.” She spat out a seed with seeming disgust.

“So then are the Faerie lands also a source?”

“Indeed. The Fae were a source of power; strange and alien and beautiful in a way. So long as our worlds were linked, we mages had access to that power. But that is no longer the case. Some of use can still channel it, but not well.”

“Isn’t it a good thing that they’re gone?”

“For some, perhaps. For mages it’s…complicated. Those two worlds are the main dyiad of powers.Our meager supply of magic is limited and weak compared to the other worlds. There is enough magic in the world still that we get by, but higher magics are now neigh impossible unless the practitioner is extremely well-versed. Even then, it is much more taxing than it once was.”

“Well who cares about that? Isn’t it better that they’re gone - they can’t take anyone away anymore. Can’t kill anyone?”

“Do people not do the same things?”

Kel was already seething. Noticing this, Max deftly changed the subject. “Anyway, that’s a done deal. No more power from the Fae.”

“Can’t the gods grant power?” Kel asked with genuine curiosity.

“The Gods.” The sorceress laughed mirthlessly.

“What - you don’t believe in the Gods?”

“No, I do. You can’t be a proper magician without knowing the Gods. But I don’t like them either.”

“How can you not like the gods.”

“It’s easy - they perform confoundedly fallible actions on a regular basis and you start to resent that these beings unformed by the physical world have more power than you ever will. Does that answer your question?

“But what did they -”

She shushed him with a quick gesture. “Back to the matter at hand. Did you read through the book on Elements?”

“Well…yes.” It wasn’t a lie. He had skimmed through it at the very least, alongside “Banishings” and the other books she had piled on for him to read.

“Good. That will come in handy today, though you may find practical experience much more instructive. Come, Let me show you.”