Once upon a time there was a settlement called Providence. It was a medium sized settlement (somewhere between a small city and a large town), and it would have been completely unremarkable if not for the imposing grey castle that stood at its centre. Gravenhall (as the castle was known) wasn’t a seat of power in the standard sense - you wouldn’t find any royalty or government officials stalking its narrow stone corridors. Nonetheless, it was home to a very powerful institution, or more accurately; four powerful institutions. These were the four guilds of Gravenhall and there was nothing and nobody that they couldn’t charm, convince, coerce, bully or kill.

Despite this enormous power and their remarkable potential for tyranny, the guilds were generally viewed as trustworthy and useful by the inhabitants of Providence. There were two main reasons for this. The first was that the guilds were very careful about how they exercised their power, and the second was that they provided a very useful and very profitable service to the inhabitants of the town and the lands nearby.

In Providence, anyone with sufficient funds could hire a group of Gravenhall guild members to perform a task for them, tasks that ranged in difficulty from stacking firewood to capturing or killing dangerous magical creatures. The economics of this were straightforward; easy tasks cost very little, difficult tasks cost a lot. This business model had proved so popular and so profitable that Gravenhall needed to constantly train new guild members in order to keep up with the demand for tasks. And this meant that Gravenhall wasn’t just a business, it was also a school.

Our story begins with the newest batch of recruits about to undertake their first ever combat training session in the ‘arena’ of Gravenhall; the wide dusty space located between the castle’s four massive walls. It is midsummer and although the sun is no longer beating down on the arena directly, a day’s worth of accumulated heat has created an unpleasant, oven-like atmosphere…

*********************

Terri Tillerson moved from foot to foot, vainly searching for a hint of a breeze across the massive arena as she waited for her name and the name of her training partner to be announced. Terri’s first day of classes at Gravenhall had gone rather well, all things considered, but the oppressive heat of the arena was slowly eating away at her high spirits. When the instructor finally called out 'Terri Tillerson and Agnes Thunderhammer' the young initiate raised her hand and searched the crowd for someone else doing the same. At first she couldn't see anyone with their hand in the air and the young cleric wondered what would happen if Agnes hadn’t attended the class. Then, out of a knot of trainees she appeared; a female dwarf striding confidently across the arena.

Dwarves were rare outside of their traditional homelands and Agnes Thunderhammer was the first that Terri had ever seen up close, so the young cleric found it hard not to stare as Agnes stalked across the arena towards her. Agnes was definitely quite short, about four and a half to five feet tall, so she ticked the first dwarven characteristic box there. She was also very broad across the shoulders and seemed to be heavily muscled, although it was hard to tell because of the furs she was wearing. Her straw-coloured hair was plaited into two braids that hung down past her shoulders and her face was round, almost moon-like, with rosy cheeks and a rounded nose. There were no signs of a beard, so it looked like that particular rumour about dwarven women was false, and as for the other rumours that Terri had heard, well, she was too polite to ask about those.

"Right then lassie," Agnes said after the rest of the training partners had been assigned. "If you've finally finished looking me up and down, you can get yourself ready for the worst arse whipping you've ever had."

She wasn't joking either, as Terri found out once the instructor had taken them through some basic combat drills and let the partner duels begin. They were using wooden sticks to practise but this did nothing to disguise the obvious skill gap between the two initiates. Despite attempting to use her considerable reach advantage to effect, Terri was unable to avoid being smacked here, there, and everywhere with the dwarf’s crude wooden sword. After a few minutes of this Agnes took pity on the young cleric and lowered her stick. "Gods above lass, you fight like a wee bairn, did you not ever play knights and goblins when you were a youngster?"

Terri dropped down onto her haunches, breathing heavily and sweating profusely. "I'm afraid not Agnes. Basic schooling was the only thing that ever got me out of the fields, and I was lucky to get that."

"Och, I keep forgetting about the peasant system you humans have out here, you poor big bugger. Well then, it looks like it'll be up to me to make sure you don't end up on the wrong side of a goblin's glaive, or a troll's truncheon, or a slaad's scimitar if you know what I mean."

Terri got the general idea and spent the next hour learning how to stay balanced on her feet while evading the slow deliberate swings of Agnes’ wooden sword. When the bell rang for the end of the day's lessons Terri collapsed in a heap on the ground while the rest of the initiates disappeared through the many doors that led out of the arena. Agnes sat down beside her. "I'll not lie to you lass, your body's going to hate every single combat training session that you have with me. I’ll promise you this though, if you stick with it I'll teach you enough to stay alive once you graduate at the end of the year."

Terri lay back on the dusty arena floor and looked up to where a patch of blue sky was framed by the enormously high walls of Gravenhall. "Thank you Agnes, I really do appreciate your help. Nonetheless, I’m already looking forward to the day when I can demonstrate my progress by hitting you with my stick, rather than the other way around."

Agnes laughed. "You're training to be a cleric aren't you lass? Well, maybe with some divine intervention you'll get there one day. You can call me Aggy by the way. All my dwarven friends used to, and I get the impression that we’re going to be great mates. Now, once you reach a point where you’re able to drag your sorry carcass up off the ground, I suggest we go and get ourselves a long bath and then a celebratory drink."

------------------------------

Later that evening Terri and Aggy found themselves in the initiates' common room toasting their newfound friendship and celebrating their first official day of lessons at Gravenhall. ‘The Drunkard’s Cup’, as the common room was known, was full to the brim with celebrating initiates and their combined hubbub made conversation challenging but not quite impossible. The two new friends had selected a table in the quietest corner of the room and the ease of their conversation suggested that Aggy’s prediction about their friendship would turn out to be an accurate one.

Agnes seemed to be more than happy to answer all of Terri's questions about herself and dwarves in general, so at first the young cleric listened more than she spoke. Terri was shocked to find out that Aggy was seventy four years old and that dwarves commonly lived past the one hundred and fifty year mark. When Terri asked the dwarf why she hadn't enrolled to be a warrior, Aggy blamed the decision on what she called her 'mid life crisis'.

"Aye lass, you're not wrong. I could have taken the tests and probably started out as a level four or five warrior but after thirty years of it I've no interest in that kind of thing any more. I wanted to challenge my mind more than my body so when the wanderlust struck it seemed like a good idea to come here and enroll as a mage. I have to say though, if I'd known how many times I was going to have to repeat that bloody spell in order to remember it I might have gone the warrior route after all."

Aggy was referring to the 'blast of magical force' spell that all Gravenhall mages were required to memorise by the time of their initiation test. It was also known as ‘magic missile’, ‘bolt of light’ or ‘energy arrow’ but for the fledgeling mages trying to remember it, the most commonly used name was 'that bloody spell' or less polite versions of the same. Ultimately though, it was not so much the spell itself but rather the nature of magic that they were really complaining about.

According to the Mage Guild of Gravenhall, all magical energy was drawn from a single source that they called 'the substance'. A mage was able tap into that energy by performing precise hand gestures while reciting specific words in the esoteric language of magic known as Jaclish. And this was where the problem lay. While jaclish was easy to transcribe and relatively easy to pronounce, its magical nature meant that it stubbornly refused to remain in a person's mind after it was said out loud. For example, the magical word for ‘frozen’ was 'vish' and anyone could easily read it from a page and then say ‘vish’ out loud. Disappointingly, nothing magical would actually happen when they did this as it took a full sentence and accompanying hand gestures to actually cast a magic spell. Nonetheless, as soon as the word left the speaker's lips it would also instantly leave their memory. If they wanted to say 'vish' again they would have to read it again and this effect applied to every word in the magical language. Therefore, in order to regularly cast spells, mages were forced to constantly relearn sequences of words in a language that was utterly foreign to them. When Aggy explained this to Terri she struggled to believe her ears.

"So let me get this straight, every time you cast a spell you lose all memory of what it was and must re-memorise it before you can cast it again?"

"Pretty much," replied Aggy. "Although for some reason the hand gestures aren't affected in the same way. It's incredibly frustrating to know the gestures for a spell like the back of your hand but still be unable to recall a single word."

"So how are first year mages finally able to learn the magic missile spell," Terri asked after pondering this for a while. "How is that even possible?"

Aggy smiled ruefully. "Well, it turns out that it isn't in fact impossible to remember words of jaclish, it's just very, very difficult. If you put in enough effort and learn a spell over and over again it will eventually stick in your noggin."

"How much effort are we talking about?" asked Terri.

"It varies depending on the individual," replied Aggy. "From what I've heard you need to cast the bloody spell somewhere between twenty thousand to thirty thousand times before you remember it."

Terri did some rough calculations in her head. "So roughly one hundred times a day if you want to leave yourself some leeway in getting it done by the end of the year. That sounds an awful lot, but it's only a five word spell isn't it? Couldn't you easily cast it one hundred times in less than an hour?"

Aggy snorted in disgust. "That's what I thought, and once you've completely memorised the spell you could probably cast it six hundred times in an hour. Unfortunately it's not the casting that's the problem, it's the memorisation. The words are completely new and meaningless every time you have to learn them, and for a spell to work a mage has to say the spell confidently and know exactly what each word means when they say it. So far I haven't been able to learn the bloody spell in any less than three minutes and it's usually closer to four. From what I've heard you get quicker at it over time but there's still a long, long way to go."

Terri exhaled in a low whistle. "So we're talking hours of practice every day for a year to learn the most simple magical spell in existence. No wonder mages truly memorise so few spells and have to carry the rest around in a spellbook. Is it really worth it?"

"Oh it’s worth it all right. It is so very, very worth it.” Aggy turned to the young cleric with a dreamy look in her eyes. “The feeling when the power flows through you is indescribable, intoxicating. I've never felt anything like it in all my 74 years. It’s hard to describe but it’s almost like -"

Aggy’s musings on the nature of magic were suddenly interrupted when the common room door burst open with such force that it almost came loose from its hinges. All eyes were drawn to the sound of the heavy oak door slamming into the wall with a thunderous 'boom' and the massive, scaly figure that strode in through the doorway.