"Welcome to Ritual Magic 201," Mr. Ganrey said, tapping his cane on the floor as he walked down the rows of chairs. He was old, arthritic, and practically blind, and had probably been disqualified from fighting in the war for at least one of those reasons, but at least he could still help by training up the next generation of soldiers to throw into the grinder. Whoopee.

Still, despite my misgivings about the Silent Academy's less-than-noble intentions, I couldn't help but be excited for today's class. School was a lot less lonely with Lucet and Meloai to hang out with, and RM201 was a lab class; we didn't get to choose our partners for ourselves, but the class only had twenty or so people in it. Odds were we'd be spending quite a bit of time with each other.

Plus, this was the first course I'd taken at the Silent Academy that went beyond theory and into practice. I'd spent the past few weeks grabbing every attunement I could get my grubby little hands on, and I was itching to try them out.

No more helpless running and hiding from every threat. No more getting outmatched at every turn. This Cienne was growing claws, and the next time the world tried to bite me in the ass, I was going to swipe back.

"In light of recent events," Mr. Ganrey said, as if he was referring to a sports match and not a war, "we've decided to rearrange the curriculum a little. Topics such as realspace-anchored soul manipulation and memory-aided spell foci were deemed too theoretical in a time when we need immediate results, and as such, the first half of this course will focus on the creation and empowerment of friendly soulspace entities. In other words, the focus of today's lesson will be the summoning and binding of demons, angels, and other extraplanar creatures."

Meloai raised a hand, but Mr. Ganrey didn't see, despite looking straight at her. I grimaced. Mr. Ganrey's mundane eyesight was nearly gone, so he relied on his soulsight—but even though Meloai's soul fragment was beginning to grow in complexity, it was still tiny in comparison to a born human soul. I wouldn't be surprised if Meloai was entirely invisible to the poor teacher.

"Please disperse to your assigned seats," Mr. Ganrey continued. In the corner, Iola and two of his new friends snickered as Meloai patiently kept her hand in the air.

"Just ask the question," Lucet whispered.

"Hm? Oh, okay. Mr. Ganrey?" she asked.

"Raise your hand first, Meloai," Mr. Ganrey said. More laughter from Iola's corner.

"I am," Meloai said, unperturbed.

Mr. Ganrey paused, adjusted his glasses, and cleared his throat. "Mm. Ah. Yes. Well. Your question, then, young lady?"

"I'm a soulspace entity myself—is what we're doing today going to be hazardous to me?"

"What planar domain?" Mr. Ganrey asked, absent-mindedly.

"Insecurity," Meloai said.

Mr. Ganrey shook his head. "The projection of the vectors of happiness and insecurity onto each other is present, but small. Don't assimilate any soul fragments you sense, but you should be otherwise fine. Alright, class, hop to it."

To my disgust, my assigned lab seat was next to Iola. Ugh, the man was worse than Odin. At least they'd left me alone after they'd stranded me in the Plane of Elemental Falsehood. I still had no idea what that was all about.

Iola waggled his eyebrows at me as I approached the lab desk, which held a utilitarian kitchen knife, a small, caged vole, and a bundle of sweet-smelling joyweed.

"If it isn't my favorite Redlander," Iola drawled, his elven halo pulsing in time with his words. "How're you enjoying my sloppy seconds? She's terrible in bed, isn't she?"

"I wouldn't know. Unlike you, I have a modicum of respect for other human beings. How're you enjoying the draft? Still begging to be let onto the front lines?" I shot back. The corners of Iola's eyes twitched as I brought up the draft—he'd been all too eager to go out and start killing people until the Academy told him that they weren't sending barely-trained students out to war.

"The goal of today's class will be to create, empower, and summon a minor Demon of Happiness," Mr. Ganrey interrupted. "As you should have learned from Elemental Theory, demons, like all soulspace entities, are comprised of the memories of the dead."

"Wonder what kind of demon would pop up if I used this on you," Iola mused, tapping the knife on the desk.

"Dunno," I said. "What do elves summon when they die?"

"Over the centuries," Mr. Ganrey continued, "this has resulted in many a cult or nation deliberately inducing certain emotionally-charged memories in human subjects, then slaying them in order to form or feed demons of their desired emotion. Demons of Fear were a particularly notable historical example. However, memories are not a uniquely human notion, and in the modern day, human sacrifices are not needed to create such entities. We will be creating such an entity by training non-sentient animals to associate certain memories with joy, then sacrificing the animals and feeding the resulting, joy-charged soul shards to the entity that coalesces as a result."

Huh. Made sense. To my left, Meloai raised her hand again—this time, Lucet raised her hand as well, so that Mr. Ganrey would see. "Yes, Lucet?" Mr. Ganrey asked.

"Actually, that was me, sir," Meloai said. "I have a question. By the first law of thaumatology, souls cannot be destroyed."

"Only changed in form," Mr. Ganrey agreed.

"So when we feed these soul fragments to a soulspace entity... or when, in general, a soulspace entity consumes a soul fragment... what happens?"

"An excellent observation," Mr. Ganrey said, "but one that is outside the scope of this class." Meloai pouted as Mr. Ganrey walked down through the aisles. "Now, in order to form the associated memories, we will have to perform some mundane classical conditioning upon the test subjects..."

The lab began, the small class of twenty laboring to form an association in the voles' tiny minds between the ringing of a bell and a sensation of sudden joy. To my surprise, Iola was a natural when it came to associating reward with a stimulus. Or punishment, for that matter, not that that was part of the lab—he just seemed to delight in watching the vole flinch whenever he snapped his fingers after the third time he'd struck the poor creature while doing so.

My budding attunements gave me greater insight into the soulspace of the vole, so I could tell when the vole's soul bloomed with dewdrops of joy at the ring of a bell, even when no herbs were supplied to follow it up with. Not wanting to let Iola have the dubious honor of sacrificing the vole—knowing him, he'd drag it out just to watch the poor thing suffer—I slit its throat with the sacrificial blade, killing it instantly.

The rest of the class was still catching up to Iola's freakishly good conditioning abilities, which left me some time to wait. I was going to ask if we were supposed to get started on a second vole when Iola picked up the corpse of the sacrifice and... started... cooking it.

Through my newfound suite of attunements, I could see the outlines of the spell he was using. Though joy normally manifested as dewdrops in soulsight, Iola's was something... different. Feverish, sickly, somehow. He pumped it into the vole, the dewdrops accelerating to terrifying speeds as they neared its body, and the vole's body started smoking. Was he... was he cooking the vole with light? Was that even possible?

"What... what are you doing?" I asked, faintly nauseated.

"Hmm?" Iola started skinning the vole with the sacrificial knife. "I'm hungry. Want some?"

"No!" I shuddered, turning away as he rolled up the joyweed into a rough lump and ignited it with a focused beam of light, then tried to smoke it. I was pretty sure he miserably failed by the spluttering that ensued, but I didn't want to know.

"You should all be done with your voles by now," Mr. Ganrey said. "Fanwyn, you killed yours too early. Iola, take that out of your mouth."

Iola took the magically-cooked vole out of his mouth, scowling, as Mr. Ganrey stepped into the center of the room. A small metal box stood on a dais.

"None of you, with the possible exception of Iola, are capable of opening a sustained rift into the Plane of Elemental Radiance," Mr. Ganrey said. "As such, I will perform this part myself."

The dewdrops that Mr. Ganrey used weren't the strange, sickly, endless torrent of joy that flowed through Iola's soul. But they were far, far more controlled. I watched as the tiny droplets of joy were, somehow, compressed, becoming dense, almost-solid specks before being flung into the metal box.

There was no sound when the rift opened. But the beams of pure, unceasing light that slipped through the cracks at the corners were painfully bright to look at, and I instinctively turned away.

Mr. Ganrey rang a bell—the same bell that we had used to train the voles—and waited for one heartbeat, two. The terrible light from within the box began to fade.

Then he opened the box's door.

A small, chittering vole made of pure light was sniffing around in the center of the box. When Mr. Ganrey rang the bell, its head perked up, and it scampered onto Mr. Ganrey's arm to reach it.

Moments later, the period bell rang, and the Demon of Joy scampered away in search of another, larger bell to follow. Mr. Ganrey tried to grab at it, but the nimble little creature effortlessly avoided his grasp. He rubbed his forehead, grumbling to himself, before regaining his composure.

"That concludes today's lab section on demon summoning," Mr. Ganrey finished. "Be back here the same time tomorrow." He paused, sighed, and added one last thing.

"Oh. And five points extra credit to anyone who can track down that damn demon. We'll need it for tomorrow's class."