The next day Mark was up early and grabbed a roll filled with bacon and tomatoes from the nearest baker as he headed towards the wizard’s shop. He was looking forward to developing his skill set and learning what the other forces he could sense were. He knew there was more to wizardry than life, heat and light but he didn’t know what to do with the others or even how to progress with the ones he had already used.

He arrived at the shop to find that it was shut but knocking on the door got a response and soon the door was being opened by an older man but one who couldn’t look less like Gandalf if he tried. He was balding, short, over-weight and dressed in clothes that stood out but more in a gaudy way than a fashionable one.

“What’s the rush? Someone dying and the clerics can’t help?” The man’s voice reminded Mark more of a car salesman than a man steeped in wisdom but Mark was here to learn.

“I spoke to your assistant yesterday, I’m here to learn wizardry.”

“Teaching wizardry is an expensive business, can you pay? It’s a gold a lesson and that’s if you actually have the talent. I’d need to see that you are someone who can be taught first.”

“I can pay. How would you like me to prove that I have talent?”

The man ushered Mark inside and then through the building to the yard behind. As he did this the assistant that Mark had seen the day before appeared and joined them.

“Now the easiest force for most wizards to use is heat as we can all feel that just from the sun on our skins. Watch Tomas there as he gathers the heat and makes a fireball. He will then try and hit that target over there.” The wizard pointed at a statue of a man that was some twenty yards away.

Mark watched as Tomas slowly grabbed the heat from the surroundings until he had concentrated it into a ball of fire much smaller than Mark had made even on his first attempt. The process took a few minutes and Mark was aware that Tomas had tried to take heat from him. Eventually Tomas had made a fireball to his satisfaction and aimed it towards the statue. The ball managed to just hit the base of the statue.

The wizard seemed pleased with his apprentices attempt even though Mark was much less impressed. “See if you can make a ball like that.”

Mark wondered whether keeping the ball small was a useful skill. Would it mean that he got tired more slowly? Should he be able to send the fireballs further? He didn’t see any reason for taking that long to make the fireball, enemies weren’t going to wait around for him.

“So you just want me to make a fireball and hit the statue?”

“Yes.”

Mark had already been sending his senses through the yard and as soon as the wizard replied he made a small fireball and sent it at the statue. The difference was that whereas Tomas had sent the fireball in a big curve Mark’s fireball seemed to go straight and hit the statue on the chest. A little bit of stone fell off as the statue rapidly heated in one spot.

The reaction of the two other men was rapid and contrasting. Tomas looked awestruck, his mouth was agape like he couldn’t believe what he had just seen. His master however first looked angry but then covered his initial reaction with something that looked much more smarmy.

“Can I ask why a battle wizard is honouring my humble shop?” he began.

Mark was initially confused. “I’m not a battle wizard.” He stated. “I’ve come here to learn about wizardry. I’ve only been able to make fireballs for two weeks or so.”

It took more than a few repetitions of this and similar comments before the wizard, whose name was Argril, was prepared to accept Mark’s explanation and it involved Mark having to tell more of his story than he wanted to tell someone he only just met. In the end Argril accepted that Mark was there to learn and after Mark had given him five gold coins he started to teach.

Firstly he went into depth about the things that Mark already knew, that there were a bunch of different forces, that a wizard could with training sense many of them and that the more powerful the wizard the more forces they could sense. He then explained that the wizards were the jack of all trades in the magical world and that other people would be able to do individual skills better than a wizard but that they would be restricted to only using one or perhaps two forces whereas a wizard once they could detect a force could eventually use it.

He then explained that everyone had a natural energy within their bodies that allowed them to manipulate forces and that the more you had of it the more you could do. Mark immediately dubbed this mana in his head but the wizard had a different word for it which Mark noted but then set aside. He was told that continuous practice was the general way to build mana much like strengthening muscles. Again, like muscles, there were techniques for building mana quicker and this was the first useful thing that Mark learned. Mana growth techniques were partly meditation and visualisation, partly on how much mana you used compared to how much you could use. There were warnings about pushing mana use to far and the signs of mana sickness caused by this. There were also stories about how at times of great stress it was sometimes possible to use much more mana than should be possible, in much the same way that mothers had used hysterical strength to rescue their children. However there was no known mechanism for releasing that ability. Finally after several hours, the wizard started to talk about possible spells.

Apparently wizardry was broken down into classes based on the type of force that was being used and then the spells were ranked by how much mana was needed to perform the simplest version of them and then finally each spell came in various types based on how much extra mana was needed. So for example a fireball that Tomas had created was a lesser fireball and the one that Mark had done was a hasty, fast, lesser fireball but all that was a bit of a mouthful and was generally called a firebolt instead.

Argril gave Mark a few different ways he could improve his firebolt and told him to practice, saying that that was the end of the lesson for that day as he had work around town to do. Mark was to return when he had mastered the improvements that Argril had suggested. Mark left the wizards shop with what he felt was a better understanding of the basics and a few things that he thought he could learn pretty quickly and a desire to practice that afternoon.

Mark didn’t manage to meet up with any of the others at lunch as they were all out doing different things and so he hurriedly ate what amounted to a ploughman’s lunch before heading out of town to find somewhere to practice. It took him a while to move away from the cultivated farmlands surrounding the town and into an area that looked much more overgrown and less visited. Eventually he found himself in a largish rocky valley that was far enough from the roads that he shouldn’t disturb anybody. Argril had given him four ideas to work on but the first was basically just a larger fireball which he could already do. As well as that he could also try to increase the number of firebolts he could shoot at the same time, create a firebolt originating from a different place and try to shape a fireball into something not a sphere.

Just knowing that a thing is possible makes it easier to do. This is a truth that Mark proved several times that day. He started by making a fireball in a place other than in front of him. This was easy if he didn’t try to move the focus too far away from him. The further the focus was from him the more mana he needed to create the fireball. This was something he had been sure he could do after frying the brain of the bandit. That time had been instinctual but it wasn’t much harder when he had to think through the process and create a proper procedure. As a mathematician he could imagine himself as the centre of three-dimensional co-ordinates and picture where he wanted the fireball to form as a point within the co-ordinate system. Further thought meant that he could think of the bolt as a vector within the system. This meant that he could start the firebolt in a place and shoot it in different directions. Which was great fun until he almost fired a bolt at himself through messing up a co-ordinate value.

The best part of thinking about fireballs this way was that he could easily fire behind him without looking. Alternatively he could choose a point and get a moving turret effect. The results weren’t that draining as long as he kept the fireballs small.

Just by thinking about the firebolt in terms of co-ordinates and vectors made adding additional firebolts easy. He just needed a firebolt running parallel to the first. Again, there was a bigger mana drain the more firebolts he added but it was not too bad if he started the firebolts close to him and it looked awesome when he fired bolts in different directions from two different locations so that the fireballs crossed. The most draining version he tried was a spell called fire storm, where the fireballs came directly down from a grid somewhere in front of him. He thought of it as large area of effect spell.

The hardest thing he did was to try and shape the fireball. He knew he could make simple shapes by using maths formulae in much the same way that Minecraft made all the mobs out of joined cuboids. However that never looked realistic so he needed a different approach. It was an indication of his thought processes that it took him a long time to realise that he could just try picturing the shape in his imagination. Eventually he had some success and returned to town pleased with his results.