Aether Engineering

Chapter 7

Maston Academy

The Town of Maston in the Candis East District

As it turned out, the only other thing an arcaner could do with an aether well was to make the aether well bigger. Myles was surprised to find how simple the process was. As Primrose had explained it, all that was required was to use the mana in the well to scrape away at the sides and bottom of the well within the aether space.

The problem with that was it was hard! Myles spent the first half hour just trying to get the pinprick of light to move. When he finally managed it, he couldn’t seem to move it with enough force to scrape anything away.

Myles heard a whisper from his right, where Silas was sitting. “Try moving it in a circle as fast as you can.”

After a minute of trying the new technique, Myles managed to scrape a bit of the space around his pinprick of light off. Grinning despite the headache that had started from the exertion, Myles turned to Silas. “Thanks. That seemed to do the trick.”

The rest of their morning class was spent in what would outwardly look like a meditative trance. As they kept scraping away at their aether spaces, Primrose told them that most arcaner’s chose to call this activity delving. “We call it delving,” she had said, “because in order to get larger reserves of mana, an arcaner must dig further into their aether space. Not only does this give you access to more mana, but it also has some additional beneficial effects.”

Mercy had asked her about the beneficial effects, but Primrose refused to say anything. “No reason to tell you before it’s of any use to you.”

Myles left the morning class with a splitting headache. For his efforts, Myles could see that the pinprick of light had grown into what Myles had started to think of as a puddle. Maybe it was because of the way he moved the mana—it reminded him of how water might move if you shook the cup it sat in—but he began to think of mana in the aether space as water.

His actual progress had both been extremely impressive and entirely inconsequential. He now had what he estimated to be roughly five times more mana than what he had started with. Of course, since he had started with almost nothing, he doubted his gains were really that impressive. Primrose had been sure to tell them that mana was measured in units. After eating the delving root, they each started with one unit of mana. Myles supposed that meant he now had five units.

After conferring with his other roommates—except for Kate and Seth who had both left as soon as they had been dismissed—they decided to all get something to eat from the cafeteria.

As they left NorthLeaf hall, Jane burst out in anger. “Can you believe what Kate said back there!”

Myles had never seen Jane speak in anything other than a low voice, so he was momentarily taken off guard.

Silas sighed. “She was a bit out of line to be honest. Yes, those bands do have their purpose to protect the public, but I expect the people who wear them get unwelcome attention because of it.”

Mercy scratched her head in confusion. “I don’t see why that would be the case. In my hometown, we treated those bands as a sign of respect. My family even gave discounts on our bread to anyone wearing them seeing as how that usually means they’re family of a veteran.”

Myles started to wish he had grown up in Mercy’s town. In Verith, the bands were certainly a reason for respect, but more importantly they were a reason for fear. When he was just a kid, Myles remembered his mother getting in an argument with a local merchant. When she had started raising her voice, the man’s eyes had slid down to the band around her arm. They ended up getting a great deal that day, but the shop always seemed to be closed when his mother went by after that.

Myles looked back towards Mercy. “I wish everyone thought like that Mercy. In my experience though, most people are more concerned about whether the person they are looking at is a human weapon or not. Thoughts of honoring or thanking them are far from most people’s minds.”

Mercy nodded sagely if a little sadly. “I guess I could see that.”

They all walked in silence for a few minutes before Jane decided to add another comment. “I suppose we’ll all soon understand what it means to walk around with a band,” Jane looked down at the white band wrapped around her arm, “considering we are actually arcaner’s now.”

Nobody seemed to want to add to that conversation further. They finished the walk quickly, the walk to the cafeteria was thankfully a short one.

The cafeteria was perhaps the largest building at the academy, and that was saying something. The building rose in three connected towers, each with its own entrance. Surprisingly, this was one of the newly constructed buildings. Sitting as it did directly in the center of campus, the cafeteria’s towers seemed to divide the campus into three. Considering that Primrose had mentioned they were in the NorthLeaf platoon, and there were only two other dorms, Myles suspected that this may have been intentional.

While they had taken to calling the entire building the cafeteria, it was really just the ground floor that served that function. Myles wasn’t sure what was in the rest of the building, but it was off-limits for students.

As they grabbed their food, Mercy broke the silence with something that Myles had been pretty concerned about. “So…I know we’re supposed to have lessons on our discipline or whatever this afternoon, but they never told us what our disciplines are or where we’re supposed to go right?”

Silas grinned as he sat down at a table. “They don’t like giving us much advance notice, do they? How do you think they will tell us this time? Another note or maybe they’ll send us on a scavenger hunt this time?”

Most of the lunch went by with the group making progressively more farfetched guesses at how they were going to be told about their lessons.

When they finally decided to leave the cafeteria, Myles saw something odd. As soon as they got outside, Myles noticed someone he knew, a surprise considering how few people he had met at the academy. It was Reah. Myles was certain because she wore what looked to be the same impossibly bland hoodie she had worn when they had traveled from Candis. Reah was walking alongside a man whose grey hair was in sharp contrast to his heavily muscled build. The man also had several fierce looking scars. Beyond that, Myles couldn’t help but notice many of the faculty wandering past acting with a hint of deference towards him.

Reah seemed to somehow feel Myles’ gaze on her and glanced directly at him before quickly turning back. As soon as she had turned back, a tree seemed to rapidly burst from the ground directly behind her. It was no ordinary tree though, the trunk and limbs seemed to be made of pure darkness and flames leapt furiously from its branches. There was something else about it that Myles couldn’t explain. The tree seemed somehow twisted as if it were actively rejecting the laws of nature. Myles shook his head to make sure he wasn’t just seeing things, and by the time he looked up, the tree was gone and so was Reah.

Myles felt that something was off about Reah. First, she had said that she was some kind of contractor for the academy, and now she was wandering around with what could only be an important member of the faculty with bizarre trees popping up behind her.

Myles considered that the tree might have just been an illusion, after all, he had heard stories of some people using the aether space to conjure simple illusions. This seemed a little more real than anything he had ever heard about though. More concerningly, if Reah was an arcaner, that raised more questions since she wore no band around her right arm.

As it turned out, every single one of their guesses had been wrong at lunch. Right before they entered NorthLeaf hall to check if a letter had been delivered to their room while they were gone, a metal pole suddenly shot out of the ground in front of them. The pole shot a letter out of one of the many slots that lined its length. The letter flew right at them. When it landed, the pole promptly retreated right back into the ground.

Silas muttered as he leaned down to pick up the letter. “Well, that was odd.”

Myles ignored Silas as he ran over to where the pole had emerged. Myles knew with certainty that whatever that pole was, it was absolutely a result of aether engineering. Myles was only somewhat disappointed when he realized that all he was able to see was a metal hole with a covering over it. Myles reasoned that the device would have needed to first figure out that the letter’s recipients were nearby then move several parts to get the pole to rise into position and fire the correct letter. Myles was certain that the device—whatever it was—had a larger purpose than just delivering them a single letter. Perhaps it was able to store large amounts of packages. Myles looked around, but he couldn’t see anything that could be used to deposit a package into the device.

Myles heard a voice from behind him. As he turned around, Mercy raised her voice even further. “Did you hear Myles! You’re going to be late. You and Jane need to go halfway across campus to get to your lesson. Seems they all start in 5 minutes.”

Myles hurried after Jane who had been waiting for him. There was no need to ask what discipline he had been assigned to. He had only come here since he had been promised he would learn about aether engineering after all.