The Magic Scholar
"Will you be my disciple?"
With the words, Benjamin held out his hand. I looked at his palm in silence. The bones were rough and powerful, the skin carved all over with wrinkles, each crease as deep as a ravine. One petty skill I had picked up across long years of begging was this: to read a person's character in the palm of a hand. The palms of officers' wives were smooth, without a single callus. Raised free of hardship, they were apt to take other people's suffering lightly as well. But a hand steeped in years told me his life had been a kind of penance.
On a sudden impulse I looked down at my own palm. It resembled his.
"......"
My answer was decided. A hundred words would never carry a true intention. So I reached out in turn, and felt those two ravines settle into each other's hollows. His grip closed, hard.
Benjamin hauled me along and opened a door—the room immediately beside the storeroom where the sickbed had stood. Books were packed tight along the shelves, and the air was thick with the smell of ink and paper. It was Benjamin's study.
"Sit wherever you like."
A round desk. I took one of the two chairs set beside it: wood, fitted with a leather back and a leather seat. Of every chair I had sat in across my life, it was without question the most comfortable.
"Whoa..."
Benjamin paid me no mind and dropped into the chair opposite. The room looked as if someone had painted the word scholarly. It sat poorly with my first impression of him as nothing but a cantankerous old man—though if this was a professor's study, that was another matter. A muted lamp, wood rubbed with oil, and the quiet atmosphere the two of them made together. I was still caught in it when a sharp rap struck the desktop.
Benjamin drummed his fingers against the wood.
"Eugene. So long as you're my disciple, I don't mean to be stingy with my support. That's certain, and it's already decided."
"......"
"And you won't have anything like my certainty. Am I right?"
I kept my silence, but it amounted to an admission. He had put his finger on it exactly. I was a man who had lived five years as a beggar. To be called a genius out of nowhere, and promised support in every way a man could give it—means and care alike—was hardly going to wheel me about in a breath.
Being recognized feels good. But only on the assumption that I know the one doing the recognizing. And I knew Benjamin far too little.
"Benjamin. I'd like you to tell me about yourself."
"Figured as much."
Benjamin nodded.
"Well. An ordinary introduction, I can manage. Former chair professor of the Federal Magic University. Benjamin Oslo, theoretical magic scholar."
"I don't know what any of that is supposed to mean."
"Course you don't. And more than that—"
His eyes went wide.
"You don't know magic yet. So it won't do you a lick of good for me to prattle on about university professors and theoretical scholars."
"......"
Benjamin's logic was, for the most part, sound. Except in one respect.
I set the grimoire from inside my coat down on the desk with a heavy thud. A dull vibration traveled across the wood.
"I don't know magic? A moment ago you said you'd seen me use it."
Then what was this grimoire? Short of losing his wits to age, he could hardly claim he didn't know magic. The Levitation I had learned only recently was proof enough. Suspension in midair. If that impossible harmony was not magic, then what in the world was it?
But Benjamin only chuckled, low in his throat.
"Who said you can't use magic?"
"Pardon?"
"What I mean is, you only know how to use it. You don't know what magic actually is."
Our eyes met.
"So I'll ask you now. What is magic?"
"...What?"
"Don't hem and haw. You can be ignorant of the rest, but you ought to know what you're about to learn. I'll ask again. What is magic?"
Benjamin's eyes were wide—a look that would not forgive a sloppy answer. Well. That was fine by me. Magic. The pride that had let me endure five years of a gutter life. My very soul. No professor, however grand, was going to casually cheapen what I had come to understand.
I answered with confidence.
"Magic is imagination, made real."
One hopes that imagination will take on reality: the open sky for a canvas, imagination for ink, and the pen called magic drawing its stroke upon the world. Magic, therefore, was nothing other than imagination realized. And once I had grasped that principle, I had succeeded in learning my first spell, Disc.
Benjamin heard me out and nodded, unruffled.
"A fair reading. Imagination is the essence of magic, sure enough. Which is why a gutter whelp like you can scoop up a single grimoire and start flinging spells all over the place."
"Agh—why are you insulting me all of a sudden?"
"Why do you think? Because you're wrong."
He let out a short chuckle and went on.
"Magic. You want to learn it, don't you?"
"Yes."
"And what is it you think magic is?"
"Imagination, made real."
"Can imagination be learned?"
For an instant, I felt the world stop.
"......"
"If that doesn't sit right, turn it around. Can imagination be taught? Can you pull the intuition and the images out of a head and hand them over, just as they are? That's what I'm asking."
"That's..."
"I can't, at any rate. It's the same as telling me to teach you how to move your fingers."
"...I see."
There was sense in it. I had taught myself magic, with the grimoire's help, by the most brutish method imaginable. There was no chance I could teach it to another soul. And yet how did a university of magic exist at all?
"If a man could do that, he wouldn't even be a genius without equal. He'd be raving mad. But."
Tap, tap. Benjamin drummed his fingers, and light began to seep from my grimoire where it lay on the desk.
"But what's contained in here—that can be taught."
"The grimoire..."
"What we can make into a book, we call a discipline."
He looked me straight in the eye.
Magic is a discipline.
"Hm..."
"Heh. Not quite getting a feel for it, are you?"
He'd seen right through me.
"It's written all over your face, so what's the use? Come on. On your feet."
I obeyed, meekly enough. As I rose from the chair, Benjamin stood as well, planting his cane.
"I'll show you with your own eyes. Pick up the grimoire and cast the spell you know best. I've filled the mana to the brim, so don't you worry."
"Understood."
It was a simple matter. In five years I had learned all of four spells, and one of those only a few days ago. Said the other way around, I had used nothing else for five years, and in sheer proficiency I was sure of myself. I drew the grimoire—worn smooth by years in my hands—against my chest, and moved in a motion closer to instinct than to thought. A finger lifted toward the ceiling.
"Disc."
⟨ Disc ⟩
It began as a single drop. One blue point rising into the air, and nothing more. But I imagined—a blue disc, spinning as freely as it pleased—and in that instant the droplet's shape began to change, with a deep hum.
We were indoors. I could hardly draw droplets from the rain, but in exchange a finer control was possible. The realization of imagination took no time at all. Without wasting a single grain of mana, I lifted a trembling film of water above my fingertip. Time elapsed: a mere two seconds.
Benjamin's breath caught.
"...Quick, that. Considerable skill."
"R-really?"
"Really. You're a prodigy. Now hand me the grimoire."
Even lukewarm praise, they say, will set a whale to dancing. I passed the book over without a word of protest. The film of water broke with a patter and spilled across the desk in droplets. Benjamin paid it no mind at all and took the grimoire.
"Watch closely, greenhorn Eugene. You'll likely fall flat on your backside."
"What?"
Benjamin snickered, and the grimoire in his hand blazed with light.
"The founder of magic theory. What was Jean-Pierre Ochelimet's greatest achievement?"
It did not seem a question meant to be answered. The old man's gaze was fixed on empty air.
"Magic boasts thousands of years of history. It has passed through the hands of hundreds, of tens of millions, and every one of them raised achievements of their own."
A drop. He lifted a finger, and a bead of water rose above it. Type 1 Magic: Disc. Fine work, but slow. It felt all the slower because this was the first magic I had ever watched from outside my own hands; by my reckoning, the disc took some seven seconds to assume its proper shape. And yet there was a difference as well.
"Thanks to all of that, the age of sorcerous rite—amusing oneself by drawing magic circles—has become a tale from the distant past."
Precision. A film of water keen enough to cut, and perfectly level. In precision alone, Benjamin's magic overwhelmed mine.
And then—
"However."
A soft slide of motion. The instant Benjamin closed his eyes, the film of water began to warp, and to warp with exquisite precision. I stared wide-eyed at what had been a disc.
"However. Why do we set every other name aside and praise his as the Father of Magic?"
It twisted this way and that, a seeming tangle. But if one asked whether the motion was irregular—not in the least. In one moment the warped disc rolled tight into a long stem; folded just so, it became a thorn; bent with elegance, it became a petal. A thousand transformations in a breath. Which was also to say that Benjamin Oslo was imagining every stage of the process, systematically.
Impossible. How could any person—
"Ochelimet's great achievement can be summed up in a single phrase."
And in the next moment—
A single blue rose bloomed in the empty air.
What had once been a single sheet of blue film, folded and folded again, had become one rose.
"......!"
My eyes flew open, and no wonder. It was astonishing. To hold a form that complex, and the balance of it, entirely inside one's head—absurd.
"Ah."
Magic was a discipline. The theorization of imagination. Not instinct, and not abstraction—magic as rigorous theory.
"This is magic theory."
Benjamin grinned.