Rune mage

Chapter 1: Interview for final year.

"My name is Logan Lofe, and I am a mage student." I left my words there. If I had been younger, I might have rambled, might have mentioned that I don't look like much; I'm built like a tree, all limbs and trunk with legs that seem almost too thin to hold me up. My hair is longer than most men's hair and braided in the way of what academic men might call barbarians. My tunic was once colorful, with teal blue edges, but has long since lost most of its color. Most would probably look at me and dismiss me out of hand, noting the worn trousers and boots with obvious worn spots, dirt stains upon both my clothes and my hands. The dirt stains come from honest work, training in the arena before the sun rises, then rushing through chores until breakfast and attending my courses before working until late into the night to earn my tuition.

Still, I needed to say something more to these three men. My life was literally in their hands.

"I have been here since I turned fifteen, and am ready for my final year." I spoke with confidence, my head held high.

"Are we to overlook that you came to your interview looking like a street rat?" Tolermire sneered. I never much liked him and he knew it. Mostly because I told him so the first week of school four years ago when he made a classmate cry because she didn't immediately address him with an honorific, as if we first year students were supposed to memorize the staff's names and titles before having met any of them.

I met his eyes without fear as I replied, "I have the same skill regardless of what I am wearing, and a fancy mage's dress robe will do me very little on the battle field. Or has the war ended and no one alerted us students?"

Next to Tolermire, I saw the faintest sign of approval from Petre. There was a man who was hard to please but fair and consistent. The kind of instructor that Tolermire wished he could be, but couldn't quite get there because he had yet figure out that humiliation didn't engender respect. "No," Petre said, "The war has not ended. All the same, Logan, the instructions for today's interview included proper attire."

I nodded my head respectfully, "Yes, sir. I saw those instructions. They came with the bill for the final year. The required down payment, that I might add was clearly identified as non-refundable, ate through all of my extra funds, making the purchase of fancier clothes unattainable. I suspect the school rarely turns down the final year students, and so is not charging students what most families would raise in half a year only for them to lose all of it upon rejection. That would be most unethical." I paused and glanced at the final instructor, "Wouldn't it professor Lutsel?" He would know since he was the ethics professor at the school. File this away as ironic, since his own behavior was an out of class discussion of ethics regularly.

I didn't miss the flash of anger in his eyes.

There were two professors in the school who despised me: Tolemire and Lutsel. It was my luck I would end up with them on my interview board. Bad enough I was the kind of mage no one expected to get through or, frankly, survive the final year. I was also known to talk my way out of places I had every right to be. Of course, I would talk my way right back in, or in some very few incidents I won't speak of ever, magic my way back in.

Being a rune mage was the ultimate wild card because most people had no idea what runes could do. They pictured in their head a bespectacled old man sketching protection runes on shields, a man who rarely left the walls of his village. Because most rune magic was done by people who never had enough magic to attend the mage school. The few rune mages whose magic had ranked high enough to attend...rarely survived. Because failing out of mage school led to worse things than humiliation. At least, that was what we were told, repeatedly. Failure was death. It seemed a cruelty, but we were at war, and had been for a considerable length of time.