Those Who Would Not Be Gods

2. Graduation: Raff

It was a wonderful day to graduate. Though winter's chill still lurked in the shadows, clear skies and a warmth in the air promised an early spring. Raff heaved a deep breath of fresh air and stretched his arms out to the sky. Sun, at last!

After a long morning spent shoved in a dark, dank hall, the ancient High Priest droning something or another about Ignis and the Fuocco Curativo and how it showed that they should all be kinder to one another, the sun was a glorious relief. Even the sharp chill in the air was preferable to the stuffy heat of the Grand Hall. He pulled the tie out of his hair and shook his curls out before tying it up again with a cleaner knot. The fresh air in his lungs, the sharp bite of a late winter breeze, the warmth of the sun through his coat. This was how life was meant to be lived, not cooped up in dusty buildings watching old men mumble.

A hand caught his shoulder, and he turned to find Sab grinning back at him. "We're free men!" he said. "Graduated at last! Can't hardly believe it."

"Can't believe it," Raff repeated, shaking his head. He raised his fist to the sky. His formal robes, soft black hemmed with bright red, fell back to reveal scarred hands and arms, marred by angry red stripes and soft pink blotches. Sab lifted his fist as well, similar scars marking his arms. The scars of a fire mage. They accumulated over the course of training, as they made mistakes and the fire went out of control. Some people hated theirs, but Raff saw them as war stripes instead. Marks of success. After everything he and Sab had been through, they'd earned them.

A dark fist streaked with pale, narrow branching scars and splotchy burns joined theirs, this sleeve embroidered with a thin silver thread rather than hemmed with red. With a bright laugh, Giada jumped into the air. "Free at last!" she enthused. As ever, her dark, curly hair seemed to be standing on end as if charged by the lightning she wielded. Not all lightning mages gained scars the way fire mages did, since their element was more precise and more dangerous, but she'd managed to survive her way through racking up an impressive array of scars nonetheless. After a few shared lunches, she'd been inducted into their brotherhood as an honorary fire mage, and the rest was history.

"Not quite free," Milo reminded them, pulling up alongside them. "We've got the crusades or our placements ahead of us."

His robes were hemmed in blue, and no scars marred his forearms or hands, though he didn't hold his up, either. Unlike the other three, he wasn't wearing a green dress uniform and matching breeches under his formal robes, but more robes, these long, flowing, and in shades of blue. Raff nodded at him as he joined them. He didn't know Milo as well as the other two. Vaguely, he remembered the man from his many trips to the infirmary, as one of the healers rotated in and out with the rest of the students of light and water. Rather than one of his friends, Milo was one of Giada's friends. Looking at him now, Raff couldn't see it. Milo was a mild, pale thing, a reader, not a doer; there was a book tucked under his off arm even now. Giada acted like she had an allergy to books. Giada was lowborn, too, same as him and Sab. Milo, meanwhile, was the son of some noble family or another. It didn't add up.

Nobility wasn't supposed to matter at Schola Luminis. The school, of which this was but one of its seven branches, was where all aspiring Shrineguards and priests went to study magic, those being the only professions available to mages. Some, like Giada, had spent their whole childhoods dreaming of their chance to attend, hoping that the element in their blood would prove pure enough to offer them the shot at becoming one of those noble servants of Lucism, its Shrines, and its seven gods. Others, like Raff and Sab, had been dropped off at the school's doors as children, more castoffs than hopefuls, driven away from their families for being 'too strange.'

And then there're the Milos, Raff supposed, looking at him now. The third or fourth sons of nobility, whose parents saw the Shrine as a more fitting, yet still proper, career when compared to the military or political marriage, as long as the elements in their children's blood were pure enough. Nobility didn't matter at the Schola Luminis. But all the students knew who among them belonged to highborn families, and most treated them with respect. Whether it be from fear or hope the favor would be returned in some distant future, Raff couldn't say, but it was an undeniable truth.