Just a Bystander

Ensnared

After the mental and emotional blitz of the first week, I didn't know if I was prepared to face the next. The weekend had barely given me enough time to come to terms with all the things that had happened. By unspoken agreement, everyone in the dorm focused only on practising how to vent and seal out ambient arcana, and stayed away from any more arcanic infusion.

I had personally settled on the term 'arcanic infusion' to refer to the compulsion/empathy thing that we had all experimented with, but it still didn't sit well in my mind. It was a general description of how the thing was accomplished - by infusing arcana with emotion, or with thoughts, and using the arcana as a vessel or channel to transmit those things - but it didn't seem to serve as a proper name for the technique itself. I wanted to get Ambrose alone so we could talk about it, but somehow the rest of that weekend never presented any opportunities for such an exchange.

Ordinarily, things like that wouldn't have given me pause. However, this continued to nag at me, mostly in the form of Reeves' voice sonorously repeating the phrase in my head, where it was quickly taking on an axiomatic quality - precision is important. It felt like I was missing something vital, and that I was courting danger by not having the right term to use.

At the very least, the six of us had gained something out of that ill-fated experiment with infusion. When we found ourselves seated in Reeves' lecture once again, we all managed to stay in our seats enough though Reeves had leaned more heavily into the infusion, making the air grow taut with power. More than half the lecture hall had been taken by surprise at the increased intensity, and at how it was now going on for several seconds instead of being a momentary burst.

I was struggling even though I had already fortified myself ahead of time with an auric shield (another term of my own invention, but this one felt right) to keep the ambient arcana firmly shut out. Devon was particularly taxed - his neck visibly reddened as he focused on maintaining his auric shield against Reeves' assault. Jerric had closed his eyes and looked like he was trying to ignore a loud noise. The twins had identical frowns that made it look like they were glowering at Reeves, which was slightly comical. Ambrose merely looked irritated.

'Some progress,' Reeves said approvingly as he relinquished his hold on the ambient arcana. He nodded at the six of us in the first row, and the other scattered students around the hall who had managed to resist. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Triss collapsing into her seat with a scowl, and a small smile tugged at my lips as I thought about what my sister might think or say about this Triss failing to uphold the honour of Trisses everywhere.

'But more work to be done for the rest. And it would do well for those who succeeded today not to rest on their laurels,' Reeves added with a hint of menace. It was clear that he would hit us even harder next week.

For a moment, Jerric looked like he was going to raise an objection, but his nerves failed him. He spent the rest of the lecture looking greatly vexed, but I couldn't tell if it was self-directed frustration or if it was because this lecture's material was even more challenging than the last. Reeves spoke at length about the theories behind the origin and nature of arcana, then started tying them into modern practice and talking about how holding to certain theories seemed to make arcana behave in different ways for a person. He introduced the term 'frame-shifting', which involved adopting a different perspective of the nature of arcana in order to take advantage of the desired qualities and attributes of arcana that seemed to be tied to each perspective. It was like being told that you could think of water in a certain way and thereby turn it to ice or steam.

The Advanced Glyphs class was no less demanding. Celwyn spent half an hour going through the semantics of some of the glyphs in the Basic Set, and we learned that they could be used in ways that were not immediately obvious. The standard glyphs for directions, for instance, could be used to refer to abstract spaces as well. We learned that the trick with the light globe she had pulled during our first class simply involved a different interpretation of the glyph 'down' - that allowed things to be selectively hidden 'under' the light of the globe. After that, we had to go about deriving other semantic interpretations of the glyphs in various commercial artefacts that she had procured. It was unexpectedly difficult even when it came to deriving the semantics of glyphs from the Basic Set.