The Rossem Project

Settling In - Part 3

     The demi shae's worries didn't last long, however, as she thought back to the good times she'd had as an apprentice, and soon a smile of pleasant reminiscence began to spread across her face. "I never knew you were such a monster!" she said. "Twenty years we've been married, and you never told me those things!"

     "You never asked!" replied Thomas with a smirk.

     "Yes I did!" spluttered Lirenna in outrage. "I asked you many times, and you told me all kind of stories about your life as a student, most of them describing the antics of other students or teaching wizards! You never said a word to suggest that you were worse than any of them!"

     "Well, yes," conceded the human grudgingly. "It was mostly during my first couple of years here. It was such a fantastic experience to be surrounded by so much knowledge, you see, and to have almost unlimited access to it. All my life I've been curious about the world, I've wanted to know all its secrets, all the reasons why things are the way they are, instead of different, but when I was a kid hardly anyone knew anything more than I did. You can't imagine how frustrating that was, how maddening! I'd ask my father where rainbows came from, and he said it was the beam that held the sky up! Even at that age I knew what nonsense that was. I asked my mother why snow crystals are always six sided, and she told me it was because the Gods liked them that way. Now I ask you, what kind of an answer was that? I had that kind of thing all my young life, seemingly sensible people giving nonsense answers to sensible questions.

     "But then I came here, and suddenly all the knowledge of the wisest people who ever lived was available to me. It was fantastic! I remember a time, it had just rained and it was still drizzling a little, and the sun was beginning to peep through the clouds. There was a rainbow in the sky, I looked at it, and I knew what caused it! I knew because just a few days before I'd read the works of the Agglemonian natural philosopher Tan Mandercoss who'd done experiments shining sunlight through polished prisms. I knew what caused that rainbow, and it was the most fantastic moment of my life!"

     Thomas’s eyes were shining with euphoria. He looked at Lirenna and saw her staring back at him with anadoring smile on her face. "That sort of thing happened all the time during those first two wonderful years. I kept discovering the true reason for all kinds of common everyday occurrences, explanations that had been worked out over thousands of years by the greatest minds that have ever lived. I knew why the suns and moons crossed the sky. I understood the motions of the planets. I knew where rain comes from and why the wind blows. Hundreds of things like that. Hundreds! Is it any wonder that I was a little drunk with euphoria and that my high spirits drove me to play all kinds of childish pranks on everyone around me?

     "Unfortunately, though, it all came to an end when I left the second year. When I entered the third year and began to learn some real magic for the first time, that was when it really began to come home to me that maybe I really could become a wizard. Until then, I'd thought I was being a bit of a fraud, that I was just pretending to be an apprentice so that I could steal all their knowledge. I mean, I'd taken the test a few weeks after I'd arrived and that proved that I had the potential, but it still didn't really seem real to me. It wasn't until that first day, when I cast my very first spell, that it really came home to me. I remember seeing those little tiny sparks of light dancing in front of me and thinking I did that! I did that! You know what I mean?"

     "Of course I do," replied Lirenna. "You think it was any different for me?"

     "Yes, of course," said Thomas with an apologetic smile. "Sorry. Anyway, when I realised that I could, that I really could, become a wizard I became determined that I would, and all of a sudden I saw three years of hard, backbreaking work stretching ahead of me. I remember I groaned out loud and Varlin, my tutor, laughed, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. After that, the pranks stopped and I became a model pupil, much to the relief of everyone around me, I think."