Algernon Black

(Chapter 41) The Direction of Growth

"Magic is in constant motion," Punditwood stated as the opening of the day's lecture. "When you stop allowing its movement it disappears. That's why there is no suspension of magic. It is a free-flowing current supplied from the particles of energy floating in the air around us."

Lucy heard the professor but absorbed little of the lecture. Her eyes wandered with her thoughts to land on Algernon as she replayed the events of their strange night spent in the greenhouse and how she had miraculously ended up in her bed the morning after. He, on the other hand, was doing everything he could to avoid looking at her.

"Sensate focus," Punditwod said. "Is the physical sensation magic elicits on the body and how we determine if it is being properly channeled." He illuminated the spot above his hands with a small circling orb of light.

Algernon didn't care much for the lecture either when he was stressing over the events of last night. He was embarrassed and disappointed in himself for losing control of his demons, though he saw just as many monsters surrounding them now where Lucy saw her classmates.

"At first, light magic has a static feeling," Punditwood explained. "A reaction to your uneasiness with controlling it."

Lucy looked down at her hands. She remembered the static stings that happened when she first started practicing. Shocks that would numb her hands after hours of failure.

Punditwood examined the circling orb he controlled. "It's a hard feeling to describe, but once you mastered the magic," He raised his hand above his head where the ball lit up twice its size before it burned away. "You'll feel only comfort in it's warmth."

"We can't feel anything until we start actually using it," Wilham groaned.

"And you won't feel anything if it kills you," Punditwood emphasized. "You may already know how to call upon the magic, but do you know how much your body can hold before it starts to overcome you?"

Wilham pursed his lips together with no answer.

Punditwood raised his white eyebrow at the student. "Not knowing that answer for themselves has cost a lot of practitioners over the years the tips of their fingers, or an arm or an eye. Those that were lucky enough to live once they over-called magic."

Jared had been careful to introduce Lucy to magic in small stages for that very reason. One time he caught her trying to practice light magic on her own and spent half an hour reprimanding her about how if she ever lost her grip and couldn't close of her channel to magic it would burn her inside out.

"To grow, you must struggle. But if you step too far past your limits, you'll pay for what you tried to reach for by losing permanently what it is you need." Punditwood walked about the room with a hand in his pocket. "To prevent that you need to know what your limits are in the first place."

Lucy contemplated her limits for a moment. She never took the time to define them on her way to overcoming them. She looked at her classmates, who sneered at her back, in this case, there wasn't so much overcoming them as ignoring them.

"It's more obvious than you think." The professor said noticing their blank faces. He drew an upside-down V on the board. "Your mind." He said, hitting the side of one. "And your body." He finished hitting the other.   "When channeling magic, you work like a faucet, pulling out the available energy in the world, to be reconstructed under your control. That magic is as important as the faucet. You must keep intact your body and mind to soundlessly incorporate energy through it." He finished the triangle with a line connecting the V. "At each corner, your magic must pass the check to continue." The professor explained by hitting each corner with his chalk. "If you don't have permission from your mind, you can't call magic into your body. If your body isn't properly prepared to handle the magic, then you can't properly send it out. And that energy stays inside of you, where it eats away at both your body and mind. You can only control as much as you can physically and mentally handle. Pushing yourself too far could destroy either of those." The professor touched the point at the triangle that connected the mind and body. A flicker of light magic on his fingertip started to burn the triangle like a wick as it pushed outward. "And to grow, we must expand our bodies and our minds." As he spoke the lines of the triangle grew past their original shape. "And where that ends." The professor said as the two lines made a sharp change of direction and came together. "Is up to you." The outcome was a triangle, blazing alive with light magic.

Pecilia nearly nodded her head in approval of the teacher's profound explanation and of all the first-year professors figured he might be an actual fit for his job.

Lucy lingered past dismissal as she kept pace with Algernon who was intentionally always one of the last to leave.

"Algernon," Lucy unconfidently called to him.

Algernon barley looked up, and when he did his eyes instinctively drew pass Lucy to some others of their year that had yet to leave.

"What." Algernon said, but doing his best to avoid her eye contact.

"I was just checking to see if everything was alright with you after last night."

Algernon's alarm raised along with the ends of his hair. "That was nothing. I mean nothing happened between me and you last night. And don't go around talking or acting like it ever had." His eyes darted to their classmates and then back to Lucy but had slanted into what looked like a threat though his voice sounded like a desperate plea as he added. "Ok?"

Lucy nodded to his back as he rushed out the classroom, looking as if he was going to trample over Pecilia and Wilham in his haste.

Pecilia rolled her eyes and breathed out an insult at Algernon, before glancing over Lucy's slumped posture with more sympathetic eyes but left before her empathy would get the best of her and leave Lucy for the worse.

Punditwood though, not bogged down by any teenage angst but a proper developed adult, approached Lucy with smiling eyes. "What a burdened boy that one is at so young an age."

Lucy looked up at the professor, which he took as his sign to continue. "So much stress put into him that it explodes out onto anyone near him."

"That was stress?" Lucy asked, still straining to understand the workings of people with the limited data she had acquired so far in her sheltered life.

"At the forefront." Punditwood said. "With possible some very serious and strong underlying emotions fueling his aggression to be so high."

Lucy looked to her feet. "I don't understand." She sighed. "I don't understand any of this."

Punditwood giggled at her doleful eyes thinking them so similar to a child's who had just been shot down for a game of hide and seek.

"You're in the biggest change of state you'll ever experience, Lucy. That is what this age entails and why emotions are so high amongst you all. But it's also in this mess of weeds in which your greatest growth will bloom from."

"And how am I supposed to do that?"

"It comes naturally," Punditwood said, "For all life, there is only growth or death, but the direction in which you are changing is what you have to focus on." He smiled at her still confused expression. "That is why you have to figure out your goals."

Lucy bit her cheeks. "What if I don't know what that is."

The professor chuckled. "A tree does not think about why it reaches for the sun. It does so because it needs too. Your sun isn't what you create, but what is already pulling at you."

"And what if I never reach it?"

"Then you'll have grown." The professor stated.

Lucy looked at the empty seats of her classmates as she still felt the confusing rejection from Algernon. She could grow the life she wanted. If only she could grow past everyone trying to pull her down.