Faen's Child

Chapter 8

[Chapter 8]

With a sigh, I stuffed the remains of my bread in my mouth, not even bothering to finish chewing it before I grabbed my bag from my side. My friends gave me forlorn looks, as if trying to show pity, but I knew they were just sad that I couldn’t join them for another round of snowball fight at the Sanctuary.

“Sorry guys, I gotta go.” I mumbled incomprehensible words through the bread in my mouth, but they got the gist of it. Sarah gave me a little wave while Logan only made a gesture for me to scram. That bastard. Logan had woken up on the wrong side of the bed today, so he had been all grumpy and sleepy all through breakfast. It didn’t actually help that his face was connected to the plate that he had been eating from.

It turned out that holding down two elements was not as pretty as things seemed. It was like double the workload. Everything was doubled. As compared to Madeline, the first-year air-user in my class, I had double everything. It was horrible… And it was only a few months since school started.

Of course, I fared well for both my elements. But elemental magick was definitely harder than normal studies. I almost couldn’t remember the times where I used to stay at home, not bothering to do homework, because I was smarter than the rest. Here, it was a mad dash to catch up with double the workload.

It didn’t help that many information got twisted as it went up to my brain. One day, my Training Master for fire would tell me that the first rule was to prepare for confrontation. The next day, I would tell the same Training Master that the first rule was to avoid confrontation –which happened to be the first rule the Training Master for air told me.

It did not help –too –that fire and air were vastly different elements. Fire demanded control. Air demanded freedom of flow. Fire demanded a strict hold over my power; air demanded that I let my power flow loose.

Yet, despite all these problems, I found I had no problem picking up use of both elements. I had no problem interchanging between both elements as and when I liked it –though I managed to piss of both my Training Masters doing that.

The problem for me, however, was the theory work. Information of the fire would somehow find their way to the essays I wrote for my Training Master for air. Information of the wind cycle would crawl their way onto the reports I came up about the usage and importance of fire. Of course, my Training Masters understood that I was still struggling to come to a balance between these two pesky elements, but they still had to squeeze me dry.

‘For my sake’, they told me.

I ran as fast as I could towards the Training Hall for Fire –aka. The Lava Sauna. It was easy to explain why that place was called the Lava Sauna. The Training Hall was basically where we wielded our powers and it was where everything involving heat right up to the temperature of hot lava would come to life. The Sauna name came in since the ventilators and regulators broke down, keeping the place a permanent sauna.

“Late again, Ms. Alveron.” Mr. Blaze greeted me as I swallowed the rest of my bread, pulling on my fire-gloves with haste. Beginners were always taught with fire-gloves; to protect ourselves from the fire that we held. Of course, the fire-gloves protected our hands, but I realized that they were also tweaked for our powers to be drawn inexplicably to our hands when we summoned it. It helped a lot, since fire was usually channeled from our fingertips forth.

“Sorry. There was Training from Mr. Kote just before breakfast. We stood against the cold wind the entire morning even before the sun rose.” I apologized, though we knew the excuse I gave wasn’t really valid. But seriously, of all Training Masters; I had to get Kote. The eccentric, ever funny but crazy man, Kote.