It had been nearly a week since classes began, and Martice was already dreading the next one.
Not because it was difficult. Not because the professor was strict. No—because next week, he would be assigned a new elective. And his next subject?
Spirits.
He could already feel the boredom clawing at his spine.
Right now, he was in his element. Quite literally, as the air around him crackled with metaphysical energy, and the very ground beneath his feet shimmered with intent.
He stood in the training hall of Aetherion Academy, an expansive room reinforced with enchanted stone and outfitted with a towering crystal embedded in the center of the floor. The crystal—a spatial augmenter—glowed with steady pulses, expanding the interior far beyond the dimensions the room should allow. In this space, students could test their powers without fear of destroying the school, though Martice found the idea of "accidental destruction" more of a challenge than a risk.
He loved this class. Loved the mental dance, the creative tension. The subject? Sigilic Rhetoric.
Magic through verse. Power through poetics. Rewriting the world one stanza at a time.
Across from him stood his current opponent—a girl with braided silver hair and eyes like twin mirrors. She was good. Very good. The two had been locked in their duel for over twenty minutes now, both of them conjuring increasingly complex sigils that layered spell over spell in rapid-fire succession.
Martice stood with one hand behind his back and the other extended, fingers splayed as shimmering lines of golden ink spiraled around his wrist. The scent of parchment and ozone filled the air.
With a flourish, he spoke:
"By tongues of truth from lips unsewn,
Let mirrors lie and glass be stone—
Undo what's seen, yet leave it known,
A world refracted yet alone."
The words shimmered as they hung in the air, curling into a glyph that pulsed with illusory power. The temperature in the chamber shifted, the air warming as the reflective surfaces conjured by previous spells began to melt into obsidian, twisting perception and reality into a warped mosaic.
The girl responded swiftly, her voice cutting through the mirage like a blade:
"When silence sings in hollow shells,
Let backward chimes unbind all spells—
Through nested thought, inversion dwells,
Where sense breaks free and chaos swells."
Her counter rippled across the room, unraveling Martice's illusions with recursive logic. The melting obsidian stilled and then shattered into mist. Echoes of sound began to distort, reversing in time. His spell didn't just fail—it rewound, forcing Martice to feel the dissonance of his own magic unmaking itself.
But he wasn't rattled. He was inspired.
He grinned and twisted into a spin, golden ink flourishing like ribbons in the air.
"In every echo not yet cast,
Bind futures first, then tether past—
Through folded time the present passed,
Rewrite the now, and make it last."
The crystal embedded in the floor pulsed in response. The training hall dimmed as temporal distortions kicked in. Shadows elongated unnaturally. Footsteps made before they were taken echoed behind them. Heat bled backward into the stones, curling steam off the previously shattered mirrors.
A pulse of temporal feedback made the ground shimmer like water.
The girl narrowed her eyes, then extended both hands. Her next verse came slow, deliberate, and laced with elemental fury.
"Let thunder wake the weeping sky,
Where floods devour and sparks defy—
Call forth the storm, let oceans cry,
And drown the clock where echoes lie."
Clouds formed above them—impossible in an enclosed space, yet real. Rain burst downward in a torrential downpour that hissed against Martice's time-heat field. Lightning forked across the dome, striking the spatial crystal's barrier in brilliant flashes. A tidal surge swept across the arena floor, crashing into the temporal rift and dragging it into a liquid snarl.
Martice slid backward, boots skimming the surface of the water. His coat flared behind him, soaked and heavy, but his smile didn't falter.
He raised both hands now, ink bursting like wings from his shoulders.
"Where flame forgets its fevered pyre,
And frost consumes the echo's choir—
Let heat retreat, let cold conspire,
To freeze the flood and still the fire."
Instantly, the temperature dropped. The air grew razor-sharp with chill. Steam froze mid-hiss and shattered like glass. The rain solidified in midair, creating a field of suspended droplets that glittered like stars. The flood froze mid-crash, locking into a jagged sculpture of elemental chaos.
His opponent exhaled slowly, frost curling from her lips. She pressed her palms together, then raised her arms toward the ceiling.
"Let stars forget the songs they knew,
Unchain the verse, erase the hue—
Where rhyme dissolves and laws undo,
No syntax binds, no will breaks through.
A formless thought, a silent cue…
And in that void, I bury you."
Her sigil didn't cast the spell. It unwrote it.
Light bled from the room. The frozen rain evaporated without steam. The storm unraveled into motionless air. Even the sound of their breath grew hollow.
Martice blinked as the battlefield itself dimmed into a world of blurred edges and fading boundaries.
For a single heartbeat, he didn't know what the spell did.
His instincts screamed.
He didn't have a counter.
He had to improvise.
With his last burst of ink and will, he raised his voice:
"Where meaning dies, let silence end,
Through paradox, let reason bend—
If void consumes, then let me send,
A sigil born that none can rend."
His glyph tore through the fading world like a sunrise. It didn't cancel her spell. It overlapped it. A new rule layered onto the erasure, not resisting it—coexisting.
Light returned.
Sound crackled back.
And then, like a breath released, the training hall returned to its former size. The crystal in the center flickered once before going dim.
Silence fell.
The class erupted into cheers.
Martice stood, panting, hands on his knees, soaked in rain and ink and sweat. He looked up at the girl, who offered him a slow, respectful nod.
He returned it, grinning like a madman.
"If they make me switch out of this class," he muttered, "I swear I'll riot."