The Apprentice’s Path

Chapter 2-1

2

After I brought the documents to that office, I got nothing for an entire week. Lectures had already started, so I just focused on managing my schedule, with all the labs, seminars, and lectures we had. This year, maybe to give some jobs to the people in the Interpersonal and Intercultural Relations Department, or maybe to annoy us, they changed credit requirements and demanded we get a course in the IAIRD by making it mandatory.

That was bad news. The IAIRD was the place where almost all the empaths were. It's not like dark arall hate light arall, anymore, after the Reformation; we just dislike and avoid each other. Their magic is much finer than ours, more related to the living, whereas dark magic works better on inanimate objects. Hence the modern euphemism Practical Magic. Light mages can get echoes of other people's feelings (though thankfully not their thoughts), and they can manipulate living organisms. The only practical uses of their magic that weren't ethically questionable were their plant and animal breeding program (although there were still huge debates over whether it was OK to modify spiders so they wove their nets to death), and Healing. Healing requires a very strong soul, to not go crazy with all the pain and suffering they feel the patients go through. Healers were actually the only tolerable light arall, with their dark humor and cynicism. But the only thing more risible than a dark arall empath was a dark arall Healer, so I had to choose something else.

Since empathy is not my thing, and I wasn't interested enough in ancient cultures (who cares what a bunch of primitives did? Modern technology is so much more interesting!) nor foreign languages (my father forced me to learn classic Yllamese, my ancestor's language; there were no alchemy books written in classic Yllamese — none at all!), I decided to take a course called Kalmar Republic's Law. Knowing the law is useful — especially if you want to break it.