>>5779989>>5780015>>5780016>>5780029“Global Magical Studies,” she said, producing one book, then another, then a scroll, then another, then another, then another tome…
“Woah, woah!”
Henzler stopped, looking up at you in the little adjunct classroom which you two have commandeered for the purpose—not in use now anyway, except as storage for stacks of excess desks and chairs, for unusual but largely-uninteresting apparatuses of uncertain age, and SEEMIGNLY the better part of the Tower’s collection of dust.
“It’s really just the fear Eastern stuff which gives me difficulty,” you admitted. “You know, magical theory from Goldenriver, or The Hidden City Amidst the Mountains, or Red-Dawn?”
Henzler glanced down at the books and scrolls, placing a few of them away and taking out a few more.
“How do you FIT all that in there?” you balked. “How do you CARRY it all?”
“It’s a Handy Haversack,” she explained. “An extradimensional storage space bund to a—”
“I know what it is.”
(A lie, but you can infer.)
“And you just… HAVE that?” you asked, unable to help yourself.
“My mother is the Archmage,” she answered, simply.
Must be nice… Or not, not always. You reminded yourself of the latter, tamped down your adolescent angsts, and took a seat beside Izirina. She smelled, of lavender and honeysuckle, faintly—a soap or perfume of some sort. She opened a book and unrolled a scroll at once, and then produced a third book. You looked between them, fixing your gaze finally upon the ONLY one which seemed to have any symbols or letters you recognized from your daily life, written in the tidy printing of Henzler herself.
“Uh…?” you said.
“This,” Henzler told you, tapping the big book, “ is a treatise on the fundamentals of what the Easterlings call, depending upon the tradition, chi, or ki, or qi, or chakra, or prana. What we call ‘lifeforce’ or, what the Southmen of the furthest coast sometimes call ‘mana’. It is written in the script of The Hidden City, because that is where it was written. Their monastic class is really the BEST at properly communicating all the intricacies in a way that allows a person to put the teachings into practice in a way akin to our mages here in the Westlands.”
“Northlands, you mean?” you asked.
Henzler shook her head, and said: “That’s not what THEY call us, no. You must get used to thinking like an Easterling to understand Easterling magical tradition.”
