It can’t be done, they’d all said.<\/p>\n
Why not? Jofrey had asked.<\/p>\n
But then, that could describe much of the young man’s life to date. He’d always chafed under rules and restrictions, the more so when nobody could give him a good answer why those rules existed in the first place. Some of them made perfect sense, at least once he was old enough to see other people as people<\/em> and not mobile scenery. He wouldn’t want his<\/em> possessions taken from him, so he shouldn’t take things that belonged to others. Fine.<\/p>\n But why<\/em> couldn’t he walk through the orchard instead of around it? Why<\/em> was this treat only made around Midsummer when the ingredients were always at hand? Why<\/em> did he need to approach dray lizards always from the left? Why<\/em> was it so important to use this<\/em> fork for the main course and that<\/em> one for dessert?<\/p>\n Of course, as he’d grown and his magic had blossomed, his questions had changed. The tiny little matters of etiquette and protocol bothered him still, despite his ongoing efforts to learn them \u2013 and make that effort he did; however inane he found the whole business, he didn’t want<\/em> to get scolded for so tiny a thing as starting a walk with the wrong foot. But he’d just about given up on getting such things explained to him.<\/p>\n No, most of his questions, his objections to the constant refrain of \u201cyou can’t\u201d and \u201cyou don’t,\u201d now centred on magic. This principle, that postulate \u2013 it seemed, much of the time, that there was nothing his colleagues and instructors enjoyed so much as finding things they couldn’t<\/em> do.<\/p>\n Of course, most of them, past their twentieth year, had needed a year and a half of study to accomplish such feats as Jofrey had with a thought and a gesture on the day he’d first learned he had such a talent, back when he was fourteen. They had to train themselves hard to achieve the focus that to him was instinctive. They were accustomed to failure, and only with great care could they identify the things at which they could succeed.<\/p>\n The only thing Jofrey had really, truly failed at since coming to the Academy was in remembering all those cursed rules and strictures. When he focused his will, something<\/em> would happen \u2013 maybe not quite what he’d had in mind, but far from the nothing<\/em> that greeted the efforts of many other apprentices.<\/p>\n And that was when they were trying to do things the Academy said could<\/em> be done. Jofrey had been called to task a dozen times so far for trying things that were against some rule he hadn’t previously been told about \u2013 and he’d never once got a straight answer if that rule meant a thing was forbidden,<\/em> or impossible.<\/em><\/p>\n As far as they were all concerned, the two were inseparable. If something couldn’t be done, you didn’t try to do it, and that was that. New developments were incremental, coming from careful melding of existing practises.<\/p>\n It was all so incredibly boring.<\/em> Jofrey had already done enough twice over to finish the trials to become a journeyman, but the masters wouldn’t let him advance until he had enough of their dusty theory<\/em> crammed into his head that he was crapping textbooks. And every time he tried to push the limits on his own, the masters were so… disappointed.<\/em> He could do great things, they said, if only he’d learn the rules by which magic truly worked. They thought his experimentation was wasteful.<\/em><\/p>\n As far as he<\/em> was concerned, if there was any waste here, it was in how they could take something that had seemed so wonderful when he’d first discovered it, and turn it into something so incredibly dull and stagnant.<\/p>\n Why, he’d asked, could a man not fly like a bird? And he’d been referred to enough tomes and texts to bury him, full of \u201cproof\u201d that magic would not permit itself to be used in such a manner. Jofrey hadn’t asked the question again.<\/p>\n Nor had he bothered to go into the details of all the rules. He’d seen some of them before, and for others he’d seen their like. Some of them had<\/em> been worth looking into \u2013 a man could not use magic to fly, truly fly, because its currents were too unpredictable; at one point he’d be bringing to bear all his effort just to stay in motion, and then he’d cross a mana current and suddenly have so much force behind the spell that he’d be knocked senseless if he was lucky. That<\/em> was useful information.<\/p>\n But that wasn’t flying like a bird, was it?<\/p>\n Now, men were very different from birds. He’d studied birds, with mundane and magical means, and come to understand just how<\/em> different. To change a man’s body into something akin to a bird’s would be a phenomenal undertaking involving a great amount of power \u2013 albeit only for a short time, not something sustained like levitating over a distance would be. But what he<\/em> had found suggested it would be possible<\/em> \u2013 if only he could find four other magi who weren’t absolutely convinced it wasn’t.<\/em><\/p>\n So birds were out.<\/p>\n Bats, on the other hand, had a little more in common with men.<\/p>\n So he’d turned his studies there \u2013 first to the small ones that fluttered about in the night sky, then to the rather larger ones that sometimes frequented orchards. He’d done some tests, transmuting features on a smaller scale. And now, he thought he was ready.<\/p>\n If he wasn’t, this was going to hurt. But if he kept to only the things he knew for certain, how would he ever learn anything new?<\/p>\n He looked out from the top of the seawall at the churning waves. Men dived from here sometimes \u2013 it was a long dive, but the water was deep and it could be done unharmed. It was as good a place as any.<\/p>\n Jofrey took a breath, closed his eyes, and vaulted forward.<\/p>\n He’d rehearsed this dozens of times \u2013 the focus, the image in his mind, all of it. The melting sensation, the tingle as his body flowed and rearranged \u2013 that was all familiar. The rush of wind over his limbs and body, rather less so.<\/p>\n The vertigo passed, and he extended his limbs. Wind rushed over new-grown wings, giving them purchase \u2013 but not enough, not alone. The first few frantic beats didn’t much help.<\/p>\n Then he got them at just the right angle, and that made all the difference.<\/p>\n He swept over the peaks of the waves and then left them beneath him, crowing in triumph. Couldn’t be done, could it? Well, let them say that now!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A talented sorcerer strives to push beyond the strictures and limitations his peers adhere to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-one-shot","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401,"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions\/401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/furry-tales.net\/shurhaian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}