"So..." Rauba began. She had no idea what to teach or even where to begin. "Uh, sorry, I don't know what to do. I've never taught before." She pressed her fingertips together awkwardly.
"You could start by teaching me your easiest spell?" Paley suggested. "Yes! Let's do that." She exclaimed, "My easiest spell..." She thought for about a minute or so before deciding.
"Firebolt. That's the easiest one I can think of. Should I show you?" She already got in position for it before Paley answered.
"Yes, please." He said as she bought her hands together, forming a diamond with her indexes and thumbs. "Firebolt!" She shouted quietly. A sphere of translucent flames came to life inside the diamond and shot forward after swirling in on itself a few times. It hit a tree, but the fire wasn't strong enough to ignite the wood.
"Ah, crap!" Rauba suddenly remembered one of the most important rules of magic, "You're probably a wind type aren't you?"
"Huh?"
"Oh, right, I forgot you forgot everything. Pretty much there are a bunch of types of magic. Air, Fire, Water, and Earth are the main ones. Apparently, everyone can use every magic type, but you'll have an affinity to only one and maybe sometimes more. It's pretty much impossible for normal people to use a magic type they have no affinity for. Like I could never hope to use Water Magic." She explained.
"Okay," Paley nodded.
"....So we gotta test which one you are. But, since you could control wind that much, my guess is you're a wind type." Rauba added and walked over to the river, pulling out a small notebook from her ragged dress. She flipped through the pages until she found the section she was looking for.
"Put your hands against the ground." She asked and Paley complied, making sure that every inch of his palm made contact with the ground. "Do you feel your magic... reacting?" She found no other way to describe the sensation.
"Nope, it feels the same." There is no way to compare your magic to someone else's, so Paley hadn't any idea what his magic 'reacting' felt like. He was used to it always churning furiously.
"Any difference when you stop touching the ground?" She asked. He stood up and felt the air around him. "Nope," He replied. "Try the water, then." She moved out of the way for him to dip his hands in the water. Still the same.
"Then it's gotta be fire. There's no way you're a Quimnia." She concluded. A short burst of pain struck Paley's head at the word. "Can you say that again?" He requested as he held his head.
"Then it's gotta be fire?"
"No, the thing after that."
"There's no way you're a Quim-" The word stabbed Paley in the head again, this time making him fall to his knees and rendering him breathless. His eyes twitched violently for a moment before he calmed down. "You okay?" She held her hand to his back and felt his heart pounding through his spine.
Her touch snapped him back to normal. "Yeah, I'm fine." He recovered and stood up, "So how do you cast Firebolt then?"
It took a painstakingly long time for Paley to learn Firebolt because Rauba forgot to teach him how to manipulate heat first and she struggled to tell him what to visualize when casting the spell. But on the bright side, he used a stronger version of it that actually managed to light a tree on fire.
Luckily, the trees in the forest were spread out and the flames couldn't spread much, though they did still have to stomp out any grass and blow leaves that caught on fire.
"That's incredible." Rauba stared at the ash left behind by the tree, "Yours is so much better than mine."
"Thanks," Paley gave an incredibly faint, humbled smile, "So, what's the next spell?"
"About that, I should probably teach you how to control heat first," She grinned awkwardly.
For the next two hours, Rauba taught him basic Fire Magic concepts. For example, Fire Magic wasn't limited to just flames. It could be magma, though many argue that should be a different magic type altogether, or the control of heat.
Rauba was especially talented at controlling heat and it seemed to be the same case for Paley as after she taught him to control heat, he was able to conjure Fire Magic spells much more powerfully.
"Once you master controlling heat, you can pretty much control flames at your will." She said with a dubious, thinking expression, "...Can you do something for me?" She asked.
"Sure," he replied.
She took him to the river and made him dip his hands in the water again. She had to clear up one thing; the fact that he had the same feeling for all the main Magic Types.
"Can you try to do a spell with water?"
"Aren't I a fire type?"
"Just try it," She urged him and he complied. Her doubts were cleared when the water shot up and froze mid-air into ice spikes. His permanently cold eyes radiated red and his breath condensed under the freezing temperature around him. He had no idea how he cast the spell. He just did it.
"Holy crap!" She exclaimed. "You're a Quimnia!" She jumped around ecstatically. A regular joe would be excited, but Rauba was incredibly fond of magic, so this ordeal excited her out of her wits.
"What's a Quimnia again?" Paley asked as the ice melted back into the river. The word 'Quimnia' no longer gave Paley a headache, instead, it bought on a strangely nostalgic feeling.
"A mage who can use all the magic types without limits! You get one nearly every two thousand years. They're that rare! Try using Earth magic!"
Paley pressed his hands against the ground, feeding his magic into it and creating a pillar of cracked dirt that crumbled as fast as it was erected. He stepped back in awe at his power.
"There you are!" Jurie and Teerom appeared on the other end of the river. They had been looking for them for half an hour now since the sun began to set.
"It's nearly dinner time, have you been learning magic this whole time?" Teerom's question was answered by Rauba's quivering excitement.
"He's a Quimnia!" She exclaimed over the river.
"A Quimnia? You're kidding, right?" Jurie was a fiction bookworm and in all her favorite stories, the protagonist would be a Quimnia. They were seen as symbols of righteousness and power.
"Prove it!" Teerom's cool demeanor crumbled away. He was a fanboy of a hero called Aneros, who was the third Quimnia in history and bought down an enormous demon army to protect the country - he was a real person. Paley nodded and dipped one hand into the water and the other against the ground.
He didn't have the skill to transfer magic to something without touching it directly yet, but the results were the same. This time, instead of dirt, a thin log of wood grew slowly out of the ground. Paley had visualized a tree growing out of the ground and even added a water supply from the river, but his magic wasn't strong enough to grow an entire tree. Yet.
"Woah!" They were taken aback massively despite the log quickly withering away. "You made a tree!" Rauba exclaimed even though it was just a dead stump. He was making extremely quick progress, like a pianist trying to play again after years of not touching a single key.
"You gotta show everyone, come on!" Teerom ran through the river and grabbed his hand, taking him back to the cottage in a rush. Jurie and Rauba followed behind. Paley was already tired from using three different kinds of magic, so he just let Teerom drag him along back to the cottage, where everyone was waiting around the table.
"Where were you for so long?" Madella asked.
"Paley's a Quimnia," Teerom smirked coolly.
"A Quimnia?" Everyone was confused at first.
"What's a Quimnia?" Amasha asked, but everyone had begun to urge Paley to do a spell.
"Is your food cold?" Paley planted his hands on the table and discharged an enormous amount of heat. The table and the food were set ablaze, but luckily, he reduced the temperature enough for the food to be fine. "Now it's warm again," He looked at them awkwardly.
After a long night of entertaining Adimia and Reben, he finally got a chance to rest. Everyone in the orphanage went to bed at around midnight and most of them woke up at around 9 a.m. It was a very energetic place and Paley loved it for that. But at the same time, it was incredibly exhausting.
"Where should I sleep?" Paley whispered to Teerom as the others tucked.
"You're sleeping with me and Jurie." Teerom pointed to a slightly larger bed in the corner of the room, where Jurie was sleeping against the corner. Paley had no issue sleeping next to a girl, but he'd feel guilty if he was the reason they couldn't have a good night's rest.
"There's not enough space, I'll sleep outside." He tried to slip away but Teerom caught him. "Come on, it's just a girl, she won't bite." He teased and pulled him onto the bed.
After around thirty minutes, once he was one hundred percent sure Teerom and everyone else were asleep, Paley quietly slid out of bed and tip-toed his way toward the stairs. Looking back, he saw Jurie pressed right against the wall and Teerom hanging over the bed slightly.
He went back to push Teerom back onto the bed and pull Jurie next to him slightly. She turned and wrapped her arm around Teerom, smiling slightly in her sleep. Paley nodded to himself conclusively and made his way downstairs, where Madella sat in front of the fireplace, inspecting a letter of some sort.
'No way down there' He went back upstairs and into the bathroom to climb out of the window, landing on the soft grass- He walked around to the back of the cottage, where he had made a chair with Teerom. There were still bits of wood scattered around the grass from every time he made a mistake and chiseled too much or too little.
The stars were glimmering softly on the black canvas of the sky. He gazed upwards at them as he walked towards the river. He lay down on the grass opposite where he had first woken up, watching the stars as sleep gradually crawled in.
He didn't care about the past anymore. Whatever his memories were, they should stay locked away as far as he was concerned. Because he was happy. An emotion he felt like he never had before. After taking one last glance at the droplets of milk above, he dozed off into a peaceful, peaceful sleep.