At once there was a bright flash and the crackling of spark, as the air between Katherine's extended palms came alive with superheated energy. Katherine furrowed her brow and in a few seconds, had nurtured the spark into a sizable ball of roaring flame that vibrated in the air, as if lightning was bottled. Though Elwin and his friends were sitting some 30 feet away, they could feel the clarity of heat on their faces.
Professor Aionia nodded and gave her a thumbs up; Katherine was overjoyed to showcase the culmination of her skill to the audience. If only Professor Helen was here to see this as well!
Elwin watched in delight, for it was not something he could do. Surely he could learn how to do it; but his Maht wasn't Fire, so it'd take him a lot of effort and time to master.
By now Professor Aionia had pulled out a pocket watch from her waistcoat and started the clock. It ticked second by second and minute by minute, impressing the audience even further; but gradually, the absolute look of confidence on Katherine's face started to waver.
"Two minutes."
"Three."
"Four minutes."
As the minutes passed, Katherine looked no more to the audience but the fire between her palms; her eyebrows were furrowed fiercely now, her smile contorted in intense concentration, painted with drops of hot sweat. It was no easy task to maintain a fireball of such size or sustain a display of such control; her palms wavered and her arms shook with all their effort in trying to keep the miniature sun vibrating in the air.
And that's when everyone saw it. Next to Katherine, the water in the glass bowl began to frost over. It started from the surface; bit by bit, what was once liquid began turning to ice, and as the seconds passed, it began freezing violently, turning to crystals that refracted the rays of the sun like gemstones. Katherine took no notice of it, because she was so focused on the fireball, but everyone else leaned in, their breaths held, listening to the crackles of expanding ice. The frost had now raced to the bottom of the bowl –
"Five minutes."
And at the count of time, with nowhere else to go, the ice shattered the glass bowl into a thousand pieces, scattering its shrapnel to the floor; and Katherine in a pained expression finally extinguished her fireball from the air, which imploded with a firelight of smoke.
"Well done, Katherine. We are grateful for your demonstration."
All the first-years in their seats gave Katherine a passionate applause, Elwin included; it was a grand and difficult feat to create and sustain a fireball for this long. All except Lucian, who looked upon Katherine with wordless disdain.
But now the spectacle was over, there remained the question of what happened with the glass-bowl.
Professor Aionia briskly strode toward Katherine, and removed the metal shield between her and the shattered remains of glass.
What remained was a very large ball of ice; and Katherine, seeing what had happened to the bowl of water for the first time, recoiled from the sight with a concoction of bafflement and curiosity.
"What happened? Could it... I – I did this without knowing?"
"In truth, we all do when we perform the Arts."
Professor Aionia faced the audience to speak.
"In the last five minutes, you have witnessed the most fundamental principle behind the Four Mahamastra – the Four Elemental Arts – that to perform a feat of energy, you must first take it from somewhere. This is a rule that no person nor sage can break; it is a law of the cosmos."
She faced Katherine, patting her on the shoulder.
"Thank you, Katherine. You may take your seat now."
She hurriedly nestled next to Isaac, dusting the faint soot off her fingers. When she'd taken her seat at last, Professor Aionia continued again.
"To create a fireball, one must first gather the energy needed to produce it from someplace else. To sustain it means to channel such an energy from a source – as you saw, it also includes water. Take energy away from liquid water, and you are able to obtain ice," she continued, motioning shards of floating ice and glass around her hand in a prismatic display of light.
"Know this: every feat you perform and give has a cost. Many a time, this cost is ignored. But if such a cost involves life and living beings, what then should you do?"
"We are born into a blessed world where we are able to control the forces of nature to our calling; as natural as we breathe."
"But seldom do we consider where this power comes from, how it works, and how we can use that knowledge to help the world. What I teach is precisely those questions, and how we can hope to answer them."
"We tend to think of each Art and each Element as distinct and separate. Nothing could be more opposed to fire as does water; and earth to air, which dances to their own melodies. But as you just saw and witnessed, there are rules and principles that transcend each and connect them to one another."
Elwin and Katherine gave each other a brief glance.
"At the root of the world, the same laws govern each of the four Mahamastra and how they behave; the cosmos is a painting, and the Elemental Arts its colors, part of the ultimate whole."
Professor Aionia roused the broken glass and orbited it around her hand, heating them until they were but viscous molten globules; she brought them together and stretched them suspended in the air with the motion of her fingers, until what was once broken glass had become statuettes of two figures who they didn't recognize. The ground beneath her feet had frosted over.
A single hand shot up in the middle of the audience.
"Yes, Mr. Robert."
"Who came to figure this out? Isn't it so obvious that each Element is so different from one another?"
"A judicious question indeed. And thus goes the tale..."
Professor Aionia gestured from a motion of her Quan, and all the curtains draped over the windows. The sun-drenched lecture hall plunged into utter darkness; a dark so intense that Elwin could barely see Mirai's hair next to him.
Heavy silence permeated the hall.
Then there came a voice from yonder, Professor Aionia's voice, but amplified, shattering the long dark.
In the morning of time, DEIA AETERNITAS weaved a grand tapestry that became the cosmos. Upon each weave were written the powers of everything there was, is, and ever will be: from the roar of the midsummer Sun to the tremble of a dewdrop upon morning grass, from the chorus of every grain of sand to the waltzes of the stars.
Eleven thousand years ago, in the dawn of human consciousness, there arose five figures who we now call the FOUNDERS, who discovered ways to control the strands in this grand tapestry of time. Those ways were called the MAHAMASTRA, or the ELEMENTAL ARTS; and the parts of reality that these methods influenced and governed were called THE ELEMENTS.
The FOUNDERS understood that strands in the tapestry of time responded to, and were resonated by, unique things we could do: dance to create fire, rhythm to gather water, melody to move earth, and song to shuffle air.
Elwin perked up his ears.
Great philosophers came and went, those who sought wisdom and truth. And though they were fervent in their search, they misstepped to untruth that THE ELEMENTS were the only things that made up the world, when in reality, they were simply the parts of the world – the tapestry – which we could govern with the Arts.
What the FOUNDERS originally taught of THE ELEMENTS – that they were not all the building blocks, but merely shapes, or ASPECTS of reality – was eventually muddied in the transmission of knowledge through the sands of time, and escaped the wisdom of these philosophers. They in their arrogance believed THE FOUR ELEMENTS were all there was and all that made up matter, and that all the truths were exhausted in the world, silencing voices for thousands of years that questioned otherwise.
But like how a pulled string also pulls taut and loosens another in an intricate cloth, there were hints that there was a grander painting behind the dogma of the philosophers of old, a hint which someone had to unearth.
Two hundred years ago from our present, there lived a young boy by the name of Dmitri Kosmogorov, who made his living upon the ships and shores of the Republic of Ascension, the birthplace of trade and commerce. Upon those ships he heard tales from various peoples, of merchants and traders, of captains and fellow sailors, of venturers, those who minted gold and precious metals, of Quanmasters, of chefs, galley-cooks, of fishermen; distant travelers from the Empire of Jin, sojourners from Avan even beyond those imperial lands; which revealed to him hints of the world beyond the mist, beyond the comfortable allure of old philosophy.
From where Professor Aionia stood, there sparked to life the tip of a single matchstick, its wavering flame audience to a hundred eyes. She continued.
Driven by a courage to open a new world, to lift humankind upon shoulders of new knowledge, Dmitri Kosmogorov dedicated his life to uncovering the secrets of THE ELEMENTS and what they truly were. Through an endless litany of experiments, he uncovered the phenomenon of antaricity; and from this new ground, sought to classify THE ELEMENTS according to their melody and rhythm.
And to his enormous shock and blow to convenient truth, he found that they could not be classified as four alone, but many, many more: atoms, or THAT WHICH IS INDIVISIBLE, as he gave their name. The ELEMENTS, he discovered, were mere ASPECTS in which those atoms behaved in collections – FIRE for PLASMA, WATER for LIQUID, EARTH for SOLID, and AIR for GAS.
He found that the newfound knowledge of atoms and of the true nature of THE ELEMENTS could be used for an enormous good. It could make new medicine more potent than ever to help the ailing sick, enrich the soil for crops to grow, and ensure no child starved evermore. His intention was not to replace the FOUR ELEMENTS, but to bring them to the light of honest understanding and experimentation – so that the atrocities humankind committed in its contest over resources and fates never had to recur.
But scholars were unkind to Kosmogorov. To them he was a perverser of philosophy, an iconoclast of the sacred and untouchable FOUR. They threw out his research and barred him from academies; no more invitations were sent to him, and no coin nor loaf of bread came to rest upon his table. Even then he continued his experiments, in hope of a grander world; but alas, the task escaped the reach of a single man.
He died hungry and alone, wishing for humankind to one day become immortal; to look proudly to the heavens and voyage to them when time arrived.
Unbeknownst to him, there was someone who took interest in his research – an orphan who worked as a janitor in the libraries of the academies. He protected Kosmogorov's research and papers when they were thrown out, and in time, read them to become a distinguished scholar in his own right. And in this orphan the torch that was Dmitri's hope burned once more. Taking on the name of Alexander Kosmogorov, the orphan-turned-scholar fervently devised new methods of experimentation, and with unrelenting evidence showed the scholars of the age that there was a grander and far more nuanced vision of the world: that of atoms, and the old ELEMENTS simply appearances of matter, not matter itself.
A second flame joined the first next to Professor Aionia.
The scholars who looked upon that new vision carried on his legacy, and the next, and the next. The light that Dmitri shone onto the world never truly died; it passed on like a torch from one generation to generation, from sea across sea and past the mountains of time, by those that carried the dream of knowing the world.
The second flame leaped to a candelabra on the side of the dimly lit lecture hall, lighting its candle; the flame then leaped to another, then another, and another, until the lecture hall was dark no more, and they could see Professor Aionia's face once again.
And with this relay of hope and knowledge, Experimental Philosophy was born. The courageous search for truth, the fireblood of effort, the legacy of ordinary human beings; that which builds those skycrafts; that which fuels the trains; that which constructed this hall; the medicines that doctors use in grand hospitals, the vast and ample food upon which the republics rests upon – what began as a tiny candle became our second SUN:
In Our Age, there is no more night!
Professor Aionia flung open the curtains once again, and the Sun shone its rays in cascades of gold upon the countenance of every student in that hall, radiantly reflecting off the statuettes that she had made moments earlier.
"This is Dmitri and Alexander, and their legacy is what I teach. You will perform the experiments that Kosmogorov and other great experimental philosophers had once done, and learn of their stories – how it leads to the world we cherish and enjoy, and how we can go further."
"I will teach you the Four Mahamastra not by their cold usefulness but how they can be used to perform great deeds of warmth and humanity – so that when time comes, when the long dark descends upon us, you can light the way out until we can sail the stars."
With her words, all of Elwin's concerns vanished to dust.
***
"Yeah, I'll see you guys at dinner. Don't be late!" yelled Lucian to his friends.
"Lucian, a word," said a figure, emerging from the shadow behind a pillar in the quadrangle lawn.
"Huh? Who's –" His expression relaxed then contorted into one of recognition as the figure invited him on a walk.
A walk to talk about what? Lucian wondered, as he followed the figure along the emptying hallways and corridors to a secluded yard tucked away in the southern quartier.
Lucian ended that day with a new mission and a path to take.
A mission that no one could know.