What the System doesn't give you, you'll have to take for yourself.
The words lingered in Dalliance's ears.
"People make that mistake about air mages," he said loftily. "Easy targets. But it’s not so. Can anyone here tell me why it's not so?"
Silence.
That could explain why Sterling was here, Dalliance thought. The boy had never been an idiot. If he had to take part in a Practicals class, why not choose aeromancy? In the aftermath of the duel, Dalliance himself would never willingly fight an earth mage. Fire mages were known to be the most deadly, with water mages second only to fire mages by virtue of their faculty with drowning. Sterling was looking for an easy ride.
"The reasoning," the instructor continued cheerfully, "Is that aeromancy has no proper damage spells, so what you actually want to do is fight an air mage. And it's wrong. Confused? Consider this rule of thumb: in an actual conflict, availability of your element is king."
Oh. That made sense.
"Under idealized conditions, when everything is already provided for you for, you, fire does the most ruinous damage. During the average defensive action, however, if everything hasn’t already gone completely wrong, nothing should be on fire."
Triumphant smiles, around the class. Students relieved that they hadn't selected a dead-end school after all. Effluvia gave him a little jerk of her head, a 'look at you' acknowledgement.
"So, Aeromancy," the teacher said. "Let’s get into it. The fundamental forces behind aeromancy are the mythical Four Winds."
"Mythical," Dalliance protested.
Again, before thinking. He hadn't been paying attention--he'd been too concerned with his class's viability.
"Yes, obviously so," said the teacher.
"But the system said they were my friends," said another voice. Flounce, beside him, looking nearly ready to cry at the denial.
"The system says a lot of things," the instructor shot back. "The system talks about the gods. They’re dead."
"Firth took my offering once," Dalliance said quietly, an aside to her that nevertheless drew the teacher's immediate response.
"The god of death isn’t dead," quipped the professor. "Shocking. Look, in three dimensions, you can move in six directions. There should be six winds. It’s just an Aeromancer's conceptual framework for making things easier for younger students."
He was moving on, but a hand on the other side of the room was raised, attached to a dark-skinned young man with striking blue hair, blue eyelashes, and blue stubble. Dalliance suspected it was real.
"Excuse me," he said, his voice cracking with light adolescence. "But the Temple . . . "
The teacher cut him off. "Must I get through this every single semester?" He strode over to the board. "The Temple is stuff and nonsense paraded for the masses. Their augurs practice wish fulfillment. Their healers use healing magic and won’t tell anyone their spell forms. They’re a silo." He sketched the word 'silo' and drew a big box around it. "Not a source of wisdom, per se."
"Some of you are rural, right?" Dalliance raised his hand, as did others. "Then you know what a silo is. You put grains in it. It keeps the grains from mixing. That’s the idea. So here at the college, we have some silos."
And he drew four boxes: Earth, Air, Fire, Water.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
"Why do we have silos? Anyone know? I’ll tell you myself. It’s because we don’t want to waste time teaching you to cast a [Fireball] if you have water in your soul, since if you do, you will never cast a [Fireball]."
Dalliance nodded, as did many others.
"But you can be silo’d for other reasons," said the professor, clearly irritated. "Such as reputation. A silo allows you to build up a reputation. 'Oh, I’m wise. Oh, I can heal people. Oh, sometimes I predict things a long time in the future.' It’s because you have the knowledge that other people don’t have of how to do things. Not because you actually have better ideas behind them."
He wrote this on the board, too: Knowledge ≠ Ideas. Knowledge = Facts + Context.
"What I want to do with the things that I know—that’s what matters for whether I am a good guide. What I know is what matters for whether I should teach you what I know, and whether you should want to learn it or not. These things are different. I will try to avoid polluting you with my ideas, because I am teaching knowledge. The Temple has knowledge that would be worthwhile to learn, but they want to teach you ideas."
"Perhaps I seem overly harsh," the instructor said grimly, "But I can provide another piece of evidence, since that's all these are, educated guesses. Unless someone wants to go to the High Heavens and check? No? Thus, my evidence: you don’t need the divines for divinity anymore. Enchanters use that aspect all the time, and though they will not admit to it directly, the theorem is easy enough to prove."
"I can, if I want, put a curse on you. I can put a curse on you so hard that when I tell it to pass to your father, and his father, that I have put a curse on all three of you. That’s a bloodline curse, by the way."
"No, I start with you, the youngest. I go up. Why do I do that?"
"Because this way, I’m only going to have six targets. They’re all going to be important members: families are like that. You see: one father, many children."
"Now, if you reverse the traversal of the family tree and go the other way—from father to son, from him to his sons—in time you get the 'one-to-many-to-too-many' problem. My spell stops doing much of anything."
"But that reveals a type of ward that old blood mages, and especially the founders of the noble houses, use. You hit them with a curse, and they can say, 'Okay, I’ll take that curse, and I’ll make it a bloodline curse on myself.' Sounds pretty bad, right? What kind of psycho wants to curse his whole family?"
"But you see, those old-timers, they had as many kids as they wanted, with as many men and women as would have them. Or, in the case of House Evergreen, Lady Evergreen had as many suitors as she could cajole to form a queue . . . but perhaps that’s not an appropriate topic for younger ears. Suffice it to say, she had many children, too."
"The next generation was married off among the other nobles, the kings, and what have you. And they made many children."
"And they made many children."
"Let’s pretend that the number is six . . . seven. I know of at least three Septimuses in the older ranks, and an Octavian. So. Seven by seven is forty-nine. Seven by forty-nine . . . who can do that in their head? No? Seven less than three-hunded fifty, so three hundred forty-three. Plus forty-nine. Plus seven. Plus one. So if I cast [Horrid Wilting], it would wilt you horribly. But across four hundred people, it does nothing at all."
"Defense in depth," he said, sounding like he was telling a clever joke.
Nobody seemed to get it.
"Oh well. My point," he said, "is that that defense does not work against a divine spell."
"A divine spell has the same effect on the first person in the line as it does on the last. If the divine mana would otherwise degrade, it instead draws power from the divine source."
"What does this have to do with enchanters?"
"I could enchant you a bangle that would provide you [Featherfall]. Once. It would then be out of power."
"But maybe I could enchant one that pulled from a mana siphon. Then it could work again and again, but it would slowly wear away the enchantment."
"Mage cannons fire hundreds of times a day, every day, and some have been in service since the day the Wall was made."
"They can be destroyed, but they never wear out."
"That’s not just good spellcraft. That’s evidence of divinity."
"So, did we kill the gods and make them into cannons? No. Do you need gods for divinity? No. A divine corpse will do. And so we see divinity used in enchanting and alchemy, but not in person. Altars won’t burn. Augurs read the auspices wrong all the time."
"The most likely reading from these pieces of evidence is that the gods are dead."
Reasonable inference?