The astronomy professor didn't look old— she couldn't have been much past thirty. She had sharp features and graceful movements; she spoke in a low volume, but it still carried easily across the open tower without her ever needing to raise it.
Marcus had mentioned that half the school was enamored with her; students lingered after class under the most idiotic excuses.
Aegeus had dismissed that information as useless, irrelevant chatter that contributed nothing at all.
But when they watched a sixth-year Hufflepuff spend three agonizing minutes posing a question that required only a one-sentence answer—hell, even Aegeus could have easily answered it—he realized Marcus hadn't been exaggerating.
After finally dismissing the clinging boy, the class was finally in motion.
She spoke for a long time; it was as if she thought everyone in the room shared her enthusiasm for star charts at one in the morning.
Identifying Jupiter's moons through the tower's brass telescope took him under a minute, and while he was labeling it, the Hufflepuff girl beside him was still trying to locate Jupiter itself.
Aegeus did not, strictly speaking, need to listen to class. He had memorized planet positions, lunar mechanics, and basic stellar classifications well before he even learned to tie his shoes. What he needed was something the first-year textbook skimmed over. How are these celestial bodies truly related to magic?
"Professor," he said, once the rest of the group had been set to their own charts and Sinistra had drifted close enough on her rounds to hear him without him needing to raise his voice, "I don't understand how any of this relates to magic."
She studied him for a moment. "The short answer is that celestial position affects ambient magical density— certain configurations make certain kinds of magic easier to cast, certain potions more stable, and certain rituals viable at all. If you want to learn more, here's my recommendation list"
She handed him a piece of paper with book names and their location, then she continued down the row, leaving him to his star chart and his Hufflepuff neighbor, who had finally located Jupiter and seemed extremely pleased about it.
He went to the library the following afternoon before dinner, and found the shelf Sinistra had mentioned— third row from the window, half-buried behind a set of star charts nobody had reshelved correctly in what looked like years. Celestial Resonance and the Architecture of Ambient Magic sat there, its spine cracked with age, the print inside dense enough that he suspected it hadn't been checked out in a decade.
The librarian, a sharp-eyed woman who clearly kept a private ledger of which students borrowed what, looked at the book, then at him, with an expression that suggested she thought he was lost.
Two minutes later, he had claimed a small, wooden desk in the back corner of the stacks, where the light from the tall, narrow window was best. He set his bag down, pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment, and cracked the heavy cover open.
The ink smelled faintly of dried oak and rust, the pages thick and slightly rough under his fingertips. Waffling's Magical Theory— the book he'd worked through over the summer, cover to cover— had been plain in comparison to this. Waffling wrote like a man laying bricks: one claim, then the next, square and load-bearing and never pretentious. This book didn't lay bricks. It didn't even seem interested in walls at all.
He didn't start from page one. Instead, he flipped until he found Ambient Density Shifts: Lunar and Planetary Catalysts, and turned to page forty-two.
He dipped his quill, set it beside the parchment, and began to read.
Consider the moon not as a stone hung in the dark, but as a held breath the whole world takes in common— the chapter began.
Aegeus read the line twice, double-checking the cover to make sure he hadn't accidentally opened a book of medieval poetry.
Ambient density is not fixed, whatever the earlier texts implied in the interest of tidiness. It rises and falls the way tides do, and for the same essential reason: something vast, pulling. The careful practitioner learns to feel for the pull the way a sailor learns to feel weather before it arrives— not by any instrument, but by attention, patiently paid.
He sat with that a moment, quill hovering, faintly unsure of how much he liked it. This book seemed to be under the impression that the sky was owed some tenderness for its trouble. Waffling would never have written a sentence like a held breath the whole world takes in.
Waffling would have called it a fluctuation in ambient magical amount correlated with lunar phase. He footnoted it twice and moved on. He wasn't certain the book was right to think so. He also wasn't certain it was wrong. He copied the line into his notes anyway, word for word, and kept reading.
The next few pages moved less like a lesson and more like a slow walk through someone else's private thinking. The author— a name on the spine he hadn't bothered to check yet— seemed to regard writing coherently as a kind of personal failure.
A ritual performed at the full moon draws effortlessly, the way gravity claims a falling stone, one passage read; while the exact same ritual attempted three days later must be dragged uphill against an invisible incline, forcing the caster to manually siphon ambient momentum—a distinction lost on lesser texts, which mistake the moon for a clock rather than a tide.
Further in, the chapter turned to planetary alignments, and the prose grew stranger still— less a description of magic than an argument that the sky held personal preferences. Saturn does not forbid, the author insisted. It asks for patience, and punishes those who will not give it.
Venus does not grant her favour to a practice; it grants agreement— a spell cast under her influence does not fight the caster's intention so much as it consents to it. None of this was measurable in any sense he recognized from Waffling, and he found himself, against his own better judgment, wanting it to be true anyway.
He read for the better part of an hour without noticing the light change outside the narrow window, and stopped only when the librarian's footsteps announced themselves from the far end of the stacks— the particular sound, he'd learned, of a closing time she preferred to enforce without saying so directly.
He marked his page with a scrap of parchment rather than fold the corner, gathered his notes, and left the book on the desk exactly where he'd found it, already turning over the word Saturn's patience in his mind the whole walk back to the tower.
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TO BE CONTINUED
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