Ash 16, 115 Age of Steel
Anton was stressed, and in the most frustratingly novel sort of way. Instead of worrying about his life or his health, he was for once confronted not with the limits of his body but his mind. It was said that in the regular physics courses taken by the vast majority of the student body the first weeks were taken up with practical demonstrations and all manner of enjoyable introductions to the ideas and intuitions behind the mechanical laws. Those happy students got to drop balls of stone and wood and watch them fall at the same speed before going to play with cradles of suspended orbs that perpetuated collissions against one another.
But this was Honors Physics. An extremely small number of students enrolled in it each year for the sheer size of the institute, consisting almost solely of members of the College of Sciences and cadets aspiring to enter into the Engineering Corps, and for a relief almost all of them had seemed as stressed as Anton himself was. Their introduction to the science had been rigid formula and a plethora of coursework, any concern that the hidden mage had about using his illegal rune erased by the sheer necessity of having to follow along with the sheer volume of written text provided by the positively ancient professor lecturing to the half empty hall.
Sharp eyed despite her age, and perhaps hardnosed because of it, she somehow managed to notice when a single one of her students stopped paying attention despite the fact that she spoke while facing the blackboard upon which she constantly wrote - and erased - equations. It was all Anton could do to copy it all down in his notes in his scrawling hand and attempt to decipher it later, a practice made all the more difficult by the fact that he wasn't able to actually see what was there. Instead he was forced to interpret everything through a mixture of the idea and intent left by the chalk, and his own biases which warred with the very basics of what he was being taught.
One of the first lessons that had been provided was that something, once moved, will remain moving until something else acts upon - the professor mercifully rising from her writing of equations to explain that in the real world countless factors were constantly working upon any object. The pull of the ground upon all things, the drag of the air, and the errant currents of aether all effected them, and Anton's not quite vision waved and warbled as for a moment he almost imagined he could see the terms that would account for such fade into being at the tail end of the rather simple equation already written. And then he was told that, for simplicity, they would be ignoring all of those and acting as if everything that was existed in a featureless void. Every part of his mind howled at such a simplification, the hazy intuition that complemented his lack of literal sight struggling at the obvious omission.
Further theorems at least did not cause such a rebellion in the young scholar, his unusual condition if anything coming in handy the further they proceeded. That the force of an object scaled with both the mass and the vigor with which it moved were trivially intuited even by someone utterly unused to science or mathematics - a gentle tap from an hammer will not hurt you, not a rapid swing from a feather, but such a strike from the first object would prove devastating. Curiously, the professor insisted that it was not the speed of the object that mattered, but instead the speed at which that speed changed, and as unintuitive as that seemed to the majority of his colleagues Anton could not help but think as he looked at the equation that it was a mere hint at a greater truth, feeling as if one who could almost but not quite remember a word that they desired to say.
The simplest, and least thought about, of interactions took on a startling new light when formalized and subjected to mathematical rigor, the students forced to consider an axiomatic truth of reality. For every action, an equal and opposite reaction is provoked. Where one walks upon the ground, exerting themselves upon it, the ground too exerts itself back in response. A fish swimming in a river both moves the water about it back, and is in turn pushed forward by the same. The formula written to represent this truth was almost laughably short, even Anton writing it with room to spare, but its implications ate at him and every other person in the hall whose minds forced them to actually consider the concept in the context of what they all knew but none dared to bring up. At least, until Anton himself did.
"Professor," he called out, hand shooting into the air before she could continue on to the next of the rapid fire concepts. "A physical action has a reaction, but is the same true for magical actions as well?"
Moments passed in utter silence as the woman stared back into the student's sightless eyes, seconds passing so slowly that it felt as if it was an eternity. "Mister Michaelis. Is this the College of Minders?"
"No, ma'am," he replied, doing his level best to retain his composure and retain the simulacrum of eye contact as best he could. At least now anyone would assume that his not quite hits were the result of anxiety rather than the truth.
"Then this is not a class upon magical theory?"
"It is not, ma'am."
"Then why do you ask me such a question?"
"To know if what we learn here describes everything, or just some things."
Silence immediately fell upon the hall at Anton's words, mixtures of anxiety, concern, and excitement coloring the faces and auras of the other students in the room. All eyes were upon the professor to see how she would react, more than a few assuming that this would be the last they would see of the sickly lordling. It was not that their instructor had a reputation for a temper, per se, but rather that any who crossed her soon found her classes intolerable in the extreme.
"Well answered, Mister Michaelis," she eventually said, the entire chamber deflating in relief or disappointment at her indulgence of Anton's question. Some few were excited to see the answer, but they were a rather small number all told compared to those who had hoped for an explosion. "Know this. Every action has a reaction, but not all reactions are immediately obvious. There is no shame in not understanding where it lies, but rest assured about one thing. Magic enacts a toll of its own upon its user, a price paid to balance out the scales. Action, reaction, equal but opposite. This is how it must be."
Just as quickly she went back to the board, writing with her right hand and erasing with her left, unconcerned by how swiftly her students had to write to keep up with her prodigious pace. That general lack of concern for any of them only made itself clearer with how nonchalantly she introduced yet another concept into the mix, one that sounded almost childish - or if anything, magical - compared to the grounded and intuitive truths they had previously been taught. If one were to ask any person upon the street why something thrown up comes down, they would perhaps answer by saying 'it was in the air' at best, but were far more likely to act confused at the question itself. How fast does it come back down? Why does it come back down that quickly? Can something fall slower than that speed? Faster?
The ultimate answer to all of these questions, they were told, lay in the fact that everything wanted to be part of everything else. Some of the more conservative students in attendance, most numbering among the cadets, scoffed at such a notion before a single look from the professor silenced them. This was no notion of universal brotherhood, but a matter of dominance. The larger a thing was, the more it could pull upon all other things - and the largest thing was the planet itself. So vast was it that the pull of all other things was minuscule in comparison, its sheer vastness orders of magnitude greater than anything even theoretically createable by man. Proof of this could be derived by the notion of two objects of different masses falling from the same distance, the professor insisting that they fell at the same speed while writing a lengthy equation proving it to be so. No practical demonstration of such was made, the students simply told that this was the work of gravity.
What gravity exactly was was left frustratingly vague, more than a few within the class assuming that it must simply be a form of magic, or some avaricious pull at the center of the planet left by the Dragon Gods when their work was done. Neither of these explanations satisfied Anton however, but the lordling struggled to comprehend the notion of an all pervasive attractive force that was not magic but instead a property of an object having mass at all. Frowning at the proof provided, his attempt for a further explanation were thwarted with a not unkind explanation that such was beyond the purview of the course. The fact that he did not understand what was happening, and that evidently he would not for quite some time, and that this was both intended and expected did not please him. But such, it seemed, was his lot.