It was unusually cold that evening in the Astronomy tower, but the individuals who were blanketed by shadow did not seem to mind.

They were the quiet types, the ones who sat in the back of class and did not draw attention to themselves, but soaked up every bit of information they could find like leeches, their eyes just barely glinting with triumph when they understood new concepts. Many had thin and drawn faces, serious and blank, with dark circles indicating the strain they put their eyes under every night by candlelight. They were older students, quiet and startlingly still.

The one thing they all had in common was that they were not easily recognized. They had faces of nothing, with features that seemed to blend together, so that they reminded you at once of everyone and no one; you would confuse another person for them, and the moment they were out of sight you would forget them.

Freja Lux drew back the curtains, and the room was flooded with moonlight. The chittery scrape of the curtain hooks drew the students out of their silent contemplation. No one talked, no one laughed, and no one smiled - except for Freja.

"Good evening," she said, with a chilly brand of warmth in her voice.

Naul had done his best to hustle through the sopping campus in the clocking rain to make it to the Observatory in some decent amount of time. Sure, he'd idled a little ... how could he not? Wet, out of breath, and a little distracted, the dark-eyed boy stumbled up the stairs and toward where he was confident he could detect an unexpected gathering of fields.

Without pausing to swipe the dripping hair from his face, he sort of cracked the door, looking in a little before attempting to slide in, moist book still clutched to his chest, shoes squeaking from the puddles along the way.

His eyes widened once he stepped in the room, realizing he'd had classes with more than one of the students (there were other students!) in the room. Like a guilty puppy, he shifted his gaze to Professor Lux, a hint of color deepening in his already-flushed cheeks. He was so clocking not on time. For a moment, he considered apologizing out loud, but he swallowed that thought out of apprehension of a reprimand.

He squished his way toward an empty seat instead, biting his lip. Naul was well aware he was already pissing in his privilege before it started, being so obvious and tardy.

The other students turned and stared at Nauleth; he recognized the girl closest to him as the biologist who had sat next to him at the Headmistress' dinner. She looked a little gaunt, and surprised to see him. There was a very pregnant pause as they all wondered what Freja Lux was going to do to this impertinent newcomer.

Surprisingly, she smiled warmly at him, her eyebrows relaxing slightly as though she was relieved he had showed up at all. Something deep in the depths of her look suggested that this was a one-time leniency, perhaps to save face for him.

"I am glad it could be made," she said to him, in strange Hoxian syntax. The students seemed to tense, as though expecting a sudden reign of fire; nothing of the sort happened, though a thunderclap did shake the building slightly. The rain outside had picked up. "We were just about to begin. Introduce yourself."

Naul was, of course, anticipating a much more disapproving sort of response, shoulders tense. He winced a little as his shoes squeaked loudly against the floor, still dripping, cautiously relaxing at the surprisingly warm reception from Professor Lux. He tried not to scowl at the requirement of an introduction, part of him curious at how much of one he needed at the moment and part of him wondering if ambiguity would've been a better idea.

Still, he sniffed and glanced around, slowly allowing something more pleasant (though slightly forced) to lopsidedly grace his facial expression, hands finding his pockets as he stood there awkwardly, wishing very much to just sit down and disappear, "Nauleth Siortanti. Eighth form."

"Hello, Siordanti" was the response, echoing throughout the tower; the other students had spoken almost in unison. Susan was lagging slightly, still curious as to why this boy had interrupted their session; one eyebrow raised, she ended her last syllable when the rest of the room had fallen silent once more.

Freja had given up the smile by now; it seemed like it pained her to continue smiling for too long. Her expression was blank once more.

"You will have a chance to meet the others later," she said efficiently. She stepped backwards, putting a little more space between herself and the students for some reason. The others seemed to take this as a cue to stand up; they did so with the practiced discipline of soldiers.

"For now," she said, "perhaps we should welcome our newest member with a little...demonstration."

She glanced around the room.

"Simon."

A pale-haired boy stepped forward. Nauleth recognized this boy from his form; he always had the vague impression that he was a weak and timid boy, one who rarely spoke out and didn't have many friends. Simon was quite good at fading into the background.

This seemed like a different boy entirely - indeed, he seemed like a man now, one whose eyes showed a strange new maturity. His round face was full of confidence and solemness, as though partaking in some kind of vow or ritual; it was alive with something, perhaps best described as life itself. He bowed to Freja, and she returned the bow with equal status; it seemed odd, because teachers never did that.

Without a single word, Simon put out both arms straight into the air and held them there, quiet and meditating. He seemed to tense his entire body; his spine bent ever so slightly backwards, and his face tilted towards the ceiling, eyes clenched shut and teeth set, and he began to shake from the effort of holding the pose. It might have been comical if not for the deathly hush in the room; all eyes were trained on him.

There was a crunching sensation - not one of the usual senses, like sight, or sound, or feeling, but almost another sensation altogether. A very specific point in space in front of Nauleth crunched. He did not hear or see it, but it happened. Several conflicting sensations followed; he felt silence, he heard emptiness, and what he saw made no sense whatsoever.

Something solid, something enormous, sprung from nothingness. It was so sudden and shocking that Nauleth felt his adrenal glands spring into action, as though suddenly confronted by a predator. Simon had leaned forward, clenching his muscles, bringing both arms into his body. The thing grew; new chunks jumped out of its surface like bubbles in boiling water, revealing a crystalline structure of pure blackness, something so dark that light seemed to sink into it. Nauleth got the distinct impression that it had practically no friction. It grew and grew, writhing like an animal and rolling like an out-of-control boulder in the air; he felt the collective fields of everyone in the room expand in admiration and exhilaration.

Finally, when it was the size of a cannonball, Simon let out an enormous breath; it dropped two feet and almost hit the ground, but Freja turned to look at it and it stopped in midair, turning gently as gravity fought the spell.

No spell had been uttered. No matter had been transmuted.

Simon had collapsed once more into a chair, and was panting heavily. A few students had bent to check on him. Freja paid them no mind.

"Excellent," she said, inspecting the new matter that had come from apparently nothing. It was strangely beautiful. She glanced over at Nauleth as if expecting a question.

Naul had steadily, slowly, carefully been sliding as far back into his seat as he possibly could, dark eyes wide. His expression melted into a lopsided mixture of fear and fascination, almost studying the event with the keen intention of figuring out exactly what in Alioe's name was going on.

Then, Simon was apparently done casting and the thing was just floating there and he was left blinking up at the Hoxian woman. Arching his right eyebrow and frowning almost seriously, Naul looked away from Freja to the whatever-it-was. He had no idea what spell it was, even if he could come up with several theories as to how it happened.

His mouth worked wordlessly for a moment, gears obviously turning. Suddenly, his eyes flicked to Simon again and instead of asking any of the obvious questions (i.e. what clocking spell was that? how the clock did that happen? is that clocking dangerous?), Naul said simply,

"Casting wordlessly is more physically taxing than spoken magic? I would think the opposite would be true."

Simon looked mortified as Nauleth spoke, and his face turned cherry red. The students who had been helping him looked concerned, but Susan smirked. A tiny, nearly inaudible sound of mirth issued from her throat.

"Simon is weak," said Freja simply. The boy lowered his eyes, clearly embarrassed and exhausted. "In time, perhaps, he will learn to pace himself, to concentrate, instead of allowing his mind to wander so greatly. Susan!"

The pale girl snapped to attention, chastised.

"Explain the core of what we do," ordered Freja.

Susan swallowed, but answered in a confident and clear voice, folding her hands in front of her and not looking at Nauleth.

"Casting is a request, a prayer," she said. "Our art is different. It is not reliant on monic cooperation, or language. We do not beg the mona to change for us. We change the world around us by force."

"That is not quite right," snapped Freja.

"What I mean to say is-" She coughed. "If you - pick up a rock, and smash a window, you did not ask for that to happen. You made it happen, whether the world wanted it to or not. It's not spellwork or magic or any of that nonsense..."

Normally, every galdor in the room would have been aghast at such incredible blasphemy, but the students didn't blink an eye. Still, Freja seemed displeased at Susan's explanation, so the girl hurriedly finished her thoughts.

"It's will," she said, and the word sounded tiny against the backdrop of the enormous thing that had just happened in front of him, the miracle of creation. "Just...will."

"And understanding," spoke up another student, a young Hessean man. He sounded reverent of the idea.

"Yes," said Susan, nodding slightly, emboldened by the confirmation. "In simple terms, what we do here is impossible. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It's a law of the universe, something we always assumed as so important and integral to the structure of our world. As it turns out, there are...loopholes."

Naul's expression tightened into something almost wolfish, allowing himself to visually enjoy Simon's discomfort in front of the entire class. Tilting his head and slowly relaxing back into his seat, he listened to Susan, careful to hide any surprise from his face. Freja's subtle annoyance was interesting, and the dark-eyed boy weighed the other student's explanation with what he'd been told by the Hoxian woman in her own office in Intas.

He was quiet and thoughtful for some time, left hand tracing the woodgrain of the desk with his index finger, "Professor Lux, you've mentioned before that all things are one, anyway—" He couldn't remember the pronunciation of the word she'd used on the roof, zkratas, "—so that ultimately when we seek to bend the will of the mona, we're still also bending our own. I take it that this is all heavily based upon the same concept, if not the natural continuation of it?"

Looking up at her, Naul blinked curiously, "Regardless of whether or not we're asking the mona directly, you're implying that we're still capable of making things happen ... in more than just a magical sense, too." He paused, biting his lip as he thought about all he'd been taught about both the physical and magical world over the past eight years. With a sigh, he added quietly,

"That's not really creating something new so much as somehow redirecting what's already there. Or something close, as far as I can tell from what's going on."

Freja closed her eyes and smiled, and the hunk of strange metal (for that was almost surely what it was) rose slightly in the air, hovering and turning as if it were floating in water.

"This material did not exist until a minute ago," she said calmly, and Simon, embarrassed and red in the face as he was, turned to look at what he had made with a sort of primal reverence not usually seen on the face of a young man. "Perhaps that is difficult for the uninitiated to comprehend. After all, we have always been told that matter is matter. Mona is mona. It is all one material, and there is only so much of it to go around."

"But the universe is far bigger than we thought," said Simon breathlessly. In a normal classroom setting, Freja might have berated him for speaking out of turn, but it seemed that she valued the opinion of these few students enough to allow them the freedom of candidness. "We can push its boundaries, create new materials."

"And destroy others," said Susan, for whom the idea seemed to hold a great deal of weight.

"It's flexible," said a boy with a pronounced Bastian accent.

"Our will, Nauleth, extends beyond the simple material plane," said Freja softly. "That is why we are self-aware. The powerful beasts of this world understand this also. They do not cower beneath the the mona, but command them, as was ordained by whatever it was that created the universe. Our brain matter and our bodies are mona, but our will, our soul, is separate. Apart. Somewhere in history this was forgotten by our people, and our world has been in chaos ever since."

Naul was rather confident that if Professor Lux had any particular secret powers, the most obvious of which had to be melting brains with her words. In fact, he was very sure that the thawing sensation between his ears was in fact a direct result of what he was hearing. It wasn't unpleasant, just chillingly terrifying. At least the boy managed to keep his jaw form hanging open stupidly.

Mostly.

He gaped a little.

"You're serious? About creating things?" That was just bordering on the unthinkable, and Nauleth really considered whether or not the Hoxian woman was messing with him to find weakness later. That's what he would do, after all.

"We're both part of the mona and separate from the mona at the same time. Our separation from the mona makes us —" He paused, hesitant, still turning Freja's words over in his mind. It was a bit much to consider: it was scandalous, shocking, crazy.

"—In control." The boy stopped short of saying superior, though he wondered. The world was in chaos? Had galdori really forgotten their place in that way? Was it on purpose? Exerting the kind of control over the mona they were talking about brought back memories of pain, of brails and backlashes, of what happened when the Noble Uses were ignored.

"However," he reached up to shift his white-streaked bangs from his face, "if that's true, if we're meant to be in command of the mona in the way you imply, why is there backlash? Why are there rules? It can't all be cultural confusion."

Obviously, that was personal, but he did his best to keep it from his expression. It was, on top of a million other questions now flooding his thoughts, perhaps the one that burned the most. If everything was as she said, why did things happen the way they did now?

Susan and Simon both seemed eager to answer, but Freja turned her head slightly to them and put a thin finger to her lips, and they quailed.

"You are not yet a father," she said to Nauleth, "but perhaps you have ridden chroven, in which case this analogy will seem like sense to you. If you merely request things of the beast, it will become discontent and act out against you, sensing weakness; it will buck you if you spoil it with tender words, and it will gore you if you do not give it much respect. But in Hox our chroven do not act out against us. They follow our commands, when we give them, without fail. We are their masters, and we do not ask politely, nor grovel at the feet of the beast when it does not obey our wishes. We lash it, we starve it, and in the end we need not ask repeatedly, or kick in its sides with our heels, or speak harshly to it. It knows we are in command. With this, we give purpose to the beast."

Naul just hovered there, letting her metaphor about a galdor's place with the mona sink in like stones in a river, heavy and fast. He swallowed, hard. No, he wasn't a father, just a terrible brother and a currently half-assed fiance. He'd never ridden chroven, but he'd seen them, watched the Seventen ride them through the streets, understood the kind of unpredictable power beneath their rough, black coats.

Gods, what was this Hoxian woman saying? Did she know she was shattering everything conventional in a handful of words? Commanding the mona ... just like that?

The dark-eyed boy blinked, very sure something inside his brainbox was officially broken. His mind raced and he could feel the color drain from his face, one side at a time, something else entirely stirring deep in the back of his mind. Something new. Something very hungry to know more.

"You're saying ..." Nauleth paused, struggling to finish, words stuck in his throat because his thoughts couldn't slow down, "You're saying that we're not meant to be subject to the mona ... but the other clo—the other way around? If we, as galdori, were to take command of the mona in the way you're suggesting—"

Nothing will ever be the same.

"—what would that look like?"