The sorcery teacher was an old woman with grey hair tied into a bun, a sharp gaze, and a stern face that suggested she had seen everything at least twice and had formed opinions about most of it.
She looked between the two of them and said, "I see you're getting along well. That's good."
"Yes," Hermes agreed pleasantly. "We're already best friends, aren't we, Cassia?"
"Ei… right. Yes." Cassie said, in the tone of someone who had not yet confirmed this internally but was choosing not to fight it. "Friends."
Oi…
Well. Close enough.
He took the seat directly beside her despite the entire classroom being empty and approximately forty other options being available. She didn't comment on this. He chose to interpret that as acceptance.
"I am Awakened Laura," the teacher said. "Your names?"
"Hermes."
"Cassia."
Laura nodded.
"What other courses are you both taking?"
"None," Hermes said. "I chose Sorcery because I wanted to understand it deeply. I didn't want to divide my focus."
"Sorcery only, as well," said Cassie.
Laura considered this for a moment, her sharp gaze moving between them.
"I understand Cassia's choice and won't question it." She turned to Hermes. "You, however… I'd advise adding the combat course. I suspect you may have a misconception about what Sorcery actually is."
"I'll keep that in mind," Hermes said politely. "Thank you for the advice, Teacher."
He did not get a good feeling from the advice.
Laura began the curriculum.
Hermes was beyond disappointed.
Sorcery class taught you how to activate runes. That was it. The most basic applications, fire to start a campfire, water to drink, wind to generate a breeze. Individually useful. Collectively, everything he had already known since day three of his nightmare trial and significantly less than what Charles had taught him on top of that. He had asked Laura, with appropriate tact, whether this was the full extent of what the course offered given that he already knew all of it.
She had said yes.
Without an Aspect specialised in sorcery the ceiling was apparently very low. Each person had their own unique abilities and different ways of reaching it, but the ceiling itself didn't move. The tablets they used were synthetic replicas of clay, the same method, the same principle, just with better materials and worse intent behind most of the students using them.
He looked at the tablet in front of him.
He looked at Laura explaining the fire rune to an empty classroom.
I see, he thought, why there are no runic sorcerers in the story.
It was a lost art. Not lost because it was impossible, lost because the ceiling the Academy taught everyone to accept was so low that nobody ever thought to look above it.
Even the Valor clan used runes only as enchantments layered onto other things. Direct runic sorcery, runes as a primary system, as a complete practice in themselves, apparently no longer existed as a living tradition.
Which meant nobody was going to teach him anything useful here.
And practicing his own spells in this classroom would bring exactly the kind of attention he did not want. His runic sorcery was more advanced than probably anyone in this world currently.
He made his decision.
"Teacher." He raised his hand. "I'd like to drop this course and transfer to Combat."
Laura did not look disappointed. She looked, if anything, like someone whose prediction had just been confirmed on a slightly faster timeline than expected.
"Of course," she said, with an understanding smile. "That's a wise decision. Sorcery isn't for everyone. I'll notify the course leader so there's no confusion."
"Thank you, Teacher."
He gathered his things and stood. On his way out he paused at Cassie's desk.
"I'll see you at lunch. Bye and good luck with your learning."
"Bye," said Cassie, watching an unusual weather event pass and not entirely sure how to categorise it.
He left without ceremony.
He headed straight for his room.
Well. That was a letdown. He had genuinely been excited about the course.
Whatever.
He sat on his bed and stared at the ceiling and let the question that had been sitting at the back of his mind finally come forward.
What were runes, actually?
Not what they did. Not how to use them. What were they? Why did the fire rune mean fire? Why did the luck rune mean luck? Who decided that? Hope, presumably, since she had gifted humanity with writing after all, but that just pushed the question back a step. Where did Hope get it from? What was she transcribing?
His mind reached back past Shadow Slave, past the Academy, past everything, to a body of knowledge he had accumulated across years of late night rabbit holes into the occult and Gateway tape sessions and failed astral projections.
The Language of the Birds.
Langue des Oiseaux in French alchemy. Lashon Ha Tzipporim in Kabbalah. Vitan in Norse mysticism. The divine language underlying all human tongues, not a constructed language, not a cipher, not a metaphor. A living frequency system of which all material human languages were pale, degraded echoes.
The Sufis called it Mantiq al-Tayr, the Conference of the Birds. A soul's journey toward union with the divine through the recovery of the original tongue.
In the Hermetic tradition it was described as the language spoken before Babel. Before the divine tongue shattered into the multiplicity of human languages that replaced unity with division and left every civilisation holding a fragment of something they no longer had the context to understand.
In the Kabbalistic framework, the Hebrew letters were not symbols representing sounds. They were sounds that were reality. Each one a specific vibrational signature of a divine creative act. The Sefer Yetzirah described God creating the universe through the combination and permutation of twenty-two letters, not as metaphor but as literal mechanics. The operating instructions of existence, written in a language that predated the existence it was describing.
The mystic who discovered the Language of the Birds didn't just see a tree. They saw the divine letter sequence sustaining it in existence at every moment, the vibrational text the material world was written in, legible to anyone who had recovered enough of the original tongue to read it.
Hermes stared at the ceiling of his Academy room.
Runes were forty-four, at least the ones he knew. Hebrew letters were twenty-two.
The Sorcery of Names had existed before, possibly everything. Everything that exists has a name. It is a fact that a thing only starts to exist after it is given a name. Hope had not invented the runes. She had transcribed them. Gifted humanity with a writing system capable of encoding something that already existed, the same way musical notation didn't invent sound, it just gave humans a way to work with it deliberately. That was the only explanation that made sense.
Which meant the runes weren't arbitrary. They weren't assigned meanings by committee or divine fiat. They were perceptions. Partial, imperfect, culturally filtered perceptions of a frequency system that predated everything, the same system his world's mystics had been reaching toward from a dozen different directions for thousands of years without ever quite grasping the whole of it.
Hm, he thought.
So that's what I'm doing.
Not learning a magic system. Recovering a lost language.
He lay back on his bed and looked at the ceiling for a long time.