Apprentice: Page 2

Someone's fist pounded on my door, and I felt myself slip back into consciousness. I groaned and pulled myself out of bed. My first night in that house was rough, to say the least. Sleep hadn't come until the early hours of the day, and it had been restless when it did arrive. In the mirror, some ghoulish thing stared back at me. I dug through the closet, settling on one of the less tacky outfits supplied to me. Thankfully, Forester lacked Tormani's rigid dress code, so I walked into the bathroom in a white dress shirt, blue jeans, and some pointy leather shoes.

I took a moment to straighten my hair with a comb before anyone had to see it. From the other entrance walked in a zombified Lexi. She rolled her eyes when she saw me standing in front of the mirror.

"Hurry up, Johnson, I need to curl my hair."

"Morning, Miss North, just crawl out of bed, did you?"

"Just crawl out of the Nine Hells, did you?"

I scoffed at her. Ironic, I know, considering the source of my magical power. Fortunately, she didn't know that.

"You've got a mirror in your room, do your hair there."

"The outlet's too far from the mirror, genius."

I spread a layer of toothpaste over my toothbrush.

"Well, guess you better wait."

A few minutes later, we all met Forester out in the backyard. He was reading from a large leather-bound tome while we all waited. After a few minutes of awkward silence, one of the other humans, a man called Jake, cleared his throat.

"Uh, Mr. Forester?"

his head snapped upwards like he had been surprised.

"Uh, so, like, I don't really have any material planned for today, so your job is to sort this pile of sand into individual colors."

He gestured at a pile of rainbow sand that appeared next to him on the ground.

"Come and get me when you're done."

Then he just walked away, never looking up from his book.

I have never seen someone switch from dead tired to eager for knowledge to rage so quickly. Lexi's face was flush red. Out of sympathy, I only laughed a little.

"Th-this is crazy. We're training for the Guild, not a sand sorting competition!"

The rest of us mumbled in assent. But it's not like we had much of a say, so we just sat in the grass, and began using magic to move individual grains into small piles. After just a few minutes, I realized that the only one of us making any real progress was the goblin girl, Emma.

I watched her fingers mime the pinching of each grain, and watched the singular grain arc to the appropriate pile. There was an efficiency in her spell that we all lacked. It's was almost like she was using a different spell.

Greater Mage Hand

I felt a now-familiar sensation, like a Lego brick clicking into place. The words bounced through my mind. Greater Telekinesis. I had gained Greater Teleportation just yesterday, but that was useless without regular Teleportation. But with Greater Telekinesis, the task at hand became much simpler.

A few hours had passed, and we had fallen into a rhythm and had even made a noticeable dent in the pile. It was difficult, but at least it wasn't impossible.

For a while, we just sorted in silence.

By the time Forester returned, the sun was beginning to set, and we were all drenched in sweat. We were exhausted, and annoyed, sure, but we had done it. We had sorted the sand into individual red, blue, yellow, and green piles.

"Cool, you guys are done. You can go inside, that's all for today."

At that point, we were all too drained to even be really angry at him, and we just shuffled to our rooms silently. I flopped onto my bed, not even bothering to take my shoes off. I planned to just sleep for the rest of the day, but life had... other plans.