Agatha was petrified as she looked at her agate. She didn’t know what was happening, yet at the same time, she possessed all the knowledge in the world. There was a single truth, a single answer to the question. No more, no less. She twirled her hand around as she inspected her little sapphire that was pinched between her index finger and thumb.
The seamstress-in-training felt like a top-class jeweler as she moved her hand around, inspecting each and every corner of her agate. Which was the whole agate because it was perfectly and utterly round. It had been since the beginning, yet now it felt even more so, as if it had retroactively written the rules of nature to place itself at the apex of smoothness.
Finally having had enough, Agatha dropped the little sapphire – though it was not-so-little now – on her palm and she rolled it around with her other hand. A coat of the clearest glass had grown atop the agate. It was thin, but that alone had doubled her agate’s volume.
Agatha wrapped her hand around her agate. She knew what she had to do. No words were needed. Only facts.
At first, the lone agate started flying out of her palm through the Control command. An action that the young villager had performed so many times that it had become second nature. But before she could do anything else, she was petrified by her own agate.
Her little sapphire had always been responsive and powerful, but that was even more so the case. It didn’t even take conscious thought, but a subconscious one, to move her agate around. This isn’t second nature anymore but… third nature. The girl hadn’t read many books, and it showed with that awful analogy.
But she told no lies.
Her lone agate moved with preternatural ease. Agatha’s strongest point hadn’t been her high-quality agate but her inhuman reaction time. She could muster commands far faster than most people – that was how she scored so high in the speed test in the statal examination – but now her agate had seemed to transcend even that need. There was no need for reaction time, for the was no need for coherent thoughts.
“And it will only get faster,” Agatha smiled.
After all, this was only the start. The increase in the quality of her agate had just started, yet she felt that it was already superior to all the agates René Dago had showed them bar one. And hers wasn’t that far away already.
“But I’m not over yet,” Fran?ois looked at the girl with curiosity as her sapphire orbited around her at greater speeds than most Speed commands.
She took a deep breath.
Agatha felt herself bustling with giddiness. Not only her, but also her agate. For some reason, she felt even more nervous than when she was at the statal examination. In a way, this was a far more important moment, for not that many people had reached the point she had just reached.
She exhaled and, at that exact moment, pushed yet another command on her agate.
Shape.
Normally, it was outright impossible to give a command to an agate while there was one in play already. It had to be removed beforehand to apply a new one. And some commands, like Speed, needed some time to pass for the agate to decelerate a bit to first remove the command imprint.
Yet none of that happened now.
Her little sapphire accepted the command, and the perfectly smooth sphere degenerated into a shifting mess. It was probably the worst shaping Agatha had done in her life, but she couldn’t help but clutch her chest and let out tears of joy.
“I’ve done it!” She muttered between sobs. “I’ve reached the Second Stratum!”
She jumped on the spot as if she were made out of springs. Her body was exploding with joy and energy. And so was her agate as it unconsciously took the shape of a ball of spikes that palpitated like a beating heart. The sight captivated her only for a moment as she turned to face Christie’s stoneshell.
“I’ve done it, Fran?ois! I’ve done it!” Agatha grabbed the mock turtle by his cheeks with her open palms as she continued hopping. “One year to reach Second Stratum?” She mockingly imitated her teacher’s voice. “How about three weeks?” She burst into a giggling fit.
The trepidation was filling and explosive. She had hit a new high that she could never match again in her life, and that was a problem, because it was highly addictive.
“I need to show Christie!” That was the first thought that passed through her mind once she had mildly calmed down. “Can you go back to the stable on your own, boy?”
“Hah,” Fran?ois grunted affirmatively.
“Attaboy!” The girl didn’t hesitate and broke into a sprint to the gardens, her lone agate lagging behind like a dog on a leash.
Unfortunately, her presence didn’t seem to be welcome there. The moment she reached the location where the tea party was taking place, she was stopped by a maid.
“I regret to inform you that you are not invited to this party, Miss Malachite.” Even though this was the first time that Agatha had seen this maid, the woman seemed to recognize her.
“I care not for the tea party!” Agatha protested. “I am only here to talk with my roommate!”
“Then you will have the modicum of respect and patience to wait until the tea party is over.”
Her words were not unreasonable at all. While Agatha doubted they could block her way to the gardens as she was also a student of the academy, it wasn’t an unreasonable petition by any means. But she couldn’t wait! Her whole body and agate were thrumming with electric excitement. She was going to burst if she didn’t free that glee, if she didn’t share it!
It wasn’t the first time an adult had tried to block her path in her life, so taking advantage of her short height, Agatha made a feint and rushed past the woman’s side.
“Christie! Christie!” Agatha shouted with the same cadence of her thrumming agate.
Once her lagging agate caught up to her, she established it on a stable orbit on top of her and finally switched in the Light command. After all, she doubted Christie would see the Shape command like she had personally tried before from her current distance. Even in all her excitement, Agatha had enough presence of mind to shove her agate high enough so the Light command didn’t blind all the onlookers, herself included. Now that her little sapphire’s quality had increased, she was able to push it far further than before as her command range had increased. She hadn’t tested it, but she knew it instinctively and deeply, down to her core.
“I have achieved the Second Stratum!” The seamstress-in-training celebrated with her arms extended toward the twilight sky.
Her roommate whispered something to that annoying noble before she rushed toward her.
“How?” She simply voiced out.
“I do not know!” Agatha chuckled in glee. “I was sketching some dress ideas with Fran?ois, and before I noticed, lo and behold, a Second Stratum agate!”
The dirty-blond girl recalled her little sapphire to her palm with Light switched off and set it airborne again, only that now she added a new command: Float. It wasn’t a command she had had the chance to use it as it was rather useless with a single agate and a single Stratum, but now it was different.
“It is amazing! I can even create floating platforms!” Agatha shaped the floating agate into a disk, but she had enough presence of mind, even through her withstanding joy, not to try to step on top of it.
“That is… er…” Christie was at a complete loss for words. She didn’t blame her; she was too. “So… it just happened?”
“It sure did,” the villager shrugged. “Pretty casually. And anticlimactic at that. One moment it was a First Stratum agate, the next one it was not.”
“I do not know what to say.”
“I have noticed,” she responded with a smile.
She couldn’t help it; she was bursting with happiness. No matter how much she tried to expel it out, it kept showing up as it came from a limitless source.
“I…” Christie looked around nervously, all the surprise she had previously shown had now snuff out and was substituted by her meek self. “We should talk it out with Teacher Dago first.”
Before Agatha could say anything, the redhead grabbed her by the hand and dragged her out of the tea party. Well, or more accurately, the dirty-blond girl let herself be dragged out. There might have been a ludicrous difference in size, but she was leagues stronger than her, after all.
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Without stopping to rest or breathe, Christie took her to René Dago’s office. The poor girl was gagging from her lack of breath by the end, and yet, she still didn’t stop until they made it to their destination.
“Teacher Dago? Are you here? It is Christina!” The tall girl knocked furiously on the door.
A few muted steps were heard before the door slowly opened. “As a matter of fact, yes.” The black-uniformed soldier said from the doorframe. “What is the issue, Chri-“ his eyes lingered on Agatha for a moment, “Miss Valasela? It is a tad rude to knock on someone’s door with such vehemence.”
Not bothering to give explanations, Christie shoved Agatha and herself into the room and then closed the door behind them.
“You better have an explanation for this rudeness,” the teacher frowned and crossed his arms.
“Agatha, show him,” she stated plainly.
The seamstress-in-training complied with her roommate’s command and summoned her agate. Whilst the new crystal-clear layer was enough of a clue to what was happening, Agatha also applied the Shape command while she had the agate floating in front of her. It was a rudimentary shape that she gave her little sapphire, one of a dodecahedron – she had learned it in geometry class – but that was enough for the teacher’s eyes to shoot wide open.
“Consider your behavior excused, Miss Valasela. And consider me impressed,” René Dago let out a soft chuckle. “So, Miss Malachite, how is it that you have achieved the Second Stratum in just three weeks?”
““That is what I would like you to explain me.”” Both Agatha and Christie voiced out at the same time. The two girls turned their heads to face each other and both portrayed visages of utter confusion. ““What she said.”” They said again at the same time, and both squinted at each other, pondering if the other had psychic powers.
“Nice trick and all,” the teacher clasped his hands together, “but alas, I do not possess the answers to the world’s mysteries.”
“Should this not be in your area of expertise?” Agatha inquired, only to notice how rude that came out, so she added a “Teacher Dago?” at the end to mitigate the effect.
“Agatecraft has been a field long shrouded in mystery, and even though scholars and soldiers have done their best to clear that fog, we are still nowhere close to achieving an empirical truth. I had high hopes for you, Miss Malachite, so in that sense I have to apologize to you, for it seems they were too little and shortsighted.”
“I would prefer answers before apologies.”
“You and me both,” the man chuckled. “For the time being, I must ask of you two things. First, do not use the newly acquired capabilities of your agate unless I am present. Second, visit Terráquea tomorrow first thing in the morning; she might have answers for you.”
“I can understand the latter, but the former? I want to experiment with the Second Stratum!”
“I get it, I get it,” he made a calming gesture with his palm. “I was young once, and I comprehend what you are going through. Even if you are, most likely, the youngest person to achieve the Second Stratum.”
“Really?” Agatha’s eyes lit up as if commanded by Light.
“Probably,” René Dago shrugged. “Even nobles tend not to teach their scions any Agatecraft for fear of repercussions. And the materialization and mindfulness I explained to you takes a lot of time. A lot…” He frowned. “You came to the academy with your agate hanging by your neck already. Since when have you had it materialized?”
“Uhm… around a month before I arrived here? I wore it all the time on the caravan to Knight’s Ascent, and I used it daily for cooking and illuminating the caravan during the night.”
“Alright,” the soldier groaned affirmatively, extending the sound of the ‘a’. “Now that makes a lot more sense. Two months is a far more lenient and understandable time than three weeks. The pace is still prodigious, mind you, but nothing that is unseen. Especially in people who have had to increase several agates to Second Stratum. But anyhow, we are diverging from the path. Do not use two commands simultaneously. So far you have been lucky, but some synergies can get incredibly dangerous, and you could kill yourself by mistake.”
Normally, their teacher was crass and gory with his jokes, but Agatha only felt plain seriousness coming out of his mouth now.
“O-oh,” the petite girl let out reflexively.
“Yeah, oh.” René Dago reiterated dryly. “Trust me here. Either way, you will only need to wait for a couple of days. This week, we will start with a bit of military Agatecraft, so you will be able to test your agate under my supervision. Understood?”
“Yes, Teacher Dago,” Agatha replied with the same seriousness, even if she was a bit perturbed.
“Now go and sleep a bit, you will need it for tomorrow.”
***
René Dago was right; she did need that sleep. Not because achieving the Second Stratum had exhausted her body or something, but because she was confronting the deranged mind of a military engineer.
“Oh, wowowowowow!” Terráquea chirped like a cockatoo the moment her eyes fell upon Agatha’s little sapphire. “Girl, you are a copper mine of surprises! Yes, yes, the perfect analogy! I was searching for platinum and instead I found copper! Superfluous!”
Agatha had heard the emaciated woman use that term before, but she was pretty sure that word wasn’t used like that. Also, even though two weeks had passed since she had last seen her, Terráquea still looked like a mess. And judging by the smell, she doubted the woman had even showered.
“Thank you for the compliments…?” The petite girl said with a healthy dose of doubt.
“Oh, it is I who must thank you, Agatha. This agate is marvelous!” The military engineer heaved up and down her little sapphire on her palm as if it were a chunk of osmium.
Then she licked the agate.
Agatha spasmed upon seeing that crass imagery. Her shoulders curled inside her body, her neck tilted to the side, and her eyelids jerked intermittently. A wave of grossness assaulted her body as if she had been the one being licked. She instantly recalled her agate.
“Do, not, do, that.” The dirty-blond girl muttered slowly and heavily.
“Okay, I will admit that it looked wrong,” Terráquea raised her open palms inoffensively. “But I had my reasons.”
“Oh, yeah? Please enlighten me.” She was so grossed out that she didn’t care if this was the person whom her whole scholarship depended on. She preferred to be out of the academy by tomorrow before having her agate be defiled like that again.
“As you might know, agates are mineral formations of mostly silicon, so…” Terráquea looked at Agatha’s confused visage. “You do not even know that?”
“To be fair, I am a new first-year student.”
“Okay, I will enlighten you then, for your education has not caught up to it just yet. What have you not understood from that sentence?”
“What is ‘silicon’?”
“Crown in the heavens!” The emaciated woman’s eyes shot wide open, and she grabbed her head as she started swaying it back and forth on the verge of a panic attack. “Were you not from a mining hamlet? How the fuck do you not know about silicon?”
“I was not a miner?” She smiled nervously. “So what is it?”
“It is a metalloid; it basically looks like a dark metal ore in nature. I will not go over with specifics, but it is a fundamental part of what agates are made of.”
“And agates are made of…?”
“Silica,” Terráquea responded with a sigh. “They are a mineral made out of this substance. There is a lot of nuance there, but the purer the silica, the clearer the agate is. When agates have a lot of coloration, it is because they have impurities like magnesium or iron, but I have seen weirder like aluminum or chrome. These impurities can be tasted, so I wanted to check out how pure this new layer on your agate was.”
“And how pure it was?”
“Well, it is not an exact science, but pretty much as pure as it can get. Having said so, technically speaking, your agate is not an agate.”
“Say what now?” Agatha’s face distorted uglily to portray her confusion. “What do you mean my agate is not an agate?”
“As I said, technically speaking, what you wield is not an agate, but a chalcedony. Having said so, we just call everything agates because it is far easier to say and classify. But there are a lot of types of ‘agates’ out there, like carnelians, chrysoprase, heliotropes, onyx, and even more chalcedonies.”
“Right…” She didn’t get a single word.
“Rocks, minerals, stones… however you might like to call them – which is already a very profound and heated discussion – have a lot of classifications based on their origins, composition, and formation.”
“Wait…” Agatha did get a single one of those words Terráquea mentioned, only that it had taken a while to process it. “Are onyx a type of agate?”
“Yeah?” The emaciated woman squinted at her as if she were dumb. Which she might or might not be. “Have you never seen anyone wield onyxes?”
Agatha shrugged. “I just thought they were black agates.”
“Yeah,” Terráquea nodded. “That is what an onyx is, girl.”
“Oh,” the girl murmured.
“And now that we are talking about different minerals, I am inclined to think that your ‘agate’ is actually an opal.”
“Wait. I am pretty sure that opals are not agates.”
“Because they are not,” she gave her again that ‘are you stupid?’ look.
“Then?”
“As I have told you, agates – as a whole – are made out of silica. But that does not mean that all the agates you know are what is academically accepted as an agate. I said that this subject went deep.” If that was a joke, she didn’t find it especially funny. “However it might be, what matters is the silica content. Opals are mostly silica like agates, only that they are more hydrated. Depths! That sounds weird if you do not have the academic context…. Meh!” Terráquea groaned, apparently not bothering to explain herself. “In layman's terms, opals are included in the agates we refer to for Agatecraft. And a little fun fact, as they are not crystalline like agates, they are mineraloids and therefore closer to rock than actual agates. So technically speaking, it is not wrong to call opals rocks, whilst it is wrong to call agates rocks.”
“Noted,” Agatha would continue to call agates rocks. “So why do you think my agate is an opal?”
“Several things: the blue color, the vitreous luster, and the slight iridescence. Having said so, opals do not tend to be this clear as they are amorphous. But then!” As soon as Agatha was about to ask what amorphous meant, Terráquea continued speaking. “Agates also do not tend to be this clear, so I think this is more of a quirk of your agate than an actual, naturally occurring thing.”
“Is this not naturally occurring?” The girl summoned her little sapphire on her palm and frowned.
“Naturally occurring?” The emaciated woman giggled with the cadence and the grace of a corpse. “No. The moment you increased the Stratum of your agate, it no longer had anything natural to do with it. And talking about Stratums, we have diverged too much from the path! Unfortunately, I am rather occupied for the time being, so I cannot inspect your agate currently with the due respect and process. So please come back in a handful of days – maybe weeks, I am still not sure – so we can have a meaningful conversation then.”
“Okay… Though I have one last inquiry.”
“Do tell.” Terráquea opened her arms, as if welcoming the question.
“I usually carry my agate on my necklace, but right now… well, it is too big to fit.”
The military engineer lunged her head forward, right before Agatha’s chest, and inspected the necklace.
“Oh, yes, that is quite the ingenious design,” she mused with a hand covering her lower jaw as she practically shoved her head on Agatha’s bosom without a hint of shame. “There is a perfect command for this occasion: Compact. Try it out.”
To help her out, Terráquea summoned one of her agates and – exactly as the command said – she compacted it into a fraction of its original size. Nothing had seemed to change except for the translucency of the woman’s agate, which now became far opaquer. With that clear imagery and such a simple command, Agatha was able to perform it first try. Alas, the results were… well, not completely unexpected knowing her background.
“That is the size of a rice grain,” Terráquea frowned at her.
“That is the size of a rice grain,” Agatha affirmed.
“Girl,” she rubbed her temples. “You should really practice control over the magnitude of your commands before anything else.”
“I… it is on my to-do list,” the seamstress-in-training answered defeatedly.
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