#askwinstormandmarkless

It is always interesting, addressing a class for the first time. Who watches her, eager to learn? Who watches the other students, and how? Are they wary or open? Have they already found themselves a clique, or are they solitary? She knows the Academy well enough to predict which ones will survive, and for how long. The tall boy  in the corner, hunched over his books and refusing to meet her eye... unless someone takes him under their protection, as her mother did for Master Djafi when they were young,  he will not make it more than a year. The girl in the front row tries to mask her ambition behind a pleasant expression; that will serve her well once she’s practiced it more. Safiya raises one of her eyebrows at the direct stare of another boy. When he’s older, she thinks, he will challenge one of the masters. Perhaps even her.

But there is time before that, and perhaps she will be wrong about her students one of these days. Safiya turns, Kaji fluttering behind one shoulder, and regards them more openly. They quieten under her gaze.

“Good morning,” she wishes them, and waits for the ragged chorus of “Good morning, Mistress Safiya.” Over the years, they will return her greetings many times, but they will never drift closer to unison. For all their cliques and their shared order, Red Wizards are individualistic creatures.

“Tell me,” she says, leaning against her desk, “what is life?”

There is the usual silence as everyone avoids her gaze, afraid of giving the wrong answer, drawing attention, speaking up.

She waits them out.

The one in the front says “Power,” with no nerves or clearing of her throat.

“Exactly the answer I would expect from a Red Wizard of Thay,” Safiya says, and the girl looks very proud of herself – at least until Safiya adds, “Who can give me an answer that’s a little less obvious and a little more original?”

Silence again.

“Survival,”  mutters another girl.

“That’s not original,” the first retorts, and then the class starts to come alive. Safiya settles back against her desk and observes.

“Death,” one offers, and “That’s just a bad paradox,” says another. “What about continuance?”

“Life?” “Tautology!”

“Effort.”

“Competition.”

"Pain."

The words are bandied around the room. “Look, the characteristics of life are reproduction, metabolism, excretion-“

“Oh, so the meaning of life is-“

“She wasn’t asking about the meaning-“

When she thinks they’ve talked themselves out, she takes control of the classroom again, with one word. “Change.”

Then she elaborates. “Life is change. Living creatures can change themselves as they grow or develop; their very process of living changes the world around them. You are changing now, and you are affecting change. What is the motto carved into the gates of the Academy?”

“Nothing is immutable,” they mutter, the ones who remember.

“Nothing,” Safiya repeats. “What is living will change on its own, and you may guide those changes. What does not live may be changed by your life. Students...” she smiles now, a calculated softening, “only grasp this, and all the mysteries of the school of Transmutation will clarify themselves for you. Are you ready to begin?”

They nod – some eagerly still, some awed, some unimpressed by her rhetoric, others bored already.

Had she ever been that young?

“Excellent,” she tells them, and says a few words to Kaji. Her familiar flaps away, returning with one of the Academy’s gnolls, who has a brown rabbit in a cage. Safiya takes the cage, dismisses the servitor, and turns back to her class. “Now, say I wished to change this beast into... hm, a goat. What spell would you recommend, and what are the potential complications of that approach? Are their similarities – mammals with systems for regurgitation and redigestion – greater than their differences?”

In three hours, Safiya will leave the Academy.

In two days, her mother will be dead.

In less than a month, Safiya will learn the truth.