Perhaps I should start a bit farther back.

  The first thing I remember about the day I died is that my arms hurt. It had nothing to do with how I died, but was one of the clearer bits of that day. At seventeen, my life had the familiar structure and stability to it that my post-death life lacked.

  If I had to guess, I had awoken on my death day just before sunrise to help Mother with chores and then breakfast, before awakening Kyomi, my sister. We probably walked to the academy together, as we often did, my sister going to her Foundational classes while I continued on to the Koliminary for my magic lessons. I have no way of knowing, repetition has a way of making time fade away. But given how I don’t remember, it had to have been close to the routine for it to fade away.

  I do, however, definitively know what we had been doing in class that day. Casting had always been mentally tiring for me, but the Drawing exercises we had been doing that morning had me physically aching from my channels out.

  Channel pains are the oddest of aches. Pain from within, but not from the muscles like you might after a hard day in the field and not deep like bones pains tend to be, but rather radiating pain from the groves Energy would flow, a place more metaphysical than real and more damningly with no recourse to treat. Bone ache could be treated with willow bark, muscle ache with massage, but channel ache had no cure but time.

  And you never encounter them without pointedly causing them to yourself. I had spent the morning repeatedly filling myself with ambient energy until I was full. And then, with every channel and pool point filled to the point of spilling, I would pull harder. Some of it would leak, but most of it would stay within, pressing against my channels and causing them to stretch and swell. I then held that state for as long as I could bear before driving the overfilled energy through the channels and into a spellform. And then we’d repeat, hoping that some of the stretching would become growth.

  It was a laborious process, especially for how small the gains we would see from it were. I had been doing some variation of these exercises since I had been twelve and at seventeen going on eighteen I had seen barely a sliver of improvement. Hisako Sensei insisted that the growth would increase the more I did them, that it was a multiplicative increase. She had used the example of apples. If you started with ten apples and multiplied them by one-and-a-half, you would end up with five extra apples. However, if you started with a hundred apples, multiplying by one-an-a-half would result in a gain of fifty apples.

  I had consistently struggled with math in my Foundational classes, but even I knew that the comparison only worked if the ‘number’ for my channel was very small or the multiplicative gain was much, much, much closer to one than it was to one-and-a-half.

  I also remember that I had always hated Drawing practice. In all honesty, I was nearly at the bottom of the class in terms of Energy capacity and Magical output. It was only my understanding of the Theory-craft that had kept me in the Koliminary. I wasn’t great at the calculations that went with Theory-crafting, but I had a knack for understanding and visualizing the flow of magic and the effects of runes that had helped keep me above the minimum testing requirements.

  Though, if I was being completely honest, if the rest of my class had been notably better than the bare minimum I probably would have been removed from the class regardless. It wasn’t polite to mention such things, but my Mother was one of the senior librarians and responsible for documenting history dispassionately. And it was well documented for any who cared to look that my generation was by every metric she could obtain notably weaker than hers had been. And her generation had been notably weaker than her parents.

  It was a documented fact that everyone knew, but no one could say.

  Why? Well, twenty years ago the Imperial Arcanum had conducted a study of all the People of the Realm, from the Corvians to the Usagi to the Kitsune, and conclusively found that there had been no notable decrease in the amount of ambient magical Energy nor in the raw magical capabilities of their newest members compared to the records of the past one-hundred years.

  So sayeth the Emperor and thus so sayeth all.

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  Which is why I spent twice as long working on Drawing exercises than my mother ever had and why Mother and I had started Kyomi on the exercises early even though she had not finished her Foundation yet. There was a risk that attempting to stretch the still building channels would cause them to rupture and deny her the ability to ever have the Gift, but if we didn’t, it was exceedingly unlikely that she would be able to complete her Competency evaluations at all.

  And that was why my arms hurt. For the past three months I had been spending the evenings normally set aside for leisure doing additional Drawing exercises. My Competency evaluations were in the spring and I was not about to shame my family by being the first Kitsune in generations to fail the exam. It was risky, it was dangerous, but it was the only path open to me. And normally it wasn’t an issue, my mornings at the Koliminary were typically spent on other facets of our magical education. A full day of rest was usually enough time for my channels to recover so I could stretch them once more.

  But on the rare days where we did collective Drawing practice my private exercises became a rather large problem.

  I had spent most of the morning helping other students and completing as many outside tasks as I could reasonably do, but eventually I could delay no more and my time to Draw before Hisako Sensei came. So, while Akane worked with Hisako Sensei, I discreetly massaged my forearms and to get the trembling in my hands under control. It was nearly Third Bell which would signal the end of morning classes and I would be free to leave and collapse in the privacy of my own home.

  I also remember that I was so absorbed in trying to manage the pain that I jumped when Hisako Sensei called my name.

  “Adept Kara, please show me what you have accomplished.”

  I remember looking around and seeing that Akane was halfway to the door, her ears tucked back in clear distress. I quickly averted my eyes and focused on Hisako Sensei instead.

  “Yes Sensei,” I said with a quick bow before hurrying to her.

  “The middle urn,” she commanded.

  I nodded and breathed deep, pulling every bit of ambient Energy to me that I could under Hisako’s watchful eye. The gem in her hand faded from bright blue to a duller color, reacting to the reduction my Drawing had made. My body ached, the Energy surging against my already strained channels. Hisako Sensei didn’t say anything, but I knew from her silence that she wanted me to draw deeper. And so I did. The hurt came and went, rapidly becoming a nearly blinding pain. But I bit my lips and focused instead of moving my fingers through the appropriate motions that would direct the Energy how I wanted it to flow. Slowly, deliberately, I pushed the Energy along, squeezing it along the channels and into the building Spellform. Every bit of my body, from my shaking legs to my burning arms, insisted that I move faster, but that wasn’t how the exercise was done. The slow, gradual push was what would make my channels grow and was the only thing Hisako Sensei would accept. So I ignored the blurring at the edges of my vision and put everything I had into completing the spell.

  The Energy bled through my arms, leaking well beyond what was considered an acceptable loss for proper casting and my fingers nearly trembled, but I managed to pause after each set of finger motions so that Hisako could observe my form and to maximize the expansion potential.

  She must’ve made comments, but I could not remember what they were. Instead, I willed my fingers to finish their movements and let the Energy flow. Everything I had, everything I could do, all the Energy I had gathered pulled together…

  … and made a finger-width stream of water pour from my left pointer finger for barely two heartbeats. Maybe a quarter of it splashed against the urn. I nearly collapsed, but I was smiling.

  “That was a notable improvement,” Hisako Sensei said with a careful smile. It was her barely impressed smile, but that was far better than her politely comforting one by far.

  “Now again,” she commanded, her ears and eyes dropping from pleased to sharp and observing within a beat.

  The groan that tore itself from my throat was utterly improper and would have gotten me a very severe reprimand if the Third Bell hadn’t rung at that exact moment. I managed to close my mouth before the bell stopped ringing. She was giving me a severe and reproachful glare, but for once procedure was with me. I gave her a polite bow, mostly so she wouldn’t see me smile.

  “Thank you for your instruction,” I intoned as evenly as I could.

  There was a pause and then what could have been a suppressed sigh before she spoke.

  “We’ll resume tomorrow. Dismissed.”

  I didn’t run out of the Koliminary, my legs certainly wouldn’t have been able to manage moving that quickly, but I did make for the door as fast as I could possibly manage, pausing only long enough to pick up my sandals and the basket I had brought from home.