Pounce! 

It takes a couple of tries to get it solid and neatly-layered enough to help, but after that the onionskin shield does seem to do a bit better, holding off the blow and flexing less while not being any more tiring to hold. 

Cool! "Thanks for the idea!" she tells Ma'ar.

"You're welcome." Ma'ar still having a very hard time not visibly shaking. "I - think maybe I'm tired now. And should go. See you at class tomorrow. Skan it was nice to meet you." 

Probably that's all the polite things he should say? He flees. At a calm walking pace, he's been practicing doing that in the hallway. 

"Bye!" And she flops on Skan. She's tired too.

Ma'ar makes it back to his room, locks the door, curls up on the bed, and spends the next while hugging himself and shaking. And also smiling. His body still seems to think that was extremely dangerous and scary, but he did it ANYWAY and it was FINE and Skan and Azabel were impressed and this means that it doesn't make sense at all to keep being this scared. 

He goes to (a very late) lunch, and dinner, and breakfast the next morning, and is early for their next mage-lesson. 

Azabel shows up right on time! "Good morning."

He smiles at her. "Good morning!"

They spend that class covering more variants of shield; Ma'ar and Azabel are even further ahead of the others at this point, including the one other boy who continues to pull ahead and under normal conditions, if not for the presence of two significant outliers, would probably be top of the class. Snowstar assigns one of the teaching assistants to work with them on moving mage-barriers. 

The next lesson everyone else is still working on the basics; Snowstar brings up the layering technique but says that many people take six months of practicing control to get it down. Ma'ar and Azabel, of course, both have preexisting practice with Gift-control; Azabel's with different Gifts but a lot of it seems to transfer. The teaching assistant jumps ahead to the body-hugging personal shielding that Azabel had already figured out, which Ma'ar has also mostly gotten on his own by now (he feels a lot calmer in the dining hall when he can shield himself.)

Classes continue to meet three times a week and Ma'ar continues to be interested in practicing with Azabel on the days between classes, and gets more and more comfortable with Skan, eventually to the point of asking if he can fly on him. (He then escapes and spends the next several candlemarks in his room calming down, but it's still so worth it.) He discovers the library, finally, and that it has BOOKS on MAGIC and he can start figuring out all the kinds that even exist. He's gotten fast at reading and writing by now, and takes almost as many notes as Azabel does. 

The rest of the class is still only halfway through the usual defensive-shielding curriculum by the time Azabel and Ma'ar have jumped through all of it, so the teaching assistant tries to show them how to make stabilized mage-barriers that they can leave in place. They won't be able to do very powerful or long-lasting ones, yet, their Gifts are still developing and not at full strength, but both of them will eventually be Adepts with the ability to touch nodes. 

(Snowstar doesn't agree to teach using ley-lines yet; he says he wants students their age to have three to six months of regular training under their belt before he's confident they can do it without injuring themselves.) 

Five weeks in, Snowstar throws up his hands and graduates them early to the next level of mage-classes. They'll be starting out behind the rest of the cohort, so he assigns them a week of one-on-one tutoring first, covering the very basics of offensive magic - fireballs, levinbolts, whacking things with aimed force. 

Ma'ar, unsurprisingly, is VERY GOOD at this from the start. The tutor assigned to them is impressed and perhaps a tiny bit alarmed. 

Azabel doesn't like this part nearly as much. For one thing, the standard way of teaching it involves Literally Any Footwork, and for another, when is she going to have to get into a fight - given her lack of Literally Any Footwork making it kind of dumb for her to risk it? She makes up other theoretical uses - she might ever need to hunt or start a campfire if she goes wandering in the wilderness for no reason, say, and thwacking things could, uh, break up rocks if she wanted to... tunnel through a mountain... why is there so much fighting in this curriculum, whose idea was this.

Ma'ar helpfully tries to find ways to practice it with her that don't involve the footwork part, since that does seem very stupid. Also he suspects that the very basic techniques are going to be useful for things that aren't fights? Based on the book he's been reading about magic theory, heat-spells and mage-lights are both subtler, more precisely-targeted uses of similar kinds of energy to fireballs and levinbolts respectively, and he thinks the throwing force around is going to be related to some of the techniques mages can use in construction and artificing work, though he doesn't know if she would end up wanting to do that.

They both pass their week of tutoring, though the tutor hmms and aahs more about Azabel and warns her that she may be starting out still a little behind and should feel free to ask for extra help. They join the next session, made up of students who've been studying much longer, three to six months. 

They're also getting some classroom work, now, on the other two days of the week, where they'll talk about the theory behind magic and its practical uses in Tantara, and various other topics. The first session of that involves a discussion of magic use in metallurgy. Ma'ar sits very quietly and, by great effort of will, doesn't read anyone's mind and instead writes down everything that confuses him, more of it about what questions and sorts of answers are acceptable than about the content, and asks Azabel later. 

In the regular mage-lessons: they're learning how to shield against mage-energy! This requires trickier shaping of the energies in the shield than just blocking physical force, but quickly graspable for both of them. The rest of the class has already been drilling it for a few lessons and they spend another week on it. 

The first class the next week, they're led to a set of practice Work Rooms and paired off to spar, with a teaching assistant supervising each pair! Ma'ar makes sure he's right next to Azabel so they end up partnered. 

That's very good of him. She's good at shields and can mostly stand still and send little zaps and swats his way to make him move around while she revolves slowly on the spot.

Ma'ar is at some point going to be good enough at shields that this strategy doesn't work, but for now he's still worse than her, and he's also very careful with her, gauging the strength of whatever he throws at her to be within what her shields can take. He would - feel bad, he thinks, doing this for someone who actually needed to learn to fight, but Azabel explicitly doesn't want to do that, and he can see that it's just not smart for her to learn it the usual style anyway, it wouldn't work for her.

So he'll play along and get her through the class; it's not like any of the other students are good at practicing real fighting with each other, either, occasionally the teacher shuffles their pairings and he ends up with someone else, this was terrifying the first time but they're so bad at fighting and barely even manage to startle him. He's a little worried that if he does ever get spooked he might react instinctively enough to actually hurt someone, but the teacher seems to be taking this kind of thing into account, making sure everyone is very solid on shields before sparring and that they're supervised. 

In general Ma'ar is much less visibly scared all the time, these days. (This doesn't mean he's not scared a high percentage of the time, but he's gaining skill in doing it invisibly to everyone except Azabel, and sometimes including Azabel.) He still has a lot of nightmares but most days he makes it to class having slept enough, and he eats in the dining hall for most meals and gives the bullies a blank-eyed stare when they hassle him and they do, after a few weeks, mostly stop. 

If she ever gets in a real fight she will probably rely on set-commands. Why is this whole class about fighting! When does she get to learn to tap nodes and make GATES and ILLUSIONS and TOWERS and ARTIFACTS?

Ma'ar asks about when they'll learn nodes, at one point, and the teaching assistant actually makes a pretty good point about why their current class is useful. Drilling simple offensive magic is one of the best ways to toughen up young mage-channels, get the students used to channeling raw energy fast, which will leave them much readier to learn to tap ley-lines and eventually nodes. There's a test for it, actually, throw as much lightning as you can at a shielded target over thirty seconds, and an Adept with the right training can use that to judge who's ready for those lessons. It'd be very early, for them, but they're both making such rapid progress, given previous experience, if they want he can schedule them to do the test early and then maybe get tutoring? 

A target sounds much easier than a person who keeps moving and attacking her and should not actually be injured, if the actual point here is "maximum zap"! She would like to practice with the target.

They can do that! The school does hold that all mages should know basic self-defence with magic, which includes subduing attackers as well as shielding yourself, since you might up menaced by bandits out on the road with some non-mage friends and other innocent people in danger. But there will be lots of more complicated techniques for that later that don't involve zapping or dodging, she may just do better with that. In the meantime: target! He takes them over to a different room to try it. 

ZAPZAPZAPZAPZAP

That gets a smile and some light applause from the teaching assistant. "Not bad! I'm not trained to assess if that passes the threshold, we'll need to get someone else in here for that next time they're available, but - I wouldn't be surprised if that's enough. Ma'ar?" 

Ma'ar always drops into a balanced fighting stance when doing offensive magic, it seems instinctive, and his face looks kind of scary, but this time he's also looking excited. 

LIIIIIIGHTNING! 

"Excellent! All right, both of you, take a breather and you can practice it some more until you're tired - do stop right away if you have a headache, please." 

"Okay, thank you!" She rests a bit, stretching. She has taken to stretching when taking magic breaks because it feels like less of a waste of time than just lying there but if you do it right stretching is a lot like lying there except your leg is uncomfortable.

They rest and then practice it some more until they're both out of breath and sweaty - it turns out that doing magic with the goal of maximum zap ends up tiring the same way running is, not that Azabel would presumably know - and then the teaching assistant dismisses them early, with the promise of booking the Adept who does the assessments for next week. 

Ma'ar is tired enough that there's no room left to be scared even a little bit, and he's so pleased with himself! 

"They should have told us what the point was to begin with," she opines.

Shrug. It's not like he minded learning more fighting. "- I feel a lot less scared about going places," he admits. "Even though - probably no one would start a fight and we'd both get in trouble if they did - if I could fight back..." 

"I guess maybe I would feel like that if I didn't already have set-commands. And could... walk. I'm glad you're feeling better though."