Good enough for now, he supposes.

Maybe if he's lucky he'll be able to kill Savaross before anything irrevocable happens to her. Or maybe not! Who knows.

Once he's completed the anti-witch-and-wizard curriculum they can go back to non-metamagic topics for a while. Application of telekinesis-adjacent effects to reshape contiguous matter.

Also known as More Awful Things To Do To Small Animals.

Well, partly; this subject is tricky because it works differently for different--textures, for lack of a better word--of matter. Doing awful things to small animals will be useful, but not comprehensively so.

Eh, fine. There are more things in this world than animal torture.

Yes. Of course, if he's creative and really wants to, he can probably leverage stoneshaping-or-what-have-you into animal torture.

It's a fun hobby.

And one Savaross is happy to encourage!

Next: assorted defensive magic, including the blinding circle thing.

Nice. That's a good one to know.

It is one of the easier protective spells. Like most of the recent ones, this section of the curriculum is complicated and extensive. He will probably finish at just about the same time as his eleventh birthday.

He celebrates his birthday by reading poetry and torturing songbirds!

Anaseverina has managed for his birthday to locate a whole human anatomy textbook. Not all the drawings are as gory as might be hoped, but a lot of them are.

She is pretty great and he is glad he has her.

She is really glad that he is glad he has her. Being had by him is so much better than trying to navigate the other apprentices on her own.

They have a pretty good thing going here!

He never mentions to her that that one incident was engineered by Savaross. That fact goes entirely unmentioned by him in all contexts. But he thinks about it, sometimes, and he studies very hard.

Then he will move onto more advanced subjects! Lesser and Greater Transmutation should together take up about a year, if only because Greater Transmutation needs a lot of power. Lesser Transmutation requires specific categories of ingredient, for the given result, but can have fairly complex results. Greater Transmutation can turn any material into any other, but it's really hard to get more complicated than just a chunk of a given material, and some materials are more difficult than others.

These skills have fewer applications in animal torture, but they're still kind of neat.

He could turn bits of animals into other things, presumably.

For his twelfth birthday Anaseverina finds him a knife with a prettily carved wooden hilt and matching sheath.

Awwwww. He likes that one a lot.

Savaross starts him on enchanting. This won't take long to get the basics of but will be very hard to actually master.

The basics are as follows: a spell is "stuck" to an object, in such a way that it will activate when a given trigger condition is met. This is similar to some of the principles in the wards section, but it is distinct in the following tricky ways! The more complicated the trigger condition or spell, the harder it is; it's also possible to put more than one spell on a given object but that gets non-linearly more difficult. Also, enchanted objects only have a certain amount of charge, and need to be refueled every so often; the power will slowly bleed out even if the spell is never activated.

It's fiddly and technical and not his favourite thing, but he learns it anyway. It's certainly useful.

It's very fiddly and technical! Savaross is going to keep him on it for a while.

He is extremely stubborn about learning all the magic as well and as fast as he can.

When he is almost thirteen Anaseverina would like to talk to him about a thing.

Then he will happily go somewhere with her to talk about a thing!