Fairy Tail: Dawn of Change by Melissa Nichols (books to read for self improvement txt) 📕

hurt the most. No matter how much she fought it, she was exhausted. And if he said it was dangerous to practice magic when she was this tired, well… he was her teacher so he knew best. She needed to trust him and do as he said.

 

"Can you let go now?" Gray asked, relief making his gut unknot. He wasn't really all that comfortable with the clinging and hugging and stuff, but he could tell that she'd needed it. He wasn't that blind.

Roxanne sniffed one more time and nodded against his chest, and then pulled back, wiping her eyes and nose on her sleeve and desperately wishing she had a handkerchief or tissues.

Gray relaxed a little more, letting out a sigh of relief and plopping down on the ground. If that little scene hadn't wrung him out so thoroughly, he might have taken better note of the way Roxanne had corralled her disappointment and stress, and shoved them aside for later instead of dealing with them properly.

 

"Okay, so," he said, "do you need a notebook?" He hadn't thought to bring one—stupid, stupid!—but there were a bunch of little stores nearby, so he could run and buy one if he needed to.

 

Roxanne shook her head, sitting down in the shade nearby. She was still shaky from crying, and her voice wavered. "I'm good at remembering things." She'd never really needed to take notes in school the way other kids had. It wasn't quite what Jacob had called a 'photographic memory', but once she'd heard the lecture and seen a few examples, she never forgot them.

 

"Alright." Gray nodded, eyes lifting to watch the pattern of sunlight through the leaves overhead as he searched his memory for the fundamentals. "Let's see, where to start… I guess the first thing you need to know is that every spell requires three things. Do you know what they are?"

 

"Um…" Roxanne hurriedly searched her memories of the anime and tried to find the three things that appeared most consistently. "An incantation, a magic circle, and magic energy?" she guessed. In almost every instance, two things were always shown while a spell was being cast. One was a character shouting the name of the spell, such as Natsu's Fire Dragon Roar. The second was a rune-etched magic circle, which appeared as the spell was being cast and was usually the origin point for the spell itself. The magic energy was mentioned on several occasions, mostly in the first season as Lucy pointed out that magic energy was the power behind the spells.

 

"Exactly," Gray nodded, pleased that she already knew that much. "Here's the thing, though—before a mage can cast a spell, he -or, well, she- needs to have discipline, visualization, and determination." At her confused and fearful expression, he shook his head. "I don't mean discipline as in being punished for doing something wrong. I mean she needs to have the mental and physical strength needed to perform magic. Without it, even the simplest of spells can go horribly wrong."

 

"But… why?" Roxanne frowned, puzzled. She couldn't recall any scenes from the anime with the characters hurting themselves by screwing up their magic. Well, there was the flashback to Gray's childhood with Ur. One of his spells had fizzled and backfired at him because he was just starting to learn how to handle his magic. But there wasn't any time where an adult couldn't handle the magic. "How can a simple spell go bad?"

 

"Because magic is dangerous," Gray said simply, thinking of anger, shock, and a world suddenly empty and cold. "It's born when a mage's energy harmonizes with the natural energies around them. But magic isn't alive, it's not intelligent, and it doesn't care if someone gets hurt. It's born from the mage's soul, and it's up to the mage to decide what to do with it. Bad people use magic to do bad things, and good people use magic to do good things. But even a good person can hurt someone if they make a mistake. Like…" He tried to think of an analogy. "What if I'd messed up making the net you were crawling under this morning? If I'd made the barbs too sharp, they could have hurt you even though I never meant them to. Or what if I'd messed up with Hit the Birdie? Your racket could have shattered and the splinters could have taken out an eye or something. Or think about the brawl that happened the day you first showed up—there's a reason Gramps stops that kind of thing before magic gets involved." Gray paused at the wide-eyed stare she gave him. Oops, didn't mean to scare her.

 

"None of us in Fairy Tail are careless enough to hurt anyone like that," he assured her hastily. "Not even Natsu, and he's a reckless idiot sometimes. But that's because all of us know what we're doing, and we trained to the point that we don't have to think about doing it right, we just do it. That's part of discipline."

 

"Oh." Roxanne nodded slowly, feeling better. "That's why you said I can't practice on my own."

 

"Exactly." Gray nodded. "Since we use the same kind of magic, if something goes wrong while you practice, I need to be around to counter it until you have the experience to make it safe to practice on your own. Incantations help with that discipline. Any kind of ritual does—Ice Make generally uses gestures instead, because, well…" Gray tried to remember how Ur had explained it to him. "You use your hands to make things, right? Cooking, cleaning, building, even art and stuff. If you make something, it's with your own two hands. And it's the same with Ice Make magic. Think of it as a kind of sign-language version of an incantation, though sometimes we use verbal incantations too. Anyway, they help us remember our goal."

 

Roxanne nodded, fascinated, disappointment and tears entirely forgotten now. This was interesting. "So the incantations, the gestures… they're a short-cut for remembering how to do the spell right?"

 

"Right. It also helps you focus—I mean, if you're yelling at someone, your mind isn't going to be a million miles away, worrying about if you left the stove on, you know?"

 

Roxanne giggled at the moment of levity, but then sobered. "So why didn't you use incantations while making the equipment for Hit the Birdie?"

 

"Because," Gray said. "I don't have an incantation or specific gestures for that yet—no shortcut—so I have to pay attention and be very careful as I do it the long way. And speaking of doing… next up is the magic circle. Do you know what its function is?"

 

"Um…" Roxanne wracked her brain, but she couldn't think of any episode that had clearly explained it. The closest she could think of was Freed's Rune Magic. "It holds the runes that define how the spell works?"

 

"Yes and no. Technically, the magic circle is a portal between magic energy and intention, and the magic's physical form. It's not something the mage consciously creates, unless they're a mage who specializes in manipulating other magics, but it's part of the spell-casting process nonetheless." Levi had gushed a couple of times about how the runes that appeared in a magic circle held the keys to the magic's rules and nature, but there were very few people who could do anything about that. Most spells didn't last long enough.

 

"Does the color matter?" Roxanne asked. She'd always wondered that. In the anime, everyone's magic circles had been a different color, and she'd wondered if the color depended on the magic being used, or if it was just to make it easier for the audience to tell them apart.

 

Gray nodded. "Your magic is pulled from your soul, remember? The kind of magic you're using changes the color of the magic circle, and it's tied to the affinities of your soul, and the energy stored in your Magic Container. Take Ice Make, for instance. Our magic circles are a bright blue-green—" Cana had specified 'cyan' once. "—though there are slight differences depending on who's casting the magic."

 

"But… ice is white, isn't it?" Roxanne frowned, thinking about it. "So why aren't our magic circles white?"

 

"Well, what color is water?" Gray asked her, leaning back and waiting for an answer.

 

"Um… blue?"

 

"That's what most people think." Gray grinned. "But water is actually clear, unless there's something in it that changes the color. The ocean, for example, only looks blue because it's reflecting the sky. Ice is white because the little tiny flaws in it reflect light weirdly and make it look white even though its actually clear."

 

Roxanne's mouth made a little 'O' of surprise. Like a polar bear's fur! She'd learned that in class, once. Polar bears had black skin, but their fur was clear and reflected light funny to make them look white while still soaking up the sunlight enough to keep the bears warm.

 

"But… why is our  magic cyan, then?" That was the color his magic circles had been in the show, and that was the color of her own soul. So there must be some significance behind it. It couldn’t just be the animators making the colors pretty.

 

"Because of the reflective nature of water and ice, they reflect the mage's soul color. And mages with Ice magic tend to have cyan-colored souls." Gray smiled at her. His own magic circles were ever-so-slightly brighter than Lyon's had been, which someone somewhere probably thought was ironic, considering Lyon was the one with ice-white hair while Gray's hair was black.

 

"With other magics, you can use the color to figure out the element. Pure Water magic is a much deeper blue. Natsu's Fire magic is red and orange. Earth magic has two components, Leaf and Soil, and each of them have their own magic circle color. Anything that creates or controls plant matter has a green magic circle, while magic that controls actual dirt has brown ones. And if a spell uses multiple types of magic, or even if it's one type but is just really powerful, it usually has multiple magic circles." Like Erza's Heaven's Wheel armor and the freaking two hundred swords she could individually summon while wearing it. "Based on all of this, the number and colors of magic circles, you can guess quite a bit about the spell and estimate how powerful it is." Doing that on the fly, in the middle of combat, was nowhere near as easy as it sounded.

 

"Wow," Roxanne murmured to herself, more than a little awed. She'd never realized how complex magic could be— A frown of confusion, thinking back to something Gray had said earlier but hadn't adequately explained. "What's a magic container?" she asked. It sounded like an enchanted cookie jar or something.

 

Gray tilted his head back a little, frowning as he thought about what to say. "Scientists say that there's a container inside each mage that holds their magic energy, like an organ that stores it until you need to use it. Personally, I tend to think of my whole body as that container, since there's not an actual physical organ that you can point to and say 'that's where it is', you know?"

 

Roxanne nodded. "And your magic energy is what lets you do the magic, right?"

 

"Right," Gray nodded back at her, smiling just a little. "You can have the strongest mind in the world or the most advantageous magic ever discovered, but if you don't have the energy to activate it then the magic is meaningless. Like, it doesn't matter how much you want to climb a tree. If you're too tired to climb, or you're not strong enough to lift your own weight, you're not climbing that tree."

 

Roxanne bit her lip, hugging her knees to her chest thoughtfully. "What do we do if we're running low on magic energy?" she asked. "Can we get more? Like, um, I'm training now to make myself stronger and, and so I don't get tired so fast." And she wasn't going to get upset at