WebCat Studios
Chapter 1 — The Dreamer of Geargrin Hollow
Blizzit Geargrin’s room woke up before he did.
Springs yawned in the cot. Gears clicked in the walls. A kettle somewhere to the left began to whistle of its own accord, which was worrying because Blizzit distinctly remembered not having filled it with water. A soft bluish glow pulsed from the ceiling—his “never-go-out nightlight,” which had failed to live up to its name by refusing to go out even during the day.
Blizzit sat up, hair making a sincere attempt at several directions at once. He pushed his goggles from his chin to his forehead—he wore them to sleep, because for Blizzit the difference between “night” and “workshop” was philosophical at best—and squinted at the workbench tucked beneath the low stone arch of the room.
The self-lighting lantern was still sneezing.
“Bless you,” he told it automatically.
The lantern responded by inhaling, wheezing, and puffing a cone of sparks that would have lit a tavern hearth if Blizzit’s mother hadn’t fitted every surface in his room with fireproofed felt. A sooty puff drifted up and wrote the word “ACHOO” in the air—one of the side effects of mixing a breath rune with a spark rune on a lantern lid.
“All right,” Blizzit said, climbing out of bed and tripping over a stack of springs that had sworn they would remain stationary and then, at the last moment, decided not to. “We’ve narrowed the problem. The lantern works as long as it has a cold.”
He padded across the stone floor of Geargrin Hollow, the tunneled home his family had maintained for three generations. The Geargrins were respectable gnomes. They paid their tunnel dues, polished their door-knobs on market day, and only blew up one roof between them, and that had been at a festival where explosions were encouraged. Blizzit loved them dearly—especially because they tolerated him as if he were a particularly curious thunderstorm that had taken up residence in the house.
He prodded the lantern’s chimney with a brass pick. “If I add a drip of mint oil, you’ll clear right up.”
The lantern sniffed—truly sniffed—and went dim with relief. For three dignified seconds it behaved like an ordinary lamp. Then it sneezed so hard the top popped off, hit the ceiling, and clanged into a shelf of labeled jars: ground mallowroot, powdered shellstone, shaved copper, three varieties of “for later,” and a jar simply marked “do not.”
Blizzit lunged, caught the falling lid, and missed everything else. The jars tumbled into the air in graceful arcs that looked, for a breathless moment, as if they might all return to their places. They did not. Mallowroot dusted his hair. Shellstone pinged across the floor. The “do not” jar made a sound like laughter as it bounced and rolled under the bed.
“Morning!” Blizzit sang to the room, because saying it any other way would have felt dishonest. “Today is for greatness.”
A muffled voice called from the tunnel. “Is greatness the thing currently trying to burn the breakfast?”
“On my way, Mum!” Blizzit kicked his boots on, grabbed the nearest cleanish apron, and thumped into the corridor that led to the kitchen cavern. Geargrin Hollow wasn’t very large, but it had a habit of going on; every year or so someone discovered a side passage that had always been there and felt silly about it. The walls were warmly lit with imbued stones, the floor was swept, and the ceiling was just high enough for Blizzit’s father to stand proud without scraping his head.
“Your kettle,” his mother said, “is whistling in a key I associate with danger.”
“I think it’s practicing,” Blizzit said.
His father, a broad-shouldered gnome with sensible eyebrows, folded the morning paper and cleared his throat. “Practicing for what, exactly?”
“Spontaneous excellence,” Blizzit said, because he felt that every day ought to include at least one audacious sentence. He took the kettle off the hob and set it on a trivet. The kettle hummed to itself, then sighed and went quiet as if scolded.
“How are you feeling about your application?” his mother asked, sliding a plate of crisped mushrooms and buttered bread in front of him. She had quick hands and quicker eyes, and a way of loving Blizzit that made him feel both safe and sharper.
Blizzit’s heart did a double-tap. “Confident,” he said. “Adjacent to confident. Adjacent to the neighborhood of confident. All right, I haven’t posted it yet.”
His father’s sensible eyebrows rose. “The deadline is three days away.”
“That’s practically four if you count optimism,” Blizzit said.
His mother’s look served as both reply and prophecy. “Blizzit.”
“I’ll send it today,” he promised, then buttered his bread with a tool that was either a very small trowel or a very large spoon and decided it was both. “I just want it to be perfect.”
“Perfection is the sibling of never,” his father said, and sipped his tea.
Blizzit chewed. The word Arcanum spread honey-hot across the back of his tongue: Arcanum of Dawnfire, the greatest academy of magic and science in the mountains beyond Havenmoor, whose towers caught the morning light first and sent it ringing down the valleys like bright bells. He wanted to be there so badly that sometimes his hands shook and he had to go fix something just to make the feeling bearable.
“I can do it,” he said to the butter, the table, the room, himself. “I just have to… demonstrate it on paper.” He winced at the thought of summing up his entire curiosity in eight neat paragraphs.
“Demonstrate it by not setting the kitchen on fire before second breakfast,” his mother said, and kissed his hairline.
Blizzit took the hint. After breakfast he retreated to his room, collected his scattered jars, coaxed the nightlight to power down with a lullaby he played on a two-string gearharp, and faced the neat stack of parchment on his desk. The application questions were straightforward; nothing in Blizzit’s life had prepared him for straightforward. List your competencies. Describe a time you solved a problem using methodical reasoning. Explain why the Arcanum of Dawnfire should consider you for study in the following tracks: spellcraft, alchemy, and applied mechanics.
He penned the first answer.
Competencies:
– curiosity (weaponized)
– resilience to heat, smoke, and disappointment
– excellent aim when catching falling lids
– rapid improvisation under conditions I almost certainly created myself
He frowned, chewed the end of the quill, and crossed out weaponized. He wrote more seriously beneath it: I can read three alphabets, solder a seam without warping the measure, inscribe a first-tier warding rune (if not rushed), and assemble a gear train that will still be ticking a year later. He added: I can also admit when I don’t know a thing and ask someone who does.
That last line made him think of Professor Mentalbus.
Just thinking the name straightened Blizzit’s back. Mentalbus had a knack for arriving in precisely the way a day needed him—sometimes with an armful of scrolls and a lecture about the one missing step in a process; sometimes with a bag of sweet buns and the quiet that settled around kind men who had lost and learned. He was known simply as Mentalbus, which to Blizzit had always sounded like a bell you heard before you could see the tower.
The bell, as if hearing itself invoked, chimed in the corridor outside. Literally: the household knocker was a little euphonium with a mouth, and when you pressed the button it played an agreeable note. Blizzit looked up. His mother’s delighted voice carried from the front tunnel.
“Blizzit! We have company.”
He thumped into the foyer nearly upside down with eagerness. Mentalbus stood under the lintel, dust on his boots, wind in his beard, the corners of his eyes crinkled as if someone had told him a good joke just out of earshot. He wore a professor’s long coat, the hem scorched in ways that suggested theory and practice had not always gotten along this week.
“My boy,” Mentalbus said, and Blizzit was twelve again for a heartbeat, tugged forward by the gravity of belonging. They embraced in a clatter of buckles and pens.
“We were just talking about you,” Blizzit said.
“Then I arrived at the proper moment,” Mentalbus replied. He set a satchel on the bench and from it drew—like a conjurer—three still-warm buns fragrant with cinnamon. “For your mother’s kindness, your father’s patience, and your appetite for chaos.”
Blizzit’s father chuckled in the doorway and accepted the bun with the dignity of a man who had very often earned it.
They sat in the kitchen with tea that no longer hummed and watched the steam coil between them like a slow spell. For a while they spoke of small things—market gossip, a neighbor’s burrow that had sunk a few inches and thrown all the cupboards off level, Mentalbus’s opinion about the new archivist at the Arcanum (“very tidy, which is admirable but possibly dangerous in large amounts”).
At last Mentalbus turned his gaze on Blizzit. The professor’s eyes had a way of making silence feel like an invitation instead of a test.
“I’m writing my application,” Blizzit blurted. “And… I don’t know how to say that I’m the kind of student they want when I am also the kind of student that knocks over his own sentences while trying to write them.”
Mentalbus smiled. “Do you love learning?”
“Yes.”
“Do you break things because you are careless, or because you are reaching?”
Blizzit looked at his hands, at the constellation of nicks and burns, at the way his fingers could not stop miming a gear’s rotation while his mind turned. “Because I am reaching,” he said softly.
“Then tell them,” Mentalbus said. “Any academy worth its tower wants students who reach. Rules exist not to prevent the reaching, but to keep the rafters on while you do.” He paused. “And Blizzit… the Arcanum is many things, but it is not perfect. It needs students who will ask, ‘Why not?’ and teachers who will answer, ‘Because we tried that and it bit us,’ and then try it again properly. If anyone gives you the chance to be that student, it should be us.”
Blizzit swallowed around a knot that wasn’t peril, exactly, but its more affectionate cousin. “What if they don’t?”
“Then you will keep reaching,” Mentalbus said, and his voice gentled. “And I will keep helping you find a better ladder.”
They spent the afternoon at the workbench. Mentalbus watched without hovering, corrected without scolding. When Blizzit reached for the “do not” jar, Mentalbus cleared his throat with such timing that Blizzit set it down and grabbed the “absolutely” jar instead. They tinkered a little and talked a lot. Together they coaxed the self-lighting lantern into a state that could be described as “occasionally dignified.” It no longer sneezed; it harrumphed. Progress.
“Write the application now,” Mentalbus said as shadows lengthened in the tunnel. “Don’t let dawn find you with an unsent dream.”
So Blizzit wrote. He described the time he’d repaired the village mill’s jammed sluice using a fork, two buttons, and a length of wire—methodical reasoning under community pressure—and he described the night he’d stayed up in the mushroom cellar working out why condensate runes failed in damp air—hypothesis, test, failure, repeat, repeat, repeat, success. He wrote about wanting to learn spellcraft not to hurl fire but to wrap enchantments around machinery like careful cloth, about alchemy not to transmute gold but to find the temperaments of materials, about mechanics not to replace magic but to host it. He said the word host three times before noticing, then left it because that was honest too.
At the bottom he added the line that felt like a secret said into a friend’s ear: I won’t be the quietest student in your halls. But I will be the one who keeps trying until the door opens, and then I will prop it open for the next person.
He sanded the ink, rolled the sheets into a tight scroll, and sealed it with a dab of wax imprinted with the small gear that served as the family’s mark.
“How shall we send it?” his mother asked, arriving with a ribbon. “Courier? Rider? One of those new pneumatic tubes the dwarves are installing in town—oh, don’t make that face, I know you want to ride in one.”
Blizzit grinned, guilty. “I do. But no. We’ll do it properly.”
Properly, in Geargrin Hollow, meant the old way. They climbed the front stairs to the hill’s lip, where the door opened onto the late afternoon and the world pitched away in green and gold. Havenmoor lay a valley over, roofs aglint. Overhead the air was in the business of becoming evening. A post perch stood to the right of the door, and on it sat a delivery owl of such elderly dignity that Blizzit always addressed him as Sir.
“Sir,” he said, bowing. “An errand, if you please.”
The owl blinked once, slowly, as if to say I have seen a great deal and you are part of it, unfortunately. Blizzit tied the scroll to the owl’s leg with the ribbon. The seal bore the tower sign of the Arcanum of Dawnfire, preprinted on the application wrapper. Something in his chest rang like a struck glass.
“To the Arcanum,” Blizzit whispered. “To the morning towers.”
The owl considered the wind, the sky, and the state of its joints, then spread its wings and launched. Blizzit and his parents watched until it was a black brushstroke against the bright, then until it was not a brushstroke at all, then until there was nothing left but the space it had drawn through.
“Done,” his father said, and set a hand on Blizzit’s shoulder.
“Done,” Blizzit echoed, and felt both lighter and like he had put a coin into a machine that would not stop until it had delivered an answer.
That night he lay awake in the not-dark of his stubborn nightlight and listened to Geargrin Hollow’s gentle noises: a pipe ticking as it cooled, the soft grit of stone settling, the house breathing in the way all old places do when no one is trying to name it. He imagined the Arcanum’s great gates, etched with wards older than kingdoms; imagined their hinges lifting; imagined walking through. He clutched the goggles at his throat like a charm and promised himself that if the gates stayed shut, he would learn how hinges worked until he could teach the gates a better way to open.
In the morning he woke before the kettle did and surprised the house by beating it to a whistle. For three days, Blizzit was a model of patience—by his standards, which meant he checked the post perch every hour on the hour and, when the hour wasn’t moving quickly enough, built a small mechanical hour to chase the big one.
He pulled weeds for his mother. He fixed a neighbor’s sticky latch (he had designed it sticky on purpose, but the neighbor had not shared his sense of humor). He paid for a smashed jar at the apothecary with an earnest apology and a gear that chimed pleasantly when turned. He waited.
The letter arrived in rain.
Blizzit heard the knock—a polite thud from the perch—and skidded down the corridor in his socks. The seal flashed blue: the Arcanum’s tower sign. His hands were good hands; they only shook a little as he broke the wax.
We regret to inform you…
The words marched like a funeral procession. He read them twice because the first time he was certain he had misunderstood the grammar; he often missed small words in the middle of sentences when the big, bright ones clamored. But no—he had missed by a few points on the examination, and the cohort was full, and the Arcanum of Dawnfire encouraged him to try again in a year when he had acquired more study and perhaps fewer sparks.
His parents stood in the tunnel’s mouth, watching as if the letter had weight enough to tip him. He did not tip. He folded the parchment along its crease and slid it back into the wrapper as neatly as he could, because if he could not be admitted to the Arcanum today, he could at least be tidy.
“I’ll make tea,” his mother said, already moving. His father’s hand found his shoulder again and squeezed once.
Blizzit nodded. He went to his room. The lantern coughed once, softly—as if it knew. He set the letter on the workbench and stood in the middle of the floor and breathed. It hurt in the clean way a cold morning hurts when you first step outside. He unscrewed a housing from the clock on the wall and oiled the smallest gear. He put the housing back. He did nothing for a while except be a person in a room with a letter.
A second knock sounded on the perch.
Blizzit stared at the doorway, then at the letter, then at the doorway again, because the world rarely knocks twice in the same minute unless the world is doing a bit. He walked—did not run; did not tumble; walked—to the front. The rain had settled into a thoughtful mist. A new scroll waited in the tray, bearing the same tower seal, but this one had a second mark stamped beneath it: a small sigil he knew as well as his own name.
“Mentalbus,” he whispered.
He broke the wax with a thumb. The letter inside smelled faintly of cinnamon buns and pipe smoke. He read.
Blizzit Geargrin,
The examination measures many things, but not all of the things that matter. It did not measure how you stood in the mill’s sluice up to your knees in freezing water because you believed the town should have bread that week. It did not measure how you learned the shape of your mistakes without making them anyone else’s problem. It did not measure the way you keep reaching.
As such, and after consultation with the admissions circle, you are hereby invited to the Arcanum of Dawnfire on a probationary basis for the first term. You will attend introductory courses in spellcraft, alchemy, and applied mechanics. You will follow safety protocols with priestly zeal. You will ask for help before the room turns interesting.
Bring your goggles.
— Professor Mentalbus
Blizzit’s breath went somewhere and came back changed. He laughed, and when he laughed he hiccuped, and when he hiccuped he knocked his goggles with his chin so they sprang up over his eyes and made the world a bright, round carnival. He wrenched them down and ran for the kitchen, letter in one hand like a sparkler that did not go out.
“Mum! Dad!”
They met him halfway and in the tangle of hugs and tears and what did it say and let me see the kettle hummed happily to itself and chose, for once, not to boil over.
That night the house of Geargrin Hollow did not sleep. Not because of fireworks—Blizzit, under the new rule of priestly zeal, refrained from any celebratory chemistry—but because packing for the Arcanum proved to be both an engineering challenge and an act of faith. He laid out tools and tucked in books and, at his mother’s insistence, included at least one extra pair of socks cut to fit inside his work boots. His father contributed a small flask of fortifying cordial and, without ceremony, slipped a worn pocket watch into Blizzit’s palm.
“It runs a little fast,” his father said. “So you’ll always be almost on time.”
Blizzit held the watch like a new planet. “Thank you.”
He stood in his doorway before bed and looked at the room that had survived him and loved him anyway. On the bench the lantern sat straight-backed and dignified and did not sneeze. The nightlight refused to dim, but he smiled at it and left it be; not everything needed fixing. He slipped under the blankets, goggles on the hook, letter under his pillow like a promise.
In the hours before dawn he woke once, certain he could hear something far away—a bell, perhaps, or the bright strike of sun on the Arcanum’s highest window. He lay awake and listened until the sound resolved itself into his own heart, which had learned a new rhythm: not faster, not slower—only steadier. In the morning he would set out for the towers.
And when he reached them, he would try not to make them interesting. He would try very hard.
But Blizzit Geargrin had always been a creature of sparks.