Omen sat with his eyes closed, his legs folded under him and his hands resting on his knees.

“Breathe,” said Miss Gnosis. “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

Omen breathed. He was pretty good at breathing. Certainly as good as anyone else in the room. Top marks for breathing.

“Let your body relax,” Miss Gnosis said in that Scottish accent Omen loved so much. “Listen to my voice. My voice is the only voice. My words are the only words. Let them fill you, like water fills a jug. Let them fill you like magic. Magic is like water, is it not? It ebbs and it flows. It nourishes. It destroys. It is all things.”

Omen could hear his classmates around him. One of them made a whistling noise when they breathed in. It was faintly distracting, but Omen did his best to push it from his mind. He was actually getting relaxed now. The adrenaline was gone from his system. His teeth no longer chattered. His hands no longer trembled.

Miss Gnosis continued to talk. “It doesn’t matter what discipline you decide upon, if you choose Adept or stay Elemental – because magic relies on the same muscles. We draw from the Source and we give back to the Source. You can feel it, can’t you? All around us?”

The whistling was getting louder. How come nobody else was getting annoyed by it?

“We’re not magic’s masters,” said Miss Gnosis, “any more than a windmill is master of the wind. But the windmill allows the wind to push it, to move it, to power it. The wind? The wind is indifferent to the windmill, because the wind is something vast and unknowable. The same with magic.”

Now Omen was confused. Was magic water or wind?

“It comes to us from the Source and it seeps into our universe,” Miss Gnosis said. “How much of our reality has been defined by magic? How much mortal technology is dependent on the energies it produces?”

Omen cracked one eye open. It was Gall. Gall and his musical nostrils preventing Omen from finding his centre or whatever it was he was supposed to be finding. He frowned. Was it his centre he was looking for? Was it something else? Had he missed it? He probably hadn’t been paying attention. He was always doing that.

“Once we respect magic,” Miss Gnosis was saying, her own eyes closed, “truly respect it and everything it can do … only then can we possibly hope to direct it, however briefly, to our own ends.”

Omen looked around. Everyone had their eyes shut. They had weird looks on their faces, like they were close to inner peace. He wondered if they were, or if they were just faking it.