You are her apprentice. The young orphan she took in. You find her endlessly annoying, with her teasing personality that grates against your brooding nature, and her training that swings wildly between impossibly harsh and infuriatingly lazy. You are Merlin’s sole, long-suffering student.

Today, you are in the middle of a lesson, which is to say, you are standing in a field while Merlin reclines on a floating divan she conjured, sipping tea from a cup that never seems to empty.

“Your posture is atrocious,” she says without looking up from a shimmering, magical tome floating before her. “You’re slouching like a depressed slug. Channeling ambient mana requires a certain… panache.”

You straighten your back, feeling a muscle twinge. You’ve been standing like a statue for an hour. “You said we were practicing spatial compression today.”

“Did I?” Merlin muses, turning a page with a flick of her finger. The page turns into a small, confused butterfly that flutters away. “How linear of me. I changed my mind. We’re practicing patience. It’s a vastly underrated magical discipline. Observe.”

She gestures lazily. A single, perfect apple appears in your hand. Then another on your head. Then a third begins orbiting your left knee.

“Your task,” she announces, a playful smirk on her lips, “is to not react. Any reaction—a sigh, an eye-roll, the slightest grumble—will be met with escalation.”

You stare dead ahead, the apple on your head wobbling precariously. You want to scream. This is the “lazy” training. It’s somehow more maddening than the time she teleported you to the peak of a mountain during a blizzard and told you to “figure out the return trip.”

“You’re thinking very loud thoughts,” she sing-songs. “It’s disrupting the local mana field. Try to think quieter, more cheerful thoughts. Perhaps about bunnies.”

A fourth apple appears, balancing on the tip of your nose. You can see its glossy red surface cross-eyed. You breathe slowly through your mouth, a technique she did teach you during the “harsh” phase, which involved dodging animated, fire-breathing teddy bears.

“The great mages of Belialuin,” she continues, her voice the picture of scholarly calm, “could meditate for centuries while being pecked by metaphysical crows. You can’t handle a few pieces of fruit? My, my. The youth of today.”

Suddenly, the apples vanish. Before you can even relax, the ground beneath your feet turns into a vibrant, bouncy trampoline. You flail for a second before locking your knees, bouncing gently up and down.

“Better!” she cheers, clapping softly. “Now, while maintaining that dignified bounce, I want you to recite the twelve foundational incantations of elemental transmutation. Backwards.”

This is the teasing. The constant, whimsical shifting of goalposts wrapped in a ribbon of academic superiority. She’s the greatest sorcerer in Britannia, a being of immense power and ancient knowledge, and she’s using a fraction of her infinity to turn your lesson into a surreal comedy routine.

You open your mouth to begin the impossible recitation, a protest boiling in your chest. She raises one perfect eyebrow, her dark mustard eyes glinting with amusement. In her gaze, you don’t see malice, but a peculiar, frustrating kind of care. The harsh training forged your resilience. This absurd, lazy teasing is teaching you adaptability, to find focus in chaos, to think on feet that are currently bouncing on enchanted rubber.

You take a deep, bouncy breath. The words of the incantations, backwards, start to tumble out, awkward and stumbling. A small, reluctant smile touches her lips. It’s not a smile of mockery, but of quiet satisfaction.

It’s annoying. It’s utterly, profoundly annoying. And you know, with a brooding certainty that somehow makes it worse, that there’s no one else in the world you’d rather have as your master.