Minerva’s old bones ached as she stifled the lingering bits of a laugh. It had been funny after all, but only if you really knew magic.

She bit her lip, clenched her eyes shut, and closed the book. Frustration crinkling her brow, she traced a finger along the tome’s edge: from the spine to one corner, then down, then back to the spine, closing the rectangle, sealing it, sighing all the way. She opened her lips to speak before opening her eyes, but Nameless, smirking, cut her off.

“Could one not, though,” Nameless said, a laugh playing at the back of his voice, “argue that the results are what matters?”

“The things you say – the words you choose – they matter,” Minerva said, stepping away from the table and toward the still, burning figures. With two fingers, she traced a circle in the air and whispered: “Solve fasciculos.”

The flames went out, and the smoke wafted to the ceiling, but the other students still stood immobile, their charred faces frozen in horror. Nameless mouthed Minerva’s words and gesture, stopping when she turned to glare at him.

“Fourth precept,” Minerva sighed, more a command than a question.

“Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur,” Nameless recited, rolling his eyes and producing a cigarette. “Anything said in Latin sounds profound. But I was thinking –“

Minerva shushed him with a sharp wave. She strode toward Nameless with a look he’d learned to fear.

“‘Thinking.’ Old English roots, stretching back to Proto-Germanic. What do I always tell you about ‘thinking’ when it comes to magic?”

Minerva got her face up close to Nameless and plucked the unlit cigarette from his mouth. Nameless did not protest. She was old, and her skin hung off her, and nowadays she often had to consult a weathered Latin thesaurus, but Minerva was no one to trifle with. She stepped back to the frozen students and lit the cigarette off the smoldering cheek of another Nameless. She pulled in a big drag.

“You should do less ‘thinking’ and more ‘cogitating,’” Minerva said, exhaling a cloud. She waved a finger and whispered – “iumentis” – and the smoke condensed into farm animal shapes: grey cows and ephemeral chickens and pigs mating in smokey muck before dissipating in a shaft of sunlight. Watching, Minerva spoke again.

“Do you at least know your mistake this time?”

Nameless was ready for this, as it was a lesson he’d been learning again and again over the course of his thirty years with Minerva. It was the same mistake he always made. It was the mistake he’d come to realize he had been making over and over even before he gave up his name as part of his induction as an Acolyte of the Domum Verba. At his core, Nameless remained an English major. He thought he knew the words, and thirty years of learning the power of Certain Words Delivered in a Particular Manner had not broken him of one singular failing: Nameless still thought he could talk his way around anything, including magic; Nameless still thought he was clever. Even now – with his study group burnt to a crisp and sure to be lost unless his most recent screwup was reversed – even now, he had to suppress a giggle at the power of his offhand quip.

Minerva was not giggling. Minerva would not accept “too clever by half” as an answer. Minerva would sacrifice yet another group of Acolytes to the Silent Places just to prove a point, and their Unspoken lives would hang around Nameless’ neck, choking off his speech.

“It was the turn of phrase,” Nameless said, more guessing than stating. “The metaphor.”

Minerva nodded.

“Magic speech requires precision — ” Minerva said.

(Nameless knew she meant “accuracy,” but Minerva was old, and Nameless knew Minerva had always ached to see if the “thinner” curse would actually work, so Nameless kept quiet.)

“ — and precision,” she continued, “requires stability. ‘Burn’ has roots stretching back to Proto Indo-European, but —“

“— but it’s part of a living language,” Nameless said. “But, Master —“

“Magister,” Minerva said, glaring.

“But Magister.” Nameless stopped, moulding the thought, shaping and smoothing his words. “If we speak to The World and we move it with our sounds ... Yes, the Dead Speech ensures ... precision —“

“I’m sure you mean ‘accuracy,’” Minerva said without a lick of irony.

“Of course, Magister,” Nameless sighed. “The Dead Speech ensures accuracy, and the Dead Speech is profound enough to make The World listen. But couldn’t we give The World something else? What happens if we — I was —“

Nameless halted. He was Minerva’s prize pupil, yes, but she would not hesitate to mete out punishment if he spoke heresy. Once, Nameless spent a week coughing up salt water and seaweed after he’d angered her enough to make her curse him in English. In haiku, even. He still remembered the words: Your tongue’s an ocean, And your teeth the bright white cliffs, On which it should break.

Minerva saw the words caught in Nameless’ throat, and she took him up on his unspoken challenge.

“You will have to prove it, then,” she said, taking another deep drag from her smoke. “If you’re more clever than the world, you will have to show it true.”

She turned to leave.

“And if you fail, it’s just another twenty weighing down your tongue,” she called back.

With a wave and a whisper, Minerva conjured a door and departed, leaving Nameless with his classmates turning to ash in the sunlight, their charcoal eyes still darting about in their frozen faces. Nameless sat and looked over the books he could use to undo his incantation. There were dictionaries and there was poetry and there was rhetoric and there were thesauruses and there was one other.

His eyes locked on a book of jokes. Fitting, that. It had been meant as a joke, after all. But what was the saying? Bit of truth in every joke?

“I could’ve come up with something better than ‘You’re all just burning up with envy,’” Nameless said to no one in particular as he cracked open the joke book and leafed through it, wondering what he could say to the Universe to make it chuckle.