The man said his name was Knave and our first lesson had already begun. He showed me the knife he had stabbed his hand with and said, "You see the blood? Magic requires blood."
"I don't understand," I said.
He raised his hands upward, gesturing to the sky. I was glad all the other patrons had already left or else they might think he was some madman (although, he probably was a madman). "The universe has laws, my boy! Why can't you fly? Because gravity keeps you down. Magic is all about breaking those laws and the universe doesn't like that, no sirree."
He lowered his hands and raised the silver, bloody knife again. "So to operate magic, you need to sacrifice. To escape the gravitational pull of the earth, you need to excel to a speed where the kinetic energy plus the gravitational potential energy is zero - but with magic, all you need is blood."
He licked the knife and then spit the blood onto the floor.
"Hey," I said, "I have to clean that up."
"Watch!" He stepped on the bloody spit and then floated into the air.
I stared, slack-jawed, as he floated to the ceiling and then downward. "You see," he said, "magic is like the cheat code to the universe. A sleight of the hand-" He waved his hand and he was lowered onto the floor. "-and physics becomes your bitch."
"How can I do that?" I asked, condemning myself without knowing.
Knave's eyes lit up and he said, "I'll show you."
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