Tercius swallowed heavily, his fingers digging into his sweaty palms. He had experienced this once before and he was not looking forward to the repeat. And yet, despite what awaited in the immediate future, he couldn't help but observe with wide-open eyes.

Thick veins of neon green covered his emerald irises as he observed the formation of the spell.

Under the guidance of Mistress Prime'era, the nature of magia kept transforming, the refined results compressed and then formed into circular pictograms, crossed with straight lines at odd angles, and finally decorated with thick dots. The runes arranged themselves like pieces of a puzzle, entangling through and around each other almost to the point of touching their neighbors. The sheer scale of magia in that head-sized sun of runes made his eyes burn, and although he wanted nothing more than to see the final moments of the spell, Tercius reluctantly had to let his {Magia Sight} fade away and close his eyes to let them rest.

Even through his closed eyes, the world flashed. Tercius’ eyes snapped open and he held his breath just as the darkness consumed them. Next to him, tall and pale and young looking even in her ancient age, Mistress Prime’era seemed serene as she peered past the thick barrier of nearly transparent golden force and out there, into the void. Heartbeats passed as the golden bubble slowly shrank towards the four of them, buckling under intra-dimensional pressure. A light flashed again and the darkness spat them out back into the physical world, thousands of kilometers away from where they were heartbeats ago.

Blinking rapidly, Tercius looked at the half-set sun as they hovered far above the Sogean sand and soil in their golden-hued bubble.

“I ought to scry a bit and see if anyone was disturbed by our arrival. One can never be too careful, after all,” Mistress Prime’era’s glacial blue eyes focused on Tercius’ Mentor, Mistress Kalina. “Kalina, can you cloak us from prying senses while I work?”

"Of course, Mistress," Mistress Kalina nodded her long springs of orange hair bound with an emerald green ribbon that matched her eyes perfectly. "Talaran's variations and a compression point of sixty?"

Tercius swallowed. He could barely manage a compression point of twelve if he truly pushed himself.

“Just right, my girl, just right.” Mistress Prime’era placed her open palms on her temples and closed her eyes.

Mistress Kalina slowly inclined her head and raised her hands as if she was holding a sphere between her palms. The area between them grew disturbed and shimmering quickly, which alone spoke to Tercius of the power used for the creation of the cloaking spells.

Magia was technically tangible, but it was highly elusive. To see it with mundane eyes, feel it travel across the skin, or experience it with any other sense, you either had to develop an Skill as he did– which required time, effort, exposure, and at least a little innate metaphysical sensitivity– or it had to collect in large enough quantities. In the case of the latter, magia became visible in the likeness of heatwaves, simply because its presence started to spontaneously excite the air.

The cloaking spells that his Mentor was making held his attention only for a moment before he went back to the anomalies of earlier moments.

He had experienced spatial travel once before and he couldn’t help but spot the glaring differences between then and now. For one, his Mentor had used the help of an enchanted chamber to help her with the workload. Mistress Prime’era did it all on her own. When his Mentor took them traveling between the folds of intra-dimensional space, their journey lasted considerably longer than a few heartbeats and their barrier had been shrunk so close to them that he could have touched it if he had just reached out. Where was the ear-shattering explosion of sound upon their arrival? This time, he heard absolutely nothing.

So many broken patterns… Why? Were his initial patterns even the norm?

True, there were differences between then and now. The first time they had traveled from one hemisphere to the other, while now the journey was only from the southern end of the Sogea to the northern one, which wasn’t even a third of the journey from the Pyramid of Tergaron to his hometown, Nurium. Maybe that accounted for something?

Should he ask the present experts on the matters?

The questions brimmed in him and even more of them were formed with each passing moment of speculation, but he hesitated to ask. He was not above asking for answers, no, but Mistress Prime’era was currently focused on scrying. Interrupting her concentration now would be a very poor choice on his part.

Hells, for all he knew, she might even take offense. She didn't seem or act like the type, exactly the opposite in fact, but in this case, he'd be better safe than sorry. No matter how friendly Mistress Prime'era appeared to be in the few days that he knew her, he just did not want to risk offending her in any way.

Despite not looking the part of an old and wise Magos, Mistress Prime’era was by far the eldest and the most experienced of the three magi with whom Tercius was traveling. She had not only made the spell entirely by herself, without help from enchantments or other magi, but she powered it too.

The same spell would have to be done in a manner of a ritual, taking hours of painstaking work to form and the power of at least a dozen senior magi. Even then, the presence and knowledge of at least one capable ritualist and one excellent spatialist would be required. The immense scope of experience shown here, across so many different branches of magic, and the breadth of power hidden deep inside of her tall and slim figure revealed a glimpse of Mistress Prime'era's true age.

The woman's pale skin, glacial blue eyes, long waves of chestnut hair, and a face as symmetrical as a perfect circle put her at early to mid-thirties, yet Tercius had heard and seen enough to know that she had been around when the Bellian Royal Family became the Imperial Dynasty of today. Blazing Hells, she could have even easily been alive well before the first of the Bellian kings had forged his kingdom and in doing so sown the seeds of the Empire that today spanned large parts of four continents.

If he was correct, that would place the young-looking woman at around a millennia in age.

Now there was a number to put anyone at alert, and yet Tercius knew that if he were to compare her age to that of some magi alive today, then even Mistress Prime'era would still be counted as a child. Well, maybe a low-end teenager. On that same scale, he, biologically at nearly thirteen, would be a… tiny fetus. Hells, his fifty-five-year-old grandmother, and sixty-four-year-old grandfather could be counted as if they were still in the womb.

By and far, of all magi he met so far, almost all of them were included in what he called “the reasonable kind of people”. Still, he had little dealings with the long-lived kind. It was a weird thought, but were even sixty-year-olds considered fetuses in their eyes? Did the age of others even matter to the ageless?

In his few interactions with Mistress Prime’era, the glacial blue eyes had always had such warmth and kindness, a look that he knew well. She looked at everyone with the fond eyes of a pleased grandmother, him included.

Still, he couldn't help but see that even the opinionated Mistress Helfira stood still and silent in stoic observation, her gray robe covering her short and slim figure. Who was he to do otherwise?

The silence stretched across minutes and it was his Mentor who finished her work first. Mistress Kalina hovered to the golden-hued barrier, where a hole opened. The cold air of the troposphere took the opportunity to rush in and, in his gray robe, Tercius shivered. The shimmering spells went through the opening, the shaped and morphed magia rapidly expanding and covering the outer surface of the bubble, crawling over it like a sticky blanket.

As the hole in the barrier closed nothing changed for them, but he could imagine how the disappearance of their vehicle looked for someone on the ground. There it was, barely visible, a tiny golden orb surrounded by emerging stars in the darkening sky. One moment it was there and then it was simply gone. He had seen it happen already, both from afar and from up close, and he knew just how good his Mentor was with these sorts of spells. When she cloaked herself in the spells, she could be standing at the length of an arm away from him, and he would neither see, hear or smell her. {Magia Sight} didn’t help him one bit either, for all magi who graduated from the Academy learned how to obscure their magia from Skills, and his Mentor had attained her basic education credentials decades ago, perhaps even centuries ago.

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Unaware that he had been doing it, Tercius had rested a palm on his abdomen. There, under a wide gray belt made of elastic cloth, he felt the presence of a folded paper, a letter given to him by Perdinar. Slowly growing aware of his actions, he glanced around and made his hands fall slowly, the longer outer sleeves of his robe immediately covering his hands.

He would be reading that letter later, with great care.

“There’s an elder spirit south of us,” Mistress Prime’era spoke gently, her eyes still closed. Her words immediately captured the attention of his Mentor and Mistress Helfira, he saw. His too, for that matter. An elder spirit…

Mistress Helfira raised an arm, the massive outer sleeve of her gray robe falling to reveal aged fingers that crackled with scarlet sparks. Within moments, lightning the color of blood jumped from finger to finger. “I never tried my hand against theirs… and I’ve been warned never to try it, until I—”

Closing her mouth into a thin line with an unintelligible murmur, Mistress Helfira cast a quick glance at Tercius and he stood straight. She didn't know it yet, but he knew the ending of her sentence. She was warned never to try her hand against the spirits until she wielded energia actively at least half as well as she did magia.

“Yes, well…” Mistress Helfira looked away. “Should we start preparing?”

“No.” Mistress Prime’era’s blue eyes opened. “It is within the area where it could have sensed our arrival… However, it shows no signs of being disturbed in any way. Let us leave it be,”

Mistress Kalina nodded and looked at the diminutive Mistress Helfira. “Do not be so eager to test yourself against their kind, Helfira. Where an elder one dwells, juveniles abound.”

Mistress Helfira’s thin lips twisted with disgust. “Parasites,” she murmured.

"Parasites they might be," Mistress Prime'era said. "Yet they wield from birth what you still seek to touch the corner of. Do not underestimate them, Helfira,"

“I was not insulting them, Mistress, nor will I ever stoop so low as to underestimate something against which I have few ways to defend myself. I just had a thought where I compared them to one of the creatures I studied recently. Both feed and live off of others.”

Tercius smiled. “Don’t we all, Mistress?”

The three women exchanged amused glances.

Their bubble started going forwards and downwards, moving slowly at first then accelerating as it changed shape from a perfect sphere to a tear-shaped one. Mistress Prime'era took them all towards the ground until they were barely a few meters above it, likely seeking even more environmental protection both of magical and mundane kind. Plants and animals had magia, after all.

“Don’t you think it’s such a waste?” Mistress Helfira suddenly asked. “Where we grow into our power slowly, they grow out of it. Imagine, having all that power with a mind that only knows instinct.”

“I think you were misinformed, Helfira,” Mistress Prime’era said. “They never lose their ability. For them, it is a resource that literally represents how long they have to live. So why then would they spend it on matters that don’t concern their life itself? As they grow more intelligent with age, they simply become more frugal with its use.”

“I see, I see…”

The dry shrublands below their feet became a blur as they moved north. Within minutes, the yellows and browns mixed with more and more greens as they moved from the arid biomes of Central Sogea to more temperate ones of the north.

Mistress Prime'era followed the River Hippotion, keeping it on her right but never approaching. With the cover of the night nearly upon the clear sky, little of the regular floating traffic was present on the wide and blue waterway, and yet farms were dotting the fertile brown and green lands on each bank. Where there were farms, farmers would undoubtedly be there.

Despite the spells of cloaking that coated their spell-created vehicle, the speed at which Mistress Prime’era rushed them forward made a screaming sound, which was heard and likely felt.

As if reading his thoughts, Mistress Prime’era slowed down considerably, the barrier changing shape again, back into a perfect sphere. “We shouldn’t disturb the hardworking people while they rest, now should we?”

In the far distance ahead, the biggest and oldest city of Sogea lit its tiny lamps for the encroaching night. Stone walls sprouted and grew, while towers fattened and widened in their approach, a makeshift model growing to real-life proportions with each moment.

Spheros.

The oldest part of the city was built near the Central Ocean, strategically positioned on the outlying rocky hills of the Western Izmittor Mountains to tower above the green flatlands of the delta and the city's large port. To top it all off, the old city was entirely walled in by enormous quantities of gray and white stone, which was quarried below and around the very grounds of the city. Down in the delta, with the help of arching bridges, organic development spread the city far and wide. An abundance of local stone and strategic position in many trade routes, of both intra and intercontinental kind, allowed even them the luxury of walls, albeit not the same towering ones of the old city.

Mistress Prime’era pointed at the delta. “The last time I’ve been here, only farms were in this area,”

“Under the rule of the Empire, the population here has exploded in proportions,” Mistress Kalina said. “The last reports sent to the Repository from the Isle place the population size of Spheros at around dar sen’ane’ar.”

Which should be around one and a half million souls, when converted. A little bit less, actually. One point four eight, or so. Realizing what he was doing, Tercius chided himself immediately. He would never get fluid with the new system if he kept transforming everything into the old one. He knew the basics of the new one and its parameters should be the parameters he compared everything against.

A dot, a short horizontal line, and a curved arc were the three basic symbols upon which the entire written system of the Society was developed. Numbers, letters, symbols, even the supremely strange musical notes were all composed of specific arrangements of the three primeval runes. The dot was order and stagnation, the horizontal line was chaos and progress, and the arc was called peresangal in Magik. It was a concept similar to rebirth, or at least something similar to an inevitable end and an equally inevitable restart of a cycle of some kind.

“Hearing such numbers makes me ponder on the future,” Mistress Prime’era said. “Ours and theirs, both. The past tends to repeat itself to those who do not remember it well, after all.”

With that mysterious statement, Mistress Prime’era fell silent as they gently flew over the tops of the stone houses.

The last time Tercius had been to Spheros, just over a year ago, he had been passing through the streets and canals of the city in the company of his paternal uncle, Lux. The two of them had stayed in the city only for a few days to resolve some family issues, and then they left the port city by ship, first to Tripatis then to Lissea, where Tercius had formally entered into training with The Society of the Magi, to become a Magos himself.

Seeing the city again took him back and he had to wonder what was going on with his uncle. The wanderer, despite his free-spirited and promiscuous ways, was quite a reliable person. What had happened after they parted in Lissea? The unanswered missives certainly suggested that Lux didn't go back to the family estates in Augusta Bellia as he had intended, but Tercius had a deeper fear that something had happened to his uncle. He frankly doubted that anything save grave infirmity or death could prevent that man from answering the call which had been sent in those missives.

In the last few days, Tercius might have uttered a few prayers, hoping that his uncle wasn't experiencing what Tercius suspected he was, but he knew that his fears had a real foundation.

After he finished his business in Western Izmittor, he would have to find time to search for Lux. He owed at least that much to the man who had taught him so much.

Glancing at his Mentor, Tercius considered how he could ask for another favor so soon after this one, only to realize that it wasn’t his Mentor who’d done him the favor at all, but rather it was all Mistress Prime’era. She was the one who got him here, to Spheros. She was the one who masked his Well and in doing so protected the most vulnerable part of him.

Did this mean that he didn’t collect one of the two favors that his Mentor owed him, but instead that he now owed a favor to Mistress Prime’era? Tercius’ breathing slowed as his heart started beating faster but outwardly he stayed calm and collected. That was not at all pleasant to think about. He would have to talk about this with his Mentor in private and clear this up.

Mistress Prime’era looked his way. “Where should we head to?”

Tercius pointed at the walls that made a nearly grown man feel tiny. “The old part of the city, Mistress,”

The trajectory of their cloaked bubble changed slightly but still kept close to the flat rooftops. The magia signature of so many people would work in their favor, should anyone capable of peering past his Mentor's cloaking spells be in the vicinity.

In Spheros, they were simply a drop in a bucket of water, a firefly near a blazing torch. They were four individuals among a million and half others.