He was never the self-centered sort. But it was true that, more often than not, Beck’s thoughts centered around what he was to eat that day, what material there was to study, whether he fancied skirting around in the channels between classes, whether he fancied not to – menial things, but all pertaining to him. It was rare even for Killen to linger in his thoughts; so, when he sat through a lecture on Modern Applications of Cirae Theory, and Mir’s departing words remained rooted in his mind, he was rightfully appalled. And for more reasons than one.

He tapped a finger on the edge of his open grimoire. He was one of the few students that took the class at this level, and yet, the teaching scholar spoke in a voice that could fill several amphitheaters. Before they departed, Beck prodded her on how she knew Yuna. It turned out that she did, in fact, stumble through the halls during the morning dark, and that it was Yuna who directed her to Beck’s first lecture. It wasn’t quite the miracle Beck imagined, but even he shedded some admiration; navigating the school’s twisting halls and corridors was a daunting task at times, even for him.

The teaching scholar had drawn a new diagram on the board, and directed their attention to it. He asked something. Someone responded. He drew another diagram. Someone else responded. The hour went by with murky chatter, and Beck was only vaguely aware of it all. The entire time he had a different question occupying him. What, in the name of the world, did Yuna want with Mir?

Of course, it wasn’t exactly in his business to pry. He was just the guide. But Yuna, the hermit she was, hardly interacted with anyone in the school – not even with other staff. It wasn’t hard to see why, either. She was uncouth, brash, and looked like she crawled out of the grave every morning. Perhaps that’s why Beck was one of the few whom she tolerated; they were, in some ways, similar.

That hardly extended to Mir. Time remained a haze the past few days, but it hadn’t been long since Mir had ‘transferred’ (to that, he had his own reservations. He doubted they’d ever find clarity). And from what Mir had said, she had been stumbling around since four in the morning. The meeting between the two of them had to have taken place during that time. Perhaps Yuna fancied early-morning walks; that would explain those horrible eye shadows. Perhaps it was purely coincidence, and Beck was simply overthinking. Yet that only circled back to his original question: Why would Yuna ask for Mir?

He frowned. The more he thought about it, the more questions he had. And the more questions he had, the more he attempted to sieve an answer. And the more he sought an answer–

Well, any answer he’d come up with wouldn’t serve him. Far from leaping to conclusions, he was crossing oceans and soaring the skies. He needed to be on the ground. Sighing, he reached his hands back into his pockets. They were empty.

Empty?

Eyes becoming slits, Beck dug his hands deeper into his robe pockets. Nothing. He patted them down furiously from the outside. Nothing. His stomach sank to the floor. Mevis still had his watch.

The moment he realized he’d left it behind, Beck spun on his heel, almost slamming his shoulder into a poor girl’s face, who looked quite bewildered, and barreled through the halls with an urgency. Sweat pooled on his brow, his mouth clenched shut, and hands swayed rigidly at his side like the rod of an enchanted metronome.

Mevis’s office – if it could be called an office – was perched at one of the tallest spires in the academy, jutting out from the edge of Crater’s Circle like a finger reaching out for the stars. The great distance between his last class and her office did little to diminish his fervor; nor did the arduous ascension by the stairs or the growing hunger pains in his stomach. As soon as his eyes set upon the lacquered wooden door handle, his first thought was to fling it open–

“This is an opportunity, Madam Le’hete!”

He stopped, suspended, as his hand hung over the handle. Even from the other side, Beck could recognize Olin’s infinite chasm of a voice.

“An opportunity to get our students killed, certainly,” Mevis groaned. “Not that I’d mind too much. But think of the uproar– It's agonizing just imagining it!”

“Respectfully, Madam, you wouldn’t be dealing with the brunt of it,” Olin said. “Rather, I would be. On that, I insist!”

“Such passion,” Beck heard Mevis’s yawn from beyond the wall. “Though you forget your role. You’re not part of a band anymore. Let them handle the Bleeding, it’s not your job.”

Beck edged away from the door. This was not a conversation he should be privy to. And yet–

“But education is!” Argued Olin, whose voice had taken a rare excitement. “A naturally occurring Sweltering Rift hasn’t been observed since the Banishing Wars – now granted, this is only a Bleeding – but an occurrence like this is beyond rare. It is once in a lifetime!”

Beck didn’t realize his mouth had been agape, and that he’d drawn closer to the door, until the new quiet. The student within him gulped down a knot, suddenly paranoid at being discovered; but something else had him captivated, gripped. Rifts were tears in space, acting as gates into the Horizon. They were commonplace during the Banishing Wars, and were subsequently sealed off towards the latter end; nowadays, the closest one would get to ‘seeing’ one was as an illustration.

“You would take full responsibility?” Mevis said. Her voice had taken a new seriousness to it. Olin must have silently agreed, because she continued: “Fine. But there must be conditions–”

“Of which, I am ready to accept.”

“Then take only a few. Take ones that won’t just not get themselves killed, but won’t get others. And return with samples; even with my connections, they’re so expensive these days, you know?” said Mevis. Something shimmered and thrummed from behind the door. A new charge in the air sent shocks across his body, even from the other side. “Don’t screw up, Olin. That’d suck.”

“Of course, Madam.”

The sound of Olin lumbering off his seat sent Beck scrambling away from the door. He swept his eyes all across the room in a panic, as if looking for an exit, but all there were were panels of glass that’d surely lead to a swift death. Retreating back to the stairs, he dipped out of sight, hoping that when Olin exited, his own timely emergence would make it seem as if he’d just arrived.

He heard the door swing open and ascended, trying to remain cool. Olin acknowledged him, as stony-faced as ever, and nodded. Beck nodded back, his heart fluttering like a butterfly pumped with liquid ardor. It wasn’t until Olin’s echoing footsteps faded away that he relaxed.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

There was no greater inaptness than calling Mevis’s office an ‘office.’ It was impossibly large, stretching farther than he could see; not that he could see much, between the sidewinding towers of tomes scaling upwards, the papers frozen in the middle of the air, and a countless amount of glassware atop fraying tables, running their own machinations independently, whisked about by a pair of invisible, deft hands. A blast of air hit him in the face, reeking of herbs and substances of all sorts – a raw sulfurous smell, another of mint, and another of burning pork. Only a small corner near the door looked vaguely like an office.

Mevis herself sat across the longtable, hunching over something. When Beck got closer, he found it was a glass pipe; and not the kind for experiments. She set her mouth onto it, inhaled, and breathed out a cloud of smoke which vanished only seconds later. It was unlikely that she’d have noticed Beck if he hadn’t made himself known.

“Beck?” She stowed away the pipe into one of her desk drawers. Beck heard something shatter and cringed a little. Mevis tried to regain some stature, but her eyes were wired a pale red, and a distinct smell wafted off of her. Beck cringed a little more.

“And you want me to treat you like a High Scholar?” He said, seating himself across Mevis.

“What I do for recreation is not of your concern,” said Mevis. She waved her hand, letting out a tiny cough, and the door slammed shut behind them. “So? What’re you doing here?

“My watch,” Beck said. “You still have it. I’d very much like it back.”

“Your watch, your watch…” Mevis mumbled. She swept her hand through her hair, head inclined. Then she rose out of her seat – an awkward, lurching motion – clinging to the side of her desk as she made her way around. “Right! Hey, sorry about taking it. I’m giving it back now, so…” She gave him a sheepish smile. “Pretend you never saw me like this. I mean, not like you have a choice. I’d kick you out otherwise.”

Beck narrowed his eyes. “Why take it to begin with?”

Mevis gave no answer. She shuffled around the lab, making her way around the tables, around the books, occasionally stopping to eye a rising vial of liquid here or a powder bombarded with fire there. She languidly surveyed the room, swiped something from a table, held it to her face, and slowly waved it in the air – it was his watch, and it was polished, shining, free of grub and grime.

But Mevis did not relinquish it just yet.

“Up to what level have you taken enchantment-based classes?” Mevis said, shuffling back to her desk. She tossed the watch between her hands as she leaned against the side.

Beck made the fraction of a fretful gesture, but pulled back. “Tulria.” He said, hastefully adding, “Might I ask what relevance that has with my personal property?”

“More than you might imagine, young Danor.” She teased. She stopped tossing the watch in her hand and beheld it with a particular solemnity. “Consider this an impromptu evaluation. Tell me what you know about enchantments.”

Immediately, a line from Comprehensive Enchantment Theory sprang to mind: “The same way we imbue mana with properties to make a spell, we do so to make enchantments, giving objects magic properties,” he recited. The rest of the page escaped him, so he began to paraphrase. “But that’s where the similarities end. The deeper you look into it, the more the differences between the two are made clear. Like if I tried to apply Cirae theory to enchanting a bracelet, I’d blow it to pieces.” If I could apply it in the first place. He thought.

Mevis seemed impressed. “At least you know the basics,” She said. “Is that all you know?”

“If I told you all I knew, then we’d be here until midnight.”

“Guess so.” Her head went slightly off kilter. “Do you want to know something else?”

“What?”

“Your watch is enchanted.”

His eyebrows knit together, lips parted halfway. He couldn’t have heard that right. Yet Mevis said nothing more, only staring at him with an unnerving intentness, the expressions on her face shifting only slightly. Her eyes remained shot red, drooping at the corners. But they were locked onto him. Piercing past the bridge between his eyes. Ravenous, not in the way of beasts for animals, but of scholars for answers.

“Not funny,” Beck broke away. “You make some horrible, horrible–”

“I’m not joking,” She said, affixing her gaze back onto the watch, now swiveling in the air. Her cheek rested on her palm and she sighed. “You might not’ve noticed it yourself, being an Egra and all, but there’re traces of some magic in there. Tiny fragments. Of what kind, I don’t know. But they’re there.”

“I don’t recall allowing you to run tests on my stuff,” Beck said. As much as that irritated him, however, curiosity still welled up from within. “But you’re sure you hadn’t messed up the analysis? You’re certain?”

At this, Mevis frowned. “I haven't ran any tests yet. And if I did, I definitely wouldn’t have ‘messed them up.’ You forget who you speak to.” She tapped the watch slightly, and it spun quicker. “For all that boy is, Killen isn’t the most careful. It dropped out of your pockets just before Journ Ward. I’d picked it up; and that’s when it happened.”

“It?”

She nodded. A shade passed over her eyes. “It was… How should I put this? One moment I was in the hall, my finger brushing against the glass. The next, I was… somewhere. I’m lost on the exact details, but it was like I fell into a dream. And I just kept falling.” Her expression hardened. “It might’ve just been the Smoke, since it never happened again, but the question remains: Did I just stumble upon an artifact? And more importantly– Where did you find something like this?”

“Unimportant,” He said, but that was not all. Truthfully, he didn’t know. The same way he remembered burying his nose into grimoires and scrolls from the moment of his first thought, he had memories of that watch tucked away into his pocket. His fingers curling around the cool glass, rust rubbing off at the rims, and the way it lit up in the dead of night as his eyes swept across a book.

“Regardless,” she said, “I expected more of a reaction, even from you. I mean, not everyone just lugs around an artifact like this – not even that Victor brat. Can you at least feign surprise? Astonishment, bewilderment?”

“I’m utterly shocked,” he said dryly, and Mevis rolled her eyes.

“Then if that’s all,” Mevis’s finger sparkled, and the watch floated daintily into her palm. She gave it a final look, and after a moment, slid it to Beck. “Show yourself the way out. Oh, and don’t forget what I said earlier – it’d be a shame to lose such young talent!”

He took it gingerly in his hands, winding his fingers around it like he always did. For all that Mevis was, she wasn’t careless. Now the watch looked less like something off the street and more so plucked right from the Winding Galleries. Brass held the sheen of brilliant gold, the ridges more polished, sharper. Light danced across the obsidian glass, void of fingerprint mire, like spilled ink from a candlelight rather than a murky swirl of mud-water. And yet, a part of him missed those fingerprints, that dirt, the grime. He’d built it up over the long years. And now, it was sterile; When he looked at it, he couldn’t help but feel that all those years had been washed away.

Soon after, Mevis waved for him to go with a flick of her wrist. He momentarily considered bringing up the topic of the Bleeding Rift with her, but she’d already brought that pipe back out of her drawer, her fingertip sparking alight, and had taken in a great whiff. A frown made its way onto his face, and as he turned to leave, he found himself pocketing the watch like a hot coal. Like if he brushed against it the wrong way, he’d make away with a burn.