In a dimly lit bedroom that overlooked the city, a spectacular view was going to waste. The room’s occupant was in no state to appreciate it, and his nurse sat with her back to the window. She checked her watch now and then, counting down the minutes until the scheduled meal time, alert for any signs of lucidity, or more importantly, any words that might need to be relayed to anyone else. The nurse did not expect it much; it had been over a week since her patient had spoken above an inaudible mumble.

But today—

“Ehh—”

The nurse leapt to attention. “Sir.”

“Ehhh—ehh—” Every gasp sounded like a chore, too much work all for a measly syllable. “How long—”

He turned, barely, to face the nurse, his eyes wide, mouth frozen open.

“When will it end?” he finally croaked. “Whennn—”

And the spell was over.

An enchanted quill on the desk recorded his words, though the nurse deemed it insignificant to report. The man retreated into his vegetative state, and the quill would record no speech thereafter.

◆◆◆◆◆

Dreams came in all kinds of different forms. Usually, Myra’s dreams were disjointed nonsense, built on feelings and sentiments, with events that didn’t fit together at all, which slipped away as soon as she woke up and became unable to hold the messy contradiction in her mind. Every once in a while, though, a dream would be unusually coherent, and she would remember it for a great deal longer.

When Myra woke up on the first day of the winter semester, heart racing, she was sure her dream had been one of those. Events had flowed into each other with logical causality; obstacles had solutions; questions had answers. And someone, or something, had been after her… Intrigued and amused by the story weaved by her unconscious imagination, she quickly pulled herself out of bed and went to write it in her dream journal. She had her quill ready and a blank page open, but as she tried to write, a sharp pain pierced through her mind like a hot knife.

Nearly collapsing, she clutched her forehead and waited out a spell. When she took a deep breath and tried to return to her task, however, she was struck again. Finally, she put her diary aside and stumbled to her medicine closet for anything to help with headaches. Elixir of clam…? No, she wanted something stronger today. She took the distilled saliva of a one-antler horse from the very back. Not what she usually took, but pain like this probably warranted it.

Deciding that the dream must have been nonsense anyway, merely invoking a feeling of cohesion that didn’t truly exist, she proceeded to her morning shower. By the time she was ready for school, wrapped and warm in her sapphire-blue school robes, staff in hand, the headache had entirely evaporated. On her way out, she worried about her dream as much as she usually worried about dreams—that is, not at all.

◆

That said, Myrabelle Prua-Kent had much else to worry about.

Her entire autumn break had been marred by the unraveling of her father’s business, and eventually, his arrest, as in the fallout, the imperial authorities had uncovered sweeping fraud upon fraud. Everything had been revealed for a house of cards, the base swept out from under it. The investigation, from collapse to arrest, had taken only six days, just less than half of Myra’s break, but it had felt like months. With no desire to stay alone with her stepmother, she’d hopped on a train, returning early to the Ralkenon University of Magecraft.

And what she had been looking forward to the most—her apprenticeship at a rune forge based in the city—had been spoiled as well. As soon as they’d gotten wind that the ‘Kent’ half of her name was that of Yastmar Kent, the name that every newspaper was proclaiming as the next Cod Counterfeiter or Oliver Smear, they had decided they wanted nothing to do with her.

Still, she had the university. It was a new semester and new classes.

Not far along the walkway from her dormitory, a blonde young woman catapulted herself Myra-wards almost without warning. The classmate clasped her arms around her neck and twirled the girl around, a full three hundred and sixty degrees. This was a fairly normal greeting from Cynthia Ruona.

“How’s your morning?” she asked brightly, but she blinked immediately, as if remembering to be a bit somber. “Are you feeling better?” She lingered in her embrace.

“No,” Myra said bluntly. “I woke up with an ass headache this morning…”

“Oh,” she cooed. “Where was it?” Cynthia gently placed her hand on Myra’s forehead, straddling her temples. “Here?”

“No…”

“Here?” She moved to her sinuses.

“No, it was like… kinda back here?” Myra put a hand on the back of her skull. “Or… like, inside, I guess.”

Cynthia nodded, a serious, thoughtful look in her eyes. “Saliva of a one-antler horse,” she prescribed.

“I already took some… the headache’s fine now, really.”

She puffed a cheek out. “You should consult a doctor first!”

“Are you calling yourself a doctor?”

Around this point, Cynthia finally pulled away, sliding to Myra’s side and linking arms to begin the rest of the walk towards the lecture halls. “Well, I might as well be.”

By this, she was probably referring to the fact that her father was a doctor (something entirely different from Cynthia being a doctor). Myra momentarily felt a pang of envy: if Cynthia’s father were found involved in unethical behavior to keep his patients alive, the imperial bigwigs he attended to would probably just pay him more for the top service.

“Did you get things sorted out with that rune forge?”

“They wouldn’t even see me… but at this point, I can’t imagine it would be a productive apprenticeship, even if they begrudgingly agreed to uphold our original deal out of obligation.”

“Well, it’s their loss. And anyway they were probably going to have you testing alphabet calibration or something, nothing like … building levitation engines, or typeface design or whatever you had your heart set on.”

“Yeah.” Although, alphabet calibration (boring as that sounded) would have been a valuable skill for her toolbox, whereas designing a rune typeface as a novice apprentice was probably a bit out of her league. That kind of thing was for people like Iz.

Speaking of whom, they quickly caught sight of Iz relaxing by a fountain and reading. It was one of her favorite spots, where she basked in the sunlight and the faint mist of the fountain, which was shaped like a cone, intended in the shape of the great Ralkenon Volcano. The volcano itself was barely visible from the same spot, peeking up over some buildings. As soon as Cynthia caught eyes on Iz, she launched herself at the unsuspecting girl, ready to greet her the same as she had Myra.

Iz (short for Isadora, no last name) was the third member of their tight friend group. Unlike Myra and Cynthia, she came from working-class parents, but she had gotten in purely on a scholarship. And Ralkenon University, frankly, was pretty stingy with its scholarships. That was probably related to how she was able to warp the space around her so effortlessly as to send Cynthia flying past her into the fountain.

Or something like that. Myra wasn’t quite sure exactly what Iz had done.

“Hey, what the fuck? I’m happy to see you, too.”

◆

The three of them shared the first class of the morning, Mastery of Sensing and Manipulations, where they met up with two of their other friends, Nathan and Tazhin. Unfortunately, Myra was also met with a number of not-quite whispers from around the training room, along with some not-subtle glances in the direction of Myra. They cooled down (somewhat) in response to some nasty looks from Cynthia. But the mood was ruined.

She had hope, though, that the class would help get her mind off of it all. The Mastery series of classes was mandatory for everyone, lasting all four years of their university education. The class taught the fundamentals of using magic to manipulate the world around you—both objects in the physical world (telekinesis) and objects in Abstract Space (logokinesis). It was a relief to be here because frankly, it was a fun class. Instructor Yam had a knack for picking fun exercises that could sap up your focus for hours, and it tended to involve lots of heavy objects crashing around. Even the non-magical exercises, like juggling, which was meant to build up coordination, were pretty enjoyable. It was a goofy, but rewarding and satisfying class.

Today, they were manipulating water, shaping it, rotating it, building streams, and so forth. On its own, this was something they had mastered a long time ago. This time, there was a catch, though, which was that they couldn’t rely on any aura of the water element. This made it an order of magnitude harder since the students had to understand the behavior of a liquid at a deep chemical level so they could micromanage it, rather than rely on a more conceptual understanding of water they took for granted through the water elemental. Though it seemed extraordinarily inefficient, it was an important skill for manipulating other liquids, like oil, and it was also a step towards manipulating aura itself “in liquid-like ways.”

Unfortunately, Myra’s good mood wouldn’t last through the class. Iz had been one of the first to get the hang of it, and so she’d quickly been paired up with someone for the more advanced exercises. By the time Myra was ready, she ended up paired with a different classmate, Shera Marcrombie.

Shera was a person that was hard to miss in a crowd. She had long hair striped black and white, matching her eyes, which were sunk deep into her sockets: her left iris was black like a bottomless void, and her right iris was a cloudy white-gray, barely distinguished from the surrounding eye white.

She was also insufferable as a work partner.

Their objective was to create a stream in the shape of a ‘figure-8’. The difficulty was in handling the intersection of the streams, and of course, there was the coordination where each of them telekinetically handed off water to the control of the other.

“You-u-u need t-t-to t-tighten up your e-end.”

“It’s fine,” Myra insisted.

“It-it-it’s too wide. It’s t-too wide by-by at least c-cent-t-t-timeter.”

“It’s—”

“One p-p-point t-two c-c-centimeters.”

“That’s fine. What does it matter, it’s fine. You’re the one who’s wobbling.”

“It-it-it’s wobbling b-because your e-end is t-too wide. The m-molecules have t-t-to s-slow d-d-down and it-t-t-t-t k-kills my f-f-o-o-cus.”

“That doesn’t matter at all! It still connects up fine on your end!”

“If y-y-you aren’t noticing t-the p-problems, you aren’t d-doing it right. S-switch t-t-to f-fire.”

This again. “It doesn’t matter what element I use. Instructor Yam said we could use any element other than water.”

“It m-m-matters if y-you use fire.” Shera’s position, since the beginning, had been that fire, being most opposite to water, would ensure the most intense focus for the exercise. Myra insisted that even if that were true, she preferred to get it working in ‘easy-mode’ first, and thus continued to use the left element. Shera, though, had refused to switch from the fire elemental, and so they were at an impasse. Meanwhile, Shera’s obsession with symmetry and keeping all the cross-sections as perfect circles had been driving Myra up the wall.

“Instructor!” Myra finally called out, flagging Instructor Yam to come help. “This side keeps wobbling. Can you tell us what we’re doing wrong?”

The problem—Yam claimed—was in the boundaries where they handed off water to each other, specifically, they were each trying to control the water with slightly different velocities. Of course, the solution was to control the acceleration instead of the velocity. It was pretty obvious, once he spelled it out, though Shera insisted that she had known this was the problem the whole time, and that she had merely been assuming that doing it the way they’d been trying had been the intent of the assignment.

Unfortunately, knowing what to do didn’t make the exercise much easier. By the end of the session, it was obvious they would have to pick up where they left off in the next session.

◆

For Myra’s next class, her friend group had to split. Cynthia was taking herbological alchemy—maybe giving a bit more credence to her claims of being kind of a doctor—while Iz was taking an elective on elemental composition. Myra was kind of jealous; Iz’s course wasn’t just about basic compositions, like combining the fire element and water element to make a steam element. She would be learning how to build advanced compositions, like the house element or train element—engineered elements, in other words. It was a highly in-demand skill, both for its utility and its technical difficulty.

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Myra hadn’t mentioned this to her friends, but after her apprenticeship had been canceled, she had quickly sought out an alternative. In particular, she had seen the top university professor on rune crafting, Professor Tio Alzergodin, who maintained an active research lab full of apprentices. Myra had expected some grilling on her experience; maybe some kind of challenge to prove herself. Instead, Professor Alzergodin had told her, bluntly, that she wasn’t seeking any help.

Now, Myra didn’t know if that was because of her father’s scandal, or because the professor had already formed a low opinion of Myra, or if she really wasn’t seeking help like she said… but that was when Myra had freaked out and shuffled around her classes around, certain that her entire career as a mage was going to dead-end if she didn’t have something to make up for her father’s disgrace. She had tried to sign up for elemental composition, but the registrar had refused because she lacked the prerequisite knowledge. The registrar, of course, had been correct. Thinking about it rationally, there was no way she was ready for elemental composition.

Instead, she had signed up for Algebraic Topology, a pure mathematics class. It was a far more theoretical class than she usually took, but it was a prerequisite for elemental composition.

The class was mostly composed of senior students. Not recognizing anyone, she took a seat in a corner. People were whispering and muttering around her, but she tried to tune it out. Surely they weren’t talking about her or anything, they were just talking about break, normal stuff…

Her heart skipped a beat. Someone definitely muttered “con artist” while looking her way. What the hell? It was one thing to get nervous stares from the people she’d been in classes with for years. But these senior students—how did they even know her? She barely recognized anyone. Scanning the crowd, the only person she could even name was Benkoten Talzatta, the class president and older brother of Nathan. He was sitting at the opposite end, joking with some friends.

“Y-you’re an out-t-t-t-t-cast, n-now.”

Oh, and there was Shera, who had taken a seat next to her. And no, Myra was not an outcast, thank you very much. There were just people talking about her. For some reason.

Anyway, it would probably blow over. Myra had no idea how to respond to such a blunt comment as Shera’s, so she didn’t.

The professor, Mio Suzuki, shortly introduced herself. She was a young woman with a thick stack of notes under her arm and a suit covered in chalk dust. She was missing the mature professorial air that most teachers had, and in her introduction, she confirmed that she was, in fact, a new faculty member. She didn’t dwell on her introduction, and she dove into the content immediately.

Unfortunately, she spent even less time on motivation for her material. Myra followed the first few definitions just fine, expecting some kind of “punch line,” a clever theorem or something that explained why they were doing this. But instead, the definitions just kept piling on top of each other.

Annoyingly, Shera didn’t seem to have any trouble following along. She asked multiple questions throughout the lecture, all of which were well-received by the professor, and which made clear even to Myra that Shera somehow got ‘the point’ of what they were doing.

It was baffling to Myra not just that Shera was following along, but that she took such comprehensive notes at the same time. She copied the blackboard contents exactly, rather than scribbling out semi-legible shorthand like you were supposed to, and she interspersed it with her own comments in a different color of ink. She never even used the spell to animate her quill and have it transcribe it automatically (a fairly easy spell which saved a lot of time if you really wanted to take exact notes like she was). How could she do all that while still paying attention to the words being said?

When the class ended, Myra was sufficiently frustrated that she failed to pay attention to where she was going, and she ended up colliding square into an innocent, moving person. Books and parchment flew everywhere and Myra’s ass hit the floor.

“Ugh… sorry…” Myra muttered. Ow.

“Well, I dare say it was half my fault.” The one she’d run into was Benkoten, the class president, who was already telekinetically sorting the mess of papers back into two stacks. “Well, at least a third.” He gave a cheeky smile, and he reached out his hand to help Myra up.

“Thanks…” She tried to ignore the impatient students they had accidentally blockaded, who were muttering loudly and preparing to take some unconventional routes to the classroom exit.

They were muttering very loudly.

It was about her.

“Are you doing all right? You look unwell.”

“What, you don’t know?”

“Ah… about Kent Arcane?” That was the name of her father’s company. “I had heard some rumors that you were related, but I didn’t know if I should give them any stock. Kent is hardly an unusual name, after all.”

“He’s my father.”

“I see. Well, I can’t conceive of what you’re going through by half… if you need absolutely anything, please don’t hesitate to let me know. As the student president, I’ll do anything in my power to keep things smooth for you.”

“Oh! Th-thanks.”

Myra took her books back and quickly checked she had everything. It was all there, and even sorted in logical order.

“So, what’d you think of the class?”

“I—I didn’t get it at all, honestly.” She felt her cheeks burn as she admitted it. “I don’t even think I’d recognize these objects in Abstract Space if I saw one… and if I don’t pass—I mean, if I don’t master this class, I don’t know what I’m gonna do, you know—I wasn’t really preparing to take it in the first place, but Precision Isomorphic canceled my apprenticeship, and I don’t think I have any kind of future in rune forging anymore, I think all the forges lost a lot of money in the scandal and Professor Alzergodin wouldn’t give me the time of day, and I don’t know why my fatherwoulddothishowcouldhedothistome?”

What am I doing???

Myra didn’t actually know Benkoten that well; she knew him a little, through Nathan, and of course, she knew him as the class president, but that was hardly personal. Ordinarily, Myra wouldn’t have said much at all… but all the whispers were banging around in her head, and even Shera’s insensitive comment… and once she started, she had just… kept going.

“Um… you know? So. I need to do well in this class.”

He nodded without any judgment. “So you’re worried about the class, and you need help finding an apprenticeship.”

“Y-yeah.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound utterly intractable. I can probably help point you to professors who are looking for apprentices. I could probably spare some time for tutoring as well.”

Myra perked up. “Tutoring, really? You have time for that kind of thing? I assumed you’d be really busy as president…”

He chuckled. “Yes, I have time. How about we meet this evening?”

◆

Myra got lunch with her usual group—Cynthia, Iz, Nathan, and Tazhin. It sounded like they’d all had a better break than Myra had.

Nathan had apparently read up on the financial fallout that was resulting from the collapse of Kent Arcane. (He didn’t say he had a good time, because that would have been really awkward, but Myra could read between the lines. He kinda had a thing for the interactions of complex, interlocking institutions.)

Tazhin had attended some social events with his family. Cynthia had slept a lot and sat around bored (“but in a good way”). Iz had baked pies for her parents.

They were also joined by an older student, who had apparently walked with Iz from her class. This was Aurora Ferara, a student Myra didn’t know at all, except through her… reputation. It was rumored that her family was the same as an assassin clan that worked for the empire, the Blank Cloaks. Her hobby of collecting exotic knives did little to quell this rumor, despite the fact that the Blank Cloaks weren’t particularly known for knives.

Maybe she’d sympathize with me, Myra wondered.

It wasn’t clear if Aurora’s presence had been what drove the discussion toward death, but regardless, that was where it had gone.

“I can’t believe you hadn’t read about it, yet,” Nathan proclaimed.

“I don’t read the news these days,” Myra said.

“I don’t read the news,” Cynthia said.

“It’s a big fucking crater! How could you miss a crater on the news?”

“I mean, if we didn’t check the newspaper in the first place, it doesn’t really matter how many pages it took up—”

“A crater!” Nathan repeated. “It’s on that bike trail, the one by the train station, that goes behind that tourist trap area behind the riverbank. A cyclist died. Completely obliterated in the blast.”

“How’d the crater happen?”

“Nobody knows. The article says it was a high-speed projectile, but the projectile wasn’t found. Might have just been speculation, though.”

“Maybe it was an ice cube,” Aurora piped in.

Nathan blinked. “An ice cube?”

“Yeah. If the murder weapon can’t be found, it’s always an ice cube that melted.” Generally speaking, Aurora Ferara did very little to dispel any rumors that she came from a family of assassins.

“I don’t think an ice cube could create a six-meter crater.”

“Do we know it was murder…?” Myra asked.

“Who was it that died?” Iz asked. “It wasn’t anyone at the school, was it?”

Nathan shrugged. “I read they couldn’t identify him. They recovered his identification papers, but they were fake, apparently.”

“That’s pretty suspicious,” Cynthia said.

“That means it was murder,” Aurora said. “So many strange crimes this morning…”

Nathan tilted his head. “Huh? What other strange crimes happened this morning?”

“Oh, did you not hear about the retired sage in Jewel City? I thought you were going to bring it up next.” She smirked, knowing full well she apparently had the best murder gossip.

“Jewel City? You already got Jewel City news from this morning?” Jewel City was the imperial capital.

“Oh, this was hardly an obscure event,” Aurora explained. “You all know of Emmett Massiel, right?”

“Former Sage of Magical Infrastructure,” Nathan recalled.

“Right. He died just after midnight in his home. Of course, Sage Emeritus Massiel had his mansion decked out with the absolute, state-of-the-art home security system. All kinds of alarms, tamper-proof recordings, that kinda thing. There was nothing that pointed to any intruder. And he lived alone.”

“So how did he die?” Cynthia asked.

Aurora held her hand out flat, then struck it against her chest. “Hole burned through the heart. There was no murder weapon at the scene, but of course, the authorities checked the records for any sign of a spell being cast. Coinciding with the estimated time of death, 1:09 A.M., someone cast a spell to burn a laser beam straight into Emmett Massiel’s chest. And that ‘someone’ was…” She paused dramatically. “The only one on the premises, of course. Emmett Massiel.”

Nathan looked almost disappointed. “So it was just a suicide, then?”

But Aurora curled the ends of her lips, obviously saving the ‘punch line’ for the end.

“That’s what reason suggests, and also what the records confirm. However… Emmett Massiel went to sleep before 9 P.M., and he never woke up.”

“Wait, so you’re saying he…” Nathan squinted at Aurora, waiting for her to confirm the conclusion.

“That’s right. He cast the spell that caused his own death, all while sound asleep.”

◆

Myra only had one class in the afternoon, Biomechanical Systems, which she was taking with Cynthia. Joining on the other side was a girl named Zirphilia, who greeted Myra cheerfully. Zirphilia was a bit of a distant friend—they had worked together before and got along well, but their social circles didn’t intersect much. She played a lot of sports, and she mostly hung out with other athletes. Today, in fact, it looked like she was coming from a pretty intense workout. Her hair was tied up, and she was coated in sweat, and she was wearing a tank top that clung to her sticky skin, following her curves all the way down her long torso until it stopped short a pleasant centimeter or two above the waist of her athletic pants…

“Miss Kyow, what are you wearing?” Professor Bandine snapped. She was an elderly woman, whose own attire was old-fashioned in a way that made it look extremely formal.

“Um…” Zirphilia flushed red. “Clothes from, like, practice? Rock-dodging practice is right before this…”

“Well, you’ll need to work something out.”

“But—”

“I won’t have you making a distraction with such undignified attire after today.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Zirphilia huffed once the professor had turned away.

… Damn.

Professor Bandine was a hard-ass, but her lecture was decent. She gave a high-level overview of the field and announced they would be starting their study with cellular interfaces, a fundamental subject they would need for any deeper study into the field. It looked like it would be a pretty interesting class, and Myra was surprised at the extent it would involve runes.

Maybe I should see if Professor Bandine is looking for an apprenticeship.

Even if she’s an enemy of hot girls being hot. Myra would take what she could get, though.

◆

Myra was decently happy with this plan, but she decided to see what Benkoten had to say first since he had promised to offer advice. She stopped by his dorm room in the evening like they’d planned. It was the same building as hers, though several floors up.

“Tea?”

He handed her a steaming cup just as she entered. His room was neat and organized, with lots of desk space they’d need. It was a much nicer room than her own, probably a perk of being student president. “I’d love some. Is this mint?”

“It is! Is that alright? I could brew something else.”

“Oh, no! Mint’s my favorite.”

“Mine too.”

She took a close look at the books on his bookshelf (the best way to get to know anyone) as he prepared the desk space. Hopefully he didn’t mind. Lots of sci-fi, some textbooks like you’d expect. Ooh. a couple of recipe books … was he a cook? And… “Oh, hey, is the Spy Wyvern series?”

“Ah-hah…” He chuckled nervously and scratched his neck. “Yeah… y’know I really liked that when I was a kid…”

“Oh, I loved it!” Guys were always so embarrassed to have anything childish lying around… “It’s cute you held onto it. It’s sad when we lose touch with these things, isn’t it?” As expected, this made him turn ever redder. Hehe…

The first item on the agenda was the issue of the apprenticeship. Myra told Benkoten about her thoughts to seek out Professor Bandine as a mentor.

Benkoten, though, immediately dismissed the idea. “It’s a very intriguing application of rune-carving,” he admitted. “But you’re not going to be advancing runecraft itself. Unless I misunderstood what you’re looking for?”

He hadn’t misunderstood, though, so he went on to give his own suggestion, which was to seek out Professor Snailsworth, who worked on aura channeling and distribution. Myra was a little taken aback by the idea—aura channeling was pretty difficult, and she didn’t have experience in it, but Benkoten insisted that an apprenticeship could be that experience.

“It’s a little outside your comfort zone, sure, but I think you’d stand to learn a lot here. And if you tell Snailsworth I sent you, I’m sure he’ll give you a chance.”

Next on their agenda was algebraic topology. Benkoten suggested—and Myra agreed—that the best way to get a leg up in the subject would be to feel out some of the concepts in Abstract Space. After all, Myra thought, there was really no better way to study something than to get your (metaphorical) hands on it. After they recapped the definitions of the homotopy groups, Myra prepared to meditate, expanding her mind into Abstract Space, holding the definitions firm. It was a little tough at first, but in a little under half an hour, with Benkoten’s guidance, she was able to feel out the topological structure of the university space in a way she hadn’t before.

“Woah! This is wild. I think this element here is the loop around that column in the administrative building…”

“You’re getting it!”

“Huh… something’s weird,” Myra muttered.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, something’s different over here.” After studying it for a while, sufficiently puzzled, she switched to the more familiar geometric perspective. “Hey, Benkoten, … do you know why the interior of the event hall has vanished?”