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Chapter 112

Harlan stepped through the gate back to the academy, he would not hear what had happened until he saw Blue again.

He made his way to the cafeteria and ate with everyone, then he went to his room.

He had checked the couriers office for letters, one had come in just before dinner but he hadn’t opened it.

To his sight it burned with far too much mana for what should be possible for paper to hold and stamped in a purple and gold swirl, was the royal seal, the tree of blades.

Rosewell never replied to anything he sent her, though Dahlia did sometimes show up to yell at him.

They spoke many months ago because of Relly and he had been told she would be out soon, yet Harlan was growing impatient about what soon meant.

His letters became more and more direct whenever he sent them.

Cynthia on the other hand replied rather quickly and they had been talking back and forth with a letter every week or so.

Harlan placed his signet ring on the wax seal and it slid off with ease before it vanished into dust.

“Sir Harlan Fomoria, it is with great honor that you are to be at a gala within the royal palace in 1 month’s time. Your family will be there and you will be allowed two guests. Signed, Yggdra the 15th, King of Ragne.”

Harlan paced back and forth, why was clear, but why now was his question.

The crown had yet to unveil the communication devices, for him to be invited it could only be for that.

He would likely be shoved around like a rare animal to be gawked at by people who were either so far above him that they thought he wasn’t worth their time, or people who wanted to mess with him either for personal gain or just because he had made few friends in the academy.

His penchant for challenging others when they wanted to belittle those under them in the hierarchy made him a target for insults, but there were few people who actually wanted to fight him.

For those in the 3rd year the chances of winning weren’t great, and for those in their 4th year who thought they could win it simply wasn’t worth the cost to their reputation if they somehow did lose.

Anyone below them simply had no chance unless they had some specific bloodline ability that let them win.

“Shit.”

“What if we have fun?”

Lugh still looked like a doll when he walked around shaped like a person, he was hanging on the edge of the desk looking at the letter.

“I have no hopes for fun, the best I can hope for is that nothing blows up.”

Harlan threw a wooden ball he had carved against the wall and it turned to splinters before slowly starting to reform.

“Our family will be there, what if some son of a duke gets handsy? I don’t want a repeat of Jet but I can’t fight him.”

“Maybe Miss Cynthia will be there and she can help?”

“Lugh, thank you. I’ll request her help with a letter, it will be there before the event itself. I’m also going to need to choose two people. Sepul is a good choice, I think, but I don't want Adina there. Do you think Yara would go for it? She is outside of the noble system but people generally avoid interfering with the Golden.”

“Why not Adina?”

“Because she has no power and she is from Reino. If somebody messes with her I would be forced to hold my tongue. I need to look at the library, find out how laws on guests work.”

Harlan was on his way to look for books when he was suddenly teleported away.

He sighed and sat in the chair he found behind him.

“I take it you saw the letter?”

“Yes, I was just going to look at laws regarding guests. I also wanted to invite you to be there. My being under you will take a cut from the praise and you were important to my work.”

“I cannot accept your invite, I have already received my own.”

“Oh? I thought you left the mire of politics and parties years ago.”

“Yes, I did, but if you start causing trouble as my apprentice I will need to correct you just as I would correct those who seek your harm.”

“Thank you very much, you don’t know how much weight this will be off my shoulders.”

“You are welcome. Now, moving onto guests, don’t take Adina, if you do I will not defend her.”

“I already decided I don’t want her there, I can’t defend her the same way I could defend my family. Who would you recommend I take?”

“I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but I am proud that you understand to keep her away from some things, she is already a headache and I would rather she not be involved in more incidents. But about guests, I would suggest the sisters. Respectful relations with the Golden are part of old treaties that Marigold herself set up so they will be treated well.”

“I thought she didn’t even like her people?”

“She believes them misguided, but until the day comes that they understand her position and join the rest of the world she wants them safe from the outside world, and the outside world safe from them.”

“I can see her point, it must’ve been hard to- Wait, you are using present tense, she was the champion of Aarde, she is still alive, isn’t she?”

“Simple slip of the tongue, but yes. I don’t know where she is, last I know she was somewhere in the north solving an issue, though even that was well over 80 years ago. She always comes back as a Golden but since they don’t share information with the rest of us she could claim to be any exile and just put on a new face. Ragne is very accepting of her people, but maybe she is living in The Confederacy now. I only say she always comes back as a Golden because every time I’ve met her she was one, but there is also a possibility of her coming back as a human and living in Reino. For all I know she could be a beastkin.”

Harlan slumped in his seat, he didn’t believe Sepul would misspeak, but he let it go, whatever was the reason for it, why he wanted Harlan to know wasn’t important.

“Huh, that is interesting. Anyway, I’ll ask the sisters.”

“Yes, I believe they are likely to accept, Liat will end up as an exile and it will be a good chance for her to potentially seek employment and connections with the upper echelon of the kingdom. Yara will simply wish to see the palace.”

“Well then, thank you again for your advice, but I am also going to prepare for something later, so I need to return to my room.”

“You can’t fix her.”

“Excuse me?”

“The cause of her blindness is a faulty bloodline curse set in place by Fae. You lack the skill and the ability to correct her body. Don’t give her a false hope.”

“I won’t know unless-”

“No, you won’t. But it doesn’t matter, you would do better not wasting your time.”

Harlan stood up, the chair sliding back slightly from the speed at which he did so.

“I am not going to hear another word of defeatist bullshit. I’m the one who was born to poke around souls, you heal the flesh. I am going to do everything I can and I will spend my time however I please. Send me back to my room now.”

Sepul sent him away.

His words were to light a fire in Harlan and then let him fail.

Across his over 300 years of apprentices the biggest killer was pride, Harlan had been doing too well for too long and at such a young age it was better to douse him with ice water now.

Sitting there alone in the room a shadow smiled at him.

“Thank you very much. The boy needed a little push.”

He flooded the room with light to banish every shadow before he checked all of his wards and arrays to find out how she slipped inside.

Then he went to Cecht to make sure his mind hadn’t been altered in any way, there were no signs that she had been inside him.

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She had never outright controlled other people, yet the fact that he knew she could was enough for him to keep his distance from her.

Harlan replayed his memories of looking at her soul for hours until she arrived.

Rushing ideas between himself and Lugh, both of them had that instinct for soul magic, a certain feeling for what seemed wrong.

Their appointment was set at 9, she would be there waiting with him at 8:50.

A gate opened directly to a room for them.

This was not just a place for children to learn magic, it was the greatest gathering of healers outside of the personal staff for the king himself, discretion was something that was needed and understood by the staff.

The doctor was Hellon.

“I can’t have my best students going to another healer, it would reflect poorly on me.”

“Of course.”

Once they were beyond the point where she was nearly trying to inflict shellshock on the students she had turned to just cold towards most of the class instead of hostile.

“I’ve already heard what you want me to do, but today I am just going to be looking at her to understand which process I will need to use. It will all depend on which parts of her eyes are actually the issue, the worst case will be if I need to make entirely new nerves and connect them to the brain myself.”

“Is this going to hurt?”

Adina was shaken.

It was one thing when she was seeing things for the first time and going with the feelings at the time, yet now she was actually standing at the threshold, one more step would be too far for her people to ever accept her back.

Even just knowing that she had seen a doctor to fix her issue while knowing that soul magic was the only way to possibly fix it would lead to excommunication at best.

“No, you might feel a little warmth or a chill in your head, but it will pass. If you want to turn back now I will not say a word to anyone, I know it can be very scary to have someone perform on you.”

Harlan placed his hand on hers and she grabbed hold.

“Hellon, please continue.”

Hellon looked at Harlan, her eyes called him a sly dog.

She placed her hands over Adina’s eyes.

Her head was bursting with a yellow glow as the magic seeped deeply into her flesh and harmlessly tickled her brain.

She felt the chilly feeling behind her eyes, and squeezed Harlan’s hand hard enough that if he was a normal person it might’ve hurt him.

He squeezed back lightly.

After 30 minutes Hellon took her hands off.

Harlan could feel anger, disappointment, and a tinge of what he believed was self-loathing.

“Give me a little time, I’ll try again.”

She drank a tonic and then cast a spell to metabolize it over the next few minutes.

Another light show, another failure.

She ran other tests.

Bright lights in the eyes, deep brain and muscle scans, nerve dancing where she was sending small shocks to try and map some reactions.

After 2 hours she came up completely empty.

She tried to flesh sculpt the eyes, which were the only issue she could see, and only because could see them with her own eyes.

Adina had a natural eye color of green as it turned out, yet Adina saw nothing.

Her worry had been growing for every moment that Hellon was just sitting in silence, thinking.

“I am going to consult other doctors, I cannot see a single thing wrong with your eyes. The nerves are connected properly, your brain is functioning as it should, the parts of your eye that make it work are all there. The only thing making your eyes appear blank is some kind of magical effect that I dispelled, and now it is back.”

“Don’t bother talking to Sepul. He told me it was impossible, the result of a Fae granted bloodline malfunctioning and turning to a curse. He said I might as well not waste my time.”

“Well who the hell does he think he is? Giving up isn’t the job of healers, the unsolvable things are what we are here for. He is going to get an earful from me.”

“Harlan, you said my soul had no obvious flaws, right?”

“Yes, I didn’t really poke around too much, but I know what a human soul looks like. We all have about 98% in common with one another, so I guess I’ll need to map out that other 2% and find what is wrong. He seemed pretty sure it was soul based anyway.”

“How long will that take?”

“Well… 2 weeks, maybe more. Even if souls are more or less uniform in size, the complexity of information stored in each drop of soul water is far far denser in humans. I’ll need to take out a slice of the soul, read it, and then put it back to check the next slice. I’ll be able to skip anything that I know is just repeating information or information that hasn’t been written yet, but it is basically like trying to understand the pattern on a quilt by pulling out each thread and quilting a second one until you’ve remade the entire blanket. A book written in print so small you need special spells just to read a single letter. That 2% is more than the souls of 10,000 rabbit souls in their entirety. It is just time consuming, but I don’t mind at all. We have from after dinner until about 11, then they will make you leave my room. Then that time after that I can review everything, if I can find the issue and then repeat it on other souls then I’ll have a much easier time…”

Harlan just rambled on for minutes on end.

Hellon was taking notes, despite Harlan giving out a great deal as a matter of goodwill and improving how people heal souls, he was currently going into theoretical topics and things he didn’t tell anybody else.

Everything was going over Adina’s head but she was happy that he was thinking himself into a frenzy to help her.

Eventually Hellon had to ask a very important question.

“How exactly do you have so much information on the human soul and taking it apart?”

The air seemed to shift under the sudden tension.

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to.”

Hellon and Adina assumed it was something that happened during the 3 years he had been taken by the kingdom.

He still never spoke about it with her in any detail.

“I am sorry to have asked. I didn’t mean to bring up any bad memories.”

“It’s fine.” It wasn't.

“That is all in the past.” He accepted what he had done, but he didn’t like to think about it.

“Adina, I think we should go now, I’ll keep looking into this overnight, but I am going to catch up on the day classes I missed by going to the night classes.”

He believed with all of his heart, yet reality cared not for those whose heart outstripped their ability.

He waved her good night.

His classes had actually already started, he was still missing most of them, but he never planned to go to them anyway.

Instead he went to the library.

He had been trying, little by little, to test the systems for keeping students away from the books meant for older students.

Tonight, he would be trying to break them.

Alrick was returning the books to their proper places near the back of the room, so he was away from the doors that led to stairs leading down to the advanced materials.

The doors still had mechanical locks in place of magical locks, the older students would simply keep a key on them at all times.

Harlan thought it was strange, his room had a magical lock, class doors had magical locks, yet the place that held so much potentially dangerous knowledge was kept safe by simple locks?

Lugh shifted himself inside the mechanism and moved the pins, 10 seconds and he was in.

He actually expected that there would be an array or ward that would find out he wasn’t supposed to be here, but he didn’t expect to be able to just walk in the first time, he didn’t mind getting caught once at least.

Yet the lock clicked and the door opened without anything happening.

“Did they not expect anyone to do this?”

“Maybe? The librarian rarely leaves the front desk and most of the time there would be people in here.”

“I guess so…”

Harlan couldn’t fathom that they left it undefended because most people would lack the ability to fully understand what was written here.

Also the books were all magically marked themselves, so he couldn’t take them away even if he wanted to.

He went down the stairs to the 4th year students library, it was no less sizable than the main library.

It was empty, he almost expected that he would need to try and hide from other students who were down here, yet the librarian was the only person he could sense.

As he walked down the rows of books he realized that he never actually saw anyone else ever go into the library while he was there.

“Lugh, you can look at anything you want or you can help me read medical texts. Also.”

Harlan cast ring of light, it would expire in time to remind him when to leave.

Even if not a single student from the night classes came here, he expected that he wouldn’t be able to get away with staying here when breakfast rolled around.

“Now. Let’s go.”

Harlan and Lugh tore through books on medicine, on souls, and on Fae.

Understandably the books on souls didn’t reveal anything to him, it was a magic that until he came along was poorly understood and difficult to understand, each ritual spell would have a cost in the double digits of silver coins and sometimes involved rare ingredients.

There were few reasons to actually do it anyway since any damaging soul magic was worthless unless you managed to make your target literally walk into an already active ritual and at that point you could have a warspell or a series of arrays already set up for an ambush.

Healing soul damage on the other hand was more advanced, but its rarity as a threat and the rarity of mages who can actually heal the soul made those few that knew anything to hide it as a personal legacy that would only be passed on to apprentices.

Sometimes decades or centuries of knowledge would be discovered when a house would be made a possession of the state due to the mages having no heirs.

None of the books he found were actually using his methods because the people who should be writing these books were just improving their legacy instead of bettering the world at large.

When this dawned on Harlan he was just disappointed, not even angry.

The other books he found were equally worthless to him.

Fae didn’t like being written about so the books were written in strange formats with enough turns of phrase that he needed to find a separate book to decipher them.

Even when he did understand what was written he didn’t learn anything important, Fae magic was poorly understood and couldn’t be cast by normal people unless the person witnessing it gleaned some of the cause and effect, yet even then it was making a spell that did what the Fae had done, and it was not truly Fae magic.

Medical textbooks explained every part of the eye in excruciating detail, but Adina’s eyes were physically fine.

He was about to give up, his ring of light would expire in another 2 hours but he felt somewhat defeated and came to the conclusion that it was something he would need to do on his own.

He kept looking at the books anyway, hoping they weren’t useless.