I leapt up and headed over to the door, opening it and stepping through. Jackson was on the other side, and he grinned.

“Our last roommate is here!” he said, then gestured over to where someone was standing in the entrance to the common area. I looked over at our fourth roommate, whose door indicated was named Salem Alderson.

He was short, and although he was taller than I was, there was no chance he stood taller than five foot six. His eyes burned such a bright, almost glowing green that it simply could not be human.

His hair was black, and he’d dyed half of it white. He wore black slacks, a white button down, thin silver necklace, and a black jacket, where the sigil of the school was embossed in orange with yellow accents, marking him as a comfortable second circle caster who could stretch to cast third circle spells.

Around his wrists, where they emerged from the sleeves of his jacket and shirt, I could see the lines of what had to be tattoos against his pale skin, and his ears were covered in an assortment of silver jewelry, joined by a piercing in one of his eyebrows. I thought there were enchantments on some of the jewelry, but I couldn’t tell without using ethersight.

His scent was that of mist and old leather bound books and ink. No distinct bloodline I could smell. Maybe the eyes were all that was left of one that was now dormant?

Flawless skin. Immaculate hair. Stunning eyes. And an all too pretty face.

My heart started beating faster.

Was he from the Isle of Dreki? It was one of the few places so far north as to have many pale people, unless you counted the demon wastes, which were inhospitable, or Hydref, which was unlikely, given how far away it was from Panath hold.

If he was, he was pretty enough that one of my siblings might have taken him. And if that was the case, he would immediately recognize me, and everything would fall apart.

When he spoke, my heart started slamming even faster as I prepared to lie, to fight, to run, to do something.

“I might as well let it get out in the open now,” Salem said, his accent somewhat Hydref, leaving a slight hint of sing-song in his voice. “I’m a psychic. I can’t read your thoughts, but I can technically dreamwalk, comfortably use psychometry, and do a little bit of retrocognition.”

I let out a sigh of sheer relief. I didn’t even care that he was a psychic right now – the mere fact he wasn’t in the pocket of my family was enough to relieve me.

“If that disturbs you, I cannae, er, cannot blame you,” Salem continued. “I won’t be offended if you want to move out. It’s happened plenty.”

The scent of salt caught my nose.

“How very droll,” Wesley said. “As if a proper wizard would have anything to fear from a psychic.”

He said the last word with such scorn and venom that he practically spat it. Salem raised his eyebrows, and I realized he had a glimmering silver piercing over one of his eyebrows.

Then Wesley turned and stepped back into his room, the door rattling shut behind him.

I immediately put Wesley on my mental list of people who I would happily hold an umbrella over if they caught fire and it looked like it might rain. Jackson had been touchy and preachy, but this was just cruel.

“I don’t mind. Power is all about how it’s used, not what it is. If you had a demon as a father, that’s not your fault,” I said firmly. “What matters is that you don’t use the demonic bloodline to hurt innocent people.”

A smile flitted across Salem’s face for a second.

“Effervesce decrees equality for all people, regardless of heritage or power,” Jackson declared, hands on his hips. “I agree with Emrys. So long as you use your psychic abilities for good, I’m happy to share a space with you.”

I had not said power needed to be used for good, I had said it needed to not be used to hurt people. I didn’t care if Salem never used his abilities at all, or if he only sold his dreamwalking as a part of a messaging service, or used psychometry just to evaluate items at a secondhand store.

Those might not be using the power for good, but that was fine.

I started to say something, but Jackson plowed on.

“Besides, I’ve never met anyone from another country before!”

“Jackson, my parents are from Dreki,” I said, then realized that since that was already out there, I might as well lean into the lie, and also establish my stance for my roommates.

“I might have grown up in White Sands, and consider Cendel my home, and I’m incredibly disappointed in the Isle for the invasion, and don’t support it. But that doesn’t change the fact I was technically born there. Also, Yushin is from the entire other side of the planet. She’s as far from being born in Cendel as is geographically possible.”

I thought that might have come out a little clunky, but it should at least entrench a grain of mostly-truth in Salem’s head, and probably in Wesley’s. I’d have bet a good amount of money he was still listening to us.

“I suppose she is,” Jackson said, blinking. “Well I’ve never met anyone from where Salem’s from.”

“Hydref,” Salem said, a hint of a laugh in his voice. “I’m from Hydref.”

His face grew more serious as he looked at me.

“I’m sorry about the war, though, that’s not an easy thing to deal with. I’m sure some people would go after you if they learned you were from there, so I appreciate showing me some trust too.”

Stolen story; please report.

A worm of guilt twisted in my guts, but I just nodded.

“I’ll let you get settled in,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

Salem nodded, and I headed back into my room. After taking a moment to clear my head, I took a breath and walked back over to the papers strewn about on my bed and started trying to organize my schedule.

I really only had two categories of classes left to choose from, but unfortunately, they were the categories that were the most tempting: the classes all about spells.

They were organized into two broad categories, each with their own section in the packet. The first one – classes based around a specific spell school, as ordained by Magyk – was the one I’d put aside earlier, but I pulled it back to me now.

There were ten schools of magic, or nine, if you didn’t count the universal spells like Wish or cantrips. Considering how few and far between universal spells were, there wasn’t a class on them offered at the school, but each of the other nine had their own courses.

Abjuration was tempting immediately. Sealing threats away, countering magic, and defensive spells like arcane armor and shield had endless uses. It was the sort of thing that just couldn’t be understated in how useful it was, even if it wasn’t exactly the flashiest magic out there.

I put it in the maybe pile.

Conjuration spells, like my summon gadhar, were interesting too. Why waste ether a fireball when you can summon a fire elemental that was practically a living fireball? Why learn a charm spell when you can summon up a succubus to charm someone. More than that, it also covered a lot of teleportation spells, and those had extreme utility. What kind of powerful wizard couldn’t teleport, after all?

Conjuration joined runes, ether manipulation, and abjuration on the maybe pile.

Divination, or magic related to the gathering of information, locating specific things or creatures or places had its uses. Plenty of bounty hunter teams used diviners to look for their prey. But for all that it was useful, it was also sharply limited. Being able to tell a threat was coming was nice, but it didn’t help stop the threat at all. It might help me hide from my family, but it also might set off someone else’s defenses and cause them to come hunt me down even harder.

I set it into the no pile and moved on.

Enchantment…

No. I wasn’t interested in mind control spells, nor was I willing to take the extra ethics and safety course that was required to be taken alongside enchantment.

Illusion magic was an interesting field for sure, and I knew Yushin was planning to take an illusion course. False face had certainly shown its use when I’d pretended to be Alastor Sinclair, and I could actually use it to hide from my family. More potent illusions could even have a degree of substance to them.

It went into the maybe pile.

Necromancy swiftly joined it. Like I’d said to Salem, power was about use, and even the class description on the paper called it ‘wrongfully vilified’. I agreed with that, but at the same time, I’d seen how people in White Sands could react to blood magic or necromancy. It was entirely too easy to rile people who didn’t know people up.

Obliteration magic made me hesitate. Throwing around fireballs, bolts of lightning, and entire swarms of arcane missiles was impressive, and I was sure that some of the spells in the school could even injure members of my family.

But that was the trouble.

Some of the spells could. But when I’d been a child I’d watched Claire, a member of the second generation, fight an exhibition match against a fifth circle spellcaster. She’d waded into a river of arcane missiles, walked through a whirling storm of spheres of fire, shattered a wall of ice with a single punch, and then snapped his neck. The only spell that had even scratched her was a spear of sonic energy that caused her left ear to bleed a single drop of blood.

It was enough to convince me that overwhelming firepower could only go so far. I thought I could probably look into a few of the spells in the school in my own time. Plus, there was a chance that the Applied Mage Combat class might cover some offensive spells.

But the final nail in the coffin was that it also required an extra set of ethics courses, like enchantment magic did. That was absolutely not worth it.

I put it in the no pile and moved on to restoration, which also went into the no category. I already healed much quicker than a normal person, even without using my bloodline, and while learning a healing spell was a good idea, they were also incredibly complex and on the slower side. There was a reason that in-combat healing frequently came from the divines, and magecraft was plied outside of combat.

That just left transmutation. Much like with conjuration, it was a flexible and powerful field that covered everything from empowering the body, transforming into animals, adding properties of certain things, and altering one substance into another. It might not have the raw offensive power, but it had massive amounts of utility.

That left me putting it in the maybe pile, then I turned to the assorted spellcraft courses. Most of these were easy for me to write off – I had no interest in specializing in focusing on force or metal or plant spells, or any of the other categories that were listed. Those made for amazing affinities, able to shuck some of the limitations of normal spellcrafting and freely manipulate the element, but in my opinion, dedicating an entire class to learning something like fire magic was just a worse version of learning broad obliteration magic.

But that didn’t mean that there weren’t spells in assorted spellcraft that were worth looking into. Domestic Magic sounded fascinating, but unfortunately fell into the same category as the art classes – I’d love to take them if I had time, but I needed more practical magic.

The course on ritual magic stood out to me. The more passive and impactful abilities that a ritual spell could bestow were certainly practical, but cost was a concern, just like it was with construct creation. While my blood mark ritual had been cheap, the naiad’s kiss ritual was quite expensive, and I’d heard rumors of rituals only getting more and more expensive as they grew in circle.

Thinking of my blood mark ritual made me glance at the blood magic course. It described itself as a ‘path to utility and power that branches through every school of magic’, and though it didn’t require a paired ethics course, the later description did mention that ethical use of blood magic was going to be a part of the course. That was enough for me to put it in the maybe category, though I leaned towards no, for the same reason I was iffy on necromancy.

The course on body enhancement spells was interesting, but fell into the same trap as the elemental ones, and it wasn’t something I was overly passionate about anyhow. I didn’t need to be even stronger than I naturally was, after all.

A cantrips course caught my eye, for the simple reason that its description promised the ability to improve on affinity magic through the use of improving ether manipulation without relying on the rigid boundaries of a spell circle, but I was admittedly worried that my affinity would be useless. Banking too much on that was a fool’s errand.

Which left me circling back to a short list of courses: abjuration, conjuration, illusion, transmutation, runes, ether manipulation, and blood magic.

I eliminated illusions. Yushin was already going to be learning illusions, after all, and if I wanted to learn a specific illusion spell, I could ask her about it.

The rest were harder for me to mull over, but I removed ether manipulation next. Fine control could be practiced through spellcraft, and while improving it was never a bad thing, I only had two free slots, as opposed to the usual three.

With a bit of reluctance, I removed runes. It might be more available than artifice, but it relied on imbuing spells into items. I wasn’t going to have many spells to imbue if I only ever took a single spell course.

Conjuration, abjuration, and transmutation, then…

I considered each of them carefully. Would abjuration complement my Applied Mage Combat course? Or would there be too much overlap?

One of the most important tools in any mage’s kit was versatility. With that in mind, it really only left one option.

I signed off on Conjuration One and Rudimentary Transmutation, then set the papers aside… to look at more papers.

Ah, well.