The day we finally crossed into Panath and Ocean Spires, I got my first view of the Citadel of Ether, and of the huge city that had sprung up around it.

Towering like a dozen mountains striking out of the waves were hundreds upon hundreds of tall black and purple spires of stone, piercing up into the heavens, each one so thick that it might have covered a small town square. The stone had been carved into a long spiral ramp that wound up towards the top of the spire, where there were rope bridges supported by glowing ether constructs, linking each spire with the other.

Set all along the ramp, from barely a hundred feet above the sea, all the way to the top, were houses, carved out of the stone, or into the stone. Often I could see little more than a window and a door, but others had carved out a massive cavern to hold an entire mansion, and even imported dirt to create artificial forest.

But all of that paled before the Citadel.

Far off in the distance, in what looked to be the center of Ocean Spires, there was a large area, easily the size of Summerbone, that was missing its spires.

I frowned and squinted.

No, they hadn’t gone missing. They’d broken apart, falling into the ocean below, and leaving a wound in the landscape. Some great battle, maybe? I was sure there was historical context I was missing.

But floating near the top of where the spires should have been, in order to connect with the network of bridges, was a monumental silver cloud.

I didn’t even have the words to describe it. The cloud was large enough to be an entire city, and it seemed to be made entirely out of shimmering silvery ether. The cost to create and maintain a spell of that size boggled the mind, and made me wonder if it was even a spell. It couldn’t be a spell, could it? There was no way.

It had to be the interdiction of a god, or some sort of natural magical formation, or leakage from one of the endless planes of Etherius.

Maybe it was magic from the age of wilds? Most spells from that time had been destroyed, but some survived. I knew my mother had a sword from that age, with magic that no modern artificer could replicate. Maybe the cloud was like that.

I stopped myself from going down an endless trail of possibilities and focused.

Atop the silver cloud, I could see brass and bronze towers rising ten stories off the ground, lit with a hundred different colors of ether, and I could feel the concentration of raw ether from leagues away.

That had to be the college.

It was hard to see, given that I was looking up and at an angle, but I thought I could also make out grass and trees on the top of the cloud, like someone had taken a slice out of a verdant forest and plopped it down atop the cloud, then built towers on top of that.

On the deck next to me, Yushin took in a sharp breath as her eyes caught sight of the city. Even Jackson, who had dragged himself up onto the deck, let out an impressed whistle.

“Hellfire and sunlight,” he said. “That’s our school?”

“I thought your church members described it to you,” I asked.

“The description of a city floating on a cloud is not able to do that justice,” Jackson said, and I nodded. That was fair enough.

It took us two more days to actually reach the citadel, only one of which was on the boat. The other was spent moving across Ocean Spires.

From afar, the hundreds of connected spires had looked small, but the total area they covered was still immense. Even with Yushin shelling out for an enchanted carriage, it still took nearly fourteen hours of riding across spire bridges to reach the citadel. What had looked like simple pedestrian bridges from afar was revealed to be massive roads, easily wide enough for five men standing shoulder to shoulder. And beefy men at that, like Jackson, rather than me.

It was the first time I’d seen an enchanted carriage in person. With the high ambient ether and connection to Etherius, there were many wonders of artificery that could be produced and ran on ambient ether that simply wouldn’t work in a region like White Sands, with its low ether.

The moving enchanted carriages in particular were unique to the spires, a product of the Citadel whose design was kept heavily under lock and key.

I marveled at them, and was a bit sad when we had to depart.

We spent the night at a cheap inn on the floating citadel, far away from the wealthiest parts of the floating city where a rogue Dreki might be staying, and Jackson wound up spending the night with the bartender, which Yushin seemed frustrated by. I couldn’t care less, though I did wonder how exactly someone who I’d personally categorize as midway between a religious zealot and a town strongman was able to attract so many people.

The following morning, we headed onto the campus itself, passing under the massive burnished bronze arch that marked the entryway to the Citadel of Ether as separate from the… Citadel of Ether.

I could already tell that I was going to find it annoying to have the school and the small city around the school named the same thing.

Ah, well.

We were far from the only ones who were streaming through. There were still a few weeks before the school year officially began, but plenty of students had ridden on boats like ours, or come from all over the world to attend. I saw people of every possible race and description wandering the campus, from massive tree-folk, to muscled minotaurs, to slender elves, to squat dwarves, to winged harpies, and beyond.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The administrative hall was overflowing with almost a hundred students, but being such a massive institution, there were over two dozen attendants. Jackson, Yushin, and I all broke apart and made our way to separate lines, and I took the moment to take in the hall.

Bronze and marble dominated every surface, polished and cut into neat tiles. There was no woodsmoke in the air, as the lights were all weirlights, sustained by ambient ether. The entire place smelled clean and fresh, the halls scrubbed clean by a mix of magic and the hard work of the cleaning staff. I had to tip my nonexistent hat to the cleaning staff, they did an excellent job. My sense of smell was better than most dogfolk, and I could barely catch a hint of dust or debris that hadn’t been tracked in by the students recently.

In the back of the hall, behind the rows of administrative desks was by far the strangest set of objects:

One was the blue crystal chair that had seated the Erudite who sponsored the school and acted as its… Headmaster? Dean? President? Chancellor? It was entirely composed of ether crystal, and it seemed to be connected to the other two items, almost as if it was a power source.

The second was a tall and slender pillar of silvery cloud-smoke. I wasn’t sure which it was. It had no smell, and while it resembled the cloud holding the Citadel aloft, it was much thinner and whisper, while at the same time seeming impossible etherically dense. The attendants would frequently approach the pillar and remove things from it, so I assumed it to be some sort of storage spell or clever bit of artifice.

The third item dominating the hall was a strange tree. It looked like an ash tree, but it smelled like blood and brains, and every single one of its leaves had an eye on it. As the line moved, I could have sworn that the tree’s eyes were scanning the crowd, watching it, and I suppressed a shiver.

“Next!”

I walked up, removing my papers from my satchel and passing them over to the attendant, who wore a well fitted dress and cardigan, with a gray stole that draped over her shoulders. Her cardigan had the symbol of the university on it, and was embossed in golden thread with emerald accents. She looked the papers over, then nodded.

“Very good, Emyrs. Please fill out these forms, and I’ll be back momentarily.”

She pushed a stack of papers and a pen my way, and I began dutifully filling them out. She took my papers and left, tossing them into the pillar of silver smoke, then paused as if waiting.

The eyes of the tree focused on me. Hundreds of spots of vision, all focused on me. And they saw me. The leaves rustled in amusement, and the world froze.

“Running,” the tree said. “Fear. Loneliness. Fix?”

“Yes,” I said.

My voice made no noise.

“Stop. Overcome. Connect. Train. Train. Train. Traintraintraintraintraintrain–”

“I intend to train,” I said. “I want to learn every bit of magic I can. I want all of it.”

The rambling word stopped, and the world started moving again.

“Good,” was the last thing I heard the tree say.

I blinked as I suddenly forgot what I’d been thinking about. Ah, right. I was filling out paperwork while the attendant was retrieving my stuff from the smoke pillar.

The attendant returned after a moment, and waited for me to finish the papers, then went and fed those to the pillar too, before returning again. She placed down a thin black slate, roughly three and a half inches by two inches. It was thick and slightly heavy.

“Channel your ether into that, and it will link to you,” the attendant told me. “Don’t lose it, they’re expensive to produce, and are needed to bypass the wards in the library, classes, labs, dorms, and more.”

I pushed a spark of ether into the slate and watched in fascination as my name – Emrys, thankfully, not my birth name – age, spell circle, and an image of me all appeared.

I frowned, and my image frowned too. That distracted me enough that I spent a moment making faces and watching the image change to match me, then I looked up.

“Why does my card say second circle, then have third in parenthesis? I can cast third circle spells.”

“Ah, you must not have known many classically trained mages,” she said. “I’m guessing you’re from an ether poor region?”

“Yes…”

“Well, there’s no way to measure exactly, but you’ve got an ether pool that’s comfortable with casting second circle spells, but you can stretch it to cast third circle spells. Like a pianist, able to memorize a piece beyond their normal skill level. I will say, the fact you got admitted this way is quite impressive.”

I sat back, a little mollified, and the attendant continued speaking.

“Now, with your scholarship, you’re in the adaptive dorms, room sixteen in the Northwest Tower.”

“Adaptive dorms?” I asked.

“The room starts out very basic, with just a cot and a small bathroom separated by a curtain. But they upgrade and change, depending on your accomplishments, grades, increasing ether pool, learning more spells, and other such things,” she said. “I’ve heard that they get incredibly fancy. Enchanted tea carts that can make tea and summon teatime snacks directly from the kitchens, bathing chambers fit for a king, and a bed made out of elysian cloudstuff. Of course, those are mostly rumors, and like I said, it all depends on your performance. Your room is private, but it will open into a common space with three others, and the common space is going to be determined by the average of all four of your rooms and such.”

“Interesting,” I said, then she continued.

“You can enter the dining hall three times a day using your token, and you’ll find the schedule for what’s prepared when, as well as a map of the school in these papers here. I suggest you get your tailoring done before school starts, as some teachers are rather sticklers for that sort of thing. There’s a grace period, but things can easily get backed up.”

“Tailoring?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Ah, sorry. You look… well, I won’t go into that. But I keep thinking you’re one of the nobles who’s just slumming it and already know this. There’s a dress code on campus for the officially tailored coat and shirt and all that. The Erudite believes that it helps keep everyone on a more even playing field. But you’ll find the Citadel’s crest on each of them too, which is convenient, because it helps keep track.”

She pulled out a list and pushed it to me. The system was simple enough. The color that the campus crest was made out of indicated what spell circle could be comfortably cast, and the accents indicated what spell they could stretch to, with red indicating first circle, orange for second, yellow for third, so on and so forth. Purple was for sixth circle, with black for seventh, gray for eighth, and white for ninth, though only the Erudite was able to comfortably cast that strong of a spell.

I glanced at the woman’s stole. She was a comfortable third circle caster, then, but could stretch to fourth. Strong.

Stoles served to mark an extra layer of distinction on top of power, with white stoles for healers, black for campus guards, brown for librarians, blue for teachers, and gray for administrative staff, while labor like cooks and cleaners were free to dress as they saw fit. That felt a little classist to me, but I shrugged it off. The Erudite apparently had a purple stole, though he was rarely seen on campus.

“You should be due five uniforms,” the attendant told me helpfully. “You can request up to three new ones each semester, in case they wind up damaged, and altering the thread is free. I’d get them as soon as possible, like I said.”

“Thank you,” I said, nodding. “I appreciate all your help.”

She nodded, then looked up.

“Next!”