In the lead-up to the Last Dragon War, a Journeyman Stormcaller named Tal Binder, raised on Basin but trained in their ways by his mother, traveled openly as a dragon-blooded sorcerer at the side of Daulf, Illunia's Chosen.

-Tallen Elmheart, On Mages

—

Kole stayed up late that night working on the first of the Magic Missiles he knew enough spell components to repair, but he didn’t manage to finish it that night. The next morning he woke to find that he had visitors in the night, and the food he’d taken from the dining hall was missing.

“Flood!”

***

Kole arrived at Martial Combat 101 already dressed in the rented clothes provided by the martial college. The clothes were far from fashionable and a little itchy, but they were light and comfortable and more than half of his classmates were wearing them. He found Zale standing alone by her weapon rack, the other students giving her a wide berth and sneaking glances.

“Good morning! Late night?” She called him when she saw him.

Before he could answer, Tigereye’s voice called out, “Form Up!”

“At least you’re not late,” she added.

***

Kole didn’t see much of Zale the rest of that practice. When they ran laps around the yard, Zale was out in front, while Kole was near the back. She waved whenever she lapped him, which felt a little condescending but her tone was kind.

When the actual training began, he was grouped up with the rest learning the quarterstaff, while Zale assisted in the bastard sword training group.

When Kole's group had to pair up for sparring everyone near him quickly turned away from him to find someone else to practice with.

When the hustle settled there was a single student left unpaired aside from Kole. When the boy saw Kole alone, he let out an audible groan.

Kole was quite familiar being a social outcast from his time back home, but at least back then he'd known why everyone had hated him.

What did I do now? He thought.

"What's everyone's problem with me?" Kole asked his partner once they began the exercise.

If everyone already disliked him, it couldn't get worse by him being blunt.

His partner, who'd not introduced himself or spoken a single word aside from the groan, looked surprised at the words as if Kole were some sort of talking bear.

"You were talking to the ’half voidling girl,'" he said, as if that explained it, and then swung at Kole's head.

"So?" Kole answered, ducking the blow and swinging back.

The drill had them swinging in a set pattern to get used to the motions and comfortable blocking and dodging.

"So? There's no such thing. Haven't you heard about the outsiders in Illandrios that turned people into aberrations? She must be one of them, and if you spend too much time with her, you'll be too."

Kole, being from Illandrios, knew the boy to be very mistaken.

"That's not at all what happened in Illandrios," Kole tried to explain.

Kole began to explain Illandrios' history with the outsider who had infiltrated and suborned his home, but the boy wasn't listening. Kole had seen paintings and illusionary images of the aberrations the outsider had created, and they looked nothing like the pale and cheery girl.

They'd become sickly pale monstrosities, human only in general shape, with black stains all over their bodies.

Eventually, Kole gave up and repeated the drills in silence until they broke for the day.

“I’m sorry,” Zale’s voice came from behind when Kole was returning his equipment, remorse clear in her tone. “I should have told you this would happen if you stuck around with me.”

Kole turned to see Zale with downcast eyes, fiddling with the training sword on her belt. He wasn’t exactly in the best mood, but he understood. He’d been in Zale’s exact situation before—well, not exactly, she had at least one friend, and now he did too. At the thought of that, he realized how much better off he was now than before. Sure, he was ostracized again, but he was used to that.

“Don’t worry about it. Really. I wasn’t exactly popular back home. This is nothing new.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, smiling a bit more. “We could get in a big pretend fight right now and make it clear I don’t have my voidy hooks in you.”

“Voidy hooks?”

“Yes, they are very powerful”

They joked as they walked back to the locker room where each of them had stored their clothes. Once both were more presentable, they met out front and headed to the mess hall together.

“I think you owe me a little bit more of an explanation,” Kole said as they walked past the cashier.

Zale looked uncomfortable, but the guilt of before opened her lips.

“My mother isn’t exactly just an art professor. She’s the head of the college of art.”

Kole let out a slow whistle.

“That is a lot higher up the ladder than you first let on when you said she worked here.”

“I don’t like to stand out...” Zale said, recognizing the ridiculousness of what she said as people scurried out of her way to avoid her ’voidyness.’

Kole continued his line of inquiry after they sat with their food. Food that tasted all the better to Kole knowing it was free

“How does she feel about you pursuing adventuring? She doesn’t want you to follow in her footsteps?”

Zale let out a laugh.

“I’m following as best as I can, actually. She was an adventurer too. I grew up hearing stories about my ’aunt,’ ’uncles’ and ’father’ and all the crazy things they did.”

She punctuated “aunt” and “uncles” with air quotes, but her voice carried the same implied tone when she said father. Kole noticed, but let it go.

“My mother was the teams... acquisitions expert.”

“Rogue?” Kole asked.

Zale nodded.

“Yeah, but she claims she didn't steal things. People gave her what she needed when she asked.”

“Do you believe her?”

“Actually I do. mostly. She exaggerates, but she doesn’t lie... to me at least. She tried to teach me her skills, but my appearance made half of what she knew less than exactly useful. It was a little irrelevant though, because I wanted to be a knight like Uncle D—” she cut herself off mid-sentence and corrected “my uncle.”

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Kole reflected that despite claiming to owe him answers, she was very clearly keeping a lot back. But, her secrets were her own, and he was starting to see why she may have made a terrible rogue.

“So what can you tell me about this uncle who is helping in this study group?”

Zale relaxed a little when Kole didn’t press her on her fumble, appreciating the change of topic.

“He’s a very powerful mage. He would show up here and there as I grew up, but it seems like he’s here to stay now... we think. That’s part of the reason we are doing this class actually. He has a particular interest in primals. He had an experience with a Primordial which left him with a bit of a disability and he’s been trying to learn how to manage it. It got better as he grew older, but it's still causing him issues occasionally.”

Zale’s vague mentionings had been piquing Kole’s interest, but the mention of her Primordial touched ’mage’ uncle, a title which was reclaimed by sorcerous wizards in the last hundred years, had him hooked. He was definitely going to that study group on Saturday.

***

Kole found that it wasn't only his interaction with Zale that marked him as an outcast. Gray, it seemed, had spread the word and his classmates had a similar opinion as Gray. Kole hadn’t thought the older classmates—who were mostly training to be siege or court wizards—would care.

When he got to class—the last one to arrive—the room grew quiet as he entered. And so began another school year as a social outcast.

After class let out, Professor Underbrook stayed behind to answer any questions his students might have about their assignment—refining their spell list selection for the year. Kole waited until the last student had left before approaching.

“Professor,” Kole greeted him.

‘“Good afternoon Kole. How can I help you,” the halfling said.

“I wanted to talk to you and make sure we won’t have a problem.”

Professor Underbrook interrupted him, forestalling Kole’s imminent awkward confession. “Grand Master Lonin already appraised me of your particular situation. I won’t grant you any accommodations, but so long as you complete the work and pass the tests, I have no issues with you.”

Kole thanked him, and then ran a few spell ideas by the professor to pair with Magic Missile and Shield before the halfling excused himself and teleported away.

He wanted to ask the professor if he was looking for an apprentice but restrained the urge.

Exhausted from the day, Kole skipped dinner and went back to his nook in the library. Zale had gotten Kole extra food to take with him at lunch. It really did seem like everyone knew her.

She’d offered to get him into breakfast any day he woke to train with her before class—a topic he’d done his best to ignore when Tigereye had reminded them they should be exercising in their off time.

Kole admitted that he really would need to start working out on his off days, and the monetary benefits of doing so in the morning with Zale's guidance took the decision out of his hands, so he returned to the library with plans to go to bed at a reasonable hour

Around eleven at night—a full hour past when Kole had told himself he'd sleep—a squeak interrupted his studies then a rat appeared on his desk running away into the shelves. He looked under the desk to see the originator of the squeak and he saw another digging through his bag of food. When he moved to kick the rat, it jumped out of the way before scurrying up the shelves and onto the desktop.

With nothing else to hand with any weight, Kole threw his notebook at the creature, and it vanished just before impact. The book knocked over his ink well and they both fell to the floor.

"Stupid time-traveling rats," Kole muttered to himself as he picked up his notebook, finding it completely covered in ink.

As if taunting him, the rat let out a squeak from somewhere in the darkness.

Kole hadn't had the best day. It had been far from the worst in his life, but it had certainly been the worst of this new life. He'd tried to tell himself that the day hadn't been a sign of things to come, but only a minor dip in the road. But, the last strand of optimism in his body snapped at that sound.

He charged through the stacks after the sound, grabbing the light from his desk and banishing the darkness in his pursuit. The rat's sounds grew frantic, and the chattering was replaced with scratching.

Kole ran towards the sound and caught sight of the rat's wormy tail sticking out from where two shelves met.

"Flood!" he cursed, both angry and a little relieved.

He'd chased the creature out of frustration but was unsure of what he'd have done if he'd actually caught it. Rat was a common meal in Illandrios from before they reunited with the surface, but nowadays only the elders ate it, a nostalgic delicacy everyone else had long since abandoned to history.

Closer to the shelves, his light illuminated the narrow gap between them. He expected to see the white stone wall of the Dahn just a foot back, but instead, his light illuminated a line out into a dark opening beyond.

Cautiously he crept forward toward the opening, afraid the rat may jump out at any moment. As his light got closer, it illuminated more of the cavity between shelves and he saw that there was a chamber beyond.

He contemplated his find. On the one hand, it was very late and he was supposed to have fallen asleep an hour ago, on the other he may have just found a secret room in a magical tower library. There was no competition.

He placed his light on the ground and got to work trying to shift the shelf, but they were far too heavy for him to budge. Then he began to remove books from the lowest shelf, stacking them in a pile. In this lost corner of the library, the books were items of dubious academic value. The lowest shelf here was filled with tax codes from pre-Flood nations that had somehow found their way to Basin in the aftermath of the flood.

Once the books were clear, he examined the back wall of the shelf. While most of the shelves in the Dahn’s library were crafted magically from stone, the older shelves in the dark forgotten corners were made of mundanely crafted wood. With a few kicks, he knocked a back panel off the shelf, creating an opening just wide enough for him to crawl through.

He pushed the light in ahead of him and saw a short hallway with an ajar stone door at the end. He pulled himself through quickly, certain that this would be the moment someone came to this neglected section of the library.

The hall was short, and it was but a few steps before he stood outside the door. No sound emanated from the room, but he turned invisible before peeking through the crack just in case. When he saw no lights inside, he risked bringing his own to the crack. The runed device illuminated a small bedroom, furnished with two small beds and a writing desk. The far wall was covered with bookshelves and an earthenware jug and a worn book sat on the desk.

Seeing the room empty, he pulled the door open and stepped in. The place was clear of dust, but that meant little. Even these abandoned corners of the library were covered by the cleaning spells that kept the school tidy. Despite that, the room smelled old.

Kole couldn’t put his finger on what exactly made him feel so, but he got the sense this place was older than the section he'd just left.

The library as a whole smelled of books, the mix of paper mustiness and leather, but this room had that and something more. By then he’d forgotten about that rat that had drawn him here, and he went to the bookshelf. The majority of the spines were unlabeled and he gingerly took books from the shelves, laying them out on the bed and leafing through their pages. Many were in Torcish, a language Kole had little knowledge of, but enough were in Rilith for him to understand what was in front of him. The shelf was filled with spellbooks—traditional spellbooks, not the spellform filled tomes he thought of when he said the word.

Each spellbook was filled with the author’s attempts to record the ineffable. Pages upon pages laid out, instructing future wizards how to build the spell constructs required to harness the powers of the Fonts. The words within made sense to Kole individually, but as a whole, it was utter nonsense. He read a section aloud as he scanned the pages.

“Create a closed loop linked with a quarter twirl in the lower quadrant of the previous section.”

He stood in awe of the complexity of it all, wondering how anyone could have learned wizardry in this manner. Some of the descriptions linked to his own understanding of spell construction, but even with his particular interest in spell component study, he couldn’t believe anyone could create a spell template in their vault following this nonsense.

Eventually, he pulled himself away to look at the rest of the room. Two stone cups sat next to the jug, and he looked inside to find no liquid within. Curious, he lifted it, and turned it over to see if something was hidden within and dropped the jug leaping back in surprise as a white goo plopped out onto the floor.

The jug landed in the goo without breaking, and Kole recovered himself to go inspect it. He gave the mess a sniff, and then cautiously poked it. Finally, he licked his finger and then stared at it in surprise.

“Mayonnaise? Who makes a magical jug that makes mayonnaise?”

Putting the seemingly wasteful application of magic aside, he inspected the rest of the desk. It had no drawers, and had a simple board top, making secret compartments unlikely. When nothing of note turned up, he flipped through the old worn book on top and found it to be completely blank inside.

Odd, he observed. The cover was extremely worn by age and use, but the paper within was pristine and of high quality.

Did someone take an old binding and replace the pages? He wondered.

As he thought of a possible explanation for the book, he looked over the rest of the room, checking under the mattresses for anything else. His father had always told him to check hidden rooms thoroughly. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And where there’s one hidden door, there’s probably another where the real good stuff is.”

But, Kole’s search turned up nothing.

He looked at the books, the jug, and the journal. While the books were likely a massive find a hundred or so years ago, to him, with access to the Dahn’s library, It was nothing. The jug was… weird, but he suspected it could be made to create something besides mayonnaise. The journal was a timely find, having just destroyed his old one, but as secret rooms go, his adventuring career was off to a rather disappointing start.

Briefly, he considered moving his belongings into this room, but he didn’t want to risk discovery. The room seemed abandoned but he couldn’t be sure as of yet. Carefully he remade the beds, making note of a few distinct folds he placed. He’d come back in a few days and see if they’d been disturbed. If they hadn’t been, he’d consider moving in.

Before leaving to go sleep on his bed roll, he looked back at the bed longingly.

Maybe if I just took a little nap...