Alisa found that, without even realizing how it happened, she’d ended up with an excessively full social life.

Between catching up on classes she’d fallen behind on, spending time with Lia and Reen, or occasionally just Reen, trying to stay in tune with the political shifting of the region, and talking with Zen, she barely had time to think about Tay’s rapidly-approaching deadline. She’d begun to have second thoughts about it, torn between wanting to be as far away from The Traitor’s plans as possible and not wanting to be parted from her friends.

The closer it loomed, the more uncertain she grew. Yes, she wanted to protect Leviir, but the political situation seemed to have stabilized. The talks of invasion had lessened, and there was no news of Indencai doing anything more aggressive than shuffling its troops around within its borders. Leviir had responded by reinforcing the south-eastern border, while not rescinding its plea to Renand for backing, but it didn’t appear the tensions would escalate any further at the moment.

If she left Renand Grand, if she turned her back on the academy and never looked back, would she ever see anyone here again? She would certainly never have another chance to study with so many exceptional teachers, even if they were less useful than she’d hoped.

If only the library hadn’t been burned down, she could have stayed and happily continued her personal studies. Her project with the doorway spell had reached a dead end without any way to cross reference its individual elements, and she didn’t know any other library likely to contain that kind of information. At least not one available to a no-one from Leviir.

So when the day of Tay’s deadline arrived, it was almost a relief when the day passed without any word or sign from Tay. Almost. It still bothered her, even if she was uncertain about wanting to stay or go.

As the hours slipped by without word, she began to feel trapped and constrained, her mood slipping back toward despair.

"Did he forget us?" Alisa asked Zen that night. "This was supposed to be the day we left."

'He did not forget,' Zen said indignantly. 'How could he forget about us? We are the most important people in the world.'

Alisa tried to think of a way to inform Zen that, though he was focused entirely on her and she almost entirely on him, and the academy jumped to accommodate his every whim, not everyone in the world had the same hyperfocus. Zen wasn’t actually the central figure of the universe. Usually his draconic arrogance hid itself well, but it still lurked there, beneath his dramatic inquisitiveness and frequent doomed semi-romantic flings.

But that was an argument for another time. Right now, she felt the weight of being trapped here, the future a tight chain narrowing her options until there was no escape.

"He did seem somewhat absent minded," Alisa reasoned, trying to convince herself. She remembered the way Tay had seemed confused about whether or not he'd visited the academy yet this year. "He probably just lost track of the day."

'He'll come,' Zen insisted. 'He's not going to forget us.'

But despite Zen's certainty, the week passed without any sign of Tay. Nothing. Not so much as a message. Alisa continued her studies, but couldn’t throw her full effort into them the way she had in the past weeks. The new sense of purpose and hope of freedom drained away every hour that Tay failed to appear. Without the way out that he promised, even thinking about Reen felt silly and pointless.

Her attempts at making excuses for Tay’s absence grew increasingly unlikely as she tried to rationalize some way that he actually intended to carry through on his promise, that he hadn't just been hired by the academy to persuade her to come back. Or perhaps she hated the fact that it had worked.

Certainty began to grow, the longer he didn't appear. He'd forgotten her. Or, more likely, he'd never intended to return at all.

He'd just told her what she wanted to hear, promised her just enough to get her to stay, and now she was too entangled to get away. If she'd only kept running, taken baby Zen somewhere far away, she could have hidden out in the wilds. Now Zen was too big, too distinctive. There was no way he could pass for wild, with his distinctive long looping shape. No way she could disguise his brilliant darksilver scales.

She turned over the ruby-pointed stylus Tay had given her, tempted to hurl it against the wall, but unwilling to waste such a valuable tool. Not much could tame dragon magic, but the ruby at least helped to focus the power far better than her school-issued basic stylus.

Had this been a true gift, a promise as Zen thought? Or was it merely an apology, an attempt to make up in advance for what he knew his betrayal would do to her?

She didn't want to know. She shoved the stylus back into her bag and tried to turn her attention back to her studies. She needed to keep her score high if she wanted to graduate with the high accolades she'd once wanted so desperately. Maybe it would even be enough to get her a low-level job as an enchanter once this whole stupid war was over. That was about the best she could hope for, now.

Everything had just gone so wrong. How had everything gone so wrong? Alisa had managed to hold onto her equanimity for days, but now as the end of the week marked the absolute last day that could have reasonably been included in Tay's deadline she could no longer give him even the slightest benefit of doubt.

She'd been a fool to listen to him, to put any trust in a stranger. What, did she think an old teacher would actually care about one student? And not one he'd ever even taught? He probably had dozens of expensive styluses he kept on hand to dazzle the morons and convince idiots to believe his lies.

Zen lay coiled around her, his head resting beside hers, his disappointed eyes glancing guiltily at hers before looking away.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Not everyone's lives revolve around us, Zen," Alisa whispered. "It's not your fault. You couldn't have known. So much for his oath and honour."

'He'll come,' Zen insisted quietly. 'I don't know why he's late, but he's not going to forget us. I know he won't. He can't.'

But still Tay did not appear. Not that week, or the next.

And as much as it leached away the hope of freedom, she also felt a lessening of the growing tension that had marked the day when she would leave the safety of the academy and set off toward an uncertain future. She could stay here and keep gradually deepening her friendship and maybe-someday-more with Reen, continue her studies, learn more spells, master her dragon magic.

She couldn’t settle on whether to be thankful for the reprieve, or angry at Tay’s abandoning her. One more source of unnecessary chaos in her life. The uncertainty gnawed at her, knowing he might show up tomorrow, or never. Maybe he'd been delayed. Maybe he'd given up on her.

But for the moment, her aims and The Traitor's still aligned. He wanted them ready to fight. Alisa wanted to be prepared to defend Leviir. Renand seemed poised at the ready, preparing to rush to its smaller ally's aid should the political situation worsen, and Alisa had far fewer reservations about their training any longer.

She still didn't want to be a part of Renand's standing force of dragon mages; that seemed a bit of a stretch for a foreign scholarship student. No matter how much the academy had to offer, becoming a soldier - even a high-ranking and powerful one - was a higher price than she'd be willing to pay.

But for the moment, it would make her better able to defend her home, and Zen continued to insist that Tay would come eventually. Alisa tried to explain to him that no matter how sincere someone seemed in the moment, that didn't mean they'd actually follow through.

'I know he will come. He cannot leave us here forever.'

"Pretty sure he can. He's some higher-up academy teacher from old times, he doesn't have to bother with a random student and her dragon."

'You are not random. You are special.'

"I know I'm special to you, but—"

'No, you are special to the world.'

"Thank you, Zen, I appreciate the vote of confidence. But whatever grand contributions I was planning to make to the state of the world's magic, well..."

She let the thought trail away into silence, and Zen did not press the argument.

The longer they stayed bonded, the thicker and hotter the dragon magic corrupting her spells became. She'd assumed it would remain stable, but the faster Zen grew the more obvious it became. Dragon magic wasn't like normal magic. It didn't settle. It seethed and pulsed and shifted and burned hotter or cooler.

Her adaptations of spells from earlier in the year no longer functioned accurately, due to the power's nature shifting and fluctuating. She'd redone her personal spell library of basic conveniences like a floating light or clothes drying script half a dozen times so far already, and resigned herself to redoing them a hundred more in future. Even the basic powerscripted lights in her house failed to work half the time, until she rewrote them with deeper, wider channels to accommodate the heavier power on days when the normal one failed to activate.

Dragon magic could not be quantified, she finally had to admit. It needed to be felt. Though she continued to dutifully record her observations in hopes of discerning a hidden pattern.

The class periods focused on simple repetitive casting with slight variations, requirements she'd found so tedious and useless at first, now felt like a lifeline. Spending an hour or two every day completely focused on the hot thick power flowing through her and out her stylus no longer felt like a waste of time. Instead the constant recalibration helped, pushing her closer and closer to an understanding that hovered just out of reach. A hundred tiny variations on a spell, to shift its nature just right for a given day, and she had to memorize and practice all of them until they became more than knowledge, until they became deepest instinct.

Dragon magic couldn't be written down, quantified, and locked in as a stable factor. All her plans for revitalizing dragon magic, for becoming a shining beacon of future progress, seemed naive. Of course people besides her would have tried. No one knew about them because they'd failed, because the quest itself was pointless. Dragon mages had to be intuitive casters, not precise ones.

A painful adjustment for someone like Alisa, but not an impossible one. She still held out hope that she could figure something out. Eventually.

Zen’s classes focused on shaping his innate dragon magic for offensive and defensive use. Dragons did not draw spells or powerscript, but shaped magic with their tongues and breathed it out in great torrents or bright cascades. Smaller, more controlled spellwork was usually beyond them, but there were enough examples of individual dragons crafting cleverly detailed spells that Zen had a great many special classes to attend.

'I don't like it,' he complained to Alisa after returning from one of these. 'Magic tastes wrong.'

"That shouldn't be possible. Dragons are innately magical, how can it taste wrong?"

'It tastes like childhood and ignorance. It ought to be more solid.'

"Magic is never solid without a circle. Though, I suppose it's possible, depending on what exactly you do with magic in that dragon mouth of yours, you could create a stone bolt or something of that nature."

'I do not want stone in my mouth,' Zen protested haughtily, drawing himself up. He only uncoiled about a third of his length, but it was still enough to tower over Alisa. He kept getting bigger and bigger. The yard that had once seemed so huge, with its oversized pavilion for him to nest in, no longer looked as poorly thought out as she'd originally assumed.

"Then what do you want?"

Zen rippled his body in what Alisa had come to recognize as his attempt to replicate a shrug. 'Something is missing. I will know it when I find it. Until then, magic tastes wrong.'

Still, though he protested, he continued attending his dragon-only classes, while Alisa went to her own practice sessions and ran through the same spells in a hundred variations.

Thick, heavy spells, buoyed by dragon magic, arcing slowly up and around, to fall in heavy fiery crashes into distant targets. The academy's expansion into the scrub land to the east of Renand City had provided plenty of space for spell practice to take place. With a vast assortment of boulders to choose from, mages in the distance group could practice targeting far and near targets until their accuracy began to improve from abysmal to merely bad.

The students with dragons like brownings, blazes, or Francine's grandus, anything large enough to ride, were shuffled off into the close combat and aerial group, trained for dragon-to-dragon conflict and strafing runs against ground-based targets. Aelaniri, generally incapable of safely carrying a rider, were considered a support dragon along with Petryska or Rajori. Alisa had no desire to put Zen into the thick of things, so being trained to stay in the back and lob artillery spells while keeping any actual fighting far away was perfectly fine with her.

They ran practice exercises quite frequently, equipped with special protective gear so heavily enchanted Alisa knew it must have cost a fortune. This wasn't the sort of armor you could just buy, this was the sort of armor you commissioned custom and cost more than admittance to the academy could possibly recoup. She was surprised the academy even had one set, let alone the dozens necessary for their mock battles.

If Alisa had the time, she’d love to take it apart for the inscriptions inside, copy all the powerscripts that made up its hidden protective layers and figure out how it worked.

But dismantling powered armor that cost more than even someone like Sadie or Francine could afford to replace seemed unwise, so she let her curiosity lie.

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