James Wyatt blinked bleary eyes. Lights and shapes slowly came into focus, exacerbating his pounding headache. He was at his desk, face cradled in his arms.

He squeezed his eyes shut and put a hand in his breast pocket. Pulling out a tin case, he opened the latch, held the case to his mouth, and shook it several times. His tongue was dry and rough, but he forced himself to swallow the small tablets.

Head still down, he guided the magic within himself. His body's processes accelerated, breaking down the pain relievers and providing him with a slight relief. While his reserves meant he would never be a knight, what little magic he did have was finely honed.

He forced his eyes open, pushing his head up from the desk. His arms felt heavy, and he leaned back in the chair, struggling to stay upright. Exhaustion was an old friend by now, but this was more excessive than usual.

His nap must have been interrupted. He tried to parse through what had stirred him. His head craned left, toward the West. Next, it inclined upwards. He'd felt…something. He couldn't place it, only knowing it was responsible for waking him up. There might have been an accompanying sound as well. He couldn't remember. His head turned forward, seeing the only other occupant in the room.

Mia was sitting at one of the student's desks. She had a pen and was reviewing some documents. Whatever had occurred did not seem to have alarmed her, and so he let his curiosity wane. It was probably his oversensitivity to magic acting up again. His natural ability to feel the flow of magic was part of what made him such an astounding magic engineer.

Or had.

His eyes drifted to the nameplate in front of him.

Professor Wyatt

She'd given it to him as a gift recently, and he'd begrudgingly accepted it.

His mind clung to that word, professor. Had he known they would make him actually teach, he would never have accepted the position.

A sigh escaped his lips, and he stared at the ceiling.

It wasn't as if he ever had a choice in taking the job. Even if he had worked in the crownlands, the center of the Empire governed directly by the royal family, he would have been stifled. No, the only place he could escape the chains of a society determined to hold him down was the Academy.

With hindsight, perhaps it would have been better to work in such a restrictive environment. At least then he could have deluded himself into thinking that was the reason he failed to meet everyone's expectations. Instead, he had only one person to blame for his failure.

Himself.

He twisted his chair, turning to the blackboard behind him. To the untrained eye, the schematic looked like a series of randomly placed rectangles with a number of skewed lines drawn connecting them. What Wyatt saw was the future. An impossible one, for as elegant as it was, it would never work.

It was the same with most of his work nowadays. Large plans, massive potential, and, in the end, giant wastes of time.

When he was younger, he thought himself blessed. His magic potential was weak, but he more than made up for it with his mind. He remembered the snide comments and remarks he received from his classmates about his lack of ability. He'd tried to ignore them, telling himself that the taunts from the ignorant could do nothing to harm him. For a time, he'd managed to convince himself that was the truth. That while they lived in the past, he was destined for so much more.

Wyatt was no oracle. But while he could not see the future, he could imagine it. A wondrous world where all houses were warm, they could traverse the oceans without fear, and the Waste that encroached upon them was beat back for good. The world would be healed, made better. And it would all be by his hand.

It had made him arrogant and entitled. Those feelings were not entirely unfounded, as he was commended early on by the Emperor himself. Too early, as he realized only years later. His younger self had been elated, his feelings of superiority confirmed. So invincible did he think himself that he allowed his accumulated bitterness to break free. It lashed out at all those who had belittled him. They took it with smiles, piling on platitudes. What else could they do?

Wyatt had overestimated himself. He believed the world would bend to his reality, and when it didn't, those he spurned took notice. Every little setback brought a flurry of whispers. Questions arose constantly over his supposed genius. They were right, of course, and so when they pushed him from his lofty peak, he'd offered no resistance.

None had tried to catch him either. His family was sick of him. Any friends he'd acquired were false. And as for allies? Why would he, the one and only Wyatt, have any need for those?

All he had now was a job he was being gradually pushed out of.

Victor had said otherwise, suggesting that teaching a class might reignite the passion he had when he was younger. Back when he felt there was nothing he couldn't accomplish.

But there was no regaining that. Because he knew now that he was not blessed. No, he was cursed. Cursed to dream of the future, to be so close to touching it, and yet being too incompetent to see it realized. It hadn't been a sudden realization. The cracks in his dreams had appeared throughout his life.

That dreaded Conference had been the first. That year was hosted by the Free City Edin, and he'd been selected to represent the Empire in the innovation category. The most talented youth from all corners of the continent had been gathered, ready to prove their worth. Until the welcoming dinner, there had been no doubt in his mind about his victory.

Then he saw her. She was the youngest-looking face in attendance, looking like a child brought along to witness the spectacle. He remembered his fellow competitors laughing at how she played with her food, arranging her peas on the plate while ignoring all those around her. In a rare show of camaraderie, he shared their humor over the mannerless snake.

That was until he looked at the plate.

Formed from lentils and peas, it was a schematic unlike anything he'd ever seen. Its purpose was unclear to him, and yet something deep inside him screamed to burn it into his memory. Before he had a chance, her fork flicked, sending the entire structure into disarray. He'd looked at her in shock, only to see a look of utter boredom on her face.

He'd known there were monsters who walked the earth under the guise of humans. He'd even interacted with some before, the Hand who'd escorted his group to the Conference being one such example.

But that day was when he began to question whether the gods truly had died. For what else could Prodigy be but the reincarnation of Inis, the god of knowledge herself?

Every report he read after on her only reinforced that thought. At first, he had been jealous of her gifts. Now? He was resigned.

Wyatt rose from his chair, taking an eraser and smudging the schematic out of existence. This one had started with the thought of increasing train car efficiency. He had been thinking of creating a device that dynamically adjusted gravity to lessen the load of each car while ensuring there was still enough friction between the wheel and track to propel the train forward. That idea had grown, and he found himself wondering why he should bother with friction to begin with. He could have the entire train hover over the track. It would be propelled by a magnetic device attached to the train that corresponded to a series of others laid out on the rail. They would sync up during the journey and function as a sort of relay race, pulling the train across the vast expanse of the Empire.

It was worthless. The train portion wasn't the problem; it was the rail. Even with the best conductors they had available, a non-negligible amount of magic would be lost when traveling from one rail unit to the next. With the amount of power needed to pull a train forward, it meant they couldn't use a central hub to house cores. The power source would have to be localized for each magnetic device. Needless to say, installing cores along miles of track would never be approved.

Maybe he could have—should have scaled down the project. But what was the point? There would just be another problem encountered. Another impossibility he would learn of far too late.

It was better for the dream to die with him.

He turned, shoulders sagged. He was ready to resume his nap when he saw Mia. Her pen remained in the same position as before, and her lips were pressed thin. The confounded look didn't suit the taciturn girl, and he hobbled around his desk to approach her.

"Mia?" He questioned, wondering what had stymied her. Had it been another he would not have bothered. After all, what help could a drowning man provide? However, he had a soft spot for the girl. She was living proof that in a life full of mistakes, he'd done at least one thing right.

"Yes," she replied, not meeting his eyes. He waited for her to elaborate, but nothing came.

His hand traveled to his head, scratching his green locks. They felt grimy, and part of him realized he was overdue for a shower. He told himself he would take one tonight, even if the lie was obvious.

"You don't have to do that anymore." He pointed to her chest. "I made that for a reason."

Her hand traveled into her shirt, coming out with a locket. She rubbed her finger over it, as if reminding herself it was not a fantasy.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Habit," she said, not breaking the pattern that had been ingrained in her from a young age.

Wyatt leaned up against one of the desks adjacent to her, resting his body. He was already in his descent when he'd met the little girl in the palace. He'd recognized the kindred soul immediately. She was like him, a cursed being.

What else could you call a girl who unwillingly subverted the will of all those around her with mere words alone?

It was an affinity in magic the likes of which he'd never seen. In any other element, it would have been celebrated. But of all things, it was mind magic.

Wyatt did not care about her parentage; he would have helped her all the same. He couldn't remember how long it had taken. It was all a daze, his hands guided by a manic obsession day in and day out. But he'd done it. He'd created a discreet, portable device able to neutralize her magic, gifting her the ability to interact with the world.

What he could not do was remove the years of memories she'd lived through in that lonely palace. They had shaped the girl. To this day, she hid herself from the world, preferring to live in those of her books.

He'd tried convincing her otherwise. She should not be like him, wasting her best years in dingy classrooms with professors past their prime. His arguments were seldomly acknowledged, her mind rigidly set.

Wyatt looked at the header of the document. It was familiar, and he realized she was doing his work again.

"I told you I'd get to that," he weakly chided. Grading tests was incredibly dull, but the deadline was approaching. "You shouldn't stick around for that."

Her eyes remained rooted on the document, but he knew what she would say about that. She was convinced he'd fall apart without her presence. That wasn't wrong, but the effort was wasted on him, and he'd told her countless times she owed him nothing.

"Wrong," Mia tapped on one of the problems.

He trusted her statement without looking at the answer.

"Then mark it wrong." Fragments of memories came to his head. What was the kid's name? It started with a C. Right, Callum Ardere. Wasn't he in the same club as Mia now? He could recall some discussions around that. Had they become friends of some kind? That would explain her reluctance to fail him. "Or mark it how you want."

If she wanted to give him a pass, he would not stand in her way. He knew her flexible in that regard as well, as she had already taken the initiative to creatively file his paperwork for the class, showing he had the minimum amount of students required rather than having just the one.

Mia shook her head, her short brown hair waving. It was dyed well; he could believe it was her natural hair color had he not known her.

"Wrong." She tapped the problem again. "But not."

Oh, was it too difficult of a question for her? It might have been; he'd combined a handful of old tests together to form this one. It was very possible he had slipped something in more advanced by mistake.

His eyes flickered at the question.

Draw a converter to strip foreign corruption from cores.

He couldn't remember if they'd gone over that. His gut told him no. The usual route of progression was to first cover basic principles of hardening devices to resist degradation from ambient magic. Core converters only came later down the line, as there was not much to cover there.

There was only one working model, Hendrick's Converter. It was a fundamental model in magical engineering; every design powered by cores used it. Using scrubbers, circuits, a single regulator, and then two exhaust ports, it processed the magic from a core and produced fuel capable of powering any device it was hooked up to. Generations had tried to improve on it; he'd tried his hand at it himself, but it was a work of art and not something to be added to.

Mia did not share his breadth of knowledge, but with how long she'd stuck around him, she should have known this much.

He glanced at the answer box.

That was wrong.

It looked nothing like Hendrick's. The configuration was all wrong. Why did you need so many parallel circuits? Hendrick's used one master line that only split into two at the end, while this had six placed tightly together. Wyatt didn't pause to think about why there were regulators drawn all over them, the other issues stealing his attention. The core wasn't even placed in the center, hampering the amount of connections that could be made to it and thus stunting the rate of power drawn. And where was the exhaust for the corruption? If you ran it, the corruption would build up in the circuits and promptly destabilize the unit, most likely causing it to violently combust. The only output was for the purified magic; the rest was a loop leading back to the core.

It was like they expected to store the corruption back in the…

That couldn't be right.

Wyatt swiped the paper from the desk and hobbled back to the board. Taking a piece of chalk, he referenced the paper and redrew the diagram.

Corruption was the death knell for any device, and Hendrick's converter was designed around limiting exposure time. It would draw the magic, run it through scrubbers, and then have a regulator divide it into pure and not pure before promptly expelling the latter. There was an inherent loss in the system, as the waste could be further processed to retrieve additional pure magic. However, to accomplish that would require more scrubbers and lengthen the time the magic ran in the system. When considering the power used to operate the scrubbers and the degradation of the unit, Hendrick's was the optimal approach.

This design was contrarian. It cleaned the magic and then cycled it back to the core to be pulled again. While the corruption could be safely stored in the core, any further power pulled would result in a higher ratio of corruption to magic, harming the circuits it ran through. The secret lay in the parallel circuits used to draw power. More specifically, it was the regulators attached to them. Regulators served a single purpose, to check if corruption was present in a given feed of magic. In Hendrick's, only one was needed at the end. Here, some were placed near the beginning of the circuit, bordering the core itself. The only reason he could infer they would be there was if they were calibrated to accept certain levels of purity. If they did that, then the system suddenly made sense. It would draw magic. If what was drawn was almost purely corruption, it would be looped back into the core quickly, limiting exposure and preventing the harmful substance from running through the rest of the unit. If it was not, then the scrubbers did their work as usual. At the end of the circuit, it would reach the final regulator, which then either fed it to the fuel line or sent it back to the core to begin the cycle anew.

He ran some numbers in his head. They did not add up, and he scrambled to write them down, checking the math on the board.

"Wrong, but not," Mia repeated, having come to his side.

With this setup, if you used the core as a place to stockpile the corruption, the amount of magic gained per core over time would represent an increase of twenty-three percent. That was a rough number, and it depended on the quality of the core, but he knew it to be near enough the truth.

It was such a simple alternative. How had he never thought of it? Answers came readily to him. Advances in regulators to even determine levels of contamination were recent innovations, and more often used as failsafes than anything else. Then there was the position of the core itself. Placing it in the center was how they were all taught, and it made the most sense. It provided the most access to the core and meant the attached circuits could run in a circle orbiting it. This provided ample room to install scrubbers and reduced the overall size of the unit. But that never accounted for having to feed circuits back into the core.

There were more reasons he wouldn't have thought of it; he could feel excuses just waiting to spill from his mind. He'd failed. Again. The answer to many of his problems had been so close this entire time.

He reached out, placing a palm on the drawing, confirming its existence. It was more difficult than he thought it would be, and he had to use his other hand to steady the trembling.

It had been right in front of him this whole time. No, it had been sitting in a damn desk drawer!

When all was said, he was just like the rest of them. An ignorant fool.

A haunting memory, one he'd recently recalled, came to the forefront of his mind.

This was like seeing the work of Prodigy all over again.

"Go to the records office," he rushed out, backing up and catching himself on the desk. "I want this kid's entrance exam." He reached behind him for the drawer. "Use my-."

Wyatt paused, realizing he no longer had the privileges he used to.

"Okay," Mia responded with a nod. There were advantages to being an imperial princess, and accessing student records wasn't one of them. But Mia was a resourceful girl; if she said she would do something, it would be done. "Going."

She made to leave, and a thought came through his spinning head.

"Get everything he's ever written."

It was not every day one got to look into the mind of a genius, and Callum Ardere certainly was one.