The auditorium of the mages temple in Paras was Kanick's favourite room, crowning the western tower. He loved the light streaming through high windows running the circumference of the circular, whitewashed room. On a summer's day, such as this one, the room was bathed in the warming glow of the sun, though the high ceiling and open spaces never let the air get stuffy.

Tiers of rosewood pews lined the far wall, under the windows, facing an altar of dark mahogany that served as both desk and lecturn. It was carved with four ornate figures, representing the four main disciplines of the order, holding up the tabletop and disguising the creases where the wood had been joined. Square repeating patterns bordered carved depictions of great healers, powerful battlemages or wizened scholars on each of the desk's sides. There were no runes etched onto the surface, the wood was far too beautiful to be treated that way, but to Kanick the desk had a kind of magic of its own.

"Welcome," Kanick began, when the high stacks of benches had filled sufficiently. The children assembled in front of him were a smattering of ages, though mainly around thirteen years old, their too-big white training robes made them look even smaller. One of the boys was busy digging in his nose, presumably for gold, Kanick thought by his enthusiasm.

"Welcome to your first lecture on the principles of magic."

The assorted youths sat up in their seats, whispering excitedly to one another. Kanick had tried to put a bit of wonder into his voice. He remembered Master Ventrix's voice, back in the city of Aaton, when Kanick had sat in one of these seats, dreaming of being, not only the greatest living battlemage but the greatest of all time. The solemnity with which Ventrix delivered those words had stuck with him, and he wanted his pupils to be similarly awed.

"You have all had a comprehensive and varied education that few in the Union, and beyond, could have hoped for." He paced behind his desk. "It has included history, herbology, philosophy, both natural and spiritual." Kanick's eyes flicked from pupil to pupil, each gaze fixed on him. "It has included notation, fine art and technical drawing. But until this day, no magic. Can anyone tell me why?"

It was the first day in a new subject. No one wanted to look a fool, and the children stared direct ahead, averting their eyes as his gaze passed over them.

"Come now, or I will start to bully individuals... Ah, yes, Fia."

A young girl, younger than most of the students raised her hand. "Because magic is dangerous, Master."

Kanick considered her answer and smiled. "Hm," he made an encouraging sound. "That is correct. But if that is the case then why bother to teach you anything at all? Then Master Areonis and I could spend all our time in the refectory, getting drunk." A wave of hesitant giggles rolled over the room. "So, why do we teach you what we teach you?"

A redheaded thickset boy at the back called out. "Because it helps us to control magic?"

Kanick nodded. He knew the child had stumbled towards the answer that he thought Kanick wanted to hear, but that was fine; they were here to learn.

"That is exactly correct!" Kanick exclaimed. "Because these lessons will help you control magic. Does anyone know what magic is?"

A universal shaking of heads.

Kanick took a piece of chalk in his gloved hands, wincing slightly at the movement, and began to write as he spoke. "Magic is energy," he told the pupils. "Later in your studies you will discuss where this energy comes from, whether our world or a different plane of existence, but for now you simply need to know that magic is a type of energy. It can, as Acolyte Fia told us, be very dangerous. But if I tried to lift this desk with the force of my considerable mind, do you think I would succeed?" Silence again. "Could any of you do it? Could anyone?" Kanick interrupted drawing and turned back to his pupils.

"No," a few of the braver ones squeaked.

"Correct." The soft clack clack sweep of the chalk resumed. "So, the question is, how can we use such dangerous energy?" Kanick stepped back, admiring the circular character he had drawn on the board. It was a complicated one with many sub characters and runes, since lifting an object into the air was a surprisingly complex spell.

"Runes!" yelled the class in unison in response to Kanick's question.

"Runes." He confirmed with a smile. "And we draw runes on a vessel. So, the vessel for this rune that I have drawn is this piece of slate," he gestured at the rune and the board. "And still we need one additional piece of the puzzle. We need a mage to activate the magic now captured in the rune."

To teach the pupils that particular skill would require more specialised practical lessons. The first time was like using a new sense that you were only barely aware of possessing.

"Some of you might be able to sense the magical energy in this rune." A few hands were raised excitedly. "However you must never try to activate a rune you don't know the function of."

Green meadows and a shadow on the road flickered into his head for the briefest ghost of a moment.

"Every time a Mage activates a rune," Kanick continued, "it takes some energy from them. If the spell is too powerful, simply trying to activate it could kill you. And kill everyone around you." The meadows and forest turned to fire in the flash of an instant. You belong to me, a voice whispered.

"Now that you understand the danger..." Kanick willed the mark he had drawn to life. The pupils gasped, one of the boys screamed, as the rune on the slate began to glow with a black purple and the heavy desk creaked as it rose from the floor, the bottom of its legs about waist height.

Sweat beaded on Kanick's brow. The strain from holding such a complex spell was already getting to him. He willed the desk to lower, gently. When he released control of it, there was a crack and the pupils screeched as the slate board collapsed into fragments on the floor.

"The vessel for a rune is just as important as the rune itself," he began again when they had settled down from the excitement. "A powerful spell, like the one I just used, needs a strong vessel to hold the magic. Magical energy is corrosive and will always, eventually, destroy its vessel. However, we usually use runes depicted on paper for most spells."

Looking around, he wished he hadn't broken the board with his spell. "To summarise, the inherent chaos of magical energy is controlled and directed by a mage through the use of runes in order to achieve an outcome, whether that's lifting this desk, creating fire or even healing injuries." A boy in the front row raised his hand. "Yes, Calgetrick?"

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"Can... er... can magic regrow arms?" The scrawny acolyte asked, nervously.

Kanick smiled gently at the question. One of the boy's collegiate had recently suffered some kind of accident, he knew.

"No," Kanick shook his head. "Healing magic is an incredibly difficult art, and mages often do not fully understand the marks they use but learn of their healing properties through extensive experiments. Even then, a healer needs to direct the magic, using knowledge they have gained through many years of study. However, there are no marks that can make new flesh and blood and bone."

"Palregon did it!" Called out the ginger boy from the back, Jarque, Kanick thought.

"You are mistaken, young man," Kanick started sharply. The last thing the Order needed was students enamoured with Palregon's power. "Palregon's horrors were created by a number of mechanisms including blood curses and necromancy. His demons, the bulk of his army, were created entirely using conjured flesh. They didn't need blood, or muscle or nerves or the hundreds of different things that go into making a person." There was silence in the room.

A movement between the benches caught Kanick's eye as a young mage in blue apprentice robes quietly entered the auditorium. She waited, leaning against the door. "Palregon is a stark lesson in meddling in magics that one does not understand. He nearly destroyed the Order and much more." Kanick said.

"Master Kanick," started Fia, breathlessly trying to get her words out. "Did you ever fight one of Palregon's demons?"

The other pupils gasped at the audacious question. Kanick's heart beat faster, "Unfortunately, that is all we have time for. The lecture is dismissed. Apprentice Yokima," he gestured that the young woman, loitering by the door, should come forward.

The pupils filed out in a mass of white robes, though Fia hung back to apologise for her question.

"It is okay, Fia, you needn't apologise. Now run along," he instructed and turned to Yokima. "How can I be of assistance, Apprentice?"

Yokima approached the desk, as Kanick filed his papers and placed them in his satchel. "The Arch Mage requests an audience with you, Master." Her voice had a faint inflection of Zhura, and her features marked her as a descendant of the eastern temple there.

"When?" Kanick asked.

"Immediately, Master." Yokima replied and looked at the floor. "I am to fetch you to his solar."

The Arch-Mages apartments, as befitting his rank, took up the two top floors of the main tower of the Great Temple. Yokima professed to know nothing of the reason for Kanick's summons and they passed the walk up the central stairway by making conversation about Yokima's impending final exams. By all accounts she was guaranteed success.

"I am just worried that after..." she hesistated and then continued regardless of whatever misgiving had entered her mind. "I'm the Arch-Mages own apprentice, what if they don't dare fail me? Will I have really earned it?"

Kanick was about to answer that she would succeed on her abilities or not all, but Yokima interrupted. "Never mind, we have arrived," she announced opening a stout door, carved with the four icons of the disciplines of the order: healing, battle magic, scholarship and teaching. They entered into a small antechamber with a desk against one of the stone walls, empty as Yokima was already with him.

As Kanick entered the office proper he was struck, as he always was, by the cramped space in which the Arch Mage conducted his business. The office, with its walls lined with bookshelves, was sparsely furnished, with a desk against the windows and a table offset to one side accompanied by two chairs backed in green leather. In a similar chair, behind the desk sat Arch-Mage Areonis.

He was a small portly man, dressed in a simple white shirt under a brown leather tunic. Despite his plain dress, there was a sense of neatness to the man, exemplified in his short, precise auburn hair and the carefully trimmed goatee, erring slightly redder. Areonis's style extended to his desk, which was bare save for a green leather protector covering the desktop. The black and green robes of his office were hung on a peg drilled into the bookshelf behind him.

"Kanick!" He exclaimed happily when the mage walked through his door. "Please, come, have a seat." Areonis held out a thick hand and gestured to the chair opposite him.

"Thank you, Arch-mage," Kanick said humbly.

"Ah, consign that Arch-Mage shit!" He waved Kanick's formality away with a meaty fist. Kanick grinned and Areonis laughed, the lines of his face falling easily into the expression. "You did that to annoy me, didn't you?"

Kanick forced his face into a neutral expression. "Not at all, eminence," though Kanick couldn't resist breaking into a grin as he said the honorific and sat. "You asked for me?"

"I did," The grin fell slowly from Areonis's face. "There's no easy way to say this, but Regius is dead."

It was as though the room had expanded around Kanick, and Areonis' was now speaking from behind glass. Kanick found himself having to focus on the words Regius is dead, Regius is dead. Could he have misheard? He knew he had not.

The two mages had parted ways not long after the end of the war, Regius to continue his spellcraft in the north, and eventually the hermitage, while Kanick, once he had recovered, returned to the Great Temple but to take up teaching instead of battlemagic. Correspondence had been sparse, despite the bond they shared. Kanick preferred not to think on that day. And yet, as he processed the news time seemed to slow and he felt the hollow of loss in his chest.

"How?" Kanick managed to croak.

Areonis sighed and leaned back in his chair. "A fire."

"I don't- " Kanick was lost for words.

"I received word from Magister Edian at Woodbend, near Regius's hermitage. Regius hadn't been to collect his supply of paper for three months and the Magister sent his battlemages to investigate. They found his whole hermitage burned up."

"That's terrible news," Kanick added; it was all he could think to say.

The Arch-Mage gave a grunt of agreement. "He had hidden himself away these past years, but regardless he is a loss to the order."

"What caused the fire?" Kanick asked, unable to come up with an answer in his own mind. "The last I heard, he was researching runes of healing... I don't understand."

"The Magister at Woodbend has similar questions, but, alas, no answers." Areonis leaned forward, his hands clasped on the desk. "Woodbend rose against us in the war, and the Enclave joined Palregon. It has always been a secretive enclave, out of the way, and remains so. I think that's why Regius chose it. But I am suspicious and there are rumours of Palregon's followers abroad."

"The Sons of the Prince?" Kanick asked. "Ageing second-rate mages, cast out of the order?"

"You might put it that way, though anyone seeking to advance Palregon's ideology is a threat." Areonis met Kanick's gaze. "And that is the other reason I summoned you. You are to travel to Woodbend. An investigation must be made, and I don't trust the magister to complete it." Leave the Grand Temple? Leave my teaching? Kanick's mind was reeling. "There's a young man, almost ready to take trials to join the Battlemages, he would make a perfect apprentice-"

"Areonis, I'm sorry but I must refuse," Kanick said, steeling his voice with flint.

"Oh?" The Arch-Mage raised an eyebrow.

"My teaching, my work is here. I am no Battlemage and this is their work. As for an apprentice, well, I-"

A raised hand cut him off and Areonis leaned over the desk. "Master Kanick! Master Regius was set to be one of the foremost Spellcrafters of our generation. You wielded the power that ended the Palregon War. Even if it was for only a moment, your power surpassed that of Palregon himself. Perhaps of any mage since the Primordium. At the peak of both your abilities you turned away from your destinies. By rights it should be one of you behind this desk."

"People died," Kanick whispered, forced to confront that day in his memory. It wasn't just the pain that had ruined his hands and limited his scribing. The spell had released a wave of energy that had poisoned the land in a fifty-mile streak across Aatonia, to the foot of the Bergarm and obliterated everything in between. The biggest settlement had been Bowside, but it had been by no means the only town to die that day. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children reduced to less than a scorch mark on the ground.

"Palregon and his beasts among them!" Areonis countered. He raised himself up. "No. I have indulged this self-imposed exile for far too long and now Regius is dead when he should have been Master of Spellcraft. What happened in the Scar was a tragedy, but a lesser one than having a bloodthirsty monster on the throne." There was silence and Areonis's features softened. "Remember how we would drink in the wine bars of Aaton, before the war, the three of us? Such ambition we had. What happened?"

"We got exactly what we wanted," Kanick snorted, thinking back to childish boasts of being the greatest Battlemage that had ever lived and the cruel way it had come to pass.

"Yeah, it's shit," Areonis gave a shrugging gesture at his fine office. "But I am the Arch-Mage and so I am ordering you. You will go to Woodbend, you will take an apprentice and you will get to the bottom of this matter."