Elise

Elise yawned. It was early in the morning, and she had one of her free days.

Why did she wake up right now?

She did not know and cursed her sleep rhythm. She could have slept in! How unfair was that?

But no matter, she was awake and did not think that going to sleep a second time would work.

So she stood up and, after a short while, she was refreshed and was wearing her student robes.

She thought about searching for Jonathan, her familiar, whom she saw rarely enough. But decided against it, it would not be good if he learned to hate her. It would be better, if he searched her out, not the other way around.

But that did not mean that she could not keep an eye on him and ask someone, like Archmage Tablos, how her familiar was doing.

She went to eat breakfast. Even if she already lived here for three years and would graduate as a Mage Apprentice in another five, she was still shocked about all the luxuries the school gave its pupils, completely for free.

Or mostly for free, she reminisced, because the king, who made that possible, wanted in return that trained mages did not leave the kingdom.

This of course was utopian, with such demands only those that could not go somewhere else would stay. Sadly, she was part of this group, but most mages or prospective mages were not. So the king instead demanded that she stayed either in the kingdom or in the king's direct service, two years for every year of schooling she did receive. If she decided to end her schooling on the king’s dime after she reached the status of a Mage Apprentice, she would need to stay in the kingdom or serve the king for sixteen years.

This was much, but acceptable. But it was unlikely that she would decide that way, and instead decide to stay another ten years at school, to graduate as a full-fledged Mage. After that, she would need to stay thirty-six years in the Kingdom of Theron, but while this was a long period, it also was an acceptable one, because mages tended to live up to 200 years.

While she would indeed spend 18 years in school, starting on her 13th birthday, and then serve another 36 years in Theron or Theron itself, she would only have lived around a third of her life, and maybe she could find something she liked around here. But that was the future, the far future.

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Then, after her breakfast, she moved to the Archmages room, and knocked respectfully at the door. After a short period of time, the door opened. The Archmage gestured her to come into the room and, after she did that, to sit on the expensive-looking chair.

Sometime later, Tablos began to speak: “I see, you are still fearful of me. You look at me with reverence and seem to think that I am a god. I know where it comes from, Archmages, true Archmages, such as I am are rare, but we are still human, and, to the best of my knowledge, mortal. I would hope that you would stop that. Respect is good, reverence is not. The reason for that is simple. It makes it easy to think that the target of your reverence has all the answers and is infallible. This is, unfortunately, not true. I too would like if it were so, but as I said, I am no god or even immortal. I know much and can find more information easily, but this presupposes that I know where to look for the information, or even that I have to look for that information. But let’s get to the reason why you are here. It can only be two things. The first would be your studies, but you respect me too much to bore me, or at least that would be what you would presume, with unimportant things like the studies of one student of over 200, so that means that you are here for the second thing.”

He paused for a moment and sorted some paper on his desk: “So you are here for the second possibility. You want to know about Jonathan and his progress, right?”

Elise nodded respectfully and said, hesitantly: “Yes, I wanted to ask about him and how he is doing. I know that it would be unwise to pressure him and that he should come to me, but he is still my familiar and,” her voice broke, and, after some failed attempts at continuing, during which she sobbed a bit, she finally managed to continue her sentence: “and I feel guilty. I have basically kidnapped him from his family, his friends, and his world!”

She yelled the last word, and then twitched and began to apologise for her outbreak.

But Heinrich Tablos understood. She was thrown into a situation that even he found difficult, and he was far older than her and less involved.

He could always say: “I am not responsible. I must help, but I am not the one who did that.” This knowledge helped.

But he also knew that Jonathan planned something and he had a feeling that they would have difficulties of even finding out what, because it was massively outside their experiences.

While he said to Hager that he knew what was going on, he still found it strange. A government without a king, where the head of government was voted into office by the people? Preposterous.

But Jonathan seemed to think that that was possible.

But this all was not important right now, he should soothe the crying, panicked teenager in his office.

He thought for a while and began: “You could not have known that this would have happened. Hell, I looked at the spell and nothing I have seen indicated this possibility. But besides that, he seems to have accepted his situation. He even got a mission of the king to create a so-called printing press. He seems happy with the challenge, and he made clear, multiple times, that he only knows the basic principle of one. You should not feel so guilty.”

He spoke with her for over an hour after this, but he did not concentrate on the conversation as well as he should have.

He thought about the printing press. Something told him that Jonathan had some plans with it, and he did not think they could figure them out before they went into effect, simply because they were beyond their experiences.