True to his word, Nicolus was standing under the gatehouse arch, uniform crisp and clean as it always was, his cloak draped over one arm. The rain was still coming down lightly. There was another figure standing by him, cloak still on. For a moment, Mirian froze. She remembered the two strange people she’d seen slinking about the campus and thought, is this another one? But then she realized, that’s Nicolus’s tutor, you dummy.
“Ah, Mirian. Glad you could make it. This is Sire Nurea March, though to frustrate the sense of dignity she tries to maintain, I call her ‘Nur-Nur.’ She’s been my tutor and friend for…?”
“Twenty years,” Nurea said. Which meant she’d apparently started when he was two. The title also meant she was a knight. Long ago, that meant she would bear arms for the Nicolus’s family when called, but now it just meant she had a hereditary estate. It also meant, because of her status, that land was not taxed. That meant their families had been working together for at least a few hundred years.
“Good to meet you, Sire Nurea,” Mirian said, bowing slightly as she shook Nurea’s hand. That was, her parents had taught her, the proper greeting to give a knight.
Nurea smiled slightly at this. She was a tall woman, and beautiful. She stood straight as a soldier. The precision and grace of her movements spoke of someone who still considered etiquette important. She had a commanding presence, and a strong voice. “Good to meet you, too, Mirian.”
As they walked into Bainrose Castle–now a vast library that filled every level of the keep and several basement levels–Mirian said, “I thought the study group might be larger.”
Nicolus laughed, that easy, warm laugh of his. “Hah! That’s the other study group. They’re more… drinking buddies.”
Mirian raised an eyebrow at this. Drinking was not allowed at Torrviol Academy.
“I couldn’t hide it from Nur-Nur here if I tried, so I don’t try. Besides, it serves a useful social function, so as long as I don’t over-do it, she doesn’t even disapprove. Well,” he said, winking, “she still disapproves a little.”
Nurea said nothing to this.
Bainrose’s keep was a massive structure, with large vaulted ceilings on the first level. The second level consisted of elevated walkways that hugged the walls and pillars. Once, archers and magi would have stood there to confront any attackers breaching the keep, but now it was just another place to put shelves.
Towering shelves also stood in rows from one end of the hall to the other. Some days, when Mirian wanted to be alone, she would go to the second story and lean out on the railing, watching as people wandered the long corridors of books, here and there settling down to read. Somewhere beneath the stone floor, hot air from a magical furnace raced beneath, so the place was always warm, even in the winter.
Off the central corridor, there were loads of rooms. Long ago, one of the noble families had lived here, with all their servants and knights, but now the rooms were all re-purposed for study, research, conferences, or events. Thankfully, the Academy had also installed pipes with running water, so now only a single latrine remained in the museum wing, for preservation.
They made their way to one of the study rooms, where several textbooks and notecards were organized in neat piles on one of the tables.
“Thanks again for inviting me,” Mirian said. “Alchemistry is….”
“—hard,” Nicolus finished. “Even Nurea here can’t keep it all straight. That notebook of yours told me you had a good way of keeping it all straight though. And, it did what Professor Viridian keeps telling us to do: build out mental schema and form connections with related material.”
This comment surprised Mirian. She’d always thought of Nicolus as the type who only half-listened in class, who had better things to do than really engage with the material. She got out the notebook.
“Hm,” Sire Nurea said. “This is very good work. She even listened to her instructors about handwriting.”
Nicolus laughed at that. “Ah, but if no one can read my handwriting, my enemies can’t spy on me!”
Sire Nurea, it turned out, had already prepared a hundred notecards with all the various chemicals, magichemicals, precursors, and alchemical devices on them, and their task was to build in all the connections. Mirian’s contribution was to draw nice little pictures on as many of them as she could, as well as remind Nicolus of the various energy equations that he apparently had no head for at all.
“Math,” he bemoaned. “I’d rather speak ancient Lorcadian!”
Then, Nurea had prepared a practice exam for them.
“Where did you get this?” Mirian said, impressed at how much the questions sounded like the stuff Professor Seneca liked to ask.
“Archives. Each professor is required to keep a copy of past exams for families and politicians to review upon request. You have to fill out a form, pay a three silver fee, wait a week, and then they can look at it. Nurea here counts as family, so she can do that. She can’t make copies, but she can memorize the kinds of questions and come up with a reasonable facsimile.”
Then and there, Mirian had a revelation.
“That’s bullshit!” she said. “That just means–”
“That people with more money, time, and connections have an unfair advantage? Yup. Welcome to the way the world works,” Nicolus said.
This also surprised Mirian, who didn’t expect Nicolus to just say it. She’d talked to wealthier students before, and they almost always got mad at the mere implication that they might have any sort of advantage from their wealth. It always grated on Mirian’s nerves. Remembering her manners, though, she said, “Well thank you, then, for inviting me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “No problem.”
They went through the questions, discussing what they thought was the answer, then checking their notes while Nurea supervised.
Nicolus even had dinner scheduled for delivery: Roast duck and a vegetable medley coated in a spiced honey glaze. Mirian, having only had a light lunch and lighter breakfast, was famished, and devoured hers in record time, only slightly embarrassed by her lack of fine dining etiquette. Nicolus munched on his casually, paging through the notecards as he did, staining several with sauce. This horrified both Mirian and Nurea.
After three hours, they were both spent.
“So what brings you to the Academy?” Nicolus asked, while Sire Nurea cleaned up the notecards and sorted the practice exams and documents into her briefcase. The same man that had delivered the food arrived to take all the dishes away.
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“Artifice. It’s the best paying job, and my family needs the money.” After three hours with him, Mirian had decided Nicolus respected honesty.
“It’s changing the world,” he said. “My family didn’t see it until it was too late. By then, others had snapped up the fossilized myrvite deposits and invested in the spellforge factories. Get in with the big families. The Palamas, the Bardas, or any of these new joint-stock companies. It’s where the power is.”
“It’s all a bit beyond me,” she said.
“Hmm,” Nicolus said. “You should look into it. The spell engines these factories are making–it’s going to change everything. Production. How wars are fought. How we live. And whoever owns those factories or the key resources has the power to shape what the world looks like next.”
Mirian caught Nurea giving Nicolus a raised eyebrow.
“Anyways, it’s late and I’m tired. Good luck on the Alchemistry exam tomorrow,” he said, standing. “Though–hey. If we end up having classes in common next quarter, I’m extending the same study invitation. You game?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And thank you again.”
“Of course,” he said, still casual. “Nurea will check the registrar's office and get in touch with you. Otherwise–good luck.”
“You too.”
And then Nicolus and Nurea were gone, chatting easily.
Mirian grabbed her cloak, notebook, and satchel, and headed back to the dorms. By now, the sun was down, but the tall lamp-posts that lined the streets and path up to the dorms were glowing with warm light spells. Above, the clouds had finally cleared up, so the two moons were shining. The larger moon, Luamin, was in its third quarter, so as she walked, it was high above her. The second moon, Divir, never moved. It was eternally locked in place over Enteria, so it always hovered in place above the horizon. In the day, it was too small and faint to see, but at night, it shone like an exceptionally large and bright star.
As she walked, she thought of her conversation with Nicolus. He wasn’t at all like she had imagined. She wanted to resent him for having all the things she didn’t, but his honesty made that hard. Instead, Mirian thought about their difference in perspective. All her life, she had thought about surviving, about just getting enough. His perspective was all about seizing power.
It was interesting, but it all seemed unnecessarily stressful to Mirian. She would be happy just working in an artificer’s shop making things, knowing she could always have enough money for the comforts of life.
Or would she?
The injustices of the world had always bothered her. Her parents had worked hard all their lives–why were they so poor? Why were healers so expensive, when it cost them so little to cure most ailments? Why was stuff getting more expensive year after year if there was more stuff coming out of the factories? She’d had economics in preparatory school, but what she vaguely knew about supply and demand was that more stuff should mean things were cheaper. Right?
So maybe the world needed to change. And if not her, who?
She also thought about how attractive Nicolus was. Her imagination was just starting to think about what she would have done if he’d brushed her hand when she heard someone calling her name.
“Mirian!”
“Oh. Lily! Good to see you. How was your day?”
“Not great. My Applied Spellcasting exam was a nightmare. Oh, and the housing people told me to talk to maintenance, and the maintenance people said they didn’t have anyone to spare. For a hole in the roof! They said ‘maybe by the end of the week.’”
“Oh, shit,” Mirian said. She’d totally forgotten about that. And it had been raining all day. “Have you…?” But of course she hadn’t, she’d had exams and classes all day too.
Sure enough, the tin container she’d set on her bed had overflowed and soaked her bed.
“I’m an idiot,” she said.
“You’ve been busy,” Lily said. “But, yes.”
Mirian found some of the extra clay she’d used to make the cube. It hadn’t been fired in the kiln, so it was still soft. She smushed it into the hole. It was definitely not a long term solution, but it would keep the water off her while she slept. Then, while Mirian took the sheets off to wring most of the water out then set it by the heater, Lily got out her spellbook and had the great honor of getting to practice her heat water spell, targeting the mattress. She did this over and over, until her mana was mostly spent. Then, Mirian took over.
It was the same basic procedure as writing glyphs. The spine of the book was made of the spell-organ of a manticore alloyed in silver. This was one of the more effective arcane catalysts. By holding the book in one hand with the spine on her palm, she could easily access the arcane catalyst. Then, her other hand’s fingers hovered over the glyphs of the spell she wanted to cast. Each spell required carefully channeling the mana through the glyphs so that it followed them in sequence, then was released when complete. Heat water was one of the most basic spells, and only needed three glyphs: Mana to heat, target water, target area. It was basic enough that even a mediocre caster like Mirian could heat water as a raw spell (that was, without glyphs, using just an arcane catalyst), but that was horribly inefficient. Also, it could easily start a fire.
Mirian and Lily talked after that, not about anything in particular, but about classes and life. Lily’s older sister had gotten injured when her expedition in the Labyrinth was attacked by a new type of chimera, but thankfully, they’d been able to fight it off and retreat back to a safer level. No one knew where the elaborate network of tunnels that ran beneath the surface of Enteria came from, but a lucky strike in an unexplored area could return with an ancient relic or lost technology and set the group for life. Most of the time, though, it was just fighting a bunch of myrvite monsters because the tunnel system was also an ecosystem, fueled by arcane energy and thermal vents. As a consolation prize, expeditions could sell the magical organs they recovered. Mirian loved listening to stories of adventures down there, but had also decided it was too dangerous for her taste.
Mirian decided against mentioning the cloaked figures, or Nicolus. It would just lead to too many questions, and she was tired; she resolved to tell Lily later. Instead she talked about the disaster in Enchantments, while her roommate nodded along sympathetically.
By then, it was late, and they both had to get up early the next morning. Mirian made her bed, which was mostly dry, and fell asleep.
Mirian dreamt.
She found herself rushing through the Labyrinth, and though she’d never seen the Labyrinth, the one she found herself flying through seemed real enough. Old runic lamps and glowing fungi dotted the dark passages. Here and there, a monster stalked the halls, sniffing for the magical mushrooms it ate. Old hieroglyphs stood in relief, somehow having resisted thousands of years of erosion. She passed a vent, where alien-looking tubes and arthropods clung by the opening where hot gasses erupted.
Then she found herself flying up, further and further. Enteria opened up below her, and from high up, she could see where humans had cut away the vast forests or replaced the wild fields with farms. It was beautiful, but for some reason, she felt a sense of building dread. A chill began to spread in her bones.
She found herself standing in a great temple, the vaulted ceiling as high as the Torrian Tower was. From that ceiling were vast columns that shone white as bone, twisted like stalactites, but each one shimmering with elaborate carvings that shifted as she looked at them. It was like the stalactite was spinning, but each rotation brought into view a new surface that hadn’t been there a moment ago. When she looked, the whole room was like that. As she moved forward, the walls shifted and turned. Cavernous alcoves and shrines appeared and disappeared, the statues within them depicting many-tentacled beasts with far too many eyes. The latticework of the walls moved about, and Mirian found herself disoriented, and afraid. Something was wrong here.
The one thing that stayed was the centerpiece of the room. In the center of the vast temple was a throne the size of a mansion. The throne was all black marble, with tens of thousands of tiny crystals scattered haphazardly among the white veins of the marble, glistening. Atop the throne sat a humanoid figure, but large enough to fit comfortably on the colossal structure. It was nothing like a human, though. In place of flesh, it had wings and eyes, though those eyes sat unblinking, crusted over with thick crystals. Strange tendrils that looked like the bodies of tropical snakes coursed through this maze of eyes and wings, and here and there, maws of teeth were frozen open, though none of the teeth seemed to be from the same creature. The figure wore a great sheet of metal and stone so that it seemed it was wearing a cliff as a toga.
In its not-flesh, fifty sword-like needles had stabbed it, and lay embedded. The blades were stuck in a line along its arms and shoulders, and where it had been impaled, black ichor still bubbled.
Then, it began to speak.
All the mouths within its flesh opened and closed, and from them emanated a great booming, echoing cacophony that filled the chamber. It was like a thunderstorm had erupted inside the temple, like a hundred voices were screaming at her, like someone was whispering in her ear only none of the sounds made any sense. Instead, she saw pictures flash before her eyes, but it was too fast, like someone flipping a book’s pages so that it was apparent there was text, but not what was on it. Her head felt like it was splitting open, and another scream erupted in the great chamber.
It was her, she realized. She was screaming.