Chapter 117

Exceedingly difficult chapters to write, because there are lots of planning involved and it's really political. But here it is:

Rubidi’s void-cloaked form rippled, bristling, her shape barely holding to humanoid. Darkness sluiced off her like, and the air—or the lack of it—seemed to bend harder around her presence. She didn’t step forward, but the space before her bent as it shoved at Severa like a rising tide.

“You don’t want to fight me.” Rubidi snarled. “I taught you everything you know. I built your foundation. Every clever thought you’ve ever had traces back to me. Don’t forget who pulled you into your little stardom when your daddy left you to rot.”

Severa didn’t interrupt. The rods of light she summoned droned louder, crackling where they touched the geometry of the void, keeping the fissure pried open. Fabrisse reckoned her silence stretched long enough for Rubidi to read it as hesitation.

She began to move slowly, arm lifting, siphoning more of the void around her fingers. The dark thickened around her wrist. “Don’t make me unmake you, Severa.”

Severa’s voice broke the silence at last. “You can’t touch me, Rubidi.”

That voice alone told Fabrisse enough: they were going to enter conversations filled with cryptic high-class nuances and deliberately flourishing he wouldn’t understand.

Then he heard her voice again. “The entire reason you suck up to me—the girl you whine about behind her back for her ‘attitude problem’—is prestige.”

[PRAXIS NODE SYSTEM – INTERFACE REBOOTED]

> Legacy Fragment Detected  

> Node: Silico-Dormant Obscura [28]  

> Historical Registry Confirmed. Origin: Epoch 9e7

> Status: Authentication Token — VALID  

> Welcome, Apprentice Kestovar_28 

> Initializing User Calibration Protocol . . .

. . .

WARNING: Operator Cognitive Sync Incomplete  

ERROR: Ritual Protocols: Misaligned / Deprecated (v12.4.7)  

WARNING: No Administrative Clearance Detected  

Proceeding in Compatibility Mode

The satisfying sensation of seeing the Eidralith glowing in his vision returned, before immediately being ruined by political chit-chat.

Fabrisse craned his neck just in time to see Severa tilting her head slightly. She was wearing an utterly neutral facial expression as she spoke, “You couldn’t court my father’s favor. Or Aunt Merry’s. So you settled. You latched onto me like a parasite. Because even if I’m ‘insufferable,’ I’m still your ticket out of this little swamp you call the Synod.”

The void-shrouded figure of Rubidi recoiled half a step, enough for the air around her to warp out of sync. The darkness wreathing her fingers lost cohesion, dripping in slow, hesitant trails.  

“You have too much to lose. Touch me then, Rubidi. I’d like to see you try.”

The shadows around Rubidi’s face twisted, writhed, then smoothed into a hollow hole. “I don’t know this Rubidi you speak of,” came the response at last. Her voice was calmer now, drained of heat, eerily formal. “You must be mistaken. I am merely a servant of necessity. I have no stake in this quarrel.”

She began to withdraw. She receded, as though folding into a plane the others couldn’t see. The void heeded her steps, coiling away from the cracked seam Severa still held open, sloughing off like a collapsing tide.

Severa didn’t move. Her arms stayed loose at her sides. “Run,” she said, voice like silk wrapped around a knife. “Run back to whoever’s patronizing your little side project. And pray they’ve got enough clout to clean up after you.”

Fabrisse stared at Severa. She hadn’t so much as flinched. The air still buzzed from the departure of the void, and her rods of light hummed in that serene, judgmental way only magically weaponized geometry could. Her hair still hadn’t moved.

She was sixteen.

Sixteen.

What did they eat in the Montreal household? Sanctified posture enhancements? Raw political spite stirred into their tea?

Rubidi had vanished. The void’s retreat finally peeled back the veil—like stepping out of an eclipse—and for the first time, the room asserted itself.

A mirrored panel flared into full opacity behind Severa, throwing back a warped image of the scene. Then another. Then five more. The entire space was octagonal, obsidian-adjacent stone underfoot, mirrored silver along the walls and upper angles. The kind of architectural arrogance that said ‘we see all angles at once’, with no visible seams or frames.

This had to be one of the private quarters in the Mirrored Tower. Probably Severa Montreal’s personal training chamber.

No wonder Rubidi picked this spot. No one else would have the gall to step inside a high matriarch’s sanctum.

Well. Except Severa.

He was still trying to comprehend that when he saw Severa exhaled—too shallow to be a sigh, but not composed enough to be nothing. Her hands, still by her sides, flexed once, as if grounding herself. And for just a second, just one—

Her throat worked, a sharp swallow like she was trying to lock something down. Her fingers curled, almost into a fist, but not quite. They shook once.

Was that fear?

No. Maybe. Or maybe it was just the aftershock of the fold’s pressure. Maybe he’d imagined it. He would’ve liked to think he hadn’t imagined it. It made her almost human, somehow.

Then she turned and approached him as if none of what just happened had touched her, even though Fabrisse had watched the tension coil in her hands. 

She stopped two paces away. Her eyes swept over him as she asked, “Did you fire that flare, Kestovar?”

Fabrisse nodded. His throat was dry. “Yes.”

“That was a clean cast. You saved yourself from . . . whatever that would’ve been. I didn’t know you’d mastered new Fire spells.”

“I haven’t quite mastered it,” he said.

Severa didn’t answer. Her gaze lingered on him a moment longer before turning and began to move around the room. Her footsteps rang sharp and precise against the sableglass floor, a naturally aetherically-imbued stone with a dull glimmer beneath the polish. Not obsidian, though it looked similar. Fabrisse had read that sableglass was not inhibitively expensive to produce but still rumored to hold residual aether signatures. The theory was mostly outdated. But then again, everything about this place felt like a theory made real. 

She moved, unhurried but exact, pulling scrolls from their clamps and gathering folios into a neat pile with the same methodical energy she brought to spellwork. “After what you said to me the other day,” she said without looking up, “I looked into my mentors.”

One sheaf of parchment was flipped, then tossed into a burn tray lined with shielding runes. She didn’t watch it burn.

“You were correct, Kestovar.” Her voice was level. “There was something . . . unsettling about them. I should’ve known when they offered to teach me Darkness.” She paused everything she was doing for a second, then her hands moved again. “They said it was advanced theory,” she went on. “That shadowfold work was just another extension of spatial binding. They were lying. It was a precursor to voidbinding. Subtractive architecture. All of it.”

“I didn’t say anything about that.”

She set the last document down on a glowing slate platform and finally turned back to him. “And perhaps,” she said, carefully, like the words cost her, “you were not entirely wrong about the imbalance between us. In training. In what we were allowed to know.”

That sounded like a concession. Severa Montreal didn’t do concessions.

“But you’ve made progress, yes, Kestovar?”

“I . . . I’ve been trying.”

“Try harder,” she said. “I despise it when someone is given a one-in-a-million fortune and squanders it on mediocrity.”

Fabrisse didn’t respond. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he wasn’t sure what she wanted him to say. Vagueness always made his skin crawl. But maybe, if he understood it right, that would be the closest he’d ever get to an apology from Severa Montreal.

It should’ve stung—being called mediocre again—but somehow, it didn’t. Someone like her would always belittle; that was par for the course. But that little compromise from Severa? That felt like a victory.

Severa studied him again, one hand raised in a short, curved arc. A diagnostic ripple passed from her fingers in a shimmer of green-blue light, brushing over his frame like an invisible comb. Fabrisse tensed on reflex. It didn’t hurt, but he hated being examined without knowing the parameters.

After a pause, she said, “No trace of damage. No aetheric lesions, no splintered circuits. You seem functional.”

She turned away, placing the last of the slates into its housing. “The Lore Clerk position at the Grand Library is now vacant, if you’re still interested,” she said, like she was reciting a memo. “There will be no further interference. You have my word.”

“I don’t want it anymore,” Fabrisse said quietly.

Her head tilted, ever so slightly, then gave him a faint scowl that lasted for as long as it faded. “Take the position, Kestovar. Growth begins the moment one admits they need a helping hand.”

That line hit differently than she probably intended. Not because it was especially kind, but because it acknowledged something he hadn’t been able to admit to himself.

He had been trying. But he had been trying alone far too often.

Maybe he needed that help.

Severa turned and crossed the final distance to the chamber’s mirrored door. It illuminated itself in her presence, then folded open in an iris of light and silver. She paused in the threshold and glanced back. “Come with me, Kestovar. We need to report this to those who can actually do anything about it. Your testimony will be of utmost importance.”

Fabrisse hesitated for a breath, then followed.

Outside the sanctum, the corridor was already flooded with sound: bootfalls, orders barked with unwavering authority, the metallic ring of restraints snapping into place.

Rubidi was there, kneeling and still half-conscious, held by a formation of eight figures in gray-black mage coats, each marked with a seven-spoked insignia stitched in dull silver thread. The Bureau of Arcane Irregularities. The Bureau that had supposedly been en route for three weeks.

One of the agents stepped forward and read aloud from a thin aether-scripted tablet, voice steady, “Affar Rubidi, you are hereby detained under Article 7, Section 19 of The Institutional Accord for unsanctioned dimensional transgression, void-collusion, and subversion of institutional law. You are entitled to one sanctioned representative and a full temporal record audit. Do you understand the charges as stated?”

Rubidi didn’t answer. Her mouth was bruised, eyes unfocused. Her voidform had all but vanished.

Severa watched without blinking. Then she turned slightly toward Fabrisse. Her voice was low. “Did you know this would happen, Kestovar?”

Fabrisse stared at the Bureau’s insignia. It was the exact emblem stamped on the sealed directive Archmagus Rolen had shown him in confidence, before his departure to the Outer Fold. He even remembered the label: Time-Sensitive: Do Not Transmit.

“No,” he lied.

But he knew.

That was the plan all along. Rolen leaving had been a bait. Headmaster Draeth had sent him away, right after the headmaster himself had formally petitioned for an arrest.

“By formal request to the High Seat of the Thaumaturgical Synod Authority,” he had said, “I submit this petition for immediate action against all agents of void-aligned subversion, whose actions threaten to destabilize the sanctity, integrity, and lawful continuity of this reverent academic institution.”

Those were his words to the Bureau. And Fabrisse had been there to witness it.

[QUEST COMPLETED: “Chain the Void”]

Reward: +3 DEX, +2 FOR, +2 SYN, +1 EMO

+987 EXP

+6 Earth Thaumaturgy Mastery Points, +3 Air Thaumaturgy Mastery Point

Title Received: ‘Void-Binder’

[Combat Completed: +557 EXP]

[Progress to Level 6: 3114/2750]

[Congratulations! You have Leveled Up to Level 7.]