Daniel Newwyn

Chapter 27

To Fabrisse’s shock, it took them less than seven minutes to contain all the remaining Clucklebeaks. They couldn’t fly for very far nor for very long, and they always stopped after a while to perform their multiplying ritual, which was basically just an act of intimacy. Lorvan warned that these creatures were aetherically imbued, though, so there was no telling what could happen once they laid an egg.

Fabrisse tried not to picture what an aetherically infused egg looked like. He failed.

Feathers were now drifting through the courtyard like post-combat confetti as they walked back toward the direction of the North Pond. A few glyphlights stuttered above them, still recovering from the sudden magical noise.

Lorvan walked ahead, back straight, robes barely dusted, surrounded by thirteen softly glowing hexagrams. Each one hovered midair with a neatly contained Clucklebeak suspended inside like a very disgruntled star in a magical snow globe.

He extended a hand toward Fabrisse without turning his head. “The fourteenth, please.”

Fabrisse glanced down at the bird still nestled in his coat. It opened its eyes wide as it gazed at him longingly. Then it nibbled his collar. Then it fluffed itself and gave a soft, non-aggressive gwaark as it rubbed affectionately against his sternum like a cat that had made a very odd evolutionary detour.

[Perfect Resonance Progress: 24%]

“This one’s smaller than the others,” Fabrisse said. “And kind of cute. Can I keep it?”

“No,” Lorvan said flatly.

“I mean, I’ve got room—”

“I have thirteen ducks, Kestovar.”

Fabrisse blinked. “And?”

“Thirteen is an unlucky number.”

Fabrisse squinted. “I didn’t know you believed in that sort of thing.”

“I don’t,” Lorvan said, and for a second, Fabrisse wasn’t sure if he was joking. One could never tell when Lorvan was joking.

From the side, Liene gave a short laugh. “Wait, you believe in unlucky numbers? I’m your sister and I didn’t even know that.”

Lorvan finally turned, just enough to give her a look that could sterilize pondwater, but eventually said nothing.

The clucklebeak in Fabrisse’s arms let out a very small honk and licked his chin.

“Okay,” Fabrisse whispered. “But he’s definitely the lucky one.”

The three of them made their way toward the North Pond. Fabrisse kept pace beside Liene, who was still rubbing her forehead where a Stupenstone had made very un-magical contact.

The pond perimeter was surrounded by a glimmering silver dome, nearly transparent but laced with weaving runes along the edges. Fabrisse wondered how much inner resonance must one have to maintain this spell, or maybe if it was a collective effort. At one edge, an entire section of the aetheric dome had collapsed like torn fabric, revealing a ragged tear through which threads of ambient energy leaked and swirled like spilled ink in water.

Two Magi—one in formal azure blue robes assigned to magi, the other in field gear with scorched cuffs—were working at the breach, patching runic seams with slow, careful glyphwork and clipped arguments.

Fabrisse gazed at the scale of it and asked Lorvan, “So . . . you’re just going to release them? Into the pond?”

Lorvan responded, “Yes.”

Fabrisse nodded slowly. “And no harm releasing one fewer, right?”

Lorvan stopped.

“I’m sorry,” He said. “Is this your attempt at negotiation?”

“No,” Fabrisse said quickly. “Just a thought. From someone who’s already emotionally bonded to one of them.”

The clucklebeak in his coat peeped agreeably.

“You cannot emotionally bond with a clucklebeak,” Lorvan said. “They are fundamentally incapable of complex affection.”

Thaumaturgically, yes. But my glyph says otherwise.

“It’s licking me right now,” Fabrisse continued.

“It is tasting your coat,” Lorvan corrected.

Liene stifled a laugh behind her wrist. “What if it accidentally wandered off during release?” she said with wide, false innocence.

Lorvan gave her a long, withering look. “If I turn around and find fewer than fourteen spheres, I’m filing a form 9-G for obstruction.”

Fabrisse crouched at the edge of the containment line. The pond shimmered beyond, quiet now save for the sound of gently paddling water and a few errant feathers drifting like spells gone soft.

Lorvan raised a hand. “Now, Kestovar.”

Fabrisse exhaled slowly. He looked down one last time at the small, scruffy bird in his arms. It was no longer flapping nor squawking.

He leaned down and whispered into its plush, somewhat damp feathers. “I’ll come back tomorrow. With some bread.”

The clucklebeak tilted its head.

Then, in an almost too-serious motion, it gently tapped its beak to his collarbone, and made a sound like a polite knock.

Fabrisse’s throat tightened a little. He opened his coat and let the clucklebeak step out.

It waddled two paces forward. Then paused and looked back at him.

Liene said, “Oh, Lorvan. Don’t be so—”

Lorvan interrupted, “Call me mentor inside Synod ground, please, Miss Lugano.”

Finally, the creature trundled into the containment field, where the rest of the flock was already being released into the pond by Lorvan’s gliding glyphs.

[Clucklebeak Released: Familiar Bonding Potential — Dormant]

[Status: Will Remember You]

[Note: Return with offering to progress Familiar Link.]

Liene sidled up beside Fabrisse, shoulder to shoulder. “So,” she said softly, “bread tomorrow?”

“Are you buying or am I?” He asked.

Then Lorvan sidled up in front of the both of them. “The better question is . . . what were you two doing in the courtyard at 8:46 PM?”

The duckling disappeared into the shallows.

Fabrisse rubbed his shoulder. “I was practicing Stone Thaumaturgy,” he said.

Lorvan raised an eyebrow.

“With me,” Liene added quickly, folding her arms. “He was. We were doing basic synaptic channeling, specifically focus and emotional alignment. It was legit.”

“Fine. But next time you need to report to me if you trained this late. And do not loiter outside after the ninth bell.” 

Fabrisse didn’t plan to. There wasn’t really anything to do outside that late, and it was the official curfew time too.

Lorvan turned to Fabrisse. “I must ask, because on your own, you seem relatively stable. You don’t attend official classes, yes, but you still conduct research in your own time.” He turned to his sister now. “But when you're with Miss Lugano, you seem to develop a tendency toward . . . unnecessary risks.”

“But we were really practicing thaumaturgy!” Liene spoke before Fabrisse could. “I won’t lie about this. Not if it concerns Fabri’s progress.”

Silence followed. Not disbelief, just that kind of stillness Lorvan reserved for reviewing either highly implausible excuses or highly implausible truths. He studied Fabrisse for a moment longer before saying, “You’re serious you want to pursue this route?”

Fabrisse didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

He didn’t even pause to think. It wasn’t like he’d planned this answer. It had just . . . landed. Like the duck.

Another beat of silence.

Then Lorvan gave an audible exhale. “If it were another student,” Lorvan said slowly, “I’d advise them to pick something more pragmatic; something that doesn’t take fifteen years to master and still makes people laugh at the entrance exams.” Then he looked up, eyes level. “But since it’s you, Kestovar . . . any spellwork is good spellwork.”

Fabrisse’s eyes widened. “Wait . . . what does that mean?”

Lorvan pulled a rolled scroll from his sleeve—how did he even store things in there?—and flicked it open with a snap. “I’ll connect you with Magus Exemplar Konan. She’s the best Earth Thaumaturge in the Synod. She’ll be delighted to finally have another student. If you do well enough, she might even refer you for a grant. However, you have to promise me this one thing.” He paused for a second before looking straight at Fabrisse in the eyes. “You will take your studies seriously this time.”

Fabrisse could not lie. He wasn’t doing this for prestige. That would be hypocritical, especially after everything he’d said about students who clawed ahead just to stack titles and win favor. But the grant—

If he earned it, his mother wouldn’t have to keep funneling her hard-earned coin into tuition she could barely afford. She’d trusted him to make something of himself here. And he had to start believing in himself, too.

“I will,” he said.

Chapter 26

Fabrisse tried again.

This time, his arm moved slower, more precise. He focused on the breath before the embarrassment hit full bloom—the dip, not the spike. Just like Liene said. The stone didn’t leave his hand, but his wrist tracked the arc with a cleaner motion.

[Synaptic Thread Recognition: +4% Progress]

Huh. It’s working . . . a bit.

He felt a bit more embarrassed. This knowledge was definitely supposed to be something he should’ve learned in class, but he didn’t remember it much. Maybe while this lesson was going on, he was busy indexing different types of rare earth he’d found in a nearby cave.

The glyph flickered.

[Reward Upon Completion: SYN +7 ~ +15; SYN Attribute Unlocked]

Wait, what? Why does that have a reward? Is this a quest?

[System Note: Not all progress is tracked through active quests. Some developmental milestones are classified as latent achievements.]

[Additional Factors: Guided instruction. Repetition. Bird-based trauma.]

He stared at it. “Bird-based trauma.”

[Confirmed.]

“Did you say something?” Liene asked.

“Oh, no, no. I’m just happy we’ve made progress,” he waved away.

“Great! One more, then we’ll go full spell. You’ve got this.”

He rolled his neck, reset his stance, and lifted the Stupenstone once more.

He channeled the feeling.

He moved his arms.

The trajectory was almost clean. Aether sparked faintly across the stone’s surface.

Liene squawked.

Wait. What?

He turned around. It wasn’t Liene squawking.

Something barreled into his head from the right, feathers slapping his temple like a flapping broom.

“GWAARK!”

Fabrisse stumbled sideways, nearly tripped on his own stance, and fell straight onto his backside.

[-2 HP]

Liene’s shout of laughter exploded across the courtyard as a squat, round, web-footed creature flapped upward from the impact zone and landed three feet away, glaring at them both with judgmental yellow eyes. It was somewhere between a duck and a feathered ballista.

“Was that—” Fabrisse pointed. “What was that?”

“I think it’s a campus clucklebeak,” Liene said, nearly crying from laughter. “But they’re not supposed to be out at night. Or this far from the North Pond. Or this aggressive.”

“We’re not even near a pond!”

The glyph rang, intrusively cheerful.

[New Quest Unlocked: Cluckle Crisis]
Assist: Mentor Lorvan Lugano
Objective: Locate and help contain at least 5 escaped clucklebeak flock currently disrupting containment routines.
Current Status: 0/5 contained
Reward: Instructor Affinity +1
+ 2 DEX; + 2 FOR
✦ Bonus Objective: Return without additional feather injuries

(System Note: Current feather contact count: 1)

Additional Note: Emergency sub-quests may be triggered by environmental hazards, magical livestock, or poor aim.

Wait. Lorvan? The Mentor Lorvan? A FLOCK of clucklebeak?!

Why is Lorvan involved with birds? The only bird he tolerates is fried chicken.

Another squawk split the air like a wet trumpet, followed by the low whumph of containment magic firing off nearby. He turned around and spotted the source

A tall figure in dark robes came skidding around the edge of the courtyard, one hand outstretched, the other clutching what looked like a modified tracking scroll layered with emergency glyph overlays.

“Catch them—!” the figure, who was Lorvan, barked, already launching a hexagram of containment magic from his fingertips. “Catch them for me, Kastovar! Don’t let them breach the atrium line!”

The spell from his hand was a hexagram of light, tinged not with urgency or aggression, but an almost unnatural beige hue.

Is that a Calm-anchored spell?

[Spell Detected: Aetheric Net — Controlled Range Containment]

[Emotional Anchor: CALM]

[Color Profile: Tempered Beige]

[Status: Stable | Refraction: Minimal]

[Note: Your INT has allowed you the ability to detect that spell, this time. The probability of detection rises the higher your INT is.]

He had to double-check that.

Calm?

He looked again. Lorvan was gliding across the uneven stones, flinging defensive glyphs with zero vocal mnemonics and tracking the darting clucklebeaks with an eerie stillness. His brow was furrowed, yes, and his robes were slightly wrinkled—possibly from bird-related trauma—but his spellwork was the magical equivalent of steady breathing during a fire drill.

He didn’t look calm. But he was. The glyph confirmed it.

How?

Fabrisse stood there gaping.

“Now would be an excellent time to help!” Lorvan called sharply, his voice still maddeningly even. “They multiply if you leave them untethered for more than seven minutes!”

“What?!” Fabrisse yelped. “They what?!”

“Come on, Fabri!” Liene shouted, pulling her sleeves up to her elbows, snatching the Stupenstone from his palm, and shoved it back into his satchel. “You heard the mentor.”

Another squawk barreled toward them from the treeline.

Fabrisse barely got his arms up in time.

A third clucklebeak came flapping low from the edge of the underbrush like a feathered cannonball.

“Fabri—down!”

He ducked.

A flash of white burst overhead.

Liene’s hand was already extended, fingers flared wide as a beam of sharp, prismatic light lanced across the clearing. It hit the creature with a sizzling snap, and the bird wobbled drunkenly in the air before slamming into the grass in a puff of startled feathers.

[Spell Detected: Lightstrike — Minor Stun Variant]
[Effect: Staggered Flight Disruption — 3 seconds]

[Note: 2 spells detected in a row. Detect a third one to gain 1 INT.]

“Nice hit!” Fabrisse gasped.

“Thanks!” she called, already lining up another.

Lorvan slid two fingers across the edge of his tracking scroll, barked a short incantation that sounded like half a yawn, and hurled another beige-anchored containment glyph into the clearing.

The net of aether snapped shut around the stunned clucklebeak.

[1/5 Clucklebeaks Contained]

“Efficient,” Lorvan muttered. “Only thirteen more to go.”

“You’re joking,” Fabrisse said. The quest only asked for five!

“I have never once joked in my life,” Lorvan replied. Another glyph flicked from his wrist, calm as tea service. “Clucklebeaks are emotionally resonant livestock. If one panics, the others imprint and scatter. The effect is exponential.”

Fabrisse looked at Liene, then back at Lorvan. “Why do you have them?”

“Interdepartmental research request,” Lorvan said through clenched teeth. “Do not ask.”

Another bird shrieked from the roofline.

“Fabri!” Liene yelled. “Behind you—!”

Fabrisse spun.

His satchel swung.

The canvas bag, weighted with a half dozen enchanted rocks, an extra notebook, and at least one illegal mineral sample, collided with the skull of a diving clucklebeak.

The bird let out a strangled gweeeehk, flailed sideways, and collapsed in a fluttering heap of feathers and indignity.

[Clucklebeak Status: Unconscious (Mild Concussion)]
[Containment Ready.]

“Oh no,” Fabrisse breathed. “Don’t die on me now.”

He dropped to his knees beside the downed bird. It was small and round and, now that it wasn’t actively flinging itself at his skull, honestly kind of adorable in a scrunched, unamused way.

Liene skidded to a halt beside him. “You okay?!”

“Why don’t you ask the cluck?”

[2/5 Clucklebeaks Contained]

Three more clucklebeaks dive-bombed the warded garden wall in the distance like angry feathered missiles.

A zapping sound later . . .

[3/5 Clucklebeaks Contained]

It seemed like Lorvan managed to contain another one.

Lorvan’s voice carried over the madness, crisp as always. “Contain that one or carry it! We don’t have time for field diagnoses!”

Fabrisse flinched. “Okay!”

Fabrisse bundled the unconscious clucklebeak into the inside of his coat like a guilt burrito.

System Note: You can adopt a Familiar if you reach a Perfect Resonance with an Aetherically-Imbued creature.

[Perfect Resonance Progress: - 3%]

What? I’m not adopting a duck, he thought as he clutched the clucklebeak to his chest.

[Feather Contact Count: 2]

✦ Bonus Objective: Still Possible (barely)

Liene glanced back and saw him awkwardly shielding the bird like a scandalous secret. “You’re seriously hugging it?”

“It’s fragile!”

“You’re fragile! Awww, look at the two little ducklings—” A clucklebeak pecked her head. “Ouch!”

“I’ll help you!” Fabrisse frantically tried to cast Stupenstone Fling at the creature that’d just attacked Liene, but only casting with one hand was twice as challenging.

“Fling!” He commanded as he threw out a stone with his left, and non-dominant, hand.

The stone flew. Not because of magic, but because he actually flung it.

He yelled, “Oh no, my rock—”

It hit Liene in the forehead.

Liene staggered back. The clucklebeak atop her head let out a horrified squawk as it tried to launch itself skyward.

A geometric hexagram bloomed like a summoned constellation: six radiant biege lines locked in place in midair, forming a perfect six-pointed star enclosed within a transparent sphere.

The instant the clucklebeak’s wings brushed the edge of the shape, the hexagram flexed. Thin golden threads seized it like whipcords, coiling around the bird and snapping it to a mid-air hover.

It didn’t thrash. It simply stopped. The bird floated there, wrapped in shimmering aether strands like silk restraints woven by someone incredibly polite.

[4/5 Clucklebeaks Contained]

“Keep it up! You two are great distractions!” Lorvan closed the distance.

Fabrisse ducked beneath another errant wingbeat as Lorvan jogged past him, boots gliding noiselessly over the cobbled courtyard stones. The Mentor barely spared him a glance, already scanning for his next containment target.

The birds were everywhere. One clucklebeak was circling wildly near the upper branches of a frostwood tree at the edge of the yard. Another waddled defiantly atop the disused practice dummy, pecking at its straw scalp with single-minded spite. A third had taken refuge under the tilted bench near the glyphlight post, hissing at a student walking by.

Liene rubbed her forehead with one hand, and with the other, struck the closest one with a Lightstrike.

[Spell Detected: Lightstrike — Minor Stun Variant]

[Note: Identical Spell detected. Reward not triggered. Detect another spell.]

Lorvan contained the bird that was just struck too. 

Liene swiveled her head to Fabrisse with an exasperated huff and a hand on her hip. “Do I look like a bird to you?”

“Kind of?”

She lightly hit his elbow.

[5/5 Clucklebeaks Contained]

[Quest Completed: Cluckle Crisis]
Reward: Instructor Affinity +1
+ 2 DEX; + 2 FOR
[Note: Bonus Objective Achieved: Return without additional feather injuries

Reward: + 2 Max HP]

Additional note: Feel free to assist with the remaining clucklebeaks.

Fabrisse sighed. He was going to do so anyway.

Chapter 25

“I’m heading out,” Fabrisse said, slinging his satchel over one shoulder and trying to sound casual about it. 

The clock struck eight. Outside, the stars had begun their slow reveal across the velvet dome of sky, scattered like forgotten chalk dust across a blackboard. The campus had quieted, save for the occasional echo of a wardstone adjusting itself or the metallic chime of an unsupervised experiment misbehaving two quads over.

Greg, cross-legged on the floor with his back against his desk, was scribbling something into one of his four color-coded notebooks. A stack of assigned reading lay open beside him, each page neatly marked with flagged tabs, margin annotations, and runic translation notes written in two different inks.

It was definitely a spellcraft assignment—one of the dense, theory-heavy ones where you were expected to critique the mnemonic sequence of a 3rd-era invocation without ever casting it.

Which was exactly how Greg preferred it.

Fabrisse had never once seen him attempt practical Thaumaturgy inside the dorm. The closest he came to casting was tapping his pen with exactly the right rhythm to sync with his outline.

“Out where?” Greg asked.

“Training,” Fabrisse replied, trying not to fidget.

That got Greg’s attention.

He turned so slowly that it teetered into theatrical territory. “Training? You mean . . . Thaumaturgy?”

“Mm-hm.”

“You don’t even train during normal hours.” Greg stopped for a second and said. “Did the blond girl put you up to this?”

Fabrisse hesitated. “I mean . . . not exactly.”

“You don’t train. But you’re about to go training with a girl.”

“Well—”

“So you like her.” 

“What? No! I didn’t say—” Fabrisse fumbled with the strap of his satchel, nearly dropping it. He tried to fix it, then gave up and just stood there. “When’s the last time you—uh—had a girl in your life?” He immediately realized how much more aggressive that line sounded than everything else he usually said, and that got him biting his lips.

“No girl’s visited you since your sister, and before that, the transfer student from the Eastern Jade coast. And none of them climbed the window.” ‘The transfer student from the Eastern Jade coast’ was Fabrisse’s only ex-girlfriend, sort of. Her name was Zan, and their relationship didn’t work out because, well, she was a transfer student.

I mean, Greg wouldn’t know much about Liene. She went away before he moved it.

“Liene is a bit hyper.”

“You two seem like friends,” Greg turned back to his notes, as if the matter had already been settled. “There’s no friendship between guys and girls.”

“That’s not true.”

“Ninety-seven percent of mixed-gender friendships contain at least one unspoken romantic tension. I can cite the source.”

Fabrisse opened his mouth, kept it hanging for a couple seconds before speaking, “We’re doing spell drills. That’s it.”

“Mhm. What does she get from it?”

“Uh . . .” He didn’t know. “I don’t know.”

“She likes you.”

Fabrisse opened the door.

Then turned his head back, halfway through a defensive comeback. “It’s not like she’s—”

Thump.

He walked straight into someone.

He stumbled back a step. A pie box tilted dangerously in the air.

“Oh!” came a familiar voice, cheerful and terribly unbothered as she un-tilted the box. “Hi, Fabri~”

It was Liene.

She stood just outside the doorway, one foot over the dormitory threshold, holding a paper-wrapped parcel and grinning like she hadn't just been the subject of a statistical debate. The moonlight caught her hair like a very smug halo.

Fabrisse’s voice climbed an octave. “How—how did you get in here? This is the boys’ wing.”

“I climbed the ivy trellis,” she said brightly. “The wards on this window are outdated and very climbable. You should report that, Greg.”

“I’ll file a note,” Greg replied without not looking up from his notes.

Fabrisse wondered how much of the conversation she’d heard, but decided not to ask.

She held up the box. “Anyway, I brought pie. Mingleberry from the kitchen annex. One for you, one for Greg.”

Greg said, “I’m good.”

“You’re never good,” Liene chirped.

“I meant I don’t want pie.”

“Your loss,” she said, already pushing the box into Fabrisse’s hands. “Now come on, Rock Witch. We’ve got spells to cast.”

Fabrisse glanced back at Greg, who gave him a tiny shrug which was equal parts judgment and pity.

***

“I don’t know how to levitate rocks,” said Liene, the supposed Stone Thaumaturgy mentor stand-in.

Fabrisse didn’t look all that surprised. “I thought so.”

She tilted her head. “Oh no. Am I being demoted from mentor to decorative sidekick?”

He shrugged. “Earth Thaumaturgy’s an elective. Half the people I’ve asked think it’s just a theory class about dirt. No one signs up for it.”

“Because dirt is deeply unsexy,” Liene said. And supremely hard to control, sadly.

Fabrisse cracked a smile. “Not wrong.”

They stood in a half-cleared courtyard behind the alchemy shed, under a sky smeared with moonlight and a few drifting glyphlights (lamps powered by aether) from nearby wards. Someone had dragged an old practice dummy into one corner, possibly Cuman.

Fabrisse dropped his satchel and pulled out a smaller Stupenstone. “I, uh . . . recently learned this spell. Sort of. It slings this thing like a projectile.”

“You throw a rock,” Liene said.

“Aetherically,” he clarified, with more pride than he should’ve.

She laughed.

He turned it in his hands. “Thing is, it’s not consistent. It kind of . . . arcs weird. I think it’s my focus. Or maybe how I’m holding the emotion. Or the—uh—what’s it called when your brain has to catch up with the spell in real time?”

“Synaptic clarity?” she offered.

“That.” Fabrisse nodded. “That. I’m bad at that. You’re good with long-range casts, right? Your Lightstrike was clean enough to make Miro cry.”

“He tripped,” she said. “But yes.”

“So, I figured . . .” He gestured vaguely at the air between them. “Maybe you could help me? With, like, keeping the mental channel clean when you cast at range. Or aiming while your head’s still full of other emotions.”

“You aim spells while emotionally spiraling?”

Fabrisse looked dead serious. “It’s the only way I know how.”

Liene arched an eyebrow, then stepped back and began pacing in a spontaneous circle around him, one of her habits when she was either planning something or stalling for dramatic effect. 

Finally, she stopped. “Are you familiar with the basics from Synaptic Resonance I?”

Fabrisse responded. “Is that the one where they hook you up to a focus circle and ask you to think calming thoughts while someone screams minor hexes nearby?”

“That’s Synaptic Control I. And yes, that too.” She crossed her arms. “Resonance I is the precursor, which is about aligning emotional impulse with aetheric timing. Meaning: if you’re going to let your brain fire off a thought like ‘I’m humiliated and also angry,’ the trick is to not cast until that thought has finished being loud.”

“So I should wait until the shame has cooled?”

“Is embarrassment still your primary emotion control?” She stepped closer and attempted to pinch his cheek. “Cute.”

He swatted her hand away. “Just answer the question.”

“No.” She grinned. “You should learn to cast before the shame peaks.”

Fabrisse made a helpless little gesture with both hands. “And I assume that’s easy for you?”

“Not at all. I’m just used to casting while feeling too much.” She stepped toward him again and held out both hands. “Okay, stand still. I’m going to show you what this looks like first. We’re not spellcasting yet. This is just a synaptic control exercise. You don’t even need mnemonics; all you need is mental-to-gesture alignment.”

He tried to nod seriously, but ended up mimicking her posture awkwardly.

“Close your eyes,” she said, moving behind him. “Breathe in. Hold the stone in your dominant hand like you’re about to cast, but don’t. You’re just going to move as if. That’s it.”

Fabrisse inhaled and lifted the Stupenstone.

“Now. Picture the emotion. For you, hmm . . . that should be the one that usually fires off when you miss.” Her voice was softer now. “The part of you that cringes in advance.”

He grimaced. “That’s not hard.”

“Good. You’re going to move your hand as if you’re going to cast, but slower. Match the movement to when the emotion crests.” She moved her hand slowly for him to see.

“Okay.” He swept his arm forward at a speed that was nothing like that of Liene’s.

“Stop,” Liene said.

“I did it wrong.”

“Obviously.” She circled him again. “You flinched before the feeling peaked. Your arc was messy and your shoulder was ahead of your wrist.”

He glanced back at her. “I thought this wasn’t casting.”

“It’s not. But your posture is still garbage.” She poked his elbow. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s do it again. Match motion to emotion.”

Fabrisse rolled his shoulders and reset. Again, the feeling welled in his chest—failure, embarrassment, that froggy shame he'd just barely turned into something useful before.

He moved his hand.

“Still early,” she said.

“I don’t know how long to wait!”

“It’s not a time thing, Fabri. It’s a rhythm thing. You’re listening to the wrong part of the feeling.”

“Which part am I supposed to listen to?”

“The part that hurts a little less. Right before it turns into self-loathing.”

“Oh, that’s helpful.”

She chuckled. “One more. Then I’ll show you how I do it.”

“Okay,” Liene said, brushing her palms together like she was clearing a chalkboard. “Watch this.”

She took three measured steps away from him, then stood in a half-caster’s stance. Her feet were offset, her shoulders relaxed, and her wrist turned slightly upward as if holding an invisible thread.

Then she glided her hand in an arc. He caught it in real time.

[Synaptic Thread Recognition: +1% Progress]

[Reward: SYN +7 ~ +15; SYN attribute unlocked]

Huh?

Chapter 24

Cuman’s smirk faltered. His eyes turned from Miro to the radiating scorch mark between them, then to the woman striding calmly forward. His posture didn’t change, but Fabrisse could feel that Cuman wasn’t used to being interrupted mid-performance, especially not by someone outside their year.

If he hadn’t failed four times, he would’ve been in the same class as Liene, not Cuman and Severa, both of whom were several years younger than him.

She didn’t look at Cuman. She walked right past him like he was another overgrown shrub and stood beside Fabrisse instead, hands at her hip. 

“Oh, you’re back, Liene,” Cuman said, schooling his voice back into that familiar shade of casual cruelty. “The Rock Witch’s personal watchdog returns.” He gave her a theatrical bow. “Didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers, Miss . . . Assistant Mentor? Magus Exemplar? How high have you risen now with all that dazzling academic ingenuity?”

“Try again,” she said.

Cuman clicked his tongue. “Relax. No need for the girl to get defensive. Or is this a family business now?”

“I'm not his family,” Liene said. “I just hate watching cowards pick duels they won’t finish.”

Cuman’s grin returned, though it looked slightly forced. “Right. Well, enjoy hiding behind your big sis, Kastovar. I’m sure the next time you try throwing rocks, she'll let you use both hands.”

For a second, he felt a stupid, itching need to do something. To fight like a reckless, glowing idiot. But he didn’t.

Cuman turned on his heel, gave Miro a shove to get him moving, and stalked off without another word.

As he watched them take off, Fabrisse exhaled shakily, brushing dust from his sleeve. “Thank you,” he whispered to Liene.

Liene stepped beside him, brushing soot from her coat. She looked him up and down, then jabbed a thumb lightly against his arm. “Are you bleeding anywhere? Or worse, emotionally leaking?”

Fabrisse gave a lopsided smile. “Only my pride took a minor structural collapse.”

“Ah, that’s fine then.” She wiped a strand of hair that was covering his left eye, ignoring his startled yelp. “Didn’t suit you anyway. Looked like a wizard trying to cosplay a wilted leaf. At least they didn’t mess up the cute hair.”

He laughed—an actual, startled laugh—and for a moment the lingering tension in his chest eased.

“Thanks for the timely sunbeam,” he said. “I didn’t know you were into dramatic entrances.”

“I time them to your moments of maximum idiocy,” she said as she ruffled his hair. “Which is often.”

He reached up and gently, awkwardly, touched her wrist, guiding her hand away with a motion that was more sheepish than resistant.

“Easy,” he murmured, not quite meeting her eyes.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Liene asked again as she peered down at him.

He was about to respond before the glyph showing up at him.

[New Sidequest Unlocked: Rock and Retaliation]

Objective:
– Strike Cuman Gollivur with a Stone-Based Thaumaturgy spell
– Bonus Objective: Must be airborne at the time of impact

Reward:
✦ Spectral Appraisal (Rank I)
– View target’s basic combat stats: HP, DEX, ARC, active spell affinities
– Limited insight into behavioral patterns and resonance volatility

Time Limit: 7 days (Standard Calendar)

System Note: Violence is not always the answer. But sometimes, a well-placed pebble is.

Why do the sidequests give the most juicy rewards? This feels like something that should be earned in a main branch of quest.

System Note: Spectral Appraisal can be attained later via the main questline, but can be attained earlier during this quest.

Which meant Fabrisse could choose whether he’d want revenge or not.

“Fabri. Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?” Somebody said. 

“Huh?”

It was, of course, Liene, huffing to herself. “Why am I even asking? A concussed man wouldn’t know they’re concussed. I’m stupid! Ah—okay, so, okay. Do you need me to take you to the infirmary?” Liene now leaned in a bit to bring her eyes to his level. Her face punched straight through the glyph hovering in front of him, scattering the projection like she’d just walked into a curtain of light.

It was, objectively, too far into his personal space.

He resisted the urge to flinch.

“Fabri?” she said again, brow creasing.

“Just a breeze.” He turned away from her. “Or a concussion. One of those.”

She didn’t move. Her voice softened to not her usual playful lilt, but something quieter. “Don’t joke about that.”

“Sorry.” He appreciated her care, really—but something about how worked up she was gave him pause. Sure, they were close, fellow underachievers and occasional co-conspirators, but even he wasn’t this worried about his own injuries. It wasn’t like he’d fallen off a cliff.

There was a pause. Then her voice dropped an octave. “Right. I’m reporting this. What are their names again?”

He very quickly turned back to her. “What?”

She was already straightening up, eyes sharp, jaw set. “You got spell-slammed in a sanctioned zone. I’m going straight to the faculty authority queue—maybe Bellare if he’s on rotation, or Vavis. They’ll actually do something.”

“Liene, wait—”

“I’ll even bring a transcript if I have to. Or dig up those lantern rune logs—if those things recorded glyph activities. They’ll corroborate—”

“You’ve never gone the official route in your life,” Fabrisse said, incredulous.

She froze.

With a breathy, frustrated laugh, she spun on her heel. “Exactly! Which means it’s too late to start now!” She threw her hands up. “Do you think they’ll care? That it wasn’t a duel? That it got out of hand? No one steps in unless someone’s unconscious, and even then only if someone inconveniently sees it.”

He continued. “I don’t think the Magus are going to file a citation on Cuman Gollivur. His uncle chairs the Discipline Board.”

She turned back to him with a grin too toothy for someone frustrated. He felt his spine trying to retreat from his body.

Liena chirped, “So that leaves only one option.”

“Oh no.” Oh wait. The quest. Oh yes.

“We play them back,” she said. 

“But only with Stone-based Thaumaturgy,” he said.

A light breeze drove past.

Now it was her turn to exclaim, “What?”

Chapter 23

Some time had passed since the vault. Probably around forty-seven minutes.

Fabrisse had left Severa’s presence before she could ask more questions he didn’t have the answers for. She hadn’t followed, thank the flame. His hands still tingled faintly from the invocation, and his neck ached a bit even though he hadn’t hit anything.

[System note: Concordance spells always left a trace.] 

The spell was done, but it was like his shame had left a splinter behind.

He needed somewhere quiet. He did not find it.

The far-west quad, nestled between a runoff channel and the disused sparring bleachers, was mostly empty these days.

Except today.

Fabrisse turned the corner and walked straight into a very stupid ritual involving Cuman Gollivur, Miro, a levitating training dummy with crude charcoal grin smeared across its face, and—because humiliation wasn’t complete without poor taste—a sloshing bucket of possibly enchanted pondwater hovering in the air.

The dummy was strung up between two weathered training poles, bobbing unevenly with each idle flick of Cuman’s fingers. Miro stood nearby, incanting spells that Fabrisse recognized from Thaumaturgy for Brats: entry-level motion nudges and color bursts, the kind you weren’t supposed to weaponize but that every under-disciplined student did anyway.

Fabrisse stopped.

This is what these two do for fun?

His body tensed before his brain caught up. He could already sense the shape of what would follow.

He took one cautious step back.

Too late.

“Speak of the pebble,” Cuman said without turning, “and the gravel creeps forth.”

How did he know it was me?

For his build and general crudeness, Cuman had sharp senses. He was one of the first in their year to figure out how to cast without over-channeling, and one of the few who could do perception-based invocation with a smirk. His spells didn’t come from focus—they came from confidence, from that bloated, glimmering kind of self-certainty that made Thaumaturgy bend around him like it didn’t want to disappoint. Or, as the sanctioned phrasing in the thaumaturgic canon went: Pride and Triumph as anchoring emotions.

He snapped his fingers.

A spark of light shot from them, tinged with triumph magic and just enough amplification to echo. He thought this one was green-tinted, but the color was more mossy.

Fabrisse felt the spell touch him, like an invisible spotlight had just fixed on his spine.

[Cuman Invocation Detected — Affinity: Air/Presence]
[Trigger Emotion: Arrogance]
[Effect: Localized Attention Anchor — Target Designated]

Ah. So that’s how he knew. Cuman had literally spelled the space to alert him when someone ‘lesser’ arrived. It probably only pinged when the right amount of inner inaptitude crossed the threshold.

Cuman finally turned, and his grin was wide and deliberate, like he was preparing for a monologue. “Look at that. Kastovar the Quiet. Still gathering rocks for your sad little spells?”

Miro laughed on cue.

“I’m leaving,” Fabrisse muttered, already turning to go. His fingers curled around the edge of his satchel where the glowing Stupenstone rested.

“But you only just got here,” Miro said as he grinned. “C’mon, join us. It’s not everyday you see a training pole smuggled outside of the training field.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to—” Fabrisse replied.

But Miro had already interrupted him with his mnemonic. “Cling and cling, light as thread, bind the foot and mock the tread.”

He recognized this spell: Featherbind. It could be cast without mnemonic, but Miro probably hadn’t mastered the spell to that level yet.

A gleam of haze-mint aether appeared before Fabrisse’s vision—the color of mischief. 

A light arc of magic smacked the back of Fabrisse’s knee. His right sleeve fused to his left boot.

He pitched forward like an unstrung marionette and hit the ground.

[-3 HP]

That kind of hurt.

“Gotcha!” Miro whooped. “Didn’t even need targeting glyphs.”

Cuman chuckled. “You have to chant? Miro, remind me to thank your mother for birthing you just unskilled enough that I never feel threatened.”

If only Tommaso is here, Fabrisse thought. He’ll know how to punish these punks.

Fabrisse yanked his sleeve free and stood, mud already streaked across one elbow. His teeth clenched. His satchel rustled.

“I’ve unlocked spells,” he muttered, more to himself than to them. “I have spells. This time I’m not just a wet goblin with rock feelings.”

“What did you just say?” Cuman put a hand behind his ear and leaned forward. “Speak louder.”

He reached into the satchel, fingers closing around the Stupenstone.

“Fling,” he whispered.

[Spell Cast: Stupenstone Fling (Rank I)]

The flared a vibrant amber, with resonance, intent, concordance! Then arced into the air with the velocity of a politely tossed muffin.

It missed Cuman by three feet and landed with a splat in the bucket of pondwater.

The problem, as usual, was velocity. Or maybe intent vectoring. Or maybe he just sucked at throwing.

The laughter this time came in waves.

“Was that a warning shot?” Miro gasped, wiping tears from his eyes.

“Hey, hey!” Cuman gestured at him like calling a puppy. “Come closer. We promise we’ll stand still for you to practice throwing rocks at us.”

Fabrisse opened his mouth to say something, but—

“If you want to duel,” Cuman added with a smug smile, “I don’t duel up the ladder. House rule. You wanna fight, talk to Miro.”

Miro, who had just stopped laughing, said, “I’d really rather not, actually.”

Cuman clapped a firm hand on his shoulder and leaned down with a grin sharp enough to slice parchment. “Miro, my dear friend. You already cast first. Would be unsporting not to follow through.”

“That’s not a rule,” Miro muttered.

“It is now,” Cuman said cheerfully. “Besides, you said you were getting rusty with motion glyphs. This’ll be great practice.”

Miro turned slowly toward Fabrisse, and his earlier mischief had all but gone. “So. Uh. Duel?”

Fabrisse took a step back. “I’m not accepting a duel.” His best skill was Stealth. He couldn’t duel.

Miro gave a weak laugh. “Again, really not—”

“Miro,” Cuman said.

Miro sighed and raised one hand. “Okay, okay. One cast. Then we’re done.”

He muttered a familiar mnemonic under his breath. It was Air-based, probably a basic Disruptive Gust. But Fabrisse noticed it lacked the usual springy sharpness of Miro’s spells. The wind he summoned hiccuped as it formed, curling around his fingers but wouldn’t launch. 

A flare of aether coalesced at Miro’s palm—bluish-white, with frayed edges. He lurched forward, forcefully sending it Fabrisse’s way.

Fabrisse barely managed to sidestep. The gust flew past his ear and slapped into a nearby wall of ivy with a wet flutter.

“You’re losing your spark,” Cuman called out, disappointed. “You can’t prank like you used to when you’re this nervous. Honestly tragic.”

Miro’s jaw tightened. Without waiting for acknowledgement or permission, he lifted his hand again, this time with more force.

“Wisp and whip, stumble and slip—” he muttered, the mnemonic rushing out sharper than before. His fingers traced the shape of a spell he probably didn’t mean to cast so hard.

This time, the air shimmered with a different texture. Not clean mint like before, but something dulled and smoky, tinged with the faintest hue at the tail. Burnished ochre? No, not quite. Not his amber. This wasn’t the bright flare of Concordant shame, but something muddier, confused, creeping in from the edges of emotional instability.

Fabrisse saw it immediately.

The spell fired more erratically in trajectory, but heavier. The gust spun off-kilter, veering sideways as Fabrisse side-stepped it. The blast missed again, ruffling his hood and kicking dust off the path behind him.

“Seriously?” Miro blurted. 

His stance shifted from casual to committed.

“Oh no,” Fabrisse muttered.

Miro flicked his wrist again.

“Skip the rhyme,” Cuman called.

Another harsher burst of aether shot from Miro’s palm, streaked with that same dull ochre glow.

Fabrisse dodged again, but he misjudged the direction of the spell. It hit him on the cheek, and he felt a slap so hard his head turned sideways.

[–4 HP]

He stumbled back a step, winded. His back hit the side of a mossed-over bench. His breath came ragged and sharp.

The second gust came immediately after, but this one was worse. It had spin. Fabrisse dropped low, felt the air whistle above his shoulder, and barely avoided the strike.

Dust scattered behind him. A nearby lantern rune buzzed in protest.

“Hey—!” Fabrisse coughed, waving a hand. “That’s enough. You’re going too far.”

He looked up. Miro’s expression faltered for half a second, caught between rising anger and uncertain guilt. Miro was actually glancing at him now, as if he was deciding whether or not Fabrisse had felt too much discomfort.

“Don’t be a wimp,” Cuman said, still leaning back like a spectator. “No one’s getting hurt.”

Fabrisse wiped his sleeve across his mouth and glanced at the fading ochre trail left in the air. That was no ordinary schoolyard cast.

“Come on,” Cuman drawled. “Don’t let him psych you out, Miro. You’re not going to let the Rock Witch tell you what’s too far, are you?”

Miro swiveled his wrist. The ochre haze hadn’t fully dissipated from the last cast, and another glyph circle was already glinting into form beneath his palm. The air grew taut.

“Miro—” Fabrisse warned.

But Miro didn’t stop. His fingers began to trace the first arc of another spell.

Then the world flashed white.

A searing pillar of pale-gold light split the quad, clean as a courtroom verdict.

Miro yelped and jumped back, and the half-formed spell in his hand fizzled out instantly. His feet tangled, and he stumbled onto one knee.

Fabrisse shielded his eyes, blinking rapidly against the afterimage. That’s light-based thaumaturgy. In the floating glyph, it would probably be classified as a sub-type of Fire, but in Thaumaturgy theory, it was its own element.

He didn’t have to turn around to know who it was.

“That’s enough sparring, boys,” came Liene’s voice. “Or should I call it what it actually is—magical bullying with poor spell control?”

Chapter 22

Fabrisse lingered by the pedestal a little longer than necessary. He cradled the Stupenstone like it might protest being returned, turning it one last time in his palm.

The System’s glyph flashed before his eyes.

[Final Step Required: Invocation.]

[Manifest attunement.]

“Put it back in,” Severa said crisply.

Fabrisse’s fingers hovered over the pedestal, but didn’t move. An Invocation? Right. That makes sense. But how?

He couldn’t expect to cast at Invocation here without triggering the containment ward or making Severa suspicious. But he didn’t need to chant any mnemonic, did he? The glyph had told him so, as least during when he was trying to open the sub-sections.

Concordance isn’t about saying the words. It’s about embodying the state.

“I just need a second,” he said, stalling.

Severa narrowed her eyes. “What for?”

“I want to test something. If this really is about layered imprint resonance, then the placement matters.”

She looked dubious but didn’t argue. Maybe she thought he was adding flair. She liked things done cleanly, ceremonially.

He turned the stone slowly in his palm, as if aligning runic vectors, though in truth there were no visible glyphs. Just an instinct—shame, memory, tether—and the quiet pressure rising behind his ribs.

He angled the Stupenstone a few degrees to the left, tilted it, then moved it back. He then took half a step clockwise. 

“Are you just spinning it in a circle?” Severa asked suspiciously.

“No,” he said. “I’m observing sympathetic resonance displacement.”

That part, he probably didn’t lie.

But his hand was sweating, the kind that made his palm tacky against the surface of the Stupenstone, like his skin was trying to hold on tighter than he was. His fingers felt clumsy. He adjusted his grip again, not because the stone needed realigning, but because he couldn’t seem to make them stay still. 

[Invocation Window Available — Confirm Emotional Attunement — Trigger Emotion: Anxiety]

[Quest Objective: Initiate invocation through recovered emotional signature.]

Anxiety? That’s the trigger?

He didn’t even know there were invocation triggers for anxiety. That wasn’t a sanctioned channel—not in Thaumaturgy, not even in the joke papers the undergraduates circulated when they'd had too much scrawlwine.

So what am I supposed to cast? A nervous breakdown?

No. He needed something familiar. Something the stone already recognized. Something that had tied them together once before.

He lowered his hand to just above the pedestal, cradling the Stupenstone like a secret.

He let another shameful memory return. Not the grand, ceremonial failure in front of classmates. This one was smaller but even meaner somehow, for how petty it was.

He was nine. Dubbie had caught him in the backyard trying to teach a frog how to bow.

Not magically, but with string and patience and the solemnity of someone who absolutely believed the frog could be trained into polite behavior if addressed with proper ritual phrasing. He’d even drafted a tiny cape for it out of torn handkerchief and told her it was a ‘formality in channeling respect.’

She’d laughed so hard she’d choked on her tea. 

He’d stood there, one hand outstretched with his ‘ceremonial instruction twig,’ the other clutching a scroll titled ‘Basic Tenets of Amphibian Discipline,’ which he’d written himself in red ink and overly large letters.

She never brought it up again.

But he did.

At least once a month. Usually while lying awake at night. Wondering if the frog remembered. Wondering why he’d tried to bow back when the frog twitched its jumpy legs by accident.

Aether pulsed in an amber burst—brief, weak, almost apologetic. It radiated no farther than the edge of the pedestal, thinning like smoke drawn through a cracked door.

[Spell Triggered: Shameflare (Concordance Variant)]

Invocation Source: Emotional Imprint – Recovered

Resonance Thread: Aetheric Echo — Stupenstone Catalyst Confirmed

[Quest Step Complete: Invocation Performed at Site of Abandonment]

Bonus Objective: Severa Montreal — Not Yet Noticing

✔ Quest Complete: Weight of the Words Left Unsaid

✦ New Spell Unlocked: Stupenstone Fling (Rank I)

Aetheric force applied to emotionally imprinted object.

Effect: Launches object with targeted intent. Damage and arc scale with resonance.

Bonus: Wards and glamours destabilize more easily when object carries failure imprint.

Fabrisse clenched his jaw. Please, please let that not have triggered the wards.

I did not trigger the wards.

The chamber didn’t even react.

But Severa did.

He could feel her eyes snap toward him like a spell-lock clicking into place. “What was that?”

“What?” Fabrisse replied, too fast. “Nothing.”

“That was amber,” she said sharply. “Aetheric amber. Did you try to cast an Invocation?”

He straightened and tried very hard not to look like someone who’d just weaponized a memory about frog etiquette.

“It’s a—uh—resonant feedback leak,” he said, clearing his throat and praying she didn’t know that wasn’t a real phrase. “The stone’s, um, stabilizing the emotional imprint. I believe it let out a minor discharge.”

Severa took a step forward, and her voice was suddenly sharper. “That wasn't a containment leakback. That was a cast. Are you a fool?”

Fabrisse’s heart jolted. The spell residue still lingered in the air, curling faintly like heat off stone.

“I—” He swallowed. “It was harmless.”

“That’s not the point!” Her voice stayed low, but each syllable was knifed with precision. “There are active ward lines layered beneath the pedestal. Any unsanctioned invocation, even a passive flare, could’ve disrupted the null-field suppression matrix.”

She pointed to the aether haze. “What did you cast? Why is it amber? That’s not a spark I recognize. And don’t lie to me.”

His brain flailed. The shame was still clinging to him, sticky as pond water. “It was just a diagnostic trace,” he responded. “I needed to confirm something.”

Severa narrowed her eyes. “No sanctioned trace emits that hue.”

Fabrisse exhaled. “It was personalized.” Severa has never seen the color of shame before? Maybe even she doesn’t know everything.

That gave her pause. Not because she believed him fully, but because it aligned—tenuously—with the theory he’d been feeding her. Also, probably because of his ominous choice of words.

“Next time,” she said icily, “you don’t test theories inside a reinforced relic vault with reactive bindings unless you’ve warned me. Or unless you have a death wish. Do you?”

“No,” he said. “Definitely no.”

Her glare didn’t soften. “Good. Then don’t do it again.”

Fabrisse nodded quickly, his hands already sliding the Stupenstone back into the containment pedestal. The stone gave no further glow as it settled into place. The runes around the pedestal dimmed. Whatever power it had shared with him, it wasn’t eager to make a show of it now.

Severa stepped back, brushing a bit of dust off her sleeves like it had offended her. “We’ll file this under minor anomalous activation. Keep the emotional resonance trace if it’s stable. I’ll log it later.”

“Right,” Fabrisse muttered, resisting the urge to wipe his forehead. The spell had fizzled out. The pedestal hadn’t exploded. The wards hadn’t howled, and more importantly, no alarms had sounded. No instructors had burst in. 

For once, nothing happened. And that was a small miracle.

Severa keyed the final rune by the door. “We must go.”

He followed, doing his best not to limp from residual tension. As they stepped back into the outer corridor of Lower Containment, the chamber door sealed behind them without a sound.

Fabrisse didn’t relax until they were well down the hallway.

Still, somewhere in the back of his mind, a single, treacherous thought echoed: That went too well.

But he didn’t say it out loud. Even he knew better than to tempt the architecture.

Chapter 21

The wards around the containment ring didn’t shatter, but unraveled like silk threads loosening under a sudden draft.

The stone was oddly warm. Fabrisse didn’t think it was any magical, but more like the kind of warmth one felt when they held onto something for too long. It had human warmth. The stone was also denser and more weighty somehow, but he couldn’t tell if it was that different from a normal Stupenstone.

Then the System whispered:

[Stupenstone Reclaimed — Emotional Loop Established]

Emotional Memory Recovered: Determined Shame

Aetheric Object Classification: Aether-Imbued

✦ Passive Effect I: Shameflare-Linked Dexterity
– +1 DEX while equipped
– +2 DEX while casting Shame or Concordance-based spells

✦ Passive Effect II: Emotional Tether Thread
– Spell cooldowns slightly reduced under high emotional pressure
– Duration of Concordant effects increased during internal dissonance

This object now reflects your path not taken. Keep it close.

Bonus Objective Achieved: + 1 SYN

Fabrisse staggered slightly, nearly overbalancing from the sheer emotional snap that echoed through him. A flash crossed behind his eyes.

A failed charm spell in his first year of Basic Thermaturgy I. The laughter. The heat in his ears. The sound of parchment tearing when he’d crumpled his own notes afterward.

The shame was distant now, but still sharp-edged.

And the stone remembered it too.

This stone is now a magical item? Maybe I did crack open the latent aetheric consciousness of the Stupenstone.

Too bad he couldn’t keep it. He just wanted to finish the quest with it and leave it be.

Hold on. Is ‘SYN’ Synaptic Clarity? I haven’t even unlocked that attribute yet.

“You’ve been standing still for a very long time,” someone said. “Did it knock you into a trance or were you composing a stanza again?”

Fabrisse quickly turned and slid the stone into his sleeve. Severa was a few steps away from him with folded arms and a rather judgmental look.

“Just thinking,” he said, and taken aback at how calm he sounded. “I think we were right about something.”

Severa arched an eyebrow. “Which is?”

“And I think you were right,” he said, swallowing the last flicker of panic. “This thing doesn’t follow normal pathways. It reacts to memory, not mana. So I guess it’s an aetheric side-thread, not a core affinity conduit.” He was careful not to say the word ‘Concordance’.

“I expected observable changes after you touch the stone, but I have not yet seen any,” Severa said.

Maybe you would have if you’d paid attention earlier . . .

“It was observable, but only to me,” he said.

“How do I know you’re not lying?” Severa somehow folded her arms even harder, if that made sense.

“I saw the vision. It responded. But not to me now—to me from before. I think it’s carrying a resonance trace, so not just any old impression, but an emotional key.”

“Did you get an emotional scenario in your head? For which emotion?”

He scratched the back of his head. “Embarrassment.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“It’s not resonance-active. It’s emotion-reactive, and only once it recognizes that the person holding it has experienced that specific emotional wavelength before.”

“If that’s true,” Severa says slowly, “we could replicate the trigger by inducing parallel memories and creating a layered imprint.” Which, frankly, he had no idea how to do. He wasn’t even sure Severa could cast memory-binding spells at that level. That kind of work bordered on advanced cognitive Thaumaturgy—something only a Magus Exemplar or higher could reliably perform.

And Magus Exemplars weren’t just instructors. They were practically demigods within the institution, on par with department heads, theory architects, and the sort of people who could rewrite casting laws and get cited for it. Basically, the ranking goes like this: Magus-Student (the lowest tier), Magus, High Magus, Magus Instructant, High Magus Instrcutant, Magus Exemplar, High Magus Exemplar, Archmagus. There was no High Archmagus in the Synod, as there were only ever three High Archmagi in the entire Order, and they handle more important matters than teaching students how to make fire.

Which is great! Maybe she can realize it’s impossible and give up now.

Severa lifted her head and stared at the ceiling, which was nothing but black. “My father can do it.”

Fabrisse kept his face very, very neutral. “Oh. Great.”

She gave him a slow smile. “And you will meet him.”

He nearly dropped the stone again. “Severa—”

“You owe me access,” she said, stepping closer, her tone clipped but cool. “You promised something replicable. If this is a real path of attunement, then we can map it. My father will know how.”

Oh no. The Montreal patriarch. The last time someone said they’d ‘survive’ him, it was written in footnotes.

Fabrisse didn’t answer right away. His sleeve felt heavier with the weight of the stone. Or maybe that was just dread.

“I—don’t think that’s a good idea to get more people involved,” he tried.

Severa arched a perfect brow. “You withheld the truth to get in here. I tolerated it. Now I’m asking for something reasonable in return.”

“Meeting your father is not reasonable.”

She smiled again, this time with teeth. “You’ve faced the Eidralith. You’ll survive my father.”

That was highly debatable.

“Now,” she waved with her knuckles. “Would you please kindly put the stone back before anyone sees us?”

“Yes, of course.” He held the stone out. He’d touched it, felt its memory, and basically achieved resonance with it. There was nothing else to do.

Wait. If there’s nothing else to do . . . where’s the Quest Completion glyph notification?

Chapter 20

The Lower Containment Annex sat beneath the older wings of the Synod, accessed through a narrow stairwell hidden behind a tapestry depicting the Grand Binding of Witherwyrm Baruchel. It was a dramatic and slightly overcompensating piece of propaganda, which now functioned mostly to hide the most tightly regulated basement on campus.

For those who had no business being there, one needed a Visiting Student Permit of the highest order.

Or, in Severa Montreal’s case, a last name.

The guards stationed at the checkpoint didn’t glance twice when she presented her sigil-stamped documentation. It flared gold along the edge—Montreal House crest, Tier 2 Clearance, direct archival proxy request—and the wardstones parted without a murmur.

She stepped through like she belonged there. Which, of course, she did.

Fabrisse followed half a minute later, waving his borrowed pass like it might crumble in the light. He had no crest, just a meticulously forged ‘educational observation permit’ registered under the ‘Sanitation & Containment Documentation Fellowship.’ Greg had filled out the paperwork in full, citing interest in containment infrastructure cleanliness metrics.

Greg had helped him out after all. Severa hadn’t asked where he’d gotten it.

The moment Fabrisse passed through the main threshold, the temperature dropped five degrees. Every breath came laced with the faint sharpness of stabilizing wards and old incense residue. The lighting was low, sourced from runes embedded into the basalt walls, and provided no heat whatsoever.

The elites must have some sort of unexplainable obsession with the cold.

Massive reinforced doors lined the hallway ahead, each etched with sealing glyphs and color-coded symbols.

[SYSTEM NOTE: You have entered a Restricted Preservation Wing.]

Warning: Passive glyphs may track intent signature. Keep your emotional state stable.

Detected Attunement Artifact: 1x Stupenstone (Glowing)

Resonance feedback may increase inside chambered zones. Proceed cautiously.

Fabrisse slowed his pace instinctively.

“Don’t lag,” Severa called over her shoulder. Her voice echoed, pin-sharp in the acoustics. “Containment halls aren’t libraries. Don’t gawk like a tourist.”

“I’m not gawking,” Fabrisse whispered. “I’m . . . intellectually curious.”

“Pick up your curiosity and keep pace.”

But the place was too weird to ignore.

One of the doors was slightly ajar—just enough to see a suspended glass sphere floating above a series of concentric casting rings, all humming with quiet menace. The plaque read Chamber Four: Votive Construct (Semi-Sentient).

Fabrisse leaned.

[Artifact Classification: Votive Construct, Type IIB]
Containment Status: Stable
Known Behaviors: Murmuring, Temperature Flux, Mild Religious Judgment
Do not respond to its questions. Do not accept its compliments.

He startled then hurried to catch up.

Around the next bend, they passed a suspended scroll vault locked in a triple-casing of fireglass and alloyed bone. Fabrisse turned slightly to inspect the anchoring runes.

[System Note: Do not touch the Scroll Vault.]

[System Note: High-Security Scroll Vault (Class V: Veiled Memory Archive)]

Content Status: Obscured | Emotional Imprint: Dense

Proximity Exposure: Moderate benefit to ARC development

Warning: Access without clearance may result in recursive memory echoes.

[Optional Path Marker: Archive Reverie Thread – Locked]

Fabrisse leaned closer. The inner scrolls glinted more brightly the more he leaned in.

His ARC control was abysmal, according to the glyph. He made a mental note of the existence of this vault.

“Kestovar.” Severa’s voice cut through the reverie like a precision rune chisel.

He flinched upright.

“Stop flirting with the forbidden archives and get moving,” she called over her shoulder. “This isn’t your tragic backstory arc.”

He sighed and hurried after her, still glancing once over his shoulder at the vault as if it might whisper something just for him.

It didn’t.

They rounded another corridor and nearly collided with a tall figure dressed in deep violet robes.

Magus Instructant Bellare. Specialist in Binding Theory and Ethic-coded Sealing Protocols. Fabrissed had met him once, and he wasn’t sure if Bellare would recognize him. 

Fabrisse froze. His hood was already up, and he was ready to trigger every of his Stealth-based skill, but that meant nothing in a hall like this—intent resonance could be tracked, and he was very recognizable when he panicked.

Bellare squinted at Severa. “Miss Montreal. I wasn’t informed of your presence today.”

“I submitted a visitation form to the archive desk this morning,” Severa replied coolly. “It has been signed by House authority, and should be logged in now.”

Bellare nodded, already turning toward a nearby registry rune. Fabrisse began inching backward as if the wall might absorb him.

“And the intern?” Bellare asked, gesturing vaguely toward Fabrisse.

Fabrisse’s mouth went dry. Severa answered before he could.

“He’s a contingent observer for sanitation metrics, apparently. You know how the sub-departments like their niche research.”

Bellare frowned. “Is that the project by Greg J. Johnson?”

Greg has a middle name? He thought.

“The same,” Severa said. “He’s supervising Kestovar for cross-citation purposes. We’re logging containment humidity for threshold glyph decay rates.” 

That sounded exactly like something Greg would fabricate. Fabrisse was surprised Severa bothered learning the specifics of the project Greg had submitted. Bellare, mercifully, looked too tired to question it.

“I see,” the magus muttered, then drifted past them with the distracted air of someone already worrying about twelve other anomalies.

Fabrisse exhaled like he’d been holding his lungs hostage.

“I told you to stay quiet,” Severa muttered once Bellare was out of earshot. “And not to walk like you’re one jolt from confessing an unsanctioned summoning.”

Fabrisse didn’t bother to argue as she rolled her eyes and kept walking. He followed.

At last, they came to Chamber Seven.

The door was heavier than the others, rimmed in brushed silver and set with four locking rings. Above it, the glyphwork pulsed with the specific hue of unwelcome curiosity—a warning to those not named in the containment logs.

[System Alert: Containment Vault Identified – Chamber Seven]
Artifact: Stupenstone (Class: Unregistered Sentiment Anchor)
Security Level: Moderate – High
Status: Dormant. Aura suppression active. Emotional trace sealed.

Severa placed her sigil-stamped card into the groove on the wall. The lock clicked. “This is it?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

This was the part where she’d expect something. Justification. Fabrisse braced himself. She wouldn’t have brought him here without a reason. And he’d given her a good one.

He looked at her now and repeated the lie he’d told the night before in the echoing privacy of their study alcove:

“You said you wanted proof,” he’d said. “Of resonance pathways that haven’t been properly classified yet. This stone reacts to the Will of the Origins because it doesn’t fit into the known channels. Not Earth, not Emotion, not even Artifact-level Memory Binding. If I’m right, it might be the first verified instance of a Relational Resonance object—a spellform that responds not to talent, but to history. That’s why it went dormant after the Eidralith touched me. It doesn’t just hold power. It holds who I was before it.” It was the longest he’d said in a long time without stopping for a significant amount of time.

And she had paused. Then smiled.

Because for someone like Severa Montreal, who thrived on prestige and novel findings, the phrase ‘first verified instance’ was worth a thousand permissions.

“You’ll let me study it,” she’d said.

And Fabrisse had lied again. “Of course. If you can dig into it more clearly, maybe you can even reverse the process.” And bind with it after I’ve unbound from it, was what he didn’t say. She must’ve understood as such.

Now, standing at the threshold, he watched as Severa keyed the final rune and the door whispered open.

The temperature dipped a full degree the moment the chamber unsealed, like the room had been cryo-aged with silence, and now it was slowly leaking out.

Inside: a chamber of deep grey stone, circular and lined with containment rings. At the center hovered the Stupenstone, suspended midair inside a containment hex. 

This one didn’t glow.

Fabrisse stepped forward. His fingers itched.

[System Note: You are within 1.4 meters of Source Object. Emotional index rising. Concordant threads pulsing. Interaction available.]

“Go on,” Severa said behind him. “That’s the reason we’re here, isn’t it?”

She stepped forward slightly, just one quiet step. Her eyes were fixed not on him but the pedestal. A long moment passed.

“Good,” she murmured, so soft it might not have been for him at all. Then, with her usual clarity, she continued, “Don’t lag. Containment sensors sweep every six minutes.”

He reached toward it.

The stone didn’t move.

Instead, the runes etched into the floor flared once, just enough to mark his presence. Then, from the very center of the hex, a pedestal rose: not stone, not wood, but a shaped column of soft, pale light.

It stopped just beneath the Stupenstone, as if offering it a place to rest, or a place to return to. A dais of resonance, built from memory pretending to be matter.

The air around the stone changed. The weight of it pressed into his field of awareness. Maybe it was reaching back.

And somewhere deep inside the System interface, a new prompt appeared.

[Quest Update: “Weight of the Words Left Unsaid” – Step 3 Unlocked]

Touch the stone. Reclaim what you left behind.

Bonus Objective: Don’t let her see what it really does.

‘What it really does?’ It’s just a rock. What can it do?

He chanced a glance at Severa. She was already circling the containment room, scrutinizing the ward lines carved into the flooring, tracing her fingers across rune stabilizers like she was grading them. She’d find something to criticize, no doubt.

Now was his chance.

Fabrisse inhaled. His heartbeat felt enormous, pressing against his ribs like it wanted to punch its way out and handle this itself.

[Skill Activated: Liminal Presence Drift (Rank III)]

[Stealth effectiveness increased. Local attention anchors: suppressed.]

[Severa Montreal: Awareness Level – Divided Focus]

The magic wasn’t verbal, nor did it require intent. Because it wasn’t Thaumaturgy.

He moved.

His steps followed the fractures in the tilework, each one carefully angled to avoid the focal radii of the ward-lines. Not as a spell, but as instinct. His body knew this pattern better than any chant.

Ten paces. Then seven.

The Stupenstone, sealed beneath a shimmer-thin warding dome, rolled like it was orbiting around itself.

[Object recognizes Imprint Signature: Fabrisse Kastovar]
[Resonance building. Latent tether stabilizing.]
[Note: Emotional feedback loop forming. Extraction Possible.]

Fabrisse inched closer.

Three steps. Then two.

[Note: Concordant resonance: elevated. Action favored by internal field alignment.]

(User consent assumed.)

He reached for it.

And that was when he understood what the glyph meant by ‘what it really does’.

Chapter 19

Fabrisse closed the door behind him and immediately turned to Greg, who was sitting on the floor in front of his bookshelf, carefully re-alphabetizing their emergency snack inventory by expiry date. 

“No,” Greg said.

Fabrisse paused. “I haven’t said anything yet.”

Greg adjusted his glasses. “You paused meaningfully in the doorway, looked contemplative, and made a beeline for me instead of your desk. That only ever means ‘Greg, I have a bad idea and need someone to help me.’ So: no.”

Fabrisse deflated. “Fine.”

He flopped onto his bed, mind awhirl with forbidden containment wings and ambiguous glyph quests. stared at the ceiling for a while, then rolled over and buried his face in his pillow. The faint scent of ink and chip crumbs clung to the fabric. He sat back up and stared at the floating glyph still hovering in his peripheral vision.

[Quest Progress: Incomplete]
Target Location: Chamber Seven, Lower Containment

Priority: Elevated (Path-dependent)

He squinted at it. ‘Path-dependent’ was a probably very ominous way of saying ‘you can ignore this if you want, but there will be consequences.’

He groaned, draped an arm over his eyes, and tried to brainstorm.

Could he bluff his way in? No, not with his face.

Could he sneak in? Maybe, though he don’t think he’s that good at slinking into places.

Maybe Veist could help? She was a research student during an aquathermaturgy project, if he recalled correctly. She’d actually spoken to him again just now, in the aquatics corridor. She was working on something about the resonance patterns in spiny kelpfish, but he was too anxious to pay attention.

Still, that would mean asking her. On purpose. Which was practically a confession of incompetence.

The first confession had stung enough.

Greg suddenly said, “Whatever you’re planning: not worth it.”

Fabrisse turned to him. “Huh?”

Greg didn’t look up from his book. “That girl’s planted some ideas in your head. Now you think breaking the rules is fun and games.”

“I’m just thinking.”

“So are you or are you not thinking about breaking the rules then?”

“That’s different.”

“If you say so.” Greg moved to his desk, and soon was off doing his own thing in silence again.

Greg had been right, even though he’d been wrong. Do I need to go that far for the quest? The glowing glyph couldn’t go away, and neither could the very inconvenient awareness that part of him wanted to pursue this. To see how far he could get. 

“Why now?” he muttered to himself. “Why suddenly now do I need to be some kind of magical prodigy?”

The glyph offered no answer.

Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he could keep doing things at his own pace.

“Don’t you have Aerothaumaturgy this afternoon?” Greg spoke again.

Fabrisse shot up from his bed. “Oh no.”

***

By the time he sprinted into the Aerothaumaturgy field, he was wheezing, one sock was inside out, and the instructor had already started outlining today’s skybinding array.

The open practice grounds stretched wide under a bleached blue sky, ringed by slowly rotating wind glyphs. High overhead, a few students were already airborne on controlled wind lifts, bobbing through the air like anxious kites.

Fabrisse tiptoed toward the group, trying to blend in behind a hedge of weather-stabilization runes. He didn’t quite make it.

“Ah! Mr. Kestovar. So good of you to join us,” boomed Magus Instructant Ovrien from across the field.

The wind picked up conveniently to carry his voice to every ear present. Fabrisse grimaced and bowed apologetically.

Someone chuckled.

It was Cuman. Of course it was Cuman.

Cuman Gollivur was lounging in midair at a precisely calibrated hover height, his robes catching the breeze with effortless flair. Sparks of green light from his triumph-aided amplification spell danced around his outstretched hands like miniature stars.

He was sixteen, the perfect age to act like a flairless bully.

“Look sharp, Rock Witch,” Cuman called out. “Wouldn’t want you floating away by accident. Or maybe you just didn’t want to fly today? Or ever?”

Miro Hirosagi, his ever-present tagalong, snorted. “Maybe he’s still recovering from the head trauma.”

Fabrisse gritted his teeth, trying not to rise to it. He moved toward his assigned rune circle, keeping his head down.

A gust hit him. But it wasn’t the wind.

A ripple of summoned current, tinged with a prank glyph. He felt it the instant before it struck, but he was not fast enough to respond.

The air puffed beneath his robes and launched him a full meter into the air. His arms flailed wildly, legs bicycling midair before he dropped with a squelch into a nearby puddle, left over from some weather manipulation exercise.

A small note appeared above his head.

[-2 HP]

A muddy silence followed. Then a wave of laughter.

“Oh no! Downed already?” Cuman grinned, descending slightly for effect. “Thought the chosen ones were supposed to stay upright.”

Fabrisse lay there, staring at the sky, soaking wet, with grass in his ear and dignity leaking from his shoes.

Fabrisse groaned, rolling onto his side as mud squelched beneath his hip. The laughter was finally fading, but the humiliation lingered like water in his ears.

Magus Instructant Ovrien took a step forward, brow furrowing as he began to descend from the central casting platform. “Mr. Kestovar, do you require—”

“Allow me, Magus,” came a crisp voice from the other side of the circle.

Heads turned. Severa Montreal was already striding toward Fabrisse with an unflinching posture.

The Magus paused, mildly surprised. “Miss Montreal?”

Severa offered him a small, deferential nod. “I believe I can assist. A touch of elementary wind redirection, if you would permit me. It’s hardly taxing.”

There was a brief moment of hesitation. Students, and definitely High Distinction students like Severa, rarely volunteered to assist one another unless it was for extra merit points or to show off. But Severa looked neither eager nor boastful. If anything, she looked slightly bored.

“Very well,” said Ovrien. “Mr. Kestovar clearly needs a bit of help with basic lift stability. You may proceed.”

Fabrisse blinked rapidly as he looked up at her, dazed and still half-coated in sludge. “What are you—”

“Hush,” she said, kneeling beside him as she took out her wand. “Do you want to be embarrassed further?”

She lifted one hand and traced a precise series of motions in the air. A small spiral of wind gathered around Fabrisse. It did little to lift him, but was enough to ease the weight and dry the worst of the muck.

Fabrisse watched her warily. Severa Montreal did not do things out of kindness. If she was helping, it meant she was going to make a point—and she didn’t usually stop until that point was deeply and publicly made.

She twirled her wand. “Now. You will mirror this motion. Exactly. Do try not to trip over your own fingers.”

Fabrisse reached slowly for his wand, adjusting his grip. “I know the gesture. I’ve just—”

“Yes, yes. You’ve ‘just.’ You’ve just been tragically behind in every core subject. You’ve just barely managed to pass Basic Thermaturgy last year, and the only reason why you’re in this class is because Lorvan, from the kindness of his heart, has enrolled you into Limited-Spot catch up classes. And now you’ve just stumbled into a bond with an artifact of incalculable value.” Her eyes narrowed slightly, but her voice remained sweet. “Some of us have trained since childhood for such an honor.”

Fabrisse's grip tightened on his wand. “It wasn’t on purpose.”

“No, I imagine little you do ever is.” She smiled as if she were offering him a pastry. “Still, if you had a shred of dignity, you might consider stepping aside. An unbinding ritual can be performed cleanly if done early enough. I could even teach you a Rank II invocation or two as compensation. Something appropriate. Wind, perhaps. Suits your disposition.”

“I—what?” Fabrisse nearly choked. “You want me to give it up? Just like that?”

Severa lifted her chin slightly. “Don’t be so dramatic. I merely suggest what’s best for everyone. The Eidralith chose you—yes, tragically—but it may yet be persuaded by competence. Artifacts of that class are better suited to those with proper training and discipline.

Her voice stayed poised, but her eyes gleamed. “I, for instance, was selected—after rigorous evaluation, of course—to assist in the Will of the Origin research cohort. It is a highly competitive placement, but then, one must demonstrate aptitude.” Her wand twitched. “Now. Again. Wrist higher. You’re drooping.”

Fabrisse, cheeks burning, mimicked her gesture. A sliver of wind answered his call, sluggish and clumsy compared to hers. Still, it formed, and a thin ribbon of curled movement materialized from his palm.

“Oh, look,” Severa said. “It wiggles.”

His spell fizzled out.

Severa rose to her feet in one smooth motion and dusted imaginary dirt from her sleeve. “Magus, I believe that concludes my assistance.”

Magus Ovrien gave her a brief nod. “Well done, Miss Montreal.”

Fabrisse remained crouched on the ground, wand limp in hand, half-mud, half-mortified.

Severa smiled down at him one last time. “Chin up, Kestovar. Everyone loves an underdog. At least until they stop being amusing.”

She strode away.

He sat down. His face felt hotter the longer he sat. The sounds of the training field swirled distantly, but it all blurred.

Another sudden burst of air slammed into his back. He faceplanted again with a wet splat.

[-1 HP]

Behind him, someone snickered. Probably Cuman. Definitely Cuman.

Fabrisse stared at the mud inches from his nose. “Did Severa say she’s a research student?” he mumbled to the dirt.

He rolled over slowly, eyes narrowing at the empty sky. The glyph still glimmered in his periphery.

She’s not the one with the Eidralith. I AM the one with the Eidralith.

“I will show you,” he muttered.

He staggered upright, slinging mud from his sleeves, and bolted, gnoring the calls behind him, sprinting after the silhouette receding toward the far end of the field.

“Severa!” he shouted.

She didn’t stop. Of course she didn’t. She probably assumed he was coming to apologize.

“I said—do you want to bind with the Eidralith?”

That made her stop.

Chapter 18

They reached a tall set of opaline doors etched with celestial runes. Lorvan didn’t knock. The doors opened on their own, soundlessly, like they had been expecting him.

Inside, the air was even cooler, approaching the temperature that’d require Fabrisse to wear a coat. He gave an involuntary shiver, the kind that started between the shoulder blades and traveled down his spine like a dropped bead of ice. The circular chamber beyond was paneled in moonwood and shaped like a perfect dome, the acoustics designed to magnify even the softest sound. Fabrisse was suddenly very aware of the soft scuff his boots made against the tile as he crossed the threshold.

Three figures stood waiting—not the full Council, and notably not Headmaster Murelien Draeth, who, by all accounts, rarely involved himself unless politics or dragons were at stake. Still, these were no minor faculty members. These were Archmagi—powerful, feared, and very hard to impress.

At the center stood Archmagus Terevin Sil, her robe a starless black that seemed to erase light entirely. To her right, Archmagus Lellian Dir looked like he’d come straight from a chaotic desk battle with a thousand scrolls, and to her left, Archmagus Mikhael Rolen, well, was scratching his shoulder. 

Fabrisse hadn’t seen both Sil and Dir before; they seem to have arrived from the Order itself. It seemed a terrible idea to let Archmagus Rolen alone in charge of welcoming the welcoming the Celestial Investigator, the Archmagi, and an ancient semi-sapient relic of unknown temperament.

“Why . . . was he the one left in charge?” Fabrisse whispered to Lorvan out of the side of his mouth.

Lorvan didn’t look at him, but his sigh was world-weary enough to count as a response.

The three archmagi turned to face Fabrisse in sync, and the sensation of being observed intensified.

“You’re certain the headmaster won’t be attending?” Dir asked Lorvan.

“He’s preoccupied with the arrival of our esteemed guest,” Lorvan replied. “Apparently, Professor Kaldrin of the Outer Fold has finally accepted the invitation.”

Dir muttered, “Well, that’s inconveniently timed.”

“Worse still,” Terevin added in a voice as cold as a shut tomb, “a Celestial Investigator is en route. From the Bureau of Arcane Irregularities.”

Fabrisse had heard about the Bureau. They weren’t aligned with any academy or magical order, and basically dealt with things like spontaneous realm-folds, miscast summoning echoes, ancient spell-anchors coming loose, and the like. Basically nothing that would ever concern Fabrisse.

If they’re busy with world-ending magical malfunctions, they should probably stick to those, Fabrisse thought. Why call me here just to talk about other stuff?

Or am I the stuff?

“Of course they’re coming,” Dir sighed. “They never miss a chance to audit someone else’s disaster.”

“They are precise,” said Terevin. “Which is what this demands.”

Rolen was now scratching his eyebrow. “Do they know it’s a student?”

Oh, I am the stuff.

Terevin’s eyes, pale as misted glass, settled on him fully now.

“We’ll be direct, Mr. Kestovar,” she said. “We believe there have been irregularities surrounding this year’s Vothiculum.”

Fabrisse asked, “Irregularities?”

“We have yet to determine whether it was a breach in containment, a misclassification of the soul resonance field, or—” Terevin’s voice remained level, “—a misbehavior on the part of the Eidralith itself.”

Fabrisse thought of the glowing box before it had flung itself at his forehead like a cursed projectile. More specifically, he thought about what it had done after that.

How it had gone still. And then, complete darkness.

Like a lantern that had burned out.

“Um,” he said, mouth suddenly dry. “Hypothetically—if a sacred artifact were to, say, stop glowing entirely . . . is that, uh. Bad?”

All three Archmagi stared at him.

Lorvan rubbed his temple.

“Did it stop glowing?” Dir asked, a bit too quickly.

Wait . . . they didn’t know?

Lorvan answered first. “Momentarily. But glow fluctuation has precedent. The logs show multiple resonance dips with previous candidates. None as stark, but within tolerances.”

That was a lie. Probably. But a smart one.

Rolen, still scratching his eyebrow, chimed in, “The stopping of glowing is written down in the resonance trace logs. Went dark the moment it hit him. You should’ve seen the velocity! I personally noted down the sound it made on impact. It was ‘BAM!’, for lack of better words.”

Dir turned slowly. “And you didn’t bother to mention this, Archmagus Rolen?”

“You should’ve read the logs.”

Terevin Sil’s eyes narrowed by a fraction. “Your diligence is always appreciated, Archmagus Rolen,” she said, each syllable smoothed and sharpened like a polished icicle. “Though next time, kindly preempt the need for archival excavation.” There was no anger in her tone. That would imply wasted energy. 

Rolen scratched the side of his head again and muttered, “I flagged the entry in blue. Thought that meant something.”

“Blue,” Terevin repeated. “For a containment-class anomaly.”

“It’s a nice color,” Rolen said mildly.

Dir coughed into his sleeve to hide a laugh. Fabrisse didn’t dare breathe.

Terevin’s gaze didn’t waver. “Back to the matter at hand. Mr. Kestovar, we are not here to chastise you. But we do require clarity.”

Dir added, “The Eidralith reacted to you in a way it never has in recorded history. It chose contact. Direct, unsanctioned, and—to be frank—violent contact.”

Rolen didn’t have anything to add.

Terevin ignored him. “Since then, it has remained dormant. The traces show no further resonance. We cannot determine whether you severed its link… or completed it.”

Fabrisse’s mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again with a small noise that could have been a vowel or a hiccup.

Dir leaned in slightly. “You didn’t do anything, did you? Did you whisper a forbidden name or perform a Soul Feeding?”

“No?” Fabrisse said. He didn’t even know what Soul Feeding was. “I didn’t try to do anything. I just—I was holding the rock.”

“The Stupenstone,” Lorvan corrected.

Terevin’s eyes stayed fixed on him. “Did you feel anything, Mr. Kestovar? Any irregularities or anomalous sensations within your—” she paused, choosing her next words with care, “—essence? Or anything that might suggest a tethering of will?”

Fabrisse stared at her.

Dir leaned forward again. “We ask because, as Archmagus Rolen noted in the logs, you were heard muttering something about a ‘sky-thing’ after you regained your consciousness. That’s not terminology we recognize from sanctioned Vothiculum mnemonics.”

Oh no. He hadn’t expected Rolen to be so attentive. Why did I say ‘sky-thing’? Stupid stupid stupid.

Don’t look at Lorvan. Don’t look at Lorvan.

He looked at Lorvan.

Lorvan didn’t look back at him. They had agreed—explicitly—not to tell anyone about the glyph. Not the Archmagi, not the Order, especially not anyone from the Bureau. 

Fabrisse was about to answer, but Lorvan spoke first, “An internalized metaphor, likely. Mr. Kestovar has previously recorded dissociative phrasing during high-aether events. I’ve annotated it.”

You WHAT? Fabrisse blinked. Since when?

“He described similar imagery in a First-Year breath chamber test,” Lorvan added.

Dir squinted.

Terevin’s gaze was as piercing as ever as she turned to Fabrisse. “A metaphor, yes? You are certain?”

Fabrisse nodded with desperate conviction. “Yes, ma’am. Just a, uh, general metaphor. I didn’t have something literal hovering around me. Or inside me. Haha. That would be weird.”

Lorvan spoke at last. “Mr. Kestovar has been under observation since the incident. If there were signs of latent internal tampering or emergence, I would have logged them.”

He said it with such crisp authority that even Dir seemed satisfied.

For now.

Terevin gave a fractional nod. “Very well. But understand, Mr. Kestovar—if anything surfaces, no matter how minor, you are to report it immediately.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Dir made a note with a stylus that looked unnecessarily sharp. “We’ll continue containment analysis on the Eidralith itself. But the lack of resonance doesn’t rule out a secondary trigger.”

What does she mean by ‘a secondary trigger’?

Rolen finally chimed in, scratching the side of his head. “Might be worth mentioning—we’ve also locked away the object Mr. Kestovar was holding at the time of impact. Not the Eidralith,” he added quickly, “the stone the student was holding before the incident.”

Ah.

“A very launchy stone, that one,” Rolen nodded to himself. “It’s being kept under a wardlock in Lower Containment, Chamber Seven, if you’re wondering. Bit of a sulky artifact now. It’s not reacting to any test we’ve conducted, but I guess we shouldn’t expect too much from a Stupenstone.”

[System Note: Key Clue Received – Stupenstone Location Logged: Chamber Seven, Lower Containment]

Hearing this clue just made it worse. Chamber Seven was deep-research clearance. It was off-limits unless you were a lead researcher, a relic-handling apprentice, or one of the handpicked graduate students with a badge enchanted to not explode upon entry. Lorvan didn’t even have access—he’d said so once while very grumpily waiting outside the Archives with two coffees and a grudge.

Fabrisse, on the other hand, was neither a researcher, nor a graduate, nor even someone who remembered to label his lab jars correctly. He didn’t even know where Lower Containment was.

Wait. Maybe Greg can fill out a Research Interest Declaration Form. If anyone would gleefully sign up for paperwork, meetings, and seven levels of containment training just for the chance to be within arm’s reach of a sulky Stupenstone, it was Greg. I just need to tell Greg the stone is essential for the Preservation Annex of the Sanitation Codex and he’ll be in. Probably.

“So, Mr. Kestovar?” A sudden voice jolted him from his thoughts. “Is that a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’?”

Fabrisse blinked. “Yes?”

Sil’s eyebrows lifted the smallest, most disapproving fraction. “You are agreeing to a memory transference ritual supervised by the Bureau?”

Fabrisse made a noise that could generously be interpreted as the whimper of a dying flute.

“Aha,” Dir said dryly. “Bold choice.”

“I—I mean—”

“He meant to say he declines,” Lorvan said as he stepped forward like a warding sigil. “Under Charter clause 4.3a, memory rites conducted without prior consent and third-party review constitute cognitive breach. I’ll submit the necessary waivers for pre-ritual disclosures.” He met Sil’s gaze evenly. “Unless, of course, the Council prefers this matter to escalate to inter-order arbitration.”

Sil’s eyes narrowed. Dir raised an eyebrow. Rolen looked impressed, possibly.

Fabrisse nodded far too fast. “Yes. That. What he said.”

“Very well,” Sil said. “We’ll reschedule the transferral hearing pending Bureau oversight. In the meantime, you are not to approach the Eidralith, the artifact or attempt any self-initiated recall rituals.”

“Understood,” Fabrisse said.

“We do not assume guilt, Mr. Kestovar,” Sil added. “But the Eidralith is a relic that prefers clarity. If it chose you in error . . . we must consider what that says about its design. You see,” she continued, voice gliding with deliberate precision, “there have long been debates about whether the Eidralith is passive or adaptive. You may have—unknowingly—answered that question for us.”

She tilted her head, not quite smiling. “Which would make you a significant anomaly, Mr. Kestovar. And possibly, a proof of concept.”

That made Fabrisse’s stomach turn. He wasn’t sure which word was worse: ‘anomaly’ or ‘concept.’

Dir sighed. “You’re free to go, Mr. Kestovar. Remember this. Contact your mentor if you sense any irregularities in your psyche.”

“Yes, sir,” Fabrisse said, already halfway turned around.

Lorvan gave the Archmagi a shallow bow—more perfunctory than polite—and placed a firm hand between Fabrisse’s shoulder blades.

They departed. If Fabrisse saw the interior of that chamber another time, it’d be far too soon.

Chapter 17

By the time Fabrisse returned to class, he was exactly one hour and twelve minutes late. His robes were damp, his knees were muddy, and he still had a faint duck-feather stuck in his hair, which refused to dislodge no matter how many times he ran a hand through it.

The door creaked.

Every head turned.

Silence fell like a dropped curtain.

It wasn’t just that he was late. Or that he looked like he’d been dragged backwards through a wet hedge.

It was that he was The Chosen One now.

Thirty-two pairs of eyes stared at him like he’d grown a second head and the second one had better posture. One of them blinked with genuine awe. Another narrowed in suspicion. Someone—probably Vex Aldoran with the perpetually judgmental cheekbones—whispered something to the girl next to him, who then immediately tried to look like she wasn’t staring.

Fabrisse had never been stared at by that many people in his life. He wasn’t built for that sort of attention. He was the type to sit near the middle-back and hope no one remembered his name during roll call. He was the background detail in someone else’s story.

And yet now, the classroom felt like a stage.

He clutched his satchel tighter, trying not to let the glowing Stupenstone clink too loudly inside.

“Ah,” came the dry voice of Professor Edvaris from the front. “How kind of you to join us, Mr. Kestovar. And looking positively swamp-sculpted, I see.”

There were muffled chuckles.

Fabrisse dipped his head and said nothing.

As Fabrisse slid into his seat, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, he heard someone behind him whisper, “That’s him.”

Someone else whispered back, “Did you see the notification post? He actually unlocked the Eidralith.”

And another, “Why does he still look like a wet goblin?”

He sank deeper into his seat.

If this was what being special felt like, he wasn’t sure he liked it.

But still, he patted the satchel. The Stupenstone was warm.

Fabrisse kept his eyes down, trying to will himself into the cracks between floor tiles. The murmurs kept multiplying; he was certain they were breeding now. Somewhere behind him, someone was furiously whispering about Eidralith protocol violations. Another voice mentioned ‘residual contamination’ like it was a communicable disease.

Then, he made the mistake of looking up.

Across the room, amid a row of upper-form students who always looked like they had somewhere better to be, sat Valiene Veist.

And she was looking directly at him. She wasn’t doing anything else; just looking.

He couldn’t tell from her face what she was thinking. She wasn’t smiling. But she wasn’t frowning either.

It was the kind of look someone gave a puzzle box just before they started solving it.  It wasn’t the disinterest of someone who’d dismissed him outright, nor the open awe of someone impressed. It was worse. It was curious.

Fabrisse hated being the puzzle. Especially one she’d already once dismissed.

He immediately forgot how to hold his hands. Were they too visible on the desk? Should he hide them? Cross them? Fold them like a normal person? He shifted, then froze, then pretended to shift because of a totally normal chair adjustment reason.

Does she think I fed the Eidralith on purpose? What if she thinks I cheated? How does one even cheat during Vothiculum? What if she knows I didn’t cheat, which is somehow worse? What if she thinks I’m trying to act like I don’t care, and now I look like I care a lot?

He made eye contact again, and she was still watching with the same composed curiosity.

He looked away so fast he almost pulled a neck muscle.

Fabrisse would be thinking about that look for the next seventeen years. And he still wouldn’t know what it meant.

Soon after, the bell rang. It had probably been ten minutes only, but he felt like it was ten hours.

As the other students rose, gathering satchels and muttering their end-of-period complaints, Fabrisse stayed frozen in place, half convinced that if he didn’t move, the world would just reset itself without him.

Then . . .

He heard footsteps before he saw her.

Valiene Veist was standing there.

She glanced briefly at his satchel, where the faintest glow of the Stupenstone still shimmered under the flap.

“They have merryberry pie today,” she said. “With the glaze too.”

Words. From Veist. In his general direction.

A couple of students near the door turned to look. Even Vex Aldoran raised a carefully sculpted eyebrow from the back row.

Valiene Veist didn’t come up to people and have a chat. She was popular, sure, but not because she was approachable.

“If you’re heading that way,” she added, casually, “I don’t mind company.”

Fabrisse’s brain did a small loop-de-loop and promptly fell off its broom. “I—uh—sure. I mean yes. I—”

“Absolutely not,” came Lorvan’s voice as he strode down the aisle. “I have business with Mr. Kestovar, and it concerns many responsibilities.”

Valiene gave a small incline of her head. “Yes, Mentor. Another time, then.”

She walked off, unhurried, as if the interruption didn’t matter, but Fabrisse was already replaying every syllable in his head like a spell loop.

The Stupenstone in his satchel gave off the another tiny glimmer—not bright enough to notice, unless you were already looking for it.

Fabrisse wasn’t sure what triggered it. Her voice? Her attention? Her—

“You’re staring again,” Lorvan said.

Fabrisse snapped upright. “Yes. Business. Consequences. Got it.”

It was only then that Fabrisse noticed there was another person accompanying Lorvan. It was Professor Coll Langley, Head Researcher of the Division of Glyphcraft. Langley wasn’t a gifted spellcaster, or at least that was what he told people, but his glyphcrafting work and his contributions to the Theory of Symbolic Resonance had secured him a permanent place in the upper echelons of the Archive. Fabrisse had seen Lorvan and Professor Langley together rather often, and it seemed as though the two had a close professional relationship.

“Good morning, Kestovar. I believe you’re still neglecting your codex-crafting assignments?”

Fabrisse hesitated. “I’ve been meaning to catch up.”

Langley clicked his tongue. “You should. Theory is nothing without record. It’s the spine of magical continuity—especially for magi who don’t plan on hurling lightning around until their joints give out.”

He turned toward Lorvan, adjusting the charred folder under his arm. “You ought to have him assist with transcription sometime. Exposure breeds fluency, and it’s an essential part of archival discipline. Especially for those following a non-combat-oriented route.”

Lorvan replied, “I’ve been meaning to ask, but Mr. Kestovar seems to have a habit of disappearing whenever a codex-crafting session is near.”

Which, to be fair, he was guilty of. He had tried glyphcrafting. And tried again. And tried again.

He knew what to do. He could recite the principles of symbolic balance backward. But when it came time to set quill to page, to channel intent through the ink and weave meaning into shape, something always faltered. As with everything else he did.

Langley shook his head. “You must bring him to your next codex-crafting session, Lorvan. You are to guide him, not give in to his evading acts.”

That got Fabrisse to gulp. He knew Lorvan would take Langley’s advice seriously.

It wasn’t long before Langley excused himself. He said, “I believe you two have something rather important to attend to,” and simply left.

Lorvan leads Fabrisse not back toward the dorms, nor toward the usual lecture halls, but up. Past the Core Library spires, past the astrolith garden, and toward the high balconies where only upper faculty or guests of the Bellatorium were usually allowed. The Bellatorium was just one of the possibly dozens of chambers used for significant magical rituals, declarations of magical law, and high-level negotiations with extraplanar entities. Headmaster Draeth had long maintained that one could never have too many ritual chambers.

Fabrisse’s muddy boots squeak on polished runeslate tiles. He was about to open his mouth, but it seemed as though Lorvan had telegraphed what he was about to say.

“You’re not in trouble,” Lorvan said, which of course only made Fabrisse more anxious. “Though you are extremely inconvenient to explain.”

“Explain to who?” Fabrisse asked, half-trotting to keep up.

“To the Archmagi. And the Custodians of the Eidralith. And a few ancient, curious entities who are wondering why their sacred ward decided to nibble on your aura like it was a candied soul fragment.”

“Oh,” Fabrisse said. “So, like. A chat.” Curious entities? He thought. Can’t be more curious than Valiene. I hope.

“Yes,” Lorvan said flatly. “A very polite one. Please act like the young adult you are and try not to babble.”

“It’s not my fault the Synod teaches thirty-seven different veil forms but zero conversation skills,” Fabrisse muttered.

“You’re babbling.”

Fabrisse cursed his social ineptitude and kept walking.

Chapter 16

The lower channel ponds weren’t far, but Fabrisse felt like they were venturing into a different ecosystem entirely.

Past the eastern greenhouses and the old chalk tower, the land sloped toward a series of runoff-fed terraces where the Synod kept its minor aquafauna: the silt-swimmers, scale-eels, and the occasional duck-thing that wandered in from the canals and decided to stay. The air smelled even more of moss and charcoal than other parts of the Synod, and a light mist clung to everything as if the water was eternally shrouded by Veil magic.

The duck-things, as Liene called them, were somewhere between aquatic birds and confused garden spirits. They honked like opinionated old men and moved in slow bursts, as though deciding whether they remembered how legs worked.

“There,” Liene whispered, pointing from behind a willow-like vine.

One of the duck-things had a glowing beak, as if it had swallowed a very small candle. It was swimming away from the others, veering toward a section of the pond marked with warning glyphs and a half-collapsed shrine gate draped in algae.

“That’s not normal,” Fabrisse muttered. “Even for them.”

He reached slowly into his satchel and retrieved a flat, speckled Stupenstone named Gravelkin.

“Let’s try this first,” he whispered. With perfect hand movements and intent, he was able to cast the spell.

[Skill Activated: Sedimentary Recall (Rank II)]

He crouched near the edge of the pond, placing his hand on a wide, lichen-dusted slab that looked like it hadn’t been moved in decades. The stone was cool to the touch.

The spell clicked.

A faint shimmer rippled out from the stone.

[Reading Emotional Imprint: Medium-Low Distortion]

Wow, he thought. These notifications are really convenient. It was like he had his own magical secretary.

He saw flashes. The duck-thing was waddling along the bank, then there was the sound of quartz stone clattering from someone’s cloak. The duck-thing had waddled over, pecked curiously at the stone, and then swallowed it whole like a particularly crunchy snack. He saw nothing beyond that. No real imprint. It wasn’t his stone.

“You were right,” Fabrisse said, half amazed. “That thing ate someone’s stone.” But then, that meant someone else was also collecting stones like him, and this duck-thing took that person’s stone. But who else could be collecting stones?

“It imprinted,” Liene said triumphantly. “I knew it. Look at its aura! It’s wobbling like guilt.”

“That’s not how guilt works.”

“How would you know? You skipped emotional theory.”

“Once. I skipped once.”

He stood, brushing moss off his knees. “Alright. Time to lure it. I can animate three pebbles. Gravelkin, you’re one.”

[Skill Activated: Stonesway (Rank I)]

Three pebbles rose from his palm and bobbed lazily in the air.

The duck-thing looked up at them. Some of the other ones looked up too, but they quickly lost interests since they likely weren’t into stealing stones.

“Lure it gently,” Liene whispered.

“It’s a duck. It has the attention span of a spell-fried squirrel.”

Fabrisse made the pebbles wobble in formation, chirping magically enhanced squeaks. The duck-thing honked, honked again, and waddled toward them.

Just as it reached the edge, however, it paused.

The glow around its beak pulsed.

Then it turned and bolted, or rather, flapped with great confusion into the water, kicking up a splash of pondweed.

“Wait!”

[Quest Objective Updated: Duck-thing has moved into the Restricted Sanctuary Basin. Passage requires a Shrine Permit or active stealth effect.]

A permit is an official document or enchanted token issued by the Sanctum Authority that allows the bearer to legally enter protected or consecrated zones, or in the case of a Shrine Permit, a shrine. Affinity-based permits can also temporarily bestow a limited version of the necessary affinity (like Water, Fire, Shadow, etc.) or grant protective enchantments that help the bearer survive or interact with restricted environments. 

Fabrisse groaned. “You couldn’t have warned me sooner?”

“How? I didn’t know it’d bolt like that.”

“I was—” He was talking to the glyph. But Liene couldn’t have known that, and she shouldn’t know.

He sighed, then rotated his wrist and whispered under his breath.

[Skill Activated: Veil of Shame (Rank I)]

The memory of tripping into the Eidralith while the entire Synod watched still haunted him. He then whispered the mnemonic, “Veil my face, O fleeting flame,

Hide me now in a cloak of shame.” The shame came easily, and a few wisps of amber clung to the side of his robe.

“What did you invoke?” Liene asked. “Why’s the mnemonic so cringy?”

He crouched low and whispered again the mnemonic, feeling the familiar tightness coil in his chest—the warmth of embarrassment folding around him like a heavy cloak.

He tried walking. His footsteps grew light and muffled as if he were walking through thick molasses. 

“That’s my boy! Nice going!” Liene whispered exasperatedly.

Ahead, the duck-thing flapped awkwardly into the Restricted Sanctuary Basin, its glowing beak casting indistinct ripples of light on the mist-shrouded water.

Liene leaned close. “I’ve got you.”

She raised a hand and murmured a chant. Suddenly, a gentle current of air stirred around Fabrisse’s feet, swirling leaves and drifting petals over the damp ground.

He felt something akin to a crisp exhale across his skin. This was probably the Low-Pressure Liftfield, a standard Air-based support veil used to reduce surface presence and scatter minor tracking residues. It was pretty well-cast.

“Perfect,” Fabrisse whispered, eyes fixed on the wavering glow ahead. 

The duck-thing waddled carefully along the tangled banks. It paused beneath a gnarled tree root arching over the water, and there was no sign it had detected him.

He didn’t dare step directly into open water—not without a Water affinity or a Hydromancy permit. Instead, he skirted the edge, slipping from stone to muddy patch, keeping to the shallows where reeds grow thick. Liene’s Liftfield thinned his weight just enough that the water’s surface barely rippled.

His boots were already soaked, but the duck-thing hadn’t noticed.

One foot at a time.

The duck-thing dipped its glowing beak into the water, then pulled back with a shudder, as if spooked by its own reflection.

Nearly there.

Fabrisse was only less than five steps behind the duck before—

From the other side of the pond, Liene started waving at him, with movements far from subtle. Both her arms flailed like a weather-vane having a spiritual crisis. She pointed, urgently, toward the northern slope behind him.

He turned his head just enough to glance over one shoulder. Standing amid the glyph-lined stones at the Sanctuary boundary was Lorvan.

He was looking directly in Fabrisse’s direction, and judging from his brisk pace and the way his eyes scanned the banks, the Mentor was clearly trying to find him. He didn’t seem to have spotted Fabrisse yet, however.

The duck-thing honked indignantly and took off paddling in another direction, possibly offended by the emotional spike.

Fabrisse froze.

Very, very possibly, he had seconds.

A puff of air burst from Liene’s fingertips, distorting the light around Lorvan’s face. It was a minor glamor: Displacement Haze, if Fabrisse remembered correctly. Designed to temporarily blur visual perception, commonly used by prankster first-years to swap exam nameplates.

It glittened like cheap candlelight.

Lorvan stopped. His shoulders rose. Then, slowly, very slowly, he turned his head in Liene’s direction.

She immediately sprang from the bushes with an exaggerated grin and a finger-gun gesture. “Ha! Gotcha. Just, uh, testing some effects, you know? I just got this spell to Rank IV the other day! Can you believe that?”

“Miss Lugano. If you’re here, then Kestovar must be close.”

Liene laughed too loudly. “He might be! Or he might not be! Or—what is proximity, really, in a metaphysical sense—”

“Spare me,” Lorvan snapped. “He is to return to class this instant, and I would very much like to have a few words with him. Several, in fact.”

Fabrisse stood torn. He was five steps from the duck-thing, and also one loud syllable from being caught.

But . . . Stonebound Synapse. He needed this one. Stonebound Synapse would boost his Stonecraft rank just enough to clear next term’s prerequisites, and maybe even get Lorvan off his back for a week.

The stone was right there. 

Fabrisse felt lucky today.

He moved.

The duck-thing squawked, and its webbed feet shuffled. Fabrisse lunged forward.

Lorvan’s voice cracked like thunder from across the water. “Kestovar! Hold it right there!”

The duck-thing exploded into motion. Not in a graceful way—more like a fluffy feathery sack of rice being launched by panic. Its wings flapped unevenly, its glowing beak zigzagging wildly through the mist. Fabrisse dove after on instinct—

—and immediately slipped on a wet root.

His foot went sideways. He pinwheeled through the air with the grace of a collapsing laundry rack, and collided full-body into the tree root arch.

“Oh no, my rock!” he yelled.

His outstretched hand accidentally smacked the duck midair.

The duck squawked like a kettle being throttled and spun. Something small and shiny flew from its beak, arcing through the air with just enough dramatic glitter to qualify for magical slow motion.

Fabrisse landed face-first in a bush.

The glowing stone thunked off his forehead and bounced neatly into his palm.

[Quest Complete: Trace the Freckle-Star]
[New Passive Skill Acquired: Stonebound Synapse (Rank I)]

[New Item Acquired: Glowing Stupenstone]

[Note: A Stupenstone, but glowing.]

[Notice: Stealth bonus not awarded. Consider falling less dramatically next time.]

Fabrisse groaned, upside down in the shrubbery, one boot in the air and moss in his ear. He turned the stone over once in his palm, grinning despite the mud in his teeth. “Worth it.” Then he heard the stomping.

Across the pond, Lorvan was already storming toward him. Liene slapped both hands to her mouth, either in horror or to hide her laughter.

“Pleasant morning, mentor. I was enriching myself educationally,” Fabrisse said weakly. “With . . . ducks.”

Lorvan’s footsteps thundered closer, but he stopped just short of yelling. His eyes flicked to the glowing pebble in Fabrisse’s hand—then narrowed.

“Class,” he said again, quieter. But with no less steel.

Chapter 15

The next morning, Fabrisse did the responsible thing: he went back to the Synod.

The world had not ended. The Eidralith had not incinerated him in righteous flame. No magi in crimson robes came knocking in the night. He even got six hours of sleep, which was a personal best under magical duress.

The dormitory hallway was dim and unusually silent as he padded through in socked feet. Maybe everyone else had fled while he slept. Maybe the Synod was under quarantine. Maybe—just maybe—he was going to get away with it.

His room door stood exactly where it had been the day before. Except . . .

The ‘ROCK WITCH’ sign was gone.

The scrap of parchment that had been nailed directly into the wood, complete with childish skull doodles and an anatomically impossible stick-figure casting “Gravel Curse V,” had vanished.

Fabrisse opened the door and quietly asked. “Are you in there, Greg?”

“Statutorily, yes,” came the reply.

Greg Johnson sat cross-legged on his bed, eating a perfectly peeled orange over a page of The Unified Sanitation Codex: Vol. II. His hair was combed, his robes were pressed, and there was not a single piece of loose parchment or unaligned sock anywhere in the room. He blinked once behind thin glasses, then resumed reading.

Greg had been assigned as Fabrisse’s roommate three years ago and had somehow, across all available assessments, measured exactly neutral. No magical irregularities. No aberrant resonance spikes. No weird affinities for insects, ghosts, or screaming rocks. His Concordance rating was ‘Temperate’, and his elemental alignment was listed as ‘Undecided.’ His main contribution to the Synod was helping faculty correct citation errors in procedural texts.

“You took the sign down?” Fabrisse asked.

Greg shrugged. “It was a fire hazard.”

Fabrisse lowered his voice as he walked in and took off his boots. “Greg, Cuman cursed it. It screamed if you tried to remove it.”

“I used gloves.”

“Oh.”

“Also, some girl just climbed the window earlier and asked to see you,” he said, then resumed reading.

“What? Who? Where?”

“Look out the window.”

Fabrisse barely had time to process Greg’s sentence before the curtain across the shared dormitory window fluttered. A muffled grunt came from outside, followed by the squeak of rubber soles skidding against the sandstone frame.

Then—

thump.

Liene dropped into the room headfirst, somehow landing on her shoulders, legs still tangled in the windowsill, one boot stuck behind the curtain. She wriggled like an upturned beetle, groaning.

Greg turned the page. “She knocked first.”

“I did!” Liene huffed, kicking her way free and rolling upright with the grace of a dropped quill. Her braid had leaves in it. Her jacket was on inside out. “Hi, Fabri. Hi Greg.”

“You learned his name?”

She nodded like a spring-loaded bobblehead.

“Why are you here? You don’t study in this department . . . And how did nobody see you . . .”

“I found your freckles!”

There was a beat of silence.

“I was feeding the duck-things in the lower pond,” Liene continued, as if this were a coherent segue, “and I swear I saw one of them swim away with a shadow that looked exactly like the constellation on your left cheek. You know, the one that shows up when you’re stressed? So I followed it. But I lost the duck-thing, which means we’re going to find it together.”

[New Quest Available: “Trace the Freckle-Star”]
Type: Location Unlock — Sidequest Trigger
Triggered By: Witness Account: Liene Lugano
Associated Pathway: Southern Channel Grounds → Fifth Cathedral of the Twelvefold Flame

Objective:
Aetheric residue from an emotional overload has been sympathetically absorbed by a class-III migratory creature (duck-thing).
Locate the affected duck-thing in the lower channel ponds.
Retrieve the stone it took.

Reward:
Passive Skill — Stonebound Synapse (Rank I)

Description: Your connection with emotionally resonant stones deepens.

• Slightly reduces invocation time for all [Earth (Stone)] spells.
  
  

• Increases control precision when manipulating multiple stones.
  
  

• Enables “snap recall” of specific pebbles you’ve emotionally imprinted.

• Slightly decreases the difficulty of ranking up [Earth (Stone)] spells.

System Note: The duck did not eat your feelings. But it might be nesting on them.

Fabrisse stared at the glowing prompt, then looked back at Liene. “You were actually being serious?” And the spell is incredibly useful too? What in the Will of the Flamus?

Liene grinned, triumphantly holding up what looked like an oily duck feather and a piece of quartz. “So? You’re in?”

“But I have morning classes . . .” He must admit, though, that no morning class was going to teach him Stonebound Synapse.

Greg said, “Attendance is tracked, you know. I’d advise filing a leave of absence form under ‘psycho-emotional artifact retrieval,’ but I don’t believe that category exists yet.”

Liene leaned in. “You skip class half the time to pick rocks anyway, Fabri.”

“I do not—”

“You once skipped a lecture because a rock ‘looked sad.’”

“That was Gravelkin, and it was sad.”

Greg said, without looking up, “I’ll submit the excuse note.”

Even if Lorvan had specifically told him to not do so, Fabrisse felt like skipping class, especially today. He wasn’t yet ready to deal with the potential staring and questioning of his classmates regarding the incident. 

He sighed, already reaching for the boots he’d just taken off. “Fine.”

Liene grabbed his hand and tugged. “Good. Now hurry, before Lorvan finds out and ruins the fun.”

Chapter 14

It took Lorvan and Fabrisse another three tries to get the correct invocation to access [Skills], which turned out to be a mimicry of the old mnemonic for self-knowledge rites.

As the motion ended with his fingers touching the center of his palm, a tone rang out, softer than before.

Invocation matched with Query Type — [Competency].

[Skills Interface Accessed]

[SYSTEM NOTE: Skill terminology is regionally adjusted. Refer to ‘Notes’ for local equivalents.]

[Only reliably repeatable skills registered. Incomplete or unstable forms excluded.]

Core Competencies:

Competence Level: Low-Basic
Certifiable Casting Rank: I (practical) / III (theoretical)
Emotion-channeling: Unreliable
Aetheric Sensitivity: Inconsistent
Mnemonic Retention: Below Average

Those look horrible already . . .

Below were more sub-sections. He carefully checked each of them and read them out loud to Lorvan.

Skillset:

[Earth-Based Thaumaturgy]

[Fire-Based Thaumaturgy]

[Water-Based Thaumaturgy]

[Air-Based Thaumaturgy]

[Concordance / Meta-Category]

[Earth-Based Thaumaturgy]

Skill: Stonesway (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Earth (Stone)

Tag: [Utility] [Combat] [Flavor]

Description: Animates and levitates a small number of rocks (up to 3 pebbles) for light manipulation or distraction. Pebbles respond better to tactile familiarity.

Skill: Sedimentary Recall (Rank II) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Earth (Sediment) / Concordance (Emotion)

Tag: [Sensing] [Narrative]

Description: By holding a stone that has remained in place for a long time, you can tap into lingering aetheric ‘impressions’ of significant emotional events that occurred nearby.

Skill: Gravelkin (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Earth (Stone)

Tag: [Summon] [Flavor] [Utility]

Description: One particular stone from your collection becomes semi-sentient after repeated handling. It can lightly glow on command.

Skill: Burden of Stones (Rank II) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Earth (Stone)

Tag: [Combat] [Narrative]

Description: Temporarily imbues an object with weight based on emotional burden.

[Fire-Based Thaumaturgy]

Skill: Faultspark Ignition (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Fire (Spark)/Concordance (Emotion [Fluster])

Tag: [Combat] [Disruptive] [Flavor]

Description: Generates unstable ignition via ambient focus error. Has a 70% chance of lighting small dry material; 30% chance of misfiring onto a random flammable nearby. Strength increases with emotional fluster.

Skill: Misguided Flame Anchor (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Fire (Cinder) / Concordance (Improvisation)

Tag: [Combat] [Disruptive] [Narrative]

Description Anchors flame to the nearest organic material not protected by warding. Typically triggers with flawed intent. Often burns unintended targets.

[Air-Based Thaumaturgy]

Skill: Joy-Sprint (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Air (Wind) / Concordance (Emotion [Joy])

Tag: [Utility] [Flavor] [Narrative]

Description: No verbal invocation required. Initiated through spontaneous bodily motion combined with emotional uplift. May manifest through running, leaping, or spinning.

Skill: Stillbrace (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Air (Wind) / Concordance (Emotion)

Tag: [Utility] [Defense] [Support]

Description: Stills the air in a fixed area (up to a circular surface 1 meter across) for up to 2 seconds, forming a suspended pressure plane.

Designed to absorb or redirect low- to moderate-velocity projectiles or gust spells.

Has limited effect against chaotic or fire-aspected air magic.

At lower Ranks, need a glyphplate to form.

[Concordance / Meta-Category]

Stealth-Based Concordance Skills

Skill: Liminal Presence Drift (Rank III) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Stealth) / Air (Whisper)

Tag: [Utility] [Disruptive] [Stealth]

Description: Softens body presence and reduces cognitive footprint in a localized radius. Lowers likelihood of being noticed unless directly observed. Stronger in quiet environments.

Skill: Auditory Dissipation Field (Rank II) - Passive

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Stealth)

Tag: [Passive] [Utility] [Stealth]

Description: Dampens minor sound emissions from the user’s movements, including footsteps, rustling fabric, and clinks from stupid rock collections. Slight emotional sync required to maintain.

Skill: Aetheric Veil: Echofold (Rank II) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Stealth) / Air (Veil)

Tag: [Disruptive] [Utility] [Stealth]

Description: Briefly ‘echoes’ the caster’s presence a few steps behind them—delaying auditory, magical, or scent-based tracking. Especially effective against detection wards or scent-based familiars.

Skill: Shadowed Reposition Protocol (Rank II) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Stealth)

Tag: [Utility] [Stealth] [Combat]

Description: Allows the caster to make a short, low-profile displacement into a zone of lower attention density.

Skill: Veil of Shame (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Stealth) / Concordance (Emotion [Shame])

Tag: [Disruptive] [Stealth] [Narrative]

Description: Momentarily warps attention away from the user. Dampens visual, auditory, and scrying detection by 10–30%. Duration and strength scale with intensity of shame-based memory.

Emotion-Affinity Skills

Skill: Shameflare (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Emotion [Shame])

Tag: [Disruptive] [Combat] [Narrative]

Description: Aetheric burst triggered by embarrassment, disrupts weak magics. Breaks light concentration spells, soft charms, or ambient glamours in a short radius. Most effective in formal settings where mortification is high.

Skill: Sentimental Slot (Rank I) - Passive

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Emotion) / Earth (Strata)

Tag: [Utility] [Narrative]

Description: Stores emotionally charged objects outside spatial bounds.

Skill: Improvised Ritual (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Emotion)

Tag: ???

Description: Combines ritual fragments to create unpredictable effects.

Passive / Pattern Recognition

Skill: Pattern Intuition (Rank I) / Passive

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Veil)

Tag: [Passive] [Sensing] [Utility]

Description: Detects flawed or unstable magical patterns subconsciously.

Skill: Fragmented Affinity Trace (Rank I) - Passive

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Meta)

Tag: [Passive] [Sensing] [Narrative]

Description: Indicates latent alignment with non-classical affinity. Enables early activation of spellforms not yet tied to a fully registered element. Allows the user to unknowingly pre-register complex affinities (like Emotion or Sound) before formal recognition.

Skill: Self-Directed Query Invocation (Rank I) - Active

Sub-Affinity: Concordance (Meta)

Tag: [Sensing] [Utility]

Description: Examine the invisible residue left behind after you cast a spell—your aetheric fingerprint. It helps diagnose minor flaws in your technique by mapping areas where your personal resonance weakened or faltered.

At Rank I, the spell reveals:

Faded resonance zones (areas where your intent or focus dropped)

Surface-level fatigue marks (light strain left by effortful casting)

Minor emotional interference (where unstable feelings nudged your shaping)

Step 1 of 4: Access your Aetheric Self-Registry—Completed. Please await further instructions.

“Why don’t you have a single skill that deals damage?” Lorvan finally asked, in that low, dangerous tone he usually reserved for disciplinary hearings.

You’re my mentor, you should know, Fabrisse thought, but decided to not vocalize it.

“I mean, I could throw the pebbles from Stonesway really hard,” instead, he offered. “That is, if I can achieve a better rank for that skill.”

“And all this slinking around and being slightly quieter than usual actually counts as a skill set now?”

“I didn’t ask for stealth,” Fabrisse said. “It’s just what my resonance tuned to. Emotional echo, intent-manifestation symmetry—basic thaumaturgic theory. Apparently, shame has a strong aetheric imprint.”

“Your primary affinity path is hoarding—and yet your skills are built around not being noticed. That sounds counterintuitive to me.” Lorvan pinched his nose. “But we could make it work.”

Fabrisse replied. “Think about it. If I’m collecting emotionally resonant objects, building magical charges based on history and memory, then stealth helps me increase my carry load without alerting anyone.”

“I think you need to become some kind of intelligence-type mage with this skill set,” Lorvan mused, still scrolling through the menus. “Or a professional carry mule.”

“Aetheric logistics specialist,” Fabrisse corrected, lifting a finger. “There’s probably a prestigious name for it in the archives.”

Then something showed up before him. “Hold on,” he said.

[New Quest Available: “Weight of the Words Left Unsaid”]
Type: Spell Unlock — Foundation Alignment
Target Object: Last Known Stupenstone — Status: Unretrieved
Location: The Sanctum of Emberrest (Crescent Hall) — Fifth Cathedral of the Twelvefold Flame
Objective:

• Return to the Sanctum of Emberrest, where the Trial of the Will of the Flamus Arcane took place.
  

• Locate and recover the Stupenstone lost during the Vothiculum.
  

• Reclaim it and channel resonance through it at the site of its abandonment.
  Optional: Evade detection by current faculty. Bonus reward for stealth-based retrieval.
  
  

Reward:
Spell Unlocked: Stupenstone Fling (Rank I)
Launches a stored Stupenstone at high velocity with aetheric force.

• Damage scales with Rank, emotional weight and historical attunement.
  

• Bonus: Stuns or destabilizes wards if cast using items steeped in failure, shame, or regret.
  

System Tip: What was dropped can still be reclaimed. Especially if it’s a rock.

Fabrisse blinked at the glyph hovering in front of him, then turned to Lorvan with growing urgency. “We need to get back to the Sanctum of Emberrest.”

Lorvan’s brow furrowed. “Students can’t enter the Sanctum without permission, Kastovar.”

“You don’t understand,” Fabrisse interrupted, half-standing from the bench.

“No, you don’t understand,” Lorvan shot back, voice suddenly sharp. “The Headmaster is asking for you to return to the Synod. You’re meant to report to the Department of Aetheric Irregularities by next week. If they catch you sneaking into the Sanctum, they’ll reassign you to Theory. You’ll spend the next five years diagramming invocation drift curves in a basement office without windows.” He was threatening Fabrisse with a good time.

“I will be the first person to weaponize a Stupenstone!” Fabrisse shouted.

There was a long pause.

From the hedgerow, Liene’s voice catapulted over. “Yeah, go magic rock boy! Make history with your weird pebbles!”

There was an even longer pause.

Chapter 13

The stairs creaked under Fabrisse’s feet as he descended. Their cottage was small and sun-softened, and it looked even more cluttered since the lower floor doubled as kitchen, living room, and informal herb-drying station, depending on the week.

His mother stood near the hearth, sleeves rolled up, wand tucked behind her ear like a pencil. A practical woman with flour-dusted hands and calloused fingers, she looked more like a baker than a mage. Only the faint shimmer of condensed water hovering above the sink betrayed her training.

Madlen Arelin-Kastovar—once a Rank II Thaumaturge, now just ‘Madlen’ to most of the village—turned at the sound of his steps. She had short, wind-frizzled hair pinned back in a careless twist, and eyes that had seen too many things to be surprised by anything anymore.

“Did you come down because of the yelling, or because you finally remembered I exist?” she asked as a small arc of water twisted itself into the kettle.

“G-good morning, Mom.” Fabrisse rubbed the back of his head.

“Go greet your guests. They’re in the garden.”

“They?” Fabrisse had rarely had a visitor, let alone two. It didn’t feel like a good sign.

Maybe someone from the Synod has finally decided ‘enough’s enough’ and come to revoke my credentials. Or worse, offer me a desk job.

He pulled on his outer robe, which had somehow migrated to the coat hook overnight, and tried to smooth it down despite its lifelong vendetta against wrinkle-free fabric. As he passed the kitchen, his mother handed him a mug without looking, one of the bulkier ones that said Thaumaturgy Happens flaking off in cracked blue ink.

Fabrisse stepped into the garden, mug in hand, dreading what sort of ‘guest’ warranted Mom’s urgent tone.

He spotted her immediately: a young blond woman standing taller than most girls he knew, with the kind of posture that suggested she’d never been told to shrink herself. She didn’t need to, not with a figure that drew attention more for its confident composure than its curves—though she had those, too, generous in a way that seemed completely at ease with itself. Her boots were far too clean for someone standing ankle-deep in their overgrown herb patch, and the gleam in her eye suggested she knew it, and that it was entirely on purpose.

That was Liene, Lorvan’s little sister. She was only a year older than Fabrisse, which would make her exactly ten years younger than Lorvan, a fact he weaponized frequently, often beginning with ‘When I was your age, I’d already inscribed my first Will-binding on a live Flamus conduit without assistance.’ Liene, by contrast, had a remarkable knack for doing exactly enough to pass every course. She skipped class liberally, turned in homework with the enthusiasm of a damp sock, and coasted on charm and just-adequate scores. Still, she’d managed to rack up enough credits to hopefully graduate next year, when she turned twenty-one—which, to Lorvan’s enduring frustration, technically meant she was on track.

“Hi, Fabriiii~,” Liene sang.

“Oh no.”

He hadn’t seen her for a couple months because she was on a Synod-sanctioned research field trip—possibly an idea by Lorvan to get her to study properly. Fabrisse was unsure if it’d worked.

Back when his friend Tommaso was still around full-time, Fabrisse, Tommaso, and Liene Lugano had been known—affectionately or otherwise—as the Troublemaking Trio. A firestarter, a pie thief, and a pebble enthusiast. Tommaso had the ideas (loud), Liene had the timing (perfect), and Fabrisse, more often than not, just wanted to pick interesting rocks in peace and got roped into whatever ‘harmless chaos’ the other two called character-building. If trouble had a trajectory, he was usually standing at the end of it holding a field manual and an apology scroll.

He had only been able to pick rocks in peace for a couple months after both of them had left for different reasons. He missed them plenty, but he couldn’t deny the silence was comforting in its own way.

Then came the second blow.

“I knew I would find you here,” said Lorvan Lugano, standing near the back fence like some brooding gargoyle cursed to inspect mediocre garden plots for eternity. His arms were crossed, his hair somehow impervious to the humidity, and his expression suggested he was already disappointed. “I came to see how you’ve been handling the . . . incident.”

A grumbling gargoyle and his gremlin sister had come to check up on him. The day was off to a good start already. 

“You didn’t say you were bringing her,” Fabrisse said, pointing his mug vaguely at the girl now crouched near the rosemary, already poking at the runes his mother used to keep the humidity steady.

“She insisted,” Lorvan said, in the same tone one might use for ‘she threatened to disembowel the postal gryphon if I said no.’

“Hi again,” she said as she skipped over to him. “You’ve gotten shorter.” She was only half a head taller than him, but he wasn’t short himself.

“I have not.”

“Then I’ve gotten taller.”

“You—”

“Where are your freckles? Did they sleep in until noon?” She pinched his cheek before he could dodge.

Fabrisse swatted her hand away. “They’ve been fading.” 

“Hmph.” She tilted her head, studying his face like she was trying to redraw it from memory. “That’s unfair. They used to be cute.”

“Used to be?”

“They made you look like a crumblecake that blended in a sea of merryberry pie.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I mean, I miss them. Got it? Got it? Like . . . I ‘miss’ them?” She snorted at her own joke, before that snort turned into a full-fledged laugh. She was close now, far too close for someone who claimed to miss freckles and not the person beneath them.

That stung him a bit. He liked the freckles too, but they weren’t Stupenstones. He couldn’t add more freckles to his cheeks just by picking them up at the riverside.

“Liene.” Lorvan cleared his throat. “This isn’t a social visit. Give Mr. Kastovar some space. He doesn’t need a second concussion in two days.”

She made a pouty face. “You’re so dramatic. His skull’s probably gotten thicker.”

Lorvan ignored that. “Why don’t you help Mrs. Areline-Kastovar with the wards? I noticed the eastern hedge sigils are mismatched. You’re always saying my runework is outdated. Prove it.”

Her eyes lit up at the challenge. “You just want me out of earshot.”

“Correct.”

With a twirl of her braid, she turned on her heel and headed toward the hedge. “Fine. But if I fix three or more, you’re buying me cherry spirals for a week.”

“Just go,” Lorvan said, already turning toward Fabrisse with a look that could peel paint.

As soon as her footsteps faded into the foliage, Lorvan dropped his arms and stepped closer.

“Well?” he said. “How does your head feel?”

“Normal. I mean, I think so.”

“Good. The Synod wants you back. And once you’re back, you have to remain within Synod grounds.”

“Well, I’m glad I got home in time, then.” Ah. So he had been right.  They hadn’t meant to let him leave—he’d just done it before anyone could issue a proper directive.

“You could’ve been in great trouble.”

“Does that mean I’m not in great trouble?” Fabrisse asked.

Lorvan sighed, and proceeded to not answer that question. “Now . . . are you going to tell me what actually happened, or do I need to recite the full list of possible disciplinary actions first?”

“But I haven’t done anything wrong. The Eidralith flew at me; I didn’t fly at it!” Fabrisse was already folding his arms like a wronged bureaucrat.

Lorvan gave him a long, searching look. “Let’s sit,” he said.

They made their way to the old bench beneath the pearbark tree, the one with three legs and a fourth made of stacked bricks that no one ever bothered to fix.

After they sat down, Lorvan let the silence stretch for a few beats. “Have you seen or heard anything since it happened?”

Fabrisse hesitated. The glyph flickered at the edge of his vision, like a stubborn eyelash on the wrong layer of reality.

He didn’t answer right away.

The thing was, Lorvan had been nothing but kind to him. Except, of course, when he wasn’t. But even his unkindness had a sort of steady purpose to it, like weathering or pruning. And when everyone else at the Synod had turned weirdly hushed or suspicious, Lorvan had still made the effort to visit. That had to count for something.

“I . . . see things,” Fabrisse admitted at last. “Floating texts. They never leave my field of vision. It’s like a magical apparition that thinks I’m in a training simulation, if that makes sense.”

Lorvan nodded. “Go on.”

“It knows my name, calls me a ‘Calibrator’, and keeps using capital letters where it shouldn’t. There’s a sheet with numbers too, on what it calls a ‘Profile’. I apparently have two in Aetheric Resonance and an inherited residual rock affinity.”

Lorvan stayed silent for a moment before saying, “That rules out simple head trauma.”

Fabrisse glanced at him sidelong. “You believe me?”

“Unfortunately,” Lorvan muttered. “I heard that Thaumarch Iriadel saw great progress after being chosen by the Eidralith, but he never told anyone how it blessed him. It could very well be that it gave him something only he could see.” He paused. Then his voice dropped. “Don’t tell anyone else about this.”

“Even Liene?”

“Especially Liene.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t know what it is yet,” Lorvan said. “And until you do, everyone else will want a piece of it. The professors will treat you like a case study. The Synod will try to recruit you or dissect you. Even your friends won’t look at you the same.”

“I don’t exactly have a long list of friends,” Fabrisse muttered. He had about three in the Synod: his roommate Greg, Liene, and his friend from the same commune, Tommaso, who had already graduated and moved on with his life.

“All the more reason to keep what few you have,” Lorvan said, sharper than before. “Power you can’t explain is the most dangerous kind. We need to find out how you can use it first.”

“Then can I tell you?”

“You’ve already decided to. Now, what do you mean ‘numbers on a sheet’?”

Chapter 12

Fabrisse’s room resembled a secondhand bookshop crossbred with a nostalgic attic. It overflowed with annotated journals, old field guides, rejected thesis scrolls, and sentimental clutter no sane person would inventory, and the only reason why it looked remotely neat was because Dubbie insisted on tidying it up, even after Fabrisse had specifically told her not to.

He liked the kind of chaos he’d created. There was a logic to the mess, a cartography of clutter only he could read. The seventh shelf creaked under the weight of old geology pamphlets and snack tins he refused to throw away for ‘structural reasons.’ His desk was a mosaic of quills, ink blotches, and half-scribbled diagrams, with a single Stupenstone perched on top like a paperweight that had earned tenure.

And right in the center of it all, glowing above a pile of folded robes and enchanted paper receipts, floated the glyph:

[Primary Spellweaving Ability: Celestial Hoarding]

Aetheric output and spell amplification scale directly with the quantity of stored magical impressions, meaningful items, or personally-attuned objects within your Aetherhold.

Emotional and historical resonance increase potency.

System Tip: Clutter is power.

Warning: Inventory overflow may cause ambient anomalies.

What is this paradoxical kind of magic? Power through clutter? Strength through junk?

He had stared at it ever since he’d woken up. It seemed like an odd ability to have, but it perfectly suited him as a person.

All those years getting scolded for being disorganized, for hoarding sentimental junk, for never throwing out anything unless it physically tried to bite him (like that one spoon)—this was what it had been building to?

“This doesn’t answer what an Aetherhold is, though.” He picked up a mug, the chipped one with a faded ‘World’s Okayest Apprentice’ painted on it. A gag gift from Dubbie. Their home had no less than twenty mug, and she was solely responsible for at least eighteen of them.

He squinted at the floating glyph. “Alright, how do I get more info out of you . . .”

Then, on a hunch, he focused and mentally commanded the words, “Open menu.” At least, that was what he remembered the glyph called itself.

The glyph split into sub-sections, arranged in the air like tabs on an overambitious syllabus.

[Profile]

[Inventory]

[Quests]

[Skills] → Warning: Skill recognition protocol out of sync with local definitions.

[Spiritual Alignment (UNSTABLE)]

[Diagnostic: Residual Rock Affinity – Medium High]

He hovered his finger over Diagnostic. Of all the options, this one seemed most likely to contain magical calibration tracking and related definitions.

He traced a circle in front of his heart, then opened his palm and lifted it as if to catch something invisible.

This was the Self-Directed Query Invocation, Rank I. Designed as a diagnostic posture for internal resonance mapping, it was one of the few forms that required no verbal component. In Thaumaturgic theory, every mage left a sort of ‘aetheric fingerprint’ with every spell they cast, most often in the form of colored sparks (or thaumaturgic mark, but nobody called it that). However, the invisible imprints (or imbues) like residue from emotional resonance and arcane fatigue patterns were important for correcting one’s spellwork. This spell would usually be cast after casting another spell, to trace the patterns and see where one’s resonance fade and where fatigue marks were imprinted—signs of weaknesses in the spell. Fabrisse hadn’t cast a spell before this so the Query wouldn’t show any trace, but he reckoned it could open the Diagnostic glyph.

It did.

[SYSTEM NOTE: Gesture recognized. Would you like to assign muscle memory shortcut?]

[Yes] [No]

He selected [Yes], but a question lingered in his mind. Why can I mentally select anything as long as I’m inside a sub-menu, but not before then?

[SYSTEM NOTE: Mental interface commands are imprecise, so they are permitted only for passive, conceptual navigation.

Active system-layer interactions—such as opening inventory, invoking diagnostics, or initiating spell-focused resonance—require somatic validation. Initial access of the system-layer function must interact with the intended aetheric fields.]

He was satisfied with that answer.

Invocation matched with Query Type — [Introspective Diagnostic]
Establishing Parameters . . .
Calibrating Concordant Resonance . . .

[Diagnostic]

— Aetheric Core: Active

— Resonant Element 1: Water (Trace Affinity — Unintegrated)

— Resonant Element 2: Earth (Moderate Stability — Partial Integration)

— Resonant Element 3: Air (Minimal Affinity — Fragmented Link)

— Resonant Element 4: Fire (Low-Medium Stability — Inconsistent Channel)

— Concordance Element: Internal Hoarding Alignment (UNIQUE – Unstandardized)

— Trait Detected: Hoarder’s Mental Structure (Persistent — Cognitive Layer Integration)

Note: Anomalous emotional cross-link detected between Earth and Concordance channels.

Aetherhold — Rank I

[Definition]

[Current Physical Manifestation: Apprentice Robe]

[Storage Limitations: 10 active item imprints]

[Side Effect]

He opened [Definition].

Aetherhold is a sub-dimensional mnemonic vault tethered to the user’s Concordant field, capable of storing the essence of objects based on emotional weight, personal attunement, or sensory imprint. At lower ranks, the object must be physically carried or worn—typically within proximity to the user’s Concordance focus (e.g., robes, satchels, or body-bound gear)—to be registered. Unlike a spatial inventory, the Aetherhold does not store the object itself, but creates a magically indexed impression of it, which can be drawn upon for resonance-based casting. Higher ranks may enable remote attunement or imprint-from-memory.

So Aetherhold is like a memory-echo you can recognize, but at lower levels, it’s directly linked to my Inventory. This probably means that if I carry rocks in my robe, I have a stronger resonance with Earth-type magic.

Another note popped up.

[NOTE: To complete Phase I of the guided tutorial, please visit each sub-menu at least once.]

Okay. I’ve already accessed Profile, Inventory, Diagnostics, Spiritual Alignment. Quests should be easy enough.

Fabrisse muttered, “Trace the echo, show the weight,” tapping his temple and sweeping two fingers. With was Resonant Echo, a spell which reveals recently moved or emotionally charged objects within a short radius.

He’d barely put any intent behind it, more out of habit than need. The pulse that rippled out from his fingers was so faint it probably wouldn’t have startled a dust mote.

Still, a few glimmers sparked in the room.

His robe lit up first. Of course it did. He’d been wearing the same one since apprenticeship, and it had been through enough magical backfires and emotional breakdowns to qualify as a familiar.

A tiny glint shone from under his bed—his first field notebook, dog-eared, water-damaged, and filled with speculative diagrams about Aether currents that turned out to be wrong. Finally, his grandmother’s compass, long since broken, its needle forever spinning.

My magic scales with emotional and historical resonance. Maybe I should keep the notebook with me. And the compass. Though I don’t know what type of magic a broken compass would amplify . . . Maybe I can become a magical investigator or an arcane archivist with this set of items.

The Quest sub-menu opened.

[Active Quests: None]

[Quest History: 1]

[Tip: Quests may be passively triggered through narrative resonance, significant choices, or environmental catalysts.]

Fabrisse lingered on the menu, his eyes drifting to the final unopened section: [Skills]. He’d already failed at opening this earlier.

Should I even be opening it? He asked himself. Maybe it’ll just be another disappointment. What if I’ve studied for nearly 10 years and I only have less than 10 registered skills?

A voice echoed up from below, jolting him.

“Fabri! You have a guest!”

It was his mother, muffled through the floorboards but still managing to inject it with that tone she reserved for when someone had shown up at a very inconvenient time. Fabrisse realized he hadn’t even greeted his mother yet. What a good son I am, he told himself.

Chapter 11

He tapped his fingers against the side of his knee, glancing again at the fire, then to the glyph logs he’d recorded from his earlier invocations. All four had one thing in common. They could manifest and interact. Maybe there was a linking element that allowed for this manifestation.

If the others existed out there, and were drawn in, then this last one could be something that he had to give up in exchange.

What’s the point of resonance if not to align something inside with something outside?

He opened his satchel and pulled out a fresh strip of rune-inked paper, one of the experimental diagnostic scrolls used for spellcasting feedback loops. He then pressed the edge of his palm to it and cast a basic trace: a null-imbue, designed to log magic.

The scroll glowed faintly. He spoke again, this time to himself.

“Okay. Aetheric reaction comes from a cycle: intent, conduit, invocation, manifestation.”

The scroll didn’t register intent. Of course it didn’t. That wasn’t a measurable input.

He grabbed the scroll and wrote in the margin: New hypothesis: fifth element = conceptual root enabling intent-manifest conversion. Not emotion. Emotion is proof-of-contact, not mechanism.

He repeated the Veil of Shame again, and watched it fade after sixty seconds. 

Just like before.

Except this time, he didn’t look away.

He kept his eyes open as the memory bloomed behind his eyelids—kept his mind anchored in the moment of recollection. The wash of humiliation. The words Severa had said.

He saw the stone in her fingers and the shimmer of her robes. But more than that, he didn’t just remember his own thoughts at the time, but felt them. He could feel himself thinking, there and then, from that past self’s perspective.

Wait.

Fabrisse narrowed his gaze.

That shouldn’t happen. Not like this.

He’d recalled this memory a hundred times before. But now—it wasn’t just echo or playback. It had presence, like a room he could walk through. 

He focused on the moment Severa had turned and walked away, stone in hand, her sparks trailing behind.

And instead of just remembering how it had hurt, he felt his younger self think: “That stone’s not yours.”

Fabrisse’s eyes widened. His lips parted.

He had never said that aloud. Not then. But he remembered thinking it—weakly, angrily, silently.

And now, the memory echoed back with shape, like he was standing in the same space as his past self. 

“This isn’t just a memory,” he whispered. “It’s . . . a frame of mind.”

So this is what Lorvan meant by interacting with the scenarios in your head.

[Resonance Achieved: ??? Element — Alignment Confirmed]

— Conceptual Anchor Detected

— Source Identified: Internal Concord

— Element Registered: Concordance (Unlabeled Type)

— Rank III Aetheric Bridge Formed

System Note: No standardized Spellform exists for this element.

Awaiting User Expression.

Fabrisse stared at the message hovering above the firepit.

Element Registered: Concordance (Unlabeled Type)
Rank III Aetheric Bridge Formed
System Note: No standardized Spellform exists for this element. Awaiting User Expression.

“Concordance,” he echoed aloud, tasting the word. And Rank III at that? He’d never achieved Rank III at anything in his life, and this was supposed to be the essence of magic itself. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as magic as he’d thought?

He hadn’t even finished rereading the phrase when his mind stuttered. Had any discipline he knew ever used that term? Not Harmony. Not Unity. Certainly not any of the Twelvefold’s elemental branches.

He racked his brain for something—anything—that might link to it. No rituals. No theoretical essays. Not even in the fringe papers buried in the Thaumic Repositories. The word felt new and familiar at the same time, like a door he hadn’t known was always unlocked.

Then, another glyph overrode the existing one.

[System Update]

Final Element Achieved. Quest Completion Menu Available.

Computing Optimal Path . . .

Estimated Time to Process: 2 minutes

“Wait—what do you mean, Computing?”

He hadn’t even done anything with this element yet. He didn’t know what it meant. How could the glyph already be calculating a future he didn’t understand?

However, this wasn’t time to worry. It was time for celebration.

He looked at the flame. Then at his hands. Then back to the hovering glyph.

“Oh my stones,” he whispered. “I’m going to be somebody.”

A dozen visions burst through his head at once.

Maybe he’d be the next Stormbringer. Like Master Stormbringer Edren Ythis, who once summoned an entire hurricane through a keyhole. Maybe his Concordance would let him link to every element at once! Imagine that—Quadraligned Fabrisse Kestovar, Scion of the Unspoken Flame, Binder of Realms, Slayer of Paperwork!

He bolted upright and turned to Dubbie, still snoring against the tree. “Dubbs!” he shouted, shaking her by the shoulder. “Wake up! I’m about to get my spell focus. My optimal path!”

“Whuzzat,” she mumbled. “Did the roots move again?”

“No. Better. Look—look, look, it’s calculating! This is it. The glyph’s choosing what I’m best at! What my resonance is meant to become!”

He held his breath as he peered at the glyph menu.

The glyph chirped.

[Optimal Path Identified.]
You have achieved internal Concordance. Based on your performance and element affinity, your Primary Spellweaving Ability has been determined.

Another line appeared, gilded and radiant:

Celestial Hoarding

“So what are you?” Dubbie rubbed her eyes as she snuggled closer to Fabrisse.

Fabrisse swallowed. “I’m a Celestial Hoarder.”

Chapter 10

Some minutes later, Fabrisse was crouched near the base of a leafless tree, both hands shielding a shallow indentation he’d cleared in the dirt. A few brittle twigs and shaved bark curls lay cradled inside like a nest made of frustration and secondhand kindling. Dubbie had slumped sideways against the tree trunk nearby, arms crossed, head tilted just enough to keep one eye on him out of sheer obligation. Her other eye was already half-lidded in sleep.

[Time Remaining: 36 minutes]

Unlike water or air, fire couldn’t normally be gathered. That’s what they drilled into the newcomers at the Synod. Flames must be called. 

Every apprentice had to pass the Trial of Flame. Lighting the candle without a match was proof that you weren’t deadweight.

Fabrisse had passed with sufficient marks. Lorvan, out of grim responsibility or pity, had spent months making sure this was the one thing he wouldn’t fail at. He knew the precise intake of breath before ignition. He knew to focus through a spark’s rejection. He knew to hide failure when the Archmagi called for random spell recalls during inspections.

And still, it took him three tries on a good day.

He whispered the syllables again, this time slower, pressing his palm a few inches above the kindling.

Dubbie started yammering incoherently to herself in her sleep.

Just do exactly as I’m trained and I’ll get this done easily.

He exhaled and reached into his satchel for his apprentice’s standard-issue ignition candle.

His hand hit an empty compartment.

Fabrisse paused.

He checked again.

Then checked the wrong pocket, just in case.

Then the right pocket, just in case the first one became the wrong pocket.

He’d forgotten the candle, and he was not nearly as well-trained on ignition with leaves.

No! I’m close to finishing this quest!

He turned to his little sister. “Dubbie. Dubbie, do you have any candles? Tinder? Literally anything flammable? Paper?”

No response.

She was slumped more fully now, cheek mashed against her arm, cloak half-slipped off her shoulder. One leg twitched occasionally like she was fighting something in a dream.

Fabrisse tried again, louder this time. “Dubbs. Do you have wax, or sticks, or ancient parchment?”

Dubbie snorted softly in her sleep and murmured something that sounded like “don’t let the potatoes unionize.”

Fabrisse dropped his forehead into his hands. “Oh good. She's dreaming about agriculture again.”

He turned back to the pathetic pile of bark shavings, considered lighting it with the sheer friction of his panic, and sighed. “Okay. Improvised ignition. One trial by fire, coming up.”

He adjusted his angle and whispered a different set of syllables, something standard for lighting damp leaves and stubborn twigs. Then came a twitch of his fingers accompanied the breath pattern Lorvan had drilled into him.

A soft fshhhp answered him.

Success?

Fabrisse hadn’t expected it to be that easy. He had accepted the fact that he would get no reaction on his first try.

He could smell the faint bite of scorched fabric, maybe even a wisp of smoke, but he couldn’t see any fire. The leaves were still damp, and the twigs were still stubborn.

Fabrisse narrowed his eyes and leaned in, one palm hovering. Heat? No heat.

Then came the scorching scent again, stronger this time, and entirely the wrong direction.

He turned just in time to see a slow orange glow creeping up the edge of his sister’s robe.

“Ah—!”

He lunged, grabbed the edge of the smoldering fabric, and yanked. She didn’t even stir as he frantically slapped it out with one hand and ripped the hem off with the other.

The flame sputtered in his palm for a half second before leaping to the bark pile, settling there as if that had been the plan all along.

He stared. Then sighed. “Synod forgive me, I’ve lit my sister on fire.”

Dubbie snored.

Fabrisse gently patted her leg. “You’re fine. You’re fine. You didn’t need that part of your outfit anyway.”

The fire was burning now. He could feel the resonance forming. The spell circle beneath his kindling cooed as the fire anchored itself.

[Aetheric Impression Registered.]

[Resonance Achieved: Rank II Spell – Invocation of Accidental Combustion – Fire-Type]

Fabrisse let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The fire was alive. The spell was valid. That made four.

[Elements Registered: 4/5]
— Water: Held
— Earth: Held
— Air: Held
— Fire: Held
— ???: Unknown

[Begin Resonance Period: Awaiting Final Aetheric Impression]

[Time Remaining: 30 minutes]

“One more,” he muttered, tapping the glyph menu. “Just one. And it has to be the weird one.”

He hadn’t even tried to hold whatever element it was yet, and the glyph had already asked him to start resonating. It would mean that he’d had this element in him all along.

Maybe the last element isn’t out there. It’s what’s connecting everything.

It had to be Emotion.

Emotion is the foundation of all Thaumaturgic spellcraft. Every invocation was shaped by it. The entire philosophy of thaumism revolved around it. Lorvan used to call it “the spell behind the spell”—the hidden spark that let magic recognize its wielder.

So be it.

He tried channeling the emotion he knew best: embarrassment.

He drew his knees up, watching the fire crackle and spit in the pit he’d made. The flicker of flame should have been comforting. It just reminded him of a dozen things he didn’t want to be thinking about.

He let the memory come anyway.

It was during his second year at the Synod, just after one of the archmagi had all but declared him ‘elementally unspecialized.’ They’d just finished a field assessment—group practicals involving summoned mud traps and evasive flame glyphs. Fabrisse had failed two in a row.

He remembered crouching at the edge of the practice field afterward, pretending to study sediment layers near the runoff channel. In reality, he was trying to look busy enough that no one would come talk to him. Mostly, he didn’t want anyone to see how tightly he was gripping the hem of his robe to keep from punching the dirt.

Severa had walked past. Tall, gilded uniform robes, the smug tilt of someone who always passed with top marks. Her new elemental affinity was lightning, the fifth one she’d collected after two years, and her tongue was about as subtle.

She stopped when she saw him sorting through a few loose rocks.

“Oh,” she said in a voice so sweet it could trap bees. “Stone suits you.”

He looked up. “Pardon?”

She crouched beside him, picked up one of the pebbles he'd gathered—a green-veined one he’d pocketed earlier—and tilted her head. “Stonecraft is interesting, don’t you think? I saw you a bit down back there, so maybe I can offer you some advice.” 

For a moment, he thought she meant it. Maybe she’d noticed how hard he was trying. Maybe she was actually going to share something helpful. “I’d appreciate that,” he said.

Severa smiled.

“If you’re going to be mediocre at everything else,” she said, “you should at least have a hobby to distract from it. And these little rocks? Adorable. It might give you an excuse when your spells fail again. Maybe if you collect enough of these, no one will notice you’re not good at anything else.” Then she stood and walked away from him. “Not everyone’s meant for power, don’t you agree? Some are just texture.”

Then she walked off, robes trailing behind her like a comet tail, sparks flickering at her heels.

She took that rock with her too. It was a rare one.

Fabrisse didn’t move for a long moment. Then he picked up a Stupenstone and tucked it into his satchel. Not because she was right. But because he needed something to hold.

He was now more mature and more content with the fact he wasn’t suited for the bigger things in life, but sometimes the memory would still resurface, and it would leave him wincing every time.

Fabrisse drew in a breath and whispered an invocation.

There was a single invocation tied to embarrassment, and it was creatively named the Invocation of Embarrassment. It was not officially taught, but it was written down.

He spoke the syllables, let the heat creep up his neck, and focused on the memory. The world warped around him in a tiny radius, and he felt his presence dull, like a candle behind tinted glass. A faint but vibrant amber spark flickered at his fingertips.

The glyph responded.

[Invocation Registered: Embarrassment — Rank I]

— Active Spellform: Veil of Shame

— Effect: User becomes 10% less detectable to observers for 60 seconds.

— Interference with scrying, tracking glyphs, and direct visual focus.

— Duration scales with intensity of memory.

Spellform registered. No elemental anchor detected.

All this time I thought this spell didn’t do anything, and turns out it does? 

It helped him evade attention. Maybe that was why he was good at stealth.

Does it mean I’ve activated the resonance?

[Note: Emotional spellforms are not elements.]

Spellforms are the shaped expressions of elemental resonance.  

They are not themselves sources.

Please proceed with a valid aetheric anchor.

“Guess not,” he murmured. He should’ve figured that much. Even beneath the Spiritual Alignment glyph, Emotion was shown in the sub-section, not the main one.

[Time Remaining: 23 minutes]

He rubbed the side of his thumb across his lower lip, thinking.

“Right. Spellforms aren’t the root. They’re just . . . the bloom. Not the seed.”

The Veil of Shame had felt like a spell. It had altered perception, even his own. But if the system didn’t register it as an element, then emotion, however foundational it was to thaumaturgic behavior, wasn’t the final piece.

It was a catalyst.

Chapter 9

“Invocation for Gentle Currents, Mark II,” Fabrisse announced with all the pomp of a court herald and none of the authority.

“You didn’t bring any scrolls.” Dubbie looked up at him from her perch on a slanted boulder, her cloak bundled tightly around her knees. They had moved to the windward side of Reflection Knoll, where the hill thinned into a patchy ridgeline, offering a clearer view of the valley below—and, more importantly to Fabrisse, slightly better airflow. A proper breeze was essential for an air invocation, especially for those with limited innate resonance.

“That’s correct.”

“So you’re just going to guess a Mark II pattern?”

“I will reconstruct it from my attentive studies.”

Dubbie narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t know what a Mark II pattern is supposed to look like, but that sounds like a very bad idea.”

Fabrisse rolled his shoulders. “It’s only bad if I mess up the phrasing, the gesture rhythm, the resonance timing, or the symbolic intention. Which I won’t.”

Dubbie watched him sketch a rough glyph shape into the air with his hands, then mutter under his breath and pause.

“Well?” Dubbie asked.

“I’m assembling a resonance trap,” he said as he crouched to scrape a shallow divot into the dirt. “A physical invocation vessel for symbolic anchoring.”

He began stuffing the small dip with dry grass, a few stray leaf bits, and, for flair, the singular flower he’d picked earlier. It looked less like a magical focus and more like something a squirrel might reject for being too unstable.

He sat back, gestured grandly, and declared, “There. A ritual bowl for a god of drafts.”

The breeze promptly blew the whole thing away.

Fabrisse froze.

The System chimed in:

[Trace Element Detected: Air]
— Air: Registered (3/5 elements held)
— Begin resonance period: Awaiting Aetheric Impression.
[Warning: ‘Air’ has already been held in aetheric connection. Attempt to ‘contain’ Air may cause self-concept dissonance.]

He stared blankly. Then read the warning aloud.

Dubbie blinked. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. But it sounds metaphysically threatening.”

“Self-concept dissonance? From trying to hold a breeze? That’s absurd. I didn’t try to stuff the wind in a bottle, I just offered it a basket.”

[Clarification: Air prefers freedom. You are not the container. You are the current.]

He didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he reached into his satchel and pulled out a spare flask—glass, tightly stoppered, usually reserved for rare brews or weird slimes.

Dubbie narrowed her eyes. “What are you doing?”

“I just want to see.” He uncorked his own flask with a pop, then stopped, frowning. “Right. Can’t waste the water. That’s still part of the quest.” He turned to Dubbie. “Can I borrow your flask?”

“For what? You already drank my tea.”

“It’s for magic,” he said.

Dubbie sighed, fished her backup flask from her cloak, and tossed it to him.

Fabrisse caught it, uncorked it, and dramatically held the empty container into the breeze like a child catching fireflies. He even waved it a little for good measure, then slapped the stopper back on with quiet satisfaction.

No self-concept dissonance happened. At least nothing he could tell.

But it wasn’t like he had achieved resonance either.

He set the flask down beside him, stood, dusted his hands, and cleared his throat.

“Attempt number two.” He stepped back to the spot where his flower trap had failed and raised his arms like a conductor. “Invocation for Gentle Currents, Mark II—again. This time with feeling.”

The wind rustled politely.

He tried the same gesture rhythm, this time with more fluid motion. He inhaled on the third sweep, stepped clockwise, whispered a different mnemonic about sky-silken threads and floating breath, and even added a ripple-tone hum he’d once heard Headmaster Draeth use during a lecture.

Still nothing.

Then the glyph lit again.

[Repeat Notice: Attempt to ‘contain’ Air may cause self-concept dissonance.]

[Reminder: You are not the container. You are the current.]

Fabrisse made a soft noise halfway between a groan and a whimper, and sat down hard beside the empty divot again, huffing dramatically. “The glyph told me I shouldn’t be containing the air, whatever that means.”

Dubbie shook her head. “It doesn’t dislike you. It just doesn’t want to be held. You’re doing too much.”

“I’ve seen Headmaster Draeth do it. He just barked a phrase, jabbed his fingers, and the whole room exhaled. It tossed everything around like leaves. That’s how air magic’s supposed to look.”

Dubbie stayed quiet.

He turned his head slightly, chin on his knee. “Maybe that’s the problem. Air responds to dominance. That’s what they always say: speak with conviction, and the wind will obey. But I’m not that. I don’t have that much magic in me. I don’t even want to shout orders at a breeze.”

Dubbie said, more quietly now. “If you don’t have enough resonance to forcefully control it, why don’t you move with its groove?” 

Fabrisse lifted his head.

Move with its groove.

It sounded ridiculous. But also . . . true.

He stood again. The wind pressed faintly against his cheek. Then drifted off. Then it came back again.

He stepped forward and spread his arms.

Then, without a word, he broke into a sprint.

“Fabri—?” Dubbie sat up, startled, as he tore down the ridgeline, cloak flying like a sail behind him.

His feet pounded the hill.

It rushed past him, with him, curling over his shoulders like a delighted whisper. For the first time that night, it wasn’t something to chase or capture. It was something that had always been there, just waiting for him to run.

A shimmer of sky-blue and pale citrine light unfurled from his arms like ribbons caught on a breeze. They whorled and coiled behind him in effortless spirals.

Fabrisse laughed.

Something lifted in his chest. Something lifted his body, literally.

Then:

[Aetheric Impression Registered.]
[Resonance Achieved: Rank II Spell – Motion-Type]
[Emotional Catalyst: Unrestrained Joy]
[System Note: Congratulations. You did not become the wind. But you remembered what it’s like to move.]

He stumbled to a breathless halt near the bottom of the hill, heart hammering, skin tingling with leftover spark. The stars above tilted slightly as he grinned into the breeze, a trailing curl of light still spinning off one wrist like it hadn’t noticed he’d stopped.

Rank II. It wasn’t usual for him to cast a Rank II spontaneously, and they definitely didn’t feel this smooth. That was one of the better spells he’d been able to produce.

Fabrisse didn’t think he made the wind do anything unnatural. The air probably decided to move along with him, which was probably what had made him feel lighter back when he was running.

As the wind curled around his shoulders and his grin finally settled into something dazed and breathless, Fabrisse turned—still giddy—and looked back up the hill.

There she was.

Dubbie stood at the top, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open. Her cloak flapped awkwardly in the breeze as she slowly began picking her way down the slope.

“You—” she started, pointing at him like she was trying to accuse him of a crime she hadn’t fully understood. “You looked like . . . like one of those professional sprinters from the old relays. Just—arms out, knees up, magic trailing off your sleeves like . . . like streamers!”

Fabrisse blinked, still catching his breath. “I did?”

“Yeah. A ridiculously sparkly track runner. With wind coming out your armpits or something.”

“So I looked pretty cool. Enough for some girls to swoon.”

“Possible, from the smell of your armpits.”

“You didn’t have to say that.” Fabrisse bent slightly at the waist, hands on his knees. His hair was tousled, cheeks flushed, the faint remnants of sky-blue light still glimmering along the seams of his sleeves like they hadn’t quite let go of him yet.

Dubbie yawned as she approached him. “Do Fire next. Hurry. I’m getting sleepy.”

“Right.” He fumbled for the glyph interface and pulled up the overlay.

[Time remaining: 44 minutes]

Chapter 8

Tufted with scraggly grass and wind-battered shrubs, the hill rose like a bump on the landscape’s forehead. Fabrisse had named it Reflection Knoll years ago, back when he was ten and decided all significant hills needed names. The name never caught on with anyone else, mostly because the townsfolk of Itakonra Hollow didn’t think a hill with three trees and one ancient mailbox deserved the word ‘knoll’ in it.

The shrine light shone below like fireflies bottled in glass. From this distance, the lanterns made the whole valley seem touched by something sacred, or at least municipally funded. Fabrisse picked his way up the slope with his breath misting in the night air and his pockets clinking with every other step. Behind him, Dubbie trudged in silence, her cloak pulled tight around her shoulders.

When they finally reached the crest, he spun in a deformed circle and muttered, “Perfect. Elemental things definitely happen on hills.”

She sighed, took a seat on a smoothish patch of earth, and rubbed at her eyes. “Alright then, great wizard of the knoll. What now?”

“I start gathering,” he said confidently, then immediately picked a wildflower, pinched its stem, and held it up to the sky. “One element done. I have collected the Totem of the Great Wood.”

[Item does not qualify for elemental trace.]

What? He thought.

The System’s polite denial floated in his vision.

“Should’ve been Wood,” he muttered, confused.

Dubbie raised an eyebrow. “It’s a petal. That’s not Wood. It’s flower.”

“It’s vascular plant matter,” Fabrisse held it up so Dubbie could see, despite her seeing completely fine. “That’s the working definition of Wood under the Twelvefold Flame. Subtypes include root, stem, petal, and leaf. Wood’s about growth, not bark.”

He stared at the error message again.

[Item does not qualify for elemental trace.]

“Unless . . .” His brow furrowed. “This isn’t using Twelvefold Flame classifications, is it? Different schema. Great. What even counts as a ‘natural element’ then?”

“Well, you’re the one hallucinating apparitions,” Dubbie said.

Fabrisse ignored her. “It’s not based on applied symbolism, so it’s fundamentalist.” He suddenly remembered the primary elements he shown to him while he was looking at his Spiritual Alignment. “Like pre-Order schema. Fire, Stone, Water, Air . . . and something abstract. Aether? Or is it Spirit?” The fifth element in the apparition had been marked with ‘???’. Fabrisse didn’t understand why the glyph felt a need to hide the fifth element if it had already shown him the first four.

“If it’s stone, you should have one element already. It’s probably Earth.”

“One way to find out,” he took out a Stupenstone and held it in his hand. That was the first requirement as per the glyph quest.

[Trace Element Detected: Earth]

— Earth: Registered (1/5 elements held)

— Begin resonance period: Awaiting Aetheric Impression.

“It did register as Earth,” he said. Dubbie shrugged.

Now he just needed to perform Thaumaturgic Stonecraft, a legitimate ritual channeling method from the Second Ordinance of Mineral Invocation. You align with the mineral lattice, synchronize your breath to the stone’s heat retention curve, and let the bedrock speak.

Too bad Stone Thaumaturgy sucked. He’d be lucky if his Stupenstone got slightly heavier.

He inhaled, centered himself, and whispered a breath into the stone’s grain.

Then stopped.

Wait. Was he supposed to match the heat pattern to the stone, or do the opposite?

He squinted at the rock. He had a chart for this. Somewhere. In his notes. In a drawer. At home.

He tried again anyway, opting for the generalist rhythm used in introductory Stonecraft theory. Halfway through the chant, he realized he was reciting the intro to a completely different invocation—something about mineral preservation wards.

Nothing happened.

Fabrisse took a steadier breath, reset his grip, and tried again, this time whispering just the first line of the proper alignment script and focusing all his effort into syncing with the stone’s utterly unimpressed thermal signature.

Let the bedrock speak.

Then he felt something.

Fabrisse widened his eyes. The stone did feel a bit heavier.

[Aetheric Resonance Registered Successfully: Rank I Spell]

Rank I. The lowest possible recognition of magical output. The participation trophy of spellcasting. But it was progress.

Excited, he stood and hurried over to Dubbie, who was sitting nearby chewing on a twig she’d picked up out of boredom.

“Hold out your hand,” he said.

“Why?”

“I need you to confirm if this got heavier.”

“Compared to what?”

He placed the stone gingerly in her hand. “To this rock a minute earlier.”

She held it for a beat. “. . . You didn’t give it to me before you invoked it. Also, how much time do you have left?”

“Oh! Oh no!”

As if it’d read his mind, the glyph showed him the timer again.

[1 hour, 18 minutes remaining]

He’d spent too much time walking up the nearby hill and experimenting on a rock he’d already had. He needed the other four elements quickly.

Water would be the easiest next. He’d brought a small flask in case there wasn’t a stream nearby, but the valley was kind to fools tonight. A seasonal runoff line whispered behind the shrine path and Fabrisse knelt beside it, uncorked his flask, and dipped it into the stream.

The glyph confirmed it a second later:

[Trace Element Detected: Water]
— Water: Registered (2/5 elements held)
— Begin resonance period: Awaiting Aetheric Impression.

Perfect. He adjusted his posture, cradled the flask between his hands, and began channeling the water-breath. It was an older rhythm, passed down from introductory liturgies on liquid-bound flowwork: Ripple, draw, hold. Breathe in. Let flow. Let go.

He centered his thoughts, smoothed out his mind, and focused on the elemental feel of water,, its reflection, its depth. He imagined still lakes, rushing rivers, even that one time his dorm roof leaked directly onto his notes during finals.

Absolutely nothing happened. The flask remained cool and silent, unmoved and unimpressed.

[Aetheric Resonance Registered Successfully: Rank I Spell]

Huh? It still registered. 

Dubbie peered over. “Did it work?”

“I mean,” he said, holding up the flask, “technically, yes? The glyph called it a success.”

“Did it do anything?”

“No. The water just sat there.”

She nodded. “Well. Maybe it’s polite.”

He was sure he did the breath pattern right, and the script was solid. His emotional state was calm and focused. A Rank I spell shouldn’t require any level of innate resonance. Some random bumpkin could just chant a mnemonic and if it happened to rhyme at the right time, they could make a drop of water drop more slowly.

He had probably messed up the third element again: Intent.

[Suggestion: Review basic resonance timing. Emotional intent may not register if phrased like a question.]

Okay. He had absolutely messed up the third element again.

“Did you communicate your mnemonic at the right moment?” Dubbie asked.

“I don’t know. I’m supposed to resonate with the ripple by chanting ‘ripple’ as I just set the flask down and the water’s the most disturbed, then follow up with an anchor phrase at the right tempo. Maybe I got the timing wrong again, so the water understood the intention but didn’t act.”

Water wasn’t passive like Stone. Stone rewarded presence, but water was responsive. He needed to be able to communicate his intent at the right time, or in Lorvan’s word, ‘find the moment it’s already leaning toward, and you meet it there’.

He didn’t tell it to do anything.

“Why is Thaumaturgy so over-complicated? You should’ve just learned Pre-Order Magic.” Dubbie clicked her tongue.

“There’s a reason Thaumaturges are sought-after all across the realms, you know. Their magical output is great.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. Fabrisse just hadn’t practiced enough to land it.

He glanced at the sky. The clouds drifted slow and uncaring. Somewhere in the distance, a night-cricket whirred.

“Two down,” he muttered.

[Time remaining: 1 hour, 11 minutes]

He shoved the flask into his robe pocket. “Air’s next.”

Chapter 7

He muttered a string of silent curses and tried to open the skill repository, but nothing happened. He focused harder, willing the system to respond. Open ‘Skill’, he thought. Gain access to ‘Skill’. Acknowledge meat vessel. Hello?

Still nothing.

He reached up and poked at the floating letters.

His finger went right through them.

Fabrisse frowned. “Okay. Maybe . . . maybe it needs ritual context.”

He squared his shoulders and began miming the closest thing he could think of: Thaumaturgic glyphcraft. It sort of made sense. The floating rectangles resembled sigil frames, and the system had already used words like ‘calibration’ and ‘orientation.’ He could work with that.

He planted his feet, cleared his throat, and focused on a mnemonic he remembered from an invocation called Seeking the Veiled Way. He whispered the chant:

“By spiral thought and silent flame,
let hidden pattern shows its name . . .”

Then he flourished his hand with a sweeping spiral, splaying his fingers as he sketched imaginary glyphs into the air.

Nothing appeared.

Not even a speck of color? I should put some emotions into it.

He channeled the only emotion he’d been able to produce consistent color from: embarrassment.

The only thing visible was the rustle of his robes and the increasingly erratic rhythm of his feet. He added more motion, thinking perhaps the spellwork needed ‘more gesture.’ It probably looked ceremonial in his head. It looked very not ceremonial from the outside.

A faint blush of mottled pink leaked from the tips of his fingers. Finally, some color.

He was halfway through what may have been a sacred pirouette when Dubbie returned with two steaming mugs.

She stopped in the doorway.

“What,” she said, “are you doing.”

Fabrisse froze, arms held aloft like a marionette. “I was trying to interface with a conceptual menu using a thaumaturgic equivalence ritual—”

“You look like a monkey doing interpretive dance,” she said, stepping around him.

“It’s experimental.”

She set the mugs down and handed him one. “Right. Drink your tea.”

Fabrisse plopped down onto the nearest cushion with a sigh heavy enough to qualify as dramatic exhalation. He cradled the mug but didn’t drink.

“I still haven’t been able to channel another Thaumaturgic spell,” he muttered. “I’m sure I know the theory. I’ve studied it four more times than a normal apprentice.” Granted, it was because he had to retake them three times. “Statistically speaking, I should be a prodigy by now.”

Dubbie didn’t sit right away. She leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching him with that usual calm. With a slight tilt of her head, she replied, “I don’t think you should’ve gone to Thaumaturgic school, Fabri. You seem to have no faith in a discipline that requires faith.”

He opened his mouth to argue, thought better of it, and drank his tea instead.

Dubbie still didn’t move to sit. She just sipped her tea as she looked at him. After a moment, she asked, “What’s the mnemonic you were using?”

“Why?”

“I want to hear it.”

He hesitated, then repeated the chant, a bit sheepishly.
“By spiral thought and silent flame,
Let hidden pattern shows its name . . .”

She nodded. “Let me try that with Basic Seeking invocation.”

“I don’t think—”

“Move the way you remember,” she interrupted.

He stood and performed the sweeping spiral again, fingers dancing through the air with all the flair of someone very aware of being watched.

Dubbie watched quietly, then shook her head. “You’re adding too much fluff. Do they teach you that at school?”

“They teach us to add our own nuance.”

“Mm.” She set her mug down, stepped into the space he’d been standing, and adjusted her posture. Then, without preamble, she whispered the mnemonic under her breath and repeated the movement—not with flair, but with functional simplicity, the sort one might pick up from a Basics of Thaumistic Etiquette booklet in the local library.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then a soft blue flame kindled above her open palm.

It wavered and vanished a breath later.

Dubbie looked down at her hand, then shrugged and stepped back. “No veiled path for me, I guess.”

Fabrisse just stared.

“You—you’ve never even—how did you—?”

“It’s in those pamphlets they hand out during Guinoa Festivals,” she said, already picking her tea back up. “You’d know, if you came to things.”

“You really should’ve gone to that school instead of me,” he muttered.

Dubbie took a long sip.

He sat forward, frowning into his tea like it had betrayed him. I can’t have a non-apprentice actually humiliating me like that. He set the mug down. “Alright. Once more.”

Dubbie raised an eyebrow. “Again?”

“I’m going to try it the way you did.”

He rose, rolled his shoulders, and took a steadying breath. “By spiral thought and silent flame,” he said again, voice calm. Let hidden pattern shows its name!”

It was the simplest form, a slow circle of the forefinger over the heart, followed by a half-step back and a palm-raise. It was the same movement used in Thaumaturgic Initiation 1A, a basic rite taught to toddlers and first-years to poke at non-moving targets from a distance.

They taught it because it trained rhythm, restraint, and intent, the three things most apprentices lacked.

Instead, a soft tone pinged in his ears, and a rectangular glyph-panel snapped open with casual clarity:

Invocation matched with Query Type — [Retrieval].

[Inventory Accessed]
Storage slots: 4 / 10 filled
Contents:
— 1x Medarian River Pebble (Tagged: ‘definitely magical’)
— 1x Backup Teacup (Chipped)

— 1x Rune-Inked Paper

— 1x Rock Satchel (Extension)

[SYSTEM NOTE: Gesture recognized. Would you like to assign muscle memory shortcut?]

[Yes] [No]

Additional Note: Mnemonic phrases are not required to access indexed information.

“It . . . it says I’ve accessed Inventory!” Fabrisse stared at the glyph in awe before turning to Dubbie, who looked decidedly puzzled. 

“What do you mean?” She asked.

He pulled out a river pebble and a teacup from a robe pocket. “Look! I hid a teacup inside my robe just in case and it acknowledged it!” Fabrisse pointed to the space above his head with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for cultists or people who just discovered taxes were optional if you declared yourself legally undead. He then pulled out the rune-inked paper. He didn’t even know he’d left it in his robe. “It said ‘Inventory Accessed.’ That’s a thing!”

She stared at him. Then at the empty space he was pointing to.

“Fabri,” she said with deliberate slowness as if she was explaining the concept of the universe to a three-year-old, “what is an inventory? And why does your robe have so many pockets?”

The Academy-provided robes came with one inner pocket for quills and maybe a talisman, if you were lucky. Fabrisse, however, had . . . modified his. Technically, enchantment students weren’t allowed to alter their uniforms without faculty approval. Technically. But sometime last term, Fabrisse had found a discarded seamstitcher charm in the Salvage Wing’s lost-and-found drawer (wedged between a petrified sandwich and something that hisses when touched). After a few after-curfew experiments and the accidental fusing of his left sleeve to a desk, he’d managed to weave in four extra hidden compartments—each rune-lined and spatially expanded to accommodate his growing collection of smooth rocks, weird shells, expired potion vials, and other Important Scientific Samples™.

“It’s where this glyph stores stuff!” he said. “Apparently, I’ve got slots. I didn’t know I had slots.” Or what it meant, for that matter.

“Uh. . . Okay. What else does this imaginary menu say you’ve got?”

“Oh!” Fabrisse perked. “I was trying to access Skills earlier. I don’t know why I opened Inventory.”

“Maybe it’s because you’ve invoked a ‘seeking’ spell? If you want Skills, I should be invoking access to what you can do.”

“Try something like . . . I dunno. ‘By inner fire and sharpened will, let manifest what lies in skill.’”

He stared. “Did you just rhyme on the spot?”

“I read,” she said modestly, then shrugged. “Try that one. But keep the motion simple. No twirls.”

He stared at his palm.

Did the words even matter?

The glyph earlier had been pretty clear: Mnemonic phrases are not required to access indexed information. He’d read it twice, just to be sure. And yet every invocation he’d ever been taught had come with a fancy couplet and theatrical hand motions, like a choir performance got lost and stumbled into a spellbook.

What if all of it was just . . . flair? Something the early Thaumaturges invented to impress committees? Maybe the ancient spellwrights were just bad at writing manuals and really into poetry.

Maybe he didn’t need words. Maybe all he needed was to mean it.

He brought his fingers together: forefinger to thumb, then palm splayed open over his sternum. This was the grounding posture they’d all been taught on their first day of Thaum Theory: Centering Breath and Resonance Prep. It wasn’t even a real spell, but there was a name for it anyway: Initial Channeling Stance, or, as most first-years called it, ‘The Panic Pose.’ Designed to help apprentices regulate emotional spillover before invoking real magic, it was half meditation, half desperate self-soothing. 

Instead of [Skills], something else opened.

SPIRITUAL ALIGNMENT:

Status: UNSTABLE – Drifting resonance signature
Affinities Detected:

Primary: Earth

• Stone / Foundation → Legacy – Ingrained
  
  

Primary: Fire

• Flame / Will → Partial Affinity – Suppressed
  
  

Primary: Air

• Veil / Wind → Tentative – Inconsistent Trace
  
  

Primary: Water
(No direct secondary identified yet)

Primary: [Unknown / Fifth Element]

• Emotion / Reflective
  
  

  • Subtype: Embarrassment (Active)

Recent Resonance Events:

• Medarian Pebble registered as sympathetic anchor
  
  

• Invocation: “Let hidden pattern show its name” → Valid trace of Veil affinity
  
  

• Emotional trigger: Embarrassment → Consistent color signature
  
  

• Stabilizing factor: Grounding Breath & Resonance Prep
  → Alignment marginally improved
  
  

System Note:

Alignment instability is common in untrained calibrators. Continued use of grounding techniques may assist in crystallizing dominant affinities. You may experience temporary cross-aspect bleed until resonance path is affirmed.

Fabrisse squinted at the affinity list. Four. That’s it. Nine years of study and I’ve only ever bonded with four, and flame was forced upon him because the Order literally focused on physical and emotional flames.

His eyes narrowed at the last line.

Subtype: Embarrassment (Active)

First resonance detection timestamp: Age 13.

Most consistent emotional catalyst.

Color pattern: Blush Pink / Mottled.

Channel Stability: Partially Reliable.

Well, at least I’m decent at making a joke out of myself.

But then, something else showed up.

Would you like to initiate the Affinity Path Discovery Protocol?
[Yes] [No] [Remind Me Later]

Oh. I can discover what I’m actually good at. Surely I’m good at something. No longer will I be a spectacular failure. No more lectures to Lorvan on my behalf. No more of that look from Lorvan. That scornful look. Never again.

Disregarding the darkened sky outside and the possibility that he’d have to skip sleep to initiate whatever this ‘protocol’ was, he picked [Yes].

Another glyph appeared.

QUEST: Writ of Elemental Echo

Classification: Affinity Path Discovery Protocol
Objective Type: Calibration Quest – Tierless
Time Limit: 1 hour, 44 minutes (real-time countdown)
Location: External – Any non-urbanized open environment
Required Status: Awake, Unassisted, Semi-Grounded

Objective:

To discover the resonance path of your core Affinity, gather Echo-Traces of the elemental spectrum. Each Echo must be acquired and held for calibration analysis.

You must:

• Touch and hold all five basic natural elements.
  

• Let them remain within your aetheric field.
  

• Let them resonate long enough to generate a trace.
  

• Keep the traces with you until the end of the quest.
  

• No external tools allowed, except for those already in inventory. All objects must be personally gathered.

He barely read past “gather Echo-Traces” before spinning toward Dubbie, wild-eyed. “The glyph says I have to gather the five elements. I need help.”

[Reminder: This interface is referred to as the System, not “glyph.” Terminology adherence ensures proper—]

Fabrisse swatted the notification away like a gnat. He wasn’t in the headspace to read reminders.

Dubbie didn’t look up from her tea. “Fabri. Do you know what time it is?”

He opened his mouth, but she held up a finger. “It’s late. I’ve got morning shrine duty, and your hallucination can wait until the sun exists again. Go to bed.”

“But—”

“Nope.”

“But it’s a quest!”

“And who gave it to you?”

“This glyph!”

[Reminder: This interface is referred to as the System, not “glyph.” Terminology adherence ensures proper—]

Fabrisse swatted the reminder away again.

“Are you even listening to yourself . . .” Dubbie rubbed her forehead. “Sleep, Fabri. I’ll go with you in the morning.”

He paused, deflated. “Okay. Maybe it can wait—”

[1 hour, 43 minutes remaining]

His voice dropped into a whisper of panic. “The elemental awaits.”

Dubbie cracked one eye open. “What?”

“I need to know what I’m good at!” he cried, scrambling to his feet. “This is how I find out if I’m, like, a fire person or a stone person or something profoundly stupid but secretly powerful. This is my Destiny Quest, Dubbie!”

He threw open the door and bolted into the moonlit night, pockets jangling with pebbles and a single chipped teacup.

Dubbie stared after him, mug still halfway to her lips.

A second passed. Then another.

She swore under her breath, grabbed her cloak from the hook, and marched after him into the cold.

“At least tell me exactly what you mean!” she shouted after his rapidly retreating silhouette.

“FIVE ELEMENTS!” he called back. “I’M GONNA HOLD THEM ALL!”

Chapter 6

Fabrisse was not at the Synod anymore.

He was home.

Home-home. Not dorm-home.

Fabrisse didn’t exactly announce his return when he slipped in through the side gate. He’d been sneaking home since he turned sixteen, enough that the boundary wards had stopped reacting and the neighbor’s cat now expected treats. 

His house wasn’t far from the Twelvefold campus, but it was still far enough that nobody came here unless they meant to. The Kestovar home sat tucked in the outer boroughs, where the commune started forgetting they were commune. Not exactly wealthy, not exactly falling apart, just quietly humble, like it hoped the tax auditors wouldn’t notice it existed. Ironically, magical universities tended to be built well away from cities anyway, partly for reasons of sanctity, but mostly because spell leakage tended to make the locals burst into song or spontaneously molt.

Dormitory-bound students didn’t just leave, not unless they’d been expelled, exorcised, or caught invoking minor elementals in the refectory again. But after getting publicly whacked in the face by a god-box and potentially bound to a sentient calibration system no one else could see, he figured the usual rules were a bit more wobbly than usual. 

Rubidi had nearly ruptured a blood vessel whisper-yelling at Lorvan in the corridor. Severa had refused to make eye contact. And someone (he suspected Cuman) had stuck a note on his dorm door that simply read: ROCK WITCH.

His sister, Dubbie, eighteen and devoutly uninterested in all things magical, was half-curled on the sitting couch with a dog-eared copy of The Vintner’s Affair and a mug of lukewarm steepleaf. She didn’t look up when he entered.

She was a little soft around the edges, with a cottagecore aura. Petite, with perpetually sleepy-looking eyes, she had the kind of face that made grandmothers coo and shopkeepers offer her extra stamps. To be fair, she was always the kind to nap a lot, but weirdly never went to sleep on time.

“You’re home,” she murmured, eyes still on the page.

“Momentarily,” Fabrisse said, toeing off his shoes and collapsing onto the nearest cushion with a sigh. “Where’s mom?”

“She’s on shrine duty.” The Order had enchanted a local shrine, one with a creek that could cure townsfolk of simple diseases. There had to be at least two attendants at all times. Their father worked as a border guard. Naturally, he wasn’t around often.

Her son was just slapped in the face by an divine artifact god-box, and she’s on shrine duty?

That didn’t sit right. His mother wasn’t the sort to stay away when something like this happened.

Maybe the Synod had flagged the artifact as volatile, too sensitive to involve an emotionally compromised party, like the mage-mother of the boy it chose to punch. But then they shouldn’t have allowed him to go home. Knowing the Synod, though, someone may have tried to escalate the case, but it would have to go through at least three layers of bureaucracy. He got home before they reached a directive.

“This late?”

“They need extra hands. The shrine’s being renovated. How was the week?”

“They made us redo the Flame Litany twice because Severa’s a perfectionist and Aldren tried to hover too close to the dais again.” Fabrisse rolled to the creaky edge of his childhood cot, flanked by a chipped glowing lantern and the faint scent of lavender-scented disinfectant. The sigils still hovered in his periphery, and he’d tried hard to pretend they didn’t exist, to limited success.

“Mhm.”

“Then the invocation took forever. Lorvan saw me. Draeth insulted my academic lineage.”

“Mhm.” Dubbie turned a page.

“I collected a new shiny Medarian pebble by the river.”

“Mhm.”

“And then we opened the Eidralith and I became the Chosen One of the Twelvefold Flame,” he added.

“Mhm—wait, what?” She slapped her book shut around her thumb like a startled clam.

Okay. His family definitely didn’t know.

“It was more of an accident, really. I tripped. Possibly resonated. And now there’s a semi-visible arcane apparition giving me tutorial objectives.” He gestured vaguely to the space next to his head, where a soft glyph was slowly blinking [Pending Calibration – 4 Tasks Remaining] in a stiff font he’d never seen before. Every letter looked like bricks from different molds. The white color of the floating glyph sheet was unmistakably the same one as the Eidralith, however, so it was difficult for him to deny that whatever he was seeing was brought by that dumb box.

Dubbie stared at him, then at the empty air, then back at him. “Have you been licking the stones again?”

“I have never licked the stones,” Fabrisse said. “Besides, even if I had—which I haven’t—the apparition says ingestion is ill-advised. Also, it called me a calibrator. I don’t think it’s a job. It hasn’t specified a pay.”

Dubbie stared at him for a second longer before standing abruptly.

“I’m making the tea,” she said with a sigh. “The one that helps with hallucination.”

Fabrisse watched her go, half-offended. “It’s not a hallucination. I can’t hallucinate concepts I didn’t know existed.”

“Mm-hmm,” came her voice from the pantry. The clink of ceramic followed. “You said the same thing about that moss-covered spoon when you were twelve.”

“That spoon bit me,” Fabrisse muttered.

Dubbie didn’t reply, but the water started boiling.

She’d always been like that—calm, slightly acerbic, and annoyingly unshakeable. A homely girl in every way their mother approved of: sensible, non-magical (by choice), with an ear for recipes and a terrifying knack for budgeting. Which was a shame, really, because she had more natural talent for magic than he ever did. When the recruitment missives had come, she was the one they’d wanted. She’d smiled politely, thanked them for the offer, and declined.

Fabrisse had signed his name in her place before anyone could stop him. Anything to get away from their mother, who’d banned him from rock collecting and confiscated his prized Arcanosaur-themed stamp book during what he still referred to as The Incident.

He sagged further into the cushion and stared at the air just above the chipped lantern. “This is why she banned the rocks, isn’t it?”

The glyphs had stopped blinking. In their place was a quiet, clean prompt, sitting like a polite but insistent guest at the edge of his thoughts:

[Calibration Interface – Dormant State Detected]

You are eligible for Guided Orientation.

Would you like to begin the introductory tutorial?

There was something unnervingly cheery about the text, like a helpful waiter offering a tray of knives. 

Fabrisse sighed and nudged the mug aside. “Fine. Show me the part where I explode.”

He mentally reached for the option marked [Yes].

The air shimmered.

A new pane unfolded, ornate as a cathedral window and approximately as helpful:

Welcome, Apprentice Kestovar_28

INITIATING TUTORIAL MODE [PHASE I – Orientation & Spatial Awareness]

Please remain still. Calibrating meat vessel . . .

Fabrisse stopped sinking into his seat. “Pardon?”

Do not be alarmed. The disorientation is temporary.

[Note: Tutorial Mode may not be available again. Proceed with care.]

He was already alarmed.

PHASE I: Orientation & Spatial Awareness

Step 1 of 4: Access your Aetheric Self-Registry.

Hint: Generate a localized mental ping toward your core identity object. Not emotionally, but conceptually. Preferably with metadata.

“What does that even mean?” Fabrisse frowned. He had no idea what the hint was trying to tell him.

He saw ‘core’ and ‘mental’, and he assumed he had to concentrate on something. He tried focusing, mentally groping for . . . well, himself, as if rummaging through a disorganized closet. Something clicked. Not quite a thought nor a memory, but a sensation like tapping on frosted glass.

A translucent panel slid into view just above his right eye, displaying unfamiliar, overly formal text:

CALIBRATOR PROFILE: FABRISSE KESTOVAR_28
Class: Apprentice (Unclassified)
Field Role: Inert-Adept (Dormant)
Tier: Unverified
Epochal Registration: Legacy Validated
Status: Conscious – Mildly Concerned
Vitality (HP): 72 / 80
Focus (FP): 30 / 30

Attributes:

STR (Strength): 5
DEX (Dexterity): 11

FOR (Fortitude): 5

INT (Intuition): 22
ARC (Aetheric Resonance Control): 2
CHM (Charm): [LOCKED]
SYN (Synaptic Clarity): [LOCKED]

System note: Full stat unlock can only be achieved upon the Completion of Tutorial — PHASE I.

What are these numbers and why are they so low?

He stared at the ARC attribute like it had personally insulted his grandmother.

Please note: As a Legacy Calibrator, your stats may differ from modern magical standards.

Unlocked data reflects your baseline potential. Progression will update values as objectives are fulfilled.

He muttered silent curses and tried to dismiss the screen. Instead, another rectangular apparition opened to the side:

[MENU ACCESS GRANTED]

[Profile]

[Inventory]

[Quests]

[Skills] → Warning: Skill recognition protocol out of sync with local definitions.

[Spiritual Alignment (UNSTABLE)]

[Diagnostic: Residual Rock Affinity – Medium High]

Skills? Does it note down the spells I’ve learned throughout the years?

Chapter 5

No one really knew what the Eidralith was. Supposedly, it had been unearthed from a crater older than the Synod. Some called it divine. Others suspected it was just very ancient, as ancient as the meteor that had given magic to all the lands itself.

Fabrisse also didn’t know the answer. But at least today, as the box flew like a meteorite and slammed directly into his face, he learned that the Eidralith could hit like a gods-damned mule cart.

It was less like a divine moment and more like being curb-stomped by an angry wardrobe with vendetta issues. The world cracked, his teeth met air, and something important in his nose rearranged itself.

He fell backwards in a graceless heap. The pain came late.

Because first, before the agony, something blinked to life behind his eyes.

[PRAXIS NODE SYSTEM – INTERFACE BOOTED]

> 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

It was like the hush before a thunderclap, stretched across the marrow of his bones. The world stayed still, but something inside him didn’t.

The wards along the sanctum walls lit up in glyphs he couldn’t read, but somehow understood. Draeth’s voice was still booming about something in the background, but Fabrisse was now receiving:

[System Prompt]

You are not a recognized Arch-Level Operator.  

But you hold a valid Legacy Token.  

Manual override initiated.

ACCESS LEVEL: Provisional  

TITLE: Apprentice – Field Calibrator, Aetheric Epoch 9  

CLASSIFICATION: Inert-Adept / Unawakened

System Suggestion:  

[User does not meet combat or cognitive thresholds. Recommend Guided Mode.]

Would you like to activate Training Overlay?

> [Yes]          [No]          [Report Error]

The apparition faded just enough for him to groan, clutching his nose, which felt like it was shaped wrong now.

He blinked up at the stunned circle of robed silhouettes towering over him, mouth half-open.

“Did—did anyone else see the box fly at my face?” he croaked.

No one answered.

Except the apparition.

[System Notice – Audio Feedback Engaged]

Query received:

“Did—did anyone else see the box fly at my face?”

[. . .]

Response: No.

Clarification: PRAXIS NODE Resonance Detected.  

Cause: Direct Contact with Calibrator Node.  

Addendum: Resonance Event is currently non-replicable under sanctum conditions.

Congratulations. You are now bound to the PRAXIS NODE Calibration System (Beta).

Please do not ingest any additional rocks.

Fabrisse stared at whatever was in front of him. Was this some kind of arcane delirium? Had he finally cracked open the latent aetheric consciousness of Stupenstone?

He reached out mentally and selected the only option that made any sense whatsoever.

> Training Overlay Activated . . .  

> [Objective Received: Initiate Contact with Dormant Node “NEMESYS-LINK”]  

> Distance to Target: 9.3 light-years.  

> Estimated Travel Time (On Foot): ∞

Fabrisse’s mouth opened to say something, possibly profound.

Lorvan slapped him across the face.

The slap brought clarity. Specifically, the clarity of pain—The Emotional Regrounding Strike. His hand was even glowing with a tight wrap of reactive aether, like a layer of dense energy sheeting just above the skin.

“Hold it together! Don’t lose consciousness on me!” Lovran said.

Fabrisse lurched back into reality just in time to realize that the Eidralith was no longer hovering majestically over the dais. It was now lying on the floor beside him, pulsing in a sympathetic rhythm to his rapidly developing migraine. The light was all but drained from the box.

He rolled onto his side.

Thaumaturges messing with uncalibrated relics likely risk mental dissociation or worse, and magical slapping was the quickest way to jolt someone out of aetheric shock. Unfortunately, Fabrisse’s shock wasn’t aetheric. It was more physics.

Around him, the congregation of mages had devolved into a huddled, stunned, and slightly scandalized knot. Archmagi, mentors, and senior acolytes now stood in a loose ring, all circling with the tense curiosity of mongooses around a snake, except they weren't sure whether he was the snake or the prey.

A murmur broke out. Then two murmurs. Then a non-specified number of murmurs.

“Did it choose him?”

“Impossible. He can’t even maintain a scry-orb.”

“He brought rocks into the sanctum again. This has to be residual contamination!”

“Did he feed the Eidralith?”

In the row of faces, Fabrisse caught sight of Valiene Veist. She looked perplexed, like she’d just seen a first-year successfully bind a hexagram with only four anchor points and was still waiting for the part where it all exploded.

What does she think of this? Will she finally think I can achieve something now?

He swallowed.

“I, uh, I . . .” He turned to the nearest observer—Mentor Rubidi, whose jaw was clenched so tight she looked like she was chewing glass. “I didn’t mean to activate any epochal astral sky-thing,” Fabrisse offered. “Not without protective gloves, at least.”

“What sky-thing?” Lorvan, now having moved back to give him space, asked. His tone was too even.

Fabrisse glanced around. The glowing sigils, the floating prompts, the steadily pulsing “WELCOME, APPRENTICE KESTOVAR_28” hovering half a meter off the ground in front of him. They were all there.

No one else seemed to see them.

Chapter 4

Severa’s robes scintillated with thousands of minuscule interwoven wardthreads as she ambled up the dais. She bowed before the floating Eidralith with exacting reverence before commencing the Invocation of Concordance.

Unlike utility or battlecasting—where incantations were often raw, sharp, and focused on effect—the spells for Eidralith resonance were ceremonial in nature. These rites, taught only to upper-echelon students and flamekindlings, were aetheric alignments meant to demonstrate fidelity to the Twelvefold Flame and the guiding philosophies of the Synod.

The first spell Severa coaxed into being was a simple luminance—a coaxed thread of gold that whispered between her palms in a respectful manner. It unfurled like the memory of light, symmetrical as prayer, its glow tracing a mnemonic known as “That which burns remembers its shape.” Gold was the color of devotion, and she had coaxed a perfect gold.

For Thaumaturges, emotions and mnemonics were equally important. A well-used mnemonic could become stronger with each use over centuries, like footpaths worn into existence. Meanwhile, the right emotion could strengthen the effect of the spell.

Next came the Spiral of Veneration, a kinetic mnemonic whose gesture-path traced the remembered orbit of the Second Moon during the Founding Alignment. Her footfalls resonated gently with the local weave, syncing with ward-lights that reverberated in affirmation. She was trying to channel her reverence.

There were four elements to a Thaumaturgic spell: technique, intent, emotion, and innate resonance. Headmaster Draeth had explicitly commended Severa on how her innate resonance was the best he’d seen in a long time, which basically meant she was born to be good at magic. All that was left was to nail the performance.

An indigo-violet color followed the path of her fingers, and with it, a full, round chime. All indicative of a flawless reverent performance.

Fabrisse muttered under his breath, “I pray she’d trip just once. Just to prove she’s mortal.”

He turned his head, almost against his better judgment.

There, two rows ahead, sat Veliane Veist, the person who had rightfully rejected his confession.

Of course.

She angled forward ever so slightly, chin resting on her fingers, gaze locked on Severa like she was watching the moon unveil its second face.

Veliane had always admired competence. He watched her now, soaking in every elegant gesture Severa made, every perfect pivot in the Spiral of Veneration, and something in his chest wrinkled with fossilized hope.

Despite the most beautiful spellwork Fabrisse had ever seen, the dumb box didn’t open.

A ridiculously low subharmonic tone vibrated through the sanctum, enough to send a few banners swaying. Everyone else waited, and waited.

Nothing else happened.

Severa’s poise of victory gave way to something just barely short of disbelief.

Archmagus Draeth’s expression didn’t change. Neither did Rubidi’s. But Fabrisse noticed the way Severa’s fingertips curled.

Draeth waved Severa off, and she retreated with her head down, before seemingly realizing she needed to keep her chin up. Rubidi stepped forward and offered her a ceremonial clasp of forearms. “You have brought honor to the Synod,” she said, just loud enough for the entire chamber to hear. 

“The Eidralith has responded,” Draeth’s voice was heavy with gravitas. “Enough to confirm that its slumber has ended.” He lifted his chin. “Not since Thaumarch Iriadel of the Ninth Flame—two full spans ago—has the Eidralith acknowledged any entreaty. And now, after forty-seven years of silence, it has answered.”

A murmur rippled through the congregation. One could almost hear the rewriting of academic treatises in real time. A few of the elder magi nodded, as if this partial resonance were exactly what they’d predicted all along. 

Yes, of course. The Eidralith has, for forty-seven years, done absolutely nothing, and in doing so, commanded the most reverence of all.

Draeth’s voice rang out once more, regal and absolute. “Let all those of high distinction and rank among their peers come forward. Let them, too, be granted a Vothiculum, if the Eidralith sees fit to acknowledge more than one.”

Severa bowed once more, gliding to the side of the dais like a queen graciously allowing others to try the crown she already knew was hers.

There were more in line, of course. Each of the Branches had sent their best. And each, in turn, had entrusted a pupil to the Synod—the sacred academy charged with preparing them for resonance. Now, they would be tested.

“Cuman Gollivur of the Aeromantic Branch,” Draeth called. “Adept of the Sixth Tier. Step forward.”

Cuman, the bully? He gets to go second? What’s wrong with this school?

Cuman, broad-shouldered and perpetually stained with chalk-dust, rose with the slow gravity of someone trying not to sweat through his ceremonial collar. His hands twitched as he bowed theatrically to the dais and began the rites.

He was precise. His Spiral of Veneration was a touch slow, but his alignment aura shimmered a respectable cobalt-blue. Fabrisse didn’t know he could produce such a color.

The Eidralith did not react.

Draeth gave him a short nod and dismissed him with a wave. “A worthy attempt.”

“Aldren Nanan of the Branch of Obscurant Cabal,” came the next name. “Master of Glyphcraft and Binding.”

It was weird for Fabrisse to hear all the different disciplines come up to perform Thaumaturgy. In most magical traditions, glyphcraft is studied like geometry or language. It seemed impossible something as rigid as that could draw from mnemonics and emotional alignment. In Thaumaturgic Glyphcraft, however, rather than being etched or drawn, glyphs are traced in the air with ritualized gestures that encode a concept or intent.

Aldren, wiry and intense, moved like a lit wand. His Invocation was more aggressive, full of tight gestures and exacting syllables. He conjured a sigil wreath that was bright green—the color of triumph. It was difficult to sustain without fluttering, and his wreath collapsed just before the final bow.

An Archmagus shook his head once he heard the whimpering sound coming from the sigil at the end. Fabrisse hadn’t paid enough attention in class, but he figured that triumphant invocations were not supposed to whimper.

Still, he held his posture and exited with grace. The Eidralith remained inert.

A third name was called. Then a fourth. Then countless.

The Eidralith, ever unimpressed, continued its cosmic silence.

At last, Draeth called, “Veliane Veist, Third Flame Honorific, Scion of the Veist Lineage. Step forward.”

Fabrisse felt his breath hitch. He hadn’t known she’d been selected for a Vothiculum. She belonged to the class after Severa’s, and usually the juniors wouldn’t be called upon this year.

Veliane rose. Her dark hair was braided into a crown, and when she moved, it was like ink gliding across a spellcircle.

She approached the Eidralith and gave a measured bow. Her incantation was quiet, nearly whispered, the kind of resonance that operated with precision rather than spectacle. When her hands moved, they carved invisible glyphs through the aether like calligraphy.

Her spell glowed an indigo which was a hopeful mimicry of Severa’s, but paler. There wasn’t any aural signature to finish off her performance.

She also failed.

Veliane held the final position of her rite for a few seconds longer than necessary. As she turned to descend, Fabrisse caught a tear in her eyes.

You’ve never cried before. Why are you crying?

It hurt more than he expected to see someone like her cry—someone who actually deserved to be up there. If she’d been scared, she could’ve just cast the Invocation of Emotional Disproportion. The color it summoned was a hideous charcoal, but at least the sound it made was funny.

Draeth, unshaken, stepped forward. “The Eidralith has chosen. Let us proceed to the next phase of—”

As Veliane walked past a ceremonial urn, Fabrisse caught a warty piece of Stupenstone nestled awkwardly between the ridged tiles and the obsidian pedestal.

One of his rocks was still missing.

Fabrisse’s satchel suddenly felt too light.

He glanced around. No one was looking at him now. All eyes were on Draeth, who had turned toward the altar’s far side to summon the attendants for the rite’s transition.

This was, of course, the part of the ritual where incense would be lit anew, the votive glyphs recharged, and the irrelevant bystanders escorted out of the sanctum.

Fabrisse inhaled.

And executed the ancient, forbidden technique known only to a select, desperate few.

The Scoot of Dire Retrieval.

He duck behind a column, did a shuffle, then finally, after a silent forward crawl, carefully timed with the swaying of incense smoke and the murmured mutterings of ceremonial magi, his palm landed on the stone.

There it was.

His worst-looking Stupenstone, so ugly it brought a tear to his eyes.

A thrum shook the rafters.

The Eidralith smoldered like a white fireball, then screamed. Aether chains that had not so much as quivered in forty-seven years snapped loose. The velvet coverings were flung back.

A few screamed. Rolen ducked behind his podium.

Fabrisse gasped, “Oh no, my rock—”

The Eidralith crossed the sanctum in a blink as it flew straight at Fabrisse.

Chapter 2

The cathedral smelled like wax.

Fabrisse Kestovar slid through the side passage of the sanctum with the pace of someone who had been very late. The sanctum, a towering crescent-shaped chamber big enough to house a thunderbird, served both as cathedral and ceremonial hall for the Twelvefold Flame, one of the oldest mage orders on the continent. Today, however, it was under the administration of the Unified Synod of Thaumaturgic Study, the academic branch of the Order, tasked with training apprentices and preserving magical theory.

To become a student of the Flame, one must have faith. That was how magic worked, Fabrisse had been told.

“Curses,” he muttered under his breath. “I’m going to miss the breakhour crumblecake again . . .” They only served the mingleberry glaze during Grand Gatherings, one of the few perks of studying in a holy-academic institution—a sanctified sprawl that functioned somewhere between a monastery, a university, and a lifelong magical probation. And since stealing mingleberries from the scullery was near-impossible, it had naturally become his favorite. 

Most initiates entered the Synod at age ten, robed and reverent. The gifted ones graduated by eighteen, and became an official member of the Order of the Twelvefold Flame. The rest—those less aligned with flame or fate—might linger until twenty-one, still hoping the spark would catch.

Fabrisse would turn nineteen in a month. His spark had not so much caught as wandered off and filed for retirement.

He tugged his robes into something he deemed sufficiently respectable and slipped into a column’s shadow just as Archmagus Murelien Draeth raised his arms in oration.

“. . . For it is not through force that the Reliquary shall yield, but through alignment; of thought, of spirit; of sacrifice.” The Archmagus’ voice resonated with the authority that would’ve impressed Fabrisse if not for the fact he’d never once updated his speech.

The young man kept his head low and angled his body behind a broad scry-pillar, half-obscured by incense haze and ceremonial banners, all cut into those impractical triangle shapes he’d never quite understood.  From here, he could just make out the front row—all high-ranking magi in brocaded robes, each one still as a warded statue, apart from Archmagus Rolen, who was solemnly scratching his behind.

And there, of course, was Mentor Lorvan.

Stern as ever, back ramrod straight, jaw set in the way it always was whenever Fabrisse did something predictable and mildly embarrassing. Which, judging by the tick in Lorvan’s left eyebrow, was approximately now.

Their eyes met across the sanctum. Fabrisse tried a tiny, apologetic smile. Lorvan did not return it.

“And so it is decreed by the Will of the Flamus Arcane,” came the booming voice from the dais, “that only the Worthy may draw forth the knowledge sealed within the Astral Reliquary! Only the Devoted shall behold the glyphs of awakening!”

Fabrisse mouthed the words in perfect sync, not from piety but from sheer repetition. He’d heard them chanted since he was ten. He could probably recite them backwards while drunk—and, in fact, he once had. Word for word, with such precision it could have summoned Archmagus Rolen himself. Unfortunately, it happened to be during his confession to the girl of his dreams.

She did not accept.

Fabrisse exhaled and began inching along the column with the care of someone trying to not leave any colorful spark. Not that he was particularly worried about leaving a mark. He had failed in that portion of the exam too.

But if there was one thing Fabrisse Kestovar had never failed, not once. It was Stealth. His self-taught brand of magic.

Fabrisse started executing the ‘Side-Slink of Moderate Dignity’ as he wiggled behind the crowd. He fully intended to slip into one of the outer rows before anyone—

A hand grabbed his sleeve.

“Where are you off to this time?” Lorvan hissed, just quiet enough not to draw the dais’ attention. “Bumbling around collecting Stupenstone again?”

Fabrisse winced. “It’s called Stupidst—”

“I read your notes, Kestovar.”

“That was a working title.”

Lorvan’s eyes narrowed into pale slits. “If you’re caught smuggling rock samples into the sanctum again, I will personally transmute your lunch rations into beet paste for the next Span of the Sundering.” A Span equated to roughly twenty years, because apparently Mage Orders couldn’t afford to count the days like the inept civilians.

It wasn’t like he wanted to ‘bumble’ around. At least not when he first joined the Synod. But years of academic stagnation had led to him no longer caring about his academic performance. It wasn’t like he would’ve learned much more had he paid attention in class.

Fabrisse tried to come ụp with something clever to say, but all he could come up with was, “Yes, Mentor. No stone, totally empty-handed today.” He said as he accidentally dropped a stupenstone onto his boot.

“That is a stone.” Lorvan’s glare intensified.

Stupenstone—formally classified by the Collegium of Geomantic Rarities as Silico-Dormant Obscura, Grade Theta—was a mineral so profoundly useless it had been removed from no fewer than three official textbooks by frustrated archivists who couldn’t find a single practical application for it.

It didn’t resonate with aether.

It didn’t store energy.

It didn’t glow, chime, float, scry, shimmer, burst, or even hold a decent enchantment longer than a soup spell.

It was also hideous—a lumpen, mauve-flecked stone that looked like someone had attempted to sculpt a toad from chewing gum and then abandoned the effort halfway through.

And yet.

Fabrisse Kestovar had a collection of no fewer than twenty-eight catalogued pieces and another six he refused to name until they ‘revealed their purpose.’

Most magi assumed he was simply lazy or mad, but the truth was far more benign—Fabrisse was, in a theoretical sense, a petramancer.

Unfortunately, Fabrisse couldn’t actually do petramancy. The order didn’t teach traditional magic, his wandwork was so poor he couldn’t levitate a pebble, and his only published paper—“Stupenstone: A Case for Intentional Obscurity in Aether-Inert Geologies”—had been withdrawn from review after the editors realized he’d included a stanza in place of his methodology section (also because he had not yet been of age at the time of publish, which he found utterly ridiculous). 

Fabrisse offered a hopeful smile and bent down, one hand reaching for the unfortunate lump of mauve embarrassment. “It’s the only one I brought today,” he whispered.

“I’ve told you to stop being obsessed with stone,” Lorvan said, voice lower now. “You’re essentially limiting your potential.”

With a grin that could only be described as proudly unrepentant, Fabrisse replied, “Limiting? No, no, I’m specializing. There’s less competition in the Quiet Foundation of Stone. Also, you can’t collect different shades of fire, no?”

“There’s less competition because stone is rubbish,” Lorvan said as he tried to take the stone from Fabrisse’s hand. Fabrisse pulled back, and the stone slipped from his hand again. This piece of rock was a particularly slippery one. He sighed and bent down to retrieve it once more.

Technically, one could pursue petrothaumaturgy and become a petrothaumaturgist (which would be different from a petrothaumaturge), a title used exclusively by people trying to justify licking rocks in pursuit of magical potential. But why would anyone?

Even among the magically inclined, Stone was considered a dead-end element—resistant to manipulation, sluggish to respond to emotional stimuli, and prone to resonance decay faster than any other stable base. 

Most working petrothaumaturges barely registered past a Rank III Resonant Threshold—the magical equivalent of being able to warm a cobblestone with great effort and a headache. The legendary high watermark of the field, Professor Margenholt of the Quiet Foundation, had once reached Rank VI. She was given an award, two grants, and promptly died of boredom while trying to commune with an uncut feldspar. For reaching a Rank VI! A star student of the Ninth Tier within the university system could be immediately handed a Rank IV upon graduation.

He was halfway to retrieving the stone a second time when the Archmagus’s voice changed.

“This gathering, however,” Murelien Draeth said. His voice was suddenly devoid of pomp. “was not called simply to reaffirm our commitment to the Reliquary.”

The crowd stilled. Rolen stopped scratching.

That wasn’t part of the script.

Draeth continued, “For the first time in forty-seven years, the Eidralith has responded.”

Chapter 1

“Your dog has died! Kill the demon now!” Lorvan Lugano shouted as his student Fabrisse Kestovar held his wand aloft, face twisted in some vague approximation of anguish.

Mentor Lorvan is right, Fabrisse thought. Focus on the dog.

Bunsen was a good dog. Loyal and fuzzy, though not especially bright. He liked sausages, hated thunder, and once peed on the Headmaster’s boots in front of a visiting dignitary. That was a good day.

They were walking home from the bakery, Fabrisse remembered, the one with the honey crullers and the squeaky floorboard near the till. There’d been steam rising from the alchemy carts, just like always. Then—

Wait, he paused. Was it the bakery this time? Or the river path?

He squinted. The memory was fogging up again. Let’s start from the top. Buttons was a good dog, but he’s dying—-Hold on. Is his name Buttons or Bunsen?

“The demon’s coming!” Lorvan shouted. That was the cue; he had to fire the spell.

Fabrisse’s stance wasn’t stellar, but it was serviceable. His weight was centered, his wrist angled properly, and his grief-evoking phrases were muttered at a believable decibel. Still, the glow from the tip of his wand was saddening. It was a sickly sputter of mauve, like a bruise too shy to fully form.

“Come on! Time your emotional climax right! Do you want the demon to eat both of us?” Lorvan’s shout was getting more exasperated.

“Y-yes! I mean no. No for the question.” Fabrisse straightened himself again and realigned his wand with the demon standing still from afar. That demon hadn’t moved for half an hour, but he was still struggling to land a hit.

“Replay your tragic memory! Show some commitment! Has your dog died yet?” 

Fabrisse flinched. “Yes Mentor! It’s very dead! It was run over by a—uh, tragic alchemy cart! I rode that cart myself”

“Chant your mnemonic!” Lorvan roared.

Fabrisse inhaled shakily and muttered under his breath, trying to recall the words he’d scribbled into the margin of his practice journal last night between bouts of rock collecting.

“My heart is heavy, my tail no longer wags,
Dog is gone, beneath the funeral flags.
His bark is silent, his bowl stays dry,
Oh merciful fire, let sorrow fly!”

He lifted his wand again, channeling as much manufactured anguish as he could muster. He pointed it at the demon and released the Invocation.

A ripple of mauve light lanced out. Then it dissipated into thin air. Not even a whimper of thaumaturgic contact with the demon.

A single strand of straw fell from the unmoving demon. The demon was made of straw. It was a scarecrow.

“You messed up your story again.” Lorvan sighed as he walked over to the dummy, picked up the straw, then stuck it back onto the figure’s head.

“It’s hard to imagine a dead dog I don’t have!” Fabrisse protested.

“Well then why are you studying Thaumaturgy?”

Fabrisse didn’t have an answer for that.

Thaumaturgy, the trademark magic exclusively to the Order of the Twelvefold Flames, was a peculiar school of magic. They even had a word for the study of the study of thaumaturgy—Thaumism. 

Thaumaturges didn’t ‘cast spells.’ They attuned to local resonance conditions—primarily through emotion—and applied structured gestures and sigils to amplify that emotional channeling. The true source of all magic was Aether: the unseen medium through which energy, memory, and meaning flowed. 

Aether wasn’t inert. It responded to emotion and intention. The thaumaturge’s role was to align with this invisible current.

For this particular exercise, Fabrisse had to channel his grief to coax the Invocation of Grief. His assignment: emote deeply enough to bind the scarecrow demon staked to the practice field.

Unfortunately, grief was a particularly hard emotion to surface for him. He had no tragic villain origin story, no slain parents, no burned-down village. His childhood had been frustratingly adequate. The most grief he’d felt was during this very exercise, having to imagine a ridiculous story about a dog he’d never had just to try and produce a thaumaturgic spark.

Fabrisse winced. Lorvan’s boots crunched closer on the gravel path behind him.

“Is your resonance that weak?” Lorvan asked in a voice so sour he could’ve swallowed a lemon.

Mentor Lorvan was, by most objective measures, handsome, in the way a chrysanthemum was handsome. The man was elegant and slightly funereal in every task he performed. It was widely acknowledged that he had received more than a few courtship offers over the years—some from within the Synod, others delivered by winged note. None had succeeded.

His personality was not that of a chrysanthemum. At least, not during training. More of a gargoyle that’d skipped breakfast.

Fabrisse glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t think so, no. I mean, I felt something. A . . . tug.”

“A tug.” Lorvan folded his arms. “Are you using the same story?”

“I changed the name of the dog,” Fabrisse offered. “He was Buttons last time.”

“Fabrisse.” Lorvan walked up to him now, standing at his side and gesturing toward the scarecrow with one hand. “You must learn to interact with the scenarios in your head. Not just recite them. You are both observer and architect, the conductor of the emotional cadence. Act like one.”

He tapped Fabrisse lightly on the temple. “If you reach the moment of the dog’s death and don’t feel any ache, then you must rewrite. Right then. You don’t press forward with a dead scene and expect it to perform resurrection.”

“But I can’t fake pain,” Fabrisse extended his palms.

“And I can’t fake you a passing grade. Do you want to fail the fifth time and set a new record?” Lorvan raised his voice.

Fabrisse felt a weird sense of prideful embarrassment as he became the only one to have failed Basic Thaumaturgy II for the fourth consecutive year. His grasp of spell matrices was tenuous at best, and every time someone mentioned ‘ritual focus,’ his mind wandered to pastry. 

When Fabrisse first joined the Unified Synod of Thaumaturgic Study, he had expected to learn chants, not writing plays inside his head. He hadn’t felt many strong emotions in his life, so it was natural for him to align himself with any emotional conjuring. Nonetheless, even the dead-eyed ones from wealthy districts with emotional palettes limited to ‘mild condescension’ and ‘garden variety spite’ could embellish their way into grief or rage with enough melodramatic flair to pass a practical.

Fabrisse, by contrast, couldn’t even fake it convincingly. His innate resonance—his baseline sensitivity to thaumaturgic fields—was supposed to be intermediate according to his scouting report. Except . . . it wasn’t. If he had possessed intermediate resonance at some point, he must’ve flushed it all out of his system during all those nights sneaking out, doing things that were decidedly not Thaumaturgic training. It was almost like his paperwork had been fabricated.

Which now made him Lorvan’s problem.

Fabrisse plopped onto the yellowing grass with the grace of a sandbag rolling downhill. Lorvan followed suit with a long, pained exhale.

They sat in silence for another minute before Lorvan muttered, “The Grand Gathering is tomorrow. And if, by some godforsaken lottery of fate, you are called up for a surprise demonstration in front of the Archmagi—”

Fabrisse groaned. “Please no.” He was starting to feel real grief now. Maybe he should’ve imagined himself demonstrating in front of the Archmagi instead during training earlier.

“—then you will say, clearly and with dignity, ‘I have forgotten my wand at home.’ And then, ideally, you’ll attempt something from Mark VII. Something truly, absurdly out of your league, so I can leap in and say you were being ambitious. Misguided, yes, but bold. It might even win you pity points.”

“Mhm,” Fabrisse nodded absently.

“I recognize that tone, Kastovar. It usually precedes poor decisions. What are you—” Lorvan turned.

Fabrisse was no longer looking at him. His eyes had locked onto a distant figure passing along the edge of the training field. More accurately, they were locked onto the cloth-covered tray the figure carried, which exhaled steam and sugary promise into the morning air.

“Pastries,” Fabrisse whispered, voice reverent. “I haven’t tried the new batch they started hiding in the scullery.”

“Kastovar.”

The student was already beginning to rise with the cautious stealth of a man about to commit a petty but spiritually vital crime.

Lorvan groaned into his hand. “And don’t be late again! Or try to sneak in halfway through the opening ritual and pretend you’ve been there all along, you hear me?”

“I’ll try!” Fabrisse made a ‘respectful student’ gesture and was gone, vanishing into a soft jog with the focus of a predator zeroed in on custard prey. He even managed to make a nearby pebble levitate for half a second as he zoomed past.

“Stones.” Lorvan sighed. “The kindlings are all ready to fire thaumaturgic missiles, and my student can levitate stones.”

[I am a Table] Chapter 60

[I am a Table] Chapter 72

Added more to an existing chapter so now it is long enough to be its own chapter.

“Here, we have a table for you!” The tavern owner pointed at Blorbo as Ducaz set him down on the ground, as if Blorbo was the tavern’s property.

As Blorbo’s legs were roughly thunked against the tavern floor, a warm, sloshing noise of spilled ale washed over him. Marin had already sat down and slapped a jug of ale onto him. “Good ale!” Then he gestured for the party to come over. “Come! Talk! We have lots to catch up, and the night’s still young.” He took another big gulp and yelled at the tavern owner for another jug.

Already? This guy’s an alcoholic! This quest is going to be so easy.

[Jug of Ale refilled: 0]

What? Why zero?

Wait. The quest says ‘refill’. The first drink is not a refill.

Stupid technical wording! What if the tavern owner simply brought him a new jug? Then would it not count as a refill? He could drink the entire tavern and the quest would still be incomplete.

Then he noticed something peculiar.

The tavern owner, a stout man with the permanent expression of someone who’d just been asked to cater a wedding on one hour’s notice, passed by again. This time, however, Blorbo saw the weird contraption on his back.

A keg. A massive, gleaming keg. Strapped to his back like a steampunk tortoise shell, complete with pipes, nozzles, and what looked like a pressure gauge that twitched every time he tilted.

The tavern owner bent down, reached behind him with a hiss of gears, and refilled a patron’s mug with a precise, sizzling stream of golden liquid, without ever removing the mug from the table.

That’s a refill unit.

Marin waved a hand toward the tavern owner. “Hey! Hey, good sir! Bring us another!”

The tavern owner, clearly seasoned in ignoring loud idiots, instead strolled over to a nearby table. That table, unlike theirs, had legs made of pistons and an arm that flipped over empty mugs automatically. One of the patrons nodded, pressed a large red button, and a telescoping pipe extended from the keg into their mug. 

What the heck are those things on those tables? Why do they look like that? Do those arm extensions help the patrons with anything at all? Those legs even breathe like dragons exhaling!

None of the patrons seem to question those things as well. One is even playing with the pistons. It’s as if they’re used to it.

Marin called again. The tavern owner wasn’t even looking their way. The light overhead flared briefly as he walked beneath it. Only now did Blorbo realize how strange that light above his head was. A strange device it was—clearly alchemical in origin—hung from the ceiling, glowing softly like a captured will-o’-the-wisp inside a thin glass dome.

It had a metal stem, and three hinges. It turned when the owner passed beneath it.

Blorbo’s eyes widened.

“...Wait a second.”

That’s an angle adjustment hinge.

If he could redirect the light. Aim it directly at the tavern owner's face. That would get his attention.

Now, this was risky. Tables were not supposed to move. Not with four people sitting around it. At least Anders was busy complaining about something else again to be bothered with him.

He activated Adjustable Angle (Level 2).

The light swayed above. It began to shift, casting long shadows over their table, and then… the light beamed directly into the tavern owner's face.

“What’s going on?” But the voice that came next wasn’t the tavern owner’s. It was Lena’s. “Why’s the table leaning?”

Oh no! I’m busted!

[Passive Skill: Forked Tongue has activated. Attempting to redirect attention.]

Lena frowned and looked at the table, then at Ducaz. “Stop it. You’re gonna make our jugs fall!”

Ducaz blinked mid-sip. “What? I haven’t even—”

Lena cut him off. “You are heavy. Don’t put all your weight on the table, you’ll crush poor Blorbo.”

Ducaz would be the last person Blorbo called heavy, but as long as things were working in his favor, he wasn’t complaining.

The tavern owner shielded his eyes, still blinking from the sudden glare, and finally turned to face them.

A miracle.

“I’m not doing anything!” Ducaz protested. “Look!” He spread his arms and legs to prove he didn’t have any contact with Blorbo.

At that exact moment, Blorbo masterfully de-activated Adjustable Angle, and he sat upright again.

“Then how do you explain the table returning to normal as soon as you move out the way?” Lena asked.

“It’s not me! Ask Marin. He’s drunk and built like a stone!” Ducaz said.

“It’s probably me. I don’t know. I have that effect on things,” Marin admitted.

Don’t admit to things that are not your fault, you idiot.

[I am a Table] Chapter 76

[I am a Table] Chapter 75