On Theft and Theory

Choices, or a Lack Thereof

By the time the last of her foster mothers died, Alavara no longer pretended to mourn. The caravan had grown smaller with every passing year, faces replaced in quick succession, stories thinned and fragmented by loss. When she first arrived, a feral, silent thing dragged from the charred husk of a refugee camp, she’d belonged to no one and nothing. For a time, the endless roads and the perfumed warmth of the tiefling wagons became her world. Their festivals stitched together months of famine and rain, and there was always a hand to plait her hair, or an older child to share half a burnt potato in the snow. But as the years passed and the original cohort aged and died, Alavara outlasted them all, left among strangers who carried her history in rumor and not memory.

The new generation of the caravan, her so-called siblings and cousins, were meaner, harder, lacking the performers’ knack for petty mischief that had once kept their band light on its feet and marginally welcome in the villages it haunted. Now, thefts were brazen and bloody, and violence solved the disputes that once yielded to song or lies. The scent of spilt wine had been replaced by the stench of panic, and every season it seemed a new tiefling was run through by a guard or strung up by the roadside for public lesson. Alavara, who’d grown up shivering and anxious to please, discovered in her adulthood a capacity for silence so profound it served as a shield. She watched, and waited, and became invisible even among her own.

It was only a matter of time before she left. Not in anger or betrayal, she owed her caretakers a debt, and honored them by simply surviving, but because the rhythm of the road no longer matched her step. When the caravan rolled into the Capitol, all battered painted wagons and hungover expectation, Alavara lingered at the edge of the city’s tangled sprawl. She waited until the moon hung low, then stole away with nothing but her satchel and a borrowed knife, and vanished among the huddled masses living in the shadow of the Capitol’s high stone walls.

The city did not notice. Its appetite was boundless and impersonal. Each day, entire neighborhoods woke transformed, buildings sheathed in new layers of paint or advertising, alleyways vanished beneath the ambition of an enterprising bricklayer, the riverfront gnawed by ceaseless construction. To an untrained eye, the Capitol looked like a city at the peak of its influence, but Alavara saw the cracks, literal and metaphorical, that ran through the districts. Out in the periphery, poverty and hunger were not much different from the caravan, but here they came with the indignities of density: disease, suspicion, the constant threat of being replaced or forgotten.

Her first months in the city were characterized by a slow, deliberate study of its internal mechanics. She followed the tide of workers into the factories each morning, watched how the street merchants hawked their wares with the same half-truths and sleight of hand she’d learned in her own childhood. She picked up odd jobs where she could; laundress, courier, occasionally a day’s work as a scribe when she could forge the references. None lasted. Her ears, too pointed and tall for a human; her accent, never quite right; her patience, always too thin for the petty power games of her would-be employers.

After three weeks, she ran out of coppers and, more importantly, goodwill. Hunger sharpened her, made her resourceful. Alavara returned to old habits; watching, listening, memorizing patterns. In the crowded lanes of Riverside and Nightvalley, she mapped the schedules of the city watch, learned the hand signals of the local pickpockets, and catalogued the favored routes of the nobility’s liveried servants as they paraded through market day. She stole, at first, only what she needed: a crust of bread here, a half-eaten apple there. When desperation grew, she graduated to purses and jewelry, and found herself surprisingly proficient.

She did not enjoy it. The thrill that animated the other street thieves was absent in her. She didn't hate it, nor did she feel guilt or regret; instead, a persistent apathy settled in. The worst was the loneliness: there was no camaraderie among thieves, no sense of shared rebellion. It was every soul for themselves, and the city rewarded those who were quick to cut ties, literal or otherwise.

It was in Fountain Square, on a market day swollen with festival crowds, that Alavara’s fortunes shifted. The air was thick with the sweet scent of frying pastries and the metallic tang of fireworks. Her fingers flexed and quickly clenched into fists. Avoid the center. Avoid the looks. Avoid the questions of why someone like her was traveling with someone like them. Don’t forget the lessons. Lessons hard won with her family fleeing from those who claimed to know better. Lessons reinforced with the sting of a palm. Be a ghost.

But not here. Not now. Breathe in. Breathe out. Closing her eyes she felt the weight of her cloak on her shoulders. The slight pull of her braided hair on her scalp. The ground hard beneath the soles of her nearly worn through boots.

She opened her eyes. No time to be a ghost. She must become something new. A shadow.

 She wove through the bodies, scanning the crowd for easy marks. She avoided the obvious rubes, country gentry in new silks, gaudy merchants already fleeced by every stall they passed, and instead looked for the quietly affluent, those who wore old clothing with well-mended seams and handled their coin with practiced inattention.

She noticed an older half-elven man in a faded blue cloak, moving effortlessly with in a manner that suggested both confidence and familiarity. He seemed oblivious to the chaos, his attention fixed on the overburdened cart of spell components at the center of the plaza. He leaned in to sniff a bundle of dried apothecary herbs, the purse at his waist bobbing in invitation. Alavara approached, posture unassuming, and let herself be jostled forward by the flow of the crowd.

She had the purse off its loop and in her sleeve before the man straightened. She walked quickly, counting the beats until she could turn the first corner and melt into anonymity. Then, as she reached the shadow of an archway, she felt a sudden, wrenching pull against her wrist—like a fishhook driven through bone. The coin purse yanked itself free of her hand and floated, impossibly, above the man’s open palm.

He was waiting for her. The half-elf’s eyes, bright as gold leaf, crinkled in amusement. The blue cloak fanned behind him in the breeze, the cloth covered in old stains and haphazard repairs. Alavara froze, caught between fight and flight, but before she could move, he tucked the purse away and offered her a small, almost courtly bow.

“Next time,” he said, his voice warm and unhurried, “you might want to check for a magical sigil on the strap. But I appreciate the technique. Most go for the inside pocket.”

She ducked away, muttering a curse, and ran.

The city should have swallowed her up again, but it did not. Over the next days, Alavara saw the blue-cloaked man everywhere: lingering in a bookshop doorway, talking with street sweepers, sipping bitterroot tea at an open-air stall. Each time, she felt the prickling sense of being watched. Sometimes she caught him smiling in her direction, as if the two of them were sharing a long private joke. She became paranoid, second-guessing every movement, every shadow. Her hands shook. She started missing easy marks, her mind divided between hunger and fear.

One morning, she found herself unable to leave the abandoned tenement she called home. The blue-cloaked man was in the alley outside, chatting with a gaggle of children who orbited him like he was some rare comet. They scattered when they saw Alavara, but he only tipped his head in her direction, never making a move to follow. When she finally forced herself outside, he was gone, but she could sense the invisible thread that tethered him to her, pulling ever tighter.

Two weeks of this, and she was exhausted. She began to hope he would confront her directly, just to end the suspense. She even considered the possibility that he was the city watch in disguise, or some enforcer for a thieves’ guild, biding his time before exacting a more creative punishment. When she finally saw him again, it was in the alley off Broken Bell Lane, a blind dead-end bordered by a collapsed smithy and a ruined bakery. She should have known it was a trap, but she was too tired to care.

She took the shortcut anyway, and when she rounded the corner she found him waiting. This time, his expression was less amused, more earnest. He raised both hands in a gesture of peace.

“Please,” he said, “don’t run. I’m not here to hurt you.”

Alavara stopped, calculating. The knife in her pocket was within easy reach, but the man had proven he could disable her with a flick of his wrist.

She stared at him, silent.

“Let me introduce myself,” he said. “Alric Verenium, Master Arcanist of the Wizards’ Tower. Technically retired, but I do a bit of recruiting these days.”

She scoffed and smiled, though it did not reach her eyes.  “Need someone to poke holes in the defenses of your precious tower? You’d best look elsewhere for that kind of skill. We both know that. My talents are of a more survival-based nature. So what is it you want? Sir.” 

He shrugged. “Talent is talent. And the Tower doesn’t care where it comes from, so long as you don’t set the archives on fire. Which, in fairness, you seem less likely to do than most.”

“You did not answer my question. What is it you want? What is so interesting about me?” ” she asked, smile fading and voice hardening. 

Alric gave a half-smile, one that threatened to turn into a full laugh but never quite did. “ You’re interesting. And because I’ve seen what happens to people like you in this city.” His face turned serious. “You’re not happy here. You steal because you have to, not because you like it. Am I wrong?”

Alavara felt nausea rise and a burn in the back of her throat. Her breathing began to quicken. Her eyes stilled for the first time, unable to break the man’s gaze. Instead of searching the alley for threats and escapes, she searched his eyes for intent and meaning.  “With all due respect, sir. I must now ask a third time. What do you want with me?”

“I want to offer you a way out,” Alric said. “Come with me to the Tower. They’ll teach you, feed you, give you a bed. And if you don’t like it, you can leave. No one will chase you. No one will care if you don’t come back.”

She knew better than to trust men with easy smiles. She knew better than to trust wizards with schemes. And she knew better than to believe that someone with power would care. The road of her childhood honed her sense of earnestness. The city streets of her adulthood honed her sense of risk. These two senses were in conflict. He was earnest. The risk was high.  “What happens if I say no?”

He shrugged. “You’ll keep running, and someone less friendly will catch you. Or you’ll starve. Or get conscripted by one of the less reputable guilds. This city is efficient that way.”

He extended his hand. His fingers were ink-stained and callused.

Alavara looked at it, then at the narrow walls hemming her in. She had never been given a real choice, not once, not by anyone. And she did not have one now. She took his hand and inclined her head.

They left the alley together, and the city closed behind them, not noticing one less stray in its endless, indifferent tally.

A Gift from Alric

Kerrowyn Lightfoot had always found the silence of the Tower comforting, especially in the hour before sunrise when the only sounds were the distant mutterings of the leyline generators and the scratch of her own pen. Here, in her cluttered cell of an office, she could almost imagine herself as a mind unattached to a body; pure intellect, unburdened by the ugly facts of inheritance, clan, or the ever-widening distance between herself and the world outside.

She paused, flexing the cramp from her fingers, and considered the web of concentric circles she’d drawn on the parchment. Each ring represented a different plane, meticulously inked and labeled: Material, Elemental, Astral, Ethereal, Shadow. She’d lost count of how many times she’d mapped the relative positions, always hoping some new pattern would leap from the tangle and illuminate the question that had gnawed at her since apprenticeship. Summoning magic was easy, once you knew the rules. But the why of it, why some creatures came willingly, why others arrived screaming, why the residue of a distant plane sometimes clung to the soul for weeks, remained maddeningly elusive.

That was the way of all things worth knowing, Kerrowyn supposed. The answer never came when you wanted it; sometimes it didn’t come at all.

Her thoughts drifted to Kerric, as they always did in quiet moments. She wondered if he, too, ever found himself awake and alone before dawn, replaying old quarrels, regretting the last words they’d ever spoken. Twinship was meant to be a lifelong partnership, at least, that’s what every myth and bard’s tale promised. But Kerrowyn’s story had diverged at the root, a severance so complete it sometimes felt as if she’d amputated part of her own mind along with her family name. Kerric led the clan in Greinard now, last she’d heard, and no doubt he did it with the same wounded pride he’d worn since childhood.

She considered the small scar on shoulder, a single-letter brand that her mother had called “a badge of shame” but that Kerrowyn preferred to interpret as a punctuation mark: not an ending, but a pause.

If not for the Tower, she doubted she’d have survived long in the world’s outer orbit. Even now, centuries after her flight, she sometimes expected to turn a corner and find her mother’s assassins waiting even though she was long dead. The Tower had its own dangers, but at least they were honest, and the worst of them usually made interesting company.

She was grateful for her few remaining friendships. Alric, especially. He had a way of brightening the gloom, of laughing off the old wounds as if they were a necessary prelude to something better. If Kerrowyn were the sort to envy, she’d have envied him: his ease with people, his confidence, the way his presence filled a room even as his body withered from human age. Every year, Alric’s beard grew whiter, his voice a little thinner, and Kerrowyn felt the slow, sick drift of time that her own gnomish blood denied her. Eventually, all her friends would die, and she’d be left with the books and diagrams and memories of laughter that echoed less clearly each year.

Alric had, for several seasons now, been gently encouraging her to “pay it forward.” He claimed she’d make an excellent mentor. She doubted it. Teaching required patience and optimism, neither of which survived long in the Lightfoot clan or among the Wizard’s Tower’s many snakes. When she’d demurred, Alric had promised, with the kind of grandiosity only old men could muster, that he’d find her “the perfect pupil.”

Kerrowyn had laughed, as expected. She thought he was joking.

The morning of her enlightenment began no differently than any other. She sat at her desk, untangling a new set of paradoxes: If a being was summoned from an elemental plane, and was then returned, did it remember its time on the Material? Was memory itself planar, or was it shaped by the soul’s current substrate? She scribbled a note in the margin and reached for her mug of cold tea.

The knock at the door startled her. No one ever visited this early, and the only people allowed in this wing of the Tower were either senior Arcanists or students so far gone they’d already lost their sense of self-preservation.

She ignored the knock, hoping it would go away. Instead, the door swung open and Alric Verenium entered, as was his custom, without even the courtesy of a theatrical apology. He was dressed in his usual wizardly motley, ink-stained robes over sturdy boots, the hem caught in one hand to keep it out of the puddles of reagent powder that dusted Kerrowyn’s floor. His other hand rested on the shoulder of a much younger woman.

“Kerrowyn,” Alric said, beaming, “I’ve brought you a present.”

Kerrowyn stared at the pair of them, trying to calibrate her response. The girl was elven, with long dark hair and a complexion so pale it almost glowed in the morning light. Her eyes, an unsettling shade of hazel, darted around the room, missing nothing and trusting nothing. She moved like a street cat; tensed for flight, ready to bite if cornered. Kerrowyn recognized the look; she’d seen it in her own mirror, once.

“This is Alavara,” Alric announced. “She’s your new apprentice. Or perhaps your nemesis. Either way, I’ve decided you need each other.”

The young elf gave a slight, involuntary twitch of the lips, a reaction halfway between amusement and disgust.

Kerrowyn folded her hands on the desk and addressed the girl directly. “And you agreed to this why?”

“He claimed  I had a choice. I am confident that I didn’t.” She gestured around Kerrowyn’s cluttered office. “I suppose that’s magic for you.”

Alric laughed. “She’s clever, isn’t she?”

Kerrowyn gave him a look. “We’ll see.”

The man’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll leave you two to get acquainted. I expect a full report.” He winked, and was gone in an overdramatic swirl of his robe and a cloud of pipe smoke.

The silence that followed was sharp as a fresh blade.

Alavara remained standing by the door, gaze locked on Kerrowyn with an intensity usually reserved for wildlife deciding whether to attack. Kerrowyn took a moment to study her. There were scars on the girl’s knuckles, and her hair was unevenly cut, as if by someone with little time or patience for such things. Her clothing was cheap, but clean, and hung on her frame like it belonged to someone else.

“Sit down,” Kerrowyn said, gesturing to the battered chair opposite her desk.

After several beats of silence, Alavara did. She perched on the edge of the seat and kept her feet planted for a quick escape.

Kerrowyn considered her next move. She could launch into a lecture, assert her authority, or simply wait out the silence. She decided on honesty, if only to amuse herself.

“Full disclosure,” she said, “I’ve never had an apprentice. Or, for that matter, wanted one.”

 Alavara’s eyes continued to scan around the office. “He seems like a hard guy to piss off. What did you do?”

Kerrowyn grinned despite herself. “Nothing really. I think Alric is convinced I need a distraction from my research. He might be right.”

“What are you researching?” Alavara asked, her eyes stopping to linger on Kerrowyn’s face for the first time. .

“Plane resonance. The ways in which different realities overlap, and how that affects magic, memory, and identity. Fascinating in theory, hopeless in practice.”

“I’d like to read about it,” Alavara said, still cautious, but with a trace of genuine interest.

Kerrowyn raised an eyebrow. Most apprentices wanted power, not theory. “You read arcanic?”

“Better than most humans,” Alavara replied, deadpan.

Kerrowyn laughed, pleased. “We’ll get along. Provided you’re not here to steal the silverware.”

Alavara’s lips twitched again. “Not unless it’s worth more than the books.”

They sat in silence for a moment, the first seeds of mutual respect germinating in the loam of shared sarcasm.

“Tell me,” Kerrowyn said, “where did Alric find you?”

“In an alley,” Alavara replied. “I attempted to liberate his coin purse.  And then he just kept following me around. And now I’m here.”

“Classic Alric,” Kerrowyn murmured, shaking her head. “Did he mention what the Tower expects from you?”

“He said I could learn. If I wanted to leave, I could. But if we are being honest, I’ve got a damn good memory and I don’t think I could retrace my steps to the exit if I wanted to. So, I’m not sure that leaving is actually on the table”

Kerrowyn nodded. “That’s true. The Tower is less a prison than a labyrinth. Some people get lost. Others find what they’re looking for. Most just go in circles until they’re too tired to care.”

Alavara narrowed her eyes. . “So which one are you? ”

Kerrowyn thought of Kerric, of the clan, of the way she sometimes still reached for a twin who was no longer there. “I’m still looking,” she said quietly.

Another silence, this one softer.

Finally, Alavara broke it. “Are we going to do this or not?”

Kerrowyn gestured to the circles on the desk. “Alright. First lesson: the universe is larger and stranger than anyone admits, and that no one, least of all those in charge, has any idea what they’re doing. That, and never trust a wizard who doesn’t keep a knife within arm’s reach.”

Alavara smiled, just a little.

Kerrowyn watched her go when their hour was done, the faintest pulse of hope beating beneath her ribs. She realized, with a mix of dread and anticipation, that she might actually enjoy teaching.

She returned to her diagrams, redrawing the lines to accommodate the new variable.

This time, the circles looked slightly less hopeless.

Breakthrough

In the months that followed, Alavara became a permanent fixture at the Tower, if not in spirit, then at least in schedule. Her days ticked by with mechanical precision, each sunrise marked by the clang of bells in the Temple District and the shuffling procession of apprentices toward their various classrooms. The Tower itself was a palimpsest of old and new: marble staircases worn concave by centuries of footfall; echoing lecture halls where illusionary blackboards floated overhead; narrow stone corridors that twisted like the veins of some vast, ancient heart.

Kerrowyn’s office served as both sanctuary and laboratory, its shelves buckling under the weight of musty grimoires and glass jars filled with the sediment of failed experiments. It was here, every morning, that Alavara sat through lessons on the foundational principles of leyline manipulation, transmutation, and the ethical application of magic in civil society.

If asked, Kerrowyn would have described the process as “soul-destroying.” It wasn’t that Alavara was dull, she listened, always, her eyes fixed and unblinking as a bird of prey, but the girl never asked questions, never nodded, never betrayed the slightest hint that anything was sinking in. Kerrowyn would finish a long and laborious explanation of, say, the principle of magical resonance, and look up to see Alavara staring at her with the same pale, hungry curiosity as when she’d started. Sometimes, she worried that her apprentice was dissociating, perhaps already counting the hours until she could make an excuse and vanish back into the Tower’s dormitories.

This, of course, was not the case.

Alavara had learned long ago that the best way to survive any new regime, whether a caravan of criminals, a city orphanage, or a wizard’s guild, was to minimize one’s presence. Children who drew attention to themselves became targets. Even now, surrounded by the comfort of books and regular meals, Alavara knew that some unseen observer waited for her to slip up, to display ambition or joy or even a hint of satisfaction, so it could be promptly removed.

To protect her new safety she observed. Every word Kerrowyn uttered, every tangent or anecdote about her own magical education, every offhand mention of Tower politics, Alavara absorbed it, sorted it, filed it away for later use. She paid equal attention to the other instructors, the Tower’s internal gossip, even the way the kitchen staff measured ingredients for the apprentices’ daily porridge. Pattern recognition was a skill she prized above all others, and she deployed it ruthlessly.

She also,found herself caring about the subject matter. The idea that the world was built on invisible rivers of energy, that anyone with the right knowledge could tap into those currents and shape reality to their will, was intoxicating. She read every book Kerrowyn assigned and then some, sneaking into the lower stacks of the library after hours to puzzle through advanced treatises on magical theory. She made it a point never to mention these extra studies in her lessons; Kerrowyn didn’t need to know. Knowledge was sacred. After a lifetime of scraping by with wadded up newspapers and speed reading in bookshops before she was asked, none too gently, to leave, Alavara was prepared to learn everything she could. It was only a matter of time before she would be forced to leave. There was no reason for the wizards to know how much of their guarded, precious knowledge Alavara would be absconding with So the months slipped by, each day nearly identical to the last, until the morning when everything changed.

It began as a lesson like any other. Kerrowyn stood at the blackboard, illustrating the structure of leylines as a set of interlocking currents, their points of intersection called “nodes.” She moved through the material quickly, as if in a hurry to get it over with. Alavara followed along, silently correcting the minor errors in Kerrowyn’s diagrams, mentally rehearsing the next week’s material from the library books she’d read in secret.

As Kerrowyn segued into a rote recitation of how mages could safely harness a node’s power for ritual purposes, Alavara felt a sharp, unfamiliar sensation, impatience, maybe even irritation. It wasn’t that Kerrowyn was a bad teacher; it was that she assumed her student needed to be led, step by step, through concepts that felt as basic as breathing.

Alavara opened her mouth and the words seemed to tumble out without Alavara having a chance to pull them back in. “There is more to it than that.” 

Kerrowyn blinked, chalk poised mid-air. It was the first time Alavara had voluntarily interrupted a lesson.

“Yes?”

“You said that the polarity of a node is determined by the local field orientation, and that high-order manipulations require stabilization with a physical anchor. But in the Silva treatise, he describes node resonance as primarily a function of the summoner’s intent, not physical proximity. And that seems to account for spontaneous transpositions in high-energy environments. So…” Alavara hesitated. Her eyes began to dart around the room in a way they hadn’t since her first lessons with Kerrowyn. When Kerrowyn didn’t respond to Alavara’s interruption, she silently cursed herself, resigned to finish her train of thought., “…shouldn’t summoning be possible from an elemental plane without a stabilized anchor, so long as the mage is sufficiently attuned to the leyline?”

Kerrowyn stared, the room suddenly very quiet.

“Which treatise?” she managed, after a moment.

“Silva’s. ‘On the Permeability of the Boundary.’ Volume two, page 184. He describes three experiments—”

“Yes, yes, I remember the passage,” Kerrowyn interrupted, she sounded delighted. “That’s an advanced text. Where did you find it?”

Alavara shrugged. “Library.”

“Not on the reading list,” Kerrowyn said, eyes narrowing, “but never mind that. You’re right, Silva does propose an intent-based model for node resonance, but he’s heavily criticized for underestimating the risk of energetic backlash. If you try to summon directly from an unstable node, and your attunement isn’t perfect, you get…” She made an explosive gesture with her hands, scattering a fine mist of chalk dust over her robes.

“...catastrophic feedback,” Alavara supplied. “Like the Bastion Collapse.”

Kerrowyn’s mouth hung open, just a little.

Alavara pressed on.. “I wonder if polarity is really the problem. It’s the dissonance between the summoner’s soul and the node’s signature. If you could harmonize them—maybe through a two-stage resonance—you could bypass the physical anchor entirely. No backlash.”

Silence.

Kerrowyn’s face underwent a transformation, all weariness burned away by the blaze of scholarly fervor. “You’re right,” she said. “Or at least, you could be. I’ve never considered that. The literature on soul-node synchronization is thin, but there’s some work by a wild mage out of Aresford—what’s her name—Kellan? Kellan, yes! She claimed it was possible, but no one could replicate her results.”

“Maybe they were using the wrong kind of node,” Alavara said. Her eyebrows crinkled and she began tossing her pen in the air as she spoke. .

Kerrowyn sat down, hard, in her chair, and started to scribble notes on a fresh sheet of parchment. “Say more. What do you mean?”

And just like that, the lesson stopped being a lesson and became a conversation. The two of them argued, hypothesized, tore apart existing dogma and rebuilt it from the shards. Hours passed. At one point, Alric poked his head in, saw them both covered in chalk dust and wild-eyed, and left without comment.

When their time was up, Kerrowyn leaned back in her chair and regarded Alavara with a mixture of pride and disbelief. “You’re wasted on the basic curriculum,” she said. “From now on, you join me in the advanced seminars. No more hiding in the back, either.”

Alavara felt  nauseous. This had all gotten out of hand so quickly. She had been planning on staying in the tower until she was sure she wouldn’t be in any legal trouble. She was supposed to be gone already. But rather than opening her mouth to protest, she found herself merely nodding. “Anything you want to ask before we wrap up?” Kerrowyn said.

Alavara hesitated. “Why are you doing this? Teaching me, I mean. Why not just… do your own research?”

Kerrowyn considered, then answered honestly. “Because someone gave me a chance, once. And because you remind me of myself, if I’d grown up a little less lucky.”

Alavara nodded. “Thank you.”

After she left the office, Kerrowyn sat alone for a long time, turning over every word of the conversation, replaying the moment when her student had outpaced her, even for an instant. She felt, for the first time in years, a flicker of the old excitement, the sense that something was about to change, and that she’d be there to see it.

Alavara, for her part, returned to her room and lay unmoving in her bed for hours, mind racing with possibilities. Previously, every time she left Kerrowyn’s office, she made straight for the library. The lessons themselves had been simplistic, but she always found a kernel of something that would keep her attention for a few days of personal reading. For the first time, she didn’t want to run to the library. She didn’t want to read others’ words. She just wanted to sit and think through everything she and Kerrowyn discussed. 

When was the last time someone pushed Alavara’s mind like this? Had it ever happened? She had been challenged, of course, when learning new skills in the caravan or on the streets. But those were always tangible skills that one would be good or bad at. This intellectual dance with Kerrowyn where they were building off one another was new. And it felt good. 

She was, at last, exactly where she was supposed to be. She just did not realize it yet.

Temptation

Six months into her apprenticeship, Alavara had achieved something close to legendary status among the Tower’s population of misfit students. Not because she was the most powerful, or the most charming, or even the most dangerous, though she certainly had her moments, but because she had elevated avoidance to an art form. She attended every required class, handed in every assignment on time, and participated in precisely the minimum number of social rituals needed to avoid censure or gossip. Then she vanished: to her dorm, to the library, to the nearly abandoned garden behind the Tower where wild violets tangled with the roots of an ancient statue.

The instructors had learned not to expect much from her in the way of conversation. Some found it disconcerting; others, refreshing. A handful suspected that she was engaged in some grand rebellion against the institution, but most quickly came to accept her presence as a sort of natural phenomenon; like a draft that always found the cracks in old windows, or the persistent fungus that grew in the damp lower hallways despite every magical effort to eradicate it.

To Kerrowyn’s mild surprise (and perhaps, in private, pride), Alavara had outpaced nearly every other student in her year within a matter of months. She advanced from basic theory to more advanced seminars on leyline manipulation, and was the only apprentice who ever volunteered for double shifts in the Tower’s underfunded, overtaxed ritual laboratories. The instructors who ran these sessions, men and women more accustomed to dealing with the violently incompetent or the dangerously unstable, watched Alavara’s progress with a mixture of delight and trepidation. It was, after all, not the slow learners who changed the world, but the obsessive ones.

Yet, despite her growing facility with magic, Alavara never really felt at home. The Tower’s grandest lecture halls and libraries were beautiful, yes, but there was an uncrossable gulf between her and the people who had always belonged here. She sensed it in their laughter, the way they exchanged gossip, the casual entitlement with which they moved through the world. Even when she was alone among the stacks, surrounded by nothing but paper and silence, she felt as if every shadow was a sentry, waiting to report her movements to some higher authority.

So she adapted. She learned to move with the rhythms of the place, to time her visits to the dining hall so she would never have to eat beside a crowd, to memorize the cleaning schedules of the custodial golems so she could use the abandoned study rooms without interruption. She even made herself useful, repairing broken wands and enchanted lanterns in exchange for favors and, more often, information. It was a life that suited her, if not perfectly, then at least acceptably.

Until the day she overheard the conversation about the memory orb.

She was in the dining hall, alone as usual, when a cluster of younger students shuffled past her table. They were loudly and pointedly ignoring her, but the thread of their banter was easy to follow. One was complaining, at length, about the impossibility of remembering all the fine print in their Hexes & Illusions syllabus, and another suggested, in a tone half mocking and half admiring, that he should “just sneak into the Lower Archives and use the memory orb.” The others laughed, and for a moment their voices dipped below audibility, except for the phrase “it worked for Sella, didn’t it?”

Alavara’s eyes moved first, scanning the faces of the younger students. Their conversation had already moved on to more benign matters making any determination of truth difficult. Alavara waited three heartbeats, collected her things and rose to leave. 

The Tower’s Lower Archives were off-limits to apprentices; this was common knowledge. They housed not just books and scrolls, but magical artifacts deemed too volatile or valuable for general use. She had been inside them only once, on a chaperoned tour with Kerrowyn during her first week of study, and she remembered the sensation even more keenly than the details: the weight of centuries pressing down on her, the cold hush that accompanied displays of dangerous power.

But a memory orb? That was new. While she’d read about them, they were referenced only fleetingly in dry treatises and half-censored histories of the Empire. The idea that it might be within reach, even for a moment, was intoxicating.

She spent the next several days unable to think of anything else. Every lesson blurred into the background, every conversation became a cipher for “what would you give to remember?” She found herself recalling her earliest memories. The smell of freshly baked bread lingering on her old caretaker’s clothes. The rough feeling of a woollen blanket against her cheek. The smell of burning flesh. Once kind hands shoving her roughly in a barrel and telling her to hide. She remembers starting to cry and beg to not be left alone in the dark. A slap and a sharp word to stay put and stay quiet. And then nothing. 

Her next memory is from sometime later. Hours? Days? Weeks? She’s never been sure. All she knows is she was surrounded by bright colors, upbeat songs, and exciting magic tricks. 

But there is so much she does not know. Where had she come from? Why was she in the camp? What had happened to everyone else? Was Alavara even her real name?

She had always hoped she would find answers one day, but always assumed she never would. A memory orb could answer all the questions she never even knew to ask. 

She considered, briefly, asking Kerrowyn for permission to access the orb. But the very idea seemed absurd. The Tower’s rules were ironclad, especially for those on the lowest rung of the ladder. Besides, she still believed Kerrowyn’s kindness was a prelude to the inevitable disappointment that would come when Kerrowyn realized Alavara’s true worthlessness. It was safer to avoid further entanglement. It was easier to trust the neutrality of locks and shadows.

The plan, once formed, was simple. She would slip into the Archives after midnight. She’d mapped out the relevant corridors months ago, during a mandatory inventory rotation; she knew where the entrance to the Lower Archives was located, remembered the shape of the intricate lock on the door. It was old, probably older than the Tower itself, and while the magical protections would be formidable, the physical lock was of a design she knew intimately. The security wards would need to be deactivated for the custodians to enter. Once they relocked the door, it would take one minute for the leylines to reactivate the wards. Alavara estimated that it would take 45 seconds to pick the lock, giving her just enough time to slip in without being noticed.

The only missing component was a proper set of picks.

On her next day off, Alavara made her way into the city’s Riverside district. The years hadn’t changed it much: the same ramshackle stalls, the same undertone of threat and excitement, the same feeling of freedom at being invisible among strangers. She found a vendor she recognized from her old life, a one-eyed gnome who’d specialized in contraband, mostly for pickpockets and amateur burglars. The gnome recognized her in turn, and their exchange was wordless but mutually respectful. She left with a used and mismatched set of tools, sharpened and polished, and a small pouch of finely ground glass for disabling the pressure sensors in high-end locks.

She returned to the Tower before dusk, the picks hidden in a fold of her robe. She waited until the halls emptied and the last of the instructors had retired for the evening. Then she went to her dormitory, lay on her bed, and listened to the Tower settle into its nighttime pattern; the distant hum of the leyline generators, the creak of ancient timbers, the muffled footsteps of the other students on the floor above.

Alavara would readily admit to her tendency and ability to break the law. Definitionally, she knew this made her a criminal. But that’s not how she would categorize herself. She was intentional in her targets, rarely resorted to violence and desired to minimize the harm she knew she caused. And taking the orb barely classified as a crime; it was after hours research.

She moved purposely keeping an eye out for any anxiety ridden students cramming for some exam. She entered the Archives, its doors always open for late-night study sessions. Luckily, tonight it was nearly empty. Sitting at a table with a clear eye-line to the Lower Archives, Alavara waited and watched for the custodial crew to enter. After about twenty minutes, the crew left. Quietly, she made her way to the door guarding the Lower Archives. With a glance over her shoulder, she ensured she was alone. She pressed her ear to the door listening for the telltale sizzle of arcane wards or the click of magical tripwires resetting themselves. Hearing nothing, she proceeded to work keeping one eye on the clock knowing she had less than a minute to make her entrance. 

The lock was as she remembered it: a heavy brass thing, plated over with years of paint and inscribed with a crest she didn’t recognize.

She slid the first pick into place. She coaxed the tumblers into alignment. Breathing slowly, she refused to allow herself the luxury of fear, though doubt clawed at her resolve. Time seemed to stretch, her frustration mounting with each failed attempt. One of her tools snapped, the sound causing her to jump in shock. Alavara realized that two minutes had passed, far beyond her 45 second deadline. Somehow the arcane locks had not yet been reactivated. 

Could there have been a surge in the leylines which blew out the locks? Could the tower have used too much arcane energy today to keep all of the security features running? Or perhaps the arcane locks were only for show? 

Forcing herself out of her theorizing, Alavara removed a pin from her hair, hoping to replace the snapped tool. Just as she was on the brink of conceding defeat, the lock gave with a soft, almost apologetic click.

The door swung open, and she slipped inside.

The Archives were lit only by the faint blue glow of containment glyphs, casting the shelves and cabinets into a surreal landscape of shadows and floating runes. She moved through the aisles with practiced stealth, ducking behind stacks of bound ledgers and dodging the occasional surveillance orb as it drifted through its prescribed route.

She found the memory orb on a velvet cushion on a marble plinth, behind a sheet of enchanted glass. The orb itself was smaller than she’d imagined, no larger than a plum, and it pulsed with a subtle inner light. The case was secured with a second lock, this one newer and designed for frequent access. She picked it easily, careful not to jostle the arcane motion sensors along the edge.

The orb was cold to the touch, colder than glass ought to be. She nearly dropped it in surprise. For one wild heartbeat, she half-expected it to flash and shriek an alarm, but it lay inert. Alavara tucked it into the deep inner pocket of her robe and slipped out the same way she’d come

She returned to her room, closed the door, and sat on her bed, cradling the orb in her palms.

She knew she should wait until morning, should think, should plan, should at least run some tests on the orb first.

But she had spent her whole life waiting.

She pressed her thumb to the activation rune on the orb’s surface.

The world contracted, then expanded.

There was a moment of complete dislocation; her senses folding in on themselves, the room collapsing to a single, burning point of clarity. Alavara was still aware of her own hands, the orb’s weight against her palms, but everything else seemed to fall away, replaced by a humming white blankness that hovered just at the periphery of her mind.

At first, nothing happened. Then, with the subtlety of a vein opening beneath the skin, the orb began to pulse against her touch, each beat accompanied by a new surge of memory. The effect was neither gentle nor gradual; it was like being flung through a window to her own past, forced to watch the fragments of her life as they tumbled, out of order, through the air.

Her recent past unspooled with savage clarity. Every slight, every failure, every fleeting achievement. She went further back, to her years in the tiefling caravan, relived the faces and voices of the dead with a fidelity that made them briefly real again. She could taste the burnt sugar of festival nights, hear the snap of cheap canvas in the rain, feel the bite of every frostbitten morning. She feels the wild need and longing of an abandoned child. She relives every memory as two people: the one who experienced it and as her current self, trapped in the back of her own mind. Feeling with a kind of clinical horror she was slowly cauterized by disappointment into the adult she had become.

But when she tried to go further still, to the years before the caravan, to the ruins of a camp she only half-remembered, the memories receded. She knew, in the way of dream logic, that she had been younger, that she had been left by someone, but the details refused her. Instead, the orb filled the blank space with a rising, metallic pressure at the base of her skull. The harder she pulled, the more the sensation grew, until her vision began to swim and an electric whine built behind her eardrums.

She leaned into the pain, grinding her molars until they threatened to crack, and pressed her mind against the blank inside the orb. The pressure wasn’t a wall, but a membrane: thin, stubborn, humming with all the energy of memories that refused her. She remembered, distantly, the stories the tiefling elders used to tell about forbidden magic, how every act of recall was a kind of theft, and the price was always paid in blood or sanity. Alavara had never put much stock in stories, but now, as the pain built to a shriek and her pulse sang in her ears, she wondered if perhaps she should have.

Something gave. The membrane split open. A rush of color and sound poured into her, a torrent not of memory but of sensation; burning sun, the copper tang of spilled blood, a hand clutching hers so hard it left crescent moons embedded in her skin. The stink of fear and cheap whiskey. A hand—her hand?—reaching out for a woman whose face was a smear of tears and blood. A lullaby in a language she did not know, sung over the crackle and spit of fire. The sound of something heavy and wet being dragged across stone. A giggle, her own, impossibly young and sweet.

Alavara gasped, her body lurching upright as if yanked by the nape. The orb tumbled from her twitching hands, bounced once on the mattress, and rolled to the floor, where its inner glow guttered, then sank into a sullen, formless red. She doubled over, clutching her skull, vision radiating outwards in concentric rings of agony. The pressure in her head was so sharp she almost expected her ears to bleed.

She braced against the wooden bedframe, nails biting deep. The pain did not recede until she forced herself to take three slow, measured breaths, each one tasting of sweat and bitter old dust. When finally she straightened, the room swam with afterimages, ghosts of color, half-legible words, the flicker of a woman’s face that dissolved whenever she tried to fix it in memory. Each time she blinked, her eyelids scraped raw against her eyes.

She sat like that for what could have been hours, or mere moments, as night slowly faded into day.

Lesson Plan

Twilight filtered into her rooms, the last gold of day glassed against the endless spines of books, vials, and armatures. Kerrowyn sat cross-legged atop her battered chaise, hooded in the comfort of solitude. Her familiar, a delicate pseudo-dragon named Lynx, lay curled atop the open pages of a summoning treatise, her lavender tail gently flicking the notes she’d penciled in the margins.

This, Kerrowyn mused, was the sum total of what she’d ever wanted: silence, good light, and the slow, loyal warmth of a companion with the good sense to purr and not talk. She tickled Lynx under the chin. “You’re the only soul here who truly appreciates my handwriting,” she whispered. The pseudo-dragon’s eyes slitted in apparent agreement.

The next moment, the air chilled, just enough to raise the hairs on Kerrowyn’s arms, and an intrusive image pulsed inside her mind’s eye: the corridors of the tower archives, quiet as a tomb but for the barely audible jingle of a novice’s belt. Alavara, her first student, was hunched at the door to the forbidden stacks, fumbling at the lock with what looked, to Kerrowyn’s trained horror, like a mismatched set of locksmith’s picks.

A voice, intimate as a breath against her nape, snickered: “Such boldness! And such pitiful technique.”

“Halli,” Kerrowyn groaned, “must you always do this when I’m off the clock?”

The lamp-lit air vibrated with the tittering laughter of Hallione, the Tower’s guardian-spirit and, some days, the bane of Kerrowyn’s existence. The sound was at once childlike and impossibly ancient, the echo of a giggle in a crypt. “Would you prefer I let her break her wrist? She is very stubborn. She might try for hours.”

“She won’t get through,” Kerrowyn said, but watched, morbidly fascinated, as Alavara jammed a tension rod into the ancient lock. “That mechanism hasn’t been opened by hand in centuries.”

“She thinks it’s a challenge of will,” Hallione said. “She is wrong.”

“Is she planning anything dangerous in there?” Kerrowyn’s fingers stilled on Lynx’s scales. “Or is it just the usual; curiosity, ambition, general nosiness?”

A fleeting pause, as if Hallione had to flip through several hundred years’ worth of similar incidents. “Nothing harmful. Merely curiosity. But I thought it courteous to inform you of your apprentice’s activities. She is, after all, under your tutelage.”

Kerrowyn let out a long, pinched sigh. “Let her sweat it out for a few more minutes, then open the door. But do it gently. Don’t let her know you’re helping.”

The pseudo-dragon chirped in protest and Kerrowyn gave her a little apologetic pat. “Some of us have to work, Lynx,” she said. She focused on the mental feed, a private showing only a Tower-bound mage could enjoy.

Alavara’s efforts grew increasingly desperate. Her pick slipped again and again, scraped metal on ancient brass, then bent before snapping entirely. She pulled a thin pin from her own hair, squinting down its length, as if a different material or angle would suddenly make a magical lock forget that it was magical.

Hallione, for their part, was a connoisseur of timing. As it was clear that Alavara was about to give up, a faint click echoed up the hall, so subtle that Alavara’s expression for a full second was one of pure suspicion. Then, as the door drifted inward, her face passed through confusion and then blossomed into unguarded triumph.

“She will think she’s bested you, you know,” Hallione said, voice smug as velvet. “She may even tell her friends.”

“She doesn’t have any friends,” Kerrowyn said. She said it without malice, but the truth of it made her chest constrict. “Hmm, something to consider,” Hallione replied, and with that, the presence withdrew, leaving Kerrowyn alone again with her familiar, her open book, and the ghost of a smile. Halli had doubtlessly been intrigued by her student. Kerrowyn looked forward to watching as they attempted to meddle.

Kerrowyn reached for her quill, and as she inked her notes, she sketched in the margin an idea for her next lesson plan: “Locks, Mundane and Otherwise: A Practicum.” She closed the book with a decisive snap and gave Lynx a conspiratorial wink.

“Tomorrow,” she promised, “we’ll teach her a real trick.

____________

Morning in the Tower arrived with no ceremony. Sunlight crept up the windowsill and rolled in pale, formless puddles along the corridor floors. Alavara slowly walked the last meters to Kerrowyn’s study, clutching her robe at the chest and blinking the hangover of restlessness from her eyes. In the clarity of daylight, the ache behind her temples throbbed in time with her heartbeat.

The door was ajar. She was ready for it to be locked, to find a city watchman or another member of the Master Arcanists waiting with an accusation and shackles. But the room was empty, save for Kerrowyn herself—perched, as always, behind a desk, chin propped on her palm, as if bored with the entire concept of authority. The small gnome’s robes were starched and neat, the sleeves rolled to the elbows. On the desk, a black velvet cloth draped something solid and rectangular.

Alavara knocked twice on the open door.

“Sit,” Kerrowyn said, not looking up from a slim volume she was annotating.

Alavara sat. Rather than taking out her books and notes as she ordinarily would upon entry into Kerrowyn’s office, she simply sat and stared, waiting for Kerrowyn to break the silence. 

“Rough night?” Kerrowyn closed her book and met Alavara’s eyes with a level, pale gaze.

She sighed and apathetically gestured toward her satchel. “Research.”

“Mm. I hope it was worth it.”

Silence. Alavara felt her eyes get glassy. Her gaze slid from Kerrowyn’s face to a shelf cluttered with spell components, focusing on nothing in particular.

“I know what you did,” Kerrowyn said. She said it gently, almost offhand, as if reporting on the weather. “Or, more accurately, the Tower showed me everything. It always does.”

Alavara was surprised by the sudden tightness of her throat. The Tower didn’t handle rulebreakers lightly. She always knew that her time in The Tower would end in arrest or expulsion, but she was unprepared for the grief that came at the prospect of leaving the tower.

She reached into her satchel, withdrew the memory orb, and tossed it across the table to Kerrowyn. She whispered, “It didn’t do what I hoped anyways. Worthless. Just take it.”

Kerrowyn snatched the orb from the air and balanced it on her knuckles. “You’re not in trouble,” she said.

Alavara eyed her, waiting for the trap. “Then what? Aren’t you mad? You should be mad”

“Oh, I’m plenty mad.” Kerrowyn’s eyes glinted, but there was no malice there. “But not about this.” She set the orb aside and steepled her fingers. “If you’d asked, I’d have shown you how to use it properly. I’d even have let you borrow it, provided you signed it out like everyone else.”

Alavara blinked. “So what are you mad about? If I have an appointment with the Watch, I’d really rather speed this up.”

Kerrowyn’s lips twisted into a sly smile. “Of all the master arcanists, I am the one least likely to invite the Watch into my office. I'm mad because of your abysmal lock-picking skills. Honestly, Alavara, you didn’t even pick the lock. The Tower let you in. You’re lucky you didn’t break your wrist.”

A hot flush crept up Alavara’s neck. In her moment of embarrassment, Alavara also was forced to reevaluate some of her expectations of Kerrowyn.

Kerrowyn drummed her fingers on the velvet cloth. “Let’s talk about locks, shall we?” With a flourish, she whipped away the cover, revealing an array of lockpicks, polished, color-coded, and organized in a wooden tray, alongside a row of practice locks of increasing complexity, each mounted to a plank.

Alavara stared. She could not recall the last time she’d seen such a collection, not since her childhood in the caravan, and even then, it had belonged to someone twice her age and much less careful.

“Let’s see what you remember,” Kerrowyn said.

They spent the next ninety minutes in wordless collaboration, Kerrowyn offering only the occasional correction, her hands small and precise as she demonstrated the subtle play between tension and torque. She recounted, in dry asides, her own childhood: the Lightfoot Clan, the endless parade of jobs, the mad scramble through imperial alleys with the city guard in hot pursuit. She showed Alavara how to listen for the pins, how to feel the difference between a well-oiled lock and one deliberately fouled by a paranoid homeowner.

Somewhere between the third and fourth lock, the orb rolled off to one side, ignored by both student and teacher.

Alavara found herself fighting a smile when she managed to spring a complex cylinder in under a minute.

Kerrowyn caught her at it. “Don’t get cocky. That one’s for children.”

Alavara retorted, “What kind of kids have you been hanging out with?”

After the lesson, Kerrowyn set the tools aside and leaned forward. “You know,” she said, voice gone softer, “I’d never judge you for what you were before the Tower. I get it. Sometimes, the only way through a door is to break in. But you could ask for help, you know.”

Alavara searched her mentor’s face for any hint of condescension, found none.

She shrugged, and for the first time in months, it felt less like a reflex and more like a choice. “Good to know. I’ll try to remember that.”

Kerrowyn grinned, broad and genuine. “Good. Now get out of here and take a rest. You look terrible,” she said bluntly.

Alavara stood, flexed her hands to work the tension from them, and left the room with the lockpicks still tingling in her memory.

In the corridor, she let herself smile, for real this time. The weight in her chest felt lighter, not gone, but shifted, as if she’d finally found the right key.

A Lightfoot Cliche 

Years blurred in the Tower like pigment in wet parchment. The corridors remained constant, but the people in them shifted, aged, were replaced. Lectures were delivered and forgotten, towers of books constructed and demolished, generations of magical prodigies swept in and, eventually, swept out.

People died, it was natural, of course, friends, colleagues, and, worst of all, Alric. He went as he'd lived: without warning, in his study, face-down in a stack of student essays. Kerrowyn received the news secondhand, by way of a weeping novice who’d stumbled on the body while seeking a letter of recommendation.

There was no official funeral, Alric had loathed crowds, but the Tower did what it could. Kerrowyn found herself in a sunless commons room, surrounded by several dozen mourners, most of whom she’d never seen before. They came out of love, or curiosity, or that uniquely academic urge to be seen bearing witness. Alavara came, briefly, with condolences and words of gratitude for Alric’s intervention in her life.

Afterward, Kerrowyn spent hours wandering the Tower’s upper levels, haunted by the echo of his laughter in the stairwells, the way he’d never let a silence settle for long. The loss nested in her, molted, and then faded over time. She found purpose in her teaching, something Alric had pushed her, almost too hard, to do.

Her students came and went, always hungry, always desperate to prove themselves. Most burned out like fireflies; a rare few blazed on.

Alavara belonged to the latter. She’d climbed from student to apprentice, from apprentice to journeyman, and now stood poised to be named Arcanist proper. Yet the closer she drew to graduation, the more Kerrowyn noticed a change: her ambition had stagnated, her smiles rarer, her study sessions growing longer and lonelier.

This week’s lecture had been on the subject "Boundaries of Creature Conjuring and the Perils of Deep Summoning." Kerrowyn delivered it with the usual panache, fielding the students’ clever questions and ill-considered counterpoints. Alavara sat at the edge of the seminar circle, jaw tight, eyes unfocused, her hands steepled over the notebook but not writing.

After class, she did not linger for the customary debate. Instead, she fled to the Archives, and did not return for evening meal.

Kerrowyn finished her own grading and lingered in the corridor outside her office, waiting for a sign. It arrived, as it often did, via Hallione.

“She is in the southern reading room. With the orb.”

Kerrowyn’s first instinct was to bristle at the intrusion; her second, to be grateful for it. “Is she using it?”

“No,” Hallione replied, the voice fainter now, almost gentle. “She just turns it in her hands. She has not activated it once.”

It was not the first time. In the years since Alavara had earned her privileges as an advanced student, her name now inscribed, with only minor reluctance by The Tower, onto the roster of those trusted to browse the Lower Archives, Kerrowyn had watched, with a blend of pride and unease, the way her former apprentice returned again and again to the memory orb. She checked it out with a librarian’s diligence. She would sit in the reading room for hours, sometimes all night, the orb turning in her palm as if she meant to wear a groove through the glass. She never personally activated it, preferring only to study it and record her findings, filling in what she considered to be a significant hole in The Tower’s records.

Kerrowyn found Alavara in the silent, echoing light of the Archive’s southern rotunda. The high windows caught the last rays of sunset, slicing them into neat bands across the marble. Alavara sat alone at one of the study tables, the memory orb before her. She spun it slowly, one finger guiding it in a lazy wobble. Her face, always so quick to betray skepticism or amusement, was now unreadable.

Kerrowyn settled into the chair opposite without a word. She waited, as only the very patient or the very old can wait, for Alavara to speak first.

It took nearly ten minutes. Alavara’s finger never left the surface of the orb. She finally said, very softly, “There is so much I don’t know.”

Kerrowyn leaned in, making herself small, unintimidating. “You’re not obligated to know everything.”

Alavara smiled, a dry and bitter thing. “I thought—I wanted—I hoped this would hold the answer.” She gestured at the orb, the movement sharp. “It didn’t. But I still hoped, naively, that someday I would know enough or learn enough or just be good enough to find the answers.”

Kerrowyn reached out, but stopped her hand just before contact. “What is it you want to know?”

Alavara’s lips parted. For a moment, it seemed she might say nothing. But the floodgate, once breached, poured forth without mercy.

“I don’t know who I am. I don’t know where I come from. I don’t even know if Alavara is my real name.” The words tumbled, raw and hurried, as if she feared interruption. “I just wanted to see my parents. Once. I wanted to know who they were, what they called me, how they rocked me to sleep, what songs they sang. I wanted to see if I have my father’s eyes or my mother’s nose. I just…wanted to see them.”

For a time, neither spoke.

The orb, still spinning, caught a last flare of sunset and refracted it in a blinding thread across the table. Alavara, perhaps embarrassed by her confession, looked away. With a flick of mage hand, she lifted the orb and set it gently back on its velvet shelf.

“It’s not in the cards for me,” she said, voice barely audible. “I should have given up on that daydream a long time ago.”

Kerrowyn considered many possible answers; comforts, platitudes, philosophical arguments about the value of the present. She discarded them all.

Instead, she simply said, “I’m glad you told me.”

Alavara gave a wry laugh. “Oh please, it’s not as if you hadn’t guessed.”

“I suspected,” Kerrowyn said. “But I’m glad you told me anyway.”

A hush fell, the kind that, for a rare and perfect moment, did not sting.

Then Kerrowyn leaned forward and, with the conspiratorial air of someone about to share a profound secret, said: “You know, not all the best memories are old. Some of them, you have to make yourself. And sometimes, the best ones are the ones you never expected to keep.”

Alavara rolled her eyes, but the tension in her posture eased. “Is that a Tower cliché?”

Kerrowyn grinned. “It’s a Lightfoot cliché.”

They sat in companionable silence as the sunlight vanished altogether, and when they finally left the Archives, it was together.

A Friend for Alavara

Time in the Tower was measured in increments of achievement: new spells mastered, new experiments concluded, new titles bestowed. Alavara climbed the ranks with a tireless precision, and the denizens of the Tower began to recognize her, not for her lineage or rumored past, but for her formidable intellect and unassailable work ethic.

Yet Kerrowyn, ever the astute observer, noticed a persistent gap in her protégé’s life, a vacancy where camaraderie ought to be. Alavara spoke to no one outside her lessons, accepted no invitations to the student commons, and rebuffed every attempt at small talk with a curtness that would have been icy, had it not been so obviously defensive.

One evening, as Kerrowyn tallied the week’s progress, Hallione materialized by her desk, a faint shimmer in the air that outlined the suggestion of a body. “She needs a friend,” Halli announced, as if this were a failing on Kerrowyn’s part.

“She has me,” Kerrowyn replied, glancing up from her ledger.

“A friend who is her peer,” Hallione clarified. “One who does not grade her essays or assign her projects.”

Kerrowyn pretended to consider this. “It isn’t as easy as you think.”

“It is exactly as easy as I think,” Hallione retorted, and vanished with the sound of a closing book.

Halli spent the next several days pondering the issue. Alavara’s barriers were formidable; she trusted no one, not even Kerrowyn, with the raw nerve of her loneliness. The answer, as it happened, presented itself in the form of Talia.

Talia was a theory student, bright and blunt, with a penchant for magical logic puzzles and a laugh that could disrupt a silence at forty paces. She had been under Kerrowyn’s guidance for several months, and while her magical talents were less flamboyant than Alavara’s, her capacity for friendship was prodigious.

With Hallione’s not-so-subtle nudges, Kerrowyn arranged a meeting. A shared afternoon in the Tower’s east courtyard, under the pretense of collaborative research into the properties of leyline resonance.

Alavara arrived first, clutching a stack of notebooks and a face of mild dread. She paced the length of the courtyard, scanning the horizon as if she expected the appointment to be an ambush.

Talia arrived late, tumbling through the archway with her robe askew and a smudge of ink on her cheek. She barely registered Alavara’s guarded stance before launching into an excited explanation of her latest hypothesis, gesticulating wildly with her hands.

Alavara listened, at first, with the stiffness of someone expecting to be mocked. But Talia’s enthusiasm was infectious, and her questions, though rapid-fire, were never insincere. Within the hour, the two were locked in debate over the metaphysics of conjured matter, their voices overlapping, sometimes rising to the edge of argument, then collapsing back into laughter at the absurdity of their own theories. Hallione, unheard and unseen by the two students, laughed along with them.

What Comes Next

The Tower’s schedule rarely bent to the needs of individual students, but there were always exceptions for Kerrowyn’s lessons. Her eccentricities had, over time, acquired the weight of tradition, and so it was understood, even among the most by-the-book instructors, that her office hours could be called at any hour and with no warning. Thus, it was not a surprise for Alavara to find herself summoned at the gray edge of dawn, when the leyline generators groaned through their morning cycle and the rest of the Tower’s population clung to sleep.

She arrived on time, as always. If she was more drawn than usual, if the circles beneath her eyes had deepened from violet to black, Kerrowyn either did not notice or chose not to comment. Instead, the Master Arcanist gestured her in and resumed her habitual pacing—four strides, turn, two strides, stop to consult the chaos of diagrams wallpapered across every flat surface. She did not look at her student directly, but her voice was a paring knife.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I called you here so early.”

“I assumed you’d simply forgotten how clocks work,” Alavara replied, perching on the edge of a battered stool. “Or that you were, once again, having a fit of inspiration.”

Kerrowyn grunted, neither confirming nor denying. “You’re not far off. I’ve been thinking about your progress.”

Alavara’s hands tightened on her knees.

The instructor’s gaze, when it finally settled on Alavara, was sharp but not unkind. “You’ve reached the point where, frankly, there’s not much left for me to teach you. At least not in the realm of theory.”

“That’s flattering,” said Alavara, “and fundamentally untrue.”

“Fine. There’s not much left I want to teach you,” Kerrowyn amended, with a flash of teeth. “You’re past the point where I can just assign readings and let you marinate. So. What do you want next?”

It was not a question Alavara had ever prepared for or considered. She had spent her entire life doing what was necessary to survive: acquiring skills, ingratiating herself with the right people, never drawing enough attention to invite envy or punishment. She had never been asked, never dared to consider, what she wanted.

She answered the only way she could: “I want to learn magic that isn’t just theory. I want to do something with it.”

Kerrowyn nodded, as if this was the answer she’d expected. “The practical application, then. I see.”

A pause. Kerrowyn glanced at the wall, where a diagram of the city’s leyline grid hung next to a yellowing map of the old Empire. “There are a handful of paths for someone with your… aptitudes. You could continue in academia, become a researcher, maybe even a teacher if you fancy the taste of chalk dust and disappointment. You could join the government—well, what’s left of it. The Council always needs wizards for their endless squabbles. Or you could—” She broke off, as if the last option was a live wire she’d only just noticed.

“Or I could what?” Alavara prompted, impatient.

“You could join the Arcane Protection Service,” Kerrowyn finished, voice almost amused. “APS. City’s only legal avenue for mages who like to work with their hands. Or with violence, if we’re being honest.”

Alavara weighed this. “What do they do? Really.”

“Publicly? Monster-hunting. Magical crime scene cleanup. Rogue spellcasters, exorcisms, crowd control during riots. Anything the Watch is too squeamish or incompetent to handle.”

“And privately?”

Kerrowyn paused for a moment. "They deal with threats of a demonic nature—warlocks who've struck deals, demonic creatures that have breached the divine barrier at the Peak. The leader, Iliyria Sylren… she is different. She's a war hero from the Hundred Year War and saved the city from a demonic invasion roughly 110 years ago. She established the APS to ensure such events never repeat. She's incredibly intelligent, and possesses more raw power than anyone I've encountered, and is also, technically a Master Arcanist of the Tower, although she doesn’t visit much."

Alavara nodded, absorbing the information. “So it’s dangerous work.”

“Impossibly,” Kerrowyn confirmed, almost reverent. “But if you want to see the magic as it really is, it’s the only way. The rest is just theory and gossip.”

There was a silence, filled only by the faint buzz of the leyline generator cycling up for the morning shift. Alavara felt, for the first time, the stirrings of actual desire—a hunger that was not for safety or anonymity, but for something else entirely. She tried to picture herself among the APS: the uniforms, the fieldwork, the chance to use magic against real opposition. It was a terrifying prospect, but also a compelling one.

“Could you arrange an introduction?” she asked, surprising even herself with the urgency in her voice.

Kerrowyn paused, her mind drifting back to her last conversation with Iliyria Sylren. It had been a rough encounter. Once, they had been close friends, one of the rare connections Kerrowyn had aside from Alric. But three decades ago, their bond shattered when Kerrowyn declined to assist Iliyria in the investigation of a rogue necromancer. Iliyria had been aware that Kerrowyn held the key to the criminal's identity and felt betrayed when Kerrowyn shut her out.

They hadn’t really spoken since that day. As Kerrowyn cast a glance at Alavara, she noticed an eager expression lighting up her features, a stark contrast to her usually stoic and unreadable face. Alavara’s eyes sparkled with an excitement and passion that seemed almost foreign to her demeanor, as if a hidden flame had suddenly been ignited within her. The vibrant energy emanating from Alavara was palpable, and Kerrowyn braced herself for what was bound to be an awkward reunion. She resolved to navigate the uncharted waters of their fractured relationship if it meant she could nurture Alavara’s enthusiasm.

“Sure, I’ll see if I can arrange a meeting. It might take a while though, Sylren is a busy woman” she hedged.

Alavara exhaled, tension bleeding out of her shoulders. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Kerrowyn replied, resuming her pacing. “If you end up doing something truly stupid, I’ll deny all responsibility.”

At that Alavara laughed before exiting the office and leaving Kerrowyn to her own thoughts.

The next morning, Kerrowyn sat at her desk and stared at the slip of paper for a long time. She wrote, then rewrote, then finally settled on a message so short it felt almost cowardly. She folded the paper into a bird, a habit that Hallione insisted was “adolescent,” but which Kerrowyn found comforting, and whispered a cantrip to animate it. The bird hopped to the edge of the desk, cocked its head, and then fluttered out the window, arcing over the Tower roofs toward its destination.

The matter unsettled her for the rest of the day. She found herself drifting through lectures, her mind tracing old arguments and half-healed wounds. She’d been avoiding Iliyria out of habit, out of pride, out of the simple belief that time would smooth the sharp edges of their last meeting. But the truth was, nothing had softened. They had both been right, and both unforgivably wrong, and thirty years had only crystallized their positions. Hallione, sensing her agitation, hovered at the periphery of her consciousness, occasionally feeding consoling fragments from the Tower’s lore: snippets of Iliyria’s exploits, the minutes from old Master Arcanist meetings, the archived list of every official visit Iliyria had made to the Tower since their argument. The effect was less soothing than intended.

Messenger Bird

Iliyria Sylren was not in the Capitol. At dawn, she’d been three leagues away, crouched in a bramble-choked hollow with the taste of blood on her lips and the echo of a demon’s howling still ringing in her head. Team 5 had first noticed the demon’s presence, and Gilene’s detailed description had set off alarm bells. This was not an ordinary demonic beast, and she dismissed her runners, choosing instead to go hunting herself. She told herself that it was only out of an abundance of caution, that she was more experienced with such creatures, and it wasn’t worth the risk to her runners’ lives and limbs to send them. Yet there was a part of her that recognized a yearning for the chaos she had left behind. Years spent in the safety of an office had not quenched this desire, and she found herself torn between the comfort of her current life and the pull of the violence that once defined her existence.

She’d tracked it from the far side of the river; a minor incursion, but one that moved with an intelligence that unsettled her. The demon was a slip of a thing, barely more than a rumor, but the trail it left was unmistakable: scorched grass, a perfume of burning brimstone, a sense of wrongness that tasted metallic at the back of the throat. Iliyria had expected a brief skirmish, a few incantations, a return to paperwork before noon.

Instead, the thing fought with a calculated desperation. It recognized her; by aura, by posture, by the signature flare of blue-white magic that leapt from her fingers when she let it. It ran because it knew what she was, and what she had done in the war, and when she cornered it between two dead trees, the demon screamed her name in the old, guttural tongue that shook the ground around it, before dissolving itself into black sludge rather than let her take it alive.

She sank to her knees in the sodden black soil and waited for the ringing in her ears to fade. The world was bright and cold, the air thick with the residue of burning leyline. Iliyria spat, wiped her mouth, and only then noticed the long, thin gash that scored her left arm from elbow to wrist. Blood welled in perfect, mathematical beads before they started to run, matting the pale fabric of her sleeve to the wound.

She was crouched over the oozing remains of the demon when the bird arrived. It was a paper thing, folded with a precision that spoke of both patience and practiced irritation. The bird wheeled once in the cold air and then, with a logic only the arcane could muster, found her in the hollow. It landed on the back of her hand, smearing a dab of blood across its wing.

Iliyria stared at it for a moment, half-expecting it to combust or disintegrate. But it sat there, cocking its head with a damnable simulation of curiosity.

She snorted, the sound jagged. “Kerrowyn,” she said, and the bird gave a little shiver of acknowledgment.

She unfolded it. The message inside was short, unadorned, and written in the same spidery hand she knew from a hundred dinner invitations and a thousand petty grievances.

Need to see you at earliest convenience. Not an emergency. Not about the past. Have a pupil. She wants to join APS. Thought it best to approach you directly. —K

Iliyria wiped demon ichor from her fingers and read the message again. “Not about the past,” she repeated, with a soft huff.

For years, she had imagined what she would say to Kerrowyn if the occasion arose. Every possible opening line, accusatory, conciliatory, sarcastic, had been rehearsed and discarded on countless lonely nights. Yet now, with the prospect of a meeting finally before her, only one thing came to mind:

It would be interesting to see if Kerrowyn’s eyes still blazed with the same ungovernable defiance, or if time and comfort had finally tamed the gnome. Iliyria would not admit it to herself, but the prospect thrilled her.

She let the note fall to the ground and burned it with a flick of her wrist. Then she rose, flexed the wounded arm, and let the pain ground her in the present. We can meet for dinner, the usual spot, 7 O’Clock, she said internally, focusing her magic to cast a sending spell that would take her words directly to Kerrowyn’s ears, careful to avoid divulging any hint of her anticipation in her tone.

Iliyria arrived at the café early, as was her habit, and took a table near the back where she could command a view of both the door and the street. The place was neither grand nor squalid, a narrow slice of foreign brick wedged between a shuttered pawnshop and an office of Gray Robe notaries. It had once been a bakery, and still smelled faintly of yeast and burnt sugar. The clientele was a rotating cast of lesser functionaries: clerks, off-duty Watch, a few students from the university in their ink-stained uniforms. Nobody paid her much mind. She liked that.

She cradled her left arm, now bound in a strip of clean linen, and watched the room with the contained energy of a predator at rest. The wound was shallow, but she had let it bleed longer than necessary before bandaging it. Jarren had fussed over her with the intensity of a mother hen, hovering intently as Adan healed her, arguing that she should not have gone alone. She smiled to herself, the wizard had over the years become one of her favorites, his strong sense of responsibility outpacing her own to the extent that she considered whether he was more suited to the title Commander than she. The waitress came, offering the wine list, which Iliyria refused, opting to order a coffee, despite the time.

A few minutes later, the waitress returned with the coffee and a platter of warm olive oil bread for the table. Iliyria fiddled absently with her coffee until she noticed Kerrowyn’s arrival. The gnome had arrived not through the front, but via a side alley, and was now picking her way around a mop bucket and a slumped delivery boy.

Kerrowyn reached the table, smoothed her robe, and climbed onto the seat without ceremony. For a moment, neither spoke. Iliyria watched her, taking in the new lines around Kerrowyn’s eyes, the hint of dust in her blonde hair, the way her hands rested on the table with the unconscious precision of someone who had never quite learned to trust furniture.

“Thank you for meeting,” Kerrowyn said, her voice set to a formal register just one notch above apology.

“Of course,” Iliyria replied. There was a formality in her tone, too, but one flecked with trepidation she wished was not so apparent.

Kerrowyn gestured at Iliyria’s bandaged arm. “Rough morning?”

“You could say that.” Iliyria rested her hands lightly on the table. “I took care of it.”

The awkwardness was a palpable force, pressing both women into their seats. Kerrowyn’s eyes flicked to the bandage, then to Iliyria’s face, then away to the window where dusk gathered like a conspiracy. “It’s been a while,” Kerrowyn said at last, in the brittle cadence of someone who had rehearsed a dozen greetings and discarded them all.

“It has,” Iliyria agreed. She kept her chin up, but there was a tightness to her posture, a cautiousness at odds with her reputation for bluntness. A silence stretched between them, interrupted only by the clink of silverware and the distant cry of a street vendor peddling roasted chestnuts. Both remembered, with perfect clarity, the last time they had met; both pretended otherwise.

Kerrowyn, never one for elaborate subterfuge, dove in. “I don’t want to waste your time,” she said. “But I didn’t want to send an apprentice to the APS without warning, either.”

Iliyria arched one silver eyebrow, but made no reply. The air between them vibrated with unasked questions, and Kerrowyn, emboldened by the silence, pressed on.

“She’s good,” she said. “Maybe the best student I’ve had. She’ll need a mentor who isn’t afraid to push her.” Kerrowyn hesitated, searching for the right balance of pride and humility, and found she didn’t care enough to sand down either edge. “I think you’ll like her,” she added. “Or at least, you’ll respect her.”

Iliyria did not smile, but the right corner of her mouth twitched, just for an instant. “That’s a rare endorsement. You were never fond of prodigies.”

“Most prodigies are insufferable,” Kerrowyn conceded.

“What’s her name and specialization?” Iliyria asked, now that the meeting was clearly in the realm of business, she felt herself relax a bit.

Kerrowyn considered for a moment, then gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Alavara. No last name, high elf. Conjuration, mostly.”

The name fell between them like a stone in a well. Iliyria’s hand, poised midair above her coffee cup, hovered a fraction too long. The sound of the café receded, replaced by a ringing in her ears.

Alavara.

She had not spoken that name aloud in centuries, her pain and the sting of her failure too great to surmount. It is not her, Iliyria scolded herself internally for her weakness. Alavara is a common enough elven name; it is just a cruel coincidence. She re-centered herself, meeting Kerrowyn’s gaze.

Kerrowyn registered the micro-hitch in Iliyria’s composure, a flicker so brief it would have eluded anyone not well-versed in the architecture of her face. In another era, she might have pressed the advantage, turned the moment into an interrogation or a joke; but age, or perhaps exhaustion, had improved her restraint. She reached instead for the olive-oil bread, tearing off a piece with hands as steady as ever, and let the silence gather weight.

Iliyria set her cup down and regarded the gnome across the table. There was something almost ceremonial in the way she folded her hands, a carefulness that bespoke years of diplomacy in bloodier venues than upscale cafes. “Your timing is good, actually,” she said. “We’re short on Runners at the moment, actively seeking new recruits. She’ll need to pass an interview, then a practical demonstration of her abilities. If she survives the practical, I’ll see to it that she gets a fair shake.”

Kerrowyn let out a breath, the spell of tension broken. “Thank you,” she said. “I—well. Thank you.”

Iliyria nodded, the motion measured and final. “Jarren Saurivier is my Deputy. He’ll reach out to schedule the exam. If your recommendation holds, she’ll have no difficulty impressing him.” She paused, then added, voice gentler, “I’m glad you wrote to me, Kerrowyn. I’d have hated to learn of it from a file.”

The gnome smiled, small, sharp, but real. “You’d still have handled it better than most.”

They lingered a moment, the traces of old camaraderie warring with the mutual knowledge that neither would ever fully forget or forgive. Kerrowyn’s mind ran along the old grooves: dinners in the private rooms of the Tower, debates that turned into shouting matches, the night Iliyria had confessed her terror of losing herself to the memories of decades of conflict, of atrocities too terrible to speak aloud. The flicker of candlelight in their eyes, the rare admission that for all their power, neither wizard nor war hero could guarantee the safety of the ones they cared for.

For a split second, Kerrowyn wondered what would have happened if she’d yielded, if she’d given up the frightened apprentice, let Iliyria deal justice as only Iliyria could. But she pushed the thought away. The past was fixed, immutable as the laws of magic, and whatever sorrow lingered served only as a warning for those who came after.

They parted not as enemies, nor as friends, but as women who had once understood each other, and now carried that understanding as both shield and wound.

Kerrowyn returned to the Tower, her steps lightened by the promise that, for all its strange turns, the story was about to cross a new threshold.

____________

The meeting with Jarren was arranged for a few days later, at a coffeehouse in Midtown. Alavara arrived early, as was her custom, and settled at a corner table where she could watch both the door and the alley behind it. She wore her best robe, still a castoff, but freshly laundered and patched at the elbows, and kept her hands visible on the table. She had not been this nervous in years.

Jarren Saurivier did not disappoint. He was a tall human with dark brown skin and a bald head, exuding the aura of someone who had experienced every corner of the city. Alavara recognized him as a fellow arcanist who occasionally visited the Tower. He ordered a cup of tea, waited for the server to leave, then turned to Alavara with a smile that did not touch his eyes.

“Kerrowyn tells me you’re looking for work.”

“I’m looking for something to do with my life,” Alavara corrected. “Work is secondary.”

He laughed, a single bark, more acknowledgment than amusement. “You’ll fit right in.” He regarded her for a moment, tapping a finger on the rim of his cup. “Why the APS?”

Alavara considered the question. “Because I want to use magic for something real. Not just theory.”

The answer seemed to satisfy him. He leaned back, folding his arms. “That’s honest. Most people come in with a hero complex or a death wish. Sometimes both.”

“I have neither,” said Alavara. “I just want to be useful.”

Jarren studied her, then nodded. “The next induction is in a week. I’ll put your name on the list, but you should know: it’s not easy work. Some don’t survive the first month.”

“I understand,” Alavara said.

“Meet me in the Tower practice chamber tomorrow at noon. I’ll need to assess your skills. Bring nothing but yourself and any spell foci you require. Leave everything else behind.”

She pocketed the paper without looking at it. “I’ll be there.”

Jarren finished his tea, then stood. “One more thing. Iliyria is a legend for a reason. If she likes you, she’ll make you into something worth fearing. If she doesn’t…” He left the sentence unfinished, but the meaning was clear.

“I’ll take my chances,” said Alavara, standing to leave.

Jarren Saurivier watched Alavara go, the door’s bell still jangling long after she’d vanished into the bright street. He sat a moment longer, stirring the last of his tea and letting the silence settle. The girl was promising, he thought; he’d seen dozens of would-be mages pass through the APS’s intake, some with more raw power, some with sharper tongues, but few with the particular cocktail of hunger and damage that marked the ones likely to survive.

But if he was honest, Jarren found the entire business of warning new hires about the Commander to be more a ritual than a necessity. Iliyria Sylren had a reputation for chewing up misfits and spitting out legends, and in his experience, it was always the ones who arrived with nothing to recommend them, no pedigree, no politics, that she took a particular delight in raising to ruinous competence.

Jarren finished his tea, left a tip to match his mood, and made his way across Midtown and back to the APS Headquarters.

—----------------------------

The walk back to the Tower was slower than usual. Alavara found herself replaying the meeting, dissecting every word and gesture for hidden meaning. She tried to imagine herself in the uniform, carrying out the missions Kerrowyn had described. It was still abstract, but the fear had been replaced by something else: anticipation.

She climbed the stairs to the Tower’s student wing, letting herself into her room quietly. She sat on the edge of her bed, and stared at the wall for a long time.

She felt no regret, not even for the years spent hiding from the world. If anything, the memory of her old life now seemed like a necessary preamble, a slow gathering of momentum before the leap.

She lay back, staring at the ceiling. For the first time in a long while, she wondered what it would feel like to want something; not just to survive, but to live.

Proving Grounds

The morning after Alavara’s interview, Kerrowyn found herself unable to settle. The walls of her office pressed in with the expectation of pending change; she felt it in every draft, every cold pulse of the leyline generators, every sideways glance from Hallione, who had spent the dawn hours humming with the suppressed anticipation of a child on festival day. Kerrowyn sipped her coffee and ran her finger along the sharp edge of Jarren’s note, rereading the crisp, blocky script as if it might rearrange itself into something easier.

Master Lightfoot—

I would appreciate your input on the design of Alavara’s practical. She trusts you, and I trust your judgment to push her without breaking her. If you have time, please come by the Training Hall at noon.

—Saurivier

She set the note aside, pressed both palms to the desk, and considered, not for the first time, the uneven line between the personal and professional obligation. It was not lost on her that, in the Tower’s unofficial tradition, fieldwork of this sort often doubled as a final exam for apprentices whose talents ran ahead of the syllabus. The Council frowned on unsanctioned promotions, but results, visible, public, irrefutable, were their own justification. If Alavara acquitted herself well, she would not only secure a place in the APS, but also leapfrog the interminable crawl toward the rank of Arcanist. Kerrowyn believed the girl was ready. She was less certain about the world’s readiness for Alavara.

She dressed with unusual care, choosing her robes by the strict calculus of formality, then made her way to the Training Hall. The walk there was a running argument between hope and resignation, each step accompanied by Hallione’s soft, amused commentary in the back of her mind. “She will surprise you,” Halli whispered at one stairwell, and at the next she would counter, “Or perhaps she will surprise herself.” Kerrowyn ignored the commentary, but could not help the way her hands flexed at her sides as she approached the doors.

Inside, the hall was all angles and echo, cold marble flagged underfoot and a ceiling scored with the scars of old magical disasters. Jarren Saurivier stood at the far end, arms folded, watching as Alavara limbered her hands and shoulders near the painted circle that marked the dueling pit. Pembroke watched from the back row. There were no other witnesses, save a row of battered wooden mannequins that lined one wall, each one pitted and scorched by the passage of generations of spellcraft.

“Master Lightfoot,” Jarren greeted, voice resonant in the empty space. He favored her with a quick, not-unfriendly nod. “Your student’s prompt. Ready for the demonstration?”

Kerrowyn stepped into the circle, the velvet hush of the room pulling taut. She surveyed Alavara, who stood with her feet set square, chin lifted, hands at the ready. Not defiant, never that, but completely unafraid. Jarren’s gaze flicked to Kerrowyn, a quick, silent negotiation: How hard? How far? She answered with a nearly imperceptible nod.

“Practical will be by demonstration,” she announced, pitching her voice to fill the chamber. “We want to see what you can do with a live summons. Standard containment. Nothing lethal.” She looked pointedly at Jarren. “I’d prefer not to repaint the ceiling.”

He grinned, a flash of white teeth. “No promises.”

Alavara’s pulse surged, but she let her muscles relax, focusing on the circle at the floor’s center. She could feel the thrum of leyline beneath the marble; tense, expectant, almost as if it were alive and waiting for her pulse to set the tempo. The circle was the place where theory dissolved and only willpower mattered. She stepped forward and waited for the cue.

Kerrowyn deftly harnessed the vibrant leyline energy thrumming beneath her feet, directing her consciousness toward the swirling, chaotic realms of the elemental planes. Her mind sifted through the myriad of potential creatures until she found the perfect adversaries for Alavara to conquer. With a focused intensity, she wove a complex spell that bridged the gap between worlds, drawing these formidable beings into the material plane. With a single, authoritative command, she unleashed them into the circle, her voice ringing out with clarity and purpose, “Attack.”

The circle flared, and with a thunder crack of displaced air, the first of the elementals appeared, a creature of living stone, its body a mosaic of basalt plates and obsidian shards, eyes smoldering with a dull orange radiance. It was closely followed by a second shape, this one a coiling, translucent serpent of water, its scales flickering with the reflected memory of old, drowned cities. The third, a swirling ball of living flame, and the final one, a similarly swirling creature made of a condensed, sentient wind.

Kerrowyn’s conjurations were, by her own standards, conservative: a matched set, adversaries but not executioners, difficult but not impossible. She had chosen them for their balance, and for the subtle lesson that defeating them required magic specifically targeted at each element. It was a test of improvisation, not raw power.

But as the first seconds of the duel unfolded, Kerrowyn felt the hair on her arms prickle with a wrongness she couldn’t name.

At first, it was subtle: the elementals moved with a unity that belied their disparate natures, falling into a loose formation that bespoke either fierce cunning or the invisible strings of a master puppeteer. The fire elemental circled wide to break Alavara’s line of sight, while the wind and water twined around each other in a pincer, driving her toward the stone brute that anchored their strategy. Kerrowyn frowned. She’d meant the summons as individual tests, not a coordinated assault. Had she overreached? Or—

She caught the faintest shimmer at the edge of the circle: a glimmer of lavender, the telltale sign of Hallione’s presence. The guardian spirit was not content to spectate. It pulsed through the leylines, an invisible hand bolstering the elementals’ cunning. Kerrowyn felt a surge of irritation, then a cold slither of fear.

She glanced at Jarren, whose expression was equal parts awe and wariness. He, too, had noticed something was amiss, although he would have no knowledge that it was the sentience of the Tower itself that was meddling.

Alavara’s first move was textbook. She conjured a barrier of rippling force, then darted sideways, launching a pair of dissecting rays at the fire and water elementals. But textbook was worthless here. The elementals shrugged off the attacks, the fireball splitting and reforming in a shimmering arc, the water serpent laughing off the laser with a flick of its tail. The wind elemental howled, not in pain but in delight, and spun up a local cyclone, scouring the stone tiles so violently that flecks of marble pelted Jarren’s boots at the edge of the ring.

Kerrowyn’s hand twitched toward her own focus, old panic blooming: she’d misjudged the curve, set her apprentice against a gauntlet rather than a test. Before she could voice a word, Jarren caught her eye across the pit, shook his head, and mouthed let her try, the barest smile of faith on his lips.

Less than a minute later, it was over. Alavara was spent, injured, and drained of magic, but she was standing while the elementals, defeated, dissipated back to their planes of origin. Kerrowyn sent a feeling of gratitude along with them. She didn’t know if the creatures understood, but she always preferred to thank any creature she summoned.

She looked at her student, former student now, she realized, with a mixture of shock and awe. Jarren seemed equally impressed. “I think its safe to say you have passed,” he spoke, a hint of humor in his voice, “and I think, Master Lightfoot, that this should also serve as a clear indication that Miss Alavara has earned the rank of full Arcanist. I know my own test wasn’t nearly as impressive as what we just witnessed.”

Kerrowyn simply stared, speechless, as Alavara nodded at the acknowledgment, still catching her breath. “I’ll expect you tomorrow at APS Headquarters for your first day. Congratulations.” Jarren headed towards the door, giving Kerrowyn a small smile as he left.

Kerrowyn’s jaw clenched so tight she almost cracked a molar. At the edge of her vision, the lavender haze of Hallione’s magic shimmered a mocking, satisfied pulse. The Tower’s sentience, for all its infinity of time and intellect, had never once learned the difference between challenge and sadism. She sent a silent, blistering curse into the leyline: Next time you interfere, I will bottle your essence and use you as an exam prop for first-years. You nearly killed her.

Kerrowyn felt the answering ripple in the leylines, a smug curl at the edges of her consciousness. The presence withdrew, abashed but not contrite.

She swept across the training floor, standing by Alavara, who was now levering herself upright with both hands splayed against the sweat-cold floor.

“You did well,” she said, and it should have sounded triumphant, but it felt like a reprimand. “You did incredibly well.”

Alavara, for her part, was not so easily congratulated. The wild hum of battle lingered in her fingers; sweat stung her eyes, and every bone in her body trembled with aftershock. For a harrowing interval, she’d been certain the circle would be her undoing.

But then she had found, in the heat of the trial, a kind of clarity unknown to her before: the elementals did not simply attack, but hunted, filling the space with coordinated, alien purpose. She had matched their unity with her own; one desperate gambit after another, chaining together defensive wards, splitting focus, sapping every iota of power from the leyline and at last, for the briefest moment, becoming the very force she was meant to stand against.

It had not been elegant, but it had worked.

Kerrowyn took Alavara to retrieve a healing potion for her wounds, then led her, as soon as they'd left the hum and scrutiny of the infirmary, up four silent flights of stair to the cluttered sanctum that was Kerrowyn's office.

Inside, Lynx was waiting, perched on the edge of an overfilled bookshelf and watching them with the narrow-eyed patience of a creature who had seen all flavors of Tower melodrama.

Kerrowyn rummaged in a desk drawer, muttering to herself in the old Lightfoot dialect. At last she found what she wanted: a small box, fitted inlaid wood, lacquered in a deep indigo, and pressed it into Alavara’s palm. “I meant to give you this at a celebratory dinner, but you looked like you might faint if I made you wait another hour.” She popped the lid. Inside, nestled on dark velvet, was a silver ring set with a single pearl

Alavara looked up, uncertain. “A ring?”

“Not just any ring,” Kerrowyn said, her voice gentle. “It’s a holding focus. Stores excess spell energy. You’ll need it where you’re going.” She hesitated, then added, “And it’s traditional, in the Tower. A sort of… graduation token. My teacher gave me one, and I nearly lost a finger to it the first time I overloaded the damn thing.”

Alavara slid the ring onto her finger. She feared it would be too large, but the band contracted to fit her perfectly. “Thank you,”

At first, Kerrowyn did not meet Alavara’s gaze; she busied herself with the detritus of the desk, aligning pencils, smoothing text, performing the thousand petty rituals of those who had learned to guard their hearts against the sight of pride or gratitude. Hallione shimmered in the corner, all but invisible to the naked eye, but the cadence of her satisfaction was obvious to Kerrowyn.

“Don’t get sentimental,” Kerrowyn said, which might have been admonition or self-defense. “First day’s tomorrow. You’ll want rest.”

Alavara, perhaps recognizing the moment for what it was, did not press or linger. She nodded, rose, and departed, her footsteps light and unhurried. Kerrowyn waited until the door shut behind her, then slumped against the battered leather of her chair and allowed herself, just for a moment, the unmitigated joy of having done something right.