NOVEL NEXT Chapter 100: She’d lost a pen trying to fight off the void, while he’d lost nothing
Professor Kaldrin was a young man, much younger than Fabrisse had expected from a professor. He was likely no older than twenty-eight, and probably still younger than Lorvan. Clean-shaven with well-proportioned features, he looked like someone who'd once modeled for Synod recruitment posters. His dark hair was combed back with just enough deliberation to suggest effort without vanity. If you ignored the ragged slice torn into the side of his undershirt and the grime streaking the hem of his cloak, he looked remarkably put-together—smartly dressed in neatly tailored layers, a professor's badge gleaming just beneath his collarbone.
The classroom they found was forgotten. Dust clung to the old stone trim and the scent of dried ink hung in the tip of Fabrisse tongue, irremovable, like it hadn't been used in decades. A few of the wall slats bore holes where light leaked in, too high and too sharp-edged to be proper windows. One of them looked like a collapsed ward frame. Even the mounted illumination glyphs hadn't held a charge in years. Nobody taught here anymore. Nobody was supposed to be here.
Kaldrin had told Fabrisse and Celine that his wound was but a scratch, but he had all but collapsed into the nearest chair the moment they moved into an empty classroom across from the refectory. He exhaled slowly, gripping the edge of the desk with white knuckles as he eased himself down. At least Fabrisse couldn't see any further bleeding. The self-healing had worked.
Celine seemed to have remembered everything, well, at least up until the point her eyes rolled to the back of her head. She had at least calmed herself enough to no longer mutter apologies on repeat, but she still looked pretty dazed. She wrung the hem of her sleeve in tight little twists, and her hazelnut eyes darted between Kaldrin's wound and the closed door, as if expecting the Void-wrapped thing to burst through at any moment.
"So . . . um. Should I contact Archmagus Rolen?" Fabrisse kneeled down across from Kaldrin.
"I've already done it, but you should update him with our current location."
"I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Zonas Kaldrin," he said, voice level but grave. "My primary field is artifact resonance, specifically Pre-Order artifacts."
Celine hadn't quite regained her composure judging from her shaky voice. "Pre-Order?"
"That is, relics created before the First Codification of Magic. In this case—" His eyes swept briefly to Fabrisse. "—the Eidralith. I was its last warden before accepting a professorship."
Fabrisse's brows shot up. "You were with the Eidralith?"
Kaldrin gave a slow nod. "For half a decade. Which is why Archmagus Rolen summoned me. The Synod has long had a department responsible for the Eidralith, and they're forming a research task force to study the Eidralith's instability. Or rather, to find the cause of it. I was also supposed to become your guardian, Mr. Kestovar." He turned to Fabrisse. "But then you got attacked."
Fabrisse held his breath. Nobody said anything, so Kaldrin continued, "The moment I arrived, you were ambushed. So after some rather urgent deliberation, I was folded into the investigation team. We came to the conclusion it would be easier to capture the aggressor if I was not publicly present as your guardian." He shook his head. "But we've vastly underestimated their capabilities and cunning, perhaps."
Fabrisse narrowed his eyes. "There's an investigation team?" All of this had been happening behind his back, and he'd had no knowledge of it at all.
"There is," Kaldrin said quietly. "Its exact makeup is confidential, for now. But you'll be working with some of them soon enough."
Kaldrin's gaze landed on Celine. She had curled into herself in the corner of the classroom's long desk.
"Miss Moose, isn't it?" Kaldrin asked in as measured a voice as he could possibly muster. "Are you alright now?"
Celine looked at him, wide-eyed like a lost doe. She gave a quick little nod, then another, as though the second would make the first more believable. "Y-yes. I think so. I'm sorry I— I didn't mean to— I just—"
"You don't need to apologize for being afraid," Kaldrin said as he pressed his golden-glowed palm on his wound again. His anger had subsided, and he tried to not think too hard about the situation, because he knew he'd get mad at Celine if he did. She'd lost a pen trying to fight off the void, while he'd lost nothing. Yeah. No point getting mad at those suffering greater losses.
"What happened to her?" Fabrisse asked.
"That whip didn't do serious damage, but it had a neuro-freezing effect. You were both going to be human dolls in that realm, and I have no doubt the spellcaster was skilled enough to fold the void realm into a small containment glyph to discreetly carry around."
"That said," he continued, tone still soft but more deliberate now, "back in the hall, you mentioned something about your tipster."
Kaldrin heard it too? He must've been following us for longer than I thought.
The Professor continued, "And you kept apologizing like it was your fault the thing found us. I'd like to understand what you meant by that."
Celine cast her gaze to the ground and swallowed. "I didn't mean for it to go like that," she muttered in a voice barely above a whisper.
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Nobody said anything. Celine exhaled shakily and rubbed the back of her neck. "I . . . I run an unofficial news channel. Mostly just harmless student gossip and bits I pick up from staff and visiting dignitaries. Nothing big. I've got . . . tipsters, you could say. Friends. People who like to talk if I—never mind."
Kaldrin didn't respond, and neither did Fabrisse—who had frozen slightly at the word tipster. Celine caught the shift and hurried on. "A week ago, someone I'd worked with before messaged me through one of the secured glyphs and asked if I could help him set up a private meeting with Kestovar. He said he just wanted five minutes alone."
Kaldrin's brow furrowed. "And you agreed?"
"I knew he was one of those artifact obsessives," Celine cast her gaze even lower. "You know, the kind that memorizes containment glyphs for fun and worships anything with a relic bound to their name. And . . . He looked broody, but I didn't think it was anything sinister. He was offering two thousand kohn."
Fabrisse's eyebrows lifted. "Two thousand?" How could there not be anything sinister if he was dropping that amount of cash?
"That's more than two weeks' pay for an instructant," Kaldrin murmured. "And four times a Magus's base stipend."
Celine nodded miserably. "I thought there was no way anything could go wrong. The meeting spot was a public space, and he was a registered student. I didn't think he'd—" Her voice broke. "I didn't know he'd not be . . . human."
"What's his name?" Kaldrin asked. "Which Department does he belong to?"
Celine flinched. "Rimmar Ciemnosc."
No way.
"I asked around, and he was listed in the Department of Glyph Theory under the name Rimmar Ciemnosc. I've met him once before at a lecture on deepwater resonance. He kept scribbling down footnotes and asking what brands of pen certain researchers used. I thought—" her voice faltered again, "I thought he was just lonely."
That's the real name. His sister is literally my tutor.
"What does he look like?" Fabrisse couldn't sit still anymore. His nerves had frayed to threads, and the classroom suddenly felt far too small. He stood abruptly, drawing a glance from Kaldrin and a small flinch from Celine, but he didn't say anything. Instead, he paced to the far wall where the tall holes spilled dusklight onto a cluster of desks as Celine listed the features of Rimmar Ciemnosc.
They all matched: dark circles, always hunched, sometimes wearing a hood indoors, and casting spells in grayscale.
But that couldn't be right. There was no way he would've been that obvious. Rimmar must've been used as redirection.
"If that's a student," Kaldrin added, "it might be the case that the spellcaster used some sort of shapeshifting ability. They've turned into High Magus Kairon before."
Shapeshifting, in the context of Thaumaturgy, was considered an advanced form of recursive spell structuring, and one of the highest-order applications of aetherform manipulation. The only affinity Fabrisse had heard could attempt convincing and human-like shapeshifting was Flesh Thaumaturgy, a tribryd of Fire, Water, AND Earth, and while that school of practice wasn't banned, it was gross.
"Can Void Thaumaturges create human-like shapeshifts?" Fabrisse asked.
Kaldrin pressed a hand to his side, breath hitching as a fresh wave of pain crept up his ribs. "Void?" he echoed, jaw tight. "Not truly. They simulate images to cloak the mind and force perceptions to misalign. It's an illusion, but not a meaningful transformation." He winced again and leaned heavily against the table. "I'm a professor of Applied Symbolic Systems. I grade theses on recursive glyph drift. I'm not supposed to be bleeding in a hallway."
Fabrisse couldn't quite look Kaldrin in the eyes anymore; not after he'd said that. He was starting to doubt his decision not reporting to the Order-visiting archmagi. Terevin Sil and Lellian Dir seemed like even more powerful figures than those in the Synod, and he had no way to know if Rolen didn't have any ulterior motive for not wanting to escalate this case to a higher authority. It seemed very clear that Rolen was relying on his personal detail which might be limited in options, and from Kaldrin's inadequate showing, he felt an urgent need to demand more decisive action from Rolen himself.
But they've gone through the trouble to protect me. I can't possibly demand more than this.
Then he'd have to be strategic with what he had. To catch the perpetrator, once and for good.
He turned away from the others, letting his eyes trace the fractured outline of one of the slanted holes in the wall. It wasn't like the others. This one was taller, almost perfectly vertical, but there was nothing that suggested it was properly carved. A vein-fracture, maybe—when liquid or something buried deep in the substrate cooled too quickly under pressure. It could cause the rock to split from within, leaving a path that looked unnatural, almost architectural. The fact that it aligned so closely with the wall was probably just a coincidence.
He approached it, half-hoping for a distraction. The dusklight spilled in unnaturally, too strong for this hour. And as he neared, the hair on his arms prickled. Something about the light angle didn't make sense. It wasn't coming from the sun, but some sort of aetheric lighting.
Fabrisse squinted. Beyond the slit was the outside gardens, illuminated under the glyphlight network that ran along the campus paths.
And standing in the middle of it, as if in some performance staged for his benefit, was Severa Montreal.
Even from here, she looked pristine. Her braids, lacquered into stillness with rose-gold beads, caught the light at perfect intervals. She moved through a sequence of advanced crystalform arrays, each one executed with exacting precision—conjuring floating, reflective geometries with no visible focus vector.
Her mentor, Rubidi, stood behind her with their arms crossed, nodding once in a while but not interfering.
It all seemed perfectly normal until the smoke started curling in.
Not mist. Smoke. It slithered between the hedges and rose up in languid arcs before coalescing into a figure with impossible smoothness. Fabrisse knew that outline.
Archmagus Lellian Dir.
What in the Flamus are they doing together?
The smoke solidified into him, tall and composed, hair unbound and floating as if underwater. He greeted Rubidi and Severa calmly, exchanged a few words Fabrisse couldn't hear, and Severa gave a small, deliberate bow.
Then Lellian turned back into smoke, like he was never a person at all. The fog rippled backward into the trees.
Without hesitation, Rubidi and Severa followed.
Why's Severa here? The attack happened so close to her. Could it really be a coincidence, given the only lead he had right now was Elon Montreal's Pre-Binding Codex?
Out of all the Archmagus claiming to want him under them, Lellian Dir was the only one who hadn't approached. Had he been spending this time doing something else; something more malicious?
The door to the classroom opened. Fabrisse turned.
Mikhael Rolen had entered the room.