Flinging Rocks at Bureaucrats in a Magical Academy

She stood just inside the gate, silent enough that her presence hadn’t even registered on the perimeter alarm thread.

He flinched slightly. “How long have you been standing there?”

She tilted her head a fraction. “Mentor Lugano requires your assistance.” She hadn’t answered his question, which just made him more aware of how sweaty his palms were and how ridiculous he must’ve looked lobbing pebbles at a scarecrow like he was trying to offend it into submission.

“And he sent you?”

“He asked his mentees. I volunteered.”

Sometimes Fabrisse forgot that Veliane was also a mentee of Lorvan. She was sharp and poised, articulate in five languages and a terror in structured invocation trials. People said she’d written her own echo-thread parsing method in her first year in the Synod, which would mean she was only fifteen at that time, and no one had disproved it. It was incredible how she started studying four years later than other people and had progressed so quickly she was now only a class below Severa.

And she was Lorvan’s student.

Just like him.

The comparison made his stomach twist.

What must that feel like? To mentor someone like Veliane Veist—an Exemplar in training, already halfway to crafting a codex before her certification exams—and then pivot immediately into tutoring him?

He’d seen the teaching sequence chart once by accident. Veliane had Lorvan for Structured Resonance on Tuesdays. Fabrisse came right after her on Wednesdays.

Fabrisse kicked the nearest pebble with the toe of his boot and immediately regretted it. He would have to walk a further distance to retrieve it.

“Well,” he said, brushing dust from his sleeve, “what does he need?”

Veliane rubbed her cheek with the back of her thumb. That was one of the few weird ticks Fabrisse had observed from her. “Assistance,” she replied. “We are to assist him with some codex-crafting.”

“We? As in you and me?” Fabrisse felt a slight flush on his own cheeks.

“Yes. Do you want to grab a pie before this? I don’t think there’s any mingleberry left, but we can get mulberry.”

He wanted to say yes. He wanted to say yes so much. But the better part of him was sniffing out all the weirdness.

She hasn’t once talked to me since the failed confession, and now just after I’ve bound with the Eidralith, she’s offering me pie?

“That’d be fine,” he replied, still. Why did I say that?

“Nice,” she said with a small smile. Her smile was so elegant, like the curve of a sealing rune.

Okay, maybe that smile is the reason why . . .

“Can I get a cup of water first?” He asked. The System had urged him to drink more.

“How about tea?”

“That’s fine,” he nodded.

I asked for water though . . .

The moment Fabrisse walked out of the training field, he received a notification.

[Training Completed: +38 EXP]

[Progress to Level 5: 891/1500]

Today’s training had been less fruitful than his last. Yesterday, he’d gained 79 EXP.

They walked in near silence for the first few minutes.

Veliane didn’t seem to notice—or didn’t care—that Fabrisse kept glancing sideways at her every time she stepped slightly ahead. Her hair was a strangely enigmatic emerald, and her skin was too fair for her to not stand out. Not only that, she walked in quiet and efficient strides, like another version of Severa’s.

Wicked dragon balls, why must there exist such a beautiful woman?

“Did Lorvan say what kind of codex it is?” Fabrisse finally asked, because silence was growing fangs.

“Pattern-weave, I believe. Possibly linguistic.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “He asked for assistance with contrast-ink formatting and symbol pairing. I volunteered for the formatting.”

Fabrisse frowned. “That means I’m on symbol pairing?”

Veliane nodded. “I’ve seen your glyph sketches. They’re legible.”

“. . . Thanks?”

She glanced at him. “That was a compliment.”

Pattern-Weave was one of the oldest codex architectures in recorded thaumaturgy. It was used to design magical codices, which were books or scrolls that executed spells rather than simply describing them. Other uses included automated reactions to aetheric stimuli—like a passive shield activating when danger is near, constructing magical devices, constructs, or wards that run without constant caster attention, and other uses Fabrisse had yet to learn about. The codex usually wasn’t linear; the glyphs bent back on themselves, each one modifying the next like the lines of a recursive chant. Weaves like that didn’t reveal their meaning until the full structure clicked into place: fragile, temperamental, but brilliant when done right.

Fabrisse checked his skill list again. The only Pattern Recognition skill he had was Pattern Intuition (Rank I). He seemed underqualified for this job, to say the least.

They passed the East Clockline, and the outer tier of the Hall of Codex Theory came into view, its tall hexagonal tower marked with shimmerstruck glyphs and a central dome that pulsed faintly with arcane memory. Then they reached the pie shop and Veliane ordered some mulberry pie and two cups of chamomile tea.

“I’ll pay for this one, as I’m the one inviting,” Veliane said to him with a smile. He didn’t object.

Mulberry pie was his third-most favorite pie, and also the third-most susceptible to falling victim to his Scoot of Dire Retrieval. He’d eaten more than a dozen of those from the scullery without anyone knowing. Although they changed the crust and used a cheaper flour blend for this week, it was still more than acceptable.

There was little chit-chatting between them besides how flaky the crust was. Eventually, though, Veliane glanced at him over the edge of her cup.

“What’s it like,” she asked, “being in a class with Severa?”

Fabrisse chewed more slowly. He made sure to swallow the food before speaking, “Intense. You always get the sense she’s already thought three layers ahead of you. Or the instructant.”

“She always seems like that,” Veliane agreed. “Though not always to her benefit. I wish she could overthink a bit less and be a bit less rigid.”

He offered a noncommittal nod, then deflected. “I heard you once sat in on a lecture three semesters above your cycle?” Tommaso had told him about it, since he went to that lecture too.

“Twice,” she said. “The first time, I understood only half.”

Fabrisse took a bite of pie to avoid having to say anything about her subtle flex.

She didn’t press. Soon, they moved again.

They passed through the North Aetherwalk on their way to Lorvan’s building, where the outer archway was, of course, flanked by yet another mural of Thaumarch Muradius, one of the twenty-something painted on the walls throughout the campus. This one depicted him wreathed in golden aether, both arms extended as he parted a field of blightspawn with what looked like sheer force of will. Above him, in Old Synodic script, the plaque read: ‘He Who Aligned the World Through Sacrifice.’ It didn’t roll off the tongue well.

The building where Lorvan’s office was based loomed over them not in height, but in presence. Like most structures within the Synod’s inner cloister, it bore the hallmarks of reverence disguised as academia. Vaulted archways framed the entrance, their curvatures inlaid with etched script so fine it could only be read by tracing it with focused glyphsense.

The architecture made no effort to be warm, and it’d successfully sent chills down Fabrisse’s spine. The more he stared at the building, the more he realized there were so many people more fit to be in that kind of building than himself. He slowed, just a little. “Why did you volunteer to come find me?” he asked.

Veliane didn’t pause. “Because I was available.”

“That’s it?” That was a factual answer. Which meant it might also be a lie. He wasn’t saying Veliane Veist was lying, but generally, people wrapped motives in facts all the time.

“That’s it.” Then, after a moment, she added, “Also, I know the others would’ve asked you too many questions.”

He blinked. “About the Eidralith?”

“And about why you’ve been avoiding your peers.”

He didn’t think he’d been avoiding his peers. It wasn’t like he talked to too many people before the incident.

As they reached the entry stairs to Lorvan’s office, Veliane suddenly said, “Montreal seems mad at you.”

Fabrisse stopped. Of course Veliane Veist would have seen them together. Veist was probably Severa’s number one fan.

“She didn’t take to the Eidralith binding very well,” Fabrisse muttered.

“Understandable. Though I’m sure there’s a reason behind the artifact choosing you,” she said. The way she delivered her line sounded diplomatic to Fabrisse.

The large door to Lorvan’s office—a darkgrain metal blend with passive echo-barrier etchings—opened before they could knock.