He wasn’t that late.
By the ti Fabrisse slipped back into the lecture hall, he was only thirty-nine minutes late, which ant there were still a whole eleven minutes of the first lecture left. That qualified as salvageable, by his standards.
He activated everything: Veil of Sha, Liminal Presence Drift, Auditory Dissipation Field, Aetheric Veil: Echofold, everything. He layered it with two minor suppression habits he didn’t even think of as spells anymore: gaze-avoidance, posture minimization, and the practiced art of becoming background.
It usually worked. Students rarely questioned it.
Unfortunately, he was directly in the line of sight of Professor Ake.
The professor’s gaze stopped just behind him, resting a handspan off his left shoulder. His gaze was precisely wrong in the way Echofold always made things wrong, as if Fabrisse existed half a second out of phase with himself.
“… and resonance collapse occurs when intention outruns structure,” Ake kept lecturing. Fabrisse heaved a sigh of relief. Maybe Ake would let it pass.
“Mr. Kestovar,” Ake called. “Impressive showing of disposition spell, but I suggest you deactivate it before it develops the poor habit of wasting effort while looking positively swamp-sculpted.”
He’d already deployed Shadowed Reposition Protocol. It was too late to stop now.
One heartbeat he was standing in the aisle, then space folded with a muted shiver, and he reappeared beside an empty seat at the back row. Then everyone turned. At least they didn’t see what he’d done. Still, his robes were damp, his knees caked in mud, and a lone duck feather stubbornly lodged in his hair despite repeated attempts to brush it out. Everyone had seen that.
It wasn’t just that he was late. Or that he looked like he’d been dragged backwards through a wet hedge.
It was that he was The Chosen One now.
He sat down. Professor Ake sighed. “… As I was saying,” he continued, turning back to the diagram, “structure must always precede ambition.”
At least fifty-two pairs of eyes, combined from two different classes, stared at him like he’d grown a second head, and the second one had better posture. One of them blinked with genuine awe. Another narrowed in suspicion. Soone—probably Vex Aldoran with the perpetually judgntal cheekbones—whispered sothing to the girl next to him, who then imdiately tried to look like she wasn’t staring.
As Fabrisse slid into his seat, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, he heard soone behind him whisper, “That’s him.”
Soone else whispered back, “Did you see the notification post? He actually unlocked the Eidralith.”
And another, “Why does he still look like a wet goblin?”
He sank deeper into his seat.
If this was what being special felt like, he wasn’t sure he liked it.
But still, he patted the satchel. The Stupenstone was warm.
Fabrisse kept his eyes down, trying to will himself into the cracks between floor tiles. The murmurs kept multiplying; he was certain they were breeding now. Sowhere behind him, soone furiously whispered about Eidralith protocol violations. Another voice ntioned ‘residual contamination’ like it was a communicable disease.
Professor Ake coughed. “Now, we will examine the effect of emotional interference on spell structure.” He set the chalk down and clasped his hands behind his back.
The students’ attention, rcifully, returned to him.
“Understanding magic requires understanding what you bring into it. You have been told that emotion empowers magic,” Ake continued. “That without feeling, a spell lacks force. This is incomplete. It biases it. Depending on the emotion you choose, it can alter priority, timing, and tolerance for error. So emotions work wonders with the spell you choose; others do nothing; so actively work against your spell. Let give you an illustration.”
The students grew silent. Even the chronic whisperers leaned forward. This was the part they liked.
People enjoyed Ake’s lectures because he actually applied live spellcasting during theory. Fabrisse understood the appeal. Ake made theory feel earned, not inherited. Unfortunately, it also vividly reminded him of everything he could not do.
Suddenly, the Eidralith gave him a quest.
[Tutorial Quest Received: Emotional Modulation: A Comparative Study]
Objective: Observe the sa spell cast using the sa emotion, perford by two different spellcasters with different levels of Emotional Understanding.
Reward: 150 EXP
1 EMO
Observe? It just wants to learn?
Ake turned, as if making a decision.
“For this,” he said, “we will require a spell sufficiently complex that emotional interference is visible.”
A low murmur passed through the hall.
“Fire,” Ake continued, calm as ever. “Rare variant. Controlled output.”
A few students inhaled sharply. Fabrisse did too, before he could stop himself.
Rare Fire spells weren’t just harder. They were unforgiving, at least for students who never put the right kind of effort into restraint. Fire already resisted containnt; rare expressions amplified precision demands instead of power.
Ake raised one hand and made no other gesture aside from the bare minimum. He didn’t even chant.
[Spell Cast: Pyric Formulation, Rare, Rank IV]
Oh? Eidralith could tell what spells are cast, and the spells’ level of sophistication as well?
The fire took the form of a suspended spiral column, no wider than Ake’s forearm, composed of interlocking arcs that never touched. Each curve held at a fixed distance from the next, rotating at a speed just slow enough for Fabrisse to gawk at its ingenuity.
Axial symtry, maintained by counter-rotational torque. Radial spacing constant to within—what—two grains of chalk dust? Less? The gaps are buffered, too. Inert aether channels, probably, acting as thermal breaks so the arcs couldn’t rge even if the resonance wobbled.
The spiral wasn’t actually continuous. It was a stack of micro-loops, each one a closed pyric circuit, nested and offset along the vertical axis. If one failed, it wouldn’t cascade. The rest would persist. Fault tolerance in a fire spell.
His finger tapped furiously on the side of his satchel.
Who does that? That’s so clever.
Ake let the spiral persist for another breath, then dismissed it with a precise flick of intent. The fire collapsed.
“Now,” Ake said, “we introduce emotion. This, is calm.”
The spell reford.
[Spell Cast: Pyric Formulation, Rare, Rank IV]
[Emotional Modulator Detected: Calm]
The spiral column returned in the sa configuration—sa axial symtry, sa nested micro-loops, sa elegant counter-rotation—but this ti it was accompanied by faint, twinkling motes of beige light. They drifted lazily along the outer boundary of the spell, like dust caught in a sunbeam, never quite touching the fire itself.
He could see the changes: the edges were tighter. Where the previous iteration had occupied its full permitted radius, this one pulled in. The inert aether buffers thickened. The variance between the gaps dropped to sothing absurdly small.
“Observe,” Ake said, gesturing lightly toward the spell. “Calm biases a spell toward sustainability. It reduces bleed, stabilizes resonance boundaries, and increases tolerance for minor structural imperfections.” He glanced at the spiral. “Note the reduced edge turbulence.”
“The cost,” Ake continued, “is output. Calm discourages excess. A spell cast this way will rarely exceed its minimum necessary expression. You gain duration and control. You surrender force.”
[Modulator Effect: Calm (96% Understanding)]
Casting Duration: 29%
Spell Stability: 29%
Aetheric Bleed: −29%
Peak Output Modifier: −11%
So much upside. Why wouldn’t you cast like this all the ti?
However, Ake was operating at a 96% understanding of the emotion. What if soone with a lesser understanding cast it? This must be what the Eidralith was trying to teach him.
Ake studied the calm-ford spiral for a mont longer, then let it dissolve.
“Now,” he said, “we change the variable. This is rage.”
The spell ignited.
[Spell Cast: Pyric Formulation, Rare, Rank IV]
[Emotional Modulator Detected: Rage]
The crowd gasped.
The spiral reappeared—but it was not the sa spiral.
The arcs were thicker now, their spacing uneven. The clean gaps between micro-loops narrowed, so brushing close enough that Fabrisse flinched, expecting them to rge. Rotation accelerated, but not uniformly. The beige motes were gone, replaced by violent tongues of red-orange light snapping off the structure like thrown embers.
It had lost its neat beauty.
“Rage,” Ake said, voice calm enough to be almost ironic, “prioritizes release. It accelerates ignition, amplifies output, and pushes energy aggressively. But it does not care for patience or symtry.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on . Report any occurrences elsewhere.
The micro-loops were collapsing into partial arcs. Fault tolerance was gone. If one failed now, it’d cascade straight down the stack.
[Rage Modulation Detected (92% Understanding)]
Peak Output Modifier: 41%
Ignition Speed: 33%
Structural Stability: −27%
Aetheric Bleed: -27%
The spiral shuddered. One arc blazed brighter than the rest before Ake dismissed the spell entirely.
“Rage is not incorrect,” Ake said. “It is simply ill-suited here. You will see it far more often in battlecasting, where imdiacy matters more than longevity.” He glanced over the hall and concluded. “Emotion is not fuel. It is bias. Choose poorly, and even a perfect spell becos a liability.”
Ake dismissed the residual heat with a curt gesture, and the lecture hall slowly exhaled. The tension bled out of the benches in a series of quiet shuffles and whispered breaths.
“We’ll reconvene in ten minutes,” Ake said, already turning back toward his notes. The spell residue faded.
He knew this. He had known it since second term. Emotional bias matrices, modulation curves, the way calm damped variance and rage spiked output at the cost of coherence—this had all been on the midterm. He’d scored well. He still had the notes.
But the notes had never sparked, and never ca with percentage points. Seeing the modifiers move in real ti, stitched directly onto spellform, made sothing click uncomfortably into place. Maybe this was why Ake demonstrated instead of just lecturing. He’d always thought Ake’s demonstrations were… indulgent. Pedagogical theater. Maybe he’d been wrong after all.
The instant the benches began to scrape and people started doing that dangerous thing where they rembered he existed, he slipped for the aisle. Cool. Great lecture. Learned things. Quest progress. Ti to vanish.
Outside, the corridor air was cooler and slled of damp wards. Fabrisse leaned his shoulder against the wall and let himself breathe.
Okay.
That was… actually really cool.
He replayed the spell in his head. The quest was halfway done. He frowned.
Observe the sa spell cast using the sa emotion, perford by two different spellcasters with different levels of Emotional Understanding.
Ake counted as one.
Which ant—
He glanced back toward the lecture hall doors, already knowing the answer.
—there was absolutely no one else in there who could do that.
This was the kind of thing students wrote papers about, not sothing they casually demonstrated between lectures. Even the overachievers. Especially the overachievers—they tended to blow things up. You couldn’t just ask soone: Excuse , could you please demonstrate a high-tier rare pyric construct with emotional modulation for my mysterious glowing artifact?
He looked up, and realized there was this one particular overachiever who could probably cast every single Rare Fire spell in existence. And she was walking towards his general direction.
Severa Montreal.
He stifled a groan. No, I can’t ask her. She’s going to tear apart just from daring to open my mouth. Her ntor had already looked ready to murder during the Vothiculum ceremony.
I can’t just—what—walk up and volunteer myself for public execution? No, no, that’d be—
“Kestovar. Do you have a mont?”
The na didn’t register at first. It hit his ears, bounced, and slid off. A second passed.
“Kestovar. You cannot just pretend I don’t exist this ti.” Then the voice replayed, with the sa pitch and the sa unmistakable Severa Montreal precision.
His brain perford a frantic context refresh. He blinked several tis, and his attention finally finished rearranging itself. Severa was standing directly in front of him.
His shoulder squared on instinct.
“I—” His mouth engaged before his thoughts finished lining up. He stopped, recalibrated. “Yes.”
Severa had this look on her that she reserved for problems that should not exist. Her expression was composed, almost immaculate. But her crimson eyes were sharp with contained heat, a precision anger that had been asured, weighed, and found justified.
She was standing closer than necessary. He registered the distance, concluded it was probably intimidation, and forgot to move.
“We need to have a conversation.” She folded her arms.
Fabrisse’s brain produced three escape routes in rapid succession. All of them were bad.
“I think,” he said, already edging sideways, “that whatever this is, it might be more efficient if we scheduled it for a later—”
Severa stepped forward and placed one hand flat against the stone beside his head. He instinctively moved back. The corridor wall was cool against his shoulder blade. The distance between them vanished.
She was, objectively, smaller than him. Noticeably so. A full head shorter than him, and with a build so frail it didn’t seem like she’d ever one been required to haul field equipnt or sprint from collapsing wards. If anyone were watching, her pinning him in place would have looked absurd.
Severa said, “Do not finish that sentence.”
He swallowed. “I was just going to say—”
His gaze fixed on a point sowhere near her collarbone—safely non-eye-contact, safely neutral, except that now he was close enough to register details he would have preferred not to process. The fiery burn radiating through her robes. The clean scent of spell-ink and ozone. The way her breath stayed steady and even.
“You’re not leaving,” Severa said. “The last ti you tried to do this, you missed Fire Affinity. I intervened, and you arrived with forty-three seconds to spare. Have you elevated your fire attunent to a self-sustaining threshold since then? I assu not.”
He stayed silent. She was right. He had an 8% Affinity with Fire, and Severa Montreal was, by conservative estimate, personally responsible for six of it.
“I have a lecture,” Fabrisse said at last. His voice ca out steadier than he felt. “Emotional Dynamics. It starts in eight minutes. I am attending it.”
She huffed. “That’s your preferred tactic. You affect ignorance.”
“… What?”
“The Eidralith,” she snarled. “You geological catastrophe.”
“Oh.” It took him another second of staring before his throat unlocked enough to produce sound. “… What about it?”
She glared at him. “Have you bound with it?”
Oh.
Oh no.
He could not tell her. He absolutely could not tell her that the Eidralith had greeted him with so sort of apparition overlay, issued tutorial quests, and begun rewriting his understanding of aether in quantified incrents like it had been waiting specifically for him.
“Kestovar,” Severa said. “You are silent.”
“… No.”
Her gaze narrowed. “So that ans you were unable to bind with it, then.” She tilted her head. “In which case, the artifact would clearly be better served in soone else’s hands.”
He said nothing.
Severa watched the silence like it was an answer in itself. “Do you know,” she asked, “that there is a thod to unbind artifacts?”
“What?” The word ca out too fast. He knew exactly what she was suggesting. He hated that he knew.
“It is quite simple,” Severa said. “If you are a dungeon delver—though I assu you are not—you know that Rare-tier artifacts and above require a binding to function. Once bound, no one else may wield them.”
“I… I know that much. But the Eidralith is legendary. I’ve never heard of a legendary artifact changing hands.”
“There is a thod. I have identified a tested procedure to safely transfer a bind after artifact awakening.” Her eyes locked onto his. “And you will cooperate with .”
“I can’t just do what you say…”
“Then what are you going to do with it?” she shot back. “Sit by a pond and catalogue rocks indefinitely?”
“I— No. I do other things.”
“Such as?”
He searched frantically for sothing clever and impressive. Nothing ca.
“As I suspected.” Severa exhaled, already done with that avenue. “Very well. Let us be practical. We will make a deal. Tell what you want, and I will provide it. Is it money you need? A guaranteed passing grade? Or both?” A pause. “I have access to High Exemplar–level tutors. I can arrange referrals.” Her lip twitched. “I would even be willing to allocate my own ti to tutoring you, should it prove necessary.”
She was dismissive as ever, like she was offering to water a plant.
Fabrisse glanced around, suddenly acutely aware of the corridor.
“We can’t talk about this here,” he muttered. “People will hear.”
Severa’s mouth curved. She lifted one finger and tapped the air. The corridor remained silent. Too silent.
“Please,” she said. “I activated a suppression field the mont I approached you. It is specifically calibrated for academic corridors. We have been alone since I arrived. If you were paying attention, you would have noticed.” She let the silence sit. “The fact that you did not rather illustrates the difficulty.”
He winced.
She continued anyway, “The Eidralith deserves a wielder who can tell when soone else uses magic, Kestovar.”
Okay… But why should that weilder be you… You failed to invoke it. You couldn’t even make it respond.
Saying that out loud would be catastrophic. Severa Montreal did not react to contradiction; she detonated under it. He had seen her dismantle an upper-year duelist for less.
“Montreal…” He glanced around. “People are staring.”
She followed his gaze.
A few students had indeed paused, their attention caught by proximity if not sound. Among them were a pair of erald eyes. They were unmistakable. Clear, steady, unreadable in the way that ant actively processing. Below them, hair the sa deep green, smooth and carefully kept, falling to her shoulders in a neat, unhurried line as if it had never known panic or haste.
Veliane Veist stood half a corridor away, looking directly at them. She didn’t look away when he noticed. She did not frown. She did not smile. She did not whisper to the student beside her or pretend to be interested in the notice board. She simply watched, with the kind of look soone gave a puzzle box just before they started solving it.
Heat crept up the back of Fabrisse’s neck. His thoughts scattered, previously aligned around Severa now abruptly, catastrophically aware of witnesses. Of her.
Severa huffed once, released her pin on him, and stepped back. “Very well. This conversation is not concluded. We will revisit it,” Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “Soon.”
Then she turned, heels clicking against the stone as she stepped past him.
He suddenly rembered the quest. I need a second caster for the spell Pyric Formulation!
“Oh—wait.” The word ca out sharper than he intended, slicing straight through the space Severa had already ntally exited.
Severa stopped and turned. “So you have reconsidered.”
“No, but…” His thoughts finally caught up to his mouth, collided, and scattered. “I need you to cast a spell.”
“… Excuse ?” Severa said.
“A specific one,” he rushed on, already past the point of rescue. “Rare Pyric Formulation, with emotional modulation. Calm, preferably, but rage is fine. Either works. I just—” He swallowed. “Professor Ake cast the spell earlier, and I need to observe variance based on emotional understanding.”
She stepped back towards him again. “You have just refused my offer, and now you dare ask to assist you with a demonstration. For what, precisely? So little sche your new artifact whispered to you?”
“I… technically haven’t refused you.”
Severa went very still. Then she laughed. Then she snarled, enough to bare her teeth. “You can shove your technicality up your face because the only reason you are still breathing is that you are either catastrophically stupid or uniquely irritating. What is wrong with you? You say you do not want attention, and then you pull this kind of academic nonsense in public and expect to just go along with it. So when are you going to actually give an answer, Kestovar? Are you going to ever answer a question cleanly once in your life, or have you lost the ability to answer a question unless it cos with instructions and a margin for error?”
“... So can you cast Pyric Formulation?”
“Ugh, you—” She clenched her fist into a ball. The air around her hand shimred with the faintest ghost of crimson ignition. She closed her eyes, then took a deep breath. Her hand unclenched. When she finally exhaled, her voice was once again smooth and regal. “What Rank did Ake cast?”
“Rank IV…”
Severa turned away from him by half a step, enough that her face fell into profile. She raised one hand, and fire blood. This fire wanted to move. It wanted to consu. It burned brighter than Ake’s ever had, less stable and infinitely more aggressive.
[Spell Cast: Pyric Formulation, Rare, Rank IV]
“There,” she said. “You observed.”
Then she walked off. She angled her path just enough to carry her directly through the cluster of onlookers. She did not acknowledge the students who parted instinctively to let her through.
The pressure lifted. Fabrisse gasped for air. The corridor’s footsteps and murmurs rushed back in, leaving Fabrisse standing there with his heart in his throat.
“… What just happened between them?” soone whispered.
“I’ve never seen Montreal lose her temper before.”
“Was that a duel spell?”
“No, that was Pyric Formulation. Did you see the output?”
The words slid past him in fragnts, half-ford and overlapping, too many voices at once. He tried to focus on one piece of information.
Lose her temper.
Really? She seed to be actively restraining an explosion every ti she was within conversational distance of him. That had been restraint.
[Tutorial Quest Completed: Emotional Modulation: A Comparative Study]
Objective: Observe the sa spell cast using the sa emotion, perford by two different spellcasters with different levels of Emotional Understanding.
Reward: 150 EXP
1 EMO
[Understanding of Rage: 33% → 34%]
From the corner of his eyes, he realized Veliane Veist was still watching him like soone who had just witnessed a duel without blades.
And he had absolutely no idea what she thought of it.
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