Corren didn’t introduce himself.
He didn’t need to — every apprentice in the room already knew exactly whose workshop they were sitting in, and he seemed entirely uninterested in spending words confirming what everyone already understood.
“Samples,” he said instead, setting a wooden case down on the front table with a heavy, deliberate thud.
He opened it to reveal a row of dull metal fragments, each one subtly different in color and grain.
“Seven types.
You’ll each take one, and you’ll tell me, by the end of the week, what makes it different from the normal iron you can conjure.
Not by looking at it.
By casting with it.”
Nobody moved right away.
“Now,” Corren added, in the exact same flat tone, and the room scrambled.
Wren reached for the case along with everyone else, hand hovering a moment too long over the selection before landing on a fragment near the back — darker than the rest, faintly rough at the edges, like something that hadn’t been fully refined.
Corren’s eyes flicked toward him as he picked it up.
Not lingering.
Not curious.
Just a brief, clinical assessment, the same one he’d apparently give any apprentice reaching for any sample, servant-born or otherwise.
“That one’s a raw ore,” Corren said, already moving down the row toward the next student.
“Untreated.
Most apprentices avoid it their first week. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Bad results, low control.” He didn’t elaborate further and didn’t wait to see if Wren wanted to trade it for something easier.
Wren looked down at the rough, unrefined piece of metal in his palm, and found, somewhat surprising himself, that he didn’t want to put it back.
“For my new apprentices, this is the identification spell you’ll cast,” he said, setting down a diagram.
“It’ll let you dig into the structure of the metal in your hands and study how it’s put together.
Before you’re allowed to help with any of my actual research, I want a working spell drafted — one that forms the metal you picked, rather than plain iron ore.”
Wren leaned over the diagram, tracing each line with his eyes before letting himself copy it down.
The circle itself was denser than anything he’d drawn before — more interlocking runes than the simple shard-spell from his first week, though the underlying logic still felt familiar enough to follow, like a more complicated sentence built from words he already knew.
He copied it twice, just to be sure, and tucked the second copy carefully into his notebook alongside the raw ore fragment, still cool and rough against his palm.
“That’s all for today,” Corren said, once the last apprentice had finished copying their own diagram.
He didn’t dismiss them with any particular ceremony — just turned back toward his desk, already reaching for a stack of notes of his own, as if the room full of apprentices had already stopped being his concern the moment the instructions left his mouth.
“Come back once you’ve got something worth showing me.
Don’t waste my time before then.”
Nobody needed telling twice.
Chairs scraped back, apprentices filing out in twos and threes, already muttering about which practice room they’d claim first.
Wren lingered a moment longer than the rest, looking down at the diagram in his own hand, then at the small, unrefined piece of metal sitting beside it.
Might as well get started, he thought, and followed the others out.
Wren decided against the practice rooms, leaving them to the apprentices who’d already started pairing off in twos, comparing notes and samples like it was some kind of game.
Instead, he headed back to his own room, set the diagram down on his desk, and got to work.
He traced the circle carefully, same as always, but the runes at its center were denser than anything he’d drawn before — small enough that a single shaking line threw off three others around it, and by his fourth failed attempt the desk was littered with crumpled paper and his hand ached worse than it had after the sheet-metal spell weeks ago.
He kept going anyway.
By the fifth attempt, something started to click — not the whole circle at once, but pieces of it, the logic of why each rune sat where it did instead of just copying the shape blindly.
He redrew it slower, deliberate, letting the dull ache behind his ribs settle into something almost familiar rather than fighting it.
On the seventh try, the circle finally closed.
Gold light rose off the page in thin, layered sheets, hanging in the air above the raw ore fragment like something projected rather than solid — faint lines tracing outward from the metal itself, mapping veins of density and grain the way a cross-section might map the rings of a tree.
Wren stared at it for a long moment before he understood what he was actually looking at: the fragment wasn’t uniform at all.
Threads of something slightly different ran through it, fainter gold woven between the darker grain, like two different metals had been compressed together long before anyone had gotten around to refining either one out of the other.
He didn’t know what that meant yet.
He wrote it down anyway, in careful, cramped handwriting, along with a rough sketch of the pattern the light had traced.
Might be nothing.
Corren did say most apprentices avoid this one for a reason.
He was three pages deep into notes, the projection finally starting to fade, when a knock came at his door.
“Apprentice Wren?” The same servant girl as always, voice muffled through the wood.
“Dinner’s ready, if you’d like to come down.”
Wren blinked, only now noticing how dark his window had gone.
He hadn’t realized he’d been at it for hours.
“Be right there,” he called back, and took one last look at his notes before closing the book.