The basement floors smelled like a hearth that had been swept clean a hundred times and never quite lost the fire — which was probably why Wren didn’t notice the other smell underneath it until he was already standing outside Practice Room 4B, close enough to see that the door had been left open.
But that was still hours away.
The tower was split into sections, floor by floor.
The basement belonged to the servants — a place Wren knew better than anywhere else in the building, whether he remembered learning it or not.
Above that, the second through fourth floors housed the apprentice dorms; Wren’s own room sat at the far end of the second floor, close enough to the stairwell that he’d already stopped needing to think about the way there.
Higher still, the fifth and sixth floors belonged to the mages themselves — workshops that doubled as classrooms, depending on the hour, and apparently on whoever happened to be teaching that day.
Wren spent the better part of the morning walking those halls, reading the little brass plaques beside each door.
Room 5-C — Light Element Research, Mage Ellowen.
Inside, past a row of empty seats and a lecture desk, sat a workshop lined with crystals and instruments Wren didn’t recognize — some catching the light strangely, like they were holding onto more of it than they should have been able to.
Wren kept walking, glancing into workshop after workshop, until one caught his attention properly: Room 5-F — Metal Element Research, Mage Corren.
Inside, the room looked much like the last — crystals, strange instruments, a lecture desk pushed to one side — except this one wasn’t empty.
The air here was different too, sharp and metallic, iron and old rust caught somewhere at the back of his throat, the way blood smells right before you notice you’re bleeding.
A young man in apprentice robes, the same grey and gold as Wren’s own, was sweeping the floor around the workshop table, humming something under his breath like the chore didn’t bother him in the slightest.
Curious despite himself, Wren stepped inside.
“Hello, my name’s Wren.
I saw you working and wanted to introduce myself.
I’ve got a metal affinity too, so I thought maybe—”
“If you’re looking for a practice room, try the second basement floor.
There should be a few open.” The boy didn’t look up from his sweeping.
“Master Corren doesn’t much like apprentices poking around his workshop unsupervised.
Doubly so for the help.”
“The help?
What does that mean?”
The boy finally looked up from his sweeping, something almost like surprise crossing his face — like he hadn’t expected the question to actually need answering.
“It means what it sounds like it means.” He went back to sweeping.
“Servants.
House staff.
People who don’t belong in a workshop unless they’re cleaning it.”
Wren opened his mouth to say I used to be one, actually, then closed it again, unsure why the thought stung more on its way out than it had going in.
“Right,” he said instead.
“Thanks.”
He left the way he’d come, the sound of the broom picking back up behind him before the door had even finished swinging shut.
Wren took the boy’s dismissal to heart in his own way — if this was where he actually belonged, he might as well know it properly.
He’d only ever set foot on the first basement level, the one the servants called home.
Whatever waited one floor further down than that, he’d never had a reason to see.
He decided that was as good a reason as any to go looking.
The staircase down seemed longer than the one going up — though Wren suspected that had less to do with the number of steps and more to do with what was still turning over in his head.
I didn’t ask to be “the help.” What makes him better than me, just because he started as an apprentice?
He kept walking anyway, footsteps echoing a little too loud against the stone the further down he went.
He stopped by his room on the way down, it was better to bring a book or two than show up to a practice room with nothing at all.
The notebook sat warm against his chest as he walked, tucked close, almost deliberately so.
It was a small thing, but it was proof: whatever that boy upstairs thought of him, Wren could still do the one thing that actually made someone an apprentice here.
He could cast.
Whatever.
If I work harder than anyone else here, they’ll have to admit that being a servant for three years was a mistake.
With renewed fervor, he started down the stairs.
He passed the door to the servants’ quarters, then the Head Butler’s room, and kept going.
The basement floors smelled like a hearth that had been swept clean a hundred times and never quite lost the fire.
Seeing a door left open, Wren stepped inside.
The room was smaller than the workshops upstairs, built for practice rather than research.
A desk sat against the near wall — plain, undecorated, much like the one in his own dorm — but the real space belonged to the worktable at the room’s center.
Long, scarred, scorched black in places and gouged pale in others, it looked like it had spent years absorbing whatever its various users couldn’t quite control.
A rack along the far wall held spare spellcasting paper, stacked in uneven piles, along with a few practice orbs not unlike the one back in his room, and a shallow basin of water Wren guessed was meant for putting out anything that got out of hand.
A single lantern burned near the table’s edge, steady and low.
Wren set his notebook down, pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the rack, and got to work.
The next step in Metal magic, according to his book, was forming a sheet of metal rather than just a shard.
This, however, proved far more difficult than the last attempt had been.
Wren stared at the diagram, mouth slightly open.
How do you even copy this one over perfectly?
The lines are so precise, and there’s so much going on I don’t even know where to start.
Regardless, he got to work.
What felt like hours passed as his trembling hand attempted to trace over the spell circle, correcting line after line, starting fresh more times than he cared to count, until the desk around him was littered with crumpled failed attempts and his fingers ached from gripping the pen too hard for too long.
When it was all said and done, and he connected the last rune, nothing happened.
Wren stared at the circle for a long moment, waiting for some delayed reaction, some flicker of gold that simply hadn’t caught up to him yet.
It didn’t come.
He checked the diagram again, line by line, tracing his finger over the book’s version and then his own, hunting for whatever he’d gotten wrong.
Everything matched.
As far as he could tell, everything matched exactly, and the circle still sat there on the paper, inert and useless, mocking him with how right it looked for something that had done absolutely nothing.
It worked fine the first time.
Why isn’t it working now?
He crumpled the page harder than he meant to, the sound of it loud in the empty room, and reached for a fresh sheet before he’d even fully decided to try again.
His hand was shaking worse now than it had an hour ago — whether from frustration or exhaustion, he couldn’t tell anymore, and he wasn’t sure it mattered which.
He started over.
Finally, after another hour of failed attempts, he gave up.
Something clearly wasn’t adding up, and he was too exhausted to work out what.
Partway through, half out of frustration, he’d gone back and tried the very first spell he’d ever cast — and it worked, easily, same as it always had.
Which only made this one harder to understand.
If his affinity was fine, if his hand still remembered how to do that much, why was this one spell alone refusing to answer him?
Wren stepped out of the practice room and looked around.
Most of the other doors along the hall were shut tight, but one — 4B — sat cracked open, just slightly.
That same metallic smell from the workshop upstairs drifted out from it now, sharper down here somehow, more present.
Maybe another metal mage’s practicing in there.
Maybe they could help me figure out what I’m doing wrong.
He walked toward the door before he’d fully decided to.
Pushing open the door, Wren noticed the lantern was out.
“Hello — are you also practicing metal magic?
I’ve run into a wall I can’t seem to break through, and—” He stopped.
His eyes adjusted to the dark.
The smell got worse as they did, thick enough that he could almost taste it, iron gone rancid, something underneath it gone sweet in the specific, wrong way only rot goes sweet.
Huddled in the corner of the room was a person.
Or what had been one.
It was folded in on itself, at angles a spine wasn’t built for, ribs pressed flat against a chest that no longer had the shape of a chest no longer had the shape of a chest, like something enormous had taken hold of the whole torso and simply squeezed until it stopped being three-dimensional.
Dark stains fanned out beneath the shape of it, soaked deep into the stone, the kind of stain that told you exactly how much of a person had been sitting inside their own skin before it wasn’t anymore.
One arm had been flung wide at some point, maybe in reflex, maybe in the last half-second before there was nothing left to reflex with — fingers still curled around a scrap of spellcasting paper, a finished earth-rune scratched into it in a hand that had clearly been shaking even before the end.
Wren didn’t move.
He wasn’t sure his legs would have let him even if he’d wanted them to.
That’s a person.
That was a person.
His stomach turned over, slow and complete, and it was only distantly, through the roaring in his own ears, that he understood the sound filling the room was coming out of his own mouth.