Surprisingly, Wren didn’t get called by the Tower Master again — not that day, not the next.
Instead, the same servant girl who’d been bringing his meals slipped a folded schedule under his door, bowed without a word, and moved on to the next room down the hall.
Whether by design or coincidence, Rian’s room turned out to be right next to his.
Wren stared at that fact a beat longer than it probably deserved.
Coincidence, he decided, mostly because the alternative meant someone up in that tower was already paying closer attention to him than he was comfortable with — and he had enough to think about without adding that to the pile.
Wren looked over the schedule — packed tight, barely a gap in it.
Today: a lecture on mana-gathering formations, followed by a lecture on elemental basics, then a block of time set aside to choose a mage and assist in their workshop.
After that, he was free to do as he pleased — assuming whatever mage he chose didn’t decide to keep him working past the assigned hours.
He stepped up to the door next to his and knocked before pushing his way in.
Rian stood in the center of the room, looking over his own schedule.
“Yo, what’s up, Wren.” He didn’t look up from the paper in his hand.
“What’s your schedule look like, oh great Kaiser?” Wren asked, mocking.
Over the past two days, the two of them had gotten close enough to joke around like this without either one thinking twice about it.
“Probably the same as yours, servant boy,” he replied, matching Wren’s tone.
“Mana gathering formations, elemental basics, and then mage slavery sessions.”
“Mage slavery?” Wren asked, half laughing despite something faintly uncomfortable about the phrase, coming from someone who’d never had to actually mean it.
“It’s what we call the instructor-assistance blocks back home.
Whenever you go to a mage tower to learn, they always make the apprentices do the grunt work for the actual mages.” Rian shrugged, entirely unbothered. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Fetching things, cleaning workshops, that sort of thing.
Nobles complain about it like it’s the worst injustice in the world.
Guessing it hits a little different for you.”
“Nah, not really.
Just never heard it phrased like that,” Wren replied, keeping his joking tone intact.
“Well, regardless, we’ve got places to be.
Let’s not be late for our first lecture, yeah?” Rian said, packing his notebooks into a sack.
“Sure,” Wren replied, heading back to his own room to grab his notebook.
The two of them made their way up to the fifth floor, where their first lecture would be held.
Wren stopped in front of the door for a moment — the same door he’d glanced through a week ago, back when all of this had still been theoretical.
Room 5-C — Light Element Research — Mage Ellowen.
The crystals were still there, he noticed, catching the lantern light strangely, same as before, though this time there were rows of seats filled with apprentices instead of an empty lecture hall waiting for no one.
They stepped inside and made their way toward the middle row.
The apprentices already seated there shifted without a word — not far, just enough, a single empty seat opening up on either side of Wren like the room had silently agreed on a rule nobody had bothered to say out loud.
Wren noticed.
He decided not to let himself notice, which wasn’t quite the same thing.
Rian dropped into the seat beside him anyway, either oblivious to the gap or simply unwilling to honor it, and started digging through his sack for a notebook like nothing in the room had changed at all.
Soon, the rest of the apprentices began filing in, filling the rows in loose clusters — friends who’d apparently found each other over the last two days, small groups already forming the way groups always did, fast and instinctive, leaving Wren’s little pocket of empty space conspicuously untouched around the edges. This story is hosted at novelping . com.
One arrival made half the room look up without meaning to.
Adeleine Khal walked in last, unhurried, and settled into the empty seat on Wren’s other side without so much as a glance at the gap everyone else had so carefully maintained.
She didn’t say anything to him.
She didn’t need to — the simple fact of her sitting there, upright and composed, silvery hair falling neat over one shoulder, did more to unsettle the murmuring behind them than any word could have.
Wren, boxed in now between the tower’s least explainable apprentice and one of its oldest, most storied names, wasn’t sure whether to feel grateful or like even more of a spectacle than he already was.
A door at the back of the room opened before he could decide.
The mage who stepped out had hair the color of something Wren didn’t quite have a word for — pale, nearly colorless at a glance, until the light caught it wrong and it scattered into faint threads of color all at once, the way mist sometimes broke sunlight into a rainbow if you stood at exactly the right angle.
She surveyed the room once, unhurried, the same quiet authority in her posture that Wren had come to recognize in every mage who’d ever looked at him and found him, in one way or another, worth a second glance.
“Good morning,” Mage Ellowen said.
“Let’s begin.”
“Mana Gathering Formations are the simplest form of magic you’ll ever cast,” she started.
“That also makes them the most valuable.
Not only are they useful for practicing how to draw a magic circle, but the result” — she lifted a small crystal, the same colorless shimmer as her hair — “is useful for redirecting the cost of your spells away from yourself.”
She pulled out a thick book, runes covering its surface, and drew a few quick lines, keeping the crystal close the whole time.
Slowly, the crystal in her hand began to shrink, and a small orb of light rose up from the pages of the book, shining and hovering over the room.
“This is a basic Light spell.
Candlelight.
Its purpose is simple — light up a dark spot.
With a few modifications, it can be made to hover around the caster instead, keeping the way lit while exploring ruins, caves, that sort of thing.”