“I don’t…” Maisa’s voice broke. She felt pressure building in her sinuses and the telltale wetness pooling in her eyes. Her sniff was loud when she tried to calm herself, full of phlegm and emotion that screamed for pity. She held out her hand, gesturing for the board of three sitting on their high-backed chairs in front of her to give her a moment. She would not cry. She would not.

  Maisa cleared her throat. “I don’t understand,” she said. “This rejection doesn’t make sense.”

  Above her, Lindsay Caplis steepled her fingers and leaned over the hemi-circle table all three members of the graduates board were sitting at. “There is a clear reasoning given in the notice, Miss Talagast,” the aged professor said. “The academy is under no obligation to give explanation for its decisions, but we do so anyway. Certainly, someone with your high marks can read and understand the words written.” On the woman’s right, a dwarven man with a foot-long beard nodded, his eyes lacking any hint of sympathy. While on the far left of the table, Vice-President Cardis fiddled with a puzzle of some kind, entirely uninterested in the conversation.

  Maisa looked down at the letter in her hands again. Professor Caplis wasn’t wrong. She did have high marks, top marks even, for every single class she had taken over the course of the last three years. She knew what all the individual words written on the rejection notice meant, but she couldn’t understand the meaning.

  “A lack of civic merit,” she read again.

  It just didn’t make any sense. Most of the classmates she attended the academy with these last three years only spent their time reading, studying, or blowing off steam with others. Even those who had come from abroad, like her, never had time for anything that might approach civic merit. Yet, each of them had been easily allowed entry into the graduate program at the academy. None of them was asked to take the tests she had. They had only needed to conduct a single interview, whereas she had done three so far. For the past few weeks, as stress ate at her sleep and her appetite, a needling feeling in the back of her head had taken hold.

  She couldn’t accept it, kept dismissing the thought as some irrational paranoia. The people had been kind to her. There had been looks, but most hadn’t approached her with any animus.

  Professor Lindsay Caplis, the woman sitting center on the board’s table, left no room for misunderstanding. The dwarven woman leaned forward, the deep wrinkles of her face standing out as Maisa Talagast looked up at her. “You are unneeded here, Miss Talagast,” the woman said. “The board has reviewed your application and found that there would be nothing gained for the academy by allowing your further study here.”

  “Bad enough we already have two that have snuck into the graduate program,” Vice-President Cardis said, working at the puzzle in his hands. The man never looked up, and so Professor Caplis’ glare went unnoticed by him.

  And there it was. Maisa continued to stand there, her mind buzzing with visions of futures that could never come. The three board members continued to speak to her, but she didn’t hear their words. In that small chamber in the heart of the campus, her life shattered to ruined pieces and fell from her hands. Maisa didn’t even realize it had happened until she opened the door to her apartment deep on the western edge of the city.

  As the door swung open, she flinched at the sudden splash of light and sound that washed over her. Her parents were standing there in the middle of her apartment, along with the three best friends she had made in Faeth since she started attending the academy. It wasn’t until that moment, seeing the expectant and excited look on their faces that the dull ache in her chest gave way to desperate emotion. Maisa Talagast collapsed in the doorway, tears running down her face.

  The walls shook as the well-off of Faeth nakedly jeers at the young man standing on the stone. From her personal booth set high into the wall of the arena, Lady Talagast peered down at the same realization she was forced to confront years ago was dawning on that young man. He reacted better than she had, levelling his sword at the woman standing next to him and demanding that they get on with it. He would react better. This was a man who had faced threats she couldn’t imagine and had come out on the other side. She carried a respect for him, but that didn’t stop her from doing what needed to be done.

  The door to the booth swung open behind her, and Teravold slipped inside. “It is done, my Lady,” he said as he took up a spot next to the door.

  Lady Talagast replied with a nod as she watched the start of the fight down below. There was something in the hunch of the Willian boy that caught her by surprise as the countdown toward violence began. Her eyes, the best eyes in the world as far as she was convinced, saw the distant man with perfect clarity. He was sweating terribly, and his breathing was ragged.

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  At a thought, the image in front of her shifted as she changed her perception. A field of total darkness stood out in front of her, the only color given off by the lines of flowing magic running through the arena, the bubbling shield surrounding the walls of the audience seating, and the individuals. Lady Talagast concentrated on the two fighters below. While the Willian boy had much more raw magical potency than his opponent, his pathways were ragged, sickly, almost. There was clearly something wrong with the man.

  For an instant, she thought that perhaps she shouldn’t have bothered with her little scheme. In the state that Dovik Willian was in, would he have even been able to make it to the man that Mox was paying him to break? Then, as the final seconds of the countdown drained away, such thoughts were banished in a flash of blue light.

  Two seconds before the fighters were allowed to launch themselves at each other, magic flared from Dovik Willian. With her sight concentrated on the man and his magic, she saw nearly half of his remaining mana vanish in an instant, drawn into a construct coming into being behind him.

  An eye made of brilliant blue light was born in the air behind Dovik Willian’s head, and in the final moment before the fight began, it opened and turned on Hart. The antlered dwarf began to swell, his own essentia powers reinforcing his body, making it grow larger and hairier, but that did little to stop what was coming for him. A beam of silvery light poured out of the magical eye, crossing the distance between Hart and itself in an instant. The light attached itself to the man and began to reel him in like a fish. Despite all the bulk that Hart was putting on, he could not even hope to stop himself from being pulled toward the eye.

  Dovik Willian sprang forth as Hart was dragged closer, slashing down at the man with his swords and knocking him into the stone. Then, as Hart neared the eye that still lingered where it had been created, something strange happened. The vibrant cerulean magic of Dovik Willian’s soul presence vanished, reappearing around the eye, as if it were the origin of the young man’s soul. The edges of the aura grew hard and distinct, becoming so real that even those in the audience unable to perceive souls saw the new globe of energy surrounding the eye construct. The silvery light vanished, and Hart jumped to his feet.

  The man spun and tried to run out of the soul presence, only to be stopped when his antlers ran into its edge. By then, Hart stood almost six feet tall, tawny fur covering his skin, and three pairs of eyes set into the sides of his deer-like head. As his antlers connected with the outer edge of the blue sphere, a titanic force threw them back. Hart was knocked off his feet as the wall of blue threw him away. The tip of one of his antlers smoldered, broken down the middle where it had connected with the edge of the soul presence.

  In a flash, Dovik Willian appeared in the center of the blue energy. He said something to Hart as the beast magician picked himself up off the ground, but even sound was denied passage across the barrier of blue energy. Hart’s reply came in the form of white stars appearing between the tines of bones sticking up from his head. The stars streaked away like arrows toward Dovik Willian, but again the man vanished, appearing at Hart’s side. One saber swept Hart’s cloven feet up while the pommel of the other drove the man back into the wall of the barrier. The entire globe of blue shuddered as Hart was violently thrown away from the edge of the barrier, his back smoking, the fur that had covered it a moment before blown away by magical force.

  Much like the first fight, Lady Talagast had watched Hart have a devil of a time pinning down the young Willian scion. The man fought like a ghost, appearing and disappearing inside the blue globe at will, driving Hart into the barrier wall over and over again. Yet, there was a reason that Hart was ninth among all of those who fought in the arena. He caught the young man off-guard, trading a cut of Dovik’s sabers across his gut for a chance to grapple him. Dovik Willian’s vanishing act paused for a moment, and in that moment, Hart threw his head forward.

  Air pulsed as the magician’s antlers collided with Dovik Willian, turning the man into a streak of light that hammered hard into the barrier he himself had erected. Just as Hart had been before, Dovik was thrown violently away from the blue wall to bounce off the ground in a collision that would have broken the bones of mortal men. Hart gave him little time to recover, knocking him into the barrier again before he could make his feet. The third time he swung at the younger magician with his glimmering antlers, he found his limit. Dovik Willian vanished again, appearing behind Hart. The man’s clothes were burned, and a line of blood cut across the scars on his face, but there was a manic determination in his eyes.

  The remainder of the fight only lasted two more minutes. In that time, Dovik Willian drove his opponent into the wall more than eighteen times in an unrelenting assault. In the end, the black-clad healing staff of the arena were left banging on the outer wall of the globe, asking to be let in by the young man.

  “That will be it,” Lady Talagast said as the blue barrier surrounding the eye and enclosing the two combatants vanished. The eye remained, an incredible amount of magic still lingering inside of it.

  “It was quite a fight, my Lady,” Teravold said from the shadows near the door.

  “It was,” Lady Talagast agreed. “However, I was referring to that.” She motioned toward one of the pools of light on the stone floor across the arena from where medical staff were pulling Hart away. “It seems that our ploy has worked.” She wasn’t the only one who had noticed, but the incredibly intricate enchantments taking the place of her eyes had let her be the first. Powerful magic was welling up from the pool of light, a force made of anger and resentment. “Forgive me for this, Mr. Willian,” Lady Talagast whispered to herself.

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