Valar woke slowly from the light of the sun, his curtains hanging at his window’s side like always. He had forgotten to close them again, although he wasn’t sure if he could call it forgetting anymore. He had not ‘remembered’ to put on the curtains even once in the past days, after all.

  The first thing he felt after waking up was hunger. The boy had not eaten for almost a day, as he had skipped both lunch and dinner because of the past day’s incident. Honestly, he didn’t want to leave his room even now, but the new sigil in his pocket gave him at least some confidence. He could not go out like this though…

  Valar hadn’t changed his clothes for days, even forgetting to use his new shower. That injustice had to be corrected promptly. He tossed his set of clothes in the corner, stumbling to the bathroom to figure out how the shower worked.

  Putting the thing on was pretty easy, a switch made into the wall regulating the flow of water and drenching Valar immediately. Adjusting the heat of the water—a completely new concept to him—was a bit more difficult. He eventually got the hang of it, the different knobs a bit more confusing than just putting the shower on.

  Valar adjusted the heat many times, upping the heat each and every time. Even on the hottest setting, the water felt like it wasn’t hot enough. However, when he got out of the shower and looked in the mirror, Valar had to reconsider his opinion.

  After Valar wiped off the mirror with a towel, he was shocked to find out that his skin was red and raw all over. He shook his head in confusion, and continued his morning routine as normal.

  The boy brushed his teeth, dressed himself and eventually walked back in front of the mirror. Valar’s eyes were sunken and had dark circles around them, but that was to be expected. One needed good sleep to fix that, and Valar had gotten just the opposite.

  He went back to the bedroom, picking up a notebook and pen in addition to his coin pouch. Lacking better options, he had decided to carry the sigil with his coins. Putting it with other valuables made sense and it was pretty easy to feel out from the coins. With that, he finally left his room in search of breakfast.

  Valar knew that the cafeteria was in the entrance building but wasn’t sure about its exact location. He wandered in that general direction, as the flow of people would probably guide him well enough. A lot of people were looking at him, but he tried his best to ignore the gazes. They felt like an invasion, something constantly gnawing his mind and trying to break in. Valar hated that feeling.

  The only good news was that he found the cafeteria relatively easily. He didn’t even need to wait in line, as the door to the private dining area was in a different place than the normal door.

  As Valar went to the door, he heard people whispering between themselves.

  “Look! It’s the child mage! How did he awaken so young?”

  “Maybe he made a deal with one of the devils? Nobody can awaken that young normally!”

  “No, he has the life affinity… A devil wouldn’t give him something like that. Maybe one of the fae or an elf?”

  He ignored the rest, trying to find the sigil instead. After some fumbling around, the boy managed to finally find the sigil. Maybe putting it in the coin pouch hadn’t been the best idea…

  Opening the door was as simple as showing the sigil to the plate next to it. The door clicked open as the sigil was read, and Valar rushed in as fast as he could. Thank the gods… Blessed silence!

  “Hi! I’m Zeke. Who in the abyss are you?” A chipper voice rang out in the small room, causing Valar to almost jump in shock.

  A young man, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, was sitting at the table in the middle of the room. He was eating a large breakfast… A very large breakfast.

  The young man in front of Valar looked impressively normal. He had short black hair and a perfectly average build for a man of his age. His skin was dark, suggesting that the man or his family originated from the south. The only oddity was his eyes, which were as blue as the cloudless sky.

  “Hello… I’m Valar. I got access to these private spaces yesterday, so I imagine we’ll be seeing each other quite a lot in the coming days.”

  “Well then, nice to meet you Valar! What got you labeled as a freak like me? Is it your age?”

  The man’s energy was infectious, Valar feeling his own mood lift as he got some breakfast from a cart near the wall. “Mostly my age, I think. Everyone inspected me yesterday and now I can’t go anywhere without people staring and gossiping.”

  “Oh tell me about it! I don’t have the exact same problem, but I kind of let my power slip and now everybody wants a piece of me,” The young man laughed, managing to put a smile on even Valar’s tired face.

  “Why are you here?” Valar had to ask. “I heard that a prince and abstract mage had been given access before me, and I think the royals have golden hair… Are you an abstract mage?”

  “Oh yes I am!” The man extended his hand for a shake. “Zeke Forger, abstract mage of energy.”

  “Valar, newly awakened life mage. Nice to meet you!”

  The man’s energy was something else. Even being near him, Valar felt himself being innervated. With that surge of feeling, he finally realized that he was under a magical effect.

  Valar had been bone tired, now he was full of energy. His eyes flashed green, the boy trying to look for something. He wasn’t even sure of what he was looking for, but the search didn’t last for long. The magic was frankly obvious.

  Zeke’s aura was the weirdest Valar had ever seen. It seemed to be beating like a heart, formless and invisible energy radiating from the man with his heartbeat.

  “Oh, you saw… Please don’t go away,” Zeke’s tone became nervous, almost scared. “I can’t control it and it really doesn’t harm you. The faculty wouldn’t have let me in if it did!”

  The man’s tone provoked a kind of kinship in the orphan boy. It was similar to his own when he had tried to get friends in the orphanage. Everyone just walked away from the freak—no matter how much he tried. Valar would not send the young man away. He knew how much it hurt.

  “I believe you, Zeke. Calm down…”

  The young man’s eyes went wide. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  The pair quieted down after that, eating their breakfast in silence for a good while. Eventually, Valar’s curiosity got the better of his lessening hunger.

  “So… What can you do? I can’t do much as I don’t know any runes yet, but I read that abstract mages don’t usually need them.”

  Zeke shrugged. “Just simple stuff really. You already feel the aura of energy around me, but the main thing I can do is conversion.”

  “Conversion? What do you mean?”

  “That’s the interesting thing!” His blue eyes’ glow seemed to intensify as he got excited. “I can transform basically any energy I have some understanding of to another form!” He lifted his hand, palm facing Valar. “Punch me!”

  “You want me to… Punch you?”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The dark skinned man nodded enthusiastically and Valar shrugged. What’s the worst that could happen? He threw a quick punch, expecting to maybe push Zeke’s hand back a little.

  His hand stopped like it had hit a brick wall. It didn’t even impact Zeke’s, the hand stopping just short of the front-facing palm. The sound however…

  The room reverberated with a boom, Valar flinching back as he heard the noise. Zeke laughed, pulling his own hand back in the process.

  “Sorry, I can’t really choose what the energy transforms to. This time it seemed to be sound!”

  “What in the abyss just happened? Why did I not hit you? Why was there a boom?” Valar’s confusion was clear on his face. He couldn’t comprehend what had just happened, his brain not managing to wrap around the past few seconds in the least.

  “Oh, right, everyone doesn’t understand it as well as me,” Zeke muttered. “How do I explain this… Most things that happen around us need energy to, well… happen! Movement, heat, sound, light and even magic are just forms of energy. I grab the energy with my magic and kind of flip it around, resulting in a different form of energy!”

  Huh? Flip it around… Everything is just energy? What in the abyss is this guy talking about? Valar was starting to understand what the author of Basics of Magic had meant when he wrote about abstract mages. He could not understand much of what the mage was saying, but he guessed that he didn’t need to. Valar wasn’t an abstract mage.

  “Oh I lost you there… I guess it’s kind of hard to explain when you can’t see energy like I do.”

  I’m not even going to ask. We have actual school today, and I need to focus on the basics, not Zeke’s explanations on energy. Maybe later though… It sounds kind of interesting.

  “Do you have any idea where the first class is supposed to be held?” Valar asked. “I didn’t have time to check anything before leaving for breakfast.”

  “Oh yeah! It’s in the central tower, 10th floor. We should get going soon or we’ll miss the start. We have only 20 minutes or so before the class begins.”

  Even though the class was in the central tower, they weren’t in a big hurry. It was on the 10th floor, so they would be there with only a skybridge, no stairs needed. Valar and Zeke decided to walk together, the attention of all the new students split between them instead of being centered on one or the other. That eased Valar’s anxiety a little bit. This guy seems fun… I might’ve actually managed to get a friend already!

  Getting to the class was still a blessing. Even if the stares and gossip were split between the pair, they were still getting stared at. Neither of them liked that, so they practically ran to the back of the lecture hall, finally seeing a door with the sign: Private viewing area. Getting in worked the same as in the cafeteria, the pair finally entering the back row with cold sweat running down their necks. Neither liked the attention, and they had got a lot of it.

  Somebody had clearly put some effort in designing the illusory back row. The chairs were comfortable, well-crafted tables set in front of them. Honestly, the experience of looking at the classroom through the illusory wall was confusing. When they had entered, a wall had blocked them from seeing the row. Inside, they could clearly see and hear everything that happened in front of them. It was like there was no wall at all.

  Valar poked the space in front of his eyes, his finger encountering a solid stone wall. Upon further inspection, the wall was there, the illusion just made it disappear from their sight.

  “Cool… I wonder how this was made,” Valar mused. “Maybe it’s light magic?”

  “Probably… The builders probably used both sound and light enchantments on this side of the wall,” Zeke shrugged. “I can’t really understand how they did it, but that seems like the most logical option.”

  They spent the few remaining minutes in silence, putting their notebooks and pens on the tables. Valar hoped that the lesson would be interesting…

  Zeke spoke up just before the lesson was about to start. “I wonder where the princeling is… Maybe he didn’t deign to come on the first day.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter. He’ll come if he wants to. Before that, we’ll have this room for ourselves!”

  After a final minute of waiting, the class in front of them was finally ready for the first lesson of the semester. Hundreds of fresh iron rank mages were sitting in the large hall, noblemen and women gathering in distinct groups based on their dress. Valar even spotted Elizabeth chatting excitedly with some members of her house in the middle of the mass of students.

  “Silence, please.”

  The hall quieted down in an instant, the booming voice shocking the new students enough to quiet them down. An old man walked out to the podium, a deep frown on his face. Valar inspected him.

  Onyx.

  “Greetings, new students of the royal academy! My name is Gideon Folren, and I am the principal of this academy.”

  The man’s affinity was peculiar in Valar’s eyes. It felt like a mix between water and something else mixed together to make something new. Something unknown.

  “Many of you are wondering what you will learn during this semester. I understand the concern. Many of you have already learned runes from members of your house and some may have actually cast spells,” That provoked a flinch from Valar. Others are that much ahead?

  “But I must tell you all that you have learned nothing!”

  The room erupted with whispers. If Valar understood correctly, the noblemen and women were enraged by the principal’s words. They seemed to think that their house had taught them perfectly, or something like that. Gideon let them whisper on for a while, coughing politely after a minute or so. After that, he tried ordering the room to silence, his methods proving ineffective.

  The old man shook his head, a rueful grin on his face. “Every single semester… Time and time again.”

  Runes started appearing all over his visible skin, light blue in color. They built slowly enough but surprisingly, they did not stop appearing. When the man’s skin was completely full, they seemed to start appearing in the air around him instead, forming a light blue timepiece behind his back. At that point, most had realized that something was about to happen and had quieted down, but some were less perceptive than others. Valar was glued to the display, staring with wide eyes and an open jaw.

  Gideon’s aura flared out like a tsunami, covering the entire lecture hall with onyx rank power. Now that he felt it directly, and having gotten numerous context clues, Valar could finally grasp what the man’s affinity was. The principal of the academy uses… Time magic?

  “A Glimpse of Eternity.“

  Everything froze. Valar could not move, he could not act, nor could he think. The only part of him that wasn’t affected was his soul, and it did not like the feeling. For the barest second, every person in the hall was frozen in time, the world around them continuing as normal. The moment did not last for long, only a second or so, but it left its mark.

  The room was completely silent. Everyone could move once again, Gideon’s aura withdrawn from the hall and his spell over, but nobody spoke. They were simply too shocked to do so.

  Valar was breathing heavily, staring at the principal with manic eyes. Orange sparks danced within his irises and he felt a burning sensation spread within his body. No… No, I do not wish to burn. I reject your will, soul!

  He was fighting against the will of his very own soul. His soul wished to burn that which had violated it, but Valar’s conscious mind desperately needed it to not do so. He and his soul were at a standstill, equal in authority and opposite in will.

  Eventually, after a long minute, Valar’s soul gave up. The threat had faded and there was no need to burn anymore. As it retreated, he let out a deep sigh and fell down to his chair. He was sweating, mentally exhausted by the minute-long fight of wills, but at least it was over. I won? My soul wished to burn, and I actually managed to hold it back? Thank the gods…

  Knowing that he could drive the will of his own soul back like that gave Valar tremendous relief. He had been able to fight it back yesterday and even on the caravan, but this felt different. He had been close… Too close. Still, the boy had managed to keep the lid on and that was great. The only con was that he was missing out on important information—the principal had been speaking for a while…

  “-provide a true foundation for your magic. That you can be sure of! No matter how great your house is, they do not have the relevant resources available, and you will benefit greatly from more efficient runes, greater teaching and our wondrous library. With that, I welcome you all! Let this be the greatest class of iron rankers the world has ever seen!”

  The hall erupted in cheers, nearly every single person rising up for a standing applause. Even Valar got up, swept up in the elevated mood of others.

  “Now that the actual ceremony is over, let us start actually learning something. With that, everyone give a warm welcome to our wonderful teaching staff for the semester!”

  With raucous applause, a line of teachers entered the hall from the backstage, some waving with smiles on their faces. They were a mix of silver and gold rankers, most of them elemental mages with a couple exceptions. They seemed more like famous bards than teaching staff, the student body ecstatic to find out who would teach them for their first semester. Valar spotted Elaine, the smiling woman belonging to the few gold rank teachers. He continued his scan, everyone else unknown to him until…

  One teacher was different from the others. While the other members of the staff proudly showcased their rank within their auras, one teacher did not display their aura at all. He was not waving like some, holding a polite smile on his face instead. A face with emerald eyes and silver hair falling on its sides.

  Wait, what? Viktor’s a teacher?