Starbreaker

The Crest of the Ardent is one of the most sophisticated pieces of magical item manufacture that you are ever likely to see. A device smaller than the palm of your hand, which will nonetheless shield you from death and bodily harm unless you are exposed to ridiculously extreme forces. Just another benefit of signing up today!

—Ardent Recruitment Brochure

Quartermaster Chul was another fiend, albeit one who was about twice the width of any of the ones that Sylvas had encountered previously. Sylvas had assumed that their litheness was a species specific trait, but apparently there was a great deal of diversity. Chul looked like she had been made out of a single slab of muscle that horns and a face had been pasted onto, but she was clipped, polite and efficient in dealing with them. Handing over correctly sized uniforms to them both, and promising that she’d have three changes delivered to their bunks by the day’s end.

Kaya immediately began stripping off her old clothes to get into her uniform and Sylvas almost got whiplash, turning away so quickly.

She hooted with laughter. Then reached up and tugged at the back of his jumpsuit hard enough that it nearly pulled him off-balance. “Go on, get changed quick, we’ve got ten minutes and no clues where to go.”

Sylvas glanced around, but there wasn’t anywhere nearby that would serve to hide him from sight. Chul sat behind a desk, and beyond that desk were endless rows of shelves, but they all ran directly away from where they stood, offering no cover. Besides, he was pretty sure the fiend would not have been happy about him wandering back there. “I would prefer a little privacy.”

“We’ve seen it all before,” Kaya brayed. “Haven’t we Chul?”

Sylvas looked to the fiend for support and received nothing but the same dull-eyed expression that had been there since they arrived, and presumably every moment of her life before they walked in. Eventually the massive fiend conceded and gave a shrug with one shoulder.

Reaching for the zipper, and very deliberately not looking back at Kaya, Sylvas changed into his new uniform. There was some degree of hooting and whistling coming from behind him as he was exposed, but he chose not to pay it any mind. Or at least he tried to, he was still bright red by the time that they’d turned in their old jumpsuits and got out the door.

The uniforms were strange to Sylvas, who had spent his previous life dealing only in natural fabrics and wooden buttons. The plain dark garments worn against the skin were oddly constricting compared to the loose flowing robes he had been accustomed to, tight around him, but with enough give in the fabric that they didn’t impede his movements. At least the trousers were vaguely familiar, though they too were black. The only real flair in the whole outfit was the overcoat, which hung down to hit him mid-thigh, and was meant to be worn open, so far as he could tell. It was white, with some blue sections, presumably signaling something about his rank or role that he didn’t understand. Kaya looked completely comfortable in her own trousers and top until she added that same jacket on top, at which point the forced formality of it made her look out of place.

“Stop gawking and start running.” She grumbled at him, clearly uncomfortable with the attention. It was funny but Sylvas was pretty sure that she’d have been more comfortable strutting around in nothing at all than in the well-fitted uniform.

The distance from Outbuilding One to the temple was not far but running across the dust made for slow going. Sylvas couldn’t get traction, and even the far more athletic dwarf at his side seemed to be struggling, pumping her short legs as fast as they could carry her and only just managing to keep pace with Sylvas.

They arrived just as the red sun was dipping out of sight behind the dunes, barely having a moment to take in the hodge-podge mixture of new technology and ancient stonework that comprised the entryway into the temple building before they bolted up the stairs. The lecture hall was in the center of the spire, almost halfway up its height, and Sylvas began to wonder if their circular sprints around the bay on the ship had just been preparation for getting to class on time up these spiral staircases. His red face by the time that he’d made it to the heavy wooden doors of the chamber was due to being overheated and overexerted instead of any unexpected nudity and they burst in side by side.

There were dozens of other students in the room. All of them wearing the same uniforms as Sylvas had just shrugged on. Beyond that uniform though, there was a diversity of faces that Sylvas had never imagined that he might encounter in his lifetime. Elves, dwarves, humans, fiends, najash, and a hulking furry creature that Sylvas had never even read about sat in the rows of raised seating around the sides of the round room looking down at the instructor who was currently perched up on the edge of his desk, fiddling with his slate.

The instructor had looked human when they arrived, but on closer inspection, there were certain elements that Sylvas had never seen in any human being before. The man’s eyes were a solid blue, shining like the ocean in the sunlight and his shaggy hair floated around his head as though he were himself suspended in water. His robes were as plain and simple as Instructor Aurea’s but in a deep blue to match his eyes, and they too shifted about him as though moved by unseen tides. He looked up at the new arrivals with an expression that Sylvas found hard to read through his alien features, before gesturing to an empty space in the front row.

There was some low chatter as they took their places, along with a great deal of staring, but silence fell when the instructor rose to his feet. Sylvas and Kaya had been the last to arrive.

“For those of you who are new here, good evening, I am Instructor Fahred, tasked with the dubious honor of instructing all you meatheads in the art of magic.” There were some chuckles among the other students, but Sylvas suspected that it hadn’t been the joke that they were taking it as. “Each of you will receive some degree of one-on-one instruction to assist with your advancement, but for the most part the only time that I have to look at your vacant expressions will be here, in this chamber. Where I will impart my boundless knowledge, and if you manage to absorb even the tiniest fraction of it, a miracle will have occurred.”

He drew his hand from the slate he carried towards the great slate on the wall behind him, creating an illusory duplicate of what he had scribed there large enough for them all to see. The title on the board read “Magic for Idiots.”

Kaya seemed amused, so Sylvas kept his opinions to himself as the lecture began in earnest.

Over the course of an hour, everything that Sylvas thought that he knew about magic was overturned with offhand comments and quips from Fahred. The basics were blessedly intact, but the larger context that had been deliberately hidden from him when he was a puppet of the Grand Masters started to come into view at last.

With a soft spoken word, water began to spiral up from Fahred’s fingertips, glimmering in the dull electric light of the lecture hall, coiling and twisting into spellforms, then breaking apart into the component sigils of each form. “I present to you now, the official introduction to magic, even if it is a load of nonsense. The language of spells, the components we slap together like toddlers with building blocks, was once spoken and written by some primordial species that predated all the rest of them by so long that they have passed into legend.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Some think that magic is the language of the gods who had created the universe, some think it is the speech of a species that had advanced so far in their understanding of magic that they may as well have been gods. With every expression of their thoughts becoming reality.”

The water display burst apart, spritzing the front row with a cloud of vapor.

“Personally, I’m of the opinion that the language allegedly used by these Aions is simply some universal constant, like the speed of light, or gravity. We do not understand the full context of it, but it works all the same. A primitive sapient throwing a rock didn’t need to understand the underlying physics, he just had to throw.”

Some of the other students were frowning as he proceeded with the lecture, but Sylvas expression remained neutral. He wanted to understand what the Instructor was driving at, even if he did keep contradicting himself.

“And if you want to get truly upset with me contradicting your elementary education, I also don’t believe that Eidolons are existing creatures that dwell in another plane of reality. It makes more sense for them to be conjurations of imagination. Things that people believed in and invested with enough magical power to manifest into reality.”

Both of these views were what Sylvas would have once called heresy, but it seemed that the Empyrean Alliance and the Ardent were a little more relaxed about people disputing the things that they considered fundamental truths. There was something strangely freeing about learning the Empyrean way of thinking while also hearing someone undercut it constantly with contradictory evidence, but it probably wasn’t the most conducive to easy learning.

Kaya’s brows were drawn down and deep furrows showed on her forehead as she scribbled notes. A glance along the row showed that most of the other recruits had similarly aggravated expressions. Mages that didn’t want to learn more about magic. That was something that Sylvas had never expected to encounter in his life, but he supposed that for all of them, magic was just a fact of life, whereas for him it had been a revelation.

The instructor must have spotted his roaming eyes, because Sylvas attention was snapped back to him by a sudden squirt of water hitting the side of the head, prompting some laughter from the other students. “Terribly sorry to bore you, didn’t realize you knew all this already.” Fahred smirked before returning to the lecture. Sylvas tried to mop some of the moisture out of his hair with his sleeve, but the overcoat wasn’t absorbent on the outside, so he really just moved the water around.

There was another hour to the lecture before it finally came to its end, by which point Kaya looked as though she had gone three rounds boxing with Quartermaster Chul or drunk three rounds with Kerbo. Her eyes were glazed over. For Sylvas, it was everything that he’d hoped for and more. This idea of the words of spells being some universal constant helped him to understand some of the bits and pieces that Kaya had been teaching him back on the ship, about tapping into other concepts that existed outside of his understanding to cast magic. Obviously, he meant to learn more and bring those concepts into his understanding as soon as possible, but it was nice to know that all of them were floundering in the dark together to some degree. Even if Instructor Fahred acted as though he knew all the secrets to the universe, and they were just above Sylvas and the other recruits’ pay-grade.

The class began to file out after the instructor wiped the board clean of his hasty scribbles and diagrams, with most of the existing students heading down the stairs en-masse in a group. One or two stragglers hung back to give Sylvas and Kaya a little more staring time, but for the most part, they were left behind alone.

Fahred looked up as Sylvas approached his desk. “Your next class is in out-building five, beginning in fifteen minutes, I recommend you get down there as swiftly as possible before Instructor Vaeleth comes to the conclusion that you’re trying to skip it and sends wolves after you.”

When Sylvas still didn’t leave, the instructor sighed and set down his slate, gesturing at Sylvas for him to speak. “You said that we’d have private lessons to discuss our advancement.”

Rolling his eyes, Fahred returned to his work. “It will be added to your timetable in due course.”

The instructor seemed to think that had settled the matter, but after a long moment, he seemed to realize that Sylvas was still standing there, with Kaya half-hiding behind him as though she didn’t want to be implicated in his terrible crime of speaking to the person that was meant to be teaching them. “I’ve been told that I need to advance as quickly as possible.”

Fahred let out a high-pitched laugh while his expression remained entirely bored. “Of course you were. Which particular imbecile passed that terrible advice down to you? You advance when you have the capacity to do so, rushing it is a surefire way to create instabilities in your mana core.”

Ignoring the sarcasm, Sylvas answered the question as though it was a real one. “The doctor on the ship that brought us.”

“You were advised to advance fast for medical reasons, never heard that one before.” Fahred’s tone was still flippant, but Sylvas had obviously caught his attention. He looked up at him properly now, and all around the man’s head a halo of blue eyes began to manifest as he cast a spell of scrying. “Oh I see, oh that is profoundly stupid. Who taught you to condense your mana like that at circle one?”

The question took Sylvas off-guard. “Nobody? I mean, myself, I suppose.”

“Yes, that adds up. Self-taught mages, the bane of my existence.” Fahred pinched the bridge of his hawkish nose. “Your erstwhile medical advisor is correct, with the density of mana you currently possess, you are essentially a ticking time-bomb. Bravo! Usually students have to be here a few days before they become a danger to themselves and others but you’re ahead of the pack.”

Hearing his doom being spoken yet again had little effect on Sylvas. He’d been through enough in his short life that the prospect of death by explosion didn’t really faze him all that much. “Will I be able to receive one-on-one…”

“Yes, obviously.” Fahred cut him off before grumbling, “You’re the most special mage that has ever crossed my path, and you require my full and undivided attention because of how very important you are.”

Sylvas stared at him blankly, making sure not to show the irritation that he was feeling inside. Fahred rolled his eyes. “It will be added to your timetable when we can fit you in. Try not to catastrophically explode before then. Or if you do, try not to do it in my classroom, I haven’t the patience for cleaning up your giblets.”

They left for their next class after that without another word said and no love lost between Sylvas and his current favorite instructor. Heading down the flight of stairs alone, again, with all the other students having long since departed.

Kaya smirked at him as they rounded the bend in the stairs. “That went well.”

His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t answer her.

“Careful you don’t stub your toe and explode.” She nudged him with an elbow. “Careful you don’t trip. Wouldn’t want you to explode all the way down the stairs.”

Her antics were enough to bring a little smile back to Sylvas face, but if he had known what the rest of his day was going to contain, there wouldn’t have been a force powerful enough in the universe to brighten his mood.