Chapter 1 ALT

	To Augustine, the induction ceremony sounded like a sermon.  Three thousand bodies sat in three hundred pews, hewn from rock. Newly issued robes hung from their frames. Most were well nourished. Some were fat. That would change, soon enough. To Vulf, the robes were the color of a winter fog rolling off the water. A heavy outer layer covered the rough clothing beneath; pants and a shirt, both rendered in the same black fabric. It stretched when you moved, and remained tight to your skin. It didn’t scratch, or itch, or smell. Nonetheless, Allura found it restricting. A few of the prospects had raised their hoods, casting their face in a deep shadow. Some sought to hide disfigurements. Even with magic such as theirs, some scars refused to heal. Some were not meant to be healed. Others wished to keep warm. Three thousand bodies produce quite a bit of heat, yet the monolithic hall was almost as frigid as the gesticulating figure at its head. Tiresias merely wished to remain unnoticed. The hood was large, and he knew he could not be seen within it. That was to his liking. Simple leather boots, every one just like every other, adorned their feet. Under the tide of the Archwizard’s words, you could hear them scuffing against the basalt. Morrigan had laced and unlaced his thrice sense the ceremony had began. One moment they were two constricting, the next too loose. Sitting still was taxing, and movement, any movement, was a release.
And while the students sat and contemplated their lot, the Archwizard spoke.
“-each and every one of you has been born a wizard. From the realm of uncreation you were brought forth as vessels of immense power, capable of drawing upon the energies of a thousand worlds. You are torches in the dark, stars in the night; you have a purpose higher than yourselves, and a strength greater than you know. You are also a danger. Danger to yourself, danger to those you love, danger to those you know and to those you do not. We live with danger.  To drive a car is to embrace it. To love is to surrender to it. To live is to immerse yourself within it, to breath it, to become one with it and it with you. Yet you represent a danger that cannot be borne in such a manner. You are necessary, but not as you are. You must become something greater, something superior to who you are. Using a wizard’s magic is not enough. You must become a wizard.” The man spoke with finality, each syllable sounding the end of an eternity. Robes the color of a summer night roiled as he stalked back and forth at the front of the hall. His voice carried unnaturally, echoing off of wall and ceiling alike, reverberating in hearts and stomachs and other, less sophisticated things.
“You dabble with things beyond your ken; beings with which there can be no bargains, forces which have never learned the concept of ‘mercy.’ You hold more than your life in your hands, of that you must be certain. Your eternal soul is at stake, and many of you have already gambled.” And indeed they had. Here and there, hoods were obstructed by horns. Tails swished among the pews. Reptilian eyes clicked open and closed, set in normal (if sleep deprived) faces. They had gambled, and they had lost. A few sported scars of hellfire, reeked of brimstone. Looking up at the night sky, stars shine like diamonds. A meager few were born to seize them in one hand, to wring the power from within them and in so doing become stronger. It is easy to forget that stars are made of fire. Getting burned is a simple matter. Immolation is but a step further.
	The rest of the ceremony passed in irrelevance. Other, less spirited figures took the podium and delivered their say. The audience was regaled with calls to bravery, beseeched to be dutiful, reminded to be cautious.  Vulf coughed. Morrigan laughed.  It was a strange sound, in such a forbidding chamber. It seemed swallowed by the solemnity. Morrigan contented himself with a smirk. Augustine waited. Allura adjusted something behind her back, underneath her robes. It was important, but not quite yet. Lots of things were important in that moment. Few of them were remembered. Fewer continued to be important after that moment.
	A hush falls over the congregation; a lull in the sermon. Their occupation is at an end; their education is soon to begin. Soon, they begin to rise, singly or in groups. Turning to the rear of the hall, they begin to exit. A pair of oaken doors, scarred with age, stand open. Hinges thick as barrels stand adjoined to walls thicker than any castle’s. Morrigan is impressed. Vulf wonders why a place of learning is built like a fortress. It is a question of import, and one Augustine knows the answer to. Yet they do not speak, and so no question is posed, no answer given. The moment rises, falters, falls by the wayside, left like so many yesterdays.
	They have no more time for yesterdays. They are running out of tomorrows. And todays will soon be in scarce supply.


	If you had asked Augustine to describe the Academy later that day, she would’ve used the word “barbaric,” along with a few other choice statements. The walls looked as if they’d been carved out by hand, the floors sloped unexpectedly, all of the doors creaked. The few windows that existed were invariably set too high to look out of, towering panes of glass letting in precious little light. Her bed felt as if it was made of stone; gods know that everything else in the place was. Granite in a thousand shades, basalt and slate and sandstone too. That morning, she had cut her palm on a jagged outcropping of mica while searching in her “closet” for her materials. Healing it had been simple enough, but that wasn’t the point. The place was in horrid disrepair! The world’s foremost wizarding academy, and it looked like something out of a twelfth-century peasant’s dreams. Or perhaps their nightmares.
She’d left the introduction ceremony concerned but still hopeful. A few ominous remarks were to be expected- and given the degeneracy of some of her classmates, she could see how they were called for. And yes, this particular institution had a history of dangerous incidents, but they occurred only periodically. So what if the hinges were monstrous, if all the walls seemed designed to withstand a siege? That was just prudence. Besides, it meant she didn’t have to worry about her classmates overhearing her when she was doing her homework.
And that was the other thing. Her classmates. The worst of them was sitting at the desk in front of Augustine now, making it impossible to see what the Numerology professor wrote on the board. He was of middling height, his short hair frazzled, fingers too restless and eyes too bright; in other words, the spitting image of a mage. How he’d gotten into the Academy Augustine couldn’t fathom. Mages couldn’t pull power from other dimensions, everyone knew that! He’d be forced to complete each of the tasks by using whatever magic happened to be in the vicinity at that moment. And the smell. Like metal, almost, but there was fire there too, or maybe ammonia? Whatever it was, the boy reeked of it. He was sure to flunk- Augustine gave her one task, maybe two. Three would require astronomical fortune, and the boy was no astrologist. He could be a summoner, maybe. If he had any talent at all. That’s the thing with magic, Augustine thought, absentmindedly flicking through one of her textbooks while an instructor droned on. It requires talent. We could sit here all day, all year, memorize spells and reagents and rituals- but if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. And Augustine most certainly did have it. Six generations of it, despite the potential for wizardry not being passed via heredity. She could make flames dance, make stone run like water, grow a tree into a stool and a stool into a tree. She was powerful. And here she was, suffering through the same lectures she’d been hearing back at the estate since before she could walk.
Augustine was bored, but that wasn’t so bad. She was, however, beginning to become impatient, which was quite dangerous indeed.


	The golem was on fire, and for once it wasn’t Vulf’s fault. He also couldn’t put it out without possibly extinguishing the golem’s anima as well, and then he’d have to start all over. Why did elemental copper have to be so tricky? He’d been working with constructs for as long as he could remember. Before he’d been forcibly enrolled in the academy, walking to school with a face full of rust and breath like heartstrings had been normal for him. His own pet project, a Hellenic hoplite-golem from four hundred and thirty three B.C., had finally been finished three months ago. It’d taken four years of hard work, scouring the patina from aged binding runes that had been old when Norway was still just a concept. The shield arm had been particularly tricky; for the longest time, it kept on wanting to raise the shield whenever a cucumber within around twenty feet or so; the exact measurement escaped him. He still remembered the feeling when it had worked, when the eternal fire behind the Corinthian helm flickered to brilliance and stayed on. Given, the next moment it had almost speared him with its pike, but it worked!
	Much like how this one was not working, and if he didn’t do something about it quickly would probably never work. The workshop was big, and the roar of the foundries was saving him for the moment, but people were starting to notice, and if he didn’t fix the issue before an instructor came over he would be set back for the first task big time and- the fire flared, going from something about four times the size of a decent lighter to a seven foot tall solid wall of flame. Soot was sucked into the air, sending Vulf scurrying for cover behind a quenching trough. Okay, you can do this, all you’ve gotta to is… oh hell. The mess had started when he’d reactivated one of the golem’s recognition runes; evidently the heating rune on one arm had been scratched. Instead of a nice domestic servant that could cook you meals, it had become a hellish domestic servant that could cook you. Deactivating a rune was pretty simple for a wizard- just touch it, draw out the power, and voila. Naturally, Vulf did the one thing that made sense to him at the time.
	He tackled a four hundred pound flaming golem. Vulf wasn’t small- he filled out his six foot seven frame like a bear. So it came as something of a shock when his tackle terminated prematurely with his teeth clicking together and stars in his eyes. Well, he meant to tackle it- in all honesty, it felt more like giving a pillar an aggressive hug. He could feel his muscles (or were they ligaments?) protest as he strained, toppling the golem onto the floor, plunging a hand clad in thick leather into the heart of the inferno, probing for the rune. The leather began to melt and crack, baring his skin to the outrageous heat. Gritting his teeth, Vulf searched for a moment longer, screwed his nose, and clamped onto a vaguely knoblike shape. The fire went out with a whumpf. Rolling off of the now-doused construct, Vulf took a moment to survey the damage. All of his tools were in working order, more or less; one glove looked like it had been submerged in molten copper (only part right- the copper hadn’t been quite molten yet) and he was missing a solid strip of skin up by his neck, but really it had all turned out quite well. With a groan he rocked to his feet, grabbing a chisel and a small hammer. Let’s see if we can’t modify that output rune…
	Four sweat-filled hours later, it worked. It wasn’t much, but he had fixed it, so while it wasn’t really his it was pretty damn close. It’s anima could follow basic directions. It fetched tools when prompted, emptied oil reservoirs, restocked supply lockers- the perfect workshop companion. It’d taken six feet of heartstring to replace the linkages destroyed in the fire, and two hours to reforge a broken rune foci, but now it worked.
“Hey, idiot. You realize you’re supposed to call for help when you get hurt, right?” Vulf was tinkering with one of the construct’s ankle assemblies, and managed to bang his head on its knee while locating the source of the voice.
“Yes, you. You’ve been burnt, or are you too stupid to tell?” A short girl, raven-dark hair pulled into a savage ponytail. In one hand she held a simple runestone; in the other, a textbook on basic healing.
“You’re awful abrasive for a healer, you know that?” Vulf rubbed at the back of his head with his good hand as he carefully stood up, putting a hammer down on the workbench.
“Yeah, and you’re pretty retarded for an enchanter. Next time you decide to tackle a golem while it’s on fire, you call a healer over to take a look at you before you continue work. Now hold still.
“How did you-“ His voice cut out midsentence, throttled by surprise. He could feel the skin on his neck flowing. It felt like being burned in reverse. A sharp pain, followed by an extending dullness. Spiders crawled up his spine, his hair standing on end.
“There. All better.” The healer sounded smug, confident in her ability to heal basic surface burns. “Let’s try not to get scorched too hard next time, okay big fella?”
“Thank you? Who are you?” Vulf scratched absentmindedly at his neck, exploring the healed skin. It was hard to tell beneath the gloves, but it felt different somehow, smoother than the surrounding material. Perhaps it was just cleaner.
“My name’s Allura. I’m stuck on shift here for the next three hours, figured I might as well get some practical practice in.”
“Thank you, Allura. I’m-“
“You’re a massive idiot who barely noticed he had burnt off a quarter pound of flesh. Let’s not get too friendly, hm?” And with that she turned and left, already barking at some other student who was clutching at an injured hand.