Kalina stood alone on a flat roof, her eyes closed, even as her nose remained mesmerized by the smell of Energy in the house across the road. Did the boy have a Spring of Energy inside of him? And more importantly, what was he doing with it? That was a lot of churning Energy, even by her standards.

An Energy greeting brushed her nose from her left and Kalina turned her head, while slowly opening her eyes. She found Master Perdin’nar’s piercing blue gaze looking at her. The elder Master nodded to her, so she gave a similar nod.

Suddenly she noticed that Tercius’ overpowering Energy signature had lost some intensity, so she hurried to close her eyes and continue capturing those ethereal smells of Mana and Energy.

The most overpowering smell was that of that Energy, but below it was the smell of mana… there was the sweet fragrance that she recognized as crystal, but it was mixed with something else… something sterile, and… oh. Telekinetic mana. Crystal attuned telekinetic mana, to be precise.

The boy was doing something with Mana and Energy, both of them were slowly shrinking away from her nose which almost made her go there and take a closer sniff.

"Master, am I imagining it, or is he… trying to create a skill?" Kalina said out loud.

“I believe that he is, yes,” Master Perdin’nar answered. “A telekinetic skill. Very powerful stuff, by the sound of it.”

This was a twelve-cycles-old child and not an elder mage, she had to remind herself, and yet there he was actively creating a skill. As strange as it was to think it, Tercius did have everything strictly necessary, but… Somehow, Kalina just didn’t expect him to have made the connection on his own.

What kind of a Mentor to him would she be? To have a Disciple that had done almost everything on his own, without even a single word of help from her… That, along with every lie that she told him so far, parts of the story that she omitted and plans that she chose to keep for a later date made her possibly the worst Mentor ever to exist.

Kalina looked east. The sun was coming up, bringing with it a new day. Kalina sighed. "Master… Please, reconsider your decision and take the boy under you. I can't take this boy to be my Disciple,"

“Why can’t you?” Master Perdin’nar asked slowly.

“Well, what can I teach him?” Kalina asked. “He figured out skill creation on his own, and skill merging is just the width of a hair away—”

Shaking her head to calm the emotions that rose in her, Kalina sighed.

“I pledge knowledge and guidance for your mind and body, to support and guide you along the path of your magical craft to the utmost of my ability,” Master Perdin’nar said, reciting a part of the Rite of Tfenn in perfect standard Magik.

Kalina waited, expecting a point of some kind, while Master Perdin’nar looked at Tercius’ house. The smell of Energy coming from there was minuscule by this point.

“Did you know that the Mentorship system was established by Grand-Master Tfenn in the image of an older system called Progenitorship?”

“No, Master,” Kalina answered with a sigh.

“It was common, back in the days before the three Founders joined hands, for future mages to have children as close to the formation of the Well as possible. Males would inseminate an absurd number of non-mage women, while the females would lay with as many non-mage males as they could,” Master Perdin’nar explained in a cool, even voice.

“Almost all of the conceived children would be born healthy and almost all would become mages with relative ease. Parents leave a lot of inheritance to their children, from hair color to height and sometimes even mana affinity, but one gift is above those superficial ones— a propensity for certain skills,”

Kalina nodded. She knew that well. All Alchemists were semi-trained Healers, by trade, and research into procreation was a common enough topic. Interesting too, she had to say.

“Well, as you can imagine, the number of mages back in those days had been a lot higher. All of these children were educated by their parents and grandparents— a closed system very similar to the ones that beast-skill clans of this millennia use. Back then, our kind did not live any longer than non-mages, nor did we live separately from non-mages. We lived together. But constant struggles of fractions and powerful families meant that wars were common… and lands were often left devastated… and to make a very, very long story short— three mages had had enough destruction,”

It was the Origin Story, a story that she only heard once, but it was a story that she would probably never get tired of hearing. Mistress Prime’era heard it directly from the mouth of one of the Founders and shared it with her, but Master Perdin’nar was from another Line. To have such an opportunity as to compare the differences between the two… Kalina felt like a child, giddy at the thought of this sudden present.

“My Mentor, Grand-Mistress Kortana, First of Her Line, joined hands with Grand-Master Tergaron, First of His Line, and Grand-Master Tfenn, First of His Line. Their families had been bitter enemies and rivals for generations, with a lot of bad blood between them, but rather than let the past hold them back, the three of them cast the past aside and chose to look into the future. All three cared little for acquiring power over their peers, but all three agreed that only wasteland would remain if magical wars were to continue and so… they reached a compromise. The three of them exchanged all the secret magical knowledge of their respective families with each other, without holding anything back and then—”

Then the three mages returned to their families, armed with centuries worth of new magical knowledge. They waited, biding their time, learning more magic, building their skill sets, and never stopping the secret exchange. A few decades later each of them had become a powerful leader of their own families and despite strong internal and external opposition, which almost cost Grand-Master Tfenn his life, the three bitter enemy families were finally united by the steel wills of their leaders.

The three Founders never waged a single offensive war in the period that followed, and all who followed them followed that example. Defense and research were the way that they chose. Spells, enchantments, and potions for life extensions were perfected, skills for the same were slowly crafted, and the three of them outlived all opposition. In the cycles that followed, impregnable citadels and cities of magics and mechanisms were built, some almost single-handedly by Grand-Master Tergaron, all the while the three Founders kept gathering like-minded individuals from all over the world, teaching them their ways while absorbing new knowledge from those who joined.

“—At some early point of the unification, the first Laws were established and the first iteration of The Repository was built by the common effort of the three Founders, a grand monument where they placed all the knowledge they had accumulated and allowed an exchange of that knowledge to anyone who followed the Laws,”

The story was… an exact copy of what Kalina heard from Mistress Prime’era.

“There, I think that that's enough,” Master Perdin’nar said suddenly. “You’re calm again,”

And so she was, Kalina realized.

In the past hour, while Master Perdin’nar had told the story, she had completely forgotten of her inadequacy as a prospective Mentor. Yet now that he reminded her—

“And before I lose what progress I achieved, let me ask you something. How many Disciples do you have?”

Kalina's tongue was tied, unwilling to speak the words.

“Well?”

“None,” Kalina answered.

“And how many did you have in total?”

“Just one…”

“I see… Prime’era, Prime’era… some things never change…” Master Perdin’nar said and transitioned to mutter in coded Magik, shaking his head occasionally. “I spoke on the matter of Mentorship with Grand-Master Tfenn in person once. I had just taken on my first Disciple and thought it prudent to ask for some advice from the creator himself. He told me the story of how he had intentionally dismantled Progenitorship and picked out of a few select bones of that old system from which he then created Mentorship, a similar yet fundamentally different system in several aspects. In Progenitorship, you had a Progenitor and a Scion. A Progenitor was both a parent and a teacher, while a Scion was there to obey and learn. A simple teaching system made by mortals for mortals, Kalina.

"But at this point, we aren't exactly mortals, are we? That's why Grand-Master Tfenn created Mentorship from the ground up as a… guide of sorts.

“I pledge knowledge and guidance for your mind and body, to support and guide you along the path of your magical craft to the utmost of my ability," Master Perdin'nar repeated, and for a brief, terrifying moment the morning air came alive with darkness and Energy. "Path of magical craft is a long one… While most Mentors excel in the knowledge and support part of Mentorship, it is the guidance of the mind where most Mentors fail. I see that as clear as I see you or that sun up there. It is the part where I certainly failed the most.

“Human mind is not built for centuries and millennia of life, Kalina, and yet in the system of Mentorship, Grand-Master Tfenn has left us the tools of slowly building the seed of such a mind,”

Kalina stayed silent, as she listened to Master Perdin’nar’s grinding teeth.

Finally, he spoke again. "From the moment my Mentor took me in, when I was barely twenty cycles of age, she had given me counsel, a place to recuperate in safety, and a path forward any time I asked of her, but she had always let me walk that path on my own. She only ever directly intervened if my life had truly been in danger. Success or failure in my problems and endeavors had always been up to me. And yet… I still resent my Mentor for letting many things happen to me. I know that I am unfair in doing that, but… I also know that she could have just waved away my problems and prevented many of my traumas from ever happening.

“Yet if she did, the most likely case is that I would not be here today. Was it worth it? For me? Yes. But you will have to answer that for yourself, of course, as will any other mage.

"Disciples need to learn of magic, as well as of love and excitement and happiness. But they also need to hate, struggle, grieve and suffer. They need to experience falling to learn to get back up, repeatedly. They need to be thoroughly acquainted with all of what mortality has to offer before they reach for immortality, just like our Founders had.

“The exact words that Grand-Master Tfenn used were: “A Mentor isn't supposed to solve Disciple's problems, but rather offer guidance to the Disciple to solve those problems on their own. And if a problem isn't there to make use of… you take your Disciple and put him into one. From personal issues of love, friendship, and family, to more local or even global issues. The world is vast and riddled with issues, so throw the Disciple into the fire every so often,”,” Master Perdin’nar said.

“As I understood it from that point on, the primary intent behind Mentorship is not to be a parent and a teacher. It’s not solely about providing food and security and knowledge. Those are included and important, but they are secondary.

“A Mentor is about being a guide that will create that version of a mage that will stand the test of time.

"I’m not sure that I should be saying this to you, but… An even better Mentor is the one that realizes that in applying the system to our Disciples, we once again become immersed in mortality from a distance, and in doing so we move slowly to that version of ourselves that will stand the test of time.

"Because that's what most of the system of Mentorship is about, Kalina— transfer of knowledge is only a part of it and it was in major part meant for ordinary mages. The true core of Mentorship is a distilled guide from one of the first human immortals for how to become immortal and then how to handle and deal with what you've achieved— a guide meant for the Disciple and the Mentor.”

After Master Perdin’nar left, Kalina stood there rigid, almost stone-like.

The words spoken by the elder Master resonated with every part of Kalina. She fondly remembered the days spent with her late Mentor. And yet, just like Master Perdin'nar resented his Mentor, she too resented some things of her Mentor. Times when he could have acted to prevent certain things… yet didn't.

When she had taken on her first Disciple, she had been many things to that Disciple that her Mentor wasn’t to her. Now that Kalina thought about it, she had been a fervent protector to that girl solely to show to her Mentor that things could be done differently. That his was not the right way of doing things.

And now Kalina was alive and her Disciple was dead.

So had Kalina’s way truly been the better one?

With a thought, a book fell into her hands, a leather-bound tome that she gained from her Mentor once she decided to take her first Disciple. Her hands strained to hold it, but a quick spell later and she could have held a dozen more tomes without an issue. The title was simple and concise, just as the Founders preferred it— Mentorship by Grand-Master Tfenn. She had read it once and immediately placed it aside because in it she had seen every failure of her Mentor. At least she thought them failures then, but now… she was not so sure.

Kalina sighed and made the book vanish back into her amulet. She would have to read it a few times sometime soon.

She sat down on that roof and removed the binding that held her curly springs together. The low summer wind picked up the orange-colored hair and it went everywhere.

Tercius' home was directly across the way and his signature of Energy and Mana was practically nonexistent, yet she could smell it rise slowly. She shook her head. Strangely, the boy was a risk-taker. Not exactly a bad trait to have, but not a good one either.

Thinking about the situation in which he and his family were, Kalina now felt a major dilemma.

Just hours ago, she had been quite clear about what she would do to those people should they try anything more than harassment, but now…

She had done some investigation into those people that had been harassing Tercius' family, and she found them amassing people for what was a frontal attack. From the few conversations that she witnessed, these people planned on capturing Tercius and his siblings, as well as his mother and grandfather, to bring them away to the Capital to his paternal family.

A minor surprise for Kalina had been to find out that Tercius had familiar relations with one of the non-mage informers that the Repository kept inside the Capital. The world seemed so small, at times.

She also found out the most likely reason as to why the boy didn't want her to meddle in his family's matters. With someone monikered as The Mage Killer as his kin, she couldn't exactly blame him, but…

Silly child, Kalina shook her head. If that man had killed even a single mage under the protection of the Repository, he wouldn’t be able to use a single skill, let alone walk free around the Empire.

Still…

What was the path to take with Tercius?

Sweet Atalanta was dead and Kalina had always known that she had been at fault for that, but only right now, after Master Perdin'nar opened her blind eyes, did she see how true that was. She had coddled and sheltered the girl like a child well into her adulthood, never even...

A dreadful cold rolled over her shuddering back. If she hadn't done that, would have things turned out any different? She felt a tear roll down her cheek. She would never find out now...

Collecting her wits, Kalina wondered what to do? What she had done once before or...

As Kalina mulled over her dilemmas an alarm spell on her pinky finger tingled, one that she immediately recognized as the one that she wove into the Web of Paralysis that she had placed around Tercius' home.