Before all else, know your enemy, for the gentlest pathway to your victory is to present a false world in which he sees himself the victor.

-Tactonius, from Pontifications

My first ever trip to the Collegium infirmary was to get my fractured ulna treated, though it wasn't my last trip there. The 'surgeons' at the infirmary were sometimes actual doctors, and more often matriculated Greycloaks with some medical experience. Often of the battlefield variety. Our medical treatment was better than any treatment you could buy anywhere outside of the Mercantile Quarter, and anything the medics couldn't handle would be tended to by Dr. Silvestria.

Silvestria was a proper Shadow with an odd assemblage of talents that made her a bit of a legend among Floria's physicians… the woman was a carnemancer - a flesh shaper. A mere fractured ulna wouldn't rate a moment of the regular surgeons' time, let alone Dr. Silvestria's, so a steely-eyed medic saw to my wound. I was given a semi-rigid wrapping for my arm, a foul-tasting alchemical elixir for the pain, and orders to keep the wrap on for a week and to take three drops of the elixir orally thrice daily. The elixir made my arm feel 'fizzy', for lack of a better word, something akin to pins and needles of numbness, but with an effervescent vitality.

"That's how you know it's working," the medic assured me - he was one of the surgeon's assistants rather than a proper physician, but he knew his craft. His hands were sure as he set the wrapping and my arm was right as rain a week later, none the worse for the wear. And, not to be outdone, Mailyn's sprained ankle shaped right up, and she was sprinting around the Foreign Canton four or five days later. We'd recovered fully from our stint with the cultists.

"That's the second time in a row I beat you," Mailyn said, gasping for breath. "I think I'm faster than you now…"

"Maybe," I allowed. She got more running in than I did since I spent so much time doing translations for Mr. Hianchi. On the other hand, I always had more money because the work was steady. "I hope Nate is okay…"

"I'm sure he's fine," Mailyn said. "They said he'd be fine…"

"But he didn't come back."

We hadn't seen him since the day of the debacle in the canals. He'd suffered a blow to the head during his capture, and it was almost two hours between then and when the surgeon finally saw to him - Dr. Silvestria herself and not a medic. Modern medicinal alchemy is a wonderful thing, and most of Nate's injury was healed. I imagine an expert anatomist wouldn't be able to tell the difference between our friend's brain and a healthy one - but, when you suffer brain damage and then use powerful alchemicals to heal the wound, things don't set quite the way they were before.

"He'll probably come back soon," Mailyn said. "It's only been a week…"

"Yeah, probably," I said.

I stopped by once or twice while he was still at the surgeon's, and Zev stopped by a lot more than that. According to him, Nate would sometimes just break out into tears without any trigger. And Nate did return to us soon enough. Two weeks after the incident, our friend finally came back… but he wasn't fully healed. He woke up screaming in the middle of the night most nights, sometimes multiple nights, and he had a tremor in his left hand that worked up when he wasn't paying attention. His smiles were less frequent and they felt empty.

Six months after his abduction, he left our ranks in the Scamps, one of the twenty or so percent who never make it to Sneak. The Collegium offered him to the Alchemists's Guild, who snatched him up. There are worse things, I suppose, than being an alchemist. After all, they're the fourth most-prestigious guild in the city (after the Collegium, the artificers, and the mages, in that order… though the last two are fairly close). Nate went into training to become an alchemist, and I hear he took to that well, even with the hand tremors.

We still saw him at the step wharf sometimes, and I think Zev saw him a lot more than that. I don't really know - we didn't speak much with Zev anymore. He didn't forgive me for what happened to Nate, and I can't even blame him.

"If me and Nate never helped you out in the courtyard that day when you came, sobbing into your skirts in the front yard, we never would've known you from Enoch. You'd have gone on your way, and we'd have gone on ours, and he'd never have been muddled up by some bloody cult in the bloody Green Stones," he spat.

He wasn't wrong. Mailyn, Aldo, and I probably would have got by without a little extra help on our first ever day at the Collegium, and Zev and Nate wouldn't have been anywhere near our orbit if they'd been running around Rivers Run and we'd been doing odd jobs among our fellow Gionians in the Foreign Canton. Part of Nate's fate was just bad luck, though - the other three children slotted for human sacrifice recovered well aside from the occasional nightmare. That included Rhima and Rafael, a pair of artificer kids who were friends with Opellia.

Rhima was a Kronojic girl a bit older than me, older cousin to Nima and best friend of Opellia, who was about a year older than me. Our role in Rhima's rescue earned us some goodwill among the artificers, and Mailyn and I were even allowed to sit in on their introductory-level classes when we stopped in.

The artificers had their guildhouse on the western edge of the Mercantile Quarter and not too far from the Sun's Start Bridge, which made it a reasonable walk from the Collegium campus. As the wealthiest of the non-Collegium guilds, the artificers liked to hobnob with the merchants and vice-versa. The FACT, which Opellia joined soon after our introduction, was as grand and finely-appointed as all but the most elite exchange houses. It boasted levitating glowglobes circulating in programmed patterns, an artificial river populated by mechanical fish that responded to light and several voice commands, and a great gilded entryway with the likenesses of ancient creatures carved in relief. These 'guardians'could recognize who to admit or turn away based on whether they held a personally-attuned guild glyph.

Only a handful of secure locations in the Shadow Canton bother to use that same technology because it's prohibitively expensive, but the artificers used it for the front door of their apprentice school.

As time passed, I found myself spending more time at the FACT because the Scamp classes were no longer very challenging. Even taking all tier five classes, I no longer felt challenged at school - I'd read just about every book in The Learned Gentleman on each of my school topics several times over and many more to boot. So, whenever there wasn't anything interesting happening around Mini Gionika, I would make my way to the artificer's guild and see if there was anything magical they'd let me play with. More often than not, Mailyn would join me, though her work as a courier sometimes had her running at odd hours.

It was just under a year and a half after the incident in the Green Stones that Opellia showed us her second Acceptable-graded project as a student at the Florian Academy of Construct Thaumaturgy. Contrary to how it sounds, it is exceedingly difficult to get professional artificers to deem your project 'acceptable'.

"I finished my Ring of Fire Sphere," Opellia said, beaming. For Opellia, this was unambiguously good news - and, indeed, Mailyn and I congratulated the girl. But we were also well-aware of the subtext: Opellia would be advancing to the Class II class in artificery - a class that neither Mailyn nor I, nor any person not a student with two Acceptable-graded Class I projects, were allowed to attend…

That is to say, we couldn't sit in on her classes once she advanced. She held the ring out, presenting it upon a little velveteen pillow like the apologetic offering it was. "I want you to have it."

I glanced toward Mailyn. "Which one of us?"

"Uhh…" Opellia blushed. I knew that she thought of me, the Selenite Princess, as being of her same social class and, while she and Mailyn got along well enough, Mailyn would forever be 'Vix's friend' as far as the artificer girl was concerned. "I mean… Mai can already do fire magic."

In the past year and a half, both Mailyn and I had completed our 'awakening', the full awareness and control of our thaum. When I calmed myself and concentrated, I could feel my thaum within me, flowing like a strange, dark river with tributaries, streams, and little runnels slowly expanding and inching through my body. Mailyn said hers was like a sharp little star, sparkling and sending tiny streamers of jagged energy about her soul. Only with one's outer thaum awakened was it possible to exert control over one's magic.

Of course, as awakened children with no formal schooling in thaumaturgy, all that meant was that we could do the tricks that came naturally to us at will rather than having them randomly trigger during times of high emotion. In my case, that meant I could shadow-walk when I wanted to, and in Mailyn's case it meant mildly impressive displays of pyrotechnics. Mailyn could do fire magic, but that magic was mostly useful as a street trick, or perhaps for starting an oven fire if you didn't have a sparker on you. If you actually wanted to hurt somebody with fire, you were better off throwing a lit torch at their face.

"So… it's for me?" I clarified, already reaching for the ring.

"What do I get instead?" Mailyn asked.

Opellia stared daggers into the table. "I'll… I'll be right back." She scurried off into the back room to find a failed project with enough function to serve as a gift.

The Artificer's Guild had regular auctions to sell various student works - the proceeds were split evenly between the student and the school. The works of the more advanced students were already as good as anything you could find for sale outside of the Mercantile Quarter, and many apprentice artificers were already well off by the time they made full Artificer. Junior students like Opellia weren't likely to get more than one or two octavos for their works, and the school would only auction Class I artifacts with an Acceptable grade or higher.

The FACT graded its students projects based on two criteria: function and artistry, each of which had five possible grades. For function, these were: DNF (does not function), UF (under-functional), NF (normal function), EF (exceeds function, and GEF (greatly exceeds function). Similarly, for artistry, the grades were: CA (crude artistry), BA (basic artistry), SA (standard artistry), FA (fine artistry), and VFA (very fine artistry). An acceptable grade needed seven points between artistry and function.

I wasn't sure what combination Opellia had gotten for the ring she'd gifted to me, but for the glowglobe she'd made for her other Acceptable project, she'd exceeded the normal function of her little pewter artifact (pewter was the most common metal for the Class I artifacts, since most beginning artificers didn't have any sort of metallurgical magic). It was a normal glowglobe with a pewter lantern casing embellished in a repeating floral pattern - Opellia had toiled over the flower pattern with a little heat nib for hours, carving out a far finer pattern than I could. And she'd done something interesting with the three runes engraved on the little glowing filament at the heart of the lantern. Obviously, in an enchanted object, the runes must form a circuit to complete the effect - but there are exceptions. In this case, the apical runes weren't quite touching, which meant a few taps on the glowglobe could cause it to flicker and turn off without discharging the stored thaum. A few more taps and it would turn back on (the number of taps varied from about two to six) - voila! A glowglobe that even magical weaklings could activate and deactivate, provided somebody charged it with thaum to begin with. That clever bit of runesmithing had earned Opellia her very first EF score on a piece.

My own glowglobe was… less impressive. A little, crooked pewter cage with blobby 'flowers' that were just accretions of pewter at the mesh joints and a ruddy glowglobe filament that stayed lit for about forty-five minutes a charge - about an eighth as long as consumer-grade filaments manage. I'd earned a UF/CA for that, not that I was competing with the actual artifice students or anything…

"Oh!" Opellia called out from the back. "I've found… yes! This'll do nicely." She emerged a moment later with a pair of brown leather gloves. They were unadorned gloves but fairly high in quality - if I had to guess, one of the students had bought the gloves elsewhere and then enchanted them, which would have made the things ineligible for artifice class grading. With a relieved smile, she handed the pair to Mailyn.

"I'm guessing they do something?" Mailyn asked.

Opellia nodded. "I couldn't help but notice how your sleeves are always singed up from… you know…" She mimed a wavering flame with her fingers.

Mailyn did pyrotechnics on a street corner two days a week. It was good magic practice and earned her as many or more coins as being a messenger girl. That gig was a bit self-limiting, though - if she did more than two days a week, her earnings went down because people think that the things they see every day are unremarkable regardless of how much talent and effort goes into them. Since Mailyn only owned about three outfits (the same as any Scamp, unless they had a stash somewhere outside of their locker at the residence hall), all of her sleeves inevitably got a bit black and crispy.

"Yes," Mailyn said with a roll of the eyes, "I'm aware that my magic isn't good for my clothes. And these gloves will help?"

"Put them on…"

Mailyn did so, finding the gloves just a bit too big for her slim hands. Which, in a Scamp's world, is a good thing - clothes that are a bit too big will let you grow into them. And some fabrics and leathers will even stretch a bit, granting you a few more precious months of use. Mailyn flexed her fingers and then, with a frown of concentration and a flash of thaum, summoned a small, orange fireball above her hand. Her control wasn't perfect, so it flickered in and out, never quite extinguishing, and sending out little questing flames. With her free hand, she approached the fireball, watching the leather fingers to into the fire, wavering the body of the flame like a displaced liquid without growing or diminishing the flame.

"They're fireproof?"

Opellia nodded. "Well… fire-resistant. They were meant for handling molten pewter… they can take the temperature but keeping something solid and hot against the leather ran through the thaumic charge a lot more quickly than something, uh… gaseous, I guess? Fire is a gas, right? So it hasn't got much substance."

"Won't your friend get mad that you gave their project away?" I asked.

Opellia shrugged. "It was in the Octavo Bin."

I rolled my eyes. "Is that what it sounds like?"

"Kind of," Opellia admitted with a hint of a blush - we always teased her about how wealthy the artificers were… though that 'teasing' was mostly poorly-disguised jealousy. "There's a box of projects that the guild won't put up for auction. You put an octavo in a slot and the box lets you take one item out. At the end of a year, the school throws us a fancy party with the proceeds…"

"The box lets you take an item out?" I asked.

Mailyn looked up from her fire play, one eyebrow quirking up. "I'm guessing it's not based on the honor system." She walked through the classroom toward the back room where Opellia had retrieved the gloves. Opellia reached out to stop her, but then thought better of it because Mailyn still had little streamers of flame whisping up from her fingertips to her wrists.

"I wouldn't try… it, uh, 'zaps' you if you don't pay or try to take too much. It knows. Mistress Brawer made it, so it's really advanced."

Indeed, Floria's Master-level artificers are usually considered the best in the world after the Masters in Kronoj and a handful of prodigies in Gionika. It's my understanding that they've developed Arkavian Sigils into a sort of 'programming language' that incorporates contingencies and assessments into some form of hierarchical decision tree. Though, at the time, it all just seemed miraculous.

I looked at my sad little glowglobe with its crooked meshwork and blobby little 'flowers'. "I'll never get any good if I'm not allowed in class anymore," I huffed.

"Your school has artificer classes, right?"

"Yeah, I guess, but it'll be years before I get to take them!" I made my way over to one of the couches out in the hallway. Couches! Even the junior students in the artificer's guild lived in luxury.

Back in Barsoa, we'd had one couch, and mother would only let the children sit on it for special occasions because we had to keep the thing in good condition to impress clients. But at the FACT, any junior apprentice in artificery could curl up on one of the things to study beneath the gauzy glow of hovering, light-diffusing chandeliers. Safely ensconced on the couch, I crossed my arms and pouted. "I just want to be good at something."

Opellia rolled her eyes. "Don't you speak like a dozen languages?"

It was my turn to roll my eyes. "No, only ten. And there are like four other kids in my bunk who can do that, and even Mailyn can speak eight…"

"Even Mailyn?" Mailyn objected. She grew her little fireball in mock-threat.

Opellia's eyes went wide - if Mailyn singed the couch, it would be a serious infraction and could well get us banned from her guild. She made to destabilize Mailyn's magical fire with a pulse of thaum just as I did likewise - from opposite sides of the fireball. Sure enough, the flames went out in a wink… and the thaum pulses kept going, knocking both of us back into the cushions at either end of the couch. Mailyn laughed maniacally, as if that was the result she'd been aiming for all along.

"You're terrible," I said. "I just meant you don't work as a damn translator."

"I know. I wasn't really mad." She stuck out her tongue. Her stomach rumbled - it had been close to ten hours since breakfast and we'd both skipped lunch. We turned to Opellia… and she got the hint.

"Street food? My treat?" she said.

"If you insist!" I said, hopping down from the couch. I slid my new ring on my finger, stashed my three-point glowglobe in my pocket, and skipped toward the door.