Meyron fanned herself with crumpled parchment that was poorly folded to resemble a fan as she leaned against the pillar outside of the headmaster’s study. The weather didn’t call for a fan, but the other passing mages were quite used to her antics and hardly gave her a glance.

Winter set in outside and the wind cut through the weak sunlight. It wouldn’t be long before the northern pass closed up and the snowbirds would make their way south to their summer estates. Some only came as far as the Academy, a sprawling city with mage education at its center, while others would hire one of the hundreds of boats to take them to Paradise Island.

Off to her left the blackness flickered, and she rolled her eyes.

“You can’t be here,” she said. “The headmaster doesn’t take me seriously when you’re here.”

It gave the impression of a shrug and Meyron made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat.

“Fine, but don’t distract me. This is important.”

The ornate doors leading to the headmaster’s study, hulking things gilded and set with sapphires in the shape of the Eye, creaked open and released the last mage taking up the headmaster’s time. Meyron tucked her fan under her arm and slipped in before the heavy doors closed.

Like the doors, the headmaster’s study reeked of overdecoration, and it was Meyron’s least favorite thing about coming here. Except maybe the headmaster himself.

“Mage Meyron, you don’t have an appointment.” The small, light-haired woman behind the desk blocking the path to where the leader of the mages glared with an intensity that impressed her.

“Do I ever?” she asked, and strode past the woman and her protests. Less ornate doors led to the actual study and Meyron kicked one open.

The elf didn’t look up from his scroll or flinch at her entrance. Meyron frowned. The headmaster was one of the few elves without a single strand of dark hair showing on his head of white hair, and a smooth face that belied his age. The paler they were, the older they were. He was old, even by Meyron’s standards and that was saying a lot.

“Meyron,” he said, still reading from his scroll. “What have I done wrong now?”

“I sent a scroll addressing that topic last week,” she said, and peered around his organized desk. She didn’t see her seal on any of the scrolls there. “This is another matter.”

He set his pen in its holder and didn’t let out the sigh Meyron was hoping for. He grew accustomed to this approach. She made a mental note to change it.

“I’m here for my necromancer applications,” she said.

The other Pinnacles received dozens of applications a day, and they talked whenever she left a room. Necromancy is a dying art, they would say. Meyron was history. A relic. Something to be stored in the Academy museum or sent off to a dig site at the tombs in the mountains that made up the Scar. Something meant to be weeded out like a disease. Not proper magic.

Headmaster Trayvon raised a single eyebrow. The blackness to the left giggled and she flattened her lips and pointedly didn’t look over there and waited for a response. Anyone who knew her name knew about the madness, and no one was more deft in using it against her than Headmaster Trayvon.

“I haven’t received any necromancer applications worth secondary review,” he said. “As we’ve gone over in the past, I will forward worthy necromancer applications to you, the Necromancy Pinnacle.”

Meyron fanned herself with her makeshift fan again, and finally the porcelain smoothness and expressionless twitched. A tiny frown, and a shift in his steady gaze.

“You have a file, it seems,” said Meyron. “For all of the necromancer applicants.” She looked pointedly at the round waste bin off to the right of the desk.

The blackness grew with her temper. It took form now, the form of a man. No, the form of a ghost of a man. It demanded her attention.

“We could kill him.” The blackness, now a fully formed person with detail to match her memory of the man. Dark blue breeches, a beige shirt untucked and unlaced, tousled brown hair just darker than his skin, and those stone gray eyes that looked moments from death. “We’re powerful. We could kill him before he could even summon the magic to defend himself.”

Her eyes darted to the left. Damn it. Headmaster Trayvon smiled.

“We live in an age,” he began, his hands steepled, “where there is no place for necromancy, Meyron. We’ve had this conversation a dozen times. Those applications in your hands show little promise. Without our help, they will do little more than suck life from patches of grass that produces hardly enough magic to start a cookfire.

“The dragons, your own kind, have denounced necromancy. Let it die. Let the Great War and the destruction of necromancer madness be in the past. Your position here is honorary at best, but your knowledge is valuable. Do not throw it away because a few little pieces of useless potential catch your eye.”

Yes, he was repeating himself. Each time his speech grew more heated, and now the blackness sat in a chair next to the crackling fireplace, twisting his hair around a finger.

“It would be so easy,” he said. “Just suck the life of him and be done with it. Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it…”

Again and again, he said it over and over until the words overpowered whatever the headmaster was saying.

“No!” she shrieked at the blackness. It lost some of its form. “He is older than us and absorbing his life would kill us, and it would be wrong. Go away. I told you not to distract me. Now leave before I find a way to get rid of you.”

Unfazed, the headmaster leveled a stare over his still-steepled hands. Meyron pushed her wild mass of black unruly hair out of her face.

“That,” he said, “is why you can’t have those.” He nodded to the fan in her hand. “Reina, send in my next appointment.” He spoke to his assistant through the potted plant, a beautifully maintained primrose. Nature mages, she thought, spitting the words in her mind.

The primrose wilted, dried out to brown, and then decomposed.

The headmaster let out a sigh and Meyron smiled as she left his study with her fan tucked back under her arm.

It was a long trek from the headmaster’s study back to Meyron’s apartments, but it gave her time to think. The blackness and her hallucination were gone now, of course, likely from the little bit of power she took from the plant. Power always kept the hallucinations at bay.

The grand corridors of the main entrance didn’t impress her anymore. People from all over the known world came in and out, marveling at the architecture, the carvings, the marble and the rich wood. Now all it did was irritate her that it attracted so many people and clogged the main pathway to and from common areas in the Academy proper.

The Academy was technically a city, even bigger than the capital, but the place where mages and people seeking the help of mages was truly the Academy. People crossed that impossible bridge spanning the ocean below without any support with a purpose. Anyone wandering this way on accident was up to something.

“Excuse me,” said a man’s voice and when he called out again, she realized he was speaking to her. “Mage? With the hair?” He clearly didn’t know who he was speaking to. He saw a robe with the Eye and an ornate belt, which to many meant their problems would soon be over. For a price, of course. Meyron had her price like anyone else in the world.

“Sir?” she asked, stopping to address the man. He looked middle-aged with his hair thinning on the top of his head and skin starting to leather from too much time in the sun.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mage, but the others, they ignore me, they won’t look at me,” he said, and wrung a floppy cap in his hands. “It’s my son.”

“Where is he?” Meyron looked around, her eyes peeled for a sickly boy or someone on a litter.

“He isn’t here, but please, listen,” he said. His eyes pled even more than he already spoke.

“I’m listening, go on,” she said.

“His body isn’t sick, Mage, it’s his head,” said the man, tapping his temple with two fingers. “He sees things no one else sees, and he talks about it like it’s something normal folk see, b-but…” He licked his lips, and sweat formed on his forehead even in the cooler season. “He’s been tested, you see, to see if he could be a mage like you. He didn’t pass, Mage, this isn’t magic.”

So, psychosis then. The pathetic thing probably ingested a poisonous weed as a child and never recovered. Or he survived the Fever that swept the nation nearly a decade ago. It did many things to a person’s brain when their body got that hot. Not even the healing mages could do anything about the damage.

“I can’t help you,” she said, and began to walk away, her mind already moving on to something else. Something much more important.

“Wait!” The man grabbed the sleeve of her black robe and she swung around to stare at him with fire in her eyes. He dropped his hand like she had truly caught fire to it.

“I am the Pinnacle of Necromancy, you fool, I wait for no one.”

“I know.”

Meyron drew up short. So he did know who he was dealing with. She held up both of her hands in question.

“I could suck the life out of you and go about my day like nothing happened, and no one could punish me,” she said. “This better be good.”

“He calls them tendrils,” he said, his voice quaking. As it should. “Black vines just out of sight and always there. He claims they are why the harvest was so good this year. He claims he can keep the produce fresh when we take it to market at the Capital.” The man shook his head continuously as he spoke. “It’s true, the squash is keeping longer than it should, but it has nothing to do with his...condition, does it?”

Meyron dug into her pocket for the crumpled up fan and licked her finger to flip through the almost unreadable pages. Ah, yes.

“Eldeman?”

“That’s me,” he said, tapping his own chest. “Josiah Eldeman.” The last few centuries taught her there was no such thing as coincidence.

“Excellent,” said Meyron, her mood turning for the better and putting a smile on her face. “There is nothing wrong with your son, Mr. Eldeman. I believe there may have been a misunderstanding with the mage who administered it. Please, come with me.”