It was generally true that the senior researchers for the academies lived reasonably rich lives. While they might not be able to afford the luxuries owned by many of the Drafters, they certainly lived on par with engineers and Illuminators. Many worked shifts utilizing their magical potential, since research was a purely academic pursuit.

Aron’s office suggested this was true. It was a small but ornate space, decorated with geodes and cast iron statues of various animals frozen forever in time. A handsome paining dominated one wall of the space, somewhat eccentrically depicting an erowist in the shape of a fox, looking out over the mountains with eyes that shimmered an eerily accurate purple. A broad window to the side of the woman’s desk flooded the room with natural light by day. Heavy satin curtains on either side of it and a spindly silver lamp sprouting from one corner of the room suggested Aron might use her own magics to light the room in the evening hours.

Since there were just two chairs – one on either side of the desk – it was not difficult for Merigold to determine where she was supposed to sit when Aron gestured her towards the desk and closed the office door softly behind them. Aron took the seat at her desk and leaned back, fingers tented in front of her. She regarded Merigold thoughtfully, eyes bright and expression indicating she was thinking carefully through where to begin. Not rushing her, Merigold extracted brush, ink, and paper from her bag, and arranged them on the desk. Then she waited patiently, and not for very long.

“The erowist have always been here,” Aron said after a moment, “for as long as any other form of life, anyway. But, their numbers ebb and flow, seemingly at random. Sometimes there are many, sometimes there are few. But there are patterns. Patterns like one we are seeing now, in which the many low-class erowist of a locale are abruptly replaced by higher class ones, and their population on a whole swells. That is the pattern we witnessed six years ago, before Bertlith was decimated.”

A shadow passed over Aron’s expression, and for good reason. Everyone remembered Bertlith. It had been a thriving city, not equal to Hakarth, certainly, but some hundreds of thousands of souls in size. It had been home to two academies and an impressive research network, specializing in the export of the malleable metals, silver and nickel. Merigold had visited the city with Reese and her parents when she was seventeen, and while her mother and father had spent three weeks roaming the halls of various businesses while offering up their services as Drafters, she and Reese had spent them instead ogling the impressive jewelry stores that lined Bertlith’s streets.

Less than a year later, the city had been leveled by a class five erowist. It had simply appeared in the mountains one day, a creature the size of a building, shooting bolts of lightning, pulsing every color of the rainbow. It had descended on the city with a hoard of smaller erowist, ripping – by all accounts – great furrows in Burtlith’s cobbled streets, and knocking over buildings like toothpicks. Survivors spun stories of how it lifted one of the trains from the city streets, still belching steam and sparks, and rammed it into the ground, as if trying to dislodge the comparatively miniscule people within. Tens of thousands had died before the Combat Guilds managed to destroy the erowist’s core. Shortly after, the other erowist had disappeared, gone from wherever they had come.

But Bertlith was not rebuilt. No one wanted to desecrate, it seemed, the grave of the once splendid city. Survivors simply fled to Hakarth or the surrounding cities and villages in the mountains, and began their lives anew.

“That, however, is not what I brought you here to talk about. There are many, many people monitoring the erowist situation. No, no. I want to talk to you about magic.”

Aron flashed a smile in Merigold’s direction.

“You learn in your classes that we are conduits for the Astral Plane, and our magic is borrowed energy, in a sense. Since the Astral Plane exists parallel to ours, and in some senses within ours, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we are not the only such conduits. The vast fauna and flora of Venerith, many of its ores and waters, and even to some extent its skies, are conduits for the energies of the Astral Plane,” Aron continued. “At the academies, we spend a great deal of time teaching all of our students how to become the ideal conduit, master and hone their abilities, and apply them to the well-being of our nation. Despite what happened with your Awakening, Merigold, I’d suppose you never really thought about why some people Awaken as elementals, and others as Organics, and still others as Lightbringers.”

“Genetics,” Merigold said simply, holding out a hand as if she could hold the entirety of the answer in her palm. “And mutations. Throwbacks.”

“Do you see yourself as a mutation, then?” Aron asked curiously.

“What else would I be? Both of my parents are Drafters,” Merigold agreed.

Aron nodded as if this were reasonable, but did not seem convinced. “What if I told you that we are starting to suspect the Awakening is a more delicate procedure than we imagined? Yes, it is simple. An Illuminator, who has the ability to conduct the energies of the Astral Plane in mediums on a flat surface, tying spells to runes and symbols, draws such a symbol on your palms. You clap them together, at least conceptually completing a sort of circuit like the ones that fill our steam factories and move our trains. In that moment, you are Awakened. It is done, forevermore. But how, Merigold, does the Illuminator know what symbol to use for you?”

Merigold curled the edge of her notepaper between her finger and thumb, unhappy with the direction of the conversation. Of course, she did not know how an Illuminator determined what symbol to use for each student they Awakened. In their classes, they were told that the Illuminator would simply know, perhaps through many years of long study, which symbol to apply in each case.

“Let’s take a step back,” Aron suggested. “If we are all simply conduits for the energies of the Astral Plane, why is that you I am a Lightbringer, and can be nothing else. Why is that you are a necromancer, no matter that both of your parents are Drafters, and that your sister might well also be a Drafter, and yet you, too, can be nothing else?” She raised a finger like a lead, drawing them both to the answer. “What if the answer lies in how we sense the Astral Plane?”

Merigold shifted uncomfortably. “What do you mean?” she asked. Aron seemed pleased by the question.

“I mean that Elementals are the purest form of conduit. They channel the energies of the Astral Plane through themselves, and release them in various forms into the environment. Fire, electricity, air, water, ice, plasma…they are tied closely to the nature of our world. Organics are not able to channel the Astral energies this way, but they are very adept at seeing how those energies move through other living bodies. They redirect those energies, healing, growing, and sometimes, yes, killing.”

Intrigued, Merigold folded her hands over her notebook.

“Then what about Drafters?” she asked. “They must be channeling the Astral energies, so why can’t they do what Elementals do?”

“Well, I told you already that Illuminators can conduct the energies of the Astral Plane in mediums on a flat surface. Or any surface, really, but flat ones are easiest. It just so happens that Illuminators are also not so good at channeling Astral energies through themselves, so they instead channel them into shapes, including runes. Mediums are their focal tool. By comparison, Drafters are really very strange. They seem to channel the Astral energies in a way that is almost the same as Illuminators, except that they are incredibly logical and rule-oriented. They shape the channel, in other words, carving the path the energies of the Astral Plane must follow into the clauses of their contracts and through living things. In a strange way, it could be said that they carve runes into us, redirecting our energies inside of ourselves to fulfill the terms we have accepted.”

Merigold could not help but feel stilted. Everything about the description of a Drafter still suited her. The rules, the specificity, the logic. She wanted precision. She wanted certainty.

“So, given everything I’ve said so far, how do you think I would describe a psychic to you, Merigold?” Aron asked, clapping her hands together to reclaim Merigold’s attention. It was a tactic used by most of the professors at the academy, often on a daily basis.

“They seem like Elementals,” Merigold said, unsure.

“I thought so at first, too. But if you very carefully study the Astral energies around a psychic while they work – which is extremely difficult and probably inaccurate – you’ll find they are nothing like those around an Elemental. Psychics move the Astral Plane. They pull pieces of it around themselves to create shields by forming a sort of region of intensely dense energy, or they expel it forcefully to throw people back. Psychometers, like Gregory, who I heard you worked with recently, are very, very rare. We think that they can actually see the Astral Plane. What Gregory describes about the past events affecting an object or place sound very strange. When he described them to a mathematician who studies the movement of sound, however, that mathematician was ecstatic. He said Gregory’s experiences are very similar to what we expect the bats living in the eves of the academy must experience when they use echolocation to find their way around.”

Unsure where to begin, Merigold still had not written anything. She was staring openly at Aron now, imagining Gregory standing on the scree fields with his eyes closed…listening.

“And necromancers? How could you describe necromancers?” Merigold asked, unsure whether hearing Aron’s answer would make her feel better, or not.

“Necromancers,” Aron said, clearly excited to share her theories, “are like psychics, and a little like psychometers. They – you, Merigold – manipulate the Astral Plane like a web, letting them move Astral energies through the channels of other things. Corpses are effective tools for that sort of manipulation, given that they have channels for Astral energies, but do not do anything to interfere with your manipulation of those energies. They have no will of their own, no desire to ignore your demands. You receive some sort of feedback from those threads as well, which might be what allows you to hear the erowist.”

“But as you said, that wouldn’t allow me to control the erwoist,” Merigold stated, grasping immediately to the strangeness of what had occurred with her contract. Aron was nodding already.

“Yes, I thought that was odd when I first heard about it, which was why I had to meet you. After doing so, I think I have an idea, at least. You clearly spent many, many years working towards becoming a Drafter, and to be frank, you have all the personality trains that would have made you a very good one. There is no particular reason why a necromancer, who excels in manipulating the Astral energies in another body, could not do more or less what a Drafter does.”

“I could be a Drafter,” Merigold said excitedly, standing abruptly and dropping her notebook on the floor. “I could choose. Is that what you’re saying.”

Aron regarded her a bit sadly.

“Maybe, Merigold. I can’t tell you that for sure, one way or the other. You could try it, of course. But it would be a difficult path to take, now that your Awakening has been publicly announced. Even if you could convince clients that you were able to do what a Drafter does, don’t you think they might worry that your power might overstep the bounds of a Drafter…that you might be able to manipulate them the way you would a corpse? I’m sorry. I can see how much it hurts you to hear this, but if I’m honest, I think we are going to need you as a necromancer. I think…with your help, we could permanently change our relationship with the erowist, and make Hakarth, and maybe all of Venerith, a safer place for everyone.”

“But it isn’t what I want,” Merigold said calmly. “I want, and have always wanted, to be a Drafter.”

“Even if it means discarding the possibility that, if the erowist situation declines from here on in, we might have a new means of fighting, even stopping them?”

“I don’t want to fight. I faint at the sight of blood. I nearly got my unit of the Radvik Guild killed,” Merigod stated factually, feeling a pang in her chest. “Necromancers….Drafters, neither belong in a Combat Guild.”

Aron was staring hard at her, still with that sad expression on her face. It was the look, Merigold thought, that Alecia had given her when she could not accept that she was a necromancer after all.

“Just because they haven’t been there before doesn’t mean they don’t belong there,” Aron said more softly than before. “Years ago, it was said that Lightbringers did not belong in academia. It was said that only Elementals and Organics could comprehend the particulars of the material world, because they dealt every day with heat exchanges and fluid dynamics and the flaws of flesh and blood. Today, Hakarth has changed, and people like me fill the halls of the academies. We usher in the future. Do you really not want that, Merigold?”

Merigold squared her shoulders to make clear that she did not. Aron seemed to be ignoring, at any rate, the key fact that academia was not particularly dangerous. It did not require facing down marauders or erowist or wild animals.

“If it’s danger you're afraid of, we’ll take you here, in the lab. I would love to work with you, Merigold Lee. You could be the first necromancer in academia as well.”

Merigold hated that Aron seemed to know what she was thinking after all. She hoped it did not show on her face.

“Take a few days and think it over,” Aron suggested. “I’ll look forward to hearing your answer. Let me walk you to the train.”

She rose, straightening her coat, while Merigold again collected her things. She moved quickly, but without haste, trying not to think too hard about what Aron had said. She could be a Drafter. That was all that actually mattered.