Harlan slept again that night, he dreamt of a woman sitting in a ball room alone in a chair, she had no face and spoke no words he could understand.

As he got out of bed he heard a knock at the door, looking through the peephole he saw it was an elderly man.

He opened the door and the man asked to be let in, which Harlan obliged.

“Would you like something to drink?”

“Oh no, I don’t drink.”

“I meant tea.”

“I know.”

The man had a grin that set Harlan’s hair on end.

“I was sent here by an associate of ours, The Darkness has reasons for not appearing here in this place at the moment. But she wanted me to pass along a few messages.”

“Alright.” Harlan was trying to keep an even tone, but every sense was telling him to run and hide.

“Very well, for starters she has sent a man to watch over your sister Ava, she stumbled into the aftermath of a fight between this man and a very powerful vampire.

You will be receiving a letter first from Balor, asking for your permission to allow her to go on missions with Breken, he has given her permission currently but it is predicated on your permission that she be allowed to continue. Secondly you will be sent a letter by Breken assessing the situation and asking that you not let her go on missions with him so he doesn’t have to be the one who breaks the news to her. The last letter will be from Ava herself downplaying what happened so you let her continue to work with him. For the record, The Darkness has not seen any reasons why you should deny her the ability to learn under him, as the man watching out for her is very powerful and the chance of her being harmed is very low.”

Harlan would’ve gone against this, but he could barely think while looking the man in the eyes.

“Last order of business, Sepul has fallen ill, he will call for you, when he does, stop him from telling you any secrets, just tell him that Cecht was nearly killed by The Darkness because he had been working with Faelings to disrupt her ability to see time. Or you could ignore all of this, goodbye.”

The man walked out of the room and Harlan let himself breath again.

Lugh was shaking in his sheath and after another 10 minutes they decided that they needed to go on a walk to clear their minds.

He simply walked around the campus until classes started again, finding Tau was also up,neither of them slept well.

They spoke of the usual subjects of philosophy and his pacifism.

Then Tau spoke what was really on his mind.

“What has frightened you so?”

Harlan took a deep breath.

“I got a visit from a man this morning. Every time I looked into his eyes I was overcome with fear, he exuded an aura of pain and suffering, he was death incarnate.”

Tau would’ve laughed, Harlan was dramatic at times when he wanted to send a message despite his desire for simple words, but he could see Harlan wasn’t putting on a show.

“Share with me this feeling, so I might know your burden.”

“No.”

“I won’t force you, but it might help you calm down.”

Harlan did as asked, Tau could swear the man was looking directly at him even through the memories.

“Hmm… I understand your fear. Yet also it is a great relief in a sense.”

“What?”

“If she has a man that strong as a messenger, then surely the one who watches you sister is far beyond him.”

Harlan thought for a while longer, he listened to the fountain and the morning birds.

“Thank you.”

“I’ve done nothing, just provided another point of view.”

Harlan went ahead and sat at their usual spot, waiting for his friends.

Today he was seated next to Adina and Zella, across from him was Claude.

“Will your sister be joining us?”

“No, she had plans with another friend.”

Claude opened his mouth as if he was going to ask something but then closed it again.

“How about we have a tea party after dinner. I feel like there is something you and Adina both want to ask but you don’t feel comfortable with.”

“Should I ask Amber and the others? Or is this a private party like we had before.” Zella asked.

“That depends, Adina, Claude, would you rather have a smaller gathering? Or even none at all, I am not going to force you to answer, just if you want to.”

He found it somewhat funny how both of them seemed to react with the same expression, both wondered if what they wanted to ask was appropriate.

“I wanted to know, you talked about the god of dark mana. Did you really talk to them?” Claude questioned.

“Her, and yes. I’ve spoken to her a handful of times. I won’t get into the details however, mostly it has been very personal.”

“I… I wanted to know the same thing. I’ve never spoken to our gods, but the idea that there is another pantheon of sorts, well, it is very strange to me.”

“It was strange to me too, but she talks to me like a parent, I didn’t even mean to talk to her at first. It just happened when I meditated like how normal people start to mana sense.”

Claude’s eye lit up.

“Do you mean you were born able to sense? I’ve only met a few others who could do it. How does it look here?”

“Not as bright as I expected. I am sure that this place is enchanted down to the smallest brick, but I guess they probably have some trick to hide the magic from sight. Actually, everything here seems off, I heard that because we are in the center of the continent or something like that we recover faster and generally feel stronger, but I’ve seen places with more free floating motes of mana.”

“Fascinating. Why do you think so?”

“Maybe the arrays are using most of them? Maybe the academy pulls them in somewhere to store them? I really don’t know enough about what mana is to give a good guess.”

They spoke of these things until they had to move out to class, Claude and Claudia were both in group A so they shared their schedule with Harlan and Adina, though Claudia walked and sat with her own group.

Then they all moved out to their classes.

Basic elements was the first of the day.

Harlan was interested in why light and dark needed to be their own class when the first one handled 4 elements already.

The average looking mage named John was already standing at the front of the class, eager to be teaching a new generation of mages.

"I said yesterday that I needed more time if I was to explain what light and dark magic are, now, when you think of light, what do you think of?"

He asked a few different students but the answer was always the same, healing.

"No unexpected answers this time, you are mostly right, light is best known for its healing, even basic instinctual light magic is healing. But, light is also space, light also shares an aspect of heat from fire, it is fast like wind, it refracts like water. Light is an abstruse element, seemingly doing whatever it wants. Does anyone want to guess why light takes the traits that it does? There are no wrong answers, just guesses."

Se students talked between themselves, some just took wild guesses, then Harlan raised his hand.

"What is your guess?"

"Because light represents control, Cecht dislikes his sister because control and freedom are opposed to one another."

The teacher could only awkwardly cough and ignore the answer, only making it more clear that Harlan said something with more meaning than they realized, the beastkin had some respect that he would outright name a true god in front of Reinoian students again.

Harlan meanwhile was continually getting annoyed at those around him, Reino was beaten, the headmaster did all but outright name the true gods and call the gods of Reino Fae.

He didn’t know the context behind the fight that Ava saw the aftermath of, nor did he know why Cecht did what he did or what a Faeling was, but he wanted to blame the threat he most clearly understood.

John moved onto the next subject.

"The second most important part of light magic is divination, though some of you might know it as search or finding magic. Light reveals things, darkness hides them. One might expect invisibility to be a light magic since it is tied to illusion and light refraction is the basis for basic invisibility, but truly high level invisibility is actually a dark magic spell. Moving onto darkness, it is a simpler but still odd element, darkness destroys, but not always in the same way. Let me show you what I mean."

He brought out a few ingots.

"Now, here is steel. If I cast a find steel spell they will all glow. But, watch what happens when I cast different darkness spells on them."

When he was done only one of them glowed.

"Now, what happened here is that this first one degraded, it turned to rust as time wore away at it until it became dust, though that dust is still close enough to steel for the spell to know what it is. This second one that isn't glowing anymore was broken down on a level that cannot be seen without specific spells to magnify eyesight. If I cast find iron and find coal then the pile will glow again since the steel is an alloy of those things. Lastly this one is dust because it was cut apart on a higher level, making it like sand. Now, last question. What is magic?"

Harlan raised his hand but was consciously skipped over.

After a few "It is the power to change the world" type answer John spoke again.

"Magic is a thing that does stuff."

He got stinkeye from more than a few students for his childish answer.

"I know I know, it isn't the answer you want, but while magic is a science in and of itself, it is also a near complete unknown. We find new element advanced elements all the time, each of these is an example of magic reacting to itself in a way that we didn't know or understand before that point. So keep learning, keep experimenting, there is a world of wonder if you look for it, don't be dragged down by the cold numbers of mages whose greatest strength is the power to put any student to sleep. Now, let's all run tests on these papers with different magics."

The rest of the class felt to Harlan more like arts and crafts, perhaps the point was to tell the students not to sweat the small stuff? Or was it to look deeper into everything they did? Maybe the teacher just didn't have enough material and wanted to let them have fun for a few minutes?

Either way Harlan did have a question to ask, John didn't even think about it when he decided to let Harlan ask it.

"What about time-"

Before Harlan could finish the question John had silenced him and said what the time was, turning his question into something mundane.

Harlan just let it go, it didn’t really matter, he could just ask The Darkness about it if he wanted to really know about time magic.

With the remaining time in class Harlan folded little paper flyers and used air magic to make them run circles around the classroom, eventually others joined in on this and the room was being filled to the point where they crashed into one another and caused them to land on other students, then some of them caught fire but no one was sure what happened there.

John waved everyone away and called in golems to clean everything up, paper wasn’t free and it was easy to make it back into something they could use.

Harlan spoke with a few of the others around him on the way to the next class, they had asked where Harlan learned to fold the paper like that and he had to make up a lie instead of telling them Cynthia showed him how.

Adina was there but kept her distance and didn’t butt into the conversation, he could feel a little sadness from her so he invited her in.

Outside she didn’t change, but he could feel the sadness fade away.

Spell crafting was more of the same, they all experimented in making whatever magic they wanted to while John watched them closely to make sure everyone was doing so safely.

Harlan tried to make a mass soul sight spell to see everyone around him but it made everyone get an itchy feeling from their sixth sense and Harlan was told not to do that again.

Wards were just more refinement and new items to ward, Blackwall was actually very helpful even if he did come off as a man on a high horse. He was very passionate about warding and it bleed through as rude to some, but those that shared his spark excelled under his teachings.

Arrays was half a combat class to Harlan, Aria pushed people to test their arrays, sometimes with explosive results, she had to be reprimanded by Blackwall once after he heard what she was doing.

He learned how to make cutting, explosive, burning, freezing, blinding, deafening, and lastly weight reduction arrays over the course of the next few weeks.

He was top of his class alongside Claudia.

Soul defense finally moving onto the actual soul defensive part.

Golems came in with sedated rabbits and Selen put up a far too familiar array.

“Good morning everyone. Before I get to the next part of the class, how many of you have killed an animal before?”

There were only a few hands down.

“How many of you have butchered an animal?”

Outside of the false undead and beastkin there were few hands raised.

Selen seemed a little nervous about the numbers but moved on, there wasn’t anything she could do about it anyway.

“I am going to warn you that things will get blood, though this array will keep it from splattering around. Now, the most basic soul defense is to make a scaffolding, look at the rabbit soul and imagine it is a building under construction, we’ve found this visualization leads to the best results. Now, little by little build that scaffold inside the rabbit soul until you’ve made dividers that segment the soul. The way it protects the soul is by making any damage need to break past this barrier to reach the rest of the soul.”

Harlan did the movements and spoke the words silently, feeling the subtle offness in the spell, it was puzzling for him.

He changed the spell in the same way he did the soul searching spell, feeling that they needed to make it sound softer, it was harsh, it didn’t flow gently. He knew what it could do to someone if it was used offensively, and perhaps that was the hang up the people who developed the spell had? They thought it was a sword that could be twisted into a shield, but what if it was a shield twisted into a sword?

After a few repetitions he cast it on his rabbit, he could see structure being added to the soul, it felt more solid in a way he didn’t fully understand, he thought adding these ‘walls’ should displace the soul in some way, but they seemed to be completely unseen unless interacted with. He moved to the next part, at least he hoped it was supposed to be the next part. He began poking the soul, prodding it in ways that he knew should kill the rabbit, but it didn’t.

The soul in that section began to jiggle like one of those molded deserts he had seen, but it didn’t break, it didn’t disperse and float away, it didn’t collapse into itself, it just shifted, but the waves of destruction had nowhere to go. Harlan felt he had done well, so next he started taking down the walls, seeing how much he could get away with removing before the waves grew strong enough to burst the beast.

It didn’t take long, once he broke the second set of walls in a square pattern it turned from a rabbit into a ball of gore, getting him a stern look from Selen. She knew just from watching him that he did it right the first time and then kept messing with it, testing limits.

In a private setting it wouldn’t bother her, but some of the other children went pale seeing what happened if they failed. Few felt confident enough to cast the spell, and their hesitation grew as they saw the result of a failure. Harlan was engrossed in reading the blood as it was, so he pushed his emotions down a bit more, so much fear around him was an annoyance to him when he was trying to work, once more Lugh told him to be careful but Harlan said it was fine.

He couldn’t help but notice that there were more identifiable pieces of organs in the mess, he used some magic to shift the sphere and spread it, letting him dissect it with the help of the array. He wondered why when the soul, and thus the body, burst there was less destruction of the flesh than what would normally happen?

Selen snapped her fingers, though this was not to activate any spells, simply to draw attention to her.

“There is no better way to show you what happens if you are hit by a soul attack without protection than what you have all seen here. Since Marigold gave us magic it has been our sword and shield against the world. There is always another new threat around the untouched or lost corners of the world, so magic must change to deal with these threats as well. Don’t think about the results of your failure on these animals, think of that ball of blood being you because you failed to grasp or you were too scared to grasp how to defend yourself. The same applies to your next class on melee combat, you must take, if nothing else, the basic precautions to avoid an easy death because someone got close to you while you were casting something.”

The students regained their color, Selen felt pretty happy over the speech. It didn’t last too long though as the failures started occurring and the students went back to being squeamish.

But some of them carried on with a new resolve, letting their failures drive them towards improvement instead of driving them towards fear of themselves and their magic. A common issue for mages without real world experience that the academy had its ways to hopefully get their students passed before they left this place for learning.

Harlan would give his improved version of the spell to her after class and improve success rates.

When it came to melee combat Harlan ended up with his opponents shuffled around, he fought Ursas, Minos, Ibexians, but only a few times did he get to fight Delmet.

The headmaster had set them against each other to teach the Golden boy some humility, but he was starting to question if Harlan was the right one for it.

He had reacted quite poorly to Harlan’s wins and had to be talked down to prevent him from trying anything outside the ring.

Instead the boy was sent to see the counselor, if he couldn’t take advice from another Golden and if his attitude continued to get worse he might be written off and told to come back another year when he grows up.

Politics got into a lull, there were quite a lot of important events, but they all revolved around the last 1000 years of fighting.

Harlan hoped he could learn something by the time they reached the classes on the 2nd War of the Beasts as they called it.

Merchantry would only be another 2 classes, it was far from important, but it was important enough that they felt the need to drill some things into them.

World history felt more like a class where Harlan had to hold his tongue than anything, Vowren was clearly unhappy about it but he had to skim over details like where the beastkin came from and a few other touchy subjects.

Lugh was interested at least.

Finally it was time for magical creatures, which obviously Sepul couldn’t teach.

5 minutes after the class was supposed to start staff were sent to check on Sepul, 5 minutes after that class was canceled until further notice and Harlan was asked to see Sepul on account of the archmage specifically asking for him.

He arrived at the simple home once more, though this time he was flanked by a staff member.

He was led upstairs to Sepul’s room, despite it seeming to be a cabin not unlike Harlan's; it was a mansion closer to Blackstone’s inside, space was so heavily distorted and stretched that Harlan wondered if he didn’t have a hand in making the academy as it was today.

Before he could open his mouth Harlan spoke.

“Stop, I was told that you are going to be fine, Cecht got beaten up pretty bad for messing with The Darkness but once he recovers your powers will kick back on and you will be back to normal.”

“Just in case… My will is located…”

“No, I was told in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t supposed to let you share secrets with me, and the messenger scared me to death so I am doing just that.”

Sepul was shocked, the list of people the messenger could’ve been was down to 3, 4 if he really thought about it, but there shouldn’t have been any issues with fear for 2 of them, and the other 2 were banned from academy property with wards specifically set up to stop them.

“Are you sure? I could tell you about…”

“I am going to trust her this time, she sent him to scare me or to just warn me that whatever you have to tell me will end with something bad happening so I am just going to not listen to whatever you were going to share with me.”

When he said him it narrowed it down to just 1 person, Sepul tried to get out of bed and double check every ward he had to make sure he couldn’t get in.

After a few doctors forced him back down he calmed down.

“Harlan… If that man appears again… tell the headmaster… also… Take this letter… My friend needs to hear my reply… For your safety.”

“Of course.”

Harlan wished that the mysterious man had explained this part, maybe it was on purpose, maybe it wasn’t.

He would be 50 in less than a decade, he had to pick before then, he narrowed down his choices, he thought of the other option, it felt like the right one, or it could tear everything apart.