They returned after another day, just as he was asked to.

It was quite early in the morning, and the breakfast alert had not yet been sent.

There were quite a lot of ideas going through Harlan’s head, many of them made Dawn scream at him.

“If I had feet, I’d kick your ass.”

“I think it will be for the best, I’m still just an ignorant fool. I can’t really stop being one unless I do this.”

“How can you even think it is a good idea?”

“I am an influence on everyone I meet, good or bad, I can’t be sure for everyone. I’ve lived too long sheltered from what the world is, really, for a normal person. 11 years a farmers son, 4 a noble mage, how much do I really even know? These last couple days of being weak, of not being allowed to use magic, they showed me how much I use it for just my day to day life. I don’t even turn the pages when I read, I just use telekinesis.”

“You are being rash, you are confused because you couldn’t bring yourself to be a monster at your party. Calm down, think this through.”

“I’ll wait until summer, then I’m doing it.”

Adina pinched his arm.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Huh? No, I wasn’t, sorry.”

“Your friend is here.”

Shelly happened to bump into them. Harlan felt how worried she was, so he hugged her and spun her around to change how she felt, one way or another.

“Put me down, right now.”

Parnell couldn’t hold in his laughter.

“You looked worried. Thought it might cheer you up.”

His laugh got louder.

“I saw you… well you didn’t die, but you lost your head, that should kill anybody, Fomorian or not.”

“I’m not normal, but you already knew that much. How happy was your mother when she thought I died.”

“That isn’t funny.”

“I’m sorry. David, any missions that look like I could tag along with?”

He stared for a bit, then let out a sigh.

“I’m not sure what could justify an archmage being called a tag-along. But, there are a few that we have been looking at.”

“Nothing has changed since I got a fancy new name. I’m still me.”

Harlan could feel that many of the students who overheard him were furious; they felt he was insulting the honor he had been given. But at the same time, that title along with his display meant that they were terrified of actually confronting him about it.

“And that is perhaps the worst thing you could be.”

Harlan chuckled, feeling that the statement wasn’t made with any malice.

“So you can banter.”

“After what you said, I finally believe that you really aren’t a monster. So, friends?”

Harlan put his hand out for a shake, which he knew David didn’t like.

“Of course.”

And he reciprocated and the group kept walking through the hall.

“There is one issue with me making moves like this. Adina, can I go with them?”

She tilted her head in confusion.

“I can’t stop you anyway.”

“That is the problem, we are together, and I know that pain comes with that, because I am me.

But I don’t want you to feel like you can’t tell me no. You saw me die, and even if I did survive it, I should’ve told you beforehand, we should’ve agreed that I could put on that little show. In the past I’ve chained you in some ways, like after your attack I shadowed your every movement without asking you about it.

I know you were glad for it, but I think that talking about these things is a good idea. There are choices that I am going to keep making without you, but I don’t want to exclude you from things like this that only add to your worries.”

Dawn hadn’t let him forget that he thought about coming back early without taking into account Adina’s feelings. She knew what Eliza did, she was bullheaded and made bad choices because nobody could talk her out of them and she never even pretended to listen to those around her.

“You can go, I know whatever is out there isn’t as scary as you. Thank you for asking.”

She interlocked her fingers with his.

Parnell really wanted to know what he meant, because he had at least implied if not outright said that he knew that a high saint was going to blow his head off.

The conversation around what happened that night was mostly between nations.

Harlan would be contacted soon, but the stance which was reached between Yggdra and Fragile Peace was that some restitutions would be given to Harlan and to the nation as a whole, Harlan would face no charges, and that the academy would also receive payment for damages.

This money would of course be coming mostly from dissolving that man’s house, though only after an in depth investigation by all sides to make sure that everyone who knew what was going to happen was dead and buried.

Shelly’s group sat at their spot, but Harlan didn’t join them.

In their usual spot Ximena and Claude were already there, Zella was off with her new friends but it looked like a heated argument had just started between them.

“So, you two, sitting together, blushing as you are. Did you finally admit it?”

“Yes.”

“Who said it first?”

“I did. I know my sister is upset, but I’m not letting her control my life. Nor will I let my parents. It isn’t like I’m going to be Duke in the future anyway, so why can’t I choose who I love? Even if this doesn't work out, it is still an important part of my life.”

“Good for you. I assume that is why your sister is beelining it to us now?”

“Probably, try to eat at least a little bit then, she is likely to ruin our meal.”

Everyone was surprised when she sat down at the table instead of standing near it and lecturing them.

“Good morning, Harlan.”

“Good morning, Claudia.”

“Were your words true? Do you forgive everyone?”

“If this is how you ask about being friends again, then I’d be happy to try that again. Assuming you aren’t like you were before.”

“I admit, I might have judged you too harshly before.”

“Are you here to secure deals for your family?”

“What? Of course not.”

“I forgive you, and them, but, if you are trying to trick me a second time-”

Harlan set his glass down with some force.

“don’t bother. What you did hurt me. I forgive you, but that doesn’t mean I forgot what you did. If you are here for anything but to be a friend, leave, and I won’t hold a grudge.”

“The rift between you and me, along with the rest of what was once our group, has harmed my relationship with my brother. If he intends to be as mulish as you, then I can only mitigate damages by being close to him.”

“So long as everyone else can accept that, I can accept that.”

Everyone was wary, Adina and Ximena clearly didn’t forgive her, but they pretended to do so because they would rather not make more bad blood.

“Glad that we can all be friendly. Ximena, where are Liat and Yara? You normally come in a group.”

“Liat told Yara that she was absolutely going to leave the tribe, Yara didn't take it well, thinking her sister is going to abandon her. Liat wanted to ask you for work when the year is through.”

“Surely she already knew what her sister was going to do, she is bright, no way she didn’t realize it.”

“Yara didn’t want to believe it, whenever she asked, she just said that she was planning to, but she wasn’t entirely sure. Now she said it with some finality.”

“I’ll talk to her later.”

“Not a good idea.”

“I know, but who else can? I’ve spent months talking with her, we’ve picked each others brains about all kinds of subjects.”

“I’m not going to say that you can’t try, but I couldn’t get through to her.”

After breakfast Harlan went to his room to work through the rather small backlog of work until his warmagic class started.

There was work that he could do for the class, but it was all theory, actually casting warmagic wasn’t allowed on academy grounds for obvious reasons.

“You all have rather solid foundations, no need to continue the repetition of elements and their unique uses, for now at least.”

There were a few happy sighs, almost all of the second year thus far was about how each element more or less had special properties.

A crystal nova could be modified in a variety of ways, from making jagged towers which could be placed in the field and used as a mages tower, to turning the ground into a sea of spikes that is effective for stopping calvary.

Fire, well, it was fire, it burned this, it superheated the air until breathing became a death sentence.

Ice was much the same, its effects were normal.

Sound was a matter of learning how to direct the sound so you wouldn’t deafen the entire battlefield.

One thing that became clear however, was that sometimes warmagic wasn’t just hitting something with a big ball of death, as shown when they learned to cast mudfield, which could turn a large area into a swampy mess that could disrupt enemy troops and force them to change how they fought.

Harlan thought back to when Amber mentioned that she knew how to redirect a river.

“Today, you will find out how to handle the most heavily defended structures. Unless of course those structures are also magically fortified properly with counterspells. Spiral piercing magic, generally it is best to remain with a single element; I would like at least one of you to volunteer to attempt a multielement spiral spell once you have a grasp of how to properly cast a single element one.”

The other students didn’t say it, but everyone was expecting Harlan to be the first one to try a multielement.

“The basic process is simple in nature, but requires quite a lot of focus in practice. This is going to build on what you already know of, so I expect a few good casts before the class is over.”

A radiant nova appeared instantly, then it split into numerous pillars of white hot death. Then they wrapped around one another until it was a spire with a thinner tip and stabilizing fins on it.

“Tell me, what did I just do?”

The first to answer was a women, she looked to be in her late 20s.

“You first cast splitter, and then put them back together, each individual projectile contains its own power, and by wrapping them like that they superheat the core spells under them. When it strikes the target, the weaker spells on the top layers fade away and leave the condensed spells underneath to actually deal the damage.”

“Yes, I should expect such an answer from a professional.”

“Thank you, Sir Dust.”

“Now, please don’t answer this. But for the rest of the class, why would I do this? Why not condense the magic myself and throw a smaller projectile from the start? When would a spiral spell be useful for other elements?”

Before he could open his mouth, Sepul also told Harlan he wasn’t allowed to answer.

While it was good to be able to give answers, and he was near the top of the class outside of the adults who were coming here to refine their craft after years of real experience, the other students should also be allowed to answer questions and get their brains working without relying on Harlan.

After a few minutes of not good enough answers, he let Harlan speak, if Harlan didn’t give a good answer, then it was the grown ups turn.

“First, how common is that dispel magic that the teachers here can use?”

“Outside of here, almost non-existent for reasons I can’t go into.”

“Alright then, from my own experience with trying to make a smaller frost nova with less than desirable results that nearly killed me, condensing magic once cast is hard, very hard, and casting it from a smaller size and expanding it often leads to instability without as much power as you are spending in mana.

Each of these threads that make up a spiral spell has some sort of resonance effect that lets the spell compress itself, instead of the mage needing to do it. If dispel was uncommon, or even if it was rare, I would say that spiral spells are harder to dispel because they are layered and it would only strip off a piece instead of the entire spell.”

“That is close enough to correct that I am willing to explain the faults in your answer. Firstly, each of these threads does resonate, magic naturally wishes to be a single thing when it is in the same element, it wishes to reach balance with itself. The outside of this spear is hardlight, the inside is radiance, which is light stripped of its benign qualities, and I am condensing it through the spell, but it is not through the means you believe. Each layer of this is light in another form, which pulls to the purest source of light near itself. The hardlight on the outside wishes to rejoin with the pure radiance underneath, so it naturally collapses and compresses the inner radiance, this then rids it of certain impurities which human casting it simply too imprecise to remove without an excess of time. Any questions? Or should we begin casting.”

Sepul threw the mass of light and it pierced cleanly through the stone monoliths set up for target practice in the area, each no less than 15 feet thick stone standing 100 feet tall with 20 feet between each of the 6 pillars.

Sepul gave a few pointers, solid elements worked best for beginners because if the threads destabilized with something like air or fire, well, the results would be clear.

Harlan lamented being told that while void was solid, it also wasn’t, and its nature to resist being in a single form, much like wind, made it a very bad idea to start with.

Also that an earth nova didn’t really exist, such magic required physical ground, which is why it was far more useful to add solidity to other magic instead of just tossing stones around.

Even the spell that people called earth nova still had wind in it and was a hollow shell that exploded when it struck the ground to release high speed shrapnel.

Currently Harlan was working with crystal, he had become familiar with the nova over the last few months, and while it was also physical, the more important properties of it was how the crystals would spread, and not how hard the actual crystal itself hit the target.

The spire flew through the air, striking the first monolith and the crystals reaching and damaging the second, though there was no piercing, the crystal spiral simply told the stone of the monolith to turn to crystal and move forward using the force of the spell.

It was a far cry from what Sepul did, but he didn’t need Sepul to save him from himself like a few others already did.

By the end of class Harlan couldn’t use a non-solid spiral, nor could he use more than one element.

He went through most of the day without really worrying about the one thing that was actually worth worrying about.

Liat had arrived for lunch, but Yara was still in her room reading books.

When dinner arrived, he brought food with him.

After knocking on the door she yelled at him to go away, not that he could hear her on account of the wards each room had, but he somewhat expected that she had done it since he anger spiked for a moment and then she felt some form of self-hate that he assumed was embarrassment.

Yara opened the door and Harlan forced his way inside, the young woman had little chance to stop him.

“GET OUT.”

“Are you mad at Liat for abandoning you?”

“YES, NOT LEAVE.”

“Yeah, what a bitch, a completely unforgivable fool.”

“What did you just say about her?”

The anger was still there, but it had been redirected.

“Oh? So you don’t agree? Then it sounds to me like you are just being dramatic by locking yourself away for the last few days.”

“Don’t try to tell me how to feel about MY sister.”

“Think about this, in 2 years, when your sister has already been gone a year, and you go back to the desert, will you be happy? In 3 years, can you see yourself content to stay in the sands, getting married, having children, hunting wyverns or whatever you people do? In 4 years will you still be happy there, will you miss her?”

“I’m not playing your game.”

“In 10 years, can you still be happy, can you see that for yourself, right now?”

“I don’t know, I’m too young to know that.”

“Liat isn’t, sure, you have 2 years between you, but look at how much you’ve changed since meeting the rest of us. How much has she changed since three years ago, when she was just a first year?”

“I get your point, now leave.”

“I don’t know that much from your people, but I met them in the sands once, a woman was injured, and both her husband, and her grandmother-in-law refused to let me heal her, because she was supposed to suffer as a lesson. I manipulated their minds until they let me do the right thing. Are these the people you want to be with?”

“You don’t get it, they are my life, I’ve known them since I was an infant, we have our parents, but we are raised by the entire tribe. If she leaves, she can never come back, she will be tattooed as an exile. I can never see her again.”

“If I was raised by Fomorians, I might feel the same way about them.”

Yara was not quick to violence, but she raised her hand to strike Harlan.

He grabbed her wrist and did not let go even as she struggled.

“Your culture and my ideals don’t fit together. I’m not asking you to not be angry at her, but I am saying that she is not abandoning you, your people have long abandoned the world, only coming out so they can talk down to the less magically blessed people who would scatter them to the winds in a real fight because they spend more time actually acting instead of sitting on their asses and thinking they are the height of life.

Marigold would forgive Liat, and she would forgive you for not forgiving her, because she is better than her people, just like I am better than my people. Do not let them define you, you are not the Golden, you just happen to be a Golden.”

Harlan let her go and walked out of the room, leaving a plate of food on her desk.