After two-and-a-half years at Avalon, I could safely say that I absolutely loathed written exams. They were tedious, stressful, frustrating, and never failed to leave me grinding my teeth in anxiety until the professor finally decided to actually grade them. Even worse, basically everyone, including many of the teachers assigning them, agreed that they were an absolutely terrible way of assessing how well a student learned the class material, but somehow the practice managed to persist regardless.

Every class with more than twenty-or-so students, barring a few exceptions, tended to have one. They were typically accompanied by a practical examination or spell demonstration, and those were often weighted more heavily in terms of grading for the class, but to do well you still had to perform at least adequately on the exam. If you wanted a chance at the top spots, you basically had to ace the exam, no matter how good your spellcasting was.

Some written exams weren’t too bad. For instance, the one I’d taken earlier this morning for Advanced Body Alteration 1 had been about as simple as I could have possibly hoped for. The questions were mostly straight forward and only required a few sentences each to answer. Basically all the material was taken word for word from her various lessons and, since the exam was open note, I could just copy what I’d written in my notebooks onto the test paper with only minor alterations.

I was the third person to submit my paper and I felt rather confident with all of my answers. All in all, it could have been much, much worse. Still, I couldn’t quite manage to silence the tiny voice at the back of my mind whispering that I’d completely messed everything up, that I’d written my answers in the wrong places, that my notes had been sabotaged, and so on. Even though I’d triple-checked everything I’d written before handing Professor Yana my paper, that lingering worry remained and would probably continue bothering me until grades were posted.

Unfortunately, Professor Shrike’s exam was not nearly as ‘nice’. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t known to expect; Professor Shrike had pretty explicitly told us that the exam was going to be ‘just like the homeworks’. However, the difficulty and complexity of the homework he gave every week could vary dramatically. I had foolishly hoped that the exam would be on the easier side, since we only had two hours to do it instead of a full week.

Apparently even after all this time I was still far too naive.

The exam was brutally difficult. Not as hard as some I’d taken, I hadn’t even been able to answer a quarter of the questions of Professor Zim’s final during my freshman year, but much harder than I had expected or hoped for.

‘An attacker standing ten feet away begins to cast a standard third-circle Fireball spell, but with several sections of the spell modified as shown below. Would Lugavin’s Flame Ward be sufficient to ward off the ensuing attack? If not, what modifications would you make to the spell to more adequately protect yourself? Alternatively, what would be the cheapest way to defend yourself in this situation? Explain’

I hummed thoughtfully as I read and reread the question, studying the complicated spell diagrams provided alongside the question that took up nearly two full pages of the eleven page exam. My voice echoed strangely in the opaque bubble of silence around me, a precaution to ensure that no one could cheat by looking at another student’s paper. The bubbles were also warded against scrying, mental communications, knowledge divinations, and basically every other way of cheating that Avalon had encountered over the centuries.

This was a trick question, I concluded after another minute of considering the diagrams. If someone tried to cast a fireball with those modifications, it would explode violently, and not the way a fireball was supposed to. The spell matrix would simply collapse when they attempted to activate it, and the backlash would probably be strong enough to reach someone standing a mere ten feet away from the caster.

Lugavin’s Flame Ward, while a very good defense against most fire spells, would do absolutely nothing to protect you against something like that. Instead, a very simple mana shield like we’d all learned in our first years would be more than enough to do the trick. Honestly you’d probably be fine without it if you had good control of your own mana, but Avalon tended to take the view that it was always better to be safe than dead.

Content with my conclusion, I began to write down my answer, making sure to thoroughly describe exactly what about the spell modifications would cause the fireball to fail and how I had reached my answer. Even if this wasn’t exactly what Professor Shrike was looking for, he was one of those Professors who would accept multiple correct answers as long as they were sufficiently well reasoned and explained.

It took several minutes to get everything down and then a quick look up at the floating clock illusion at the front of my privacy bubble told me there was almost exactly half the time left in the exam. Having looked through the entire test before I began answering questions, I knew I was slightly more than half done, so it looked like I was making good time.

I flipped to the next question. ‘Diagram the changes needed to make the light produced by a Force Spike spell purple regardless of the caster.’

I couldn’t quite hold back a groan of annoyance. A properly cast force spell was basically translucent. When it wasn’t translucent, it was typically tinted with the same color as the mage’s mana since that was basically what was causing the color in the first place.

Thus, what this question actually wanted was a force spike spell modified with an entirely separate light-producing component for some reason. I was intimately familiar with the spell in question and had even modified it somewhat in several ways, but this wasn’t something I’d ever attempted. After all, what was the point of making a combat spell more obvious?

I looked up at the clock again, then down at my test. I had fifty-seven minutes left and this was probably going to take at least twenty or thirty of them, especially since I needed to both do the spell modification and write it all down. Diagraming multi-dimensional spells on paper was a challenge at the best of times, much less when under a time crunch. And then there were two more questions I needed to answer after this…

I made a snap decision and flipped the page to quickly skim the other two questions. Neither was easier exactly, but they were probably going to be significantly less time consuming. I could come back to this one when I had finished the rest of the exam.

I groaned, twisting my wrist this way and that. The pain was mostly a phantom sensation, a few hours of writing wasn’t really enough to hurt my wrist with all the circulations I had running, but it was certainly unpleasant regardless. I really, really hated written exams.

“Well you look like you’re having a splendid day,” Liam joked, setting his plate down on the table across from where Orion was sitting.

Orion didn’t look like he particularly appreciated the joke. The younger man was sitting hunched over his food, his eyes looking through the piece of meat speared on his fork more so than at it. His usual fake smile was missing, replaced by the same look of cold focus and intensity that had originally convinced Liam to strike up a conversation with the random third year who had sat down beside him in what was otherwise an upper-classman only speciality lecture.

“I hope you don’t mind if I join you, this place is kind of packed tonight. I take it we’re still good for seven tonight?”

That finally seemed to shake Orion out of whatever it was he was focusing on. He shook himself slightly, then straightened his back and looked up towards Liam. He was smiling again and it looked much better than what he’d been able to manage at the beginning of the year. If not for his experience with Orion and years of political training, he might have almost mistaken it for a real expression.

“Of course, take a seat. Sorry I was just… lost in thought.” Orion paused for a long moment, his eyes never leaving Liam’s face. “You’re a bit early. Let me just finish up and we can get going.”

“You’re all good, take your time. We’ve both had a long day and I am starving.” Liam demonstratively picked up his dinner, a soft flatbread wrap filled with lightly roasted vegetables, crumbly cheese, and meat, and took a big bite of it. It was fine. Avalon’s food was rather bland and not particularly amazing compared to what he was used to, but it had the massive benefit of never being poisoned as long as you stayed inside the cafeteria. That was not something he could really rely on at home.

Orion nodded slowly. “Okay. Do you have somewhere for us to go or should we see if one of the rooms at the library is open? I still have a few reservations open for the term we could use.”

Liam quickly finished chewing and swallowed. “I reserved a room, don’t worry about it.” Being a seventh year came with a number of perks, such as an unlimited number of room reservations each semester as long as they didn’t abuse the privilege. Liam made sure to always have a room at the library set aside for his use, as well as an alchemical workshop.

It had been a little bit annoying to set up at the start of the year, but it had saved him a lot of time and effort in the months since. Some of his classmates preferred to do all their research in their own rooms, but sometimes doing so was just completely impractical. Sometimes research exploded, and he much preferred it when that happened far away from his own expensive reagents and equipment.

The two of them ate in silence for several minutes. Liam idly watched the bustling crowd of students moving through the cafeteria. With so many mages in such a comparatively small space, their mana mingled and flowed together until it felt like one great rainbow beast crouching over the room

In a few spots, Liam recognized the mana of some of his peers, their much denser auras forming gentle buffers within the currents where little foreign mana could intrude. And of course above it all was the barely perceptible taste of divinity filling the entire space with a sense of warmth and homey comfort. Even after years of effort he could only just barely perceive it beyond a faint haze that seemed to cover everything within his sensory range. It was clearly mana, or at least something very much like it, but it was just slightly out of phase compared to what he was used to.

When he’d asked his mentor about it, the professor had simply smiled softly and shaken his head, and no amount of research since then had been able to shed a light on what exactly he was sensing. The knowledge was clearly out there, but it was not something available to him. Not yet at least. Perhaps once he had enough points saved up, he might finally be able to access the necessary books, but that would have to wait.

Liam had just taken another bite from his wrap when Orion suddenly asked a question out of the blue. Liam typically enjoyed some light conversation while he was eating, but he tended to conform to his companion’s preferences whenever he was meeting with someone and Orion tended to be on the silent side of things.

“Do you think that encompassing a force spell inside of a colored illusionary shell is the same thing as making the force spell produce colored light?”

Liam blinked, slightly confused by the question and not really having caught everything that Orion had said. He’d been so focused on trying to feel out the edges of the cafeteria’s divine enchantments that he’d stopped paying Orion very much attention.

“What?”

“If you make a shell of illusionary light around a force spell and make it glow a specific color, is that the same as making the force spell produce that color of light?”

Liam considered the rather strange question for a moment. “I mean. Maybe?” he finally answered, “I guess if you do it separately, then no, but if you slap together an illusion spell and a force spell and then link them up so they travel at the same rate then… I guess yes? But a properly executed force spell should be fully transparent so I’m not really sure about what you’re asking.”

Orion seemed oddly pleased by Liam’s nonsensical answer. “That’s what I thought too. I hope Professor Shrike agrees.”

Ah, that made a lot more sense. Some professors hated it when students already knew the answers to their exam questions before they took the test, so they often used mostly nonsensical spell modifications and combinations in their questions to hopefully ensure that no student had attempted the specific given exercises in the past.

During his fifth year Liam had been asked to design a spell to tell the specific wrong time based on a complicated scheme that varied based on the current temperature and humidity. The spell he’d created was both utterly pointless and needlessly complicated, but it had done the trick. He hadn’t cast it a single time since and doubted he ever would.

“An exam question, I presume?”

Orion sighed. “Evocation fundamentals three. Had it this afternoon.”

“My condolences. I thankfully dodged any such ridiculous questions this year. Most of my exams have been practical.”

“Lucky,” Orion grumbled, but there was no real heat in his response.

Liam laughed and explained, “It's mostly just something that happens for fifth years and above. The classes are all much smaller once all the idiots are gone so you have a lot less written work and a lot more mandatory demonstrations and practical exams. It doesn’t really save any time to have a written exam or weekly quiz when it’s only six people compared to just having them show the professor that they’re learning the material. There are a few exceptions of course, but even then it's usually more like what we are doing in our class than the exams early years have to take.”

“That sounds amazing,” Orion said wistfully, “I can’t wait.”

“Just another year and a half,” Liam joked. For most third years, it would probably sound like a bad joke. Very few of them stood a chance of getting that far, much less survive the following three years to graduate. However, he had absolutely no doubts that, assuming nothing terrible happened, Orion was going to get there.

He’d already heard rumors that Orion had cast a fourth-circle spell during his practical exam yesterday. A no-name human only halfway into their third year casting a fourth-circle spell sounded utterly outlandish, but as far as he knew it was the truth. Absolutely insane, but the truth.

Back when he’d been a third year, Liam had only barely started experimenting with that sort of magic. His first few fourth-circle spells had taken him more than half-an-hour each time, and that was with far more advantages than Orion had going for him. Just the safety precautions he’d set up beforehand would have probably been enough to beggar the other boy a dozen times over.

What a monster he was going to be someday. Liam was very glad this particular opportunity had basically fallen into his lap. Someday, this might turn out to be one of his very best investments.

“Just another year and a half…” Orion whispered, “that’s only three more sets of finals.” He sighed loudly. “Thanks Liam, that’s good to know.”

Liam smiled cheerfully. “Always happy to help.” He glanced over at the empty plate in front of Orion. “Are you just about ready to get going?”

Once Liam finished his own food, they made their way together towards the library. When they were safely ensconced in their reserved room, Liam dug out his final paper and the two of them went through it together. It was nothing particularly impressive unfortunately, he’d been far too busy working on his graduation spell to give this project the dedication it really deserved, but Liam was mostly happy with it.

Orion stared at him for several minutes as he demonstrated his technique several times, but didn’t really say or do anything else. He did manage to catch a few minor errors in Liam's writing, but they were all easily corrected in a matter of minutes. Overall, Liam was rather happy with how things went.

Then it was Orion’s turn. Liam hadn’t really known what to expect. On one hand, Orion was just a third year in a class filled with much older and more experienced students. Not only that, but this was his very first time working on such a project. On the other hand, this was Orion he was talking about. Liam had gotten rather used to surprises when it came to the younger man.

Liam read slowly through the nearly forty page paper that Orion presented him with, occasionally making a minor note about grammar or marking a confusing spot in Orion’s reasoning. It was certainly an interesting concept, but he just didn’t see a way for it to be practical. The strange mana weaving was certainly novel, but likely utterly inferior to a proper spell. It was just too complicated, too cumbersome, too slow to be worth the effort.

Liam asked for a demonstration. In a matter of moments, Orion was surrounded in a dense web of interlocking strands of rapidly spinning mana forming a scintillating dome of purple-tinged light. He could only shake his head in amazement as Orion began to enumerate a number of flaws with the techniques and ideas on how to adjust for them. What. A. Monster.