Chapter 6. The Entrance Trials

Alderman Gressil had been reviewing candidate lists for forty-one years, and he fully intended to die doing it.

He sat at his desk in the faculty chamber overlooking the eastern approach, a cup of tea going cold at his elbow, his spectacles balanced on the tip of a nose that had been broken twice in his youth and had never quite forgiven him for it.

The list for this year’s intake was spread across the desk in front of him, three pages of names written in the Registrar’s careful hand, and he was reading through them for the fourth time because he was ninety-four years old and his memory, while still sharp on matters of policy and history, had started doing unhelpful things with proper nouns.

The horn had just sounded. He could hear it still, the last note hanging in the air outside the chamber windows, and beyond it, the low rumble of voices and boots on stone that meant the candidates were assembling on the approach road. He had perhaps twenty minutes before he’d need to be standing on the balcony with his robes in order and his voice ready, which was plenty of time to finish his tea if he remembered to drink it.

“How many this year?” asked Veyra Tull, the academy’s Master of Assessment, who was standing by the window with her arms folded, watching the procession below. She was seventy-three, had been at Sartheon for nineteen years, and had a talent for asking questions she already knew the answer to.

“Hundred and twelve,” Gressil said, turning to the second page. “Down from last year. Up from the year before.”

“Quality? I expect this year’s batch to be strong.”

“The usual spread from the lesser houses. A few surprises from the provinces. Three Draeven children, which is more than they usually send.” He adjusted his spectacles. “A Solenne, naturally. Two Kaelith, which will make the assessment period interesting, given that we’ll never be entirely sure what they’re actually doing. One Vashren.”

“And?”

Gressil looked up. Veyra was still facing the window, but her reflection in the glass was watching him, and there was a particular quality to her patience that told him she wasn’t interested in the rest of the list.

“Howl Aridis,” he said.

She turned from the window. Alderman Bryce, who had been organizing examination materials on the long table by the far wall and pretending he wasn’t listening, stopped pretending.

“So it’s true, then,” Bryce said. He was younger than both of them, early sixties, with a round face and a tendency to state the obvious. “The Axiom is actually here.”

“He’s on the list,” Gressil said. “Whether he’s actually what they say he is remains to be seen. The Aridis have been making extraordinary claims about their children since before I was born, and I’ve been alive long enough to see most of those claims age poorly.”

“This one might be different,” Veyra said. She crossed the room and pulled a chair out from the table, sitting down across from him. “The reports from the eastern provinces have been consistent. Multiple sources, multiple years. A child born with the Axiom mark, borderline inexhaustible mana reserves, functional proficiency across every major school of magic. The Aridis pulled him from the family entirely. Sealed wing, private instructors, no contact with anyone outside the household. They’ve been building him like a weapon since he could walk.”

“Every great house builds their children like weapons,” Gressil said.

“Not like this. The Aridis hired Bellos.”

That got Bryce’s attention. “The Copy Mage?”

“As the boy’s personal combat instructor. For six years.”

Gressil removed his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Bellos was a First Seal, one of perhaps thirty in the entire kingdom, and the idea that someone of his calibre had been spending the last six years training a single child in a sealed wing was quite surprising, to say the least.

“What Seal do we expect him to test at?” Bryce asked.

“We do not need to expect,” Veyra said. “The academy assessed him at the Aridis estate last year. He is Sixth Seal. Confirmed.”

Bryce set down the examination booklet he had been holding. “Sixth Seal at sixteen, already?.”

“Yes.”

The room went quiet for a moment as Gressil removed his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

He could not fault the silence. The boy’s growth rate gave even seasoned faculty reason to pause.

The Seal structure measured a mage’s control over mana, from the Twelfth, where a student first learned to shape it into something usable, down through the narrowing grades to the First, where mastery became total.

No waste, no slippage, no gap between intent and result. There were perhaps thirty First Seals alive in the kingdom at any given time, and most of them had not reached that ceiling until their thirties or forties.

This boy was Sixth at sixteen. If the trajectory held, he would reach First Seal before he was thirty. Possibly well before.

And after First Seal, there was only one place left to go.

Beyond the ceiling was the Quasar, a completely different category of existence.

Where a First Seal mage had perfected the relationship between self and mana, a Quasar had dissolved it.

The mana was something they were, and when that dissolution turned outward, it produced what practitioners called an Expression: the Quasar’s inner world imposed on the physical world, absolute within its range.

Inside a complete Expression, reality belonged to the Quasar.

Anyone caught within it was subject to their will, fully and without recourse. The only known counter was a stronger Expression, which meant the only people who could contest a Quasar were other Quasars, and there were three of them on the entire continent.

The sole mercy was the cost; for even the strongest could only hold one for minutes and across a limited range before the mana drain forced them to close it.

But an Axiom was not just the strongest.

If the only saving grace from a Quasar’s might was their powerful but still limited mana pool, an Axiom, who by default carried a mana pool with no practical ceiling, could sustain their Expression for as long as they wished, across whatever range they wished and… that range was, if the histories were to be believed, and Gressil felt his skin prickle simply thinking about it, the whole world.

“You should also know,” Veyra broke the silence, picking up one of the examination booklets from the stack Bryce had been sorting, flipping through it without reading it, “that the Axiom’s existence has had effects beyond House Aridis. Every great house and most of the mid-tier families have been aware of him since he was born. The Vashren restructured their youth training programme thirteen years ago. The Solenne brought in outside instructors for their current generation for the first time in centuries. The Draeven, who historically couldn’t care less about who sends what to Sartheon, are sending three candidates this year. Three.”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

She set the booklet down. “This generation trained harder because of him. Every house in the kingdom looked at the Axiom and decided their own children needed to be better, or they’d be left behind. So when I say this year’s batch is strong, I mean it, and a good part of the reason it’s strong is currently standing on our approach road.”

Gressil put his spectacles back on and looked at the list again.

Under normal circumstances, he would have been irritated by the amount of attention being given to a single candidate out of a hundred and twelve.

He’d seen great house heirs walk through these gates with their chins raised and their families’ expectations strapped to their backs, and most of them turned out to be exactly as talented as any other well-trained child with good tutors and expensive equipment. The title didn’t make the mage. The work did.

But this was House Aridis, which made it a different conversation.

The Aridis were old. Older than most of the houses on this list. They kept to themselves in that fortress of theirs in the east and they rarely involved themselves in the affairs of the wider world, and because of that, people tended to forget about them, the way one could forget about a mountain range that’s been on the horizon for ever. It was always there. You just stopped looking at it.

Until an Axiom was born, and then everyone remembered very quickly why the mountain was there.

House Aridis was the only bloodline to carry the Axiom. It wasn’t a title granted or a rank earned, but more of a dormant spark in their marrow that refused to wake for anyone else.

In all of recorded history, the blood had only stirred four times, and every single time, there had been major changes in the world order that defined the rules for the next millenia.

The last Axiom had risen one thousand three hundred and forty-two years ago, and that particular young woman had gone on to reshape the political map of the world so thoroughly that the kingdom they were all currently sitting inside of existed because of her.