87 – Spatial Rift

Vivi considered the man across the desk.

Lysander, the Headmaster of the Thaumaturgical Institute, was about as assertive and arrogant as she’d expected given the opinions Aeris had voiced earlier. The surprising part was the reasonability laced into his disagreeable behavior. The man spoke with a tone that predisposed Vivi to wanting to dig in her heels and argue with him, but when she’d calmed herself and thought about what he was saying, she’d been reluctantly forced to agree. She herself had been the one to accuse him unnecessarily, so could she really be upset when he met that attitude in turn? He had eased significantly the moment she’d ceded. Though had never quite taken on an affable tone, or anything close.

As for the spatial rift, the Headmaster of the Institute had every right to be upset with her. The moment she’d cast [Carve the Firmament] and cut away the section of space the Red Tithe had been standing in, horror had filled her; she’d known she’d taken a risk she shouldn’t have. The drastic action had been justified in some sense—it had been the surest way to protect Saffra, and in that sense Vivi didn’t regret her actions even now—but she couldn’t have promised that there wouldn’t be catastrophic consequences from unleashing a spell of that tier. Consequences that might have radiated out beyond the Institute and into Meridian as a whole.

The spatial rift, and the Red Tithe, was something she’d given a lot of thought to in the past two days, during her travel across the void-realm and her head-pounding convalescence.

“I was going to address this in the upcoming meeting at the High King’s Palace,” Vivi said at last. “But I suppose as the Headmaster, you deserve to know. Morningstar’s assassin, the Red Tithe, attacked me and my apprentice. The garden annex was a meet-up point my apprentice arranged with Isabella Caldimore. As I said, the two were friends, and it was their actions that allowed my quick response to the breach. The Red Tithe was equipped with activated void equipment—I understand Rafael divulged that concept to appropriate figures?”

“Indeed. The only reason the traitor’s head hasn’t been separated from his shoulders,” Lysander said coldly. “That he might prevent the end of the world, or so he’s convinced our—” He cut off. “Introduced the doubt of, to our leaders of state,” he corrected, clearly a man concerned with the absolute accuracy of his words.

Vivi’s eyes narrowed. It seemed the Duke hadn’t been totally wrong with his desperate claims that he might weather the storm thanks to the sheer utility he offered. She did understand the general idea—that survival mattered above all else, especially to a world that had been, prior to a hundred years ago, always dangling on a thread—and so she couldn’t fault the High King for taking a bigger-picture view. Or at least not rushing to execution, instead keeping his options open until he understood the situation better.

But her threat to the Duke from earlier remained. She would solve the puzzle of his voidglass herself, so that he could be dealt with—through legal means—as he deserved, without any so-called ‘value’ to temper his sentence. And yes, she’d decided to leave the Duke to the laws of the world. She strongly felt that she should never be the one to extra-judicially decide a person’s fate. Let the legal system handle him.

And if he wasn’t handled appropriately… she would deal with that if or when it happened.

“But never mind that,” Lysander said after the silence stretched a moment too long, Vivi lost in her thoughts and Lysander probably misinterpreting why. “The Red Tithe. I see. I was aware of Morningstar’s involvement, but not that there had been a battle in these halls.” His lip curled in distaste. “I am also to blame, in that case. Excuses could be made, but I will not. A Headmaster should protect his students and ensure the safety of his academy, and in that regard, I also failed.”

It was that particular blend of good-heartedness mixed with arrogance that left Vivi conflicted about this man. “As you said earlier, a person cannot be omniscient,” she said. “I had to take extreme measures because it was my first time interacting with the material. I chose to remove the threat by overwhelming its resistances with a spell I knew wouldn’t fail.”

“I cannot strictly fault you for such an action, of course,” Lysander replied, his dark gray eyes appraising her. Vivi waited for the obvious ‘but’, yet one didn’t come.

“But some blame might be appropriate anyway,” Vivi finished for him. “I know I endangered your students, no matter the circumstances.” And the rest of Meridian, though Lysander didn’t seem to realize that, and she wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up. “What’s been done’s been done, though. When it comes to fixing that anomaly… I’ve given that a lot of thought. I’ve theorized a way to stitch the shredded space back together.”

Lysander’s eyebrows twitched at the announcement. “Such a thing is possible?”

“I can’t say anything with certainty, but I should at least try. And not just to fix the anomaly itself.”

“But to reclaim the activated voidglass,” Lysander deduced. “In the vanishing odds that it wasn’t destroyed.”

Well… yes. That was a reason. More privately, Vivi wanted to solve the spatial anomaly to make sure she hadn’t delivered some horrifying fate to the Red Tithe that would make even the atrocities of the Shattered Oracle seem tame. The Red Tithe might have been an awful person, but nobody deserved a gruesome fate like that. She certainly wouldn’t ever be someone who deliberately doled out cruel and unusual punishments.

“Those items would serve as a significant aid to our research,” Vivi agreed, letting Lysander assume that was what she meant from the start. She had less than zero sympathy for the Red Tithe, but nevertheless, she suspected her mindset was unusually… humane for this world. Uncomfortable as she found it. “The dagger was more resilient than even the Greater Voidbeasts. And studying Caldimore’s project directly will be easier than chasing its shadow.”

“A true statement, though I find myself skeptical the dagger survived.”

“As do I.” It had much greater odds than the Red Tithe himself though. “In either eventuality, fixing the rift is my primary goal. I won’t leave a spatial anomaly in the middle of the Institute for a day longer than I have to, even if I’m confident that it’s no danger to anyone.” She hesitated. “It’s no danger so long as it isn’t being tampered with, at least.” If it wouldn’t have been patronizing, she’d have elaborated, and extracted assurances from Lysander that the mages she’d seen at the garden annex were being exceedingly careful.

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Lysander seemed to take offense even at the vague allusion, so she’d been smart to moderate herself. “Archmage Theophania is no initiate to meddle with forces she doesn’t understand. We are taking appropriate precautions.” He calmed himself. “It sounds like you have a specific plan for how you’ll ‘stitch it together?’”

“I’ve always learned faster with hands-on experiments,” Vivi said. A second later, she regretted speaking, because she should have left her plans vague. She continued anyway. “I’ll go somewhere remote and tear open another rift. Then see what I can do to it. When I’m sure I can repair them without issue, I’ll come back and fix the one here.”

Lysander’s face went blank. A silence stretched between them, and Vivi would definitely have started squirming in her seat if not for her new body’s more serene tendencies.

“I see,” the Headmaster finally said. “I wouldn’t dare question the Sorceress, not when it comes to sorcery.” His tone made it clear that he was questioning her, though.

Defensively, Vivi said, “It’s not the kind of magic that will propagate worldwide even in a catastrophic failure. So long as I’m somewhere remote, this will be the fastest way to learn and is no risk to anyone.”

Lysander’s face remained carefully neutral. “Of course, Lady Vivisari.”

She felt like she was being judged. Her logic was sound. There were magics too esoteric for her to even experiment with, like tampering with dimensional boundaries, but spatial spells simply weren’t on that level. The worst-case scenario was ripping open another hole she couldn’t stitch back together, and if that happened a thousand miles off the coast in some nowhere portion of the ocean, thousands of feet up in the air, did it really matter?