Chapter 28 – More Changes

It was, Mirian decided, a good thing it was the weekend. She awoke to an empty room, the hour well past breakfast. If Lily had set the alarm candle, she certainly hadn’t heard it. For once, she took her time waking up, then resumed her studies.

Mirian ravenously consumed the books on combat magic, divination, and illusions that she’d picked up, and when she wasn’t doing that, she alternated between visiting the metal shop and the spellforge. She also signed up to get combat certified. Since plenty of students would be joining combat magic classes for the first time in the next academic quarter, there were dozens of sessions being held before winter quarter started. She chose the earliest one, scheduled for the next Thirdday. She was going to be pushing herself pretty hard to get there, but the only thing she was using her auric mana for, besides practicing the basic combat spells, was artifice. Worst case scenario, if she strained her auric mana too much, she could actually afford an elixir of mana rejuvenation. It would cost a whole gold doubloon—A-class mana was expensive to obtain, and even more so to distill—but she actually had the money to do that now.

Creating the three wands she needed for the combat evaluation only took her an afternoon. She did several stability checks on the glyph sequence and found she’d probably gone a bit overboard. The wands were the easiest bit of artifice she’d practiced in four years. That didn’t mean all wands were simple; a complex spell was harder to fit in the standard compact frame, and for certain high-intensity spells she’d have to have mana channels running in parallel, but for spells like minor force blade and shock chain, there just weren’t any major complexities. The material cost rankled her though. Even though she had money now, needing to buy an arcane catalyst for each wand deeply pained her. It was just such an inefficient use of resources.

She finished the wands an hour sooner than she’d planned, so she spent the extra time scribing her first real illusion spell—geometric image didn’t count. There were two ways to make an illusion spell. The first was math intense, and involved creating a spell that put points of colored light at predetermined areas. Geometric image did that. So did the illusion projector spell engines that most of the professors used, though the number of equations and light points they used made even her head hurt. Those spells had no mental component, which was why even a machine could create them.

Most illusion spells did have a mental component. Certain glyphs interfaced with the mind, and the resulting spell projected images, sounds, or touch that the caster could imagine. That made them quite a challenge, though; the arcanist had to hold the result in their mind all while casting the spell. It was also hard to teach because no one’s thoughts worked quite the same. Serious illusionists had to figure out the mental component themselves, though there were of course plenty of advice manuals on techniques that worked for most people. Mirian had worried the common techniques wouldn’t work for her, but after an hour of practice, she found her worries were misplaced. The trick was to practice the spell so that rote memorization became instinct and you didn’t have to think that hard about the spell part, and then you could really focus on the image. And Mirian was, after all, an artist.

“Hey roomie,” she said upon her return to the dorm.

“Hey Mirian how was your oh my Gods what did you do to your hair?” Lily blurted out when she saw her.

She laughed. “I learned an illusion spell. A real one!”

“Thank the heavens. I mean, it’s your hair, you can do what you want, but that shade of blond looks… weird? Like, it’s not you.” Lily examined her more closely, then said, “That’s pretty good though. I knew you’d have a knack for it.”

“Thanks,” Mirian said. She didn’t talk about the reasons for it. The more she talked about time travel, or even alluded to it, the more uncomfortable Lily got. Instead, they chatted amicably about the goings on of class. Really, Mirian mostly listened to Lily. Then she headed out for the Luminate Temple.

She thought about if she should bother going anymore. She didn’t like the priest. And she’d heard the sermon before. The weekly trips to the temple weren’t about that, though. Did the Gods care if time was repeating for her? It was ultimately to them Mirian was faithful. She wondered how closely they watched the temples. She wondered how closely they examined their own priests. It was through the priests that they acted, wasn’t it? Mirian had always been taught that the celestial energy that the priests and healers used for blessings and to treat the infirm were fundamentally different than the arcane energy they used, that it only came by divine grant. The Academy teachings said the same thing. That was why everyone in Baracuel went to the Luminate Temple; the proof of the Gods’ miracles was in every hospital, in every temple, and in the holy relics the faithful wielded. The head priest in Torrviol may have been a condescending jerk, but the Gods saw something in him.

The Gods had seen something in her too, she reasoned. Was she their conduit now? What else could explain the miracle that had now twice brought her back from death?

She listened once again to the priest’s sermon on Ominian, and Their sacrifice. The statues of the Ominian had always struck her as gruesome. No matter the temple, they followed a theme of mutilation. Most had knives jutting out and a chest carved open so the anatomically correct heart was showing beneath the peeled-back ribs. The one in Torrviol was especially grand, and especially detailed. But Ominian’s statues never showed pain, discomfort, or hesitation. Her eyes traced the swirling patterns of the stone They were carved from.

This time, she left as soon as the sermon was done. She stopped before the figure of Yiaverunan and Her hourglass. In the Kiroscent Dome, the statue held the hourglass upright. Here, She held it at a quarter-turn. Mirian wondered at it. Will you do it again? she thought.

She returned home.

***

Mirian was not entirely surprised when, once again, the Myrvite Ecology exam was different. It wasn’t just different, though; Professor Viridian walked in with his beard combed, looking well-rested and quite pleased. He actually had with him a little plant.

The main body of the plant was several long, narrow leaves. In the midst of those leaves was a thin stem that had about a dozen cute, droopy, bell-shaped flowers. They were white at first glance, but shimmered slightly. “Lily of the prophet’s sorrow. Or, in other regions, whitebell. Likes shade. Very poisonous. But pretty to look at, nice to smell, and quite harmless magically. Unlike violet wispsorrow, this plant produces an illusionary smell, which is one of the hardest kinds of illusions to produce. No one has figured out why it does this, but it should make the classroom quite pleasant to be in. Good luck on your exam!”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Well that’s nice, thought Mirian.

It was the only exam now that had changed three times in a row. Apparently, Viridian actually wrote his final exam over the weekend or something? It wasn’t a problem, though. This exam was about marsh ecology, and Viridian had talked about marsh ecology endlessly. This time, the essay question had to do with people going missing. Local magi were sure it was bog lion attacks, but a careful reading of the clues (plus knowledge of how the ecosystem worked) made it clear that the real culprit was actually baduka boar attacks. Culling the bog lion and fire drake population had led to the boars overpopulating the area. Mirian felt oh-so-clever figuring that out. One thing she could certainly appreciate about Viridian was that his exams were almost fun to take.

In Arcane Mathematics, Mirian watched Professor Jei introduce the exam, and expected her to depart and the proctors to take over. This time, though, she didn’t run off. She just… stuck around.

What changed? Mirian wondered. She was sure that Viridian’s change had been because she’d stopped the spy that was wrecking havoc on the Myrvite Ecology building. But what had done it for Jei?

Shortly after the exam began, the despair set in. The extra dozens of hours Mirian had spent on alchemistry had made even that legendarily difficult exam not so bad. The same amount of practice had done nothing to make the Arcane Mathematics exam any easier. The questions were still utterly baffling, and now that Mirian had checked her notebook and the lectures against the exam, she was absolutely positive that half the questions on the exam hadn’t even been covered.

“No crying,” Professor Jei told the class. “Exam score is scaled. Tears are not necessary.”

It was probably the least consoling speech Mirian had ever heard, which she found funny. Professor Jei really was the only person who made Professor Torres seem warm and emotional by comparison. And yet, despite the tone and words, Mirian felt she could sense that there was a compassion there.

After the exam, Mirian approached her. “Thank you, Professor Jei. I’ve enjoyed taking your class,” she said.

“Good,” she said. “I teach one more class next quarter. No math, too many complaints. You will sign up.”

Mirian was pretty sure that demand meant Jei liked her as a student. “Artifice Design?” she asked.