present

Graphite sticks scratched over folded notepads in time with the Kleio’s words. Her own chalk danced over the slate board at the front of the room. Four students sat in two rows of desks in the small classroom that had been created for them, the four Blends— the only children born of Paragon blood in the history of Evren.

“... if all the energy exchanges between particles in the universe were captured and stored for use, this would provide an inexhaustible energy supply... ”

Whispers behind her drew her attention away from the information in her head she was delivering in lecture.

“Knock it off, Dare,” Verity hissed.

“.... the problem lies in the fact that particles often do not act in coherence, negating the energy created by another, which is horribly inefficient…

“C’mon,” the other girl whined. “Tell me something about your new boyfriend.”

“... In fact, if we were able to focus the energy of all the particles of light inside a light bulb, forcing them to act in coherence together rather than randomly, the energy produced by that light bulb would be thousands of times more than that of the sun…

“For that comment alone, I’m done talking you, possibly forever— pay attention.”

“You’re killing me— tell me something!”

Whipping around quickly, breaking in the middle of her statement, Kleio called, “Darenger.”

With wide Indigo eyes, the girl snapped to attention. A few snickers came from the two bo sitting at the desk behind the girls.

“What are the two forms of existence in the universe?”

“Energy and matter,” Darenger supplied, as if bored, recalling information so overly memorized it came out as easily as breathing. “The manifestation of the ethereal and the physical.”

“Ehrat.” Kleio’s eyes jumped to the boy in the back who had been snickering, who also jumped as clearly he had not been expecting to be called out as well. “ Explain the attraction between these two forms.”

“One is inextricably drawn to the other, like all aspects in the universe. Neither can exist without the other, nor can either be created or destroyed, only transformed.”

“Rylem.” Kleio turned slightly addressing the much quieter boy to Ehrat’s left, her right. “ Describe this process of transformation.”

“Matter— “Shifting in an energetic way, he smiled, and began position his hands to provide a visual representation of his description. “ — consumes energy until it is depleted within the matter in which it is contained.” His excitement increased as he moved his hands frenetically, demonstrating with the shape and motion of his hands. “Then, the energy is released as matter is broken down, converted as matter returns to energy.”

“Last but not least,” Kleio smiled, turning her gaze back to the front row. “Verity, what is this exchange between energy and matter called?”

Lifting her eyes from the words she had been writing, Verity tapped her graphite stick in annoyance. “Involution is the process of energy descending to matter, exchanging the ethereal for the physical. It’s fundamental opposite, the ascending of matter into energy, is called evolution.” Tilting her head slightly ask if to express the question Are we done here?, Verity finished by answering the question entirely. “The summation of this process is referred to as a Round.”

“Good,” Kleio nodded. “Now that I know that you do pay attention to the things I teach you in this class, and we are back to academic thinking rather than palace gossip, can we please return to our Esoterics lesson?”

“Kleio!” Darenger exclaimed with a huff. “How can you expect us not to be curious about this? About him?”

“Alright…” she sighed. “I can see we are not going to be able to move on until we get the distraction out of our system. What do you want to know?”

Verity groaned, slumping in her chair until her neck fell over the backrest.

Rylem half raised his hand. “When do we get to meet him?”

“He’ll be joining class soon. Right now he is still settling in.”

“What’s he like?” Darenger asked, her signature smirk quirking up the corner of her mouth, no doubt at considering this new young man as a fresh prospect.

“You all know as much as we do,” Verity interjected, finally raising her head. “He’s been busy with Captain Padgett since I met him.”

“Doing what?” Ehrat asked.

Verity turned to him with a level gaze, deadpanning, “Sentinel stuff.”

“It’s just that…” Rylem began and then paused when everyone’s gaze was fixed on to him. “Do you think that the Sisters are going to give all of us Sentinels?”

Slowly the other students turned back to Kleio waiting for her response, and she could see their uncertainty deep in the four sets of stunning eyes boring into her. These were her students, her children, just as Verity was to her. Yes, she had been Verity’s governess since birth, but she had taken all these children under her wing as teacher. They were scared. They were confused. Everything they had ever known was changing, and they need assurances of what that meant for their world, their fallen parents, for them. After all, they were not Paragons. The were not deities of the Infinite Expanse who could operate without limitation, they were flesh and blood. Yet, contained within that flesh and blood, in that physical matter, lived the power of magic, of energy.

And, as Rylem had so accurately explain, energy trapped in matter depleted over time. It was the course of mortal nature— a living being had a fixed amount of time in the physical plane before they ascended to the ethereal one. What did that mean for a group of children, who she now realized had so suddenly become young adults in front of her eyes, who possessed the esoteric abilities of their once ethereal parents, yet existed here in the physical. Here they were, still grappling with these abilities, their consequences, their meaning, their potential. all the while knowing that, unlike their parents and despite the laws of the physical plane which Esotericists once thought immutable, each one of them represented an aspect that existed without complement.

To the field of Esoterics, they represented disruption to equilibrium. To the world, they were considered unstable, dangerous.

“Things are changing,” she finally said, approaching the desk and laying her palms flat against the top. “This is a strange time, but it’s also a time of incredible discovery, and you four are part of that. It’s natural to have questions, to be curious, even scared. You deserve answers, and I wish I had them for you. All I can say is this, and it’s going to sound like an empty platitude, but I have learned it to be true…” she sighed, disappointed it was all the comfort she could offer them. “All things are revealed in time. We may not understand their actions in the moment, but the Sisters always make their reasons known to mortals in time.” This seemed to placate them for now, and she nodded. “Why don’t we come back to our previous discussion another day. To settle our wandering minds, lets focus on something we know to be fact, and refresh what we have learned about the Natural Aspects.”

Moving back to the board, she swiped a dusty cloth over the board as what she had been writing disappeared. Drawing a box, she divided it in two.

“What are the Tangible Aspects?”

In unisom, the voices of the students harmonized as they repeated the material back to their teacher.

“Water, Fire, Sediment, and Air.”

Splitting each set between the boxes, she wrote each of the aspects next to its complement, then drew a line to divide the box again, this time striking a horizontal line to separate what she had just written, and labeled it to the outside of the box with the word Tangible.

“Now, the Intangible Aspects?”

“Light, Darkness, Life Death, Order and Chaos.”

As with the first group, she wrote them in their corresponding boxes until they filled the rest of the box, and labeled them as Intangible.

“And, the Independent Aspects?” She asked, as she created another box to the side.

They paused, but slowly the answers came one by one.

“Dimension,” Darenger said.

“Density,” Ehret added.

As they spoke, Kleio wrote the words into each of the separate corners of the second square.

“Generation,” Rylem supplied.

“Manifestation,” Verity finished.

“Now, with the discovery of these new independent aspects,” she paused, turning towards the students with a warm, knowing smile, “your individual aspects, the Esotericists are still trying to figure out how they fit into the Law of Equillib— “

With a disruptive pop, the tip of Kleio’s chalk snapped under the pressure of her pushing it against the slate. The remaining chalk fell from her hand, shattering against the stone floor into three more pieces. Gripping the edge of board for leverage to hold up her own weight, her body slumped as if it had lost all structure, her knees buckling as she fell towards the floor.

“Kleio!?”

Verity was the first out of her seat at Kleio’s side. The other’s raised up from their seats, unsure about what to do.

“Darenger, get a physician!” Verity began barking orders. “Ehrat, a cold cloth.”

Blinking away, Darenger disappeared to get help, and Ehrat rushed towards the stack of clean wiping cloths on the shelf under the board. Taking one of the stack, he poured water from the pitcher on Kleio’s desk until it absorbed into the cloth, and quickly shifted it from a state of liquid to solid, ice crystals forming across the surface of the fabric. He pressed the cloth the Kleio’s forehead as her eyes rolled, but it did nothing to shock her back or soothe her.

“I think she’s having a heart attack.” Ehrat said quietly, weakly, uselessly.

“Rylem!” Verity turned to the one Blend who still stood motionless, frozen in panic at his desk, and he snapped out of his daze. “Worse case scenario, do you think you could restart a heart?”

“I… I… “ he stammered. “Theoretically? Yes.”

“Not— “Kleio managed, words broken apart in long pauses. “Not… an… attack.”

Finding the focus to order her thoughts, she collected herself the best she could, and pushed Ehrat and Verity aside. Crawling a few steps toward the desk where Darenger had left her notepad, she swatted at it, and it fell to the floor.

“Graphite!” She motioned to Verity to give her the stick that the girl still held in her hand, and she rolled it across the floor.

Frantically scratching the graphite over the pad, completely ignoring the provided lines, a picture began to form within the jumble of messy scribbles. It had taken a few few minutes to get over the initial shock. It had been decades since she had experienced a vision. The last time she had seen a firebolt in the sky, a piece of the Infinite crashing into the realms. Only when she saw Rowan pulling her lady, Avadiel from the carnage of that crater did she realize it was not the Infinite, but the Paragons themselves who had fallen, banished, exiled for their support of their still loyal mortals. The message had come from the lady herself, the last message she had ever received from the Infinite.

But, her lady had fallen, had lost her connection to the Cosmos, so who was speaking to her now?

The edges of a face came into recognition on the page. A face that Kleio had never seen in the flesh. This visage had only ever been cast in bronze on a statue in the square outside his temple, painted on canvas that hung in the museums of the realms, woven in thread on a divine tapestry that had stood as testament to the history of the known universe, ever changing until the remaining Paragons had abandoned the mortals on the belief that they had abandoned them first, choosing science and industry over faith and devotion.

The graphite came to a stop and hit the notepad. Kleio hovered over the sketch, falling back to a kneeling position as she stared at the picture she had just produced. Rylem moved towards her, placing his hand on her shoulder gently, causing her to jump at the touch. Her eyes were wild like an animal before they refocused, and she shook her head, letting out a choked exhale.

Verity’s eyes caught on the picture, and she gravitated towards her governess, coming to the ground beside her. Taking the notepad into her hands, she examined the picture, and then turned to Kleio with searching eyes.

“Who is this?”

Kleio closed her eyes, swallowed, and took another deep exhale.

“Valen, Paragon of Order.”