Marlen stepped back into Yulda’s office and closed the gate behind him with a snap of his fingers. Maziar didn’t seem to be taking as much interest in the girl as he had thought, and Marlen had spent more time explaining the devices to her than he’d intended. She wasn’t likely to be able to use them efficiently, but he would sleep better knowing that she wasn’t going to burn the tower down.
“How did it go?” Yulda asked him. Her earrings softly tinkled as she tilted her head up at him.
“The young miss is settled,” Marlen told her. “She’s curious about her environment, but I can’t say she wishes to be here.”
“Can you blame her?” Yulda said. “What about Maziar?”
“Disinterested.”
Frustrated, Yulda picked up the pen on her desk and threw it across the room. Glad that it was the pen and not something of any particular weight or value, Marlen picked it up for her and placed it back on the paper it was previously sitting on.
Glaring at him, she said, “I threw it for a reason.”
“Yes,” he affirmed. “And now you can throw it again if you wish.”
Yulda sighed. “What should I do with him?”
“You can’t make up for the past,” Marlen told her, knowing that a large part of her patience for him came from her own self-blame. “And coddling him will only make him worse. In his defense, however, I don’t believe he’s done this intentionally. Maziar likes to play tricks and rile the noble children, but he’s never hurt anyone. He tends to do things for a reason.”
“You’re referring to the complaint from the Zyers boy?” Yulda asked, her brow twitching.
“Indeed,” Marlen told her. The complaint had come in shortly before the others had arrived. Cardin Zyers had reported a scuffle between him and Maziar to another teacher before they had gotten there. In theory, it might have led to heavy consequences—but the situation was not all that it appeared to be. “Kasslir Elutai came forward while you were speaking with Ennette and Maziar. He says he wants to take any blame for what happened in the Tower of Agnon. Elutai was certain that Maziar wouldn’t have gotten involved if Zyers hadn’t used him as bait.”
“Which is exactly why Zyer used him,” she grumbled. “And then, of course, it’s favoritism when I don’t punish Maziar, regardless of what actually happened or whatever evidence exists.”
“Maziar’s concerns about you being more responsible for his actions than he is aren’t invalid,” Marlen said apprehensively. “He does stupid things—he’s not actually stupid. He very well recognizes the fact that anything he does falls onto you tenfold—and short of expelling him, nothing will ever be enough.”
“And even when he behaves, he gets dragged into someone else’s shit,” Yulda said, spinning in her chair. “I can’t protect him from this.”
“You cannot.”
“But how do I save him?” she asked the ceiling. Interlacing her fingers over her chest, Yulda leaned back in her chair and looked at the shiny wooden ceiling of her office.
“I can check the legal procedures,” Marlen told her. “Aside from that, I don’t think there is much you can do until we find out how to break that contract of theirs.”
"Yes,” Yulda started grimly. “That contract.”
Something was wrong, and they all knew it. Someone either wasn’t telling the whole truth, or there was something else to this matter that they were missing.
“Perhaps visiting the circle he used yourself would be of help?” offered Marlen.
“I planned on it, but I wanted to make sure you were here before I left. The last thing I need is for someone unnecessary to start poking around while I am gone.”
“Do you think it was, perhaps, someone else?” Marlen asked in a quiet voice.
Yulda stopped her spinning chair and crossed her arms. “No matter what Maziar did or did not do, there isn’t any way I can think of for him to have had enough power to summon anything from across even a single plane, let alone one I’ve never even heard of.”
‘Earth,’ Zerathon had said. ‘She said she was from Earth.’
“Then our thoughts are the same,” Marlen said, looking down. “Even I haven’t heard of ‘Earth,’ and I’ve traveled many planes.”
“But if Maziar didn’t have the power to do it—if even you don’t have the power to do it—then how would it have happened?” Yulda asked. “The only possible way I can think of is that he had someone to help him come up with the rest of it.”
“Even then, when you start talking about reaching through layers of planes, that’s a bit ridiculous,” Marlen told her. “Even if you and I were to attempt to pull something through layers of planes in an instant, I would only expect us to manage to pull through three or four. That’s nothing compared to what we are talking about with Ennette.”
“Multiple feeders then? But how many would that take—and why?” Yulda asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Speculation without evidence is just speculation,” Marlen said. “I suggest you inspect the scene yourself; I’ll keep the others from making a ruckus. You can call me if you need anything.”
“Thank you, Marlen,” Yulda said. Marlen bowed and took his leave.
Yulda stood and took her coat from the back of her chair. She shoved her hands through the sleeves and tried to think of all the possibilities. What, exactly, was she looking for? A conspiracy? Was there someone out there who may have been hoping that maybe he would have summoned something more powerful rather than something from so far away? But to what end? And why Maziar of all people?
She grabbed her staff from its place beside the bookshelf, then teleported to the Tower of Agnon, where the summoning ritual was held.
One of her least favorite towers, the Agnon was an odd, short kind of tower—calling it a tower seemed generous and was more of a tradition than a literal title. A small, circular structure, three stories high, it had several star-shaped glass lanterns dangling from iron chains that hung from the eves. Made of sandstone, it was pinkish in appearance, and its roof was domed rather than pointed—but most unsettling was that it had no windows.
After checking in with the tower’s formation, she inspected its physical perimeter. Nothing seemed especially out of sorts. It needed a good cleaning, but that was the student’s responsibility, so she made a mental note and moved on. It would make a good punishment for Maziar and the Zyer’s boy later.
Entering the tower through its arched doorway, Yulda was struck by the strong smell of sweet incense and a wall of cool air. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light of its single room, but even when they did she didn’t see anything out of place. It was as odd and eerie as she’d ever seen it—so she walked on.
Zerathon had left Maziar’s circle where it was in case Yulda could make heads or tails of what went wrong. However, even that seemed like it was, as Maziar said: textbook.
“Oh, that clever little brat,” she muttered as she saw that he had doubled every circle and marked it with extra fine break lines that were hardly noticeable even looking at it up close. There were also small dots of ink placed in the crevices so as to be almost entirely invisible if she wasn’t specifically looking for such tiny flaws—but the closer she looked, the more she saw.
Maziar was right: The circle he drew shouldn’t have worked on multiple levels.
It was a crying shame that the boy had lost the majority of his magic. If he hadn’t, she was sure that he would have been one of the greatest magi of their time. She felt a simultaneous twang of pride and sorrow as she thought what he must have been like as a boy—the boy she never saw. What kind of hopes and dreams had he had, with the world fawning at his feet?
Yulda knelt and touched the circle lightly—and then tilted her head as a strange sort of energy began to pulse through the tips of her fingers.
That wasn’t right. That wasn’t right at all.
The Tower of Agnon wasn’t without its oddities and legends—most of the towers in the Northern Tower were far older than they looked, preserved by magic throughout time. Some were said to have been brought by powerful dimensional affinity casters from other planes. One would ponder the question as to why they would feel the need to transport piles of rocks, wood, and metal from one plane to another, given that most had nothing all that special about them—but when you get a bunch of bored, drunk, magical people together over the decades with more power than they know what to do with, strange things are bound to happen.
Most of Agnon’s secrets, though, had to do with astral magic. Though the science of it wasn’t fully understood, the tower generated power when the stars aligned in certain ways. That power was then used to power the tower's lights, and astral spells cast in that light would benefit from that source of mana.
But familiar summoning spells were not astral magic—and it was the light that generated that power, not the simple sandstone floors.
Then what? Yulda wondered, spinning around to see if there was something she missed. If the energy was coming from the floor…But there wasn’t anything wrong with the floor either.
Unless…could it be?
“It could be,” she decided, muttering to herself. “That there was an illusion spell on the room…”
…and if there was, it could have been drawn into the floor, gathering magic all along.
Though rarely used for the same purpose, light and astral magic had an inseparable relationship. Mostly used for visual manipulations and for its radiation properties, light magic was capable of creating powerful illusions that had any number of uses—and if someone was powerful enough to cast a light spell efficiently enough to fool her, then that was information that needed to be known—but the spell would have also been able to utilize the powers of the tower to maintain itself.
Gathering a ball of light mana in her hands, Yulda knelt on the ground again. Pressing her hand flat against the floor, she sent a shockwave through the stone. The floor rippled with light and shadow as if her hand was a stone cast to still water—and the illusion dissipated.
“Shit,” Yulda breathed, staggering back up and staring.
Never before in her life had she seen such a thing.
Absent of the illusion, the lights in the room were now completely dark—all of their mana absorbed by a single, massive magic circle formation that lay glowing brightly underneath Maziar’s dark one. It shone with brilliant whites and blues and pinks as it radiated colors of light like waves on water.
It was intricate and complex, and the words were written in a language that Yulda didn’t know—but the structure of the thing was clear enough.
It was a summoning circle.
Whatever was going on, Yulda was almost certain now: Ennette had not been summoned by accident—and Maziar had summoned her by someone else’s design.
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