For a moment, Orion forgot how to breathe.

  Antares strolled down the terrace path with perfect poise, making the guards’ sudden wariness stand out even more. White hair, midnight-black robes, and a face that shouldn’t have been so familiar made it clear that the most reclusive Archmage was approaching.

  He barely glanced at the soldiers, dismissing them as a threat altogether. It wasn’t necessarily with disdain, but it was obvious he didn’t think they were on his level.

  Orion’s fingers twitched toward the bridge of his glasses out of habit. He fought the urge to cast Inspect, knowing it wouldn’t even work anyway.

  Raising his chin, he met his father’s gaze steadily and decided that whatever brought him here, Nick wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing him out of balance.

  Antares stopped by their table and looked at him with open curiosity. Not at his face, Orion realized a breath later, ignoring the twinge of disappointment, but at his glasses. The man’s gaze followed the lenses, the tiny filigree at the hinges, and the faint depression where the enchantment sat tucked into the frame.

  Raising an eyebrow, he decided to be blunt. “If you want to know how they work,” he said, “you could just ask.”

  Brennar made a noise that sounded like a swallowed curse. The second guard’s hand grazed his sword's hilt.

  Ophelia quickly hid a laugh at his brazenness, turning it into a cough. Antares’s mouth twitched up, and his amused snort finally broke the tension.

  Up close, the resemblance was uncanny. They shared the same hair, the same line to their cheekbones, and while differences existed once you looked—Orion’s nose was a shade slimmer, Antares’s jaw was more defined—they were mostly due to age.

  “Take it as a piece of advice,” Antares said mildly. “I don’t recommend offering to explain your creations to just about everyone.”

  “I never said I would explain, I just said you could ask,” Orion answered, equally even.

  Antares smiled, then reached out as if to sit in the empty air. Before, there was nothing beneath him, and in the next moment, carved wood wrapped in silk and filled with feathers appeared.

  Orion hadn’t looked away for a moment, which let [Verification Principle] catch the magic, fast as it had been, giving him a glimpse of just how powerful the man was.

  He had altered the state of the air, transforming oxygen, nitrogen, trace gases, and dust into something new, re-bonding them into cellulose, protein, lacquer, and cloth in a fraction of a second.

  It was, by far, the greatest feat of transmutation Orion had ever seen, and it was executed so smoothly that if he hadn’t been looking directly at it, he wouldn’t have even noticed.

  “Those glasses,” Antares said as if nothing particularly interesting had happened, “are the first artifact of this kind I’ve seen. I know ways of looking into the System’s data, but I’ve never seen this runic matrix.”

  Any questions Orion might have had about the chair were silenced there. He’d known his father was an Archmage, but to learn that much from just observing the SGDs in action once… He might have a similar trait to [Verification Principle].

  Ophelia couldn’t hide her surprise, her eyes flicking to Orion and then back to Antares, as if she suddenly understood what the glasses actually signified.

  Yeah, I’ve known from the start that you weren’t who you claimed to be.

  Antares noticed. Of course, he noticed. He offered a nod of apology, his eyes locked on Orion’s, but he didn’t take any action to actually help.

  “They’re mine,” Orion said, heat creeping up the back of his neck despite himself. “You couldn’t have seen the matrix because there wasn’t one before I made it. The specific notation,” he resisted the urge to touch the frame, “is also my adaptation. The whole glasses are my invention, really.”

  “That’s pretty good.” Somehow, Antares didn’t make that sound patronizing. “I assumed it was something new, since the syntax is so clean. I would have fired half the Collegium if I’d found this language sitting in a dusty tome and no one told me.”

  “I’m surprised you can even parse that much,” Orion admitted. “I had to adjust a lot of values while tinkering with its reaction to the Mana Field.”

  “It’s technically called the Weave,” his father commented, apparently knowing exactly what he was talking about, “but I’m not one to get hung up on language. If the meaning gets across, it’s fine, and I’d say you have a fine understanding. Perhaps it’s a bit rough around the edges, but I can see you smoothed out the kinks on a second try.”

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  Orion had never talked to anyone about what happened during the Class Ceremony, so he had to blink to hide his shock. Still, a tiny part of him rejoiced at the praise from someone who seemed to know what he was talking about.

  He was still annoyed with the man for his sudden appearance, which wasn’t even to mention his feelings about how he had behaved toward his mother, but this conversation reminded him of the technical discussion he had had with his colleagues in his past life.

  That alone revealed how dangerous Antares was.

  The conversation continued from there, turning into a debate about mana efficiency and artificing syntax that he could keep going with for hours.

  They carefully navigated the type of research that would have labeled Orion as a heretic in the Sanctum, using similar terms like “adversarial layer” but with different meanings. They identified the point where both interpretations were correct, since both referred to data poisoning. However, in Orion’s case, he considered it as potential damage to the Computing Crystal, while Antares seemed to see it as memetic damage done to the local Field, something that Orion had never even considered possible.

  Ophelia listened, out of her depths but still intrigued. At one point, she interrupted to ask if the Weave’s mutability in Valderun made enchantments more effective because of that very phenomenon.

  “Yes, that is the reason why the Arcane Collegium was settled here, even if the official explanation is that the institution came first, and its presence altered the Weave into what it is now.”

  Orion was so engrossed that it took him several minutes to realize something was wrong.

  The terrace was much too quiet. The murmur of conversation was completely gone, and only the sounds from outside the shop came through. He felt the hair on his arms stand up as he realized the implication.

  Turning his head slowly, as if speed would break something fragile, Orion saw the proprietor behind the counter standing with a kettle suspended half an inch above a funnel. A server in the doorway had a tray angled in a way that should have spilled but hadn’t. High in the sky, a bird with a strip of bread in its beak hung mid-flight.

  Ophelia noticed his sudden wariness and looked around, immediately spotting the same thing he had. The guards remained still—not out of professionalism or fear, but because they had turned into statues, frozen in the stance they had assumed when Antares arrived.

  Their eyes didn’t blink. Brennar’s hand hovered about a quarter inch above the small lip of the belt where his fingers rested when the danger spiked.

  Orion turned back. Antares already knew he’d noticed; the man’s mouth had that slight crease on one side that showed he was finding the whole thing amusing.

  “You cast it when you made the chair,” Orion said. “You deliberately drew my eye to the wrong thing.”

  Antares didn’t deny it. “Casting two spells at once means most people only focus on the flashier one,” he said. “It’s a trick worth learning.”

  “What is it?” Ophelia asked, voice small. “Some kind of stasis?”

  “A localized temporal arrest,” Orion answered, annoyed that he could feel his blood race with excitement. The little data he could interpret from the spell appeared extremely complex, but even that was enough to tell him what was happening.

  Antares stood as his chair vanished back into the air.

  He took a step back, and Orion could see the space fold around him. “If you ever wish to participate in real research, without the constraints of the Sanctum, I will be glad to have you.”

  “I’m already doing real research,” Orion replied defensively.

  Antares nodded in acknowledgment. “I can see that, but you should know that a dedicated environment where your curiosity is valued as a gift, rather than a curse, will help you reach much higher.”

  “You could have offered that many years ago, and perhaps I would have accepted,” Orion replied, trying not to get drawn into the mental picture of what he could do at the Collegium.

  Antares accepted his accusation without reply. “Think about it.” Then he was gone, space unfolding, the air untwisting.

  Sound returned like a tide. The bird outside finished its wingbeat and didn’t notice it had been made to wait. Hot water hit a cup in a pour, and the proprietor hummed to himself as he stirred. Brennar’s fingers tapped his belt and then stilled, realizing the man he was worried about was no longer there.

  SYSTEM NOTIFICATION

  +1 to Attunement

  +2 to Mind

  +1.000 Exp

  Orion found his mother in the embassy’s inner salon, deep in conversation with Magistra Kissea. She and Asteria were in the midst of a close talk, hands wrapped around cups of herbal tea.

  Kissea looked up first. “You didn’t get in a fight,” she said. “That’s a good start.”

  “I only get punished for doing research,” Orion said, and then wished he hadn’t when his mother’s expression shuttered in guilt.

  Asteria took a deep breath, then examined his face for any signs of injury, which told him she knew more than he had anticipated.

  Did the Magisterium’s guards send word ahead of who we met?

  “How did it go?” she asked.

  “I drank some good mou,” he said, because despite what happened afterward, Ophelia had been true to her word. Then, since he could see the frown forming on her forehead, he added, “He came to find me. We talked about some magical research, and then he left.” His tone of voice remained steady, but Orion had to work hard to keep his inner turmoil from showing.

  Bafflement, anger, disgust, and longing all blended into something he couldn’t quite identify, so he chose to set it aside for later.

  Asteria’s eyes darted to Kissea, whose eyebrows lifted briefly in surprise before settling into a calm, composed line.

  “I suppose I should have seen him get interested, especially after yesterday. He’s never the type to leave something unresolved, even if he should have,” Asteria murmured. Then, shaking her head, she continued, “As for us, we have an answer. Elder Yue and I have reached an agreement.”

  Kissea made a contented little noise in the back of her throat, apparently very satisfied.

  “A good agreement,” Asteria added, though he could read between the lines and knew she wasn’t completely happy with it. “She will take us back under her wing.”

  Orion had known that would happen after he showed Yue his Computing Crystal, and yet he still exhaled in surprise. This issue had loomed over his life like a storm cloud for so long that he didn’t know how to feel now that it was resolved.

  “And the conditions?” he asked after a moment. I doubt she is doing this out of the goodness of her heart, after all.

  “We won’t leave tomorrow,” Asteria said. “Or next week. Yue will make proper arrangements to return us to the Sanctum safely and ensure our stay there is secure, but it will take her a while to rekindle old connections. She estimates about a month. Maybe a little more.”

  “A month,” he echoed, and sensed his idea of the near future shift in his mind. There would be no reunion with his friends anytime soon.

  Kissea watched his face do the math and smiled in reassurance. “There is plenty to occupy you here, don’t worry,” she said. “If you ever feel lost, I’ll be happy to hold a lesson or two.”

  “I would be glad to,” Orion replied, knowing that it was only because of her relationship with his mother that she was offering.

  Asteria’s hand found his forearm, warm and steady. “We’ll make good use of the time,” she said. “No matter who wants to harm us, moonbeam, I promise you, we will be safe now.”

  He nodded. With Elder Yue’s protection, very few people would dare bother them. Still, something tells me this month won’t pass without something else happening.

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