The oldest coherent memories Maran had were of her death.

  She wasn’t entirely sure of what had happened, but she was lying inside what she assumed had been her own home, lying in a puddle of her own blood, and seeing someone she didn’t know taking things from a drawer. Most likely, she had been stabbed by a thief. Or perhaps shot, she wasn’t sure. She remembers thinking of an older woman whose face she no longer remembered, but she assumed was her mother. She remembers having difficulty breathing and closing her eyes for the last time before a flash of light and opening them again as a toddler trying to stand up; in a vastly different world.

  Maran was born into a rich family. Her second father had founded a large company on his youth, and after decades of working on it and making it as big as it became, he settled down, courted and married her mother, was ennobled as a baron, and then her second mother had her.

  She remembers having some negative thoughts about their age gap, but she couldn’t negate that her second father had helped raise her as best as he humanly could and had been a perfectly loving parental figure to her.

  Her second mother had at one point been one of her second father’s workers, she was barely a teenager, although a prodigy, when he hired her, and their marriage had come some long time later, as he had never been really interested in forming a family until he was already in the age in which he had to stop working as hard as he had been.

  However, since the moment she had access to those memories, and with them a wealth of knowledge from her previous life, her life was set. She knew mathematics, she could easily draw, she struggled a bit with the language, but afterwards could easily read the texts of all kinds of scholars and philosophers; Since an extremely young age, Maran was regarded as a genius, and treated as such.

  At just fifteen, despite her protests, she was sent to the Academy of Lastria, one of the country’s most venerable institutions. A school, that beyond being military, could teach its students all the ways of magic, of the natural sciences and of the arts.

  And Maran was to become a magical logician, like her second mother.

  Of course, for her that was a problem. Not only she was more interested in artistic pursuits, despite having a cursory understanding of magical theory and being quite good at the mathematical calculations needed for works of magical logic, but she found the work in the discipline, to be utterly boring, to the point that, despite threats from her tutors, she would skip classes altogether and read while sitting on the coziest place she could find; a corner bench next to a tree in the courtyard of one of the laboratories of experimental magical theory, which she loved because not only it was picturesque, but the thick walls of the laboratory, meant to shield its contents from both exterior disturbances and whatever in the Seven Punishments was happening inside of the building, made it for an incredibly quiet place.

  That was, of course, until the sundown of one day, in her fourth year in the academy, when she saw a thin dark-haired man of roughly her same age rushing out of the building, screaming, followed then by a massive gust of fire that, fortunately, died down just as soon as she jumped from the bench in surprise.

  Maran rushed towards him, who had fell, first into his knees, followed by his hands. “Hey! Sir? Are you alright?”

  He looked up to her, his eyes wide and wild. “Did you see that?!”

  While she hadn’t had the opportunity to interact with that many people at the Academy, it suddenly struck to Maran that the man’s reaction wasn’t a normal one. Sure, he seemed upset, which would be normal given the situation, but instead of any kind of panic, he sounded, just as he began ranting about how much it had taken him to prepare that spell, quite disappointed.

  She arched an eyebrow and sighed, rising from her knees, a position in which she was trying to determine if he was hurt. There was no physical damage, thankfully. And placed her hands on her hips.

  “The explosion, yes, I did. So, sir, are you a student at that laboratory?” She asked, as calm-sounding as she could.

  “Not exactly.” He replied, looking down for a moment before breathing in deep and rising to his feet. “I’m not under any professor right now. I’m just, well, I’m using that one for my personal experiments.”

  Maran stared up at him, he must have been a full head taller than her, although it isn’t like she wasn’t a bit short. Being conceded the right to use a laboratory entirely on his own, specially at this time of the day, so near the curfew, marked him as likely quite a privileged, intellectually speaking as nearly everyone in the Academy had some kind of it, student.

  “However,” He continued, “Maybe I should go under a professor and study some of the basics again.

  She arched her eyebrow, silent, again.

  “You see, miss, that was not the intended result.”

  “Yes, that was patently obvious,” she thought. And instead said, “I had assumed as much, an explosion is usually not a great thing to cause.”

  He staggered, looking towards the door.

  “No, actually, that was the intended result of the spell. The thing that went off was the size.” He glanced at her and back towards the door, probably trying to ascertain if getting close, or even inside, was safe. “I’m trying to make them self-sustaining, to a degree, but I can’t quite figure out how to arrive at that. Instead I keep making the fires about as big as the proportion of time I want them to keep going.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  He walked over to the door, glancing inside, and coughed at the smoke. She followed him.

  “Um…” He began, turning towards her right before walking into the laboratory. “Could you do me a favor and help me open the windows?”

  Maran sighed and did so, walking in and grabbing a rather long stick with a hook at its end, which he pointed her towards, and used it to open the skylights of the hall while he opened the windows of the second floor. The laboratory consisted of a large room, about the size of a lecture hall, it was divided in two stories; one floor In which the experiments were made, and another with walkways in which the researchers could safely conduct them. There was also another room that had a bathroom and a small office space.

  She flinched when she heard him yell as, once the smoke was mostly gone, he ran to the center of the hall and started examining the many sheets of spellpaper that were on the floor. They didn’t seem to be particularly burned, although there were some marks here and there. A couple of minutes later, he looked relieved, if a bit frustrated. Maran could sympathize, arranging spellpaper properly for a big result, specially this many, took significant time and effort, as small mistakes could cause terrible variations.

  “Have you considered Chimney Charms?” She asked, sounding a bit more snooty than she wanted. “Those result in fairly large fires, and its self-sustaining up to a point.”

  He nodded, letting out a frustrated sigh. “That was my first idea, but there is no way to apply any real pressure to it.”

  The dark-haired man, who by this point was sitting cross-legged on the floor, crossed his arms, in thought, rising his chin. Then, after a few moments of silence, he flinched and turned his head around towards her. “Oh, right. Where are my manners? Thank you for helping me, miss…?”

  “Maran Rabineau.” She answered, automatically. “Yes, no ‘de’ particle.”

  “Oh” He rose and offered her a hand. “I’m Rull.”

  Maran scoffed. She wasn’t one who cared much, if any really, about the pleasantries of the nobility and their insistence in last names, titles and calling others Honorable Lord, or Most Gracious Saintess, and so on. She preferred simple politeness, it was always more practical, and prevented her from receiving more annoying adulation. However, him introducing himself just by his name irked her; it was as if he was being condescending towards her for not being from a House.

  “Like the prince?” She responded back, a bit of sarcasm in her voice. She didn’t mean to insult him, of course, but she knew that nobles were embarrassed if they happened to have the same of a similar name to other nobles, a weird cultural thing that she never managed to not find downright silly.

  He staggered. But there was neither embarrassment nor anger in his face. He just seemed surprised, as if she had done something nearly any other person hadn’t.

  “Removing the ‘Like’, but yes.”

  Maran understood it immediately, and letting out a sound like a whistle that communicated so many emotions and thoughts at once that it didn’t really mean anything in particular, she performed a small bow. Of course, of course she didn’t recognize him, although, she thought, her not recognizing the second prince is fairly normal, according to every noble, he was a hermit who only really cared about his studies and was just straight up not present in the vast majority of the social gatherings of the uppermost class, and she herself barely went to any of them.

  “My apologies, your Highness, I hadn’t recognized you.”

  “It’s fine, really.” He responded, reassuringly, scratching the back of his head as if this situation was perfectly normal for him. “You have been of great help Miss Rabineau. If you ever need a favor, just ask for an audience with me and I’d do whatever I can to help.”

  A smile appeared in Maran’s face. He seemed honest, at the very least. And, despite her best efforts trying to ignore it, there was a question in the back of her mind, crawling in an whispering in her ear to ask him.

  “May I ask for that favor right now?” She said, barely breathing.

  He arched one of his eyebrows and nodded.

  “It is just for the sake of intellectual curiosity, really, but what were you doing here, exactly?”

  “Oh, right. I guess experiments with explosions are not quite normal, aren’t they?”

  “Unless I have run into the testing of a new kind of weapon, no, they are not. Have I done so?” She asked him, sarcastically. She shouldn’t have done it, of course, but nobles tended to value the use of wit in tense situations, and he seemed friendly enough.

  “Oh, no, no. I’m trying to use explosions as a source of power, sort of. The theory is that if I comprise it enough, I could use it to move heavy objects.”

  “I see.”

  “I know it probably sounds insane to you, but imagine horseless carriages that move due to small, continued explosions. In a perfectly safe manner.” He began, while a certain thought was building inside Maran’s head. “Yes, yes, I know that the current research is based around using magic to move them directly, but the research and development for that is going to take decades, and besides, I’m not even trying to have this thing built. Just prove that it is possible so I’m granted a research station.”

  The thought was eating away inside Maran’s mind, but she made herself smile, feigning interest. “I see… Then, if this isn’t what your Highness is interested in, what are you to study?”

  He began talking, Maran recognized the term, “The Vansted Problem”, a basic part of magical theory, but she didn’t remember not cared much about his explanations. She knew that he would start talking about it in detail, intellectual types like him always did. What she actually cared about were some sheets of normal paper that were on a nearby desk, unharmed by the earlier fire. She didn’t understand the diagrams, nor most of the notes, which to be fair, didn’t seem to be saying anything important. But right then, she noticed two words on the corner of a page.

  Two words written in an entirely different language compared to the rest, one that she easily recognized.

  “Combustion Engine.”

  She read, aloud. Then she turned around and saw that the prince had stopped in his tracks, completely still, completely silent, and growing pale.

  Maran sighed. She had assumed, from an early age, something rather irrational. She had assumed that she was unique, and everyone around her had only reinforced it. But there it was, someone who was like her.

  “Ah.” The prince said. It was the smallest little sound.