During practice, the men were fiddling with stone cubes: some were trying to enhance their muscles, some were training their endurance, and some, like Yaron, were senselessly pounding a stone, which resulted in a dislocated Yaron’s shoulder, but he winced and kept laughing, just so people would look at him. Ortahn walked straight up to Tulila, who was watching her "flock of girls" with an usual hand shading her eyes.

  "I need normal practice," he stated without preamble.

  "This is normal practice. By definition of normality. It's what you do constantly," she replied calmly, only a single raised eyebrow betraying her slight surprise.

  "Normal practice for studying magic," Ortahn clarified. "What we're doing is not normal practice for studying magic; it is too inefficient. A more effective set of actions must exist."

  The students froze, staring at Tulila and Ortahn, and someone even dropped their training implement in shock. Now they weren't sure what to expect. But for this, she surely had to hit the insolent student at least once. Even just a slap to the back of the head.

  "Why have you stopped, girls?" Tulila managed to glare at everyone at once, making them abruptly remember their cubes. "Work. Unless you have questions like Ortahn does."

  No one had questions like Ortahn did, but many continued to watch the two of them furtively, pretending to work hard. Tulila led him to a corner, away from prying ears and the deafening crash of stone on metal.

  "How do you suppose I, a woman, can teach men their magic?" she asked, her voice surprisingly soft, but her eyes chilled the space around them. "Magic is, above all, an internal process. And even I barely understand what goes on in your male heads. Now imagine the level of awareness of some Chancellery witch who writes our training plans."

  "I have a different question," Ortahn did not back down.

  "'Why not have a male mage teach male mages male magic?'" Tulila guessed with a slight smirk. "'Someone must graduate from this so-called school. Can't at least one of them stay behind and pass on their knowledge?'"

  Ortahn nodded. For someone who had just admitted to a poor understanding of the opposite sex, Tulila had read his thoughts with surprising accuracy and even formulated them better than he could have.

  "Ortahn. Tell me, what kind of starry-eyed world did you grow up in before this?" the teacher asked quietly, and wrinkles appeared on her forehead and near her eyes. "Our world... The world we built rests on one simple principle: magic is power. And power must belong to us." Her hands swept out in all directions, indicating the world beyond The Scar's walls. "We don't train competitors here. We make tools. And tools don't need to know how the hand that holds them works." All of her limbs now pointed to a lone cube. "Lift it. Faster and higher than yesterday. That is the only 'normal' practice you will receive."

  Ortahn had his answers. Exhaustive and merciless. He silently walked to his cube and began to "practice." His head and soul were heavier than any stone block at that moment. He understood everything completely. He wasn't just being confined, as in a cage, but was also being kept in the dark. A thick cover had been thrown over the cage.

  Ortahn's room became tighter, practically a suit, when two people entered it. But they didn't notice; their minds were already soaring in the infinite planes of magic and possibility. Esh sat on the only chair, her legs tucked under her, while Ortahn perched on the edge of the bed. The southerner's sharp tuft of hair stuck up like the feathers of an alert bird, and in her hands, she held a homemade notebook made from scraps of paper from the storeroom and a stylus "borrowed" from some homunculus. The dim light-line on the ceiling illuminated their focused faces, playing with the shadows.

  "I should say right away that this information comes from the head of one mad sorceress," Ortahn warned.

  "I don't care if you made it up. It's better than nothing." Esh fidgeted on the hard chair, then caught herself. "Although, no, it's not. What will the first lecture be about, teach... Teachman? Teachful man? What's the right way to say that word for a man?"

  "Just Ortahn," he waved it off, trying to structure the knowledge in his head.

  "Wow, named it after yourself," Esh rocked back in admiration. "That's right, why be modest?"

  "It all starts with the aethers," Ortahn began, his voice taking on an unfamiliar, lecturer's tone. "These are invisible fields that envelop the whole world like a web and make magic possible. The Great Matrix creates the aethers, and it also chooses who can absorb them and decides how much. This is what determines a mage's power. The Matrix is generous—it grants aether-absorbency to almost all women."

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  Esh illegally covered her brand with her hand and asked, to change the unpleasant subject, "And where is this Matrix located?"

  "Only the highest-ranking know," Ortahn answered, embarrassed, glancing at her shoulder. "My aunt (that mad sorceress) was pre-high-rank and she didn't know. But even if she did, she wouldn't have told a boy. She did, however, share her guess that it's in the planet's core."

  Esh quickly began to scratch with her stylus, drawing a diagram: a circle-planet, a fat dot in the center for the Matrix, rays-aethers emanating from it, which wove into a web after leaving the circle. The girl sighed in disappointment; a hope had apparently flickered within her for a meeting with the Matrix and the correction of the grave "error" of her de-magic-ing. Ortahn knew there had never been a single case of this brand being removed, but he decided not to sadden his friend beyond what had already been done.

  "So, the aethers... There are several types, as you've gathered from the plural. My aunt didn't have time to teach me this, but I know that any given aether seems not to distinguish between reality and the will of those chosen by the Matrix."

  "I sketched some hand gestures for spells and wrote down a couple of magic words, but I'm not sure about the transcription," Esh reported excitedly, flipping through her little notebook. "From memory, of course, I couldn't exactly draw in front of the mages."

  "Magic responds to thoughts and feelings. Gestures and words are like hooks to direct and hold the will; it likes to dissipate. You can do without them, but that's how many women learned and got used to it..."

  "So many mages cast spells as if they're writing in lined copybooks for children?" Esh asked with a vengeful smirk. The humiliation of the "blessed," even if it was secret from them, soothed her resentment a little.

  Ortahn, for his part, remembered how the Supreme Being, the Ministeress of the Outer Contour, had also used her hands, just like any low-ranking novice. It was... It was suddenly funny to see her from that angle. His terror of her crumbled a little.

  "So, you just think it, and—poof? A harem of buff, half-naked, oiled-up men materializes?" Esh only realized the meaning of her words after she had let them loose, and her coppery skin began to glow as if red-hot. "Just an example. For those perverted mages. They're capable of it, so that's why the example is like that. Yes."

  "It's not that simple," Ortahn replied, politely noticing only the essence of her question. "There are rules, conditions, formulas. But the most important thing is the price."

  "The price?" she asked, diving headfirst from her burning shame into note-taking.

  "If I lift this chair with my hands, I spend energy I got from food. If I lift the chair a hundred times, my muscles will get tired. It's the same if I lift the chair with my thoughts. But more energy is spent, and after intense work comes mental exhaustion. If you push on through willpower, the body will begin to break down. There's also a theory that the Overlordess don't pay a price, which is why they are so powerful. The difference between them and the previous rank is enormous, like the Mortina Canyon. Their magic is purer, or they distribute it differently, or maybe the Matrix chose them in a special way."

  Esh froze, her stylus hovering over the paper. She slowly raised her eyes, and something sharp, like the thorns of a rose, flashed in them.

  "Wait, Ortahn. If all our magic is tied to the planet..." she whispered, "then if you go beyond the atmosphere, the magic will die out, like a fire without air."

  Ortahn nodded, the corners of his mouth stretching into a proud smile of their own accord. He had planned to discuss this later, but his student turned out to be quite mentally agile. A pleasant surprise, by Procyron.

  "Yes. You can take some aether with you, sealed in artifacts, but it's weak and limited. It's easier to use the magical systems of other worlds."

  "So that's why Tulila's so mean? She was in dangerous deep space without her magic. Must be humiliating for a high-rank," Esh put in. "Now it's like she's living with a stick up her ass. No, wait, she took it out and now she beats everyone around her with it."

  "That's why the stellar colonies are subservient to our center—they are sent artifacts from here that can't be created there," Ortahn again let Esh's remark pass him by. Not only out of politeness but because he was starting to like Tulila. "And that's why the Virions are fired upon specifically from Eden. In fact, this is the source of the theory about the Matrix being in the core."

  "But that's dangerous!" Esh exclaimed. "The trajectory of the shots can be traced back to where the fire starts. No... Astral mirror stations," the girl answered herself, crushing any remaining doubts about the sharpness of her mind. "They redirect the Fires of Eden between them, confusing the enemy. But... maybe the Virions already know our location. And the Quiet Plague was their doing."

  "Conspiracy theory. There's no proof," Ortahn frowned, shadows falling across his face in harsh folds, making his expression mountain-like. "My aunt said it was just a disease, a mutation of the aether. The Virions... They wouldn't have left us any chance of survival. Probably."

  "And who are they, these Virions?" Esh's mind, without slowing down, leaped to a new topic. She leaned back in her chair, her lips curved in a thoughtful arc, her eyes remaining serious. "They say they're not living and not machines, but something in between. And they don't see us as individual beings, but as carriers of a genome. And for them, that genome is the only enemy. It's as if we're just individual parts of a colony, or cells of an organism."

  A chill ran down Ortahn's spine. He deeply disliked the idea Esh had voiced. It was terrifying to realize that your enemy wasn't fighting a government or an ideology, or even a planet, but the very idea of your species. For whom genocide is the only acceptable war plan.

  "You like all sorts of unproven theories, don't you, Esh?" Ortahn asked in a falsely cheerful voice.

  "I take what I can find," Esh said with a shrug. "A starving person can't be picky. Although, theoretically, they could. But that would be foolish and harmful. Therefore..."

  At that moment, a bowl of nutrient paste materialized in the room from the thickening air. Esh jumped in surprise.