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2023-09-17
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2024-03-25
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2/?
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and again and again and again

Summary:

Wide-eyed, mouths agape, features twisted by their last moments. There were exactly thirty-one heads in the graven mass. Sellen ought to know. She'd put them all there herself.

Chapter 1: starting point

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Azur's departure took place with considerably less commotion, much to the remaining Academy leadership's relief. Lusat had reacted to his sacking with the vigorous fury of a man half his age, and students who had been visiting the university town when he first heard the news had claimed that snatches of his thunder were audible from even down below. His conspectus had supported him, of course, and the halls had filled with Olivinus crowns calling for the Carian queen to step down from her position as headmistress.

They hadn't been alone. The primeval current was too exotic and advanced a study for most of the school, yes, and the distasteful costs involved in delving it were an open secret within the campus walls. But it was the principle of the thing that chafed. Danger was intrinsic to sorcerous study, and if such restrictions began, who knew where they'd end? And for this to come from Rennala, one of the Academy's own...

 Even Haima had been hesitant to enforce the royal edict. The Academy's population was naturally more bookish than fiery in personality, and the Adjudicator had been glad of the tempestuous Master Lusat's company. Drunken evenings of combat testing and learning to sing Sellian shanties and marching tunes weren't enough for Haima to forget his duty entirely, but it certainly made gentle his gavel. So his battlemages had merely stood guard and watched as the students of the Olivinus conspectus rallied through the hallways and lecture rooms and forced the Academy to suspend classes indefinitely. Intervened only if the outrage grew too physically enthusiastic.

She had been there, of course. Had marched through the hallways with all the rest. She wasn't Olivinus - she'd earned her own crown already by then, though not her own conspectus - but you didn't need to be Olivinus to be upset. Censorship and oppression was something that happened to lesser schools. Feeble institutions, nameless and obscure.

Oh they had names for themselves, to be sure. Fancy names, too. The more meagre their magic the fancier the names they gave themselves. But all through the lakes of Liurnia and beyond, if you told someone you were a sorcerer of the Academy, they'd know exactly which academy you meant. A ban like this... Not just limitation or restriction or some other slap on the wrist for overzealous test subject requisition, as had been the customary response from previous Liurnian monarchs, but an outright total proscription on the primeval current and dismissal of several of the Academy's great sages?

This was an attack, as surely as if Rennala had struck their walls with trebuchet.

Plus, she had other reasons, but ones she kept guarded close.

Sellen had stood in the plaza one night, tolerating the press of the crowd, as a Karolos-headed upperclassman stood at a balcony and railed against the restriction. Had added her voice and applause to all the rest when the speech concluded.

It wasn't the best rhetoric, she'd observed. During normal times, the likes of him would have been laughed out of the Debate Parlour just a few sentences in, but spirits had been high and the speaker's clumsy, earnest anger resonated with the crowd.

And what a crowd it had been. The attendance of those who'd earned their conspectus rights was expected given the matter at hand, but even the uncrowned had joined in. The uncrowned... and others. Sellen had glimpsed a surprising number of talentless lordlings and minor nobles mingling in the mass. People whose wealth and aristocratic privileges had allowed them to buy their way into the Academy but lacked the ability to climb its hierarchy.

Some of them even spoke. Academic underachievers still wearing nobles' clothes and gems, not the sacred blue-red mantle of Raya Lucaria. It was unsightly, Sellen had thought. Their kind weren't even permitted entry to the upper spires. They were tolerated for the funding they brought, not their minds. Feeble intellects and bloated egos. What did they think they were doing, acting like they were in any way invested in a form of study utterly beyond their grasp?

"This lot probably just wanted to join the fun," one of Sellen's acquaintances had opined. "Good excuse to get out of lectures." Sellen had flicked her gaze across the knots of crownless robeless unworthies mixing in with the real students and quietly agreed.

Either way, Olivinus had been glad of the rabble's support. A conspectus prefect had argued that if the protest went on long and loud enough, then surely their grievances would be heard, all the way over in Caria Manor where the queen had retreated to keep the Academy's turmoil at a distance. The protest did go on long, and very loud. And they were indeed heard in the Carian court.

Little good it did them.

It was the arrival of a brace of Carian knights with a thousand royal men-at-arms announcing their intention to help restore peace and order which finally forced Haima to admit that he'd been tarrying in the vain hopes the situation would resolve itself somehow, that Lusat would give in one day or Rennala would rescind her decree. This state of affairs was spiraling out of control.

Waiting for the school to sleep, he had shown up at Master Lusat's door in the dead of night with two cups and a bottle of fine vintage. There Haima cajoled, begged, threatened, reasoned, browbeat and pleaded with his old friend until at last he'd wheedled out an agreement from a tipsy and melancholy Lusat that however absurd this new blanket restriction on the primeval current was, starting a civil war over his disbarment would be even more so. And that's where it had been headed.

The day before, a motion to seal the gates had been raised in the Debate Parlour and voted down on an uncomfortably slim margin. Everyone knew Olivinus would seek another, and again if that failed to pass too, and each time they did the continued presence of a small Carian army at the foot of the Academy would push more students and staff towards their side of the chamber.

Lusat cleared his rooms and laboratories and left with some of his closest pupils a week later, but not before vowing to return one day when the queen's silliness(or madness, or idiocy, or all three - the old master's judgement of her being as mercurial as his anger) cleared up and she saw the error of her ways.

Agreement hadn't equaled acquiescence, and Master Lusat had seesawed between muttering curses and hurling insults as his party went down the elevator.

The rumour mill later claimed he had spat at the Carian knight-commander as he passed, though nobody who'd actually been there could say when he might have found the time to do so, or mustered the spittle necessary. Sellen had watched from a low cliffside window, peeking through a cluster of fellow onlookers all jostling for the best view, as he'd stopped his little procession in the middle of the university town, right in front of where the royal troops stood at parade rest, and given a profanity-filled speech on what a grievous treason it was for the queen to suffocate the very same institution she had once attended and flourished her arts within.

The primeval current revealed the path of the stars and enabled Man to pluck knowledge from the heavens. It opened Man's mind to the wonders and terrors of the sky.

Aye, the path of the primeval current was fraught.

Aye, the path was murky.

Aye, the path demanded sacrifices.

But this has ever been the way of magic. Ever since the first astrologer of old legend had called the Founding Rain and brought the amber of the stars down to the world, sorcerers had been laying down their lives, willing or otherwise, to push the boundaries of Man's understanding.

She had no right, no right at all, and it made little difference if she was queen or headmistress. She could go bugger her Full Moon all she wanted(and that new red-haired boytoy of hers, he'd sneered), but the stars would still be there, ban or no. The stars... and their magic, too.

Having worked himself up into one of his famous moods, Lusat had come very close to offering to "demonstrate" what a single cast of his famous Stars of Ruin could do to such a tightly-clumped force, but sanity and the pleading of his more cool-minded followers had prevailed; he had not committed high treason right there in the streets. Satisfied with the flash of alarm on the Carian commander's face and the ripples of fear that shook the once-neat ranks of armoured men, he'd finally stalked off with his close apprentices, taking himself and his knowledge back to his old hometown. And there he would stay forever, despite his vow.

 

 

Centuries later Sellen, Graven Witch and Headmistress of the Academy, jerks awake from a nightmare. Tangled in sweat-drenched bedsheets. Breathing hard. Choking and coughing on bile.

 

 

Even before the thousand lakes had become one, it had been the norm for refugees seeking shelter from war to find themselves puddling against the Academy's rocky foundations.

 

 

Sellen fought hard to keep the irritation from showing on her face. Judging from the way the frog-headed staffer flinched as he retreated from her office however, she suspected she wasn't as successful as she'd hoped. She did manage to keep herself from sighing until the great double doors swung shut, at least. The moment the muffled click of the latch reached her ears, she allowed herself to slump, first back into her seat, and then forwards to rest her head on the cool smooth oak of her desk. Deflating from the image of self-assured headmistress into a second, lesser archetype that was no less familiar to the denizens of Raya Lucaria: the overworked student facing a looming deadline. 

I need sleep, she thought, forcing her head up so she could shoot a peek at the shadows stretching across the carpeted floor. The window behind her was a work of art, a great round pane near four times her height, inlaid with a decorative grille wrought in cosmic patterns. Stars and other heavenly bodies swarmed across its face. A constellation here, a meteor shower there. A silver crescent within a great circlet crowned the top - the moon, both waning and full. Most important to Sellen was a certain long-tailed comet positioned at the window's upper-right quadrant. Telling time using this makeshift sundial was an inexact science, but Sellen knew that when its silhouette wandered close to the edge of her desk, the end of office hours was near.

Currently that particular shadow was nowhere close to where she needed it to be. If she was to be honest with herself, it was utter optimism to have checked at all. Lunch hadn't been that long ago.

Taking a deep breath like a swimmer preparing to dive, Sellen forced her eyes back down to her desk. Gazed numbly at the paperwork covering nearly every centimeter of free space. Expenses. Taxes. Staffing. Materiel stockpile reviews. Petitions on petitions. Worried whispers from Altus, where a new Elden Lord had taken up his reign. Updates on efforts to rebuild the Academy Gate Town. And a hundred reports of new arrivals, with more streaming in each day now that some semblance of authority and order had returned to the Liurnian heartland.

Her desk was a heavy wooden beast, broad and thickset. Sellen had once tried moving it without the help of magic and failed. She had thought it oversized when she'd first encountered it - an obvious conclusion given it had been built with someone nearly twice her size in mind. But now it felt too small for the job, crowded and overrun. The paperwork, in both stacks and scrolls, had full reign of its surface. It belonged more to them than her. The only concession she received was neat little clearings to her left and right where a lantern and a teapot with accompanying teacup sat, respectively. It was too early in the afternoon for the lantern to be lit. Too late, for the tea to still be hot.

Her seat, at least, was scaled for normal humanity.

Sellen's eyes blurred as she attempted to take another crack at the page laid in front of her. Yet another contingent of Cuckoo remnants had reached out and were seeking parlay. The knightly order had splintered during the Shattering and many had turned feral in the absence of central authority. Now that some semblance of order had returned to Liurnia, they came skulking out of the swamps, worried that they'd be labelled outlaws. As they should be.

All of them claimed it was some other group that had burned the village down, always some other group that had stolen the farmer's livestock or grains, always some other group that had drowned the merchant and made off with the goods. Weeding out genuine Liurnian loyalists who had melted away into the river reeds to await a restoration from all the opportunists who'd spent the past years no better than bandits was an exhausting and fruitless task.

It didn't help that they all wore the same old Cuckoo colours. Was it her eyes blurring or the page itself? I can't. Not like this, not right now. She stood and paced to face the window, fleeing. Let her eyes and mind wander the streets of the Gate Town below.

 

 

In those days Liurnia had no Queen, but a hundred self-proclaimed queens, as well as kings, and dukes and barons and earls and countesses. War between their fiefdoms would engulf Liurnia near as often as her seasonal rains, and the countryside would bleed and burn.

None of the carnage touched the Academy. None of it neared the Academy. It was well understood throughout the lakelands that in the face of conflict, the sorcerer-scholars had a habit of sealing their gates and proclaiming neutrality. Yet this isolationist stance was not the reason Liurnia's countless warring petty nobles gave the Academy a wide berth. No, the reason for that was the understanding that Academy's policy of neutrality did not preclude individual members from taking offense at trespassers and raining glintstone down from on high.

A warlord may slay their foes on the field and burn their enemies' hamlets as they pleased, and the Academy would take no action... but they would not do so within sight of the university walls. For this reason, no slaughter ever took place near the Gate Town, no peasant massacres, no rapine or pillage. Nothing that might disturb the students' studies and risk drawing the professors' ire.

 

 

Sellen turned from the window and circled back to her desk. She ran a finger against her teacup experimentally. Less than lukewarm, its contents had gone completely cold. Sellen paused, her hand almost but not quite holding the cup. Eyes almost but not quite open. 

Somewhere outside that wonderful window, the moon was rising. Low, still, at this hour. And made indistinct by the fog. Far below in the remains of the Gate Town, lanterns and candles were lit before the approach of dusk.

 

 

This norm did not change after Liurnia's unification under the Carian monarchy, was not forgotten during the period of peace that followed. When war had come once more, this time not flaring up between neighbouring petty fiefs but roaring down from the Plateau with spears in its hands and trees painted on its shields, reaching the relative shelter of the Academy Gate Town again became the goal for all those who found themselves in the way. The taverns and inns and pleasure houses rented out every bit of space under their roofs at a premium, and once they filled up the tardy and the poor would shack up as best they could nearby. Rag tents and driftwood huts, farmer's carts turned sideways to serve as shelter, a veritable shantytown that huddled against Raya Lucaria's suburbs like a swamp sore.

 

 

In a harsh, almost angry movement, Sellen abruptly raised the cup to her lips and swallowed its contents in a single gulp. Placing it back on her desk, she sat once more. Tugged her chair forwards, back ramrod straight. The very image of proper scholarly posture. Your teachers would be proud if they could see you now. A part of her wanted to giggle at the absurdity of the position she found herself in. All those years on the run, in exile, only to end up here, in this chair. It was a very small part. The rest of her was too tired for humour.

 

 

Cloistering in packed halls or huddling in the streets or squatting in the mud, the migrant masses whispered in hushed and fearful tones, "Godfrey is coming. Godfrey is on his way." Nothing stood against his fury. For the first time ever even the Academy's sanctity did not seem so solid a refuge. Dragons and giants alike had been crushed beneath the Elden Lord's boots. As powerful their magicks were, sorcerers were merely men...

But so were Leyndell's regulars. And as powerful Godfrey was, one champion alone cannot sustain a conquest after his army has been shot to ribbons.

An oft-contested rumour held that when the Elden Lord came to understand his invasion had fallen apart, he'd directed a salute not towards Rennala but to the sorcerers who in those days flocked around her like a secondary royal guard. Her Carian knights had held the vanguard against him longer than thought possible, but it had been the detachment of Academy "volunteers" who had filled the skies with glintstone and broken the myth of the Erdtree's invincibility. Where dragonthunder and giantsflame had failed, a storm of comets and crystals had won, blasting swathes out of Godfrey's army even as he raged and crushed Carian helms in his palms like a lesser man crushed berries.

 

 

The teapot sat empty, but Sellen didn't notice. Work to rebuild sunken foundations in town was plagued by a constant lack of tools and materials. A herd of lobsters, bloated to monstrous proportions by agelessness, were ranging dangerously close to Academy territory and would need redirecting or extermination. More rumours the new Elden Lord had used the word "united" to refer to the Lands Between, causing worry. Another three petitions for access to the Grand Library. Denied. She reached to pour herself another cup and seemed disoriented and confused when nothing flowed from the pot.

 

 

A considerably less controversial rumour held that Lusat had been wearing a shit-eating grin the entire time, beaming like a loon at Godfrey from his spot of honour at the Full Moon Queen's side.

 

 

It was getting proper late. The wrought metal comet's shadow could no longer be discerned from the darkness. Sellen perused a report on the Gate Town's swelling refugee population by lanternlight, idly pushing a thumb against her forehead as she did. Another caravan of some hundred-odd dispossessed had turned up, the third one this week. Some things never changed.

 

 

Needless to say, the Elden Lord had razed every settlement he passed on his way back towards the Plateau. Serosh's grip on him had grown less firm with every vaporised Altus brigade. Godfrey was husband to Marika and her Erdtree eschewed fire, but the humiliation of defeat had made cracks for Hoarah Loux to peek through; the remnants of the Golden Order's army left only ashes in their wake. Ash made for excellent fertiliser thoughbeit and Liurnia's peasantry, so used to returning home from the Academy's protection to find they had no homes left to return to, were quick to reestablish themselves. For the first decade the borders had been tense with Carian sentries watching warily for another army to come down the cliffs. None did, and as the Erdtree's incursion became history, towns and villages sprung up again like water reeds.

Agriculture and commerce in the north had only just approached pre-war normalcy when a sentry galloped up to the gates of Caria Manor atop a dying horse, shouting at the top of his lungs. The glitter of gold had been spotted streaming down the cliff face.

 

 

The Headmistress' Office was in shadow clad. The shades lay thickly across the shelves and carpeted floor, a stark contrast to the desk, which shone in the spotlight of the great round window through which the night sky could be seen. A fogless unclouded night, rare during this time of the year. In the moonlight, the remaining papers on the desk seemed to glow.

The Headmistress, her tea set, and the lantern were gone.

Notes:

This "chapter" was originally intended to be a one-off, and was written as such, which is why the formatting is a bit unwieldy. Ideas for this fic started digging their way into my brain and laying eggs and it turned into a much longer project. Enjoy!

Chapter 2: anteprologue i

Chapter Text

And fat his soul, and make his body lean.

 

 

THE TOWER

 

It was the first public execution the Gate Town had seen in a long, long time. They had picked a poor day to hold it. The monsoon rains were unseasonably late that year, following the pattern of an atypically dry semester. Even so, the Liurnian climate made its presence felt in the form of a noontime shower that misted the high arched windows of the scholar's estates and administrative manors that huddled around Queen's Square. Rooftop banners bearing Carian royal colours married to the Academy's horological heraldry fought to flap against the water-weight soaking into their fabrics. Droplets pattered against the roof of Azur's carriage and ran down its windows, blurring his view as he peered at the grey world beyond through a gap in the blackout curtains. In spite of the weather, the promise of violence had drawn a sprawling mob of voyeurs which squeezed itself, bloated and awkward, through the wide paved avenues that radiated out from the Old School Gate.

They were a very assorted crowd. Crowds were, as a rule, no stranger to the districts that formed the metropolitan heart of the Gate Town. Proximity to the Academy and the prestige that nearness carried meant the city's urban core was packed with the estates and townhouses of the realm's noblest and wealthiest. The city's day-to-day operation meant a constant flow of notaries, greffiers, clerks and functionaries passing beneath Raya Lucaria's shadow. Visitors to and from the Academy added to the foot traffic. On clear days vendors flocked downtown to ply their wares where the money was. But foot traffic had dropped ever since the Academy had closed itself off with the outbreak of war, and today the burghers and bureaucrats had fled indoors in search of shelter from the wet. In their absence, the paving stones had been turned over to a more vulgar, varied sort.

Azur felt himself itch just to look at them. As his convoy plucked its way along the edge of the square, his eyes passed over patched raincloaks and disintegrating scrapwood clogs. Yellowed teeth, grubby hands. Here a trio of woodsrunners squatting together in sullen silence, there a group of fishermen still in oilskins jabbering in their river argot. Past Queen's Square, down Eastwend and Southstreet, the Scholar's Road and Two Rivers Road, the throng roiled, long rivers of pale faces and craning necks.

Normally these unwashed plebs would never venture this deep from the outlying suburbs, but there was a spectacle to be had this day. Several Golden Order outriders had been captured by a force of Carian regulars. An enterprising commander must have thought their beheadings would make a jolly good show for the Gate Town's bloated refugee population. A precious little victory for them to cheer, while Godfrey's golden host continued to tighten its grip over Liurnia's northeastern provinces.

Azur's carriage abruptly shifted forwards, jolting him and taking his point of view with it. A tantalisingly short distance later his wooden cage halted again, causing him to sigh and rub his eyes.

Though he was no expert, he was fairly certain travel was not supposed to be this intolerable. Caria Manor had called for an Academy envoy of appropriate rank. As the youngest sitting conspectus head, Azur had been handed the task. Months ago when his delegation had first set out, when the weather was dry and the paths reliable, it should have been a clean ride on stone-paved roads following the winding banks of the Rharente until they reached the table-like highlands of western Liurnia. Naturally a conspectus head would never travel alone, but an armed escort for Azur - disguised as a wealthy merchant braving wartime travel to visit an ailing mother - ought not to have presented a weighty obstacle. They were all mounted, for heavens' sake. With the stars to guide their way they should have completed the round trip many weeks ago.

The trouble was dragons. With Caria's Army of the East shattered under Godfrey's axe and no longer a coherent obstacle to the Golden Order's rolling conquest of the northeastern highlands, Leyndell's air power was free to range, raiding deep into Liurnia's watery heart from Altus' high cliffs. Everywhere they flew, bridges were struck down and roads turned to glassy impassible slag. It had taken Azur's convoy over twenty days of searching just to find an intact crossing over the Rharente's turbid waters. After the Rharente was the River Haulaine, then the Caiven, the Aiven, the Nasonne and the Little Louge, which had not been so little when they were trying to ford it with all their horses, carriages and wagons. What should have been a few weeks' of swift riding had turned into months of doddering through Liurnian backcountry.

Months with barely any hot food. Open flames ran the risk of drawing a dragonrider's eye and an opportunistic thunderbolt; over half the country was under wartime blackout discipline. The novelty of eating pemmican and hardtack for every meal had worn off quickly. Azur never wanted to touch the stuff again.

The trip back had managed to be worse. Anticipating the coming wet season and its associated flooding of the Liurnian lowland water basin, Azur had planned to return to the Academy by ship. But the monsoon rains had been tardy, and the sky, intransigent and fickle, had let out just enough water to turn the roads to mud. If the journey to Caria Manor had been frustration, the way back had been agony. Not a day had passed without at least one wagon wheel becoming stuck in sludge, requiring the entire caravan to halt as armsmen and stewards hurried to dislodge the afflicted cart, the entire time peering anxiously up at the sky.

They had made it though. Whether by the prudence of their countermeasures or good luck or some indeterminate mixture of both, the dawn had arrived with Azur's party come within sight of their final destination unharmed and whole.

He did not get many opportunities to see his home from a distance. The popular stereotype of an Academy sorcerer - that of a shut-in scholar, cloistered away in study, a hermit in all but name - was not wholly without merit. Yes, some sorcerers did travel far, and many did regularly, doubly so in peacetime. To visit relations back home, to fulfill commissions by noble houses to serve as tutors, to carry out the administering of aptitude exams and in doing so ensure a supply of fresh and able minds. But just as many sorcerers never bothered. Raya Lucaria was nearly a city unto itself, self-sufficient in most essentials, and what goods and services couldn't be accessed on campus could be found more often than not close by; the Gate Town had a good number of thriving market streets and cookhouses all catering to students and faculty looking to eat something with more variety than the bland and simple fare served in the Academy refectories.

Azur belonged to this latter category. The last time he had been outside the Gate Town boundaries was nearly two decades past. He had been an assistant proctor then, touring the south. It had been a good year. Twelve fresh novitiates, caught by the aptitude tests, taken off the farms or fishing boats where they'd have wasted their minds away, brought to the Academy to become new juvenile scholars. Three had even made it to graduation. A very good year. Not for the young Azur, who had suffered fainting spells from the heat and shied away from fieldwork ever since. Bureaucracy had suited him just fine, and a talent for administration had sped along his promotion.

All this was to say, ever since the convoy scouts had first caught sight of Raya Lucaria's distant silhouette looming through the morning murk, Azur had been peeking out through the curtains with an eager curiosity that was more commonly associated with small children than men of his age and station. The dim dirty sprawl of the Gate Town, its gentle slopes and tapered slate roofs growing higher with proximity to the city centre.

At that point they were sharply cut off by the fortifications that ringed Raya Lucaria proper, marking the borders where Caria's reign ended and the temporal power of the sorcerers began. Long ago they had been simple wood palisades, improved and expanded with every passing generation until they had become the circuit of sharp-roofed stone forts they were today. From far away, it looked as though a giant hand had reached down from the heavens to place a crown at the Academy's foot.

From within the Crown, the crag grew.

From such a distance, it had the impression of primal inviolability, a solitary fist of bedrock punching up into the low cloud cover, but Azur knew that its insides were carved through with all manner of passages and rooms. Lesser debate halls, lecture rooms, administrative offices, testing and sparring chambers, faculty quarters, student dormitories, water closets, bathhouses. The school's bowels, a mass of corridors linking everything together. And that wasn't all.

A mere school could never seal its gates for the sustained periods of time that Raya Lucaria was accustomed to. Its founders, refugees all, had built it to serve as a holdfast first and a place of learning second. Flowers bloomed at its decorative upper terraces, but gardens of mundane foodstuffs clung to its lower cliffs. Ensconced further within its gut were cafeterias and kitchens, servants' lodgings, vast storerooms: not just parchment and pen but also glintstone and grain. A veritable army of cooks, maids, janitors, functionaries and watchmen supplemented the very real army of ensorcelled mannequins that tirelessly patrolled the Academy grounds.

Visitors often ooh-ed and aah-ed when they saw the halls lined with bookshelves. The more cynical would whisper to each other that surely it was all for show, to impress upon outsiders the sheer wealth of knowledge the Academy possessed, a display of sorcerous opulence and intellectual excess. Those who actually lived there knew better. The school simply had no room for all its tomes and scrolls. Stocking them in the halls had been a temporary storage measure that grew to be permanent. Even as the Gate Town had flourished around the Academy's feet over the decades, the doctrine laid down by the founders had remained unchanged. The food stores would not be cleared out to make room for anything else. The glintstone stockpile would be maintained. Siege utility would not bow to the whims of convenience. If and when the Academy sealed itself, it would unseal itself on its own whim. To be forced to open your gates and yield because you'd run out of food was a fate for lesser places.

And above the Crag, reaching for the sky...

Sorcerers built towers. A Caelish poet had once made the comparison to bees making hives and beavers making dams. It was a natural thing. Even the old astrologers on the clear and cloudless mountaintops had built towers so as to get better views of the objects of their study and adoration. Their descendants, consigned to the Liurnian fog, had sought out the highest spot in the land and, after establishing themselves, inevitably built towers there too. Spearing up from citadels nestled at the top of the crag, up and up they went, buttresses, spires, proud and tall, dozens of them, hundreds of them, each turned this way or that to provide the best view of one celestial body or another at various dates and times. And from the very centre - as around noon the Academy at last escaped her foggy shroud and bared her full form to Azur's worshipful eyes - the biggest and highest and most prestigious of them all, the Tower, which held the upper conspectus halls, the headmistress' office, the Debate Parlour and the wide spiral staircase leading to the Grand Library.

Crown, Crag, and Tower. The sight that had greeted every weary traveller approaching the Gate Town for generations. Azur's carriage was close enough now that he could no longer catch sight of the Academy through the window, but he could feel its presence there all the same, tugging at him.

A temptation rose unbidden. The end of months of frustration was in sight. Azur's hand shifted from his chin to his neck, gripping the pendant hanging there. His crown was packed somewhere in the supply train with the rest of his luggage, but no Liurnian could fail to recognise the starry rosette carried exclusively by Raya Lucarian faculty. The Gate Town was Carian only by legal pretense; this city belonged to the Academy. If he simply stepped out of the carriage with the symbol of his office held high for all to see and demanded a path be cleared...

A Marikan assassin's poisoned bolt may find me. A glum thought, which was immediately countered by a daring and slightly desperate surely the likelihood of a confessor in this crowd is negligible. But Azur had no wish to end up like Antère, Antère who had agitated loudly for Raya Lucaria to break neutrality, Antère who had lived incautiously, Antère who had been slain on the road to attend his granddaughter's wedding, alone and unprotected. Rumour had it that for every sorcerer who left the Academy to volunteer with the Carians, there was a Marikan confessor in Liurnia hunting glintstone heads. They didn't always succeed, but they sometimes did, and that was enough. Azur was no battlemage, no wanderer. He had been incognito for over half a year now. Risking his life over a few hours more was folly. The temptation faded. He could stomach being a humble if wealthy merchant for another few hours.

Light flashed on high, followed by the muted rumble of distant thunder. In a moment of blithe optimism, Azur caught himself thinking that stronger rains may disperse the crowd keeping him from his destination. It would be preferable to arrive before sundown, and bid final farewell to this wagon. Then reason cruelly asserted itself once more.  He wasn't so deluded as to think of himself a toughened survivalist. What a pampered Academic considered a storm would be nothing but drizzle to the men and women who, even now, continued to filter into the city centre, packing the paving stones ever tighter. Driven from their homes by the fighting in the northeast, these hardy folk would happily stand in the rain all day for a glimpse of the guillotine and a whiff of Leyn blood.

As it later turned out, they didn't manage to arrive before sundown. Progress halted completely when the crowds grew too cramped for even the most determined effort at slipping twenty-odd horse-drawn carriages and wagons through. Azur didn't even get to see the execution; his convoy had been stuck halfway out of Queen's Square when he heard the cheering. It took another hour to reach the Crown. By then the sky was pitch black and the rain had grown so great that Azur could see mannequins with pitchforks and shovels affixed to the ends of their arms wandering about looking for clogged storm drains and canals to clear - a sure sign that the Academy meteorologists were certain of a deluge. A proper Liurnian autumn storm, the sort that went on for days and days and filled the rivers to bursting. Ship travel from Carian Manor to the Academy would be easy now, he thought bitterly.

Arrival was a rush and release. At the final leg of their journey, a lone man-at-arms had been sent on foot to slip through the crowd and let the Academy know of Azur's imminent arrival. As he stepped out of the carriage, the battlemages manning the Old School Gate snapped to attention, hurrying out to surround him in a protective cordon, cutting him off from the convoy, escorts, and the outside world. Somewhere behind, Azur's former travelling companions were given their pay and ushered away.

There was a burst of activity as luggage and cargo changed hands. A mixed retinue of servants and guardsmen hurried out to take care of his possessions, following Azur as he strode up to the Old School Gate. Four battlemages flanked him closely, stretching an oilskin out above his head to shield him from the weather. Shouts of "FACULTY RETURNING!" were echoed inwards and upwards the gatehouse by its garrison. The portcullis lifted obediently in response, gears and chains clanking. Azur let the noises of obeisance wash over him and balm his spirit as he stepped through the boundary into his home.

After the agonisingly slow squeeze through downtown, the lack of competing foot traffic was a blessing. So late in the day, most of Raya Lucaria was either in study or at rest, allowing Azur ample room to stride down the Crag's arcing corridors as quickly as he could without impugning his professorial dignity. That wasn't to say the halls were empty. The school never truly slept.