Jackson rubbed his forehead as he sat in Miss Aster's Ego class. Luckily, his spar with Elquire hadn't ended with them both getting sent to the medic, Cealta Croi, but his head still throbbed relentlessly. Ego classes were strange, to say the least. Apart from his lessons during the first week he awakened—which were mainly about showing off everyone's individual Ego—the students normally did most of the studying themselves. Miss Aster was up and about, providing advice, answering questions, and generally instructing her students. One of the biggest complications with teaching Egos was that they all had different magic, so Miss Aster couldn't teach them anything collectively apart from the pure fundamentals. Instead, she opted to focus on each mage individually, going over them one by one and giving them pointers. How she managed to balance observing, analysing, and relying advice or criticism to each of the hundred or so students in his class was beyond him, but her advice had been instrumental in his growth.

  He was already a little drained after his fight with Elquire, but his Ego reserves had remained largely untouched. His Shaper reserves were still almost full—he liked having those fairly high for peace of mind—a habit he started after his encounter in the woods. Jackson began using his Ego and lifted into the sky at a controlled rate. Whilst his Ego shared similarities to certain applications of Shaping earth, it differed in a few key ways. The first was control, since he wasn't really used to earth pushes and didn't know how much ground he would need to grab to achieve a specific amount of force, primarily using them to achieve grand leaps with lots of initial velocity. Flight was also a lot more versatile when he was actually in the air, since performing an earth push required his Tincture to be close enough to the ground to reach it—a limitation his Ego wasn't subject to.

  He rose a little higher until he was about halfway between the tall ceiling and the floor. Rotating in the air was difficult when he was just using his Ego, but like Landy said, developing skills individually was important, and Shaping air to cheat that process would only be a detriment in the future. As it turned out, when he used his Ego, he didn't have to push off a single point, but could choose to push off multiple. He held his downward push but applied a gentler one just off to the right of his head. The sudden boost in force was a little more powerful than he had hoped, with it pushing him a few feet to the left, but he began to spin, eventually coming to rest upside down. It wasn't particularly comfortable, with all the blood rushing to his head and whatnot, but it was probably a useful thing to know.

  "Are you trying to be a bat or something, Jacky?" an energetic—and painfully loud due to Jackson's probable concussion—voice echoed from behind him. Ellion walked underneath him, the boy's hair and mage's robes flowing in a non-existent wind. Ellion, it seemed, liked to use his Ego, illusions, for very vain purposes. Jackson grimaced slightly as pain coursed through his already tingling head.

  "I'm trying to rotate in the air. I think I'm starting to get the gist of it."

  "What's even the point in that?"

  "Well, I'm sure it has some sort of use."

  "Yeah, sure it does. Making yourself lightheaded from hanging upside down for too long sure sounds like a dandy application of your Ego."

  "Aren't you using yours to make your robes billow?"

  "Nah, they just kinda do that around me," he looked at Jackson with pity, and a hint of sadness. "I apologize, I forget people aren't as beloved by the Gods as I am."

  "I thought you didn't believe in any of the Gods?"

  "I don't, if anything, they believe in me."

  Jackson rolled his eyes. He always found it hard to reconcile that El, who was either, put bluntly, strange or plain narcissistic, and Louise were related. Both bore the Railora name, but they couldn't be more different. He'd only had a few brief conversations with Louise, but he could practically never escape Ellion. Not that he minded, at least normally. The siblings, El in particular, were the only mages that had made an effort to befriend, or at least talk to, Jackson. It seemed word got around quick that he wasn't part of a noble House, unlike the vast majority of mages in his year. That didn't bother Jackson; he didn't really want to befriend those people anyway, but it served to reinforce the idea he had of nobles. Even when he wielded the arcane, he would always be lesser to them. But then what about Elquire, or the Railoras? They were friends, but they were noble. They were raised by the wicked and would likely grow up to be just like them—chewed up by the system and spat right back out. He almost felt pity for them, until he remembered that the same thing happened to everyone else, the only difference being the type of machine. For the nobles, it was an elegant loom, and for the average person, it was a beartrap. Jackson didn't know how long he could keep pushing that line of thinking away, but he would do it over and over so long as his friends proved a challenge to his worldview. Truth be told, he wanted to be wrong. But it seemed a universal constant that nobles wound up rotten, like how one plus one will always equal two.

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  The boy continued prodding at Jackson, trying to distract him and break the concentration he had been maintaining on his flight. After a few more, often hit or miss, jokes flew from El's mouth, a crimson hand emerged from behind him and covered his face. The boy's shoulders slumped, and he gave the floor a downcast look, like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  "Quieten down, Ellion," Louise began, annoyance evident in her voice as her construct, wearing the armour of a knight made of crimson light, prevented him from speaking another word. "Some of us are trying to practice. Something you stand to benefit from if you actually cared."

  A faint smile appeared on Ellion's lips, vaguely visible through the slightly transparent construct. "Who says I'm not?" As the words left his mouth, the Ellion before him went up in a poof of red smoke and another, the real Ellion, appeared next to Louise. His arm came down on her shoulder as Ellion began leaning on her whilst eating an apple that he had clearly swiped off Miss Aster's desk. His sister jumped back, but El just kept a shit-eating grin plastered across his face.

  "That," he said whilst taking another bite of the apple, "will never get old. Can't believe you of all people fell for that. Oldest trick in the book and all."

  The pair began to squabble, as they often did. Jackson rarely saw Louise speak that much unless she was having an argument with her brother. He supposed that was natural, but being an only child, he wasn't really sure. Jackson saw another person looking at him from across the room. A kid with wild silver hair, the same one who had beaten Jackson on his first day as a mage. I think Miss Aster called him something 'Deirdre', he thought to himself. Deirdre had been doing this for a little while now, since Jackson officially passed the Assessment, but Jackson couldn't get a read on the kid. He was an asshole, and didn't seem very sociable, but he was a powerful mage. That much Jackson was sure of. He seemed to get more interested whenever Jackson started using magic, almost like trying to pick apart how a street performer would do their tricks. He didn't like that feeling, that he was being observed. It reminded him of the Cruthru in the woods. He lost concentration and fell on his head.

  Louise and El rushed to his side, putting their bickering on hold whilst they checked him over for injuries. He was fine, but the extra hit to his head wasn't fun. Everyone in the class continued honing their magic until the end of the school day. Jackson left through the extravagant halls of the academy, always awed by how exquisite they were. He worried that he would become accustomed to such things, that he would lose touch with who he really was outside the academy, but that worry began to seem unfounded. Elquire was waiting by the front gates as Jackson walked up to him, accompanied by the Railoras. Elquire bowed his head slightly, apologizing for hitting him a little bit too hard with the headbutt, but Jackson just insisted it was okay. The four of them chatted for a while near the gates, with El doing a solid two-thirds of it all. Jackson noticed the same silver-haired kid standing under the shade of a tree, trying to look inconspicuous and failing rather spectacularly. It gave him that feeling again, and it killed his mood. What Jackson hadn't expected though, was for the boy to start walking up to him.

  Jackson felt himself get angry. Sure, he didn't like being watched, but it was more than that. This person had beaten him on his first day, had told him to give up on becoming a mage, and that hurt Jackson's pride. His ego wasn't massive by any stretch, but you could chip a pebble just as easily as a mountain.

  "We need to talk," the boy said as he found himself in front of Jackson, drawing silence from the others.

  "Like Hells we do," Jackson said, his disdain evident in his voice.

  "It's important, you—"

  "I don't care if someone's trapped in a burning shed!"

  "Look, you need to—"

  "Stop trying to tell me what to do!" Jackson practically shouted.

  "Oh, would you just shut up, I'm trying to hel—"

  "—Trying to help? Oh please, if you wanted to do that, you wouldn't have sucker punched me the first time we met!"

  "He what?" Ellion said, his voice a little quieter than normal.

  "That doesn't matter right now, I'm telling you—"

  "Would you just shut it. First you hit me, then you start staring at me like some creep and now—"

  "I think we're being watched," the boy said, his voice hushed. There was silence. He moved his eyes to the side, signalling the group to glance in the same direction.

  Ellion wasn't very subtle, moving his whole head in the direction. "I don't—"

  "Shush," Louise interjected, her tone slightly panicked.

  Sure enough, there was someone there. They wore a typical miner's outfit, stained black with soot and coal, the only oddity being the wide-brimmed hat that was pulled low over the person's eyes coupled with a scarf that went up to their nose. They were standing at the cusp of an alley, just beside a tavern. Nothing really stood out about that, since it was common for workers, miners especially, to take a break around noon given they would've risen before even the sun. The man seemed completely innocuous, but something just felt off. The man picked up a bottle next to him, downing the contents before standing to walk away into the alley. Before he was completely out of sight, Jackson had an idea. He activated his Tincture Sight, and he saw it. The briefest flicker of color as the man left. It was sickly, a mix of saturated yellows with streaks of black that mixed into a muddy symphony of blight.

  That person was a mage.