Jim did not startle awake as much as he screamed himself awake. His body contracted in a spasm that threw his legs and head up, both of which ended up smashing into a hard surface. The pain brought him clarity, and as his forehead and toes throbbed in sheer agony from the violent movement he'd subjected them to, his mind swirled.

  A knock sounded on the door. "Arrival in two hours! Everything all right in there?"

  "Yes," Jim shouted in a struggling voice.

  Through the throbbing in his head, he could hear the footsteps of the professor distancing themselves, before another knock, lighter and more far away, came to his ears.

  "What the fuck?" Jim whispered to himself as he rolled over to fall off the bed. "What the fuck!?"

  Once on the floor, he scrambled over to the porthole window and opened it. In terms of how he felt that time had passed, he'd done the exact same thing half a day ago. The sight that greeted him was the same. Far in the distance, the pleasantly green and fruity Richean landscape passed by as they approached Sredina.

  He opened his mouth. To shout out of the porthole. To scream. To release the tension in his body. He needed some sort of escape from this pain, even if it was animalistic in its simplicity.

  Something flew into his mouth and straight down his throat, causing him to choke, fall to the ground and knock himself on the head again.

  He battled for his life. Choking, spitting and retching as he rolled around in what little space he had available to do so. Eventually, when he noticed that whatever insect wanted to utilise his oesophagus as real estate wasn't going to leave through any physical means and his vision started growing black splotches, he tried something else.

  The first exercise all mages needed to master was how to expel mana. After all, to be a mage was to use mana to create supernatural phenomena by shaping the arcane energy. Usually, one did this with one's hands, but another not-so-common area of magic used the mouth.

  This is what Jim attempted, drawing in mana, and letting it solidify in his throat, as the black spots in his vision grew to overtake the few bits of reality he could make out.

  Right before he judged it to be too late, Jim released the solid mana, the arcane, the stuff magic missiles and mage shields were made of. It travelled violently up his oesophagus, tore the insect away from where it was struggling and ejected it violently from Jim's mouth and onto the floor, alongside a gallon of blood.

  The shaping exercises for the magic missile consisted of quickly forming and quickly shooting the mana. The mage shield required a solidification of that very same material. These were the attributes that Jim's magic had trained itself to attain in times of stress. To form quickly, to be solid, and to shoot violently. He'd blown out the insect, but he'd also blown out the majority of his throat.

  As he lay there bleeding out on the floor like some street dog that had made the mistake of trusting a human, the adrenaline making sure that he could scramble around uselessly as he did so, Jim only had time for one thought.

  'This is why I hate magic,' he thought to himself. Several years of training, then one mistake, and you're done.

  As darkness overtook his vision once again, this time completely, he saw the door to his cabin slowly open. A horribly dressed brown blob with matted hair entered and froze upon seeing him lying there on the floor, looking up at it, accusingly.

  He died.

  -/-

  Jim did not startle awake as much as he shook himself awake. His whole body clenched and unclenched at the sudden wholeness it was experiencing in comparison to the miserable death it had just died. His eyes fluttered open, and he stared at the wooden overhang, for once not smashing his head into it.

  “Yes,” Jim muttered angrily on cue, like an actor in a cursed play. It was hard to put the thoughts flitting through his mind into any real order. But, if there was one theme that kept repeating itself, it was the fact that he had died three times now.

  Killed by the monster in half a year, killed by the headmaster, killed by a magical accident.

  He didn't dare move for a very long time, simply laying there as the tremors shook themselves out of his body and the tears he'd shed dried on his face.

  Jim had never considered death before. But now? Knowing that futures in which he died existed? It terrified him more than anything had ever terrified him before.

  It scared him more than failing the academy and being banished from his family. It scared him more than his erstwhile magic teacher, Radez. It almost, almost scared him more than poverty.

  All he knew was that he wanted to live. But he just didn't know how.

  "Think, Jimmy, think. Shit," he muttered to himself, bringing a hand up to his face and covering his eyes from the barely lit, but still somehow too bright cabin.

  The prophetic dreams he was receiving were not like anything he'd heard of before. And considering that one of his ancestors had had the gift, this was a topic he'd researched. Prophetic dreams usually came in the form of foggy memories that tried to slip out of one's mind the second when the dreamer woke up. They were marked by a special feeling that distinguished them from normal dreams, and usually predicted only a possible future, not an inevitability.

  The visions he'd just experienced. For the next half a year. The next day. In the next hour. They didn't at all feel like dreams. They felt like memories. And each time, there had been a specific trigger.

  Death.

  He’d dreamt of all the ways he could die in the future.

  He'd never heard of anything like it. Prophets, as a general rule, were not able to predict their own death. This was the one event that would never pop up in their visions. Perhaps there had once been a bloodline of prophets for whom this wasn't the case, but they had assuredly died out. Knowing when, how, and why one was going to die. It was enough to drive Jim crazy, and he knew for a fact that he was not opening the porthole or visiting the headmaster, even if the fate of the entire kingdom depended on it. The one village would be fine without him as well.

  A hand went to the pocket inside his robe, coming back with a mocking piece of parchment. His coin purse was gone again.

  Why had the headmaster killed him? Jim wondered.

  The cabin suddenly felt like it was closing in on him, getting smaller. He almost felt like he could feel the corpse in the room with him. He could smell the blood. Stumbling to his feet, Jim exited the cabin and immediately collapsed once he'd left it, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The corridor was empty, and for a brief moment, Jim considered just hiding out on the ship and letting it take him back to Riche. The rational part of his mind held him back. His prophetic talent was obviously trying to keep him alive, so technically it was safe to go to Sredina. Just as it was safe to go anywhere else, right?

  He'd simply not tell the headmaster that he'd awakened the talent. In fact, he wouldn't tell anyone. What was the point anyway? The visions centred on him anyway. The future events wouldn't be of any use to anybody else.

  But if that was the case, why had the headmaster killed him? It hadn't been for the money, that was for sure. Jim knew the contents of his little treasury, and it wasn't anything to kill over. Unless one was a very poor peasant, perhaps, which the headmaster wasn't.

  The man had seemed genial, even nice in a way. The only thing that Jim had done that might elicit any sort of response had been the prophetic dream. The man clearly couldn't be mad that Jim had awakened the talent, as it would, if anything, raise the prestige of the academy.

  The contents, then. It must have been the contents of the dream. What had he told the man again? The monster in Mitelos. The ritual. The dark figures.

  There was only one conclusion Jim could come to when he examined the facts. Unless the headmaster was simply insane, which was also a worrying possibility, the man hadn't wanted Jim to repeat the information in the visions to anyone else.

  Why? Because clearly he wanted them to happen just as they had in the vision. But why would the headmaster care about orchestrating the destruction of some random village in Mitelos?

  Jim gripped his hair in sheer exhaustion as his mind whirled. It hurt, and the pain centred him enough to think clearly again. The ritual was obviously more important than some random village. He laughed – hollow and sharp. Of course. Of course that’s how it would work.

  Of course prophetic visions would be a double-edged sword. After all, there were mages, politicians, kings, aristocrats and entire nations who were all involved in some sort of secret activities. A prophet running around? One that had specifically seen one of the things they were involved in? That wasn't something to celebrate; it was a threat.

  In a way, the prophetic dreams were a blessing, just not in the way he'd originally thought. He discarded the tales he'd been told as a child, where seers gained knowledge of future catastrophes so as to heroically help their families profit in the chaos. It was obvious, with the visions being centred on him and him only, what their goal was.

  To prevent his own death. A task that would include, never, ever, telling anyone he'd seen the future in any capacity.

  Having a mage with the ability would greatly help keep House Savant safe from future danger. And most importantly, it would keep HIM alive.

  He had developed a magical talent that could save people. It just so happened to be that the person that needed saving the most was himself.

  -/-

  Stumbling on the deck, Jim was unexpectedly almost bowled over again by a dirty figure dressed in rags. However, this time he was much more skittish, and while he certainly hadn't graduated the academy with honours in the future, he had graduated. A mage shield sprung up around him in the split-second in which the figure entered his peripheral vision. They crashed against the shield, which took all their kinetic force, threw it back, and made them gracelessly tumble to the ground.

  Jim glared at the girl, who he somehow recognised, but couldn't put a name to. She was looking up at him with wide eyes, hiding behind dirty and matted brown hair. "Watch where you're running," he muttered, angry, but with his thoughts on other things. The girl promptly scrambled up and ran away, likely to crash into someone else.

  He looked after her fleeing form, before shaking his head and going towards the edge of the deck. "Some people, really," he muttered to himself as he came to lean against the railing to look at the city. Professor Mirtol was doing the same, not so far away to the right, and Jim's hand subconsciously went to the inside of his robe, where he lightly brushed against the parchment.

  The academy had already proven useless in this regard. Mirtol had refused to help him, and the headmaster had killed him. He wasn't going to be approaching them with the theft anytime soon. He would need an alternate method to find the thief and to bring them to justice.

  "Wow, Savant, that shield was awesome, how did you do that?" a voice suddenly asked from his left.

  The boy in question almost started answering before he looked over and saw who'd addressed him. A blonde boy in a white tunic and brown pants. Rough clothing, but somewhat still presentable. The Mitelos was written on the idiot's face, however, and Jim disliked this specimen in particular. He sneered. "None of your business," he snarled and was about to turn back to the city, when he noticed the other boy standing beside Herus, the Mitelos orphan that the professors could not stop praising.

  It was Marcus Evergreen, dressed in an elegant white robe with green highlights. A famous Richean family mixed in with the military. Good standing with the crown.

  "Evergreen," he said with a nod of greeting, but received only a disdainful sneer for his efforts.

  Marcus turned to Herus. "It was a reflexive shield; anyone can manage that with enough practice. You eventually just lose the need to use incantations and gestures," he explained. Then he looked at Jim again, sniffing. "But let's go somewhere else, this place stinks," he said disdainfully and pulled a confused and innocent-looking Herus after him as he marched off.

  Jim threw them a hateful look as they left. So what if the Savants exported food to Ezengerd? Were they just supposed to let the island nation starve, especially when they had so much coin to spend? The raids had stopped centuries ago, as the former winter island became independent through their newly gained fire magic, but it was just that they were now reaching the limits of their agricultural capacity.

  "Seriously," he muttered. "What's the point of a thousand-year-old lineage if you keep every single enemy your ancestors had throughout the existence of your house?" He shook his head, and shortly thereafter, the ship docked in Sredina.

  Lebowski seemingly wasn't present for some reason, or perhaps Jim simply missed him in the large throng of students spilling out of the ship and onto the port, from where they scattered even further.

  Not feeling like taking any risks, and his mind still whirling with fears and anxieties, Jim joined the largest group of students who were going to the academy dorms. He didn't interact with anyone, giving one-word responses when someone tried to strike up a conversation with him. His heartbeat quickened as the academy loomed into view, only to settle when the group swerved off toward the dormitories instead.

  Once inside Jim approached a large older man who was losing what little brown hair he still had to an ever-growing bald patch in the middle. Thankfully, Jim's room had already been paid for in advance, so the fact that he hadn't gone to the bank to pick up a new coin purse didn't hinder him in this regard. He continued keeping to himself, an arduous task considering his palpable charisma. The less attention he drew, the better. He silently took the keys.

  He went up to his floor, the sixth, through the wooden panelled corridor and into room 68. A humble abode that fit a small bed, a working table, a wardrobe, a balcony and a separate nook with a bathroom. Magic gifted him the necessities of hot running water and a working drainage system. Overall, it was perfectly sized for one person.

  Jim breathed a sigh of relief once he entered the space. One that he'd lived in last semester, seen in his visions, now grown intimately familiar and thus comfortable with. He closed the door behind him, locked it for good measure, before an attack of light-headedness made his back crash against the door, and his body slid down onto the floor, where he cradled his head in his hands.

  Idly noting the trunk which had somehow arrived here before him, Jim wondered once again what he was supposed to do. The reasoning flew through his head once again. The visions warned him of how he might die, and as long as he avoided those fates, he could survive.

  But just because it made sense didn't mean that it was easy. His gaze wandered up and focused on the bed. In a world of sudden complexity, it looked incredibly inviting. He stumbled his way over there and laid down on the covers, taking only his shoes off to do so. Once on his back he stared at the ceiling and the sky outside his window. He didn't know how long he did so, not caring overly much about time at the moment.

  Eventually, he rummaged through his trunk on the lookout for a book. Finding the novel he'd been reading, of which the ending he now knew, he sighed and contented himself with reading one of his textbooks.

  For the rest of the day, Jim ended up reading almost all of his textbooks, subsisted only on tap water, fresh air from his window and the thoughts swirling in his mind. He'd even gotten bored enough at several points to just play around with a shaping exercise.

  He had thought about leaving several times, to do what, he didn't know. But every time he even looked at the door leading outside of his room, he started feeling dizzy. Perhaps he just wanted to survive this day, on which he'd already died twice in his visions. Perhaps he needed to be alone to process the reality of his situation.

  Anyway, when in the late hours of the night Jim finally decided to unpack his trunk and go to bed, he was beyond exhausted.

  The darkness took him more easily than ever before.

  AN: After this initial chapter dump the update schedule of the story changes to once weekly, every friday! I'll just say ahead of time since its pre-written that Book 1 has 19 chapters, which means the book finale will appear end of May? Then I'll probably take a week or two off just to edit Book 2 and if Book 1 is successfull enough, maybe I'll switch to two chapters per week :)

  If you liked it so far, please review, would mean lot