Chapter 16
In the main building of Umbrveyl’s campus, on the fifth floor, was the Arcane Defense Department. Regardless of which house the students were from, everyone was afraid of it because of the one person who presided over it: Professor Barrowhane.
Professor Barrowhane had been a Vanguard officer a long time ago.
Now he was a strong, stern, deep-scarred, powerful old mage whose job, as far as anyone could tell, was to terrorize every student who stepped into his class.
Lesya found out about him the hard way, which was how most students found out about him.
It was her first year at Umbrveyl, and she was still trying to make sense of the timetable—how some of the classes happened at the same time and you still had to attend both, which meant you had to manipulate the space-time continuum to do it, and how some classes happened after midnight and did not take into consideration that you would be tired after a long day of learning and would probably want to sleep.
But no. When the astrology professor called, you had to answer at exactly three in the morning, in one of the many towers designated for studying the stars and what they could tell about the world’s future.
Lesya was not altogether displeased by that class. It was fine. It was a quiet way to spend the hour looking at charts, at Orion, at Sirius, at Venus and Mars, and inferring the tapestry of fate from the way those constellations sat on the canopy of the night. It wasn’t her favorite class either.
Her favorite class was alchemy. Alchemy was more nuanced than potions or transfiguration or charms because it dealt with the nature of things.
It dealt with sympathy. How a single leaf could be used to harness the power of a whole forest. How a single flame could contain within itself the power of the sun.
How one person, when it came down to it, was the entire universe bound in mortal form.
During her first year, she learned enough about it that she had already decided to pursue it after graduation. She could see herself making an insane amount of money and repute from a nuanced approach to the work.
The campus was large, and it wasn’t just one big Gothic castle.
There were grounds used for the study and propagation of the different species that lived in Aladria; grounds used for sport; grounds that had been turned into forests and groves so students interested in forestry, horticulture, and agriculture could apply their theories in the dirt.
Lesya had also discovered that behind Umbrveyl there was a narrow path through the wilderness that led to a little forest the rest of the faculty and the students had forgotten about.
It never got a lot of sun. Nestled between the mountains and the castle, the swath of trees was moist, dark, and claustrophobic—perfect for a student of House Balthazar, whose mind had been conditioned to like all of those things.
What surprised her even more was that when she followed that path on a dare from Trisha, she found a clearing where slivers of sun made it through the canopy and shone on a small cabin: a ramshackle shack of wood, creaking in the trees.
Other students, mostly seniors, had warned her against coming here.
Don’t go down the winding path of the Riovan Forest. Inside is Riovan’s cottage.
Riovan had been a madman, an exile from Umbrveyl’s intelligentsia.
He had lived in the cottage. He had killed himself there. At least, that was the official story.
Lesya found a grave, unmarked. What she didn’t find was any substantial evidence of the place being haunted.
What she found instead were the vestiges of a life well lived: shelves stacked with books about nature, flora, fauna, how to make a good stew, potions, and how to quell one’s own existential crisis in a world filled with forgotten gods and magic.
It hadn’t taken her long to clean the place up and preserve it from the inside while leaving the same forgotten look on the outside, so nobody else would be tempted to peek in and get curious.
She did not go every day. More like once a month, when she needed a deep session of alchemy and enough quiet to make gold she could sell.
Producing gold was hard. Alchemy in its many facets was not an easy science. That was why a lot of the students, within the first few months, opted out of the elective and pursued something easier.
The possibilities were still limitless. She had seen what it could do.
She had converted less-precious metals into gold and silver and traded them at a jeweler’s.
The proof of concept had passed. Now she wanted more—more of alchemy’s nuanced principles.
You could essentially create a macrocosm out of a microcosm.
At least that’s what Professor Cartwright had said.
He had seen the promise in her. Unfortunately, he didn’t stay long. He left the next year. But before he’d left, he had given her enough to intrigue her for the rest of her life.
In one of those classes, populated by only seven or eight students, Professor Cartwright had taken a ripped piece of page and flailed it in front of the class.
“Alchemy is not just about change,” he said, still flailing the yellowish parchment.
“It’s also about transference. It’s also about how, in a single drop, an entire ocean resides.
Now. Before I do this”—he grinned mischievously—“how fond of your books are all of you? Because this experiment is going to teach you how to manipulate matter at a molecular scale, and I cannot promise the safety of your belongings.”
Lesya had spent a little fortune on the books she had been made to buy, and the proposition scared her. The rest of the students were far too excited. In that excitement they all said, resoundingly, yes.
“So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to use this one page, and I shall transfer my magic from it, sympathetically, toward all the other pages in this room.
That includes your notebooks, your books, all the scrolls and parchments lying on my shelves.
So I will ask again: how comfortable are you with this? ”
As far as asking for educational consent went, he was one of the only professors who did that. Lesya loved him for it. Whenever a lesson got too real, he would back off, and in alchemy, the lessons got real all the time.
“Can’t we do it with something else, Professor?” she asked, raising her hand.
“Oh,” he said, scratching his head. “That never occurred to me.”
He put the paper down. As genius as he was, he was also, sometimes, woefully unaware of his surroundings. He opened a cabinet and took out a large branch of oak. The students oohed and aahed at the polished wood.
“What?” Professor Cartwright said. “Don’t blame a guy for having a hobby. I was going to fashion a staff out of this. In the interest of today’s lesson, I think I can let a little bit of oak go.”
She was surprised. With a spell from his harness, he cut the wood into a dozen pieces and made them float across the classroom, placing one in front of each student. The ones that were left he put in the unkindled fireplace. He was left holding a single twig.
“Now, alchemy allows me not just to change matter from one form into another, but to transfer a change upon one matter to another, given that they both originate from the same place. Observe. Ignis.”
He set fire to the twig.
Everybody gasped as the cut pieces of oak caught at the exact same time. Tables were on fire. The kindling in the fireplace was on fire. Everybody rushed to smother it except Lesya.
What she had witnessed was a true miracle, and it was no wonder it was not taught so readily in the rest of the university, and why only six or seven students were still learning it in a class the rest of the student body had abandoned in the earlier months.
This was the most powerful thing she had seen. The applications of it?—
“Lesya.” Professor Cartwright waved a hand in front of her face.
“I know what you’re thinking.” He sat next to her and gently passed his hand over the burning oak on her table.
It stopped. He winced and blew on his fingers.
“The theories of what sympathetic alchemy can do are indeed infinite. In the old days, the same theories were also being applied to matters beyond academia. Do you know what I mean?”
She had not understood the depth of it then. He had been talking about Aeternumancy. About necromancy. About the manipulation of mind and matter. She pretended she did.
“I completely understand, Professor Cartwright.”
The following year, she would be disappointed to discover he had developed a serious illness and resigned.
But this memory was not from the following year.
This memory was from the first few months of her first year, when she had walked, afraid, along the fifth floor of the main building, looking at the portraits of battle-mages and knights from ages past: warriors with swords and shields and staffs and hand harnesses, maces and blades.
It was truly the Department of War, that floor.
Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the walls, and they only sharpened the anxiety of being up there, as if invisible witnesses from outside would watch the students’ pathetic attempts at learning how to defend themselves and ridicule them.
There was a rumor that several years ago, Professor Barrowhane, teaching a class how to deflect a spell, had accidentally killed a student.
Whether that was rumor or straight falsehood, nobody had ever contested it.
From the minute they walked into the classroom—shaped like a large dueling arena—they realized he was indeed a man who could accidentally kill a student.