Three weeks into the semester, during a free period between elemental theory and practical training, Aaron found the painting.
He'd been systematically exploring the academy's main building during free periods — not obviously, not with the quality of exploration that drew attention, but the ordinary-looking movement of a student who sometimes went the long way to his destination. The main building's interior was large enough that new students had genuine reason to navigate slowly, and no one remarked on a first-year found in a hallway he didn't strictly need to be in.
The painting was on the third floor, in a corridor connecting two administrative wings. Not a prominent corridor — no reason for students to be here, but not restricted. Low traffic. The kind of place where things got put when no one wanted to throw them away but wasn't sure where else to put them.
The painting was large — perhaps two metres wide, one and a half tall — framed in dark wood, the paint old enough to have developed the slight crackling texture of dried age. It depicted —
Aaron stopped.
He stood very still and looked at the painting.
It depicted ten figures, standing in a circle. Around them, and between them, and in the air above them: the world, fracturing. Not metaphorically. The sky in the painting was cracking like ice, the fracture lines spreading outward from the circle in every direction, and through the cracks, other skies were visible — dozens, hundreds, each slightly different. Different colours of light. Different shapes of sun or cloud or void.
At the centre of the circle, where the figures' hands almost met: a light that was not any element Aaron could name. Absolute white.
"Sirath," Aaron said, very quietly.
The old mage was silent.
"Sirath."
"I see it," Sirath said. His voice was different — something in it that Aaron had never heard before. Not emotion exactly, but the effect of something that had been compartmentalised encountering the thing it was compartmentalising. "I see it."
"This painting depicts the Shattering." It wasn't a question.
A very long pause. "Yes."
Aaron looked at the ten figures. They were depicted without faces — not because the painter had been careless, but because the painter had been deliberately non-specific. Ten silhouettes of different heights. One of them, slightly taller than the others, was surrounded by silver light rather than the other elements that haloed the rest.
"That's you," Aaron said.
"That is a representation of me. The painter did not know what I looked like." A pause. "Or, if they did, they chose not to show it."
"Who painted this?"
"I don't know." Sirath's voice was still very quiet. "The technique is not from my era. It was painted much later — perhaps four or five centuries ago, based on the materials. But the content —" another pause. "The content shows knowledge that should not have existed four or five centuries ago. This is not a myth-painting. This is a record. Someone knew."
"Someone with access to the records," Aaron said. "The same people who've been maintaining the formation network."
"Yes."
Aaron stood in the empty corridor and looked at the painted sky, cracked into hundreds of pieces, each piece showing a different world. The Shattering — the moment three thousand years ago when ten mages reached too far, and reality answered by fragmenting.
He understood something now that had been forming slowly in the back of his mind for weeks. The multi-layered formation network beneath the campus. The preserved illusion array at the entrance. Lysander's knowledge that exceeded his position. The painting in a forgotten corridor.
This academy had not simply been built on old foundations. It had been built to maintain them, by people who knew what they were maintaining.
"Sirath," Aaron said. "The formation network. You said it was a key. What does it unlock?"
"Think," Sirath said. "You know enough now. Think."
Aaron looked at the painting. The cracked sky. The other worlds visible through the cracks. He thought about the space element — the element of distance, of the gap between things, of the mathematics that described not just where things were but how far apart they were.
He thought about the word "Shard." He had heard Sirath use it once, months ago, and not again — a word that had sat in his memory, waiting.
"The Shattering broke reality into fragments," Aaron said slowly. "Separate worlds. Each one a Shard." He looked at the silver figure in the painting. "And you built a formation network — before it happened, or after? — designed to reconnect them."
A long silence.
"Before," Sirath said. "I built it before, as a precaution, because I knew — I suspected — that what we were attempting could go wrong in exactly this way. I built it into the foundations of every significant mountain in this region, because those mountains were the most spatially stable locations I could find." A pause. "Four Gods Mountain is one of them. The silver tower in this academy is another. The network connects the stable points and maintains a minimal degree of spatial coherence between the Shards. Without it, the fragmentation would have continued until the Shards were too far apart to interact at all."
"And 'too far apart to interact' means —"
"Means each Shard would eventually be a complete world unto itself, with no possibility of return. The space element, as a field, would lose coherence across Shard boundaries." Sirath's voice was careful. "Which would make what I want you to do impossible."
"What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to reach a level of spatial mastery sufficient to cross Shard boundaries consciously and deliberately. To travel between worlds." A pause. "The ten of us, in the moment of the Shattering, were scattered across the Shards. Most of us were likely destroyed in the fragmentation. But not all of us." A very long pause. "And there are things in the other Shards that need to be understood before the damage can be assessed. Before we know if any of it can be repaired."
Aaron looked at the painting for a long time.
"That's the real goal," he said. "Not being the strongest mage. Not graduating from this academy."
"Those are necessary steps," Sirath said. "Not ends." A pause. "I tried to be clear about this from the beginning. I told you I didn't want a successor to continue what I had built. I wanted someone willing to ask whether what I built was right." His voice dropped slightly. "I built the formation network in three thousand years of isolation and guilt. I built it because I thought it might help. I don't actually know if it helps. I don't know if what I'm asking you to work toward is wisdom or another mistake."
"You're not certain," Aaron said.
"I am almost never certain. Certainty was the thing that caused the Shattering." A pause. "I am sure that the consequences of doing nothing are worse than the consequences of trying. That is the most I can say honestly."
Aaron absorbed that. He turned from the painting.
"I'm going to be late to practical," he said.
"Yes."
"We'll come back to this."
"Yes," Sirath agreed. "We will."
Aaron walked back down the corridor, passed through the administrative wing door, and rejoined the flow of students heading to the training grounds. He moved through the crowd with the ordinary face of a student going to class.
Inside, the tower of the Void Catalog had lit three new windows — sections he hadn't been able to access before, now glowing, available. He could feel their presence like doors with handles he could now reach.
He would open them tonight.
The painting stayed in his mind, though: the cracked sky, and the light at the centre that had no name, and the ten silhouettes reaching for it.
He wondered which of them had known, in that moment, that they were about to break the world.
He wondered if they had done it anyway.
He thought, with the part of himself he kept most honest, that he understood how that could happen. The unreachable thing. The hand almost at it. The choice.
He was going to need to be careful.