Fluder Paradyne's POV
Three days later...
I had been watching the horizon for the better part of an hour, the particular anticipation of a long journey's final stretch making every distant shape worth scrutinizing, when the first one resolved into something unmistakable, a vast winged figure circling at an altitude that ordinary creatures simply did not operate at, the scale of it growing more apparent the closer we drew until I had to crane my neck against the cart's window frame to keep it in view.
I activated my talent of magic gauging out of pure professional reflex.
The reading that returned made me sit back in my seat.
In my years of magical practice, I have gauged the power of dragons, of the most accomplished battlefield mages the Empire has produced, and of artifacts whose origins predate recorded history. I have developed, through decades of calibration, a reasonably precise internal sense of where any given magical phenomenon sits on the scale of what is possible in this world.
The angel above E-Rantel did not sit on that scale. It exceeded the top of it by a margin my talent struggled to express in terms I could parse.
I laughed. Genuinely, helplessly, the laugh of a man whose entire framework for understanding magical power had just been thrown out of the window. If a single summoned angel produced a reading like that, what would the summoner's own magic register as?
I could barely sit still for the remainder of the approach.
---
As we got near the gates, we had ignored the line as we headed to the gate, and the gate guard stopped us as he asked for papers.
I handed him the letter.
The gate guard who examined Tim's letter of invitation went through several visible stages of processing before reaching a conclusion. He read it once more, slowly. Read it again. Looked up at me with an expression of pure shock.
Then he turned and shouted to the other guards with a volume of genuine alarm.
"TIM INVITED GUESTS! OPEN THE GATES NOW!"
The gates were opened shortly after.
---
I do not have adequate words for what entering E-Rantel was like for a man who has spent years studying magic as an academic discipline, encountering the largest concentrated demonstration of applied magical theory he had ever witnessed in his life, all at once, with no preparation time to compose himself.
The tier one and tier two angels were everywhere. Not occasionally, not as a rare and impressive sighting BUT *everywhere*, distributed through the streets with the casual ubiquity of street lamps, each one radiating a magical signature that would have, in any other city in the world, justified a formal expedition and years of academic study. Here they simply hovered near market stalls, occasionally healing a child who had scraped a knee, entirely unremarkable to the local population who walked past them without a second glance.
I made my cart stop at the first shelter we passed.
I am aware, in retrospect, that my behavior was not befitting a man of my position and age. I do not regret it. I ran toward the structure with the specific uncontained enthusiasm I had not felt since I was a much younger student encountering my first genuine magical breakthrough, my magic gauge firing continuously as I approached, the readings climbing with every step until I was standing in the entrance, and as I entered, looking up at a sky that should not have existed inside a structure.
Clouds. Genuine clouds, moving with the unhurried drift of an actual sky, inside a room that the exterior dimensions suggested could not possibly contain this much vertical space.
I wondered whether it rained in here.
I did not get an answer, because Leinas had arrived behind me with the grip of someone who had run out of patience for my non-professional enthusiasm derailing our actual purpose and physically dragged me back toward the cart while I attempted to explain, at length, the theoretical implications of internally generated weather systems within a bounded magical space. She ignored every word of it.
---
An hour later...
As we came closer to the rumored academy, we saw a dragon teaching a class to a courtyard full of attentive students of all ages; it was the moment I genuinely lost control of myself.
I had heard the rumors, of course; every academic network in the Empire had been buzzing for years about a dragon librarian attached to Tim's academy. The stories were treated by most of my colleagues as the kind of embellishment that accumulated around any sufficiently mythologized figure. I had not believed it would be literal.
It was REALLY REAL.
A genuine dragon teaching about the history of dwarf magic, which I desperately wanted to ask about, was standing, or coiling, more accurately, at the front of an outdoor lecture space, addressing a rapt audience of perhaps thirty students on the subject of historical rune magic.
Rune magic.
I am the headmaster of the Imperial Magic Academy. I have cataloged every recognized school and subdiscipline of magical theory currently practiced in the New World, have personally trained students in seven distinct magical traditions, and have read every text on magical theory my considerable resources could acquire across two centers of dedicated collection.
I had never encountered the term "rune magic" in my life.
I tried to run toward the lecture. I wanted to know everything: the theoretical foundation, the historical origin, why no academic text I had ever read mentioned it, and whether it represented an entirely separate magical paradigm from the tier system I had spent my career mastering.
Leinas's grip on my arm was, by this point, considerably less gentle than it had been at the shelter.
She pulled me directly toward the academy's main building, ignoring my protests with the specific efficiency of a woman who had traveled days specifically for a purpose and had no intention of letting me derail it through unrelated academic enthusiasm, however justified that enthusiasm might objectively be.
---
Tim's office was unremarkable in a way that struck me as almost deliberately so, given everything I had just witnessed walking through the rest of the city. A desk. Papers. A young man sitting behind it who looked, by every visible measure, entirely ordinary.
I activated my magic gauging out of professional habit, expecting, I am not certain what I expected, but something more dramatic than what the reading actually returned.
Tier three.
I sat with this for a moment, genuinely confused. The angels outside, the shelter's internal sky, and the dragon teaching rune magic in a courtyard, all of it traced back, presumably, to the man sitting in front of me, and my talent was telling me he was a competent but unremarkable tier-three caster. The kind of rating I would expect from a promising student at my own academy, not from someone capable of producing the phenomena I had spent the last few hours gawking at.
Tim stood up.
He looked at Leinas. Looked at me.
Then he transformed.
I do not have adequate language for what my magic gauging produced when the light enveloped him and the form of the life god Alah Alaf stood in front of me instead of the unremarkable young man I had been speaking with seconds earlier. The talent did not simply update its reading. It strained against something, the sensation entirely unfamiliar to a tool I had used reliably for years, the magical reservoir it was attempting to measure registering as something approaching limitless before the strain became uncomfortable enough that I instinctively released the ability rather than continue pushing it.
A god. An actual, functioning god, standing in an office in E-Rantel, having been an ordinary tier-three human a moment before.
I went to my knees.
I am aware this was undignified for a man of my position. I did not care in the slightest.
"Please, Lord Tim, PLEASE TAKE ME AS YOUR STUDENT. I will do anything. PLEASE."
I meant every word of it with the complete sincerity of a man who had just had his entire understanding of magical possibility rewritten in the space of ten seconds.
Tim raised a single finger, the gesture asking for a pause rather than dismissing me, and the divine form receded as quickly as it had arrived, the ordinary young man returning, the tier three reading settling back into place on my talent like nothing extraordinary had happened at all.
"I would like to learn the Forbidden Arts from you, Fluder Paradyne," he said. "Specifically, I want to learn the spell for immortality."
I knelt on the floor of his office, my excitement at being accepted as a student beating any worry I had.
----
Tim
[level 97]