Date: October, 540, from the Fall of Zanra the Dishonored
A gray dawn found Gil at the table in the corner of their room in the Institute of the Carved Scroll dormitory. Before her loomed a pile of books and scrolls she hadn't managed to conquer during the night. The air held the sweetish smell of a burnt-out oil lamp, mixed with the aroma of old paper and dust. The fingers of her right hand were numb from constant strain, and in her temples throbbed an insistent, monotonous pain, familiar to anyone who has strained their eyes too long in dim light.
Her world had shrunk to four walls, stacks of books, and the endless, merciless flow of information she had to absorb in an impossibly short time. The physical space of the room, which she shared with Lia and Sigrid, had become a metaphor for her inner state—cramped, overcrowded, and devoid of oxygen.
The first ray of sun, pale and cold, fell on the open treatise "Fundamentals of Dwarven Geometry." Gil blinked, trying to dispel the haze of fatigue. She hadn't slept for the second night in a row. Thoughts tangled, formulas and axioms began to dance before her eyes, losing all meaning. She pressed her fingers to her temples, trying to force knowledge inward.
At that moment, she heard rustling behind her, followed by discontented muttering. Lia had woken up.
"Holy Spirits, Gil, you didn't sleep again?" the merchant's daughter's voice was hoarse with sleep and full of genuine bewilderment. "Are you made of flesh and blood? Or of ink and parchment?"
Gil didn't turn around. She just ran her hand over her face, feeling the rough skin and the dampness of unshed tears of exhaustion.
"I have to," she said curtly, fixing her gaze on a diagram explaining the principle of the Archimedean screw. The words were devoid of all emotion, merely a statement of an iron, inexorable fact.
"Have to? You have to sleep too!" Lia snorted, noisily swinging her legs off the bed. "Look at yourself! You're paler than the library ghost they tell first-years about. No man will even look at you, let alone..."
"Lia, enough," Sigrid's quiet but clear voice came from behind the curtain of her bed. The mathematician seemed to wake up already fully dressed, with a solution to some theorem ready in her head. "Not everyone measures their worth by the number of glances they get."
Lia muttered something in response but fell silent, beginning to noisily get ready for her first lecture—"The Art of Trade Negotiations and Basic Diplomacy."
Gil mentally thanked Sigrid but had no strength to express it aloud. Every word, every social interaction consumed precious joules of energy, allocated in her mental budget: seventy percent—geometry, twenty-five—ancient languages, five—basic physiological needs. There were simply no resources left for anything else.
When both girls had left the room, Gil finally allowed herself to lean back in her chair. Her eyes closed on their own, and for a second she was engulfed in blissful, black emptiness. But the internal alarm immediately went off—the guilt of lost seconds. She shook herself violently, stood up, and, staggering, made her way to the washstand. Ice-cold water temporarily banished drowsiness, but not the deep exhaustion that had been building for weeks.
Her days had become a kind of ritual dance, running in a closed circle with the same steps.
Step one: Lecture. She sat in the front row, absorbing every word of the lecturer. Her pen scratched across the paper, tracing even lines of notes. But sometimes, words stopped making sense. She would catch herself staring at the moving lips of the Magister, hearing only a distant hum, as if her head were filled with cotton wool. She saw other students easily nodding, understanding the material, and felt panic bubbling inside. "They all knew this. They studied this for years. And I... I know nothing."
Step two: Library. After lectures—a direct route to the sanctuary of knowledge. Endless shelves, receding into the heights, oppressed her no less than the stacks of books on the table. She took volume after volume, searching for missing pieces of the mosaic. The smell of age, which had once inspired reverent awe, now seemed suffocating. She learned to find the most secluded corners, where her sobs of powerlessness would not be heard by any librarian. Once, she even fell asleep like that, her head on an open folio, and woke to the touch of the night watchman, looking at her with pity.
Step three: Room. Returning to the room was a return to the arena. She would sit back at the table, light the lamp, and immerse herself in study. The rustle of Lia's pages as she prepared for bed, the quiet tapping of Sigrid's pencil on parchment as she solved her complex problems—all this was background, white noise she had to ignore. Sometimes her gaze would get stuck on the window, beyond which the evening Nest darkened. The lights in the windows of other houses seemed so distant, so alien. There were people there who had dinner, laughed, lived their lives. And her life had narrowed to these four walls and the flickering flame of the lamp.
She ate sporadically, whatever she could—mostly dry flatbreads and cheese she brought from the canteen, forgetting to eat them in time. Sleep was not rest, but a forced pause her brain desperately tried to use to process the day's information, causing her dreams to turn into nightmares where she was chased by living geometric theorems and scrolls screaming in ancient languages.
One evening, towards the end of October, the inevitable happened. She was trying to master one of the fundamental laws of spectral resonance magic—a concept that required abstract thinking, to which her analytical, systematic mind was not entirely suited. She read the same paragraph for the fifth, the tenth time, but the words bounced off her consciousness like peas off a wall. Everything inside tightened into a tight, painful knot of despair and rage at herself.
"Not working?" Sigrid's quiet voice came from right by her shoulder.
Gil started so violently she nearly dropped the book. She hadn't heard her approach.
"I..." Gil's voice cracked into a hoarse whisper. "I don't understand. It says here that resonance occurs when frequencies coincide, but I can't... I can't imagine this 'frequency.' It's not a number, it's..."
"It's a feeling," Sigrid said softly. She didn't offer advice. She simply placed on the edge of the table in front of Gil her own, perfectly organized notebook of notes. On the open page, the same theory was depicted in an elegant spiral diagram, where mathematical formulas coexisted with visual analogies from the world of music. "Sometimes it's useful to look from a different angle. You can borrow it for the night."
It wasn't an act of condescension, but a gesture of camaraderie, an acknowledgment that they were both on the same battlefield, just fighting different opponents. Gil only nodded, pressing her lips together to stop them trembling. Taking the notebook, she felt an unexpected surge of strength. Tiny, but very important.
When Sigrid moved back to her bed, Gil buried herself in the book again. But this time, she wasn't looking at the incomprehensible words, but at the clear, logical diagram in her neighbor's notebook. And suddenly, like a click, something fell into place. Not everything, of course. The circle wasn't broken. Tomorrow, lectures, the library, and nocturnal vigils awaited her again. But at that moment, she understood she was not alone in her run. And that, perhaps, was enough to take one more step.