Ianmus gripped the letter in his hands, its edges crumpling.

  It was a simple thing — rough-cut and crudely processed, with a tan tint that suggested it hadn’t been through a bleaching wash. An everyday, run-of-the-mill product like he might expect a simple innkeep to use for his ledger, yet the information it held struck far harder than its common heritage.

  The Mystral delegation was arriving in hours.

  Ianmus rocked back in his chair, the letter fluttering to the table. So soon. He’d expected that his contemporaries would still be days away. The administration of the Spires was many things, but swift-moving wasn’t a word he would have picked to describe it. Even with the current circumstances, organising so many mages from multiple different Spires should have taken time.

  Was it him? He still didn’t know how the Headmaster had been able to tell, but the man had noticed his strength immediately.

  What was he thinking? Of course his sudden ascension to Silver would have forced the Spires into action. He was a known quantity — skilled and dedicated, yes — but he was not so egotistical as to think that his rise would have been expected.

  His fate had been changed irrevocably when he met Kaius and Porkchop, and that would have been just as evident to the Headmaster as it was to him.

  Ianmus glanced at the letter once more, detailing not just the upcoming arrival of the mages, but who he should expect. Seventy of them. Most senior mages, well on their way through the ranks of Steel. From Sunspire, Stormspire, Ironspire, and Stonespire.

  That, in and of itself, didn’t surprise him. Of course the Headmaster would ensure a sizable delegation from their shared dynasty. And the others were either close allies in the complex dance that was Mystral politics, or — in the case of Stonespire — straightforward and honourable.

  Though he suspected those mages had an ulterior motive to join as well. He’d never met a stone mage who didn’t dream of defending against a siege.

  More surprising was the composition of the cadre: five Silvers, headed by Ophelia of Stormspire — and Cantor of his own.

  Ophelia, he knew of only by reputation. Fiery and resolute, she was a mid-Silver who had mastered flight. No doubt a significant part of this swift arrival would be her doing, supported by the Steels of Stormspire.

  Cantor, though — that man he knew.

  Ianmus blinked, remembering those hard grey eyes boring into him, always watching, waiting for him to slip up. Ianmus never had, for he was not the man that Cantor had always assumed him to be.

  The son of a wealthy, blueblooded merchant, Cantor had been one of the few in the Spire to hold no distaste for Ianmus’s half-born heritage. No, his prejudice had been founded entirely in the fact that Ianmus was low-born — a dirt-streaked rat with delusions of grandeur.

  Ianmus clenched his fist. Once, he might have been nervous, perhaps even felt a little sick running into Cantor once again. Not now.

  How would the mage react now that they were equals?

  A thought came to him, causing him to shake his head. Were they equals? Cantor had taken decades to reach Silver, and while he had made respectable and notable achievements to the progression of the mystic arts, they were only what was expected of him.

  He, on the other hand, had seized a Heroic class, discovered a whole new branch of spellcasting, and gathered Honours by the pile.

  Cantor might have been a middle Silver with forty levels on him, but Ianmus had killed Golds.

  The idea that he was stronger than a man who had once been his strictest tutor was an odd one.

  He grinned. Cantor must have been briefed on what to expect, and Ianmus would have paid all the gold in the world to have been able to witness that conversation through an illusory eye.

  Still, regardless of their personal differences — and Cantor’s personal failings — Ianmus knew that the mage respected Sunspire and the duties of his station above all else. In five years at the Academy, not once had Cantor overtly abused his power to unfairly block Ianmus’s advancement. Oh, the feedback had been extensive, harsh, and often dubiously even-handed compared to some of his classmates — but he’d never been unfairly marked.

  He remembered that day, at the end of his second year. He’d been sitting at his desk, working on some final preparations for a spellweaving demonstration he had to undertake at the end of that week. Despite knowing that he was easily the most prepared in his class, he’d still pushed himself — right up until a letter had arrived, summoning him before the Headmasters and his professor.

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  Even with the note providing no details, he’d known what it was for. It had come only two weeks before the official announcement of the valedictorian. It was everything he had strived for: month after month of labour, pushing himself to the brink to prove to himself and the rest of the Spire that he was more than worthy — that he was the very best.

  Cantor had been there when he had been presented with his sash — a single face amongst over a dozen that had crowded the Headmaster’s office, a space already drowning in stacked piles of books and small mountains of scrolls.

  The Silver mage had looked like he’d swallowed a bitter pill, but Ianmus hadn’t missed the sincerity of his congratulations.

  Maybe he was overreacting. It had been years since he had last seen Cantor. It would be the first time they met as equals, rather than professor and initiate.

  Ianmus ran his hands through his hair. Who was he kidding? An old, squabblesome relationship with a teacher mattered nothing in the face of keyseal conjuration.

  His notes. They still weren’t finished.

  Rocking to his feet, Ianmus tore into his room and grabbed the notebook that still lay on his nightstand from where he had been working on revisions the previous night. Hurrying back to the table, he flicked through the pages, summoning a pen to hand.

  Most of the groundwork was there: notes on forms of sacred geometry that he’d discovered held particular stability, both from his initial two system-granted key seals and his early experiments, would provide a base point for people to jump from. More important was the aspect of how key seals bound to the soul, which was still opaque to him. His first binding — the one that had granted him a skill, and eventually a class relating to the art — had almost killed him.

  Keyseals were distinct from his teamleaders glyphs. Unlike runes, which had a stabilising effect all on their own, his keyseals needed the support of being intricately bound to him. It was the only way they could stay stable, despite manifesting outside his body and manaflow.

  His Keyseal of the Rising Dawn had given him some insight. Its very structure was woven with the power of the sun, with mana infused with just a hint of his soul — a significant reason why it reserved from his pool instead of outright consuming the energy.

  There were massive holes in his understanding, as was the common failing of all novel skills granted by the system. He did not have complete access to its theoretical underpinnings.

  More than that, it was a skill of heroic rarity in the second tier, and inordinately complex for it. Hopefully, what he had been able to derive would be enough for the Spires to replicate, given time and careful study.

  A better spot than Kaius to be in. Not only did his team lead have far less academic experience than he did, but glyphbinding was, admittedly, more nuanced than keyseal conjuration. Runes were notoriously fickle, and that was an aspect that did not change when they were applied to spellcasting. Traditional magecraft, and keyseals, were reliant on intent. Glyphbinding was almost totally derived from execution and exacting geometry. A single misalignment of a rune could cause the whole of the weave to fail.

  Ianmus sighed, thinking of how much research they had to do. Getting the word out to the spires was the right move — beyond personal benefits, it was how the fields would advance as a whole. He hoped Kaius and Porkchop returned quickly from their brief descent into the Imperial ruin underneath the city. Their absence from the arriving delegation would be notable — maybe even questioned. Kenva, at least, would almost certainly have received a letter of her own. Most likely, she was already on her way back, storage artefact filled with hundreds or thousands of arrows destined for the walls.

  He heard the muffled sound of a heavy footfall in the hallway — unmistakably Porkchop’s. Hanrick might have enchanted all his rooms with silence formations, but they were not absolute, and Ianmus had his father’s ears.

  That, and the floorboards really had a unique way of protesting to Porkchop’s considerable bulk.

  “Ho there,” Kaius said, opening the door to their suite. Porkchop’s black and grey head poked over his shoulder. “Manage to get much work done?”

  “Oh, thank the gods,” Ianmus said, sighing in relief.

  “Did something happen?” Porkchop questioned.

  Kaius seemed equally interested, sliding in next to him with a puzzled frown on his face.

  “My fellow Spire mages are arriving in a few hours,” Ianmus replied, nodding to the letter on the table.

  Kaius raised his brow as he picked up the letter and scanned it. “So they are.”

  A heartbeat later, Kaius shot to his feet. “Shit, my notes!”

  Ianmus watched his team leader launch for the room he shared with Porkchop.

  Headmaster’s beard, he knew their was no way Kaius had remembered to finish them!

  “And that’s why I sighed in relief,” Ianmus muttered, swivelling towards Porkchop as he settled down to sit by the head of the table. “How was your visit with the Castellan? Are they able to help with the defence?”

  Porkchop grunted. “No. Something about the automata being defence models means they won’t work outside of the ruin. It will, however, reinforce the ruins themselves and populate the maintenance tunnels outside of the wall with drones to prevent incursion into the city via that method.”

  “And the blast doors?” Ianmus asked. The hope had been that the civilians would be able to control them and seal themselves off, but who knew if it was possible?

  Porkchop nodded. “It’ll only take a couple of days for the Castellan to do the work, but it’s certain it can be done.”

  “Thank the gods.”

  The letter mentioned that the mages Mystral had sent included a number to escort any refugees back to the coastal city, but Ianmus knew that would only be a fraction of Deadacre’s populace. There were too many with homes and businesses in the city that had refused to leave.

  Reaching over, Porkchop dragged the letter across the table.

  “So, anything I should expect when all these mages recognise what I am? I assume they will notice just as quickly as you did when we first met.”

  Ianmus paled. He hadn’t even thought of that.