Chapter 200: Orion

The noble, academic concern for the safety of the Capital suddenly shifted into a desperate, shifty, incredibly selfish gleam in their eyes.

"Yes," Elder Vane coughed awkwardly, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze. "To... to protect the city. And to nurture a brilliant mind."

"Indeed," Sylas nodded a little too quickly, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow. "For the good of the magical arts. It is our duty as educators."

It was a blatant, transparent, universally understood lie.

The Elder Mages of the Aethelgard Tower didn’t give a single flying spark about the safety of the Imperial Capital.

They didn’t care about nurturing a brilliant mind.

They wanted to scout this new, terrifying powerhouse for one specific, personal reason.

They needed a savior.

They needed someone, anyone, who was powerful, terrifying, and capable enough to distract, occupy, or otherwise neutralize the unmitigated nightmare that currently resided within their own walls.

"The Tower Master is currently attending the Emperor’s welcoming banquet in the Capital," Vane whispered, his eyes darting nervously toward the ceiling, as if afraid to invoke a curse.

"We must send an urgent, encrypted missive to him tonight. He must locate the anomaly and bring them back as a new apprentice."

"Light preserve us, let it be true," a random mage in the back wept openly. "If the Master takes in a new apprentice... perhaps he will finally leave us alone."

A collective, shuddering sigh of traumatized agreement rippled through the Grand Observatory.

The mages, masters of reality-bending power, looked like war veterans suffering from extreme psychological fatigue.

They prayed to the stars that the mysterious powerhouse in the Capital would come to the Tower.

Because if they had to endure one more week under the tyranny of the current youngest apprentice, the entire faculty was going to resign and take up farming.

***

Five floors below the panicked chaos of the Grand Observatory was the Aethelgard Tower’s Great Archive.

It was a majestic, breathtaking library of unimaginable proportions.

Towering, polished oak bookshelves spiraled upward for hundreds of feet, disappearing into the vaulted, enchanted ceiling that was charmed to resemble a clear, starry night sky.

Millions of ancient tomes, glowing scrolls, and whispering grimoires lined the shelves.

Magic permeated the very air; books floated from shelf to shelf on invisible currents, and glowing, spectral owls served as librarians, hooting softly as they organized the manuscripts.

Usually, the Great Archive was filled with frantic, studying apprentices cramming for their elemental exams.

Tonight, however, the aisles were completely empty.

The apprentices had long since learned that venturing into the restricted sections after midnight was a surefire way to become the victim of a highly creative, incredibly devastating magical ’prank.’

Deep within the restricted section, far away from the glowing lanterns and the spectral owls, the silence was broken by a soft, rhythmic, incredibly lazy sound.

Zzzzz.

Up near the very apex of the vaulted ceiling, roughly eighty feet in the air, a figure was defying the laws of physics.

He was not flying.

He was not levitating.

He was lying perfectly flat, fast asleep, directly on the ceiling.

He had used a Grandmaster-level gravity-inversion spell, a piece of magic so complex and mathematically demanding that elder mages required chalkboards and hours of concentration to cast it.

He had cast it effortlessly, silently, and entirely for the purpose of taking a nap where the faculty couldn’t find him to assign him into cauldron-scrubbing duties.

He appeared to be around eleven or twelve years old.

He was, objectively, infuriatingly handsome, possessing the kind of striking, effortless, arrogant beauty that made older apprentices want to throw him out a window.

His hair was a messy, chaotic, brilliant shock of raven-black, but the very tips of his jagged bangs faded into a vibrant, striking shade of electric blue.

He wore the standard, dark blue robes of a Tower Apprentice, though he had heavily modified his uniform, cutting off the restrictive sleeves and leaving the collar rakishly unbuttoned.

A heavy, ancient grimoire titled Theoretical Applications of Dimensional Rending was currently resting directly over his face, acting as a makeshift sleep mask to block out the ambient glow of the library.

This was Orion.

He was the personal, handpicked apprentice of the Aethelgard Tower Master.

He was the youngest mage in the history of the spire to achieve independent casting authorization, and possessed an intellect that rivaled supercomputers and an affinity for magic that was nothing short of miraculous.

He was also, undeniably, the laziest, most arrogant, mischievous, and unrepentant little devil the Tower had ever seen.

Below him, the heavy wooden doors of the archive burst open.

"Check the restricted section!" the panicked voice of a senior apprentice echoed up from the floor.

"Elder Vane demands all hands on deck! We have to find the coordinates of the Capital Anomaly before the Tower Master’s banquet begins! Move!"

The sound of scrambling boots and frantic incantations echoed through the aisles as a dozen older apprentices began frantically searching the lower shelves for leyline maps.

High above them, glued to the ceiling, Orion’s breathing hitched.

The grimoire resting on his face shifted slightly.

A slender, pale hand reached up, pushing the heavy book off his eyes, letting it float casually in the inverted gravity field next to his head.

Orion cracked one eye open.

His eyes were not the violet of the North, nor the green of the South.

They were a brilliant, striking, predatory shade of molten gold. They glittered in the shadows like a cat watching mice in a maze.

He didn’t move his body.

He just lay there, perfectly comfortable upside down, his hands tucked behind his head, listening to the frantic chaos unfolding eighty feet below him.

"I swear, if we don’t find this new Archmage, Vane is going to make us work double shifts," a senior apprentice groaned loudly, flipping through a glowing scroll. "They say the mana wave was that of Supreme-tier. The Master is going to recruit them immediately when he finds them."