Sh'kteiro didn't recognize the diagrams, and he couldn't easily get in touch with anyone who might until he returned to Vishnen.

  At the phrontistery, Preceptor Wijin was having a meeting, so Caen had to wait outside his office.

  “Caen,” Preceptor Wijin said when he stepped out of his office. The elderly man wore a dark scarf around his head. “Have you been waiting long?”

  “Not at all, sir. I wanted to ask you about something I saw somewhere.” He took out a sheet of paper on which he'd reproduced the symbols and handed it to Wijin. “I suspect it's a language, but I don't know for sure. I found nothing in the library.”

  “Hmm.” Wijin retrieved a pair of reading glasses from his pocket and put them on. “Where did you say you found this?”

  “Grat-line,” Caen lied.

  Wijin nodded. “I am not too certain about it, but this resembles an archaic Vedul shorthand I've come across before. I'll look into it and get back to you.”

  “Thank you, Preceptor Wijin.”

  “And now that I have you here.” He took off his glasses. “You haven't been coming around lately. I take it you've been spending more time at the tri-clinic.”

  “The commune, actually. Just doing some administrative work for my uncle,” Caen said.

  “I see. That's a shame. There’s a class or two I needed some extra hands with. Fewer volunteers this month than usual, you see.”

  Most teaching assistants volunteering at the phrontistery had primary jobs that took up the better part of their time.

  “I can come around to help with that,” Caen said. He was asking a favor of Wijin. It was only fair that he reciprocated.

  “Excellent,” Wijin said, then gave Caen a date.

  ***

  “Hshnol is looking into it,” Vai’s disembodied voice said, echoing from all around the labyrinth. “He should be able to get a hold of a language expert soon.”

  “Thank you, Uncle Vai,” Caen said, grimacing as a force tore into his mental shield. Invisible specters pelted his mind with weaker attacks as Caen hurried to reconstruct his mental shield. He reoriented himself in the maze, adding more modifiers to the other spell he was casting, even as Vai tried to interrupt the spell.

  He was currently in Vai's mansion, where a maze with dim lighting and shifting fog had been constructed. It made for a rather eerie experience, and the urgent whispers and occasional movement in the periphery of his vision weren't helping. He couldn't see most of the specters, but he could vaguely feel the weight of their existences around him. Vai had particularly selected these specters for their exercise today. They pelted his shield with dull attacks, while Vai occasionally launched more serious attacks.

  “If Sh'leinu thinks that you're free of spectral influence, then she's probably right. I'm no Dream-guardian, so I have a very different opinion about specters. But I've met the ones in your mind, and they're harmless. Quite friendly even.”

  Caen frowned. “Specters… in my mind. Uncle Vai—” A force ripped aside the mental shield Caen had been sustaining, causing him to wince again. He immediately reconstructed the shield. At the same time, he successfully cast a locate mind spell with the other half of his spirit.

  An orb of light appeared to Caen's left, and he began following it.

  “Every mind has specters,” Vai's voice echoed as Caen turned a corner. “We can get into all this once you've built a mind palace.”

  Caen nodded. “That will have to wait till after the trials.”

  The orb of light winked out, just as another attack from Vai tore into Caen's mental shield. He reconstructed it as he cast the locate spell again.

  Multicasting taxed his mind in ways that merely splitting it didn't. This was all the more true for his spirit. It was incredibly slow work, riddled with a sense of wrongness. Their first few sessions had had him performing very long and tedious flexibility exercises for his mind and spirit.

  The locator orb eventually directed Caen to Vai’s mind.

  Vai phased into view. “That was easy mode. Better speed than last time.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I still have a few more hours before I wake up,” Caen said. “Can we scale up the difficulty?”

  The new sleep reposit spell he'd learned from Brother Nabik allowed Caen to store up sleep for the coming week. It didn't always last a week, though, depending on how much he exerted himself. Caen had taken to spending his sleep day in Vai's Astral domain.

  As soon as Vai phased out of view, a mental attack shattered Caen's shielding spell. He reconstructed his shield, already casting the locate spell.

  ***

  “Here,” a preceptor said, handing a stack of pamphlets to Caen.

  “So, I just… hand these out?”

  “Mhm. To the parents and guardians,” she said, nodding. “You can take one for yourself.”

  As she walked away, he read through a pamphlet and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You are cordially invited to the Abundance Club for a night of mysteries, wonders, and deep insights.’

  Caen shrugged. He stood by the entrance of the lecture room, handing out pamphlets as people arrived to drop off their children and wards.

  Most of the children were between the ages of four and eight. None of them were awakened, but these lessons were preparing them ahead of time.

  “Old man priest!” declared a little boy with brown hair.

  “Hey. Caen, right?” said a young woman, her brown hair tucked underneath a pink scarf.

  Caen nodded at her in greeting. “Hello, Norna.” He turned to the boy. “Hello, Werni.”

  He'd met these two on a train months ago. He handed her a pamphlet, which she took with an amused smile.

  “I helped make these,” she said. “Remember the group of Surfeitists I told you about? We have something truly mind-boggling planned. Will you be there?”

  “Mm…” he glanced at the pamphlet. “It doesn't mention a date.”

  “We haven't picked one yet, but soon. Soon. Just spreading the word for now. Hey, you should tell your friends and family.”

  “... Will do.”

  ***

  The day proceeded smoothly. After the preceptor had explained some basic concepts to the children using songs and interpretative dance, she broke the class up into smaller groups for their exercises.

  Caen and one other teaching assistant made the rounds, sitting with the children, talking them through the exercises, and answering their questions.

  “My mom says that if I work very hard, I’ll be an archmage by next year,” said a girl of six as she colored between the lines of a rudimentary spell schema. Unelevated spells were the easiest to visualize, especially for unawakened children.

  “You could even play the role of archmage in the dance drama next year,” Caen said, holding back a smile.

  The girl brightened at that and began coloring with more zest.

  A boy with whiskers and cat ears was doodling all over his exercise sheet. “Well, my mom says that the only way to be an archmage is to sleep on time. That's how Archmage Trellam did it.”

  Caen gently exchanged the boy's exercise sheet with a new one. “You also need to do your exercises to get to archmage,” he said.

  “But what comes before that?” asked the six-year-old.

  Caen hummed the part of the song they'd just learned today.

  “Oh!” She giggled, covering her mouth. “Attuner,” she sang. “Early, then mid, then! All the way too late.”

  “How do we get to mid?” another girl asked quietly.

  “By doing your exercises,” Caen said as though he were revealing an important secret.

  She nodded seriously and returned to her work.

  ***

  Preceptor Wijin called Caen to his office late in the afternoon.

  It was a small room that smelled of ink and aging paper. A shelf behind the door was crammed with books and stacks of paper.

  Wijin’s table was clear, save for a memory crystal shaped like a disk and a fat tome with yellowed pages.

  “Come, come, sit,” the preceptor said as soon as Caen walked in. Wijin turned the tome around and opened it for Caen to see.

  Large sections of either page bore unfamiliar glyphs.

  “They might not look similar, but this here,” Wijin said, tapping a section of the unfamiliar glyphs, “shares striking features with the symbols you showed me.”

  Caen had already pulled out his own notebook to compare the glyphs. “I think I sort of… see it,” he mused, leaning closer.

  “It's called Klakalk,” Wijin said. He placed his elbows on the table. “And what you see there in the tome is a shorthand derived from a descendant language of Klakalk.”

  “Where is it native to?” Caen asked, still examining the glyphs. “Vedulan?"

  Wijin laughed. “No, no. Klakalk is a dead language. It's been dead for, what, thousands of years maybe? The shorthand in the tome is now taboo in academic circles. In certain parts of the world, it's downright illegal to own materials like this.”

  Caen was as intrigued as he was disturbed. He lifted the tome to check its cover.

  ‘Post-modern Trends in Filiation Magic,’ the title read.

  Filiation magic concerned the study of bloodlines, affinities, and magical potential.

  Caen felt a chill.

  “Wherever you stumbled upon these glyphs,” Preceptor Wijin said, jutting his chin at Caen's open notebook, “My advice to you is that you might want to stay away from there.”