Their spellcraft instructor arrived a few days later with an announcement that visibly excited the whole class. "Today," she said, "we're learning a conjuration spell that will change how you think about storage forever. It's called interdimensional storage, and it lets you keep anything at all inside a hidden pocket of space that only you can reach."
She recited the chant slowly, giving each syllable its full weight: Khaanii yavuul, khüüniin gazarluu, Minii duudlagaar, butsaanaa dahi.
Corren's attention sharpened the instant the words left her mouth. He recognized the language instantly, an ancient Mongolian he'd spent the better part of two years of his old life reconstructing from scattered inscriptions, and unlike every other chant he'd encountered so far in this world, this one had survived intact, its grammar unbent by generations of careless repetition. It translated cleanly: away, depart, to a phantom place, till I beckon thee, to return again.
There was nothing here to correct. The rule still held anyway, he suspected, watching the class attempt the chant with wildly varying success: precision mattered even when the words themselves needed no fixing at all. Grammar spoken cleanly, without the drift and mumble most speakers brought to inherited magic, simply produced more.
The teacher demonstrated first, opening a small, spinning black hole in front of her palm and drawing out a diary, then returning it and sealing the hole shut with the same chant spoken a second time. The students took turns after her, most managing holes barely large enough to swallow a coin or a stick of chalk, a few failing outright when nerves scrambled their pronunciation. Wrenna surprised everyone, herself included, by opening a hole the size of a serving tray on her very first attempt, storing and retrieving several books to genuine applause.
When Corren's turn came, he spoke the chant with total, practiced confidence, and the hole that answered swallowed nearly the entire ceiling in spinning, starless black before he'd even finished registering how much bigger it was than intended.
The class gasped as one. Corren, feeling the familiar hollow drain settle fast and heavy behind his ribs, the well emptying faster than he'd budgeted for, spoke the chant again to seal it shut before anyone got hurt, and only once the black hole had vanished did he let himself notice how badly his hands were shaking.
The teacher's expression hovered somewhere between alarm and open fascination. She dismissed the class early, visibly needing a moment to process what she'd just witnessed, and asked Corren to stay behind as the rest of the students filed out, buzzing with excited chatter about the display.
"Trainee," she said once the room had emptied, studying him with new interest, "you've earned S-rank marks in four of the five schools already. Word among the staff is that you're something of a prodigy. A no-contest candidate for Knight of the Realm."
"Thank you," Corren said, meaning it, though the too-careful evenness of her tone told him a question was coming that he wasn't going to enjoy answering.
"So tell me," she continued, voice gentling into something more probing, "why are you still here? Learn the last S-rank illusion spell, graduate as a mage properly, and put your remaining energy into swordsmanship and alchemy instead. You don't need another semester of this class."
Corren opened his mouth to answer and found, for once, that he genuinely didn't have a ready reply. Before he could improvise one, a familiar voice called his name from the doorway.
"Corren?"
He turned. Wrenna stood there, faintly out of breath, relief flooding her face the moment she spotted him. "There you are. I've been looking everywhere."
The teacher's mouth curved into a small, knowing smile, and she waved the two of them off without pressing the question any further, murmuring something to herself that sounded suspiciously like "ah, now I understand" as they left.
That night, in the dim glow of a single candle, moonlight pooling faintly across the floor between their bunks, Corren lay awake longer than usual, replaying the teacher's question in his own head without arriving at an answer he liked any better than the one he'd failed to give her out loud.
Below him, Baris lay just as awake, uncharacteristically quiet, his eyes fixed on the underside of Corren's mattress.
"Alright," Corren said finally, sitting up to peer down at him. "I know I'll regret asking this, but why aren't you singing or kicking my bed tonight?"
Baris blinked up at him, genuinely startled by the question. "What are you talking about?"
"Every night since we got here, you hum, or sing, or kick the frame until I want to throw you out the window. Tonight you're just lying there. Something's on your mind."
Baris was quiet a moment longer, and when he spoke again, something wistful had crept into his voice that Corren hadn't heard from him before. "What you did for Wrenna today," he said. "The duel. I've always wanted to be that. The knight who rides in and saves the girl from the bad men. Since I was small enough that everyone still laughed when I said it out loud."
Corren felt the shape of that confession settle somewhere he hadn't expected it to land, gentler than Baris's usual bravado ever let on. "There are plenty of bad men left in the world," he said. "Your turn will come. I promise you that."
He blew out the candle after that, and neither of them spoke again, though Corren lay awake a while longer than usual, listening to Baris's breathing slow into sleep, thinking about wells that could run dry, about a crown that supposedly tested truth, about a girl two rooms away carrying a debt in her chest that no one had actually asked her to pay, and about how much of this world he still didn't understand despite understanding, technically, every single word spoken in it.
The morning after brought them both down from the rooftop training grounds sweat-soaked and sore, descending the stone stairs toward the courtyard below in the loose, companionable silence of two people who had trained hard enough together to have run out of things to say for the moment.