The courtyard was quiet.
Warm breeze. The smell of grass and old stone. Roz sat on the wall across from Arthur with his legs folded under him and his bow tie straight and his red eyes waiting.
Arthur leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
"To tell you the truth, Sir Roz." He kept his voice even. "I'm not from this world."
Roz tilted his head. One ear moved slightly. "What do you mean, boy."
"Back in my world, there was a magic war. A specific type of magic called flux. When it hit a person they didn't die. They just disappeared." Arthur looked at his hands. Vexis's hands. Long fingers, pale, the Lestilaut crest on the uniform collar catching the light. "Transported. To other worlds. Like me."
'Hey.' Vexis appeared at his left shoulder, voice dropping out of its usual volume. 'You're from a different world?'
Arthur didn't acknowledge him.
Roz's red eyes moved to the crest on Arthur's collar. He looked at it for a moment the way old things look at things. Without hurry.
"You're a Lestilaut," Roz said. "Family that holds an ArchMagus seat. And you're telling me the person wearing this uniform isn't the person who was born into it."
"Correct." Arthur lowered his head slightly. "I'm a living soul without a body. I inherited this one. And as it turns out the original owner was a genuinely terrible person who spent most of his time making other people's lives worse." He paused. "So I'm trying to fix that. And I need your help to do it."
Vexis started swinging at Arthur again.
Arthur ignored him and kept his eyes down and waited.
Below the surface of that entire story was a smirk he was working hard to keep off his face.
Huh. I might actually be good at spouting random bullshit.
Roz said nothing for a moment.
"In your world," he said finally. "Are you a mage."
"Yes. But magic there works completely differently. By the standards of this world I'm a beginner." Arthur kept his head down. "I watched a child water a plant this morning and it was more impressive than anything I can currently do. I need help, Sir Roz. Badly."
Another silence.
Then Roz made a sound in the back of his throat. Low and deliberate.
"My instincts tell me you're lying," he said. "My instincts also tell me you're telling the truth." He fixed Arthur with those red eyes. "You understand how annoying that is."
Arthur looked up.
Roz sat with his front paws crossed and his expression somewhere between annoyed and considering. He looked like a judge who hadn't made up his mind yet and was aware you knew it.
"Alright," Roz said. "I'll help you with magic."
Arthur exhaled.
"On one condition."
Arthur waited.
"I want my disciple to be the greatest womanizer this academy has ever seen."
Silence.
'…What.' Vexis said flatly behind him.
Arthur looked at the ancient 599 year old retired bellus sitting on a courtyard wall in a bow tie and processed that sentence.
What's up with this old little guy. No. Don't think about it. Just say yes.
"Yes, Master." Arthur straightened up. The mouth fired slightly and he let it, it was going in the right direction anyway. He winked. "I may be emotionally stunted and arrogant and have absolutely no practical experience in that department. But I have the looks. It will be easy."
Inside he was cringing at himself.
Roz grinned. For the first time since he'd appeared on that desk the expression reached his eyes.
"Alright. But first." He hopped off the wall. "We eat."
-----
The smell hit before the door fully opened.
Pork. Broth. Something fried. And underneath all of it the warm heavy smell of booze that had been spilled and cleaned up and spilled again enough times that it had become part of the floor.
Arthur found a corner table and sat. Roz climbed up onto the table without being invited and immediately began pointing at things.
A woman passing by stopped and made a sound.
"Oh my god it's so cute—"
"Ha." Arthur cleared his throat. "Yeah. That's. Right."
Roz did not acknowledge the compliment. He was already three pieces of meat in and working on a cup of something amber that was genuinely too large for his body. He drank from it the way someone drinks when they've earned it.
'You're seriously asking this creature to teach you magic.' Vexis had settled somewhere near Arthur's shoulder, staring at the spectacle with visible disgust.
Can you please just let me have this.
Arthur waited until Roz came up for air. "So, Master. When do we start."
"Ask me what you want to learn first," Roz said, mouth still full. "No point in starting anywhere until I know where we're going."
Arthur leaned back in his chair.
"I want to create my own type of magic. Something that can't be easily identified. Something that doesn't look like anything in the standard catalogue."
Roz stopped chewing.
He swallowed. Set the cup down. Looked at Arthur with an expression that was not quite amusement and not quite alarm but sat somewhere between the two.
"Create your own magic." He said it slowly. "Boy. Do you understand what that requires."
"Not fully, no."
"The aetheric volume alone—"
Arthur raised his hand.
He breathed in, faster than normal, out slow. Felt the warmth build in his chest and move through his shoulder and down his arm the way it had in the courtyard. He pushed it further this time. Past his palm and into his fingertips.
His forearm ached. His fingertips lit faintly.
What rose above his hand was wobbly. It was dense. Small, coin-sized, but dark. The blue of it was wrong, too deep, the color of water over something that had no bottom. It sat in the air above his palm and didn't move and didn't wobble and looked like it weighed more than it should.
Roz went still.
He stepped closer to the edge of the table. His red eyes were fixed on the water. He leaned forward and actually sniffed it, nose twitching, and then sat back with an expression Arthur couldn't quite read.
"Your aetheric density," Roz said. "It's bigger than Verul's."
Arthur kept the water steady. Who's Verul.
He filed the name away and said nothing.
Roz was still looking at the water. Not with the mild interest of someone seeing something slightly unusual. With something older and more careful than that.
Arthur let the water disperse.
Now here's the thing.
He'd been a chemistry major for two years before he'd dropped out and committed fully to being a bum. He hadn't been exceptional at it. He hadn't failed out. He'd just looked at the career at the end of the road and decided it wasn't worth the drive.
But he remembered enough.
And the magic system in this novel was, if you squinted at it from the right angle, just chemistry with extra steps. Elements. Combinations. Reactions. The author had written it as mystical and ancient and deeply complex and Arthur had written in a comment thread at two in the morning that it was essentially just a periodic table with better branding.
He hadn't been wrong.
Which meant that somewhere inside a body with an absurd amount of raw aetheric blood and a head full of half-remembered undergraduate chemistry was something genuinely dangerous.
If he could figure out the bridge between those two things.
He looked up.
Roz was grinning. The kind of grin that started in the eyes before the mouth caught up.
"You're more interesting than I thought, boy."
Arthur smiled back. Actually smiled.
"Heck yeah I am."
Roz narrowed his eyes and turned his head slightly and for a moment Arthur could see him running something over in his mind.
Then Roz picked up his cup and drank and said nothing more about it.
But Arthur caught it.
The half-second before Roz looked away.
That was not the face of a retired old creature stuck with an inconvenient caller.
That was the face of something that had been waiting a long time for something specific.
And thought it might have just found it.