A glare of light snuck through the pulled-closed curtains and onto Lysander’s face, slowly dragging him out of a deep slumber. He came to with a stir, a grunt, and a smacking of lips, one eye cracking open to squint at the offending ray of white.

“[Telekinesis],” he mumbled.

With a flick of his finger, the curtains closed fully, blessedly blocking out the light beam. Thoughts foggy, he would have slipped back into unconsciousness if not for the crick in his neck. That same discomfort made him wonder why his neck hurt, which alerted him to his strange sleeping posture. As in… he was in a chair, slumped over a desk.

He jolted to his feet, awake in an instant. His office? How had he fallen asleep in his office? What time was it? The alarm faded as he pulled those answers one by one from his foggy, sleep-addled brain. He hadn’t overslept some important meeting—of which a number were scheduled, considering what had happened four days ago, and again yesterday. No, he’d slept through the night; that had been morning’s dawn rays bothering him.

When was the last time he’d fallen asleep working? As the Headmaster of the Thaumaturgical Institute, the premier magical academy of the human kingdoms, he was an outrageously busy man, but he also lived a regimented and efficacious lifestyle. There was little point in overworking oneself to the point of exhaustion. It was inefficient, objectively speaking, and Lysander sought efficiency above most else. How else could one attain greatness without using their time well? Even the longest-lived man couldn’t escape mortality. He had a specific number of years available to him, no matter how large that number may be, and thus they needed to be portioned out wisely.

He frowned down at the notes organized on his desk. They detailed his most recent theories on the nature of void energy and various theoretical workarounds. He eyed a dark spot of drool on the white paper and disgust curled his lip. An urge to tear out the marred pages and rewrite them struck him, but he didn’t have time to indulge that neuroticism, not with his current circumstances.

He shouldn’t have fallen asleep at all, busy as he was. But even Titled could only push away biological needs for so long. It seemed three days of constant mental strain was as far as his body allowed.

He structured his thoughts as he shambled over to his office’s attached restroom. As always, he had many tasks that needed attending. More than usual, even. Busy, busy, busy. He didn’t dislike a packed schedule; in fact he would claim the opposite. But perhaps not to this extent.

In front of the bathroom’s mirror, he cleaned himself up, straightening his robes and hair. His eyes paused when they caught on his grimoire hanging at his hip. It jogged his memory as to what he’d been dreaming of, five minutes prior.

Vivisari Vexaria. The Sorceress, and how she’d shattered that comfortable but harmful illusion of his youth. A century of life tended to fade memories, but that one remained vivid despite its age.

It had been decades since his subconscious had dragged up that particular sequence of events. Deducing why posed little difficulty: the Sorceress had returned to the world. No matter what the Archbishop was going on about. Lysander had been there himself for the first breach, fighting those otherworldly hordes, and he had once more witnessed mastery of the arcane that had humbled him so thoroughly that even days later he felt vaguely disgusted he called himself an archmage.

Arch. It should mean pinnacle. The greatest title that could be bestowed on a mage. What a farce, to assign that moniker to himself, after what he had seen.

But he knew that line of thought was illogical. He was an archmage. If a list of the ten most powerful and skilled users of the arcane across all the mortal realms were created, his name would undoubtedly be present. And as the youngest entry by far. He deserved the title of archmage. More than some others, even.

Still. What he had seen, that night four days ago… that magic.

Lysander was one of the best-suited men in the world for identifying powerful spells and categorizing them. Yet he had absolutely no idea what tier they had been, or even their general nature. There were depths to the arcane that he hadn’t begun to plumb—that he never would. It was a depressing thought, not just a humbling one.

He shook the malaise away. His mind was not so fragile as in his youth. He had come to terms with these facts of life, even if he found them unpleasant. Honor is found equally in the pursuit of greatness as in its attainment. The result is not all that matters. Remember this, Lysander, as all great mages must—lest your name be purged from the history books, as Lucorius’s was.

After freshening up, he collected the notebooks, tomes, and other scattered resources on his desk, then strode out of his office. His secretary, Priscilla, was present at her station on the other side.

“What do I have today?” he grunted in introduction.

The woman seemed neither offended nor amused at his ruffled demeanor and lack of greeting. They’d worked together for too many decades to be anything but totally comfortable with each other. She answered smoothly, not looking up from whatever document she was scribbling on. “Your schedule has been cleared, Headmaster. The High King requests your attendance for an urgent meeting this evening.”

Lysander digested that announcement. He was hardly unused to attending conferences with important people. The High King demanding a same-day meeting was certainly… unusual, though. “Did he say why?”

“Matters of state,” Priscilla replied. “Further specification was not provided, but the missive impressed on me that your absence would be highly displeasing, Headmaster.”

In the overly respectful communication that had become standard between nobility and Titled—the two powers of different types having learned how to deal with each other over the centuries—it was as close to an outright demand as the High King would ever make of Lysander. And thus had to be extremely important.

“I see.” He assumed it had to do with yesterday’s breach over Prismarche. Though that seemed to be stable. Aeris had returned and informed Lysander of the gist of what had happened, though there were several gaps in the man’s explanations. Lysander had theories why. “Anything else?”

“No, Headmaster. Until third bell, the day is yours.”

“Hmph. Thank you, Priscilla.”

He wandered out through the front door, feet carrying him toward the nearest elevator. Tuning out the world around him—even the idle niceties he made with the elevator attendant—Lysander found his mind inexorably drifting toward the phenomenon of his captivation these past four days.

Void material. Void energy. The two seemed to be linked. The carapace channeled that force to produce incredible nullifying effects, but he had also seen several of those beasts emitting the energy in the form of ranged attacks or otherwise. He suspected an intrinsic link between the physical material and the energy; they were intertwined somehow.

Even depowered voidbeast carapace possessed fascinating properties. Properties he hadn’t come close to dissecting. What am I missing? The question itched at him. There was nothing he hated and loved more than a puzzle.

Absorbed in his thoughts, he essentially teleported to the ninth-floor garden annex. He stirred to awareness only after stone walls abruptly shifted to sunlit greenery. Coming back to consciousness, he scanned the hubbub with his dark gray eyes.

The void invasion had taken the dominant portion of the Institute’s attention, but the freshly carved hole in the spatial fabric took definite second place. As such, dozens of mages had cleared a space around the jagged black gash that even Lysander didn’t particularly enjoy letting his gaze linger on. The various researchers had set up desks, bookshelves, chalkboards, and other relevant furniture to aid in the study of their newest fascination. The garden had turned into a miniature research facility.

One young woman had fallen asleep at her desk. He rapped his knuckles on the wooden top as he passed, startling her awake.

“Sorry, Headmaster!” came groggy, panicked words several seconds delayed.

He sympathized, obviously, but it was no excuse; appearances should be maintained. At least he had overworked himself in privacy.

He headed for the woman in charge of the project. One of the three archmages acknowledged by both the Institute and the Grand System, Archmage Theophania was the weakest mage at the top of the academy’s hierarchy, but her specialty had never been spellcasting itself, unlike Lysander and Aeris. A half-elf, she was older than even Aeris, and had seemingly always existed in these halls, her natural longevity further extended by her Title.

As far as levels went, she was a slow grower—even accounting for the hampering of progress given by her half-elven heritage—but when it came to her analytical abilities, her skill in treading new ground in all manners of arcane topics was beyond question. Not quite Lysander’s peer—he had been assigned as the lead researcher for void energy and not her for a reason—but she was certainly worth acknowledging.

“Archmage Theophania,” Lysander greeted as he approached the head-mage’s desk. The woman’s blonde hair was slightly shimmering, the luster not quite the same as a full elf’s, but still immediately marking her unusual birth. That same hair was horribly frazzled. Theophania was maybe the worst among them at maintaining appearances, and thus at constant odds with Lysander, given his preferences for how authority figures should behave. He avoided sending her out in public at all costs. Fortunately, she was more than happy to oblige in that regard. “I see you’ve kept yourself busy.”

“Hm?” the woman asked distractedly, hunched over with pen clenched in two fingers. “Oh, Lys. Hi there.” Her nose wrinkled. “Stop with that, won’t you? Call me Nia. Even Aery does.”

The Headmaster of the Thaumaturgical Institute surveyed the third most powerful mage of their organization with calm eyes. He didn’t comment on Theophania’s insistence on… nicknames. “How goes your research?”

“Super duper,” came the atrociously unprofessional response, despite how two dozen of her subordinates surrounded her. None batted an eye, illuminating the severity of the situation.

Something truly had to be done about Theophania’s behavior. Her conduct reflected poorly on the Institute, but the woman predated even his previous Headmaster. While he and Aeris often disagreed, they were aligned in wanting to present a strong front to the world. This was a battle, however, that his predecessor had already lost. In several centuries of tenure, Aeris had failed utterly to curb Theophania. Lysander believed in learning from his ancestors’ mistakes, and the lesson here was clear: surrender the fight and seek victory elsewhere.

“Excellent in what way?” Lysander prompted.

“It’s been unanchored,” Theophania effused. “But without being moved! It’s right there—it’s just… gone, somehow!”

He wanted to disapprove of the indecorous, unrestrained enthusiasm in the woman’s voice, but even he found his childlike fascination sparking at the explanation. With his mind occupied with other, more important matters, he’d only superficially considered the spatial anomaly ripped into the garden annex.

Unanchored? The choice of description was no doubt deliberate. It still existed, but was set adrift yet somehow remained in place. A simplification of the principles at work, no doubt, since the magical could never be so profanely reduced into something like human language, but the broad idea could often be expressed, if nothing else.

“It is safe, though?” Lysander asked. “You’ve kept to the protocols we agreed on?”

Theophania cocked her head. She took several seconds longer than she should have to understand what Lysander meant. “Oh! Uh, yes. Definitely. Totally have.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head. Despite the woman’s absentmindedness, she’d been a leading archmage at the Institute for centuries, and hadn’t called down even a single apocalypse… which wasn’t to say she hadn’t been involved with several incidents of note. But precedent suggested that Theophania wouldn’t collapse the entire city of Meridian by foolishly forging into the unknown.

“Have you theorized any means of stitching it closed?” he asked. That was the supposed goal of their research, though he admitted he would be disappointed if that was all they learned.

“Ha! As if,” Theophania laughed. “Whoever did this makes us look like initiates, Lys. It’ll take more than a few days to catch up. Give me… at least a month. I think I can figure something out by then.”

He frowned. It had always bothered him, how uncaring Theophania seemed of their inferiority in a cosmic sense—that so many beings existed that could summon his and her greatest workings with a flick of their wrist. But Lysander was not a boy any longer, and had settled that turbulence in his mind. Mostly, at least.

“It is safe, though?” he insisted. He’d only gotten a half answer.

“Yes. I promise.” She nodded vigorously, and there was something suspicious about it, but Lysander had learned to pick his battles with this woman. He did trust her, however strange she could be. There was probably a disturbing story underneath the insistent reassurance, but he didn’t want to hear it.

I do trust her, he repeated to himself like a mantra. She is a long-term sitting archmage and knows the risks involved with studying such esoteric magic. She would not endanger the Institute.

“How was your own research?” Theophania asked hurriedly, as if to distract him, which almost broke his resolve.

“Fruitless, ultimately,” he said with a sigh. Though the condemnation was only relative to his exacting standards. He’d seen progress… maybe as much as Theophania had, comparatively. But not enough to satisfy him.

“You should get a team! It helps,” the woman replied cheerfully, as if such a thing hadn’t been suggested dozens of times before. “You can’t do everything yourself, Lys. You’re too hard on yourself.”

Lysander suppressed another sigh and opened his mouth to respond, but an arrival into the garden-annex-turned-research-facility had him cutting off and turning.

Striding in was the third of the Institute’s archmages—a man who had returned right as an emergency message from Prismarche had brought Lysander hurrying to the scrying room to deal with reports of a second breach. A man who Lysander thought still owed him many explanations.

Archmage Aeris.

And beside him, a short, ambiguously youthful demonic woman.