The Potions Hall–though, as the new inhabitant of this body, he had never been here before–smelled exactly as he would have expected. The bitterness of dried herbs mingled with the metallic note of reagents and the dampness of stone walls that had absorbed years of steam, smoke, and careless explosions. The worktables were arranged in even rows, each fitted with an identical set of vessels, scales, and burners. The entire room conveyed the sense of a space in which chance had been thoroughly displaced by procedure.
Mael took his place without hesitation. His body remembered the way–the distance between table and aisle, the height of the work surface where his hands were meant to rest. He reached for the apron and tied it in a single motion, careful and unhurried, as if performing a task he had repeated hundreds of times. And in fact, he had. The cauldron settled exactly where it belonged, the scale was zeroed, the ingredients laid out in their order of use. Mael watched his own hands with mild detachment, noting how steadily they moved, without tremor or pause, how they knew what to do even if he himself could not have said where that certainty came from.
“Today we’ll be preparing Clarus Mentis,” the instructor announced, without raising his voice. “It will prove useful with exams approaching–those who manage it well will find studying easier. Standard proportions. No improvisation. Follow the recipe exactly.”
A few students sighed quietly; someone turned a page in a notebook. Mael did not react. The words standard and no improvisation carried no charge for him; they were simply part of the description of reality.
He began precisely when he was supposed to. He glanced at the recipe:
1. White sage leaf – memory stabilization
2. Dried moon-mint – cooling of thought
3. Birch-bark powder – purification of intent
4. A single drop of dew gathered at dawn (Aequinoctium or Jaromir)
5. Spring water – preferably from an “uninhabited” source
Heat the water slowly until the first sound of steam appears (do not boil). Add the birch bark and stir sunwise. Add the sage and mint without stirring–allow them to sink on their own. Remove from heat. Only then add the drop of dew. Cover the vessel and leave undisturbed for fifteen minutes of silence.
He measured each ingredient precisely, without the need to recheck the scale. He stirred slowly, according to the instructions, watching the liquid in the cauldron shift from cloudy to lighter hues until it became nearly transparent. Everything proceeded correctly, predictably, exactly as it should.
And yet something was shifting–not in the process itself, but in his attention. He noticed that the sounds in the room reached him more distinctly than before: the faint clink of glass, the breathing of other students, the instructor’s footsteps moving between tables. He caught himself lifting his gaze from the cauldron for a moment, as if checking for something beyond the boundaries of his work, though he could not have said what.
He adjusted his grip on the spoon and refocused. The potion was nearly complete. All that remained was to remove the vessel from the burner and add the final ingredient at precisely the right moment. Mael executed the motion flawlessly. The liquid stabilized–smooth and clear, exactly as the instructions required.
“Good,” the instructor said, pausing at his station. “As always. No issues.”
There was no surprise or praise in the remark–only confirmation that everything was proceeding as expected.
Mael inclined his head, accepting the statement without reaction. Only after he set the cauldron aside and sat back, allowing his hands to rest on the work surface, did he realize that a quiet tension had accompanied him throughout the task–one unrelated to the risk of error or the difficulty of the assignment. The potion was correct. The procedure executed without fault. And yet it had brought no sense of inevitability.
What must once have been natural was now merely replicated correctly by a stand-in, as if the action had separated from its meaning, leaving behind a mechanically functioning structure. Mael looked down the row of cauldrons lining the hall and understood that although he stood exactly where he was supposed to stand, doing exactly what was expected of him, something in that precision no longer anchored him.
The class continued, rhythmic and orderly, and he participated without flaw, already knowing that it was in this very lack of friction that the first difference lay–a difference he could not yet name, but which he had begun to see. Assessment began with such small things.
The session ended without a sharp boundary, dissolving instead into a gradual loosening of the room’s rhythm as the instructor walked the rows, offered final remarks, and allowed the students to begin clearing their stations. Flames beneath the cauldrons went out one by one; someone set a still-warm vessel on the stone slab. In the air lingered the scent of incomplete reactions and scorched residue, far less controlled than during the brewing itself.
Mael cleaned his workstation methodically, with movements that were practiced and precise, in the same order as always–though he had the distinct impression that he was doing it with greater attentiveness than anything else so far, as if the sequence of actions were the only thing he could rely on at the moment. Only after setting aside the last vial and wiping the surface dry did he allow himself a brief glance into the depth of the room.
He saw him almost immediately. He was standing several stations away, bent over a cauldron that clearly refused to cooperate even now, when the class had officially ended. In the same instant, Mael remembered an image from before the lesson: standing with Kalis by the corridor wall, noticing the same boy approaching with someone else–taller, broader, moving with an easy confidence. They had been talking, laughing quietly, and then, just before the doors to the hall, they split without hesitation: the other boy turned down a side corridor, while he entered the room alone.
That was when Mael had assumed they weren’t in the same year–that their encounters were truly incidental, limited to shared Academy spaces. The thought had brought him a brief, almost imperceptible sense of relief, which he had accepted without reflection. Later, it would prove mistaken.
“Kieran!” a voice suddenly rang out, completely altering the tone of the room.
A girl hurried toward him like a flash of lightning, stopping right at his station, frustration written plainly across her face. Her hair was disheveled, the sleeves of her apron stained in several places, as if she had already accepted that today’s potion was beyond saving.
“It was supposed to be transparent,” she declared indignantly, pointing at her cauldron. “And it looks like a swamp. And it smells like rotten eggs. I swear I did everything exactly the way they said.”
The red-eyed boy leaned over the cauldron and sniffed without much hesitation, then grimaced and let out a quiet laugh, clearly amused.
“That’s true,” he admitted. “This isn’t a potion anymore. It’s a state of matter.”
The girl sighed heavily.
“That’s not funny.”
“It kind of is,” he replied, smiling more openly. “But if it makes you feel any better, my ingredients refused to combine at all.”
He lifted the lid of his own cauldron and held it so she could look inside. Instead of a clear liquid, there was a scorched, uneven mass fused to the bottom.
“You burned it,” she said, incredulous.
“Very much so,” he confirmed without remorse. “At some point, I just stopped fighting it.”
She looked once more at her potion, then at his cauldron, and burst out laughing–completely at odds with the gravity of the room, which only moments earlier had been filled with focused silence.
“So I’m not the worst,” she concluded with relief.
“Absolutely not,” Kieran assured her. “I think together we’ve established a whole new category of error,” he added, giving her shoulder a light pat.
Mael watched the scene from a distance, leaning lightly against his own table, pretending to check something in his notes, though his attention was wholly fixed on the two of them. He noticed that the reaction stirring in him–prompted by the girl’s laughter and the boy’s easy manner–was different from before: less abrupt, more concentrated, as if his body were no longer sounding an alarm but committing something to memory.
It wasn’t a response to failure. It was a response to being. To the way the boy accepted failure without tension, without trying to mask or justify it; to how naturally he shared it with someone else instead of hiding it behind correctness. Mael realized that it was precisely this lightness–this misalignment with the Academy’s ideal precision–that drew his attention more than the mere fact of the boy’s presence.
The girl picked up her cauldron with both hands and sighed once more, this time more calmly.
“Come on,” she said. “We need to dispose of this before it starts developing a will of its own.”
“Good idea,” Kieran agreed.
They headed for the exit together, still talking, and Mael watched them go, aware now that his earlier certainty had been an illusion. Not only were they in the same year–they were part of the same space, the same daily rhythm, which he was only just beginning to discover.
Assessment was not about finding answers.
It was about realizing how profoundly mistaken first assumptions could be.
He didn’t look away right away. He allowed himself a few extra seconds of observation, though he couldn’t have said what held him there instead of returning to his own tasks and filing this fragment of the day away among irrelevant events. The conversation he was watching concerned nothing important–no topics that demanded attention, no words worth remembering–and yet something in its course held him more firmly than any lecture had.
He noticed his shoulders loosen, just slightly, almost imperceptibly, and his breath–previously guided with intention–slipped back into a calmer rhythm on its own. There was no relief in it, no fatigue, only a brief suspension, as if his body had momentarily stopped expecting something specific and allowed itself simply to exist. More importantly, it was not the result of any imposed stabilization, like the one during breakfast.
He was simply listening to their voices, registering tone rather than content. The girl spoke quickly, with a touch of exaggeration, like someone unafraid of her own failure because she treated it as an anecdote rather than proof of incompetence. The boy answered her with an ease that was unmistakable–without trying to take control of the exchange, without correcting or instructing–as if they were moving through a space where mistakes required neither reprimand nor immediate repair.
It was something fragile, fleeting–appearing in his thoughts without warning, stripped of context, yet persistent. A lightness he could not assign to any familiar behavioral pattern, because it did not arise from precision, from advantage, or from control. On the contrary, it grew out of acceptance of failure, out of permission for something to go wrong and remain uncorrected.
He realized that the corner of his mouth had lifted, just barely–so subtly it might have been dismissed as a random muscle twitch. That small movement startled him more than the conversation itself. He didn’t remember choosing such a reaction, nor judging it necessary or appropriate. It had appeared on its own, quietly, like an answer to a question no one had asked.
He considered the feeling, trying to describe it in terms that didn’t require reaching for unfamiliar concepts. It wasn’t tenderness or interest. It wasn’t tension, nor relief. It carried no urge to act, no impulse to change anything about his behavior.
If anything, it was a brief sense of affinity with a situation he was not part of. The thought that it might be amusement came later, cautiously, like a hypothesis awaiting confirmation. He knew the definition of that state, at least in theory–amusement as a reaction to something unexpected yet harmless, to a small incongruity that carried no threat. It fit. And at the same time, it seemed too… too inconsequential to be considered important.
And that was precisely why he couldn’t dismiss it.
For the first time since the world had begun rearranging itself around him, he had felt something that demanded neither explanation nor correction. Something that required no response, no decision. It had simply happened and faded, leaving behind only the faintest trace.
Mael returned to cleaning his workstation, performing each step exactly as required, yet the awareness of that subtle shift did not leave him at once. He knew the feeling was too fleeting to build conclusions upon, and yet too distinct to be written off as chance.
Assessment, he understood, was not only about observing others. It was also about noticing the moments when something within him reacted without instruction, without coercion, and without expectation. And though he could not yet say whether it mattered, he already knew that experiences of this kind could not be completely erased from the picture of reality–even if one went to great lengths to pretend that nothing at all had happened.
⸸ * ⸸
After the potions class he had some free time, so he went to the library, which occupied the same wing of the building. The shelves rose high overhead, even and weighty, filled with volumes whose identical spines bore numbers, symbols, and dates that revealed nothing beyond their own internal order. The air smelled of dust, parchment, and old ink, and the silence here was not so much an absence of sound as a rule no one thought to challenge.
The rustle of pages, distant footsteps, an occasional cough were swallowed by the height of the space, absorbed by the shelves arranged in orderly, almost ceremonial rows. Mael moved among them slowly, as if each step required confirmation that he was indeed allowed to be there. He had the impression that this place remembered more than it was willing to reveal–and that not every question deserved an answer. He hadn’t come with a clearly defined plan or a specific inquiry. He only knew that if he was to learn anything about the life that had preceded this one, he couldn’t begin with people.
People tell stories. Books preserve facts.
He stopped at one of the side lecterns where the old registry cards were kept–handwritten, carefully maintained, even though the Academy had long since adopted more convenient systems. He ran his fingers over the thin cards, turning them with care, until he found the name he knew better than any other: Mael.
The handwriting was neat and consistent, carried on steadily over the years. The list of borrowed volumes was anything but random. Treatises on magical stabilization, dissertations on long-term spell structures, commentaries on the works of ancient masters, texts on balance between body and energy. Not a single book that could be called impulsive. Not one that suggested rebellion or curiosity beyond the sanctioned range.
He looked at the titles as one looks at traces of someone’s life–ordered, logical, without gaps. He wondered whether that person had sought answers in them, or merely confirmation of what he already knew. Whether the choices had truly been his, or simply the best possible fit for who he was meant to become.
He returned the card to its place with the same precision with which he had removed it and moved on, heading toward the older collections–where bindings were heavier and titles written in a language that demanded attention and patience.
He found one of the books almost by accident, when an image of his parents surfaced in his mind, recounting his plans for the future. The Tower of Mages–the name echoed without a clear trigger, as something he had heard often enough to recognize as important, though still empty of substance. He knew it was a place. He knew it mattered. That was enough to make it a starting point.
He located the proper section quickly. Magical architecture, training structures, pre-academic institutions. He pulled out the first volume–a heavy tome bound in dark leather–set it on one of the long tables, and opened it carefully, as though a careless motion might destroy something beyond repair.
The text was dry, factual, stripped of ornament. The Tower of Mages was described as an older-style training center, operating long before the establishment of the current academic system. A selective, demanding place, built on direct master–apprentice relationships, with an emphasis on discipline, control, and early identification of talent. It was not an open institution. Nor was it meant for everyone.
Mael read slowly, allowing the information to settle without trying to assign it immediate meaning. He learned that children admitted to the Tower showed exceptional aptitude for manipulating magic at a very early age. That the training was intense, often isolating, and that its purpose was not to discover potential but to direct it. He turned a few pages. References to graduates appeared only sporadically, usually in connection with later achievements within academic or administrative structures. Names passed through the text like points of reference–without character sketches, without personal histories. Only dates, functions, locations.
He lingered over one paragraph, reading it twice.
Graduates of the Tower demonstrate a high degree of adaptation to classificatory systems, and their later functioning within institutional structures is marked by a low incidence of deviation.
He closed the book for a moment, resting his palms flat against the cover.
There was no flash of insight, no emotional shock. Instead, there came a quiet, uncomfortable sense of alignment–like a puzzle piece sliding into place too smoothly to be coincidence. The Tower was not a memory. It was a process. Something that could shape ways of thinking, reacting, judging the world, even if the images themselves had been lost.
He reached for another volume. The more he read, the clearer the picture became: an institution that left little room for doubt or for accidental choice. The Tower of Mages did not ask who one wished to become. It taught who one ought to be. And it did so effectively–so effectively that its pupils rarely questioned the roles imposed upon them.
Mael closed the next book and looked deeper into the library, where the rows of shelves dissolved into shadow.
For the first time since he had begun searching for answers, he realized that what he was learning did not bring him any closer to himself. On the contrary–it was sketching an ever sharper outline of someone else, someone who had inhabited this body before him, someone formed by systematic training, selection, and expectation. He felt neither hostility toward that figure nor grief.
Only a growing caution. If that life had been constructed as precisely as the books suggested, then its absence was not an accidental void. It was a gap in a structure never designed to have anything removed without consequence.
Mael gathered the volumes and returned them to their places with the same care with which he had taken them down. The library accepted them without reaction, just as it accepted his presence–indifferently, according to its own order. And then he noticed something else. This book had not been marked as especially important. It rested among chronicles and myths, bearing a neutral title that revealed nothing beyond a general scope. When he opened it, he understood at once that this was no children’s legend.
It was written calmly. Almost gently. It spoke of a time when the world had not yet known the concept of balance, when magic flowed freely, responding to the emotions, ambitions, and fears of those who reached for it. In those days, three great mages ruled three regions of the world–brothers not by blood, but by choice and shared study.
The first, Aurelion, was a mage of form and order. His domain was structure, boundaries, laws that allowed people to live without fear of their own power. The second, Caelreth, wielded the magic of life and transformation–he understood the body, nature, the cycles of growth and decay, believing the world was meant to be nurtured, not subdued. The third bore the name Varyon.
The legend described him as the one who saw farther. His magic resisted simple classification, reaching into realms inaccessible to the others, allowing him to perceive what they could neither name nor comprehend. He was the first to speak of the limits of knowledge, of the illusion of control, of the cost of trying to confine the world within rules. But between the lines, Mael read something more. Varyon was overlooked. His contribution was often undervalued because it was difficult, uncomfortable, dangerous to interpret. Over time, a sense of being lesser–of being insufficient–curdled into resentment, and resentment into the belief that only a complete reordering of the world could bring true good.
The legend did not call it betrayal. It called it an error of judgment. Varyon reached for magic in a way that exceeded the limits of the human body. Fed by emotion, ambition, and anger, it began to change him. His form lost its stability until he became something else entirely–a creature of untamed force, resembling the ancient wolves of northern myth, capable of destroying entire realms in the name of “saving the world.”
When Aurelion and Caelreth understood that their brother would not retreat from anything, they formed a pact. Not to destroy him–the legend emphasized this clearly–but to preserve life, even if that preservation required the sacrifice of freedom. Together they created the Tower, a place meant to stand as guardian of balance. There they wove a long-lasting spell capable of subduing excess magic, binding the beast and drawing upon its power to spread a protective structure over the world.
The text spoke of this as an act of mercy. A choice of the lesser evil. A decision by which the world endured. In time, tools were devised–wands–that allowed people to use magic without risking the disintegration of body and mind. They were described as a blessing, a gift that made possible the rise of civilization, the Academy, and stable societies. Those who resisted this order were mentioned cautiously, without emotion–as individuals unable to adapt to the new balance, and who paid the price for that failure.
He closed the book slowly. He felt no anger, no rebellion. Instead, something like caution began to gather within him, as though he had suddenly realized that the story he had been given was coherent to an almost excessive degree. Too clean. Too logical. It left no room for the possibility that someone might have seen the world differently and not become a monster.
He looked once more at the shelves, at the hundreds of volumes standing in calm, even rows, ready to confirm any version of events that served the preservation of order. For the first time, the thought occurred to him that perhaps the former Mael had searched these books not for knowledge, but for justification. And that he himself–though he still did not know precisely what he was looking for–was beginning to understand that answers are not always what they appear to be.
He returned the book to its place and walked away without haste.
As he left, he already knew that assessment was not about reclaiming the past. It was about understanding the space he now inhabited–and how much of that space had been constructed with someone else in mind, someone he was not and did not have to become. It was uncomfortable knowledge, but for the first time, he felt that he was not entirely blind.