(Immediate Conflict) Leo wasn't supposed to be here. The "CONDEMNED" signs plastered on the bolted main doors were plain enough. However, the loose floorboard in the rear of the chemistry part, the one he had found after a month of careful research, was a less noisy, more comfortable sort of mischief. It branched off into a maintenance tunnel, a black alleyway to the depths of the forgotten wing of the school. His excuse was pathetically banal: his father's silver pen. A graduation present of a man who believed that he was bringing up an engineer and not a fantasizer. Leo had lost it here yesterday, running away under the custody of one of them, and abandoning it. He couldn't go home without it. On his hands and knees, he had to work in the light of his phone as a flickering shadow over cobwebs and broken walls. The tunnel opened into what must have been the head librarian's office. It was a vault, and was ruled by an enormous, frightened oak desk and shelves sagging with water-ro

The silence in Leo's bedroom had taken on some physical form, and it was full and dense and close to the unsaid words and the phantom presence which made its home within his skull. Three days he had been playing his own life, going through the motions of school and home in a hollow-eyed fashion. The world had not yet put back its focus since his experience with the reliquary. It had just been permanently modified, as a plain piece of glass which had been marked with a subtle, unshifting frost.The UI was the frost. It was suspended on the fringes of his perception, a cluster of glittering, alien symbols which glowed of a gentle, golden light. He had been taught by trial and error, to turn a blind eye to it ever since. To see through it, as one may see through the dirty window. Yet it was always present and it was there to remind him that his reality was no longer his.And then there was the Warden. It was dumb since the broken recollection of the battlefield, a cold, alert boulder in

The infirmary door was not leading to a hallway. It led on to a vertigin balcony that stuck out on the side of a tower so elevated that the bottom of the tower had been lost in a carpet of cloudy opal swirling. Leo's stomach lurched. The air was cool and fresh, and had the smell of ozone and night-blooming flowers. In front of him, across an abyss which appeared to divide the sky itself, lay the Mage Academy in all its inconceivable splendor.It was not a building, but a system of buildings that contradicted the laws of gravity and construction. Towers of white stone rolled like the horns of unicorns, and were linked together by fine, clear bridges that glowed with energy contained within them. The Domes of crystalline lattice work fluttered with light within and complete parts of the campus were upon floating islands of rock levitating and hung with waterfalls falling down into the abyss. The sky above was a continuous, intense dusk, shot through with shimmering auroras which were no

The silence in Leo's quarters had become an entity presence, an extra wall which thrust in upon him, and smelled of his own panic and the ghostly ozone of the released power. For three days, he had been a ghost in the machine of the Academy, and a cage of gilt had been his prison. The four walls, that had seemed foreign at one time, now seemed like the only thing between him and the world that would have him listed and put away. And the new tab of the Codex, called SYSTEM LOCK: PHASE ONE BROKEN, was flashing a faint ill warning purple light at the edge of his vision, constant and aching as a wound, a reminder of the boundary he was on. Or more precisely the path that the Warden had dragged him along kicking and screaming. He repeated and repeated the scene in the Proving Grounds in a torturous circle of infinity. The sensation of that cold, disarming power unravelling out of his heart was not a warmth, was not a stream, but a dismemberment. How Jax and his magic, his presence, such a

The Echoing Well was a memory that was following Leo everywhere. The sensations of drowning and burning that he had experienced as a phantom were engraved into his nerves, a low-level hum of trauma, continually present. Power, however, accompanied the trauma. His senses were sharper. The circulation of the diffusive spirit in the halls of the Academy was now the stream of visible essence to him, the river of light which he could have almost touched with his hands. His statistics, there forever stained with that ominous pinkish hue, was his ordeal, a monument to that ghastly deal he had struck.He had already returned to an approved classroom, Applied Thaumaturgy, but was no longer that cowed initiate. He sat better, and his look was not so much terrified. The other pupils continued to avoid him openly, and they now cast a new and doubtful respect at him, as they whispered, Unmaker. Permanent scarring of Jax had become known, and the boy who had brought it about was not merely a null;