Chapter 242.5: Interlude Osmod

Osmod woke before dawn. He remained still for a few seconds, while next to him, Epistula shifted under the linen, one arm thrown over her eyes.“It’s early,” she groaned without moving her arm. “Bureau duty outside the Tower must agree with you.”

He closed his eyes again. There she went again, poking at a sore spot.

“It’s my new schedule,” he said as he got up and dressed. “Applicants can come in from dawn.”

Epistula’s arm lowered. Her hair was in sleep-tangled curls that might have looked cute if her face hadn’t been so pinched. “Right. The very important work of reading the signatures of farm boys who will never cast beyond a candle flame. Remind me why the Tower assigns a full mage to that duty?”

He stood and swung his legs to the floor. “You know why.”

Silence was easier than getting back into it. She did know why. Everyone did.

“We could have moved,” she said after a beat, softer. “If you’d asked Master Thold for a recommendation in Maros or Vale. Your name isn’t ruined everywhere. You were—” She bit off the rest.

He approached the stove—an old manual one, not the sleek gadgets in the tower’s apartments—and snapped his fingers, releasing a breath of mana. jumped from his thumb to his forefinger and touched the tinder beneath the stove, igniting it.

He busied himself with the kettle, the small pan, or anything else that required his hands. There were mornings to fight and mornings to retreat. This time, he chose not to get into it.

“I’m not running,” he said, measuring a spoonful of tea from the jar. “And I’m not asking for his charity again. He already did enough.”

Epistula pushed herself upright, the blanket pooling at her waist. There was a time he would have stared, amazed that someone as beautiful as she would waste her time with him. Now he just felt tired. “Four students died, Osmod. People will remember you as long as you are here. They will only forget if you leave. A decade, maybe two, and we could come back.”

“There was a Night Hunger,” he said. The pan handle creaked under his fingers, and he eased his grip. “There was nothing I could have done against a Prestige monster.”

“You were the assistant lead,” she said, with no poison in her voice this time. It hurt even more. “You signed off on the route.”

He didn’t mention that three of the four had gone back to help the fourth against his orders, and that was when the Night Hunger entered their shadows. Once it had, they were dead men walking. Leaving them behind was the only choice.

He poured water into the kettle and set it to hum with , a spell that was all utility and no artistry, and would have once been below him. He cracked two eggs into the pan and set to a low, steady burn. Epistula joined him and wordlessly flicked over yesterday’s cups.

“Take the wash with you,” she said, as he slid one egg onto her plate. “The laundry mages are going to raise prices next week; I heard it at the scriptorium. Everyone’s bleeding exam season for coppers, since they know magical ink doesn’t come off with basic spells.”

“I’ll try a before I go,” he said. “If we can save up a bit, it’d be better.”

She paused with yolk on her lip. “You’re not a maid, Osmod.”

“Cleaning spells are just as important as any other kind of magic,” he said. “It doesn’t make me less of a mage to focus on improving that skill.”

Her mouth twitched. “You’re right. You’re a very important ward clerk now. You have all the time in the world to study what you want.” Dıscover more novels at novelhall.com

He would have laughed if her tone hadn’t lodged in his chest like a splinter. He washed his plate in the basin, pressed his palm against the flat cupboard door, and let make the contents shuffle into neat rows. He had personally inscribed the sigil loop into the wood when they first moved in, back when he had yet to understand the death of his career.

Now Epistula dabbed on her cheeks to hide the long nights. He cast over his one good robe to erase last week’s wrinkles. He drew across the door to make up for the lack of wards over the building and spelled the windows shut.

They left their small apartment without looking at each other and met again on the landing because there was only one set of stairs.

“This damn district stinks in the morning,” Epistula said, wrinkling her nose at the wash of market smells rising from the lower streets. “Good luck with your farm boys.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but failed to find the words. Instead, he nodded and turned his collar up against the wind.

The city was in the midst of exam season. Tower-blue posters displayed messages like “Registration Closes in Seven Days” and “Do Not Attempt Unlicensed Casting Near the Tower Grounds.” Young people filled the bakeries near the Tower, as tired adventurers just back from a hunt, hedge-witches in their best shawls puttered about, and wealthy fools with enough retainers to imitate nobility strutted.

Someone had enchanted a sandwich cart to float, but the guards brought it down with indifferent gestures, by now more than used to the exuberance of prospective apprentices.

He bought a roll from a weathered vendor, since his breakfast no longer agreed with him, warmed it with a charm, and ate as he walked.

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Twice, he sidestepped children playing at duels with sticks. Three times, he fought the urge to correct some street-caster’s sloppy flare. That had been his instinct before the Field Exam, but it hadn’t earned him many friends then and would serve him even less now.

The auxiliary building at the base of the Tower looked modest only when compared to the spear of the Tower itself. Against everything else, it was grand like a lord’s house.

Its doors were open, and the air above them held a translucent curtain of wardlight, as a steady flow of applicants came through it.

Osmod nodded to the guard, a woman with a scar cutting down her right cheek. “Morning, Tam.”

“Morning, Osmod.” Her gaze flicked to the deep blue of his robe cuffs. She didn’t ask why he still wore them despite working here; everyone knew. “You’re in the back room?”

“Wards all day.” He forced a smile. “I have the glamorous assignment.”

“Better than watching kids all day,” she said, and he shrugged.

Inside, he found the two witches behind the desk already at their stations, identical stacks of chits waiting at their elbows, and identical bored expressions firmly in place.

“Meret. Alina,” he said.

Alina glanced up. “Osmod.” She acknowledged icily. He didn’t take it to heart. Her distant cousin was among those who died because of him.

Meret snorted into her teacup. “Don’t scare him off. If he leaves, we’ll have to read the ward returns ourselves.”

“It’s late in the window,” Osmod said, leaning his elbows against the desk. “Anyone half-decent should have registered weeks ago.”

“We say that every year,” Alina replied. “And every year at least one promising candidate breezes in three hours before closing.”

Meret tapped a manicured finger against the counter. “Ten coppers says not this year.”

“Ten says we get one today,” Alina said. “I like drama.”

Osmod smiled despite himself as he left. “I’ll see you for lunch.”

The ward-room wasn’t much to look at: a long space with an iron table, three viewing panes, two carved stone half-circles in the floor, and his chair. Above, layered spells hung with fine meshes of constraint and scrying, making even senior mages cautious to probe too deeply.

He touched the main ring of the interface and felt the familiar prickling of the building’s power waking up to his presence.

For the first hour, nothing unusual happened. He set the returns to scroll on the left and opened his notebook on the right. Each applicant passing through appeared as a thin color band with annotations of their age estimate, mana reserves, channel coherence, and signature complexity. He added names when Meret and Alina sent them.

“Vashti Olan,” he muttered quietly, observing her band wash in at medium brightness. “Stable channels, Water affinity, decent reserves… low-tier specialist, minor combat potential.”

A boy whose signature wobbled like a drunk caused the panes to jitter. “Too much natural flow,” Osmod muttered. “No discipline at all in that one. Might be worth it, medium potential, high risk.”

He marked three as “decent non-combat specialists” and six as “unlikely to pass.” One, a middle-aged man with a respectable amount of mana for an adult mage, he noted as “already trained, worth it only depending on background.”

The work wasn’t nothing. It was what kept the Tower running. But it was also the kind of thing you gave a mage who needed to stay out of the spotlight, but didn’t want completely gone. Thold’s generosity could only extend so far, after all.

Around midmorning, the wards bucked under his hands.

Osmod snapped upright. The panes flashed brightly enough to leave an afterimage in his retina, and the data that came in displayed symbols he hadn’t ever seen.

“What did you see?” he asked the air, trying to pull the loose data together.

Three bodies had crossed the threshold. Two warm signatures registered normally; a boy with a solid martial presence, and a girl whose mana was developed enough to suggest training, but not in the traditional fields. The third was a void.

“That isn’t right,” he muttered.

He checked the capture again. The primary layer had recorded something as the group entered: a smoothness, a perfectly trimmed line where there should have been fuzz. The reading should have outlined itself into a general silhouette from that moving presence, but when the ward looked directly, there was nothing to see.

He stopped his hands from moving too quickly and followed protocol, telling the secondary net to wake up. There was no reason to waste the Tower’s magic on most prospects, but for spoofers, nulls, and darker things that triggered the old alarms, it was necessary.

The room cooled as the deeper wards activated. The returns poured in as fractals of energy displayed as slow-moving light. The two normals became clearer, showing the boy’s channels, heavy along his forearms and spine like any good knight, while the girl’s aura revealed itself to be of a servant class. The third remained unseen, but some colors around it became clearer.

“Not a demon,” Osmod sighed in relief to an empty room. “It must be a prestige artifact, or an equivalent skill.”

If it was an artifact, it was the kind that only high nobility could afford. If it were a skill…

He watched the group move to the end of the line and the void ignore every secondary attempt to scry it.

He stayed still until the void approached Meret’s desk. When the slip with his name was filled out, Osmod hurriedly left the control room and grabbed it.

“Nicholas Crowley,” he read. “Wolfram Manor.” He blinked. “Crowley.”

Not one of the great houses. Wolfram Manor explained the martial boy, as an apprentice to the old monster would seem like a veteran despite his youth. It didn’t explain a null.

Either the kid had an item he shouldn't have, since Prestige-tier artifacts sometimes slipped through the cracks when old families fell apart, and he could think of a couple in the last decade, or he was a kind of talent Osmod once believed himself to be, before reality struck him.

Names mattered in the Tower. So did timely favors. Thold had shaved off the worst of Osmod’s consequences after the Field Exam by arguing that specialized work kept him out of trouble and made good use of a sharp mind for wards. Such a favor would have to be repaid.

Osmod slipped the chit into his pocket and nodded toward the tower. “I’ll be back,” he said, ignoring the money exchanging hands behind him.

He cut across the public hall, through the inner door, and out into the shadow of the Tower, following the curve of the wall until he reached the staff entrance and pressed his palm against the shallow bowl of the verifier.

The cold shock ran up his arm, felt like it touched his bones, and let him in with a reluctant click. He no longer carried an inner badge, as it had been cut cleanly and officially the week after the report, but he was still a tower mage.

“Business?” the guard at the desk asked.

“Delivery for Master Thold,” Osmod said. He didn’t say it was his sponsor. You never said sponsor out loud in the Tower.

The guard waved him on without interest.

The Tower’s elevators were old, stylish, and unpredictable. They were cages of brass and chalk with bells that announced floors in a clear, human voice. What madman had lent their voice was a mystery only those inducted into Artificing knew.

Osmod stepped into the nearest cage and swallowed his impatience as it ascended. Floor ten: “Administrative Offices.” Floor twenty: “General Instruction.” Floor thirty: “Private Instruction—Authorization Required.”

The cage door rattled open when he pressed his old plaque against the small reader beside the handle. Thold’s code still worked.

“Again,” he heard his Master rumble. “But this time, increase your output with the command, not after. Mana doesn’t know your intentions after the spell forms; it reads the little you give it before.”

Osmod stood in the doorway and felt jealousy wash over him. Six young faces turned toward him, and the oldest looked to be about nineteen. These were the lucky few who were allowed into an Archmage’s private lessons, the future of the Tower.

Thold looked up last, and his eyebrows crawled up in surprise. Osmod was suddenly aware of the fact that he’d run in his work robe, that his hair was a mess, and that he’d broken three unspoken rules by interrupting a lesson.

“Osmod,” Thold said, not sending him away.

“I got one,” Osmod replied, and heard the breathless edge to his own voice with something like embarrassment. He held out the folded paper. “An anomalous return. I thought you would want to see it.”

Thold took the chit, looked at the name, then read the attached comments carefully. Osmod watched the man’s face tighten as he thought and felt a knot form in his stomach. If he had misunderstood the situation…

“Well,” Thold murmured after a moment. “That’s interesting.”

Osmod couldn’t have stopped his smile from forming even if he’d tried.