Mages wore no baggy robes in Belmesion. A pearl-white button shirt. A black jacket with silver-lined cuffs and lapels. A black, pleated, three-quarter skirt. Glossy outdoor shoes of black leather and reinforced soles. A decorative ribbon. Girls had more freedom of choice with their legwear, as long as the colors stayed subdued. Socks, knee-socks, thigh-highs, and such were all fine. I opted for opaque stockings, since they were closest to pants and hid the etchings. The student's year level was shown by pins worn on the jacket's left lapel, golden for class A, silvery for B, and smoky bronze for C.

  Fencers had the same uniform, with only a different insignia embroidered on the sleeve. The set included a dark overcoat, blue-gray winter parka, raincoat, and gym outfit. But the day was warm and the base uniform by itself would do.

  Then, finally—the braid and glasses. Now even more so than before, I had trouble recognizing my reflection in the locker mirror. Who was that fragile, prudish-looking creature in those excessively formal trappings? She looked more like a seamstress than a sorceress. Well, as a disguise, it was undeniably effective.

  I’d done everything I could to prepare and was ready. It was time to go.

  I picked up the flat, leathery schoolbag of notebooks and tools and left the silent room.

  At last, it was time.

  Behind the collection of main school facilities, in a round, sunny spot cleared between the trees, rose a grand arena. A high, partway roofed oval construct with a grass field and a running track sheltered in the middle. For most of the year, the arena served as a training ground for the Sword course students, but it doubled as a venue for mass events too. Such as the opening ceremony of the school year, which now drew every soul on campus to the same location.

  Students assembled on the rising rings of seats circling the central field like side dishes on a dinner plate. For many of us, this was the only opportunity in the term to see what the seniors or fellow students of the other curricula looked like. Not that they looked like anything but ordinary young adults. Very few members of other species could be seen in the otherwise varied crowd of mixed origins. As a nonhuman, you had to be an outcast of sorts to choose a human school over one for your own, and outcasts were typically not scholars.

  The seniors could be told apart mainly by the prideful, knowing looks they spared their younger, as if we were parted by a rift of eons and wisdom in equivalent measure, despite being hardly three years older, and I didn't think all of them had spent their time here well.

  I sat down among all the rest on the harsh stone benches that were covered only with a paneling of oaken boards to keep your rear from freezing off on cold days. In the field below was raised a wide, formal stage. Upon the stage gathered the faculty members to stand in tidy lines, the professors of the theoretical subjects and the combat class instructors, and others, such as the medical staff and dormitory managers, and janitors, and cooks, and lawnmowers, and everyone else.

  The group looked quite small compared to the audience, but everyone had to notice the Archmage himself was missing.

  Even as the clock drew close to nine, he wasn’t showing.

  Did he put himself above trivial events like the opening ceremony of the term?

  No. Precisely on the hour, a large shape sprang up to the bright sky and glided in circles above the arena. The more sharp-sighted students were shocked to identify the flying thing as a griffin, the symbolic beast of the school, the feathered front half and the furred back half of the hybrid beast uniformly golden and regal and unreal. The headmaster himself rode the mythical and extremely dangerous creature like a horse without a saddle or reins, clutching onto its flame-like mane with one hand, and onto his great cone hat with the other, and laughed out loud like a brat as he went.

  “Ha, ha, ha!”

  The vast wings of the griffin scooped the air, drawing lower and ruffling people’s hairdos, and its tail rent the air snapping like a whip, the ferocious flight finally coming to land on the stage before the solemn staff ranks. And when it touched down, the animal’s noble shape faded away in a spinning flurry of sparkling, golden dust, leaving the Archmage to stand alone before the lectern and the sound amplifier on it.

  The griffin had been a summoned spirit?

  No wonder. The living animals were an endangered species, and keeping one as a pet would’ve been criminal, even for an Archmage.

  Having caught everyone’s attention and awe with his showy entrance, the headmaster proceeded to regale us with a bog-standard speech about youth, fairness, the spirit sportsmanship, and the importance of perseverance in the face of adversity.

  While at it, the headmaster seized the opportunity to advertise the new magitech course and introduced Ms Asia to the school. True to herself, Ms Asia stepped forward to give the school a flirty wave, with her gaze seeking someone in the crowd, somehow finding me there among the hundreds of faces, and then deployed an air kiss with an enamouring wink. Thankfully, the students on this side couldn’t quite pinpoint who the gesture was aimed at, and I maintained a well-trained facade of absolute indifference, even as I wanted to die inside.

  Next, the directors of the Sword course and the Magic course delivered their personal greetings to their new disciples, respectively.

  The head instructor of swordsmanship was a dark southerner of few words, a veteran of the Rapatian war, former RA Major Corben Kenway. He may have not been a fairy tale hero of great powers, but I knew him by hearsay to be all-in-all competent Swordmaster and commander, whom I could bring myself to respect.

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  The thin old woman, who'd taken my mana intensity measurement, Professor Woodrow, turned out to be the director of the Magic course, and she was also the vice principal of the academy. She did look like she’d been around longest next to the Archmage himself, if not longer, and was probably one of those dreaming about retirement days already.

  In their wake, three freshman students were called onto the stage.

  The top scorers of each department.

  The best of the fencers was a sharp-looking boy of no renown, named Cassius Farren. The top mage student was also the freshman representative with the overall highest score, and a familiar face. Drusilla Hallant. Next to those two arresting figures, the short and furtive girl who’d ranked highest among General-ed students looked like she would've given her soul for an invisibility potion.

  A practiced performer, Hallant delivered a by-the-book speech about upholding the high standards of the academy and urged her co-students to seek self-improvement, like half-blaming them for having to get on the stage. But, clearly, she took being there as a given, and wouldn’t have surrendered the spot to anyone else without a fight. Who could’ve improved her personality?

  And, of course, there had to be music.

  An orchestra played the school anthem and the national anthem and select other tunes, the instruments lacking players, magically rigged to perform on their own. The students seemed exhilarated by the sight, though I couldn’t tell why. It was only a little more elaborate version of a music box, mechanically.

  I was half conscious of these events.

  The other half of me was persistently elsewhere.

  It wasn’t like me to be so distracted, but—I had a compelling reason.

  My attention was fixed on one particular figure standing among the faculty. A man dressed in the dark robes of a lecturer, a clean night-blue suit and a tie. He seemed to be in his late thirties or early forties, neither visibly old nor young, ghastly pale like a specter, with dark, world-weary eyes utterly without emotion. His back militaristically straight and shoulders broad, reflecting unfaltering composure and inner strength. His short, dark hair was brushed back, though a bit more disheveled, the color less clear, compared to my memories. The man clutched a black cane, but made a point not to visibly lean on it, even as his left leg showed a hint of stiffness when he moved, as if an old injury troubled it.

  It did look a lot like him.

  But it couldn’t have been him.

  It shouldn’t have been him.

  I had to imagine it. Seeing things. It was an illusion of some kind, induced by a superficial similarity, a hiccup in my overworked brain. Since there was no rational, understandable way to otherwise explain why and how he could be here, in this school, today. So I convinced myself I was mistaken and put that figure out of my mind.

  The opening ceremony came to a close and the arena was in short order drained of sitters. My next destination, according to the programme, was lecture hall B1 in the Arcane department, where the supervisor responsible for our class would present his or her personal introduction, and tell us about our future. No names were given on the pamphlet.

  I followed the flood of students pouring along the gently curving walkpath eastward across the fields. Going far enough, we met the familiar department building, where the stream gradually dried up, each class and year pulled their own way and absorbed by the corridors of the aged, mysterious building. Finally only a loose group of thirty walkers remained in sight, presumably going in the right direction.

  Somehow, we ended up in the room marked with the correct number too.

  It was a long but narrow lecture hall, an ambiguous energy hanging about in the standing air, dense with the memory of bygone generations and esoteric knowledge and echoes of magic too faint to have a shape. Under a nervous silence, the class B students took their seats on the sloping, tiered rows of benches under the pale lamps, and then we waited. I detested having anyone behind me, and since I could freely choose, I went and sat in the last row behind the others, where I could see the whole room, and no one could get the drop on me.

  The others dispersed here and there, very few of us acquainted beforehand. Mages were reclusive by nature.

  Above the door was an antique clock, very faintly ticking, only audible when all other sounds had stopped.

  At the precise moment the hands met 10, that man entered.

  The door flew open untouched in front of him and closed on its own after him. The man made his way in front of the loose collection of dusky blackboards and behind the teacher’s lofty dais. Soundlessly, gracefully, his walking rhythm and breathing expertly controlled but not the least bit forced. The movable blackboards, formerly a little slanted and turned here and there on their wheeled stands, all sorted themselves out with a sharp clack, aligned frame to frame.

  Making no note of the self-operating objects, the man turned to face us. And I had nowhere left to escape the truth.

  I could understand looking or dressing similarly, but who else could share such obsession with order and telekinetic control as instinctive and fluid?

  “Good morning,” the man spoke in a voice deep but smooth and without feeling. The same voice that had dictated my every action for the first four years of war with the precision of an atomic clock. “I am Professor Dietrich Couren. The supervisor of the first year class B, and lecturer on arcane theory. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  It was him.

  The man I once called “Master.”