Chapter 1: The Gates of Arcanum

Killian Thorne arrived at the Arcanum Academy hauling a single worn duffel bag through the ornate gates.

They were massive, those gates, made of some dark metal that seemed to drink the morning light. The intricate swirls and runes etched into the surface probably meant something profound, but to Killian they just looked like fancy scratches. He adjusted his grip on the duffel’s strap, the coarse fabric familiar against his palm. The bag contained everything he owned: two changes of clothes, a roll of tools from his old life, and the folded parchment of his acceptance letter. That letter was the only reason he wasn’t currently hauling scrap metal in the Gutters. He still couldn’t quite believe it had worked.

Beyond the gates, the academy sprawled across a manicured hillside. Towers of pale, impossibly smooth stone pierced the sky, connected by arching bridges that looked too delicate to hold weight. Windows shimmered with faint, shifting colors. It was clean. Unnaturally so. In the Gutters, everything wore a permanent layer of grime and soot. Here, the very air smelled faintly of ozone and cut grass, with no underlying stench of rot or sewage. It made his skin prickle.

Students in elegant robes of deep blue and silver drifted across the grounds. Some walked in pairs, chatting quietly. Others moved alone, their fingers tracing patterns in the air that left brief trails of light. A girl with fiery red hair sat cross-legged on a patch of lawn, a small cloud of glowing butterflies orbiting her head. Killian kept his expression neutral, though internally he was cataloging it all. The movements. The focus. The complete lack of anyone who looked like they’d ever missed a meal or done a real day’s labor.

A man in simpler grey robes stood by a stone plinth just inside the gate. He held a slate that flickered with names. Killian approached, trying to mimic the unhurried pace of the other arrivals.

“Name?” the man asked without looking up.

“Killian Thorne.”

The man’s finger traced down the slate. It stopped. He looked up, his eyes scanning Killian from his worn boots to his plain, sturdy tunic—clothes meant for durability, not decoration. A flicker of something passed over his face. Confusion, mostly.

“Thorne,” the man repeated. He tapped the slate. “First-year. Provisional admittance.” He said ‘provisional’ like it was a disease. “Your orientation packet is at the Hall of Echoes, but dorm assignments are active now.” He pointed a bony finger toward the tallest of the spires, its peak lost in a wisp of cloud. “The Argent Spire. Room 47. The door will recognize your aura.”

Killian just nodded, grabbing the duffel again. Aura. Right.

He started walking toward the spire, acutely aware of the duffel bag’s presence. Everyone else seemed to have their belongings floating along behind them in polished trunks or woven baskets that bobbed gently a foot off the ground. One boy had a stack of books trailing him like obedient ducks. Killian’s method—carrying it—suddenly felt incredibly loud and physical.

The path to the Argent Spire was paved with cobblestones that were warm underfoot despite the shade. As he walked, he passed a courtyard where a fountain played. The water didn’t just fall; it sculpted itself into fleeting shapes—a bird, a flower, a dancing figure—before dissolving back into the basin with a musical chime. A group of students laughed nearby, and one of them casually flicked a wrist toward a stray leaf skittering across the stones. The leaf burst into harmless purple flame and vanished without smoke.

This was their normal. His plan, which had seemed so solid back in his tiny rented room in the Gutters, now felt like a sheet of glass balanced on his nose. One wrong move and everything would shatter.

The Argent Spire loomed larger as he approached. Close up, he could see the stone wasn’t just smooth; it was seamless, as if the entire tower had been grown rather than built. The main entrance was an archway twice his height, filled with a shimmering, opaque veil of silver light. Students walked through it without breaking stride, the light parting around them like water.

Killian hesitated for only a second at the threshold. If this was some kind of magical scanner, he was already finished. But turning back wasn’t an option. He tightened his grip on his bag and stepped forward.

The silver light washed over him. It felt like walking through a cool, static mist. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the light faded, and he was standing in a vast circular lobby. The interior walls were the same pale stone, illuminated by glowing orbs that drifted lazily near the high ceiling. A grand staircase spiraled upwards along the outer wall.

Room 47.

He found the stairs and began to climb. His legs, strong from years of hauling and climbing in the Gutters, barely felt the ascent, but he made a point of breathing a little heavily when other students passed him going down. Better to look unfit than suspiciously robust.

The doors lining the curved hallway were made of dark wood, each bearing a brass number that glowed with a soft blue light. Forty-seven was about halfway up. The door looked like all the others. He reached for the handle, then remembered what the man at the gate had said. The door will recognize your aura.

He had no aura. That was the whole problem.

Slowly, he placed his hand flat against the cool wood near the handle, half-expecting a shock or an alarm. Nothing happened for three long seconds. Then, with a soft click, the brass number 47 flared brighter for a moment before dimming back to its usual glow. The door unlocked itself.

Killian let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The letter must have keyed him into whatever security magic they used here. A clerical error of cosmic proportions, indeed.

He pushed the door open.

Inside, Killian found his roommate.

The room was larger than he’d expected, split into two distinct halves by a shared sitting area with a low table and two upholstered chairs. One side was already lived-in: books stacked in precarious towers on a desk, robes neatly hung on a stand, a small glass sphere on the nightstand pulsing with a slow, sleepy light.

The other side was bare, awaiting him.

His roommate occupied the lived-in side. He was hunched over at his desk, his back to the door, completely focused on a thick leather-bound book that hovered shakily in the air about three feet in front of him.

The book wasn’t resting on anything. It just hung there, trembling like a leaf in a breeze. It was open to a page dense with tiny script and complex diagrams that seemed to squirm if you looked at them too directly.

Elian—Killian would learn his name soon enough—was muttering under his breath. The words were low and guttural, full of sharp consonants and elongated vowels that didn’t sound like any language from the Gutters. His brow was furrowed in concentration, deep lines etched between his eyebrows. One hand was extended toward the book, his fingers curled slightly as if holding an invisible tether. With his other hand, he made minute adjustments in the air, his index finger tracing counter-curves to some pattern only he could see.

He was trying to stabilize the book’s flight. That much was obvious even to someone who’d never seen magic before. The book would dip suddenly toward the floor, and Elian’s muttering would intensify, his gestures becoming more frantic until it wobbled back up to its original height. Then it would tilt sideways, threatening to spin or slam into the wall, and he’d have to correct again with a swift chopping motion.

It was hard work, clearly. A sheen of sweat glistened at Elian’s temples despite the room’s cool temperature. His shoulders were tense knots under his fine linen shirt.

Killian stood just inside the doorway, his duffel bag still in hand, watching this private struggle. This was what real magic looked like up close: not effortless grandeur, but intense, exhausting focus. It looked like someone trying to balance a bucket of water on a stick while reciting poetry backwards.

He didn’t move or speak, not yet. He just watched as Elian wrestled with the levitating book, muttering his complex incantation through gritted teeth, trying to force the unruly object to obey.

The book dipped violently toward the edge of the desk. Elian’s hand shot out, fingers splayed, and he barked a sharp syllable that sounded like “Keth!” The book jerked to a halt, its leather cover now just a hair’s breadth from colliding with a precarious stack of parchment. For a moment, it hung there, trembling.

Then, instead of righting itself, it began to spin. Slowly at first, then with increasing speed, it turned in a wobbly, unstable circle. The pages fluttered, threatening to snap shut or tear. Elian gestured frantically with both hands now, his incantation rising in pitch as he tried to arrest the motion. His efforts only seemed to make it worse. The spinning circle widened, the book’s path becoming a drunken ellipse that brought it dangerously close to his own head. He ducked instinctively, his concentration visibly shattering.

That’s when he noticed he wasn’t alone.

His eyes, wide with the effort of magical control, flicked past the spinning book and landed on Killian standing silently in the doorway. The surprise was total. Elian’s muttered stream of arcane words cut off mid-syllable.

The immediate effect on the book was dramatic. The erratic spinning stopped as if it had hit a wall. For one suspended second, the heavy tome just hung in the air. Then, with the suddenness of a dropped stone, it fell.

It only dropped about six inches before Elian, reacting with a speed that spoke of panic, snapped his fingers and hissed a single word: “Astrum!”

A faint blue shimmer, like heat haze, flashed beneath the book. It landed on this cushion of force with a soft thump rather than a crash. It settled there, hovering shakily about desk-level, as Elian let out a shaky breath. He kept one hand vaguely pointed at it, maintaining the simple sustaining spell, while he turned his full attention to his new roommate.

“Oh!” Elian said, blinking rapidly. He straightened up, running a hand through his hair, which was a light brown and stuck up in places from where he’d been gripping it earlier. He had a narrow, intelligent face, currently flushed with exertion and embarrassment. “You’re here. I didn’t hear you come in.”

Killian finally stepped fully into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him with a soft click. “The door let me in,” he said, stating the obvious as a way to buy time. He set his duffel bag down on the bare stone floor by the empty bed. It looked profoundly out of place.

“Yes, of course it would,” Elian said. He made a subtle curling motion with his finger, and the book drifted sideways to land with a more definitive thud on his desk. The blue shimmer vanished. He turned to face Killian properly, offering a slightly strained but polite smile. “I’m Elian. Elian Voss. I suppose we’re to be roommates.”

“Killian,” he replied. He didn’t offer a last name. In the Gutters, surnames were fluid things, often just descriptors of your alley or your trade. ‘Thorne’ was one he’d chosen himself.

“A pleasure,” Elian said automatically. His gaze drifted past Killian to the solitary duffel bag, then back to his face. The polite curiosity in his eyes was already mingling with something else—the analytical look of someone used to solving puzzles. Killian had seen that look before on scrap merchants assessing a piece of metal for its true worth.

Elian gestured vaguely toward the now-quiescent book. “Apologies for the… spectacle. I was practicing.” He said it like someone might admit to practicing the violin late at night. “Third-year Applied Kinetics. The multi-axis sustained levitation charm. It’s supposed to be for extra credit in Professor Lorrimer’s seminar, but frankly, it’s proving more stubborn than the treatise on metaphysical resonance I annotated last week.” He sighed, a sound of genuine academic frustration. “The theory is elegantly simple: you create a self-reinforcing lattice of telekinetic energy that operates on three separate planes of motion. The execution, however, feels like trying to pat your head, rub your stomach, and recite the periodic table of elemental affinities all at once.”

Killian listened, understanding about one word in three. Lattice. Telekinetic. Planes of motion. He nodded slowly, as if following along. “Looks tricky,” he offered. It was a safe thing to say.

“Tricky is one word for it,” Elian said with a dry laugh. He leaned back against his desk, finally relaxing out of his earlier tension. “Most of my cohort won’t even attempt it until next term. But Professor Lorrimer implied that mastery of this before the mid-term assessments would ‘demonstrate exceptional proactive scholarship.’” He said the last part in a passable imitation of a stuffy, older man’s voice.

He was studying Killian now more openly, taking in the worn clothes, the calloused hands resting at his sides, the posture that was more ready for a fight than for a lecture. The other students Killian had seen moved with a certain graceful awareness of their own space. Killian just occupied his.

“So,” Elian began again, folding his arms. His tone was still friendly, but the curiosity was sharpening into a direct question. “Now that my disastrous studying has been thoroughly showcased, what about you? What’s your focus? Everyone comes in with some inclination or another.” He tilted his head slightly. “Elemental manipulation? That’s always popular—though I find it a bit brutish, personally. Illusion? That requires fantastic subtlety. Or perhaps something more scholarly? Abjuration? Divination?”

He paused, waiting for an answer. The question hung in the air between them: What is your magical specialty?

Killian had known this moment would come from the second he’d forged his application papers. He’d rehearsed answers in the mirror of his rented room back in the Gutters. None of those rehearsals had accounted for actually standing in a magical dormitory after watching real magic fail.

He kept his face still, a skill honed from years of dealing with gutter bosses and city guards who could smell weakness like blood in water. He couldn’t claim anything too flashy or specific—he’d be expected to demonstrate it eventually.

“I have a more… practical approach,” Killian said finally. The words came out flat, neutral.

Elian’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. “Practical?” he echoed. “That’s an interesting descriptor. Practical how?”

Killian shrugged one shoulder, a movement that felt too coarse for this room of soft fabrics and floating lights. “Less theory. More getting things done.” He needed to steer this away from himself before Elian could ask for a practical example right now. His eyes fell on the leather-bound book on the desk—the source of all the recent trouble. A prop. A distraction. “That the book you were working with?” he asked, nodding toward it.

Elian followed his gaze, momentarily thrown by the sudden shift in topic. “Oh. Yes. Arcane Principles of Kinetic Force, seventh revised edition by Archmage Valerius.” He said the title with automatic reverence.

“Can I see it?” Killian asked.

The request seemed to confuse Elian further. Asking to see a book someone had just been magically levitating was evidently not standard post-failure protocol here.

“See it?” Elian repeated. “Of course, I suppose.” He glanced from Killian to the book and back again. A slight frown appeared on his forehead as he tried to parse the request through his own magical framework. Perhaps this new roommate wanted to examine the runic diagrams? Check the publisher’s sigil for enchantment quality? “Do you have an interest in Valerius’s foundational theorems? His work on force distribution is considered seminal, though modern applications have moved beyond some of his more rigid—”

“Just want to see it,” Killian interrupted smoothly.

Elian blinked, then gave a small shrug of acquiescence. “Alright then.”

He didn’t walk over and hand it to him. That would have been too simple, too mundane for this place. Instead, he turned back toward the desk and raised his hand again, his expression shifting back into one of focus.

“This is considerably easier than the multi-axis sustain,” he explained as his fingers began tracing an airy pattern Killian couldn't quite follow from this angle. “A simple unidirectional telekinetic transfer.”

The book on the desk shuddered once and then lifted off the wooden surface again. This time its motion was smoother, more controlled—a straight line rather than a chaotic spin or wobble. It floated through the air between them at about walking pace, turning slowly so that its spine faced Killian as it approached him like an obedient pet.

Elian watched its progress with a look of quiet satisfaction; this was basic magic for him, something he could do without breaking a sweat.

Killian watched it come closer—this heavy object moving through empty space with nothing but willpower holding it aloft.

The book reached him and stopped, hovering expectantly at chest height.

Killian reached out with his right hand—the one with knuckles scarred from old scrapes and impacts—and simply plucked it from the air where it hung.

His fingers closed around the thick leather spine.

He felt its solid weight settle into his palm.

The moment he took hold of it, any sustaining magic from Elian was obviously severed; there was no resistance at all.

Elian stared as Killian held the heavy tome casually in one hand as if testing its heft before shifting his grip.

Then Killian did something else entirely.

He flipped the closed book up into the air above him using just his wrist—a smooth toss that sent it spinning once—and then extended his index finger directly underneath its descending path.

The book dropped squarely onto the tip of his finger.

It landed perfectly balanced on its spine-end atop that single finger point where he stood firmly planted without even seeming to concentrate on keeping it steady there at all while looking directly at Elian across from him now wearing an expression rapidly shifting from polite confusion into something else entirely dawning horror because he finally understood what should have been impossible here inside their room warded against non-magical interference specifically designed so nobody could ever just walk up and grab anything out of midair like that unless they had truly powerful magic overriding everything else which meant—

But before Elian could whisper anything about wards or implications or cosmic errors—

Before that realization could fully form into words—

Killian tilted his finger slightly letting Arcane Principles slide down into his waiting palm where he caught it neatly without ever breaking eye contact with him either

“See it?” Elian repeated. The request seemed to confuse him further. Asking to see a book someone had just been magically levitating was evidently not standard post-failure protocol here. “Of course, I suppose.” He glanced from Killian to the book and back again. A slight frown appeared on his forehead as he tried to parse the request through his own magical framework. Perhaps this new roommate wanted to examine the runic diagrams? Check the publisher’s sigil for enchantment quality? “Do you have an interest in Valerius’s foundational theorems? His work on force distribution is considered seminal, though modern applications have moved beyond some of his more rigid—”

“Just want to see it,” Killian interrupted smoothly. He kept his voice even, betraying nothing of the calculation behind the request. He needed to steer this away from questions about his magic, and the book was a tangible object, a thing he could interact with in a way that felt normal to him. Watching it float was making his skin crawl with the sheer wrongness of his situation.

Elian blinked, then gave a small shrug of acquiescence. “Alright then.”

He didn’t walk over and hand it to him. That would have been too simple, too mundane for this place. Instead, he turned back toward the desk and raised his hand again, his expression shifting back into one of focus.

“This is considerably easier than the multi-axis sustain,” he explained, as if Killian had asked for a demonstration. His fingers began tracing an airy pattern—a lazy circle that ended in a gentle pushing motion. “A simple unidirectional telekinetic transfer. First-year stuff, really, but reliable.”

The book on the desk shuddered once and then lifted off the wooden surface. This time its motion was smoother, more controlled—a straight line rather than a chaotic spin or wobble. It floated through the air between them at about walking pace, turning slowly so that its spine faced Killian as it approached him like an obedient pet. The pages ruffled slightly in its own breeze.

Elian watched its progress with a look of quiet satisfaction; this was basic magic for him, something he could do without breaking a sweat. A tiny display of competence to make up for the earlier fiasco.

Killian watched it come closer—this heavy object moving through empty space with nothing but willpower holding it aloft. He could see the individual scuffs on the dark leather cover now, the gilt lettering that had faded in spots. It was just a book. A heavy one, probably five pounds if it was an ounce, but still just a thing made of dead tree and cowhide.

The book reached him and stopped, hovering expectantly at chest height. It hung there, suspended in the cool, still air of the dorm room.

Killian didn’t hesitate. He reached out with his right hand—the one with knuckles scarred from old scrapes and impacts, the one that had hauled crates and worked pry-bars—and simply plucked it from the air where it hung.

His fingers closed around the thick leather spine.

He felt its solid weight settle into his palm, a familiar, grounding sensation.

The moment he took hold of it, any sustaining magic from Elian was obviously severed; there was no resistance at all, no lingering tingle of energy. The book became inert matter in his grip.

Elian stared, his polite smile frozen in place. The expected next step would have been for Killian to perhaps open the book, to comment on a diagram or the weight of the paper. What happened instead made Elian’s breath catch in his throat.

Killian, feigning a nonchalance he absolutely did not feel, flipped the closed book up into the air above him using just his wrist—a smooth, practiced toss that sent it spinning once in a tight barrel roll. He wasn’t showing off; this was a test, a way to feel the object’s balance and center of mass in motion, something he’d done a thousand times with tools or scrap metal to judge their worth.

Then, as the book descended, he extended his index finger directly underneath its path.

It wasn’t a trick. It was physics and muscle memory. The book dropped squarely onto the tip of his finger, landing perfectly balanced on its spine-end. It stood there, improbably upright on that single point of contact, as steady as if it were glued. Killian held his arm perfectly still, his posture relaxed. He’d balanced heavier things on narrower edges while perched on unstable beams forty feet above the Gutters’ muddy streets.

He looked directly at Elian across from him.

For three full seconds, Elian’s face remained a mask of polite confusion. His brain was trying to process the sequence: the request, the levitation, the interception, the… balancing act. It was so utterly outside any magical context that his mind stuttered, searching for a category to file it under. A party trick? Some form of kinetic manipulation he’d never seen?

Then his eyes darted to Killian’s hand—the scarred, work-rough hand holding all that weight steady on one finger—and then to the book itself, and then to the empty space between them where his telekinetic thread had been so cleanly severed.

The color drained from Elian’s face.

His lips parted slightly.

“You…” he began, his voice dropping to a hushed whisper barely audible across the room. It wasn’t fear yet. It was the pure, cold shock of a paradigm shattering. “You just… took it.”

Killian said nothing. He kept the book balanced.

Elian’s gaze snapped to the door, then to the walls of their room, as if seeing them for the first time. “The ward,” he whispered, the words tinged with dawning horror. “The room ward… it’s an anti-tampering field. A basic one, but… it should have stopped you.”

He was talking more to himself than to Killian now, his mind racing through arcane regulations and academy safety protocols. “It prevents non-consensual magical interference with another student’s belongings or spells within personal quarters. It’s supposed to… if you try to grab something someone else is levitating magically, the ward creates a feedback resistance. It jams.” He looked back at Killian, his eyes wide. “It should have felt like grabbing a live wire wrapped in sandpaper. You shouldn’t have been able to close your hand.”

But Killian had. Effortlessly.

The implication settled over Elian like a physical weight. There were only two explanations for bypassing a simple anti-tampering ward so completely. One was possessing such overwhelming, master-level power that you could simply ignore low-level enchantments—the kind of power an archmage might wield casually. The other…

The other was having no magical signature at all.

No aura to trigger the ward’s reactive protocols. No active spellcraft for it to resist against. You would just be… a physical object interacting with another physical object. The ward wouldn’t even register you as a participant in a magical event.

Elian stared at the boy from the Gutters with the single duffel bag, now balancing a seventh revised edition on his finger as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

A student at the Arcanum Academy with no magical ability wasn’t just improbable; it was an ontological contradiction. It violated the foundational premise of the entire institution. It was like finding a fish enrolled in a flight school.

“Oh,” Elian breathed out, the single syllable loaded with a world of terrified understanding. “Oh, no.”

Killian finally moved. With a faint, almost imperceptible twitch of his finger, he tipped the book off its perch and caught it flat in his palm. He held it out toward Elian, offering it back.

“Seems like a solid book,” he said, his voice still flat, still calm.

Elian didn’t take it. He just stood there, looking from the offered book to Killian’s face, his own expression a turmoil of academic shock and burgeoning panic. The silence in Room 47 of the Argent Spire became very deep, and very heavy.