Chapter 2: The Anomaly in Room 47

The silence that followed Elian’s “Oh, no” wasn’t empty. It filled the space between them with a thick, tangible pressure. Killian held the book out, his arm steady, offering it back like a peace offering made of leather and bad decisions. Elian didn’t move to take it. He just stood there, his face pale under the soft glow of the drifting room orbs, his eyes fixed on Killian with an expression that had moved past horror into a kind of academic paralysis.

Killian let his arm drop after a moment, placing the heavy tome on the low table between their beds with a soft thud. The sound was too loud in the quiet. He straightened up, rolling his shoulders once in a motion that was more habit than anything, a way to settle himself. He watched Elian, reading the minute shifts in his expression—the widening of the eyes, the slight part of the lips, the way his fingers twitched at his sides as if itching to grab a quill and start taking notes on this catastrophe.

The next move was obvious. Killian had played out this scenario in his head a dozen times since mailing the forged application, though he’d always imagined a furious professor or a sneering noble catching him, not this wiry, sweat-damp student who’d been struggling with a floating textbook. The outcome was usually the same. He needed to know which direction this was going to go, and quickly.

“So,” Killian said. His voice was calm, flat, giving away nothing. It was the same tone he’d used to negotiate scrap prices with merchants who thought they could cheat a gutter-rat. “Are you going to report me to the faculty?”

Elian flinched as if the words were physical things thrown at him. His gaze snapped from Killian’s face to the door, then back again. “Report you,” he repeated, the words hollow. He wasn’t asking a question. He was testing the concept, turning it over in his mind to see how it fit.

“That’s generally what people do when they find a fraud,” Killian said. He kept his hands loose at his sides, ready but not threatening. A fight here would be pointless, but old habits died hard. “Call the authorities. Get the impostor tossed out. Maybe collect a reward for civic duty, I don’t know how it works here.”

“A fraud,” Elian whispered. He took a step backward until his legs hit the edge of his desk. He leaned against it for support, his mind visibly churning behind his eyes. “You’re not… you’re not a fraud. Not in the way you mean. A fraud implies you have some magic and are pretending it’s more or different. You have… none.”

He said it with the stunned reverence of an astronomer discovering a hole in the sky where a star should be. “Absolute zero aptitude. It’s theoretically possible, mentioned in some of the older metaphysical disquisitions as a philosophical curiosity, like a square circle. But it’s never been documented. Not in a living person. The screening alone… the Aura-Scry at the gates…” He trailed off, his eyes darting to Killian as if seeing him for the first time all over again.

Killian waited, letting him talk it out. Sometimes when people were busy thinking aloud, they forgot to act.

“The ward,” Elian continued, his voice gaining a thread of frantic energy. “You bypassed the room’s anti-tampering ward. That’s a Class One personal-space enchantment. Standard issue for all dormitories. It’s woven into the stonework.” He gestured vaguely at the walls of pale, seamless stone. “Its primary function is to prevent magical interference—stopping someone from remotely unraveling your wards or hijacking your levitation spells. But it has a secondary reactive layer.”

He pushed off from the desk, beginning to pace a short, tight line in front of his book stacks. This was clearly more comfortable territory for him: explaining arcane mechanics. “If you physically attempt to interfere with an ongoing magical effect that isn’t your own—like grabbing a book I’m telekinetically holding—the ward senses the clash of intentional fields. It’s supposed to generate a dissonance field around the object. A kind of magical friction.” He stopped pacing and looked straight at Killian. “It should have repelled your hand. At the very least, it should have felt like trying to grip a spinning blade wrapped in thorns.”

“It felt like grabbing a book,” Killian said.

“Exactly!” Elian exclaimed, then immediately lowered his voice, glancing nervously at the door as if someone might be listening through the enchanted wood. “Exactly. Because there was no clash. No intentional magical field from you for it to react against. You weren’t performing magic. You were just… performing an action. The ward is designed to detect and counter magical aggression. It isn’t programmed to care about mundane physics.” He ran a hand through his hair again, making it stick up even more. “It would be like setting a mousetrap for a specific spectral vermin and having a regular, non-magical mouse walk right over it. The trap doesn’t even recognize it as a target.”

The implications were unfolding in Elian’s mind like a cursed scroll, each revelation worse than the last. “The gate veil,” he muttered, almost to himself now. “It’s an identification and purification filter. It reads the incoming magical signature and matches it to the admission ledger. If there’s no signature to read…” He looked at Killian with dawning understanding. “It would default to a null reading. And if your name was on the ledger through some… error… it would just log a null entry as ‘verified’ and let you pass. No alarms. Because why would there be? Who would ever try to enter the Arcanum Academy without magic? It’s not a security flaw; it’s an impossibility.”

He stopped talking abruptly, his breath coming a little faster. The full scope of the situation was settling onto his shoulders. A student with zero magic was inside the most secure magical institution in the realm. He had walked through every ward and enchantment designed to keep out malicious forces or unauthorized beings, not because he was powerful enough to break them, but because he was fundamentally invisible to them. He was a ghost in the machine, a hole in reality where magic should be.

The horror of that was profound, honestly. Elian thought of the Grand Repository below the library, protected by wards that would incinerate any non-authorized aura on contact. He thought of the Dueling Chambers where spells were regulated by fairness enchantments that monitored magical output. He thought of the simple attendance charms professors used that registered a student’s unique magical presence in class. Killian would be a blank space in all of them. An error code walking around in boots.

This was beyond expulsion. This was a systemic failure of cosmic proportions. If discovered, the inquiry wouldn’t stop with Killian. It would go back through admissions, through archival enchantments, through whoever had processed that fateful letter. Heads would roll, metaphysically and possibly literally if Head Archmage Valerius was in one of his moods. And Elian, as the roommate who discovered it, would be at the center of the maelstrom. His academic record, his future prospects—all of it would be drowned in scandal and relentless questioning.

A cold knot of pure dread tightened in Elian’s stomach.

Then, cutting through that cold horror like a shaft of light through dirty glass, came another feeling.

It started as a tiny spark somewhere in the back of his brain, the part that stayed up late annotating theoretical treatises and designing experiments to test obscure magical postulates. The part that got excited about anomalies.

He looked at Killian—really looked at him—not as a fraud or a disaster, but as a phenomenon.

Here was a living subject who represented something every magical theorist since the founding of the Arcanum had dismissed as a logical absurdity: true magical nullity. What did that do to ambient mana fields? How did enchantments keyed to aura recognition behave in his prolonged presence? Could he walk through more complex wards? Was his nullity passive or could it actively disrupt spells on contact? The questions bubbled up in Elian’s mind one after another, each more fascinating than the last.

The horror was still there, cold and real. But now it was tangled up with something else—a fierce, burning curiosity that felt almost like hunger.

His eyes lost their glassy shock and sharpened with focus. He stopped seeing a roommate who would get him expelled and started seeing a walking research paper of unprecedented scope.

“Oh,” Elian said again, but this time the syllable held a different quality. Less terror, more awe-struck revelation.

The impossible anomaly was standing right in front of him, waiting to see what he would do next.

The two impulses—self-preservation and intellectual greed—warred in Elian’s head for about three seconds. Self-preservation was screaming about expulsion, scandal, and potentially sharing a cell in the spectral prisons if he was found complicit in this madness. Intellectual greed was whispering about groundbreaking research, about having exclusive access to the most unique magical subject in recorded history, about the papers he could write that would make Archmage Valerius himself sit up and take notice.

Intellectual greed won. It wasn’t even a close fight.

Elian took a deep breath, visibly steadying himself. He stopped pacing and planted his feet, facing Killian with a resolve that replaced his earlier panic. The decision, once made, seemed to settle him. He had a new project.

“I’m not going to report you,” he stated. His voice was firmer now, losing its waver.

Killian didn’t react beyond a slight narrowing of his eyes. He’d learned that people who changed their minds quickly often changed them again just as fast. “No?”

“No,” Elian confirmed. He folded his arms, adopting a posture that was probably meant to look businesslike but just made him look like a nervous professor. “Reporting you would be… academically shortsighted. And pragmatically messy for me. Instead, I’m going to make you a proposal.”

“I’m listening.” Killian kept his tone neutral. Proposals in the Gutters usually involved someone getting cheated.

“You need to survive here,” Elian began, ticking points off on his fingers as he laid out the logic. “You have no magic, which means every single lesson, from Introductory Mana Theory to Advanced Practical Enchantments, is designed to be impossible for you. You’ll be exposed within a week, probably less. The first practical demonstration in Fundamentals of Arcane Application is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Professor Blythe will have you attempt to ignite a lumen crystal. It’s a simple cantrip, but it requires channeling a spark of intentional energy. You can’t do that.”

Killian said nothing. He’d known the classes would be a problem, but hearing it laid out so starkly by someone who actually understood the curriculum made the wall in front of him seem even higher.

“Therefore,” Elian continued, “you require two things. First, comprehensive tutoring in magical theory so you can at least speak the language and understand what you’re supposed to be pretending to do. You need to know the principles, the terminology, the common pitfalls. If you can’t perform, you must at least be able to critique and discuss with convincing authority. Second, you require active intervention during practical sessions to create the illusion of competence.”

He paused, letting that sink in. “I can provide both. I am top of my class in theoretical studies. I have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of first-year curriculum because I’ve already audited most of it and find the pace excruciatingly slow. I can tutor you nightly. More importantly, during practical lessons, I can be your… auxiliary caster.”

Killian finally showed a flicker of reaction—a skeptical tilt of his head. “Auxiliary caster.”

“It’s a technique used sometimes in complex group enchantments where one mage provides the foundational energy while another shapes it,” Elian explained, waving a hand dismissively. “The point is, I can sit near you. When you are called upon to perform a basic spell, I can perform it for you from my seat, directing the effect to appear as if it originated from your position. With subtlety, of course. It would require precise control and timing on my part, but it’s within my capabilities for lower-level spells.”

The offer hung in the air. It was a lifeline, thrown from a ship Killian had expected to sail right past him. It was also a rope that could very easily become a noose.

“And in exchange?” Killian asked. There was always an exchange.

Elian’s eyes lit up with that keen, hungry curiosity again. “In exchange, you agree to let me study you.”

Killian waited for more.

“You are an unprecedented anomaly,” Elian said, his voice dropping into a hushed, earnest tone. “A person with a verified magical aptitude of zero, not just low or dormant, but absolute nullity, who has somehow bypassed the Academy’s entire admission and security apparatus. Do you have any idea what that means for magical theory? For our understanding of aura-based enchantments? You’re a living experiment.” He took a step closer, his academic fervor momentarily overriding personal space. “I want to observe you. I want to run tests—non-invasive, completely discreet tests, obviously—to document your interaction with various magical fields. I want to understand the extent and nature of your… condition.”

He saw Killian’s expression harden at the word ‘tests’ and backtracked slightly. “Not like some laboratory animal. More like… a research partner. A unique subject of study. You provide the phenomenon; I provide the analysis. And in doing so, we both get what we want. You get to stay in the Academy with my help, and I get access to a source of academic discovery that could redefine several minor branches of thaumaturgical science.”

Killian processed the offer. He turned away from Elian, taking a few steps toward the window that looked out over the too-clean courtyards and shimmering fountains. He needed a moment to think without those intense, scholarly eyes dissecting his every twitch.

The immediate risk was clear: exposure and expulsion, likely followed by arrest for magical impersonation. Elian was offering a shield against that, or at least a fighting chance. The tutoring was one thing—he could memorize facts and jargon if he had to. The practical cover during lessons was everything. Without it, he was dead on arrival tomorrow afternoon trying to light that crystal.

But the cost…

Being indebted to someone like Elian was its own kind of danger. This wasn’t a gutter deal sealed with a handshake and the understanding that everyone was out for themselves. This was a pact with someone whose motives were a tangled knot of self-interest and obsessive curiosity. How far would that curiosity go? What did “non-invasive tests” actually mean to someone who got excited about multi-axis levitation charms? Would he want samples? Would he want to see what happened if Killian stuck his hand in a ward designed to disintegrate organic matter?

And then there was the sheer instability of it all. Elian was smart, obviously, but he was also clearly high-strung, the type who might panic under pressure or decide the research potential wasn’t worth the personal risk halfway through the term. If he got cold feet and turned Killian in later, it would be even worse than being caught now—now there would be conspiracy charges added to the fraud.

Killian weighed it all in the quiet of his mind. The safe play, the Gutters play, was to never trust anyone offering something for nothing. But this wasn’t the Gutters. The rules were different here, and so were the stakes. Back home, failure meant a beating or a night in a damp cell. Here, failure meant becoming a case study in magical jurisprudence before being made into a permanent cautionary tale.

He turned back around to face Elian, who was watching him with an anxious, eager expression, like a student waiting for his exam results.

“Studying me,” Killian repeated slowly. “What does that involve, exactly? Day-to-day.”

“Day-to-day?” Elian echoed, his mind already racing ahead to schedules and methodologies. “Mainly observation. Noting any unusual reactions you have to ambient magical fields—if you feel nauseous in high-concentration areas like the Alchemy Labs, or if certain types of illusion magic seem less effective in your immediate vicinity. Simple things. I might ask you to carry a few minor diagnostic charms on your person, just inert crystals that record ambient mana fluctuations around you. Nothing that would be visible or draw attention.”

He saw the lingering suspicion in Killian’s eyes and pressed on, trying to sound more reasonable than obsessed. “Look, the most valuable data is just your continued existence here. Every day you walk through the halls without triggering a ward, every class you attend where the professor’s attendance charm registers a blank spot as ‘present,’ it’s a data point. My role would be to document those points, to look for patterns. I’d also need to conduct some baseline tests in private. For instance, I’d want to see how a simple light cantrip behaves when cast directly at you versus near you. Does it dim? Distort? Or does it just… act normally? We need to establish the parameters of your nullity.”

Killian didn’t like the sound of ‘tests in private,’ but he let it slide for now. The more immediate concern was motive. “And this is all for your personal research? To write a paper?”

“Ultimately, yes,” Elian admitted without shame. “Can you imagine the thesis? ‘On the Phenomenon of Absolute Aural Nullity and Its Implications for Foundational Wardcraft.’ It would be revolutionary. But it’s more than that.” He shrugged, a gesture that was almost helpless. “I find things I don’t understand… irritating. This,” he said, pointing a finger generally in Killian’s direction, “is the single most incomprehensible thing I have ever encountered. It itches. I need to figure it out. Helping you is the only way to keep the subject of my study from being hauled away by the proctors, so our interests are perfectly aligned.”

He took a step closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “And you have my absolute guarantee of discretion. My academic reputation depends on it. If you’re exposed, my involvement ends the study and lands me in a world of trouble for not reporting you immediately. I have no desire to explain to the Disciplinary Committee why I was running experiments on an unauthorized mundane instead of turning him in. We sink or swim together, Killian. It’s a partnership.”

The word ‘partnership’ felt too clean, too equal for what this was. Killian knew he’d be the one taking most of the risk. But Elian had a point about their interests aligning, at least for now. The scholar needed his anomaly to remain undiscovered just as much as the anomaly needed a guide.

Killian considered the other angle. “And the tutoring? The cover during lessons? You’re confident you can do that without getting caught?”

A flash of pride crossed Elian’s face, momentarily overriding his anxiety. “The tutoring is trivial. The practical cover will be challenging, but within my skill set. I have excellent fine control. The biggest risk is a professor with particularly sharp senses noticing the subtle directional flow of the spell. We’ll have to be careful, choose our moments. For tomorrow’s lumen crystal, it should be straightforward—a tiny, focused spark of ignition from me to you. The spell is so basic that nobody will be paying close attention to its metaphysical trajectory. They’ll just see the crystal light up at your desk.”

He was talking faster now, caught up in the details of the problem. “Longer term, we’ll need strategies. For kinetic exercises, you might have to physically mimic the gestures while I provide the actual telekinetic force nearby, making it look like you’re just clumsy. For elemental evocation… that will be trickier. We may need to resort to pre-prepared alchemical substitutes in some cases. I have some ideas.”

Killian listened, watching Elian’s face. The guy was terrified and exhilarated in equal measure, but he wasn’t lying about his capabilities. He’d seen him wrestling with that book—the failure hadn’t been from lack of power, but from overcomplication. Simple, precise spells seemed to be his forte. It was something to work with.

The silence stretched again, but this time it was a thinking silence, not a shocked one. Killian looked at his half of the room—the bare stone floor, the empty bed, the single duffel bag that held his entire old life. Then he looked at Elian’s side—the towers of books, the neat robes, the soft glowing orb of a life built on knowledge and certainty.

He had no better options. No other allies. No fallback plan that didn’t end with him in chains.

“Alright,” Killian said finally. The word was terse, bitten off. He didn’t nod or offer a hand. He just stated it as a fact. “We have a deal. You tutor me, you cover for me in practicals. I let you… observe. But we set rules.”

Elian’s entire body sagged with relief, followed immediately by a fresh surge of nervous energy. “Rules. Of course.”

“No tests without explaining exactly what they are first,” Killian said, ticking off his own points now. “Nothing that could expose me or draw attention. And nothing that causes pain or permanent damage.” He gave Elian a flat look that had made tougher men in the Gutters take a step back. “I’m not a lab rat.”

“Agreed,” Elian said quickly, bobbing his head. “Fully informed consent for any active testing. Observation only for the rest. And absolute secrecy.”

“And if either of us wants out,” Killian added, “we say so. No silent partners turning into informants later.”

Elian paled slightly at the implication but nodded again. “A clean break clause. Reasonable.” He stuck out his hand, a formal gesture that seemed absurd given the situation.

Killian looked at the offered hand for a second—slender, clean, with ink stains on two fingers—before reaching out and gripping it briefly. His own grip was firm, calloused, and he felt Elian’s fingers flex instinctively against the pressure before he let go.

The pact was formed.

The moment the handshake ended, Elian seemed to transform. The nervous energy coalesced into frantic purpose. He whirled around and marched to his desk, grabbing a fresh piece of parchment and uncapping a sleek silver pen that began writing on its own until he swatted it away.

“Right,” he said, talking more to himself than to Killian now. “First things first. Tomorrow’s schedule.” He started scribbling notes in a hurried, precise script. “You have Introduction to Arcane History with Archivist Pell at nine bells in the Hall of Echoes. That’s pure lecture, no practical component. Just sit there and try not to fall asleep; he drones terribly. Then lunch in the Refectory—stick to the simple foods, some of the animated platters can be overly enthusiastic with sauces if they sense unfamiliar auras… though I suppose they won’t sense yours…”

He trailed off, making another note with a concerned frown before plunging ahead.

“The problem is Fundamentals of Arcane Application at two bells with Professor Blythe in Workshop Three. The lumen crystal ignition.” He tapped the pen against his teeth. “We need to arrive separately but sit close enough for me to intervene without obvious straining. A middle row seat is best—not so close Blythe watches you like a hawk, not so far back that my spell has to travel across half the room. I’ll get there early and save you a seat to my immediate right.”

He looked up at Killian, who was watching this frantic planning with detached interest. “You’ll need to know something. Blythe always asks for the principle behind the cantrip before letting anyone attempt it. So tonight, we cover basic mana theory—just enough so you can parrot back that ‘ignition is achieved by focusing intentional will through the somatic gesture to catalyze a reaction between ambient mana and the crystal’s receptive lattice.’ Can you remember that?”

“Focus will, make gesture, light crystal,” Killian summarized dryly.

Elian winced. “Well… yes. Essentially.” He scribbled another note. “We’ll work on the phrasing. After the practical success—assuming my intervention works—Blythe might ask you about efficiency or heat variance. I’ll feed you the answers via whispered commentary disguised as my own observations to the student on my other side.”

He put down the pen and began pacing again, ticking off items on his fingers once more. “Beyond tomorrow, we need a curriculum plan for you. A crash course in first-year theory: the eight schools of magic, basic component theory—verbal, somatic, material—an overview of common alchemical reagents so you don’t accidentally call brimstone ‘yellow rock.’ We have perhaps a month before you’re expected to perform anything more complex that I can’t easily mimic from a distance.”

He stopped pacing and faced Killian again, his expression deadly serious now. “You also need to adopt certain… behaviors. Stop carrying your bag. Levitate it, even if it’s just an inch off the ground and wobbling terribly—I can teach you a fake gesture for that; people will assume you have poor control, which is common for first-years from lesser lineages.” He eyed Killian’s worn clothes with clear distress. “And we absolutely must do something about your wardrobe before someone mistakes you for a member of the groundskeeping staff who wandered into class.”

Killian glanced down at his tunic and trousers, sturdy canvas and leather that had survived gutter filth and scrap-yard abrasions. They were clean, at least. “They’re fine.”

“They are objectively not fine,” Elian said with surprising firmness for someone who had been trembling minutes ago. “They scream ‘non-magical laborer.’ You need student robes at minimum for classes tomorrow or you’ll stand out even more than you already do.” He chewed his lip for a second before striding over to his own wardrobe and pulling out a spare set of deep blue robes trimmed with silver thread—the standard first-year issue.

“Here,” he said, holding them out. The fabric was soft and light compared to Killian’s worn gear. “They should fit well enough. Just put them on over your clothes for now; we can get yours properly fitted later.” Killian took them, feeling the strange, silky texture. It felt like wearing a surrender flag. But Elian was right. He needed camouflage. Elian watched him, then turned back to his desk, his mind already leaping to the next hurdle. “Right,” he muttered, grabbing another piece of parchment. “Now, let's start with mana theory. We haven't got much time.”