Chapter 7: The Catalyst

Killian stood behind his station, his legitimate but inert Lumina Draft mixture prepared and ready for the impossible heating phase.

The ceramic vial held the coarse suncap powder he’d ground exactly thirty times, mixed with the shimmering moonstone. The water line sat perfectly at the one-hundred-milliliter mark. The phosphor leaf floated on the surface like a tiny green island, its edges already starting to curl slightly from the ambient moisture. It was a perfect, textbook assembly of ingredients. It was also completely useless. Without magic, it would remain a cup of expensive, weird-tasting water with a fancy leaf on top.

All around him, the laboratory hummed with focused energy. The air smelled of ozone and damp stone now, undercut by the sweet, earthy scent of dozens of phosphor leaves dissolving. Soft whispers of “Ignis Harmonus” came from every direction, students hunched over their stations with fingers extended. Tendrils of steam rose from vials where the heating charms took hold. Some liquids already pulsed with a soft, internal light, growing brighter by the second. The successful brews cast gentle white halos on the stone workbenches.

Killian kept his breathing even. His right hand hung at his side for a moment, fingers loose. He could feel the two hidden pouches against his body—the moss paste on his left, the heat stones on his right. Their presence was a cold comfort. They were tools for a play, props for a performance that would end the instant Morvath cast his verification charm. The analysis would strip the illusion bare, revealing plant paste and warm rocks in water. It would be over.

But standing still meant failing for sure. Doing nothing was its own kind of surrender.

He raised his right hand slowly, mirroring the posture of the student to his left—a girl with braided hair whose vial was now glowing like a captured star. He pointed his index finger at the base of his own inert ceramic vial. His left hand drifted casually toward the inner pocket where the moss paste waited.

This was it. The final act before the curtain fell.

He took a slow breath, filling his lungs with the strange alchemical air. He needed to sell this. He needed to look like he was concentrating, channeling power, not like a man about to perform a cheap sleight-of-hand with glowing fungus goo.

His lips parted slightly. He prepared to mouth the incantation, to fake the subtle focus everyone else was displaying.

As he began to form the first silent syllable of “Ignis Harmonus,” a thunderous explosion erupted from a distant workstation on the other side of the laboratory.

The sound wasn’t a pop or a fizzle. It was a deep, percussive WHUMP that punched through the room’s constant murmur and hit Killian in the chest. Every glass vessel on his station rattled. The floating orbs of light overhead swayed violently.

For a split second, there was absolute silence, the kind that follows a physical shock.

Then the blast’s aftermath arrived.

A shower of shattered glass and equipment flew through the air from the epicenter near the far wall. Killian saw twisted metal fragments, pieces of a shattered stone mortar, and what looked like the splintered leg of a workbench cartwheeling across the aisle. The shockwave hit next, a wall of displaced air that made his robes flap and sent parchments fluttering off nearby stations.

A billowing cloud of acrid smoke followed immediately, rolling out in a thick, oily grey wave. It smelled like burnt hair and rotten eggs mixed with something metallic and sour. The cloud swallowed whole sections of workbenches, turning students into coughing, silhouetted figures.

Panicked shouts broke the silence.

“What in the nine hells—” “Get back!” “My eyes! It burns!” “Proctor! Proctor!”

The orderly examination dissolved into chaos. Students near the blast scrambled away, tripping over stools and knocking over their own vials in their haste. Glass shattered elsewhere as potions hit the floor. A girl screamed, high and sharp. The cloud spread, thickening, making people cough and clutch their faces.

Killian stood frozen for half a heartbeat, his hand still raised in its fake casting pose. His mind processed the scene with a brutal, detached clarity that came from years in the Drench where sudden violence was just another part of the weather.

An accident. A bad one. Someone’s brew had gone catastrophically wrong, probably from a miscast heating charm or an ingredient contamination. It happened, Elian had mentioned once during a tutoring session, though usually on a much smaller scale. This was different. This was a proper disaster.

Instructor Morvath, who had been standing like a statue on his dais monitoring the room, moved.

The instructor’s calm vanished instantly. His pale eyes widened for a fraction of a second before narrowing into slits of pure focus. He was off the daise in one fluid motion, his robes swirling around him as he strode toward the source of the explosion. His voice cut through the din, loud and commanding without being a shout.

“All proctors to Station Four! Clear the adjacent rows! Containment protocol—now!”

The advanced students acting as proctors, who had been hovering near the walls looking bored, snapped into action. They rushed toward the billowing smoke, some already weaving their hands in complex patterns. Killian saw faint shimmering barriers spring up around the affected area, magical shields meant to contain whatever reactive compounds were still spewing from the wreckage.

Instructor Morvath and the proctors immediately rushed toward the source of the catastrophe, their attention fully diverted.

Morvath reached the edge of the smoke cloud and didn’t hesitate. He plunged into it, one arm raised as if parting a curtain. The grey tendrils seemed to recoil from him slightly. Within seconds, he was just a dark shape in the swirling murk, barking orders that were muffled by the chaos.

“Get that student out! Stabilize the reactant spill! I need a null-field over this entire station!”

Every eye in the room that wasn’t streaming tears was fixed on that corner. The steady chanting of incantations had stopped completely. The gentle glows from successful potions now looked pathetic against the violent orange flickers coming from within the smoke—lingering magical residue or maybe actual fire. Two proctors emerged from the cloud half-carrying, half-dragging a stumbling figure—the student from Station Four. Their robes were smouldering at the edges, and they were coughing violently into their sleeve.

Killian slowly lowered his still-raised hand.

The entire supervisory focus of the examination had just teleported across the room. Morvath was gone, swallowed by the emergency. The proctors were all clustered around the disaster zone, their backs to the rest of the laboratory as they worked to contain it.

For maybe fifteen seconds—twenty at most—no one in authority was looking at Station Twenty-Seven. No one was looking at any station except the one vomiting smoke and sparks.

The window was open.

It was small, already closing as some students began to recover from their shock and look around nervously instead of at the blast site. But it was there.

His heart hammered once against his ribs, a solid thump that felt like a starting pistol.

The plan had been madness. A distraction like this hadn’t even been part of their desperate hoping—it was pure, random luck falling into his lap like a brick from a third-story window.

He didn’t have time to think about why or how. He only had time to move.

The window was open.

It was small, already closing as some students began to recover from their shock and look around nervously instead of at the blast site. But it was there.

His heart hammered once against his ribs, a solid thump that felt like a starting pistol.

The plan had been madness. A distraction like this hadn’t even been part of their desperate hoping—it was pure, random luck falling into his lap like a brick from a third-story window.

He didn’t have time to think about why or how. He only had time to move.

In the ensuing chaos of smoke, noise, and confusion, Killian seized the brief window of distraction.

His body acted before his mind could second-guess the risk. He leaned forward slightly over his workstation, using his torso to block the direct line of sight from the students on either side. To anyone glancing his way, he would just look like another first-year hunched protectively over his precious brew after the shockwave.

His left hand dove into the inner pocket of his robes. The motion was smooth, practiced from hours of dry-runs in the dorm room. His fingers closed around the small clay jar of glow-moss paste. He pulled it out, keeping it low and hidden in the cup of his palm. The jar was still faintly warm from his body heat.

He’d prepared this part last night, after Elian had finally fallen into a fitful sleep. He’d taken one of the spare, empty vials from the supply closet—a tiny glass tube no bigger than his thumb, the kind used for storing single drops of potent essence. He’d filled it three-quarters full with water from their washroom pitcher. Then he’d stirred in a thick dollop of the luminous moss paste until the water turned a murky, pale green. In the darkness of their room with the lamp extinguished, it had glowed with a sickly, phosphorescent light. It wasn’t the pure white radiance of a real Lumina Draft. It was the color of pond scum under a full moon. But it glowed. That was the only thing that mattered right now.

He’d sealed the tiny vial with a cork and wrapped its base in a thin strip of dark cloth to mask its true color and provide some insulation. That vial now rested in a separate pocket, one sewn into the seam of his sleeve near the wrist.

With practiced speed, he pulled that small, pre-prepared vial from its hidden niche. His right hand made the motion look like an adjustment of his sleeve, a nervous fidget. The glass tube slipped free into his fingers.

The liquid inside glowed with a soft, steady light. In the bright ambient glow of the laboratory orbs, its greenish hue was barely noticeable. It just looked like a contained point of light sitting in his palm.

Now came the dangerous part.

He swiftly swapped this glowing vial with his own legitimate but inert ceramic brewing vial on the station.

His right hand, holding the fake, moved over the ceramic vial as if to steady it after the blast’s vibrations. His left hand came up simultaneously, fingers splaying to further obscure the action. In one continuous motion, he plucked the heavy ceramic vial off the stone with his left hand and set the small glass one down in its place with his right.

The switch took less than two seconds.

The ceramic vial was warm from sitting under the lights. It felt substantial, weighty with failure. The glass vial was light, cool, and hummed with nothing at all except fungal bioluminescence. It looked absurd sitting there on the broad workstation—a tiny tube where a proper brewing vessel should be. But from more than a few feet away, especially with the lingering smoke hazing the air, it would just look like a successful potion glowing in its container.

He palmed the original ceramic vial and secreted it away.

Turning slightly toward the wall, he slipped the heavy vial into the now-empty inner pocket that had held the moss paste jar. The pocket strained against the sudden bulk, but the voluminous robe hid the outline well enough. He let his arm hang naturally, feeling the awkward weight settle against his hip. It was evidence. Pure, undeniable evidence of his fraud, now literally hanging on him.

He forced himself to breathe normally, to not look at the tiny glowing impostor now sitting proudly on his station. He glanced toward the source of the commotion instead, playing the part of a concerned onlooker.

The proctors had formed a cordon around Station Four. The billowing smoke was thinning now, sucked toward ventilation grates in the ceiling by some activated charm. The orange flickers were gone. Instructor Morvath stood in the center of the damage, his hands moving in slow, precise arcs. A shimmering silver bubble of energy encased the entire workstation, containing whatever reactive mess remained.

Two proctors were helping the injured student toward the laboratory’s main doors. The student—Killian could see now it was a lanky boy with soot-streaked hair—walked under his own power but limped badly. His robes were charred black along one side. He kept coughing into a handkerchief, his shoulders shaking.

“The examination will continue,” Morvath announced, his voice slicing through the lingering coughs and whispers. He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. The room fell silent again, a tense, brittle quiet. “Attend to your stations. Complete your brews. You have approximately twenty minutes remaining.”

His pale eyes scanned the room as he spoke, assessing the damage beyond the immediate blast zone. A few stations near the explosion were total losses—overturned equipment, spilled ingredients swimming in puddles of inert or weirdly colored liquid. Those students stood looking shell-shocked and helpless.

Morvath’s gaze passed over Killian’s station. It didn’t linger. Why would it? From where Morvath stood, Station Twenty-Seven probably just showed a student standing calmly behind a softly glowing potion. One of the few successes in a sea of disruption.

Order was gradually restored as proctors finished containing the accident and usher the coughing, shaken student from the damaged station.

The main doors swung shut behind the injured boy and his escorts. The sound echoed in the hush.

With the immediate crisis over, a different kind of tension settled over the laboratory. The remaining students looked at their own work with renewed desperation. The clock was still ticking. Those whose potions had been disrupted or spilled stared at their ruined ingredients with blank horror. Others who had been mid-heating charm frantically tried to recast, their voices trembling as they incanted.

Killian remained still. He didn’t touch anything on his station. His ‘potion’ was already ‘done.’ Any further action would be suspicious. He just had to stand here and look like someone who had calmly finished his brew right before all hell broke loose—a lucky bastard who’d avoided the chaos.

He allowed himself a single glance down at the tiny glass vial.

It glowed. A steady, faint greenish light emanated from within, barely illuminating the strip of dark cloth wrapped around its base. It looked pathetic next to the robust white radiance coming from the braided girl’s vial beside him. Hers looked like bottled moonlight. His looked like something you might find growing on a damp log.

But it glowed.

That was the only objective criteria for visual inspection before the analysis charm. Would it pass? It had to. There was no other option now.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Elian.

His roommate was staring at him from across the room, his face utterly bloodless behind his glasses. Elian had seen it all—the explosion, the distraction, Killian’s quick, furtive movements. He’d seen Killian not casting any heating charm at all before suddenly having a glowing vial on his station. Understanding blazed in Elian’s wide eyes, followed immediately by a wave of pure terror so intense Killian could feel it across the distance.

Elian gave a minute, almost imperceptible shake of his head. His lips formed a single silent word: No.

It was too late for that.

A proctor walked down Killian’s aisle, assessing damage. She stopped at a station two down from his where a boy was frantically trying to re-grind mushrooms with shaking hands.

“You may begin a second attempt with fresh ingredients if your station is compromised,” she said briskly, not unkindly. “See me for a replacement set.”

She moved on. Her eyes flicked to Killian’s glowing vial as she passed. She gave a small, approving nod and continued down the line without breaking stride.

Killian’s muscles unclenched just a fraction.

One hurdle cleared. A low one, but still.

Now came the real test.

Instructor Morvath dismissed the containment bubble with a sharp gesture. The silver shimmer vanished, revealing a blackened, melted ruin of a workstation. He surveyed it for another moment, his expression unreadable behind a mask of professional calm. Then he turned away from the wreckage and began walking slowly back toward the front dais.

As he walked, he started checking stations along his path.

The examination was back on track. The time was nearly up.

Morvath stopped at each student, asked them to step back, and performed a quick visual inspection before moving on to cast the analysis charm elsewhere on those who appeared finished. For those whose potions were clearly failed—murky liquids, undissolved leaf chunks, no glow—he simply marked their parchment with a slash of red chalk and moved on without comment.

He was working his way methodically from the blast zone outward.

He would reach Killian’s row soon enough.

Killian kept his hands at his sides, fingers relaxed. The weight of the hidden ceramic vial felt like an anchor tied to his fate. The tiny glass vial on the stone glowed its feeble green glow, a tiny lighthouse guiding him straight onto the rocks.

All he could do now was wait for Instructor Morvath to reach Station Twenty-Seven and perform the mandatory analysis charm on what appeared to be his successful Lumina Draft—the magical verification that would dissect its non-magical nature in an instant and end everything.

Morvath returned to the examination, his expression grim as he proceeded down the line to perform the mandatory analysis charm on each potion.

The instructor moved with a weary efficiency now. The blast had added a layer of grim duty to his task, the air of a man mopping up after a preventable disaster. His pale eyes held no warmth as he stopped before each student. He would glance at their vial, sometimes asking a quiet question—“Heating duration?” or “Did you observe full dissolution?”—before raising his hand.

The analysis charm was a quick, unspectacular thing. Morvath would hold his palm face-down over the potion, his fingers splayed. A ripple of barely-visible silver energy, like heat haze, would pulse from his hand and wash over the vial. He’d stand still for a three-count, his gaze distant as he interpreted whatever the charm told him. Then he’d either nod and make a blue chalk mark on the student’s evaluation parchment, or shake his head and make a red slash.

The successes were few. The blast had rattled everyone, breaking concentration. Killian watched as Morvath failed the braided girl beside him. Her perfect white glow hadn’t been enough. The instructor’s hand hovered, his brow furrowed slightly. He looked at her.

“Your moonstone integration was incomplete,” he stated, his tone flat. “The resonance is unstable. It will fade within minutes.” He marked her parchment with red. The girl’s shoulders slumped.

He moved to the next station, and the next. Red marks accumulated.

Killian’s mouth was dry. He watched the instructor’s approach like watching the tide come in—inevitable, measurable in the space between heartbeats. His own heartbeat was a slow, heavy drum in his ears.

The tiny glass vial on his station continued its faint green emission. It looked so small. So cheap. In the clearer air now, its color was more apparent. It wasn’t the right white. It was unmistakably green-tinted, the glow of decay rather than creation.

Morvath would see that the instant he got close.

Killian kept his breathing even. He fixed his eyes on a point on the far wall, adopting what he hoped was the serene expression of someone confident in their work. Inside, his mind was a silent blank. There were no more plans to run through, no tricks left to play. There was just the vial, the instructor, and the coming moment of truth.

Morvath finished with the student immediately to Killian’s left—another failure—and turned.

His eyes lifted from his clipboard and landed on Killian. They flicked to the glowing vial, then back to Killian’s face. There was no change in his expression, no hint of surprise or suspicion at the unusually small container. Perhaps he assumed Killian had transferred his brew to a different vial after the blast for stability. Perhaps he just didn’t care about the details anymore today.

He stepped up to Station Twenty-Seven.

“Step back, please,” Morvath said, his voice devoid of inflection.

Killian took two precise steps backward, putting space between himself and the workstation. He clasped his hands behind his back to keep them from doing anything stupid.

Morvath looked down at the vial. His gaze lingered for a second on its greenish glow. A tiny vertical line appeared between his eyebrows. He said nothing.

He raised his right hand, holding it palm-down over the tiny glass tube.

When Morvath reached Killian’s station, he cast the charm over the swapped vial.

The instructor’s fingers moved in a subtle, practiced twist. The same silver haze shimmered from his palm and descended, enveloping the vial in a faint, shimmering aura. The glow from within the glass seemed to brighten momentarily under the magical scrutiny.

Killian held absolutely still. This was it. The charm was reading the potion’s essence, probing for the specific alchemical bond between suncap essence and lunar mineral resonance. It would find moss paste and water. It would find zero magical activity. It would find fraud.

Morvath’s eyes lost focus, gazing at something beyond the physical room as he interpreted the charm’s feedback. His face was an impassive mask.

Three seconds passed. Four.

Killian braced for the sharp intake of breath, for the cold glare, for the hand on his shoulder and the word “explain” uttered in that quiet, deadly tone.

Morvath’s eyebrows twitched, almost imperceptibly.

It reads as a successful Lumina Draft, though the magical resonance registers as slightly weak.

The instructor’s focused gaze returned to the present. He looked at the vial again, then at Killian. The line between his brows deepened slightly, not with anger but with what seemed like minor professional puzzlement.

“Adequate luminescence,” Morvath said quietly, more to himself than to Killian. “But the resonant bond is… faint. Underpowered.” He tilted his head slightly. “Did you rush the heating phase?”

The question hung in the air. It wasn’t an accusation. It was a teacher noting a technical flaw in an otherwise passing piece of work.

Killian’s mind scrambled for the correct response, something from Elian’s endless drills. “The leaf dissolved fully, sir,” he said, keeping his voice level and respectful. “But the steam was… less than I expected.” That was true enough, given there had been no steam at all.

Morvath gave a slow nod, as if that explained it. “A common error when concentrating too hard on power modulation. You likely channeled too timidly, fearing an overheat after witnessing the earlier… incident.” He gestured vaguely toward the scorched Station Four. “You secured the reaction, but failed to fully empower it.”

He said it with absolute certainty. He was diagnosing a magical mistake Killian could not possibly have made, fitting the odd reading into a known category of beginner error.

Instructor Morvath gave a curt nod, marks Killian’s parchment with a passing grade, and moves on to the next student.

The instructor picked up the blue chalk from a loop on his belt. He made a single, swift mark on the parchment clipped to Killian’s station—a complex sigil that meant ‘Pass: Minor Deficiencies.’ He didn’t smile. He didn’t offer congratulations. It was a transaction completed.

Then he turned away, already looking toward the next student in line whose potion was a murky brown sludge.

Killian stood frozen for a full five seconds after Morvath moved on.

He had passed.

The analysis charm, designed specifically to detect magical fraud, had scanned a vial of glowing moss-water and declared it a marginally weak but successful Lumina Draft.

It made no sense. None.

His eyes dropped to the tiny glass vial. It still glowed its soft green glow. To his eyes, it screamed ‘fake.’ But to Morvath’s charm, it had whispered ‘pass.’

A cold, sharp understanding began to pierce his confusion.

The charm didn’t check for ‘magic’ in some abstract sense. Elian had said it checked for the specific alchemical reaction. It looked for the magical signature of bonded suncap and moonstone energies.

His fake contained neither suncap nor moonstone. It contained moss.

But… what if the charm wasn’t sophisticated enough to tell the difference? What if it was tuned so precisely to recognize the result—a stable luminescent emission with certain energetic properties—that it couldn’t discern the source? Glow was glow. Resonance was resonance. Maybe moss paste giving off light through pure biology created an energy signature close enough to mimic a weak magical one.

Or maybe the charm was faulty. Or maybe Morvath, distracted by the explosion and faced with dozens of failures, had rushed it. Or maybe…

It didn’t matter why. The blue sigil was on his parchment. The weight in his pocket was just a piece of ceramic now, not a death sentence.

A shaky breath finally escaped his lungs. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it.

Across the room, Elian had been watching the entire interaction like a hawk watching a mouse in an open field. He saw Morvath cast the charm. He saw the instructor’s thoughtful pause. He saw the nod, and finally, the blue chalk mark.

From across the room, Elian watches Killian receive his mark; his face turns sickly pale, consumed by guilt over their deception and the dangerous precedent they have just set.

Elian didn’t look relieved. He didn’t share Killian’s moment of stunned victory. As Killian met his gaze, Elian’s expression was one of pure, unadulterated horror.

His face lost all remaining color, making his freckles stand out like dark specks on parchment. His glasses seemed too large for his suddenly gaunt features. He stared at Killian, then at Morvath’s retreating back, then at Killian again.

He understood what had just happened even better than Killian did.

They hadn’t just gotten lucky. They had exposed a catastrophic flaw in one of the academy’s fundamental verification systems—a flaw that only existed because of Killian’s unique nullity and their own desperate improvisation with non-magical materials. The analysis charm could be fooled by glowing pond scum if presented at the right time by someone with no magical aura to interfere with the reading.

It wasn’t a triumph. It was a discovery of profound and terrifying vulnerability.

And Elian had enabled it. His tutoring had provided the cover of procedure. His failure to find a real solution had driven Killian to this insane gamble. His silence had made him complicit.

The guilt washed over him visibly, a physical sickness that made him sway slightly where he stood behind his own station. He looked down at his hands as if they were foreign objects, instruments of academic sacrilege.

Morvath reached Elian’s station shortly after. Elian’s own potion—a flawless Lumina Draft glowing with brilliant white intensity—barely seemed to register with him as Morvath performed the charm and marked a strong pass on his parchment with a nod of clear approval. Elian accepted it with a numb silence, his eyes still wide with internal panic.

The final bell rang soon after, its clear tone cutting through the laboratory’s tense atmosphere.

“Examination concluded,” Morvath announced from the front. “Leave your stations as they are for cleanup. Evaluation parchments will be collected.”

A collective groan and sigh filled the room—the sound of forty-nine students releasing pent-up anxiety and disappointment. Only a handful wore anything resembling a smile.

Killian carefully did not touch anything on his station except to pick up his marked parchment. He folded it once and slipped it inside his robes. He left the tiny glowing vial sitting there on the stone for some poor apprentice to clean up and wonder about later.

He moved with the crowd shuffling toward the doors, keeping his head down but his senses alert. He felt lighter without the immediate threat of exposure crushing him, yet heavier with new questions and with Elian’s horrified stare burning into his back.

They had survived. Somehow. But as he stepped out of the smoky laboratory into the cooler air of the corridor, Killian understood that survival sometimes meant kicking loose a stone that started an avalanche. And avalanches, once begun, were impossible to control