Chapter 9: Passive Observer

The heavy silence hung in the dorm room after Elian turned the key.

It was a small, precise sound. The brass key clicked as it engaged the lock in Elian’s desk drawer. Elian tucked the key back under his robes, his fingers lingering on the chain around his neck for a moment longer than necessary. He didn’t look at Killian. He just stared at the drawer as if he could weld it shut through sheer willpower.

Killian watched the whole performance from where he leaned against his own bedpost. He watched Elian’s tense shoulders, the white-knuckled grip he had on the edge of the desk afterward. The silence wasn’t empty; it was thick with everything they’d just decided not to say. A schematic of a catastrophic flaw, now locked away. A live grenade, according to Elian, safely stored out of sight.

Out of sight, maybe. But not out of mind.

Killian pushed off from the bedpost, the movement casual. He rolled his neck, hearing a faint pop. The energy that had been humming through him since the exam was gone, replaced by a different kind of alertness—colder, more patient. He looked at Elian, who finally turned to meet his gaze. Elian’s eyes were wide behind his glasses, still full of that academic horror mixed with fear.

“Right,” Killian said. His voice was flat, deliberately neutral. “Don’t test it. Got it.”

He gave a single, slow nod. He made sure his expression stayed carefully blank, the kind of empty mask he’d used a thousand times in the Drench when agreeing to a deal he had no intention of honoring exactly as stated. He added a low grunt of agreement for good measure, selling the image of a chastised student accepting a sensible rule.

Elian seemed to deflate a little, some of the rigid panic leaving his frame. He mistook the blankness for compliance. He took a shaky breath and nodded back, looking relieved in a miserable sort of way.

“Good,” Elian said, his voice still thin. “It’s for the best. We just… we carry on. We survive.”

“We carry on,” Killian echoed.

And that was that. Elian turned back to his desk, pulling a different textbook toward him with trembling hands, seeking refuge in routine. Killian moved to his own side of the room, sitting on the edge of his bed to pull off his boots.

He meant the agreement, in a way. He wasn’t going to start poking at high-security wards or trying to collapse enchantments around instructors. That would be suicidal. Elian’s panic was justified there.

But ‘don’t test it’ was an impossibly broad command. It assumed you could just ignore a fundamental new fact about your own existence. It asked Killian to walk through a world built on magic and pretend he didn’t now know he left smudges on its lens.

His practical nature wouldn’t allow that. Knowledge was a tool, and leaving a tool unused in a fight was stupid. The trick was to understand the tool without cutting your own hand off.

Over the next few days, he resolved to conduct only passive, low-risk observation.

He wouldn’t test. Testing implied intent, active experimentation with a hypothesis. Observation was different. Observation was just paying attention to what happened around you naturally. It was gathering data from the environment without altering it. At least, not altering it much.

He started in their next Charms & Cantrips class two days later.

The classroom was in the Auric Wing, all pale marble and tall windows that let in thin, scholarly light. Instructor Blythe, a woman with a voice like rustling parchment, was demonstrating a basic cleaning charm for textiles. Most of the students were practicing on stained handkerchiefs, murmuring incantations and producing puffs of scented steam.

Killian’s job was to sit at his desk and look like he was concentrating very hard on nothing happening with his own handkerchief. He’d gotten decent at that particular performance.

His attention drifted to the front of the room. A large slate chalkboard covered most of one wall. It wasn’t an ordinary board; it was enchanted for self-maintenance. After each use, once the professor or a student stepped away, the board would shimmer faintly and erase itself, leaving a clean, dark surface ready for new diagrams.

A student named Corwin was up there now, sketching a runic sequence under Blythe’s direction. He finished with a flourish of chalk dust and stepped back toward his seat.

The enchantment activated. A soft blue sheen rippled across the slate surface, starting at the edges and flowing inward like water. The white chalk lines began to fade as the magic absorbed and dispersed them.

Killian watched, his chin resting on his hand as if bored by the mundane process.

Corwin passed by Killian’s desk on his way back to his seat. As he did, Killian shifted slightly in his chair, stretching his legs out under the table. It placed him a little closer to the front of the room, within maybe eight feet of the chalkboard.

The blue sheen reached the center of the board where Corwin’s runes were densest.

The magic stuttered.

It was a tiny thing. The smooth ripple hitched for less than a second. The blue light flickered, dimming to a dull gray before surging back to full strength. The chalk lines across most of the board vanished completely, wiped clean by the spell.

But one streak of runic script in the lower left corner didn’t disappear. The magic seemed to slide over it without touching it, leaving behind a smeared, ghostly imprint of white against the slate.

Instructor Blythe, who had been inspecting another student’s work, turned back to the board. Her eyebrows drew together in mild annoyance at the imperfection. She clucked her tongue.

“The maintenance charm on this board is due for recalibration,” she announced to the class, waving a hand dismissively at the smudge. “Pay it no mind. The principle remains clear.”

She picked up an actual cloth eraser from her desk and manually wiped the streak away.

No one else looked concerned. Just a minor glitch in a simple enchantment. It happened sometimes, especially with older devices.

Killian didn’t move from his slouched position. He kept his face perfectly neutral, but behind his eyes, his mind was working.

He replayed the moment. Corwin stepping away. The enchantment activating normally. Then the hitch, the flicker, precisely as Killian had shifted into that eight-foot radius. The smeared line left behind exactly where he’d been sitting, as if the cleaning pulse had gotten confused and skipped a patch.

Coincidence? Possibly.

But he remembered the quartz crystal in his hand, the confused flicker of blue light from Elian’s detection charm. Ambiguous feedback, Elian had called it.

This looked familiar.

He didn’t stare at the board. He glanced down at his own blank handkerchief, feigning frustration at his lack of progress. Inside, he filed the event away under passive observation. A data point. Location: Charms classroom. Device: Self-cleaning chalkboard enchantment. Observed effect: Temporary stutter in function, minor failure to complete task. Duration: Approximately one second. Proximity: Roughly eight feet.

He didn’t write it down. Writing things down got you caught. Instead, he pressed his thumbnail into the pad of his index finger beneath the desk, leaving a small, crescent-shaped indentation. A physical tick for his hidden tally.

When class ended, he gathered his things slowly, letting the other students file out ahead of him. He took a route that led him past the chalkboard on his way to the door.

As he passed within three feet of it, he saw the surface was perfectly clean now. But for just an instant, as he was directly beside it, he thought he heard the faintest hum—the sound of active enchantment—drop in pitch before rising back to normal as he moved away.

Another data point.

He walked out into the corridor, blending into the flow of students heading to their next lectures. His expression was still carefully blank, but his thoughts were no longer on survival alone.

They were on calibration ranges, interference radii, and the practical applications of controlled confusion.

Later that same afternoon, he found himself in the main library of the Argent Spire. It was a cavernous space of tiered balconies and towering shelves that seemed to defy gravity, with floating ladders drifting between levels on invisible tracks. The air smelled of dust, old leather, and a dry, papery scent that was unique to places where knowledge piled up for centuries.

Killian wasn’t there for magical theory. He was looking for maps—specifically, non-magical surveys of the academy’s physical foundations and the city below. If he needed to run, he wanted to know where the sewers met the bedrock. Elian thought he was studying for remedial geography.

He found a secluded study carrel tucked into an alcove near one of the library’s outer walls. The carrel had a built-in stone bench and a small, circular hearth-stone set into the wall beside it. The hearth-stone wasn’t a fireplace; it was a smooth, dark disk of obsidian about the size of a dinner plate, etched with glowing orange runes. A temperature-regulating enchantment, standard issue for study areas. It emitted a gentle, consistent warmth, just enough to take the chill off the stone chamber without risking damage to the books.

Killian slid onto the bench, dropping his satchel beside him. He pulled out a heavy, mundane atlas of the region he’d borrowed from the non-magical reference section and opened it across his knees.

The warmth from the hearth-stone enveloped him immediately. It was pleasant, like sitting in a patch of weak sunlight. He focused on the atlas, tracing the contour lines of the mountain the academy was built upon.

About ten minutes in, the warmth around him flickered.

It wasn’t a draft. The air in the library was perfectly still. It was as if someone had briefly turned a dial down on the enchantment itself. The comfortable heat dropped away for two, maybe three seconds, replaced by the neutral coolness of the stone room. Then it surged back, returning to its previous steady output.

Killian didn’t look up from his map. He kept his eyes fixed on a particularly jagged ridge line, but his awareness snapped to the sensation on his skin. The dip had been centered on him. The student at the carrel across the aisle, bundled in a thick sweater, hadn’t stirred or reacted.

Another data point.

He waited a few minutes, pretending to study. Then he deliberately shifted his position on the bench, scooting about a foot to his left, farther from the hearth-stone.

The warmth remained constant.

He shifted back to his original spot, his right side now closer to the obsidian disk again.

A minute later, another faint dip. Shorter this time, barely a second. A quick shudder in the temperature field before it stabilized.

So it wasn’t random. It was proximity-based. And it repeated.

He closed the atlas slowly, as if he’d finished his review. He gathered his things and stood up, walking away from the carrel without a backward glance. As he moved down the aisle between shelves, he pressed his thumbnail into a different finger—the middle one this time. Two ticks for the library incident. Device: Temperature-regulating hearth-stone. Function: Sustained thermal emission. Observed effect: Intermittent drop in output intensity. Duration: One to three seconds. Proximity: Within approximately three feet.

He began discreetly cataloging these minor events after that.

It wasn’t a formal log. He couldn’t risk any written record that Elian or anyone else might find. Instead, he built a mental index, organizing each observation by location and device type. He cross-referenced them with subtle physical markers—a specific finger pressed for each type of enchantment, a sequence of taps against his thigh when counting occurrences.

He noted the devices and their standard functions with a thief’s eye for detail. The chalkboard was meant to erase uniformly; it had left a smudge. The hearth-stone was meant to provide constant warmth; it had flickered cold. Both were simple, utilitarian enchantments, the magical equivalent of clockwork. They weren’t sentient or adaptive; they just performed a single task over and over until their magic needed replenishing.

The interference was always brief. Never more than a few seconds. The enchantment would stutter, wobble, or dip, then correct itself as soon as he moved away or as its own magical inertia reasserted itself. It was like walking through a spiderweb—a momentary disruption that vanished once you passed through.

He kept this data entirely to himself.

Elian was jumpy enough as it was, jumping at shadows and double-checking their door was locked every night. Telling him about these passive observations would just trigger another lecture about grenades and inquisitions. Besides, Elian would want to theorize, to diagram the interference patterns on parchment. That created evidence.

Killian’s method was safer. The tally lived in his head and in the faint, temporary crescents on his fingertips that faded by morning. The information was for his own use only, a private map of his own unique footprint in a magical world.

After a few days of passive noting, his practical nature itched for something more structured. Passive observation had confirmed an effect existed. Now he needed to understand its boundaries.

He decided to test his theory with intentional proximity.

Not an experiment—he wasn’t altering variables or trying to break anything. Just… walking closer than normal to things and paying attention. A subtle shift in his daily routes through the academy.

He started with a perpetually burning sconce in a lesser-used corridor of the Alchemical wing. It was an old iron bracket holding a blob of solidified blue flame that gave off light but no heat—a basic everlasting light charm cast on alchemical fuel. Students passed under it all day without a thought.

Killian usually walked down the center of the corridor. This time, as he approached the sconce, he angled his path until he passed within arm’s length of the wall it was mounted on.

As his shoulder came abreast of the blue flame, it guttered.

The stable blob of fire shuddered inward, dimming to a deep indigo for a split-second before flaring back to its usual brightness with a soft pop of reignited magic.

He didn’t break stride. He kept walking, his eyes forward as if lost in thought. He pressed his thumb against his ring finger under the fold of his robe. Data point: Everlight sconce. Function: Constant luminescence. Effect: Temporary dimming/flame instability. Proximity: Less than two feet.

The next test was a floating dust mop in a storeroom annex off the main kitchens.

He’d been sent there on a contrived errand by a kitchen-mage who needed “a strong back” to move some empty brine barrels—a task perfectly suited to someone whose main talent was manual labor. The storeroom was long and narrow, lit by another everlight sconce high on the wall. A magical cleaning device hovered silently in one corner—a standard-issue academy mop, its handle hung with rags, enchanted to drift around a pre-defined area and collect dust through mild attraction spells.

Killian finished shifting the barrels, wiping his hands on his trousers. He made a show of looking around for any other tasks before heading for the door.

His path took him directly past the floating mop.

As he came within about four feet of it, the mop wobbled.

It didn’t fall. It just lost its perfect, static hover for a moment. The handle dipped toward the floor as if suddenly heavier, then jerked back up to its programmed height. The rags twitched listlessly. The subtle hum of its levitation charm hitched audibly before smoothing out again.

He was past it and out the door before it fully stabilized.

Another tick on the mental tally. Device: Autonomous cleaning construct (basic). Function: Sustained levitation and dust attraction. Effect: Loss of altitude stability, brief control lapse. Proximity: Roughly four feet.

The pattern held. Simple enchantments reacted to his close presence with momentary glitches. The effect seemed tied to how complex or powerful the magic was—the simpler the spellwork, the more noticeable the wobble. The chalkboard and hearth-stone had clear hiccups. The everlight and mop showed similar instability.

He walked through the rest of his day with this new layer of awareness coloring his movements. The academy hummed with thousands of these minor enchantments—lights that never went out, doors that sealed quietly against drafts, fountains that recycled their own water through kinetic magic. A vast, interlocking system of convenient miracles.

And now he knew that if he walked too close, some of those miracles stuttered.

It wasn’t power, not in any way these mages would understand. It was anti-power. A localized glitch in reality’s magical software whenever his nullity passed by.

He filed each observation away carefully as he walked back toward their dormitory in the Argent Spire, already mentally sorting through where he might find other common enchantments tomorrow for further passive data collection.

The pattern held firm over the following days. Each time, the magical device he approached behaved erratically for a moment before stabilizing as he moved away.

A self-stirring cauldron in a demonstration kitchen paused its rhythmic rotation, its ladle clanking against the side. A set of enchanted quills in the scribe’s hall, meant to copy text from one parchment to another, all scratched out a single, identical jagged line in unison before resuming their work. A minor barrier charm on a display case of fragile crystal orbs—designed to prevent accidental bumps—developed a visible shimmer and a faint buzzing sound as Killian leaned in to read the label, the field thickening unnaturally before snapping back to its usual transparency when he stepped back.

Each event was minor. Each was brief. None drew more than a passing glance of annoyance from anyone nearby, always attributed to old enchantments needing tuning or momentary power flux in the academy’s ambient mana lines. Killian cataloged them all, building a private profile of his own effect.

He began to intuit the range. For most simple enchantments, the interference radius seemed to be about three to five feet. The effect was stronger the closer he got, and it lingered for a second or two after he moved away, as if the magic needed a moment to recalibrate to his absence. More complex or powerful spells—like the main warding on a sealed door, or the heavy containment fields in the Alchemical labs—showed no visible reaction at all from a casual walk-by. They were too robust, too layered. His nullity was a pebble dropped in a pond, not an earthquake.

It was useful information. It told him where the cracks were smallest and where the walls were solid. He adjusted his mental map of the academy accordingly, noting which areas were dense with fragile, simple magic he could potentially disrupt, and which were fortified beyond his subtle influence.

Then came the incident in the Herbalia Annex.

One afternoon, Elian was feverishly working on a paper about adaptive root systems in magical flora. He’d hit a theoretical snag and needed a specific reference: Garrow’s Compendium of Verdant Symbiosis, a notoriously dense botanical text.

“It’ll be in the Herbalia,” Elian had said, not looking up from his own notes which were covered in frantic diagrams of root nodes. “Third annex, probably on the high shelf near the eastern window. The older editions are up there because nobody actually reads them unless they’re desperate.” He finally glanced at Killian, his expression pleading behind his glasses. “I can’t go. I’m in the middle of cross-referencing pollination vectors. Could you…?”

It was a reasonable request. Fetching books was well within Killian’s cover as a diligent, if magically challenged, student helping his brilliant roommate. He nodded.

“Third annex. Eastern window. Garrow’s book,” he repeated.

“The Compendium,” Elian stressed. “Not Garrow’s Treatise on Arboreal Transfiguration. The green binding with the silver leaf pattern.”

Killian just grunted and left.

The Herbalia Annex was a smaller, quieter chamber branching off from the main library. It smelled of dried herbs, loamy soil from potted specimens, and the sharp, clean scent of preservative spells. Sunlight streamed through a tall, narrow window on the eastern wall, illuminating motes of dust in the air. The room was empty except for one upperclassman, a woman with her hair tied in a severe bun, who was hunched over a table covered in pressed leaves and a magnifying glass. She didn’t look up when he entered.

The shelves here were older, made of dark wood that had warped slightly over time. As Elian predicted, the more common texts were at eye level. The rarer, older volumes—including oversized botanical compendiums—were on the highest shelf, just below the vaulted ceiling.

Killian scanned the eastern wall. There it was: a row of thick, green-bound books about fifteen feet up. He could just make out the glint of silver leaf patterning on one spine.

He looked around for a ladder. The floating ladders that serviced the main library didn’t operate in these specialized annexes; the risk of damaging fragile old books was too high. There should have been a rolling wooden ladder attached to a rail along the shelves. It wasn’t there.

He checked behind other shelves, near the door. Nothing. Probably taken by a maintenance-mage for repair or oiling.

The upperclassman was still engrossed in her leaf analysis, her back to him.

Killian weighed his options. He could go back and tell Elian there was no ladder, waste time tracking one down from another annex, or…

He looked up at the shelf again. It was high, but not impossibly so. The shelf itself was sturdy-looking, anchored deeply into the stone wall. The books were pushed to the back of the shelf lip, their spines facing out.

He made his decision quickly. Getting the book now was more efficient. Drawing attention by wandering around looking for a ladder was less efficient.

He walked quietly to the base of the shelf directly below Garrow’s Compendium. He gauged the distance. If he stretched fully, his fingertips might just brush the bottom edge of the shelf lip.

He took a breath, planted his feet firmly on the stone floor for grip, and reached up.

His fingers hooked over the carved wooden edge of the shelf. It held his weight without groaning—good craftsmanship. Using his arm strength, he pulled himself up smoothly, his feet leaving the ground as he extended his body upward into a controlled stretch. His left hand joined his right on the shelf edge for stability.

Now he was suspended, his eyes level with the high shelf’s contents. The green-and-silver spine of Garrow’s book was about two feet to his right.

He adjusted his grip, shifting his weight onto his left hand while reaching sideways with his right, fingers straining toward the book.

His shoulder brushed against the vertical support beam that ran from floor to ceiling between shelf sections.

The beam was carved with runes—fine, hair-thin lines filled with what looked like mother-of-pearl inlay. He hadn’t noticed them from below. They were subtle decorative markings, or so he thought.

The moment his shoulder made contact with the carved wood, the runes flickered.

A soft shushing sound that had been present in the room—a background hum of absolute quiet he hadn’t even consciously registered—suddenly cut out.

It wasn’t just quiet anymore; it was silent in a way that felt physically wrong for a split second before normal sound rushed back in.

The scrape of his boots against the shelf for purchase sounded abruptly loud. The rustle of his robes against themselves was audible. His own breathing seemed to echo.

He froze, his fingers still inches from the book.

From across the room came other sounds now unfiltered: the crisp snick of the upperclassman turning a page of her portfolio, the faint scratch of her quill making a note.

Then he heard her sharp intake of breath.

He turned his head slowly, still hanging from the shelf.

The upperclassman had looked up from her work. She was frowning, her brow furrowed not at him but at the air around her as if trying to identify a strange smell. Her eyes darted around the annex, searching for the source of disruption.

Her gaze landed on him.

He was clearly visible—a first-year student hanging like a bat from a high shelf instead of using proper library equipment.

But her frown deepened for a different reason. She wasn’t looking at his improper technique; she was listening. The unnatural silence had returned just as abruptly as it had left, reactivating with a soft, almost imperceptible hum that settled over the room again like a blanket.

The brief return of unfiltered ambient noise had lasted several seconds—far longer than any flicker of a flame or wobble of a mop.

Her eyes narrowed at Killian, sharp with suspicion now rather than mere annoyance at noise. She’d heard the silence ward fail. She’d felt it. And she’d seen him touching the carved support beam at precisely that moment.

Killian didn’t wait for her to speak or question him. He moved with deliberate calmness, as if nothing unusual had happened at all. He stretched his arm that final bit, hooked his fingers around the spine of Garrow’s heavy Compendium, and pulled it free from its snug space between two other volumes. The book slid out with a soft thump against his chest.

He lowered himself down from the shelf in one smooth motion, absorbing the impact of his drop with bent knees to land almost silently on the stone floor despite his size. He tucked the large book under his arm.

He gave the upperclassman a polite, bland nod as if just noticing her presence for the first time. “Apologies for the disturbance,” he said, keeping his voice low and even.

She didn’t respond immediately. She just stared at him, her magnifying glass forgotten on her pressed leaves. Her expression was calculating now, trying to piece together what she’d just witnessed—a broken silence ward coinciding with physical contact from an unknown lower-year student.

Killian didn’t linger for her to finish that calculation. He turned and walked out of the Herbalia Annex at a normal pace, neither rushing nor dawdling.

Only when he was back in the busier main corridor of the library did he let himself process what had happened.

That hadn’t been a simple utilitarian enchantment like a light or a cleaner. That had been a ward—a dedicated spell designed to create and maintain a specific environmental condition: perfect silence for study. And it hadn’t just stuttered or dipped.

It had died.

For several seconds, in a two-foot radius around him where his shoulder had touched its runic anchor point, it had completely deactivated before rebooting itself.

That was new data. Critical data.

He walked back toward their dormitory, Garrow’s heavy book under his arm feeling like more than just paper and binding. It felt like proof of concept for something far more dangerous than Elian had ever imagined.

The upperclasswoman had noticed. She hadn’t understood what she saw, but she’d noticed an anomaly connected directly to him.

As he climbed the stairs of the Argent Spire, he pressed his thumbnail deep into his palm this time, not just making a tick but leaving a mark that might last. Data point: Silence Ward (Annex-grade). Function: Sustained area-of-effect suppression of sound vibration. Observed effect: Complete localized deactivation for approximately five seconds. Proximity: Direct physical contact with anchor runes.

He pushed open their dorm room door to find Elian still surrounded by his papers.

“Got it,” Killian said flatly, tossing the heavy green book onto Elian’s desk with less care than usual.

Elian jumped slightly at the thump but immediately seized the volume with grateful hands. “Excellent! Thank you! Was it where I said?”

“Yeah,” Killian said, walking over to his own bed and sitting down to pull off his boots again. He kept his movements routine, his face neutral.

“Any trouble?” Elian asked absently as he flipped through pages already searching for his root node diagrams.

Killian glanced at him—at Elian’s complete absorption in his safe, theoretical world of magical botany—and then looked down at his own hands at faint crescent marks on his fingers and one fresh impression in his palm.

“No trouble,” he said quietly. The chapter ended there. But outside their door, in someone else's mind in that quiet annex a seed of suspicion had just been planted