Chapter 10: Collating Data

Killian returned to the dorm and told Elian there was no trouble retrieving the book from the Herbalia Annex. Elian gave a distracted nod, already buried in the thick green volume. He mumbled something about symbiotic nutrient transfer, his earlier anxiety completely overridden by academic focus.

That was good. Elian worrying meant Elian asking questions, and Killian didn’t have answers that would help either of them sleep. He sat on his own bed, methodically checking the seams of his boots for wear. The silence ward had died for a full five seconds. Not a flicker. A complete shutdown. That changed the scale of things entirely.

He kept his movements routine, his breathing even. Inside, his mind worked through the implications with a cold, practical clarity. A ward was different from a charm. It was anchored, designed to persist. If contact could kill it, even briefly, then his nullity wasn't just a passive smudge. It was a localized eraser.

He needed more data, obviously. But he also needed to be smarter about how he gathered it. The upperclasswoman had noticed. She’d looked right at him with that sharp, calculating frown. People noticing was the one thing he couldn’t afford.

For now, he decided to pull back. No more intentional proximity tests, not for a while. He’d revert to pure observation, widening his distance, letting the pattern of his daily movements become boring and predictable again. He unlaced his boots and set them neatly by the bed, a small ritual of normalcy.

Across the room, Elian turned a page with a soft rustle, utterly absorbed. Killian lay back on his bed, staring at the stone ceiling, and pressed his thumb into the still-tender mark on his palm. The data point was stored. He just had to figure out what to do with it.

---

Althea did not forget.

She sat at her usual desk in the prefects’ common room hours later, a half-finished essay on thaumaturgical resonance fields open before her. The words blurred together. Her mind kept returning to the annex.

The sequence replayed itself with perfect, irritating clarity.

First, the sound. Or rather, the lack of it. The gentle shushing hum of the silence ward—a sound so constant she only ever noticed it in its absence—had simply cut out. The sudden return of unfiltered noise had been jarring: the scrape of fabric, her own page turn, her breath. Then she’d looked up.

The first-year student was hanging from the high shelf, his shoulder pressed against the carved support beam. His motion had stilled, as if he’d heard the change too.

Then the hum returned, reactivating with that soft sigh. The silence settled back over the room like a heavy blanket.

And the student had retrieved his book and left with a polite apology that felt somehow rehearsed.

Althea tapped her quill against the inkwell, leaving a tiny splatter she’d have to magic clean later. A simple silence ward deactivating wasn’t impossible. Wards needed periodic recalibration; mana fluxes in the ley lines beneath the academy could cause temporary drops. But those were system-wide events logged by the Groundskeepers. They didn’t happen in a perfect three-foot radius around a single student touching an anchor point.

The correlation was too precise. Proximity and timing aligned exactly.

She tried to rationalize it. Perhaps he’d been carrying a dissonance-crystal for some obscure project, something that interfered with structured spellforms. First-years weren’t supposed to have access to those, but rules were bent sometimes. Or maybe he had a wild, uncontrolled magical aura that temporarily overloaded the ward’s delicate perception matrix. That would be unusual for someone placed in the general student body, but not unheard of.

Neither explanation sat right. A dissonance-crystal would have a visible effect on other nearby enchantments, and she’d seen no flicker in the everlight sconce by the door. An unstable aura would have left a residual signature she could have sensed after the fact. The air in the annex had felt magically inert, completely normal.

The anomaly bothered her, mainly because it was an anomaly. Althea functioned on precision. Her role as a prefect was built on noticing details others missed and resolving issues before they escalated. An unexplained ward failure was a detail. Letting it go felt like negligence.

Over the next few days, she carried the memory with her like a pebble in her shoe. She found her eyes tracking younger students in the library corridors, though she never saw that particular one again.

Her curiosity itched. It was an academic problem more than a disciplinary one, at least for now. She needed to identify the variable—the student—before she could understand the phenomenon.

Discreetly accessing the library’s entrance logs wasn’t difficult for a prefect with monitoring responsibilities. The logs were maintained by a minor tracking enchantment woven into the main doors of each wing and annex. They recorded the unique magical signature of each student’s academy token upon entry and exit, timestamped and stored in a central ledger for resource allocation studies.

During her assigned monitoring shift in the archives office two days after the incident, Althea called up the log for the Herbalia Annex. She specified the approximate time window. The ledger, a large slate that glowed with soft blue script, presented a list of tokens that had crossed the threshold.

There were only three entries for that hour: her own token ID, an advanced botany researcher who’d left twenty minutes prior, and one first-year token registered to Killian Thorne.

Killian Thorne. The name meant nothing to her. She committed it to memory alongside the face—the dark hair, the build that suggested more manual labor than magical study, the unsettling calm in his eyes when he’d nodded at her.

A first year from the general admissions pool, then. Not a notable scion of any major arcanum family she recognized. That fact alone made the ward failure even stranger. Powerful bloodlines sometimes produced strange talents early on. Total obscurity usually didn’t.

Now she had a name. The next step was context.

Althea maintained a private list. It wasn’t official; it was a habit born from her prefect duties. Whenever she overheard a complaint about a malfunctioning enchantment in common areas, or when a Groundskeeper’s bulletin mentioned minor glitches awaiting repair, she made a brief note. It helped her track areas that might need extra supervision or where students might be tempted to exploit temporary weaknesses.

She pulled her personal journal from her satchel and flipped to the back pages. There, in her neat, compact script, was her running log:

Fiveday last: Everlight sconce in Alchemical Wing corridor 7-B reported “flickering” by second-year Ghent. Maintenance ticket filed. Sixday: Autonomous cleaning mop in lower kitchen storeroom listed as “experiencing levitation instability.” Briefly removed for diagnostics. Sevenday (morning): Chalkboard maintenance charm in Auric Wing classroom 3 noted to have “left residual marks.” Instructor Blythe requested recalibration.

Minor things. The kind of glitches that happened all the time in a building saturated with thousands of simple spells. They were below the threshold of real concern, which is why they were relegated to low-priority maintenance queues.

But now she looked at them with a new question.

She returned to the archive ledger. With Killian Thorne’s token ID in hand, she could query its tracked movements across the academy’s main enchanted thoroughfares—the doors between major wings, the gates into specialized courtyards. The system didn’t track every step, but it created a rough breadcrumb trail of a student’s presence in key locations throughout the day.

It took some cross-referencing with class schedules and her own notes on the glitch locations and times.

The everlight sconce in corridor 7-B had flickered just after third bell on Fiveday. The movement log showed Killian Thorne’s token passing from the Argent Spire dormitories toward the Alchemical Wing… right before third bell.

The cleaning mop instability was logged late on Sixday afternoon. The logs placed Killian Thorne’s token entering the main kitchen annex—which shared access with the storeroom—earlier that same afternoon.

The chalkboard malfunction occurred during a Charms & Cantrips class on Sevenday morning. The class roster for that period, which Althea cross-checked against another archive record, listed Killian Thorne as enrolled in Instructor Blythe’s section.

Three minor malfunctions. Three coincidences of proximity.

Althea leaned back in the wooden chair, which gave a soft creak in the quiet archives office. The pebble in her shoe now felt like a shard of glass.

A pattern was circumstantial evidence at best. It proved nothing except correlation. But in her experience, when multiple unlikely correlations stacked up around a single point, you were usually looking at causation.

She closed her journal slowly and dismissed the glowing ledger with a wave of her hand. The blue light faded from the slate, leaving it dark and inert.

Killian Thorne wasn’t just a student who’d been near a ward when it failed. He was a student who seemed to leave a trail of confused magic in his wake.

Althea gathered her things, her earlier essay forgotten. She had identified the variable. Now she needed to understand what kind of variable it was before deciding what to do next

She needed to be sure. A pattern in a logbook was one thing. Corroborating details were another.

Althea spent the next day on a quiet, methodical investigation. She started with the everlight sconce in corridor 7-B of the Alchemical Wing. She found the second-year who’d reported it, a gangly student named Ghent who was reviewing alchemical formulas on a bench nearby.

“The flickering?” Ghent said when she asked, looking up from his notes. “Yeah, it was weird. Just for a second. The light sort of… sucked inward? Then it popped back. I put in a ticket. They haven’t fixed it yet, obviously.” He gestured to the sconce, which now burned with its usual steady blue flame.

“Did you notice anyone else in the corridor at that moment?” Althea kept her tone casual, as if making routine prefect inquiries about environmental safety.

Ghent scratched his head. “Uh, maybe? People walk through here all the time. There was a bigger guy, a first-year I think, heading toward the practical labs. He passed right by it just before it happened. I only noticed because the change in light made me look up.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Dark hair. Looked like he lifted barrels for fun. Didn’t have his robes on right—sleeves rolled up. Why?”

“Just following up on all malfunction reports,” Althea said smoothly, making a note on her clipboard. “Thank you.”

The description matched. She moved on.

The kitchen storeroom was trickier. The staff-mages were busy and didn’t appreciate questions. She found the maintenance log for the autonomous mop clipped to a board outside the head cook’s office. The entry was brief: ‘Levitation charm instability. Intermittent loss of altitude control. Diagnostic scan showed no inherent flaw. Re-calibrated and returned to service.’ It was signed by a junior Groundskeeper.

She managed to catch the Groundskeeper later that afternoon near the furnace rooms. He was a practical man in oil-stained overalls.

“The mop? Yeah, simple fix,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. “The charm was reading its own levitation field wrong for a few seconds. Like it got conflicting signals. Happens sometimes if someone with a messy aura passes too close while carrying active alchemical reagents or something. Resets itself usually.”

“Was anyone in the storeroom around that time?” Althea asked.

The man shrugged. “A student was in there moving empty barrels for Cook Marnie. Big kid, strong. Did the job quick and left. Didn’t see him touch the mop or anything.”

Another point of alignment.

The chalkboard was easiest. Instructor Blythe was notoriously precise about her classroom tools. Althea approached her after a lecture, framing her question as academic curiosity about enchantment decay rates.

“The maintenance charm on the slate?” Blythe said, tidying her podium. “Yes, it left a residual mark last Sevenday. A streak of runic script failed to erase. I had to clear it manually. The charm recalibrated after class and has functioned perfectly since.”

“Do you recall if any student was sitting particularly close to where the smudge remained?”

Blythe adjusted her spectacles, thinking. “The smudge was in the lower left quadrant. Let me see… young Corwin was at the board, but he’d stepped away. The students in the front rows…” Her eyes drifted to a mental seating chart. “Thorne, I believe. Killian Thorne. He sits in the front by the window, often seems rather disengaged from the practical work. His desk would have been adjacent to the affected area.”

Three incidents. Three witness accounts or logs placing Killian Thorne at the scene with temporal proximity.

Althea returned to her dormitory room that evening and laid out her notes on her desk. She had constructed a circumstantial case, but it was undeniably coherent.

1. Herbalia Annex: Silence ward deactivation upon physical contact with anchor beam.
2. Corridor 7-B: Everlight sconce flicker as subject passes within two feet.
3. Kitchen Storeroom: Cleaning mop levitation instability during subject’s presence in room.
4. Auric Wing Classroom: Chalkboard charm failure to erase segment adjacent to subject’s desk.

The effects were all minor, temporary, and involved simple utilitarian enchantments. The common thread was Killian Thorne’s proximity.

She sat back, tapping her fingers on the polished wood. What did she actually have? A series of low-priority glitches that any instructor would dismiss as normal wear and tear. Her own eyewitness account of the ward failure, which was subjective and could be explained away as a coincidental mana flux she’d misattributed.

If she took this to an instructor—to someone like Morvath, or even to Head Archmage Valerius—what would happen? They would ask for proof of deliberate tampering or a detectable magical anomaly emanating from the student. She had neither. Her ‘proof’ was a pattern of absences and coincidences.

Worse, they might question her judgment. Althea’s reputation rested on being reliable, precise, and not wasting faculty time with hysterical conjectures. Reporting a first-year for allegedly causing enchantments to stutter by apparently doing nothing but standing near them… it sounded absurd even in her own head. It reeked of paranoia or a misguided attempt to gain attention.

She could already imagine the politely dismissive response. ‘Thank you for your diligence, Prefect Vayne. We will monitor the situation.’ Translation: they would file her report and forget about it. And her credibility would be subtly diminished. The next time she reported something serious, they might remember the boy who broke chalkboards by sitting too close.

No. Going through official channels with this half-formed theory was a mistake. It was premature and personally risky.

But letting it go felt wrong too. If there was a student somehow interfering with academy enchantments, even passively, that represented a vulnerability. It might be unintentional on his part—some kind of magical affliction he didn’t understand—but it was still a flaw in the system’s integrity.

She needed a second opinion from someone who wouldn’t dismiss her out of hand, someone who understood the importance of institutional integrity but operated with more… flexibility than the faculty.

Her thoughts turned to the student council, specifically to Lysander Thorne-Kaelin.

Lysander had a reputation for being ambitious, sharp, and fiercely protective of the academy’s standards. He came from one of the premier magical families and carried himself with an expectation of excellence that bordered on severity. More importantly, he was known to have little patience for anyone who didn’t belong or who threatened the established order through incompetence or deception.

He was also a pragmatist. He might see the pattern she’d uncovered not as a fantasy but as a potential problem to be managed.

The next afternoon, she sent him a brief message via a discreet messenger-construct—a folded parchment bird that found its recipient through sympathetic resonance. ‘Request consultation on a matter of academy integrity. Discretion preferred. The secluded nook on the third balcony of the Astral Observatory, fourth bell.’

He arrived exactly on time.

The nook was little more than an arched recess off the main observatory balcony, shielded from view by a curtain of hanging star-charts and celestial maps. The air here was cooler, smelling of old paper and ozone from the nearby weather-manipulation arrays.

Lysander stepped through the charts, his posture erect and his expression one of polite inquiry. He wore his student council pin prominently on his lapel.

“Prefect Vayne,” he said, giving a slight, formal nod. “You requested a meeting.”

“I did,” Althea said, gesturing to the small stone bench opposite her own chair. “Thank you for coming. I have… an observational anomaly I wish to discuss with someone who appreciates systemic precision.”

Lysander took a seat, his movements economical. He folded his hands in his lap, his gaze attentive but guarded. “An anomaly?”

“Concerning potential interference with campus enchantments,” she clarified. She kept her voice low and even, presenting the facts as she would in a lab report. “Over the past week, I’ve catalogued several minor malfunctions in simple spells: an everlight sconce flickering, a cleaning mop destabilizing, a chalkboard charm failing to erase completely.”

Lysander listened, his face showing mild professional interest.

“Initially,” Althea continued, “I attributed these to routine decay or mana flux. Then I witnessed a more significant event in the Herbalia Annex: a dedicated silence ward deactivated completely for several seconds before resetting itself.”

That caught his attention. His eyebrows lifted a fraction.

“The deactivation coincided precisely with a first-year student making physical contact with the ward’s anchor runes,” she said, watching his reaction carefully.

“A first-year?” Lysander’s tone was neutral, but something shifted behind his eyes—a flicker of sharper focus.

“Yes.” She opened her journal on the small table between them, revealing her notes and cross-referenced logs with Killian Thorne’s token ID highlighted. “I identified the student and reviewed his movement logs against the other incident reports.” She pointed to each entry as she spoke. “In each case, his proximity is logged within minutes of the reported malfunction.”

She laid it out methodically: the times, the locations, the witness statements where she had them.

“The effects are minor and temporary,” she concluded, leaning back slightly. “But the pattern of correlation is statistically unlikely to be random chance. It suggests this student’s presence introduces a localized destabilizing effect on low-level enchantments.”

She paused, then framed her central concern carefully.

“I haven’t taken this to an instructor yet. The evidence is entirely circumstantial. It could indicate an undiagnosed magical condition on his part, or… something else.” She met Lysander’s gaze directly now. “But it represents a potential vulnerability in our environment’s magical infrastructure, however small. I thought it warranted review by someone who values the academy’s operational integrity as much as I do.”

She fell silent then, giving him time to absorb the information and her reasoning for bringing it to him instead of a teacher.

Lysander didn’t speak immediately. He looked down at her notes, his eyes scanning the lines of data about Killian Thorne and the glitches with an intensity that had shed its initial politeness completely.

A slow, cold smile began to form on his lips—not one of amusement, but of deep, focused satisfaction as pieces clicked into place in his mind that Althea could not possibly see.

---

He leaned forward slightly, his finger tracing the name on her notes. “Killian Thorne.”

“You know him?” Althea asked, noting the specific recognition in his voice. It wasn’t just familiarity with a roster; it was personal.

“Our paths have crossed,” Lysander said, his voice dropping to a smoother, more contemplative register. He looked up from the journal, his earlier polite mask now replaced by an expression of intense calculation. “He’s an… unusual case. General admissions. From the non-magical precincts below, if the rumors are true.”

He said it as if stating a clinical fact, but Althea caught the undercurrent. Disdain, yes, but something more focused.

“You believe my findings have merit, then?” she pressed.

“I believe,” Lysander said slowly, choosing his words with obvious care, “that you have identified a series of irregularities that demand an explanation. The coincidence is indeed striking.” He tapped the page with one well-manicured nail. “A student from a non-magical background, present at multiple points of minor enchantment failure, culminating in a witnessed ward deactivation. It suggests either a profound and dangerous ignorance of magical systems… or a deliberate tampering.”

He was reframing her ‘potential vulnerability’ into something more active, more sinister. Althea felt a slight unease but didn’t contradict him. His interpretation was within the bounds of her data, if more aggressive.

“My concern is the integrity of the academy’s spells,” she reiterated. “If his presence disrupts them, even unintentionally, it could have wider implications. Should we monitor him more closely? Perhaps have a Groundskeeper perform a diagnostic?”

Lysander shook his head, a small, dismissive motion. “Too blunt. And likely to yield nothing. If he is the cause and is doing it unintentionally—some sort of anti-magical affliction—a standard diagnostic would probably fail around him just as these charms did. If he is doing it deliberately…” He let the implication hang. “He would be prepared to evade detection.”

“Then what do you propose?” Althea felt the conversation shifting out of her control, moving from mutual consultation to Lysander taking the lead.

“A more subtle approach,” he said, his cold smile returning. He closed her journal gently but decisively. “May I borrow these notes? I would like to study the pattern more closely. As a council member, I have a duty to investigate potential threats to our community’s safety and standards. Your work provides an excellent starting point.”

Althea hesitated. Her notes were her own, the product of her diligence. Letting them go felt like surrendering the problem. But what was her alternative? She had already decided against going to the faculty. Lysander was offering to act, to take the burden of investigation—and any potential risk—onto his own shoulders.

“You will be discreet?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” he assured her, his tone now one of collegial confidence. “This is a matter for student governance first and foremost. If there is a mundane explanation, we will find it without needlessly damaging a fellow student’s standing. If there is something more serious…” He let the sentence trail off meaningfully.

It was the right thing to say. It addressed her concerns about fairness and due process while affirming the seriousness of the issue.

“Very well,” Althea said, nodding. She pushed the journal toward him. “Keep me informed of your findings.”

“Of course.” Lysander took the journal and stood, tucking it neatly under his arm. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Prefect Vayne. Your vigilance is commendable.”

With another curt nod, he swept aside the curtain of star-charts and was gone, leaving Althea alone in the cool quiet of the nook. She sat for a moment longer, the faint smell of ozone in the air suddenly feeling charged. She had done the logical thing, she told herself. She had shared a concern with a competent peer who had the authority to investigate properly.

So why did she feel like she had just handed a lit match to someone standing next to a powder keg?

---

Lysander did not return to his dormitory or seek out a quiet study carrel. He walked with purposeful strides through the academy’s grand corridors, Althea’s journal held securely against his side. The polite, interested mask was gone completely now, replaced by an expression of icy triumph.

Thorne. The gutter-rat who had humiliated him, who had turned his own blackmail against him with crude physicality. The one person in this entire institution who should have been beneath his notice was instead a constant, grating thorn.

And now this.

He found an empty classroom and locked the door with a simple charm. He spread Althea’s notes on a desk under the light of a crystal lamp. He read through them again, more slowly this time, cross-referencing each incident with his own knowledge of Killian’ movements and abilities.

The everlight sconce flicker. The mop destabilizing. The chalkboard charm failing. Minor things.

But then the silence ward. A dedicated environmental spell deactivating upon physical contact.

It wasn’t just disruption. It was negation.

All the pieces he’d gathered over the weeks snapped into a devastating new configuration. Killian’s impossible performance in Workshop Three—not magic, but a physical trick that the scrambled anti-cheating wards had failed to penalize. His passing grade in alchemy for a potion that should have been inert—a verification charm confused by something it couldn’t read.

He hadn’t just been faking magic through brute strength and luck. He possessed something else entirely: an innate ability to cancel it.

A magical nullity so absolute it acted as a void, scrambling simple spells on proximity and collapsing anchored wards on touch.

The sheer, blasphemous impossibility of it was breathtaking. It explained everything. How he’d gotten past the gates. How he’d avoided detection. How he’d survived this long.

And it gave Lysander everything he needed.

Blackmail had failed because it created mutual vulnerability. But this… this was not just a secret. It was a fundamental crime against the natural order. Presenting this evidence to the faculty wouldn’t just get Killian expelled; it would get him dissected by the Arcane Inquisition to understand the aberration.

More importantly, it was evidence that couldn’t be turned back on him. There was no way for Killian to reframe this as a mutual standoff. You couldn’t threaten to reveal that your accuser was correct.

Lysander carefully copied the most relevant parts of Althea’s notes onto a fresh sheet of parchment—the timeline, the incidents, her own observation of the ward failure. He omitted her speculative language about vulnerabilities and systemic issues. He presented it as a clear, factual record of malfunctions tied to one student.

He then returned to his own rooms and composed a brief, damning summary from his own perspective as a concerned student council member who had corroborated a prefect’s findings.

He didn’t plan to submit it. Not yet.

Papers were for authorities. What he needed first was a conversation.

---

Killian was taking the long way back from Remedial Magical Awareness with Morvath, cutting through the central courtyard known as the Sunken Garden. It was a peaceful place, all manicured hedges and softly bubbling fountains powered by kinetic enchantments in their bases. The late afternoon light slanted through the arches, casting long shadows.

He was walking near one such fountain when he saw Lysander step out from behind a hedge, blocking the path ahead.

Killian stopped walking. He didn’t tense up visibly; he just settled his weight evenly on both feet and let his hands hang loose at his sides. His face showed nothing.

Lysander looked different than he had during their confrontation in the practice courtyard. There was no fury here, no humiliated pride simmering under the surface. Instead, he wore an expression of serene, smug confidence that was far more dangerous.

“Thorne,” Lysander said, his voice carrying easily across the few yards between them.

Killian didn’t reply. He waited.

Lysander began walking toward him slowly, as if they were two acquaintances meeting for a stroll. When he was within ten feet, he stopped again and held up a folded sheet of parchment.

“I’ve been doing some reading,” Lysander said pleasantly. “Fascinating stuff, really.”

He unfolded the parchment with a deliberate flourish and held it so Killian could see. It was Althea’s copied notes—the neat columns of times, locations, and malfunctions, with Killian’s name highlighted at the top alongside phrases like ‘proximity correlation’ and ‘observed ward deactivation upon contact.’

Killian’s eyes scanned the page once, quickly. His pulse didn’t quicken; his breathing remained steady. Inside, cold clarity washed over him like winter water. The upperclasswoman from the annex hadn’t just been suspicious. She’d been diligent. She’d built a case and given it to precisely the wrong person.

Lysander watched his face for any reaction—fear, panic, denial—and seemed mildly disappointed by the blank lack of it.

“It seems you leave traces after all,” Lysander continued, his smile widening into something genuinely amused now that he held all the leverage. “Not magical ones, of course. But little… holes in the magic around you.” He tapped the parchment with his free hand. “A prefect noticed. She was quite thorough.”

He let that hang in the air between them, the quiet burble of the fountain the only sound for a long moment.

Then Lysander refolded the notes carefully and tucked them back inside his robes, his eyes never leaving Killian’s face.

His expression held a smug, knowing smile that promised this conversation was only the beginning