The Five Elements City was built on a plain so flat it looked designed, which Sirath confirmed it largely was.
"The original founders levelled the terrain with earth magic," he said, as the caravan crested a low hill and Aaron got his first unobstructed view. "About two hundred years after the mages disappeared. An eighth-rank earth mage and a formation team. It took them six years."
"An eighth-rank mage two hundred years after the disappearance," Aaron said. "So the upper ranks were still attainable then."
"Yes. The decline in peak cultivation has been gradual. The highest rank currently active in the empire, to my knowledge, is the academy's own headmaster — eighth rank, as of the last information available to me. Whether anyone higher still exists in the world..." Sirath paused. "I don't know."
The city had five towers — visible from this distance as vertical lines against the sky, each a different height, built in the colours of the five elements. Earth-brown at the northwest. Fire-red at the northeast. Water-blue at the south. Wind-grey at the west. And the tallest, at the centre of the academy grounds, was silver-white, and Sirath went quiet when Aaron looked at it.
"Space element tower," Aaron said.
"Yes." A brief pause. "It was not originally intended as a tower. I designed it as a formation anchor — a device to stabilise spatial currents in the city's foundations. The academy built around it." Another pause, shorter. "They used my work as a centerpiece and did not know it was mine. I find that... I'm not sure what I find that."
"Complicated?"
"Complicated," Sirath agreed.
— — —
The city gates were staffed by fourth-rank mages as a matter of standard procedure. Aaron showed his admission letter without being asked — he'd already clocked the guard's posture, the angle of attention, the particular way she was scanning vehicles rather than passengers, which meant she was looking for contraband rather than people, and that showing documentation proactively would move him through faster.
He was right. Twenty seconds, through the gate, and into the city proper.
The streets were wider than Eskra's by a factor of three. The buildings on either side were built with the particular aesthetic of places that expected important people to look at them — not ornate exactly, but precise. Clean lines, quality materials, architectural choices that said "we know what we're doing". Shops occupied the ground floors of most buildings: materials for mage-craft, medicines, food. The kind of items that in Ivory Village were the subject of rumour, here sold from open storefronts with chalked price-boards outside.
Aaron watched a woman buy a third-grade cultivation pill as he passed — simply reached into her purse and handed over coins as though it were bread. He noted the price and did the calculation. Three months of his village's food budget, for one pill.
He could feel Sirath watching through his eyes with the particular quality of someone looking at something that had changed enormously since they last saw it.
"It was a smaller settlement," Sirath said. "When I was alive. A way-station. Three buildings and a road junction."
"Now it's a city."
"Now it's a city." A pause. "Humans are fast builders, when they have motivation. And mages provide considerable motivation."
— — —
The academy entrance was an archway set into a high wall, and through the archway Aaron could see — nothing. Just greenery, which should not have been possible given the scale of the grounds beyond it.
"Illusion formation," he said.
"Yes. And a reasonably sophisticated one." Sirath's tone shifted slightly — the particular quality of a practitioner evaluating someone else's craft. "Seventh-rank formation at minimum. The base array is old. Someone placed it before the academy existed and the academy built the wall around it."
"You?"
"Not this particular formation, no. But the technique is from my era." A brief pause. "Someone preserved this intentionally. A formation of this age should have degraded long ago without maintenance. Something is sustaining it."
Aaron filed this.
He walked through the archway.
— — —
The illusion dissolved like morning mist, and the academy replaced it.
He had been prepared, intellectually. Sirath had described the academy's scale, its layout, the approximate number of students. He had processed that description and formed a mental image.
The mental image was insufficient.
The academy grounds were enormous — several kilometres across, he estimated, taking in the scale of the buildings and the distance between them. The central silver tower caught the late afternoon light and threw it back in every direction. Sub-buildings were connected by covered walkways, and between them were training grounds, cultivation gardens, and what appeared to be a forest occupying the entire eastern section of the campus. Students moved through all of it — older students, he guessed, since the new intake wasn't starting for another two days — in the purposeful way of people who knew exactly where they were going.
Above the main gate, inside the illusion, a carved inscription read: "What is earned cannot be taken. What is understood cannot be forgotten."
He looked at it for a moment.
"That was a phrase from my era," Sirath said quietly. "I don't know who preserved it."
Two older students were approaching. Upperclassmen, by the look of them — third or fourth year, Aaron estimated by the quality of their robes.
"New intake?" one of them asked.
"Yes," Aaron said.
"Entrance ceremony is in two days. Registration is in the main building." He pointed. "If you're not sure which element class you're in, someone at the registration desk will tell you. If you've already been told —" he glanced at Aaron, noting the letter still in his hand with Elder Thorn's seal — "your housing assignments are posted outside the main building."
"Thank you," Aaron said.
The students moved on.
Aaron looked up at the silver tower.
"I want to see it up close," he said.
"Later," Sirath said. "Registration first. Tower later."
"You sound like a parent."
"I sound like someone who has seen promising students derailed by arriving late to administrative processes. Registration first."
— — —
The housing assignment for space-element students was Space Mountain — a formation of natural rock on the academy's northwestern edge, riddled with cave dwellings carved out over the academy's history. Each cave was a private space: sleeping area, cultivation space, a natural hot spring fed by mountain runoff.
Aaron's cave was on the upper third of the mountain, which Sirath said was intentional — the upper caves had denser spatial element concentrations.
He dropped his pack on the sleeping mat and stood in the entrance of the cave, looking out at the academy below. The silver tower caught the last of the evening light. Around it, the buildings and training grounds of the Five Elements Academy spread out in their careful organisation.
Somewhere below, hundreds of students were cultivating, practising, competing. Some of them would leave here in ten years as sixth-rank mages. Some would leave earlier, having failed to keep pace. A very small number would leave as something else entirely — the ones who made genuine leaps, who pushed beyond the expected.
Aaron set his mother's stone on the ledge by the sleeping mat.
"What's the goal for year one?" he said.
"Spatial Gate to instinct level. Begin artifact refinement foundation. First-rank advancement." Sirath paused. "And make no enemies you cannot afford."
"And the academy itself? What am I looking for?"
A longer pause this time. "The formation anchoring the entrance illusion. The space element tower and what I believe is underneath it. And if you can manage it without drawing attention — the academy headmaster. I want you to observe him before he observes you."
"Why?"
"Because he is an eighth-rank mage and has held that position for thirty years without apparent advancement, and a person who has stopped advancing at that level is either incapable or has found a reason to stop. Both possibilities are interesting for very different reasons."
Aaron thought about this. "You think he knows something."
"I think the Five Elements Academy has been here for two hundred years and has preserved several things from the ancient era that should not have survived. Someone has been maintaining them. For two centuries." Sirath's voice was careful. "I want to know who started that practice, and whether it continues because of habit, or because of understanding."
The light faded. Stars appeared above the mountain. Aaron could feel the spatial element dense around him, moving in the mountain's slow stone currents, and somewhere in the tower at the back of his mind, another window lit.
He lay down on the sleeping mat and closed his eyes.
Tomorrow: the entrance ceremony.
The year after that: answers, he hoped. And if not answers, then better questions.
He was good at questions.