The elemental class ran every morning, six days a week, in the training ground east of Space Mountain.
The class format was split: theory in the first session, practical in the second. Lysander taught both. He was a very different teacher in each.
In theory sessions, he was expansive — genuinely interested in the subject, willing to follow student questions into tangents, precise about distinguishing what was known from what was currently accepted but uncertain. He pushed back on assumptions. He corrected received wisdom with a frequency that suggested he'd spent some time being frustrated by received wisdom.
In practical sessions, he was a different kind of precise: economical, direct, with the characteristic eye of someone who understood what correct technique looked like from the inside, not just the outside. He corrected students' configurations at a level of specificity that most mage teachers didn't bother to reach.
Both modes pointed at the same thing: Lysander understood space magic at a depth that exceeded the standard of a mage-academy elemental instructor.
Aaron spent the first two weeks observing this without drawing conclusions. Then he spent week three drawing them.
On the fifteenth day, during a theory session on the nature of spatial resistance — the phenomenon by which dense matter compressed the flow of space particles — Aaron asked a question that wasn't quite in the syllabus.
"You said spatial resistance increases proportionally with matter density," he said. "Is the relationship purely linear? Or does it change character at certain density thresholds?"
Lysander paused. He had been in the middle of writing something on the board. He didn't look at Aaron immediately.
"What made you think to ask that?" he said.
"The theoretical implications of linearity don't hold at very high densities," Aaron said. "If the relationship were purely linear, the densest objects in the empire — certain mountain formations, deep-bedrock formations — would act as permanent distortions in the spatial field. But they don't, measurably. So either the relationship isn't linear, or there's a compensating mechanism I haven't accounted for."
Lysander set down his chalk.
He turned around.
He looked at Aaron with an expression Aaron couldn't quite map — too many layers to parse quickly, reading like a sentence in a language he mostly understood.
"What mountain were you from?" Lysander asked.
The question came from a different angle than Aaron expected. He adjusted. "Four Gods Mountain."
Something moved in Lysander's expression and was immediately controlled.
"Interesting," Lysander said, in a tone that was performing neutral so hard it was essentially admitting what was underneath it. "To answer your question: the relationship is not purely linear. At certain density thresholds, it inverts. This is not in the standard curriculum because the practical implications are —" he paused — "currently considered outside the scope of mage-rank capabilities. The thresholds at which the inversion occurs are very high."
"But they're real," Aaron said.
"They're real," Lysander confirmed.
The other students were looking back and forth between them with the particular expression of people in a room where the conversation has shifted into a register they can follow but not participate in.
The other students were paying close attention, some taking notes, others simply listening.
"What causes the inversion?" Aaron asked.
Lysander held his gaze for a moment. Then: "That's the question for the advanced module. For now —" he turned back to the board — "we have the basics to complete."
He resumed writing. Aaron sat back.
"That was not nothing," Sirath said. "He knew the answer. He knows the answer in detail. And the mention of Four Gods Mountain was deliberate."
"He recognised the name," Aaron said, keeping his lips still.
"Yes. Which means he has encountered that name in the context of spatial theory, not geography." A pause. "He has access to old records."
"Or he's read old records." Aaron turned his stylus over in his fingers. "The question is whether he's working alone, or as part of something."
"And whether what he's part of would be interested in us."
"That depends on what they want," Aaron said. "Which I don't know yet."
"No," Sirath agreed. "But the gap is closing."
— — —
After the practical session that afternoon, Lysander kept Aaron back.
The other students filtered out, one by one, until the training ground was empty.
Lysander stood in the middle of the training ground, the late afternoon light slanting across it, and looked at Aaron in the silence of an empty space.
"Your placement test results," Lysander said. "The technique you used."
"The Spatial Gate," Aaron said.
"The configuration. The rotation direction. The pressure load on the leading quadrant before activation." Lysander's voice was level. "Where did you learn it?"
Aaron had prepared several versions of this answer and selected the truest one. "I found a technique manual," he said. "Old one. On Four Gods Mountain."
The silence that followed was specific — not surprised, exactly, but the silence of a person who has confirmed a hypothesis they have been sitting with for some time.
"I see," Lysander said.
"Is the configuration unusual?" Aaron asked.
"It is the correct configuration," Lysander said. "Which is different from the standard configuration. The standard configuration, as you may have noticed, introduces a micro-oscillation in the gate's perimeter. Small enough to be functionally irrelevant in most cases. Significant only at —"
"High density or very long duration," Aaron said. "The oscillation compounds."
"Yes." Lysander looked at him for a moment. "The correct configuration eliminates the oscillation. It was developed by a practitioner whose identity is not recorded in current scholarship."
"And you know the correct configuration because —"
"Because I have also found old things," Lysander said carefully. "On different mountains."
They stood across from each other in the empty training ground. The silver light was thickening in the air, space element dense and quiet around them.
Aaron said: "You know what Four Gods Mountain is."
A very long pause.
"I have suspicions," Lysander said. "I don't have certainties." He looked at Aaron with an expression that had finally stopped being carefully managed. It was tired, a little. The tiredness of someone who has been carrying questions for years. "I have been at this academy for eleven years. I've been watching for a student with a specific profile — not talent specifically, though talent is part of it. Something more particular than that."
"And?" Aaron said.
"And you walked into my testing ground and opened a gate with a configuration that hasn't been documented since the ancient era." Lysander exhaled. "I want to be careful here. You are ten years old, and what I suspect about who taught you what you know would involve forces that are — not safe to discuss openly."
"I'm not ten in the way ten usually means," Aaron said, because it was relevant.
Lysander looked at him for a long moment.
"No," he said. "I don't think you are." He seemed to make a decision. "I won't ask you what that means. Not yet. What I will tell you is this: there are people in this academy who have been waiting for someone to arrive with certain markers. I am one of them. We do not have the full picture of what we are waiting for, or why. We only know that the records we have access to say that a student will come who carries an ancient inheritance — and that it matters for reasons we are still, frankly, attempting to understand."
"How many of you are there?" Aaron asked.
"In this academy: three, that I know of." He paused. "Possibly four."
"The headmaster?"
Another pause — more careful. "That is a question I am not comfortable answering right now."
"That is an answer," Aaron said.
Lysander almost smiled. The expression fit strangely on his careful face, like something he hadn't used in a while. "Yes. It is." He clasped his hands behind his back. "Go cultivate, Aaron. Come to my office in two weeks — the ninth day of the second month. There are things I would like to show you, if by then I have had time to think about how much trust this situation warrants."
"And if I've decided by then that I trust you?"
"Then perhaps we'll make progress faster." He turned toward the building. "Two weeks."
Aaron walked back toward Space Mountain alone.
"Well," Sirath said.
"Yes," Aaron agreed.
"I've been waiting three thousand years for there to be someone like Lysander within your reach." The old mage's voice was very quiet. "Someone who has been tending the seeds."
"You knew there might be people like him."
"I hoped." A long pause. "I planted things specifically so that people who found them and understood them would know what to look for. I couldn't know if anyone would maintain the practice this long."
"Someone did."
"Someone did," Sirath said.
Aaron climbed the path back to his cave, feeling the mountain's familiar spatial current beneath his feet — the deep, slow movement of the formations Sirath had placed here three millennia ago, still running, still waiting.
He made himself dinner, sat in the cave entrance with his mother's dark stone in his hand, and looked out at the silver tower catching the last of the light.
Two weeks.
Then answers.
Or better questions.
He was beginning to suspect the two were the same thing.