The lecture hall was carved, not built.
Stone descended in concentric tiers, each bench cut directly from the mountain's spine. Even the light was indirect—thin shafts from narrow apertures high above, refracted through crystal veins embedded in the rock.
Nothing here was meant to be comfortable.
That was deliberate.
The mage took his place without looking for familiar faces. Students filtered in with measured silence, boots scraping stone, cloaks shedding snow melt that evaporated before pooling. Rank was implicit. Seniority expressed itself in posture, not proximity.
At the center of the hall stood an empty circle of bare floor.
A bell rang once.
Professor Halvren entered without ceremony.
He was old in the Caladan sense—not frail, not slow, but compressed, as though years had been folded inward rather than worn outward. His robes bore no insignia. Only his eyes marked his authority: sharp, unaccommodating, already evaluating failure before it occurred.
"Sit," he said.
No one moved.
They were already seated.
"Good," Halvren continued. "You remember yesterday's exercise."
No one answered.
"This is not a language course," he said flatly. "If you need repetition, you should not be here."
A faint disturbance rippled through the room and attention tightened
Halvren raised one hand.
A symbol formed.
It was simple. Almost insultingly so. A single construct, rigid, angular, hovering at chest height. Its light was dull gold, stable to the point of boredom.
Aurelian.
No one needed it named.
"This," Halvren said, "is a complete spell."
The symbol pulsed once.
A slab of stone rose from the floor in front of him, clean-edged, perfectly rectangular.
He lowered his hand. The stone remained.
"Power is irrelevant," he continued. "Complexity is optional. Control is not."
The mage watched carefully—not the effect, but the ordering. The timing between visualization and execution. The absence of hesitation. Halvren did not hold the symbol.
He released it.
"You," Halvren said, pointing—not at the mage, but two rows below. "Demonstrate."
The student stood. Younger. Confident in the careless way of someone who had not yet paid for it.
He began assembling symbols.
Too many.
They bloomed into the air in quick succession, overlapping geometries, differing tonalities of light. The structure wavered under its own ambition.
Halvren did not interrupt.
The spell discharged.
Stone surged upward—uneven, fractured, accompanied by a sharp crack as internal stresses tore through the formation. The construct collapsed under its own weight, leaving rubble and dust.
The student swayed.
Halvren raised two fingers.
The symbols vanished instantly.
"Ars onset," Halvren said. "Mild. Sit."
The student obeyed, pale, breathing shallowly.
Halvren turned back to the hall.
"Ars is not pain," he said. "Pain is feedback. Ars is lag. When your cognition cannot keep pace with the structure you are running."
He paused.
"Do not confuse tolerance with mastery."
He gestured again.
This time, the symbol shifted.
Its geometry softened, edges flowing into one another, light deepening into green hues that seemed less projected than grown.
The stone slab did not rise.
Instead, fractures spidered outward through the floor, slow, deliberate, as though the mountain itself were deciding where to yield.
Sylvan.
"Same output," Halvren said. "Different grammar."
The mage felt it then—the subtle pressure behind the eyes, the instinctive resistance of trying to hold both interpretations in mind.
He did not attempt it.
Neither did anyone else.
"Congeris," Halvren said quietly, and the room stilled. "Is not permission."
He let the Sylvan structure dissolve.
"It is responsibility."
Halvren's gaze swept the hall.
"Most of you can speak one language fluently. Some of you can translate between them—with effort, with delay, with risk."
His eyes lingered briefly on the mage.
"Running two simultaneously does not make you exceptional," he continued. "It makes you unstable."
He stepped back from the circle.
"Today," he said, "you will not cast."
A ripple of surprise—suppressed immediately.
"Today," Halvren continued, "you will observe failure."
At his signal, the floor circle activated.
Runes ignited—not floating, but embedded deep within the stone. The air thickened, layered with overlapping constructs, some half-formed, some decaying mid-execution.
A controlled collapse.
"Each structure you see," Halvren said, "failed for a reason. Incorrect hierarchy. Faulty assumption. Misaligned intent."
The mage leaned forward slightly.
This was the real lesson.
"Identify the flaw," Halvren said. "Not verbally. Structurally."
Students closed their eyes.
The mage did not.
He watched the interactions—the way one construct destabilized another, the subtle incompatibility between grammars that almost worked.
Almost was never enough.
Time passed.
Minutes. Or longer.
Finally, Halvren spoke again.
"If you remember nothing else," he said, "remember this: magic does not reward imagination."
He turned toward the exit.
"It rewards discipline."
The bell rang.
Students began to rise, quietly, minds already racing.
The mage remained seated for a moment longer, replaying the failures—not as mistakes, but as things to learn from.
Outside, snow struck stone with increasing force.
The weather was turning.
As it always did.
And somewhere beneath the academy, deep within the mountain, structures older than language waited—patient, silent, and indifferent to who survived long enough to understand them.