Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotionally Incompetent

The Moonbear Room wasn’t marked by a placard, nor did it bear any wards at the entrance that a normal student could see. It simply existed, tucked behind the western observatory dome where dusklight pooled like slow-spilling ink across the marble.

Fabrisse followed Kairon up a curving corridor until they reached a door that looked like frosted glacier, though it neither shone nor reflected anything. Kairon gestured once. The door dissolved, like salt melting in warm water.

What’s happening? Why do you have to dissolve a door? That implies that you have to cast a spell to create the door in the first place. That’s so extra.

Inside was a study, or what began as a study before changing its mind halfway through and deciding it would rather be a planetary sanctum.

His whole body tingled the moment he stepped inside, and he immediately realized why. The floor was laid with mirelith, a volcanic sedimentstone so rare it was once thought to form only in realms where ley lines intersected at unnatural angles. Veins of pearl-gold filament ran through it, but it wasn’t the gold that caught Fabrisse’s breath—it was the subtle lattice shimmer beneath the surface, a telltale trait of mirelith’s aetheric conductivity. The stone was alive with a latent presence as if it had its own inner resonance. A mosaic of inlaid runes pulsed every few seconds beneath the mirelith slabs, their rhythm like the slow breath of something massive and asleep.

Kairon led him past a tea set floating silently near a crescent-shaped couch. Along the far wall stood rows of instruments—half-orbs, tuning forks shaped like bird bones, and an enormous scrying basin filled with liquid that flowed like starlight slowed to syrup.

Archmagus Iveta Monasterie stood at the center of it all, wrist-deep in a rotating glass globe that contained a miniature galaxy. Her face was all angles—high cheekbones that caught the rune-light like carved quartz, a straight nose with the faintest tilt at the tip, and lips that rarely parted unless words were already sharpened behind them. Aged 35, she was the youngest Archmagus in the South Westeros Branch of the Unified Synod of Thaumaturgic Studies, but she wore those accolades like silk gloves: delicate in appearance, lethal in implication. Fresh chapters posted on novel⸺fire.net

Nothing about her expression changed when Fabrisse entered, but the tiny nebula in the glass globe at her fingertips swirled faster.

As he took a step further, Fabrisse’s attention snagged on something across the room.

Tucked between two vertical columns of etched crystal was a mural—small, discreet, and deeply out of place. It wasn’t animated like the kind the Synod liked to flaunt in procession halls. No, this one was static: a brushed-steel relief of Thaumarch Muradius himself, rendered in impeccable detail down to the folds of his regalia and the scepter in his uplifted hand. His expression was beatific, eyes cast downward in what was clearly meant to convey divine insight, though it just looked vaguely constipated.

Fabrisse squinted at it.

Why would she have that?

The rest of the room looked like a research sanctum designed by a stellar cartographer with a private god complex—ancient, aether-reactive, built for precision. Nothing here hinted at politics, at propaganda, at anything performative. And yet, there he was. The Thaumarch. Right next to a resonance lattice calibrated for gravitational harmonics. It totally ruined the aesthetic.

Was it mandatory? Did they just . . . hand those out?

Fabrisse passed the mural cautiously, then he realized another man was there. He sat cross-legged on a suspended divan stitched with dull copper thread, his posture lazy but feline—no, not feline. There was something ursine about the way he sprawled: immense, patient, and entirely unbothered by Fabrisse’s presence, as though the room belonged to him long before it ever belonged to Monasterie. His skin had a soft luster, silvery in certain light, and his eyes were the precise color and smoothness of polished opal.

He looked human, but didn’t seem human.

He was sipping something from a thin ceramic cup. Fabrisse couldn’t tell what it was, but the scent suggested honeyed mint, if he were to trust his own sense of smell.

Why is there another man here . . .

His robes weren’t standard Synod issues. They were deep navy, edged in stormsilver, and cut in a way that was either out of fashion or two years ahead. His gaze flicked toward Fabrisse with mild amusement and zero interest.

Monasterie didn’t introduce him. Neither did the man speak.

“He has arrived, Archmagus,” Kairon gave her a light bow.

Monasterie didn’t glance at him. “Yes. You may go now.”

Fabrisse expected a formal dismissal. Instead, Kairon hesitated, just enough for Fabrisse to notice, and then bowed again, lower this time, like a courtier knowing his place.

“As you wish.” The High Magus straightened, eyes briefly flicking to the man lounging on the divan. He didn’t speak to him, only nodded. Then he turned and walked out. The glass-door reformed behind him with a whisper.

Monasterie waited until the door finished sealing. Her hands withdrew from the miniature galaxy as she said, “Fabrisse Kestovar.”

He stood straight.

“You seem capable of sending messages discreetly. Rolen receives them, I assume?”

He struggled to find an answer. How does she know? I just walked in. Does that mean she was present when the fake Kairon try to lead me astray, or did the real Kairon just give her the clue?

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Possibly the latter. If they could really spot the secret attacker and consider me an important asset, they would’ve caught that person. Monasterie is an Archmagus. She seems more than capable.

“I . . . yes, Archmagus.”

The man on the divan let out a soft snort. Monasterie stepped away from her galaxy globe, brushing faint starlight from her fingers as if it were dust. “I wish to extend formal apprenticeship.”

“Pardon?”

“Apprenticeship,” she repeated, calm and absolute. “Under me. You would be bound to my tutelage, effective immediately.” She continued, “In return, you would sign a contract excluding you from instruction under any other Archmagus, Exemplar, or High Instructant, save for those within the standardized Synod curriculum. You are either mine, or you are not taken at all.”

The man on the divan nodded lazily at Fabrisse.

Fabrisse gulped. “B-but you’ve only met me once.”

“But I have met the last Chosen One of the Eidralith quite a few times before. You’re holding unquantifiable power, young man.”