The first step into the vault was always an experience. Technically a demiplane, crossing the threshold felt like being pressed and condensed, before being stretched back out to your proper size. Not painful, but certainly-

  Sebastian retched, doubling over just as Elias’s half-eaten meal made a violent return – splattering onto boots worth a peasant family's yearly wage. I sighed through my nose and turned my attention to the inky black surroundings instead. My everlight lantern, a first-year project, was suited for late-night readings and cramped corridors. Against the vault’s endless gloom, it might as well have been a candle in a cavern.

  I reached into my components pouch, each compartment carefully arranged, the placements committed to memory. My fingers found a pinch of phosphorus, just where it should be.

  The vault’s magic hung thick and inert, pooling in the air like fog that refused to stir. I pulled at it, coaxing it forward, forcing it through my body’s channels while carefully skirting the single rotating circle of my core. Overcharging this wouldn’t be dangerous – just blinding – but in the vault, I needed every drop of power for real emergencies.

  The power gathered at my fingertips, threading into the phosphorus. I traced runes for light and movement mid-air, the embered trails lingering for a heartbeat before the spell took hold. The glow at my fingers faded, the darkness pressing in against me, suffocating and hungry, before four globes of pale light flared into existence, drifting outward like fireflies into the night.

  They spread, revealing nothing but discarded scraps and half-finished ideas. Before reaching the shelves of spellbooks and trinkets that made up the vault’s bulk, we had to pass through its true entrance: a junk pile of abandoned magic.

  I gave the mess a cursory glance, nudging an opaque blue orb with my foot. A poorly inscribed rune for water flickered on its surface, barely functional. I’d made something similar in my first year – mostly to avoid the dorm’s communal sinks. Hardly the kind of innovation that belonged in our school’s most hallowed halls.

  Behind me, Sebastian finally pulled himself upright, shaking off the nausea with a dramatic sigh. His grimace melted into a grin as his eyes landed on the bauble.

  "Ah, yes – truly the pinnacle of arcane brilliance!" he declared, sweeping the orb into his hands like an art critic inspecting a masterpiece. A faint pulse of magic, and a weak dribble of water splattered against his boots.

  He didn’t even bother turning it off before tossing it back into the pile. Instead, he fished a pebble from his pocket, muttering the words to his own light cantrip. It flared to life, bright enough to leave spots dancing in my vision. He casually fixed it to the doorframe.

  "That’ll last forty-five minutes. If it starts to fade, meet back here. That should give you plenty of time to admire my inevitable triumphs."

  “If you say so, brother. Just try to leave with something, yeah? Be a shame to spend all that gold and walk away empty-handed.”

  With a lazy wave, he ambled off, whistling as he disappeared into the aisles. I sent my lights ahead and followed suit.

  I skimmed the shelves as I made my way deeper into the vault, my lights lingering over anything that looked remotely promising. Nothing stood out. Not that I expected it to; these outer racks were newer additions, stocked with the academy’s more recent works. The kind of artifacts professors added just to say they had contributed to the esteemed collection.

  I wondered, briefly, what Tulsworth would think of what his vault had become. Then I shook the thought loose. This was no time for distractions, I had traded hours of mind-numbing tedium for this.

  As I reached the final row of outer shelves, I slowed, my fingers dipping to my components pouch, instinctively checking for what I might need. The deeper sections held older magic – stronger, but often poorly bound. If handled incorrectly, an artifact’s own power could unravel, taking its wielder with it. More than one student had entered the vault and never left.

  I was looking for spellbooks. Not the newer ones lining the outer shelves, but something older. I’d been stuck at the edge of third-circle magic for the past year. To surpass it, I needed knowledge from those who had done it before, a trait pointedly lacking in my academy professors.

  I flipped open my spellbook, scanning the most recent addition to my repertoire. Misty Step – a short-range teleport, quick to cast, requiring only words. A failsafe. It wasn’t flawless – I had yet to master the casting, and it didn’t always land me exactly where I wanted. But even a few feet of distance could be the difference between walking out of here and being carried.

  I snapped the book shut. No more delays. I had already wasted ten minutes just getting here.

  Stepping past the final shelf, I felt the pressure shift – the kind of weight in the air that told me I had crossed into a space where magic had settled, resting undisturbed for decades. My lights bobbed ahead, illuminating a collection of dusty relics and thick-bound spellbooks. My gaze flicked across the spines, scanning for anything worthwhile.

  The modern wizards who filled this vault did so out of self-importance, adding their works for prestige whether they deserved it or not. The older wizards? Their books weren’t given up willingly. They had been taken. Won in duels, seized after deaths, claimed as trophies. Older wizards didn’t believe in sharing power. Their spellbooks weren’t just locked away – they were armed. Some would rot your mind for reading the wrong page. The worst of them? They didn’t even wait that long. Touch the cover, and you'd be lucky if all it took was your hands.

  Normally, Detect Magic would solve the issue. But casting it from my own reserves would cost me half of what I had left. Casting it with ambient power? That would take ten minutes. Ten minutes I didn’t have.

  I exhaled slowly, weighing my options. The smarter choice would be to take what I could safely examine and leave. But if I was already committing the time…

  My eyes drifted deeper into the vault. I’d never gone past this point before. The artifacts here were truly ancient, some of them predating Tulsworth himself. Last time, I hadn’t dared to risk it. But dangerous magic is only a threat if you mishandle it. And if I was already going to waste ten minutes, I might as well make them count.

  Steeling myself, I dropped to the floor and began pulling at the vault’s stagnant magic, dragging it toward me like drawing water from packed earth. It resisted, heavy with age, but slowly, painfully, it began to move. I forced it through my circuits, coaxing it into something I could use, each sluggish inch forward scraping against the edges of my control.

  This would be a long, grueling process. And I would feel every second of it.

  The tug of war finally abated, and with it, a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Sweat beaded my brow, and my limbs felt heavy with exertion. Strange, but not entirely surprising. Pulling magic was usually as easy as breathing – just not here.

  I kept my eyes shut, fingers forming familiar seals, mouth murmuring familiar words. This was one of the first-circle spells we learned at the Academy, long reduced to muscle memory. I took a steadying breath and cracked my eyes open.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  A thousand colors assaulted my senses, magic bleeding into vision and sound. My head throbbed, a sharp, insistent pressure at the base of my skull. I grit my teeth and pushed through. The headache would pass. It always did. Piece by piece, my brain sorted through the chaos, the screaming colors settling into a readable spectrum spanning the aftershocks of every spell ever cast here mingled with the remnants of enchantments long faded. For a moment, I let myself admire the beauty of it.

  Then I looked closer.

  As I feared, none of the spellbooks here were usable. Every one of them reeked of curses, petty vengeance from the long-dead on a future they would never see. The artifacts weren’t much better. Not cursed, but so unstable they might as well be.

  I pulled myself to my feet, my muscles protesting every movement, and pushed forward.

  The deeper I went, the heavier the air became. The magic here didn’t just exist, it clung. It weighed on my limbs like thick humidity, my body responding to an illusion of resistance that wasn’t really there. My lights, on the other hand, surged forward with the opposite effect, flickering almost too bright, eager to impress. A risk I hadn’t accounted for. I needed to move quickly.

  I scanned the aisles with magically attuned senses. They were sparser here, long since ransacked by others before me, but the magic was no less dense for it. The spellbooks, unfortunately, were all obviously and horrifically cursed. One in the corner felt like it was daring me to even look at it. I declined. You don’t take a book up on a bet, especially one soaked in magic this ancient.

  Beyond the books, I spotted several artifacts that still thrummed with power, perhaps even stronger for the years they had spent undisturbed. But anything worth taking was chained down, the bindings glowing with layered enchantments. Not the kind you could dispel, the kind that ripped the hand from your wrist if you tried.

  I gritted my teeth and kept moving. I had come too far to leave with nothing.

  I had hoped to find something untouched – something forgotten, rather than stolen. But the deeper I went, the clearer it became; nothing in the outer shelves would be enough. A second-circle wizard could settle for what was out there. I needed more. The kind of power that didn't come free, power pried from the fingers of the dead and outwitted from the clutches of those stronger than me.

  Each step was deliberate. Lift, place, shift. Repeat. My eyes flicked across the shelves, scanning for something – anything – that would make this worth it.

  Then, I saw it.

  Or rather, I felt it.

  The hues that filled my vision twisted, bending under some unseen will – an entire spectrum of light calling to me.

  Magic wasn’t supposed to feel desperate. But this did. I felt it as clearly as the ache in my knees, as real as the breath in my lungs.

  Something knew I was here. And it wanted – desperately – to meet me.

  I hesitated, old stories of Faustian deals and Fae trickery flashing through my mind. Then I shoved them aside.

  Powerful, yes; but also bound. If it was dangerous, I would leave it, just as I had the last hundred beautiful, deadly artifacts I’d passed by.

  Still, I dipped a hand into my components pouch. It paid to be prepared.

  I stepped forward and the weight on my limbs vanished.

  The magic slinked away, as if unwilling to intrude on this moment.

  I frowned, and pulled. Magic should never be far from me. It obeyed, too easily. I dispersed it with a harmless crackle of sound.

  It sat alone on a pedestal of warped, age-darkened wood, the shelves around it left bare, as if nothing dared be placed beside it.

  The cover was a deep, inky black, so dark it seemed to drink in the light from my Dancing Lights, swallowing their glow before it could touch the surface. Faint traces of arcane script shimmered along its spine, shifting and writhing like ink refusing to settle.

  Even with my magically attuned sight, I couldn’t tell what material the binding was made of. It wasn’t leather, nor metal, nor anything I recognized. It pulsed, not with power, but with awareness.

  It was watching me back.

  The script shifted again, slithering across the cover like it was trying to form words I could understand. My breath hitched.

  I took a slow step forward, pulse quickening. “Can you… see me?”

  The air around the book pulsed in response, a single, deliberate acknowledgment.

  My heartbeat kicked up a notch. Sentient objects were rare. Sentient objects that could act on their own? Unheard of. This was a treasure unlike anything I’d seen before.

  I scanned the enchantments binding it and frowned. They should have been airtight, layered in magic so dense I wouldn’t even be able to see the book beneath them. That was how vault relics were meant to be stored. That was what I had expected.

  And I suppose, technically, it was. But the wards weren’t intact. They were riddled with gaps, the magical equivalent of moth-eaten fabric; frayed, thinning, full of holes. Even I, an amateur at curse-breaking, could see the threads holding the entire structure together.

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’re the reason the wards are falling apart, aren’t you?” I murmured, watching the shifting script. “Eating them from the inside.”

  No response. No pulse of magic this time. But the longer I stared, the more certain I became.

  I made a snap decision. This was a risk unlike any I’d taken, but I couldn’t leave it behind. I stepped forward, pulling magic from my core, carefully threading it through my circuits.

  Strictly speaking, I didn’t have a spell to break whatever trap was holding the book down. But magic was magic, and when it was this weak, it was fragile.

  Magic surged to my fingertips, eager and restless. I steadied my right wrist, bracing my arm.

  Bolts of force erupted from my palm, Magic Missiles streaking through the air with perfect accuracy. Weak on their own, but numerous. Unerring. Each dart found its mark, striking a fraying thread in the ward’s weave. My vision exploded in a riot of color as the enchantment shattered.

  I had miscalculated.

  The broken wards didn’t simply dissipate. They ruptured.

  Energy surged outward in a tidal wave of technicolor heat, enough to leave nothing of me but a charred memory. Time seemed to slow as the wall of power rushed toward me. I acted without thinking – hands snapping together, thumbs and forefingers forming the simplest shape I knew. A triangle. The last of my magic surged forward as my lips formed a single sound.

  My core emptied.

  Skill and cleverness meant nothing now. My magic burned outward, collapsing into a single concave wall of force. My Shield flared to life, a shimmering bulwark against the oncoming blast.

  It wouldn’t hold.

  Cracks splintered across the surface. I could feel it giving, the rushed assembly of my spell leaving it fragile, imperfect. The avalanche of magic pressed harder. I braced myself for the collapse.

  Then – suddenly – it stopped.

  The wall of energy hung there, suspended, completely obscuring my view of the book. For a moment it simply lingered, its final act of vengeance interrupted. Then, impossibly, it reversed.

  Bit by bit, the magic changed course. Not dispersing, but pulling inward, siphoned back toward the book. Reassembling the ward? No. The energy didn’t settle back into place. It was being devoured.

  This colossal tirade of the arcane, consumed as if it were nothing.

  I hated to admit it, but the book was a more capable wizard than me.

  I licked my lips.

  I had so much to learn.

  What I’d just done hit me like a physical weight.

  I had almost died. My life had been saved by a book.

  I took a slow breath, forcing my pulse to settle. This was going to be a problem.

  Students taking items from the vault was technically illegal, but everyone knew it happened. The powers that be mostly turned a blind eye – provided it was from the outer shelves. Taking something worthless added a certain prestige to the vault, reinforcing the mystique of the professors who had left them behind. They would act with performative outrage that anyone would dare steal from Tulsworth, all while basking in the knowledge that their discarded trinkets had been deemed worth taking.

  This was not that.

  The sheer magical weight of the book alone was enough to date it back an age. And the chains? The vault held thousands of spellbooks, but only the dangerous ones were bound. No one broke bindings. If something was chained, it was assumed there was a very good reason for it.

  I couldn’t leave it behind. My mind was already swimming with possibilities, my fingers itching to study it properly.

  I was taking it with me. I just needed a plan.

  Sebastian would help, and Elias –

  Fuck.

  How long had I been here?

  I turned toward the direction I’d come, searching for the glow of the cantrip we had left behind. Nothing. Not necessarily a problem, this deep into the shelves it would have been obscured anyway.

  My Detect Magic was still up, which should have been a good sign – the spell lasted ten minutes, meaning I hadn’t been here too long. Ordinarily. But the vault’s magic was thick, and I had just been blasted with it. My reserves were empty. There was every chance that whatever power still hung in the air was feeding the spell beyond its limits.

  Either way, it was time to go.

  I crept forward, approaching the thick tome.

  Standing before the pedestal, I extended a hand but hesitated before making contact. The book was… waiting. The magic around it stilled, as if the world itself was holding its breath.

  "If you eat my soul, I’m going to be quite upset."

  I grasped the spine.

  A jolt shot through me – not quite magic, not quite thought, but something deeper. A presence surged forward, pressing against my mind with a single, desperate whisper:

  Escape.