The Dean was waiting outside Sal’s room the next morning.

  He smiled and walked up, “good morning Chadwick, do you remember what today is?”

  Chadwick drew a blank, he knew it wasn’t his birthday. Was it the Dean’s birthday? Adults had only ever asked him that question for birthdays. But he was drawing a blank.

  At Chadwick’s lost look, the Dean laughed, “six months since the last assessment of your magical reservoir. As agreed, I am performing the test myself.”

  “Oh, I had forgotten all about that. It never seems to come up much, aside from during reshaping. Especially since we changed my focus and I caught up to most of the students. I was sick of being last in that class,” said Chadwick.

  The Dean seemed to have a bit of a pained look on his face, but he forced a smile and said, “well, no need to rush lad. You are still young.”

  The Dean began to turn to lead them to the library, then paused, “I know we haven’t been able to tell you much and you have been absorbed in your work. But I did want to follow up and ask how your hand has been doing?”

  Chadwick held his fingers up and flexed them, “I don’t really notice anymore. The tricks I learned in reshaping to allow me to correct the bones made a large difference. It took me longer to perfectly learn what hand bones should look like than it did to fix them. Since I had to do the changes without being able to see the bones, the healers insisted I have perfect visualization before I could try any reshaping on myself.”

  “A handy skill to have. Not as big of a deal for how quickly the young heal. But as you get into your sunset years?” The Dean said and then seemed to pause, “actually, have you considered whether you could repair bones on others? The life of a healer is a valuable one. People always want a healer to stay around.”

  “Right now I’m more interested in the combat applications of what I can do,” said Chadwick. Leaving the obvious reason why unsaid.

  The Dean grimaced at that. He had apologized every time he saw Chadwick for weeks. Until Chadwick had asked him to stop reminding him of the event that led to almost dying in the first place. Simply asking the Dean to stop had never worked. A little guilt seemed to do the trick though.

  They walked in silence for a while towards the library. It was somewhere Chadwick knew his way to easily after six months living inside the tower. Eventually the Dean asked about how his other lessons were going, careful to only mention the public version of his launcher class. Just a normal discussion between a Dean and a student.

  “How are your parents doing?” The Dean asked, suddenly changing the topic.

  “Both of them seem to be throwing themselves into their work. Father has done quite a number of scribing jobs for Elvera since she has far too many for me to keep up with. Mother has been making enough jam to feed to the whole village six times over. There was talk of selling it in other villages,” Chadwick answered.

  While he talked, they rounded a corner and the Chief Mage was walking down the hallway towards them slowly.

  He seemed to have been listening as he was looking towards them and said, “it’s easy to forget we collected you so young. With how much older your written hand is. Never a fault in the messages you deliver. I daresay neater than I would write it myself. And where are you two off to?”

  The Dean brightly answered, “I asked Mage Brackly if I could deliver young Chadwick’s slider test. Professional curiosity and all that, never seen a mage of tiny things before.”

  The Dean was the only one that referred to Chadwick’s affinity that way. The other teachers didn’t really have a better term and he had heard some of them refer to him as the tiny mage. He wasn’t a fan of the nickname. Even though he was pretty sure he had grown an inch since being there, he was still quite small.

  The Chief Mage narrowed his eyes slightly at the Dean, then shrugged and said, “I have words from the king that need our attention. Come by my office after you are done. Bring Taverish.”

  The Dean nodded politely and then kept walking into the library.

  Chadwick was pretty sure the Dean was sweating slightly.

  They came to the room with the slider and the Dean quietly closed the door, “I know I’ve said this before young lad. But never let anyone else test you on the slider if you can find a way to avoid it. And,” the Dean seemed the be struggling to get the words out, but finally said, “just, don’t be in a hurry to grow up.”

  Then he leaned down very close and stared Chadwick in the eye, “it’s important. Don’t grow up yet.”

  Chadwick just confused again, “I don’t know what you mean Dean, I can’t very well stop growing…”

  The Dean’s eye was twitching, “of course not. But, just think about those words, alright? Think carefully on them. Weigh them in your mind.”

  Chadwick nodded slowly, to show he was listening. He wasn’t sure he understood, but he had heard.

  The Dean gave a frustrated sigh and then pulled out the trays of weights, “hand on the orb. Don’t take it off until I say.”

  The Dean pulled out the same tray of large weights he had to use the first time, “now, you were at eight large and three small last time. So it’s a safe bet that you made it to a twelve on the large weights. So we can go straight to sack weight. And then add on from there.”

  Chadwick nodded and kept his hand on the orb. He was familiar enough with the measuring system that was done in units of twelve. Going from grains, smalls, larges, sacks and then horses.

  The Dean put a large brass ‘sack’ onto the scale. Since sacks filled with sand was a rather imprecise system, with different sized sacks, or sand from different sources, the brass weights had developed across the kingdom to replace those original items. The names stayed the same.

  The Dean pulled the lever and winced at the clang that accompanied the arrow shooting up, “definitely more weight.”

  He started to load on weights until the arrow dipped. The final tally of weights was 1 sack, 11 large and 8 small.

  The Dean just shook his head, “same as before. If anyone asks, you got 8 small. Technically true.”

  “I don’t quite understand why the deception, Dean,” said Chadwick quietly.

  “Not something I can explain I’m afraid my lad, secret of the tower council. Just take my word for it. Give my words the weight they deserve. You. Don’t. Want. To. Grow. Up,” said the Dean, staring at Chadwick and then at the slider and back. Nudging his eyebrows towards the slider until Chadwick’s face finally lit up in understanding.

  “Good, 8 smalls it is. No rush though lad, still plenty of growing to do,” said the Dean. Then reminded him that they would need to do this again in six months and sent him off to breakfast.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The day got a little strange when Taverish wasn’t present at their launcher class. A much younger mage was there, shouting orders.

  Chadwick did his best to be quiet and unobtrusive while he fired extremely slow-moving bits of sand at his rigged dummy. The bits were so small no one else could even see them.

  The younger mage was going around the room one at a time giving somewhat obnoxious ‘help’ like saying “you call that a fireball? That wouldn’t knock over my grandmother. No wonder you lot are still here.”

  When he got to Chadwick and saw him still working on the first pipe he just snorted, “mage of tiny things. More like mage of tiny results.” Then simply ignored him and walked off to harangue a water mage who had splashed him by accident.

  Sal was in his classroom when Chadwick went there, but seemed to be in a sour mood and sent one girl off in tears after he called her conditional magic “as neat as something a dog threw up.”

  Chadwick decided not to try and interact with him that day.

  After dinner he headed up to Elvera’s office and found it locked. Normally she was there before him. So, for the first time, he had to use his own key.

  He stepped into the office and saw no one was in. So he closed the door behind, checked if there were any new messages on the stones and then settled in to read the book from Sal.

  After two hours of reading, Chadwick was ready to head to bed, assuming Elvera wouldn’t be arriving. When he finally heard the door unlocking.

  He stopped out of the workshop and saw a haggard looking Elvera slump into his desk chair.

  “Is something wrong, Mage?” Chadwick asked, hurrying around.

  “Oh, young Chadwick. Fetch me a bottle of that brandy I have hiding under the sink would you?” Elvera said wearily.

  Chadwick was worried something had happened, but he complied and fished out the bottle. He took it as a bad sign that Elvera was admitting the brandy was there. She had thoroughly refused to acknowledge the question when he had first asked about it. He would catch her sneaking a glass on occasion when she thought Chadwick was absorbed in his work.

  She took a swig straight from the bottle, “good for the nerves, that is.”

  She stared at the bottle for a while before looking up at Chadwick, “apparently I’m now expendable, because I’m off to war with the Siyene shamans. I somewhat regret teaching you our message code. Without that I might be required to stay here.”

  “War!?” said Chadwick in alarm. He had heard the stories from Mage Sloan, but mostly the students seemed to be kept in the dark. He barely had an idea there was even a battle going on.

  “Oh yes, where do you think those messages about conditional magic come from? The lads who are on the front, looking for any advantage they can get to keep them alive,” said Elvera morosely. “And now I’ll be one of them. Living in a tent, trudging through mud. Trying to keep those bloodthirsty shamans from eating my heart.”

  “But,” began Chadwick, “how could they send someone so… necessary to a warzone.”

  “You mean someone so old? Just a small woman? Just come out and say it,” then she shuffled out of the chair and said, “I’ll remind you of something I’m sure you have told yourself before lad.” She beckoned him over to the window and flung it open, “that size has very little to do with magical ability.”

  She leaned her arm out the window and then snapped her fingers. A bolt of lightning crashed out of the sky, striking a tree on the lakeside. Not only was the tree split down the middle and left smoldering, but the sky was lit up almost like it was daytime for the briefest of flashes.

  Chadwick stared with amazement, Elvera was one of the mages that had been rather secretive about what her affinity was. Now he knew.

  “And,” continued Elvera, “age is, if anything, a positive benefit to magical ability.”

  Elvera looked out at the tree and muttered, “though my aim is not what it used to be, I was trying to hit the water.” Then she closed the window with a sigh and said, “help me pack lad. This will have to become your office now. Since you are to be put in charge of messages.”

  As the last thing they did before they left the office, Elvera took out the written reply from the Chief Mage, encoded it and passed it into the message stone with just a little concentration.

  Chadwick briefly saw the encoded message pop up on the front of the stone before it sent, his mind immediately translating the message being sent to the king.

  It said, “Thirty percent of magical weight has been assigned to the front or sent as replacements for civil mages and will leave tomorrow.”

  The procession of mages that had left a few days earlier, had left the tower feeling very bare. The only one of his original teachers that Chadwick had was Sal. Though his company was hardly desirable at the moment, with his bad temper still persisting.

  Every other teacher was someone who seemed freshly graduated to the rank of Mage. In fact, Chadwick was pretty sure the one teaching history had been the student that was trying to strangle the armored dummy with vines on Chadwick’s first day.

  The teachers that remained seemed oddly determined to get every student ready for their book as fast as possible. Once a student had scraped by the minimum requirement for a class, they were told to spend more time on whatever they were still missing.

  Chadwick was, if anything, even more thoroughly ignored. Since the minimum magical weight from the slider, for graduating to mage status, was one large weight. And the teachers all believed him to be at 8 small weights. There was little they could do to speed that up beyond what was already being done.

  The history teacher gave an exam one day and then passed half of the class, telling them they no longer needed to attend. Since Chadwick was one of those that passed, this left him with some extra free time. Which he sorely needed with his new job as scribe.

  He found himself running up to Elvera’s office, which he supposed was his now (but he would never think of it as anything but hers), between classes and meals. Running messages all over the tower. Then racing to classrooms.

  The Chief Mage became used to seeing him regularly and would occasionally inquire about his studies when receiving messages about the war. He seemed quite pleased to hear Chadwick was already done with history and never needed to do basic literacy classes.

  The messages Chadwick had to deliver were mostly about the war. He wasn’t sure if he just didn’t see most of the messages about the war before because Elvera handled that, or if there were just a lot more of them now that more people had gone to the front.

  The war messages were quite depressing. They mostly contained tedious things like supplies updates, mentions of various fortresses and walls that had been knocked down or resisted some attack. But something almost every message contained, was a list of those who had died.

  Chadwick would wince each time a message came in from the war front, then check the names to make sure it was no one he knew. The only name he recognized so far was the metal mage that the teachers had been so pleased with since he started with ten small weights. He couldn’t have been more than 15 years old.

  Chadwick had never seen the metal affinity boy achieve the rank of mage, but he must have done so before the call came to send more to the front.

  The Chief mage always compared the list of names to a large board in his office that seemed to have hundreds of names on it. He would match the names up, remove them from his board and sigh deeply as he saw a pipe on one side lower down. The pipe seems to be tied directly to the names.

  A few other interesting messages started coming directly from Elvera herself, the first was one casually asking if Chadwick was still the one manning the message stones. Once he had replied and asked how the war was going, he started to receive a flood of instructions from her.

  She told him to pack certain things she had forgotten and take them to the dock-house master with instructions. To ship out three books to his father, Alver, which needed six copies of each. Lastly, to check on her shipment of brandy that was overdue (this one was marked as highest priority).

  Broken up in between various messages of this nature were instructions for him to study certain books from her private collection. They seemed like an odd mix of discourses of mental magic, some enchantment theory, a history of all the past Chief Mages of the tower and the full lineage of the royal family.

  Chadwick felt he had the time for more study, since he no longer had his Saturdays with Taverish. And he had graduated from his history class. He thought it an odd mix of books, but Elvera had always been good to him so he complied and studied her requests whenever the messages traffic was quiet.

  Sal eventually returned to his normal self, but he did start giving Chadwick tasks that seemed like they were just regular work. For those, he didn’t bother having Chadwick learn all the theory of the enchantment. Just gave him an example and asked him to copy the rune symbols. Then Sal would activate it himself and toss it into a box.

  It was fairly mindless work, but Chadwick was at least still learning the various symbols and getting practice in getting them just right. Each had varying thicknesses and depths of lines that had to all neatly fit together with the symbol next to it.

  Technically, Sal could have passed Chadwick on his conditional magic class any day, but he didn’t bother as he knew Chadwick still hadn’t achieved five pipes. A lot of other students had been passed or told they no longer needed his class. Just the youngest seemed to be left.

  Chadwick was wondering why he was hiding the fact that he had already been working on six pipes with Taverish and was well past the minimum for magical weight. But the Dean’s words had made him want to just keep on as things were for the moment.

  He also noticed that quite a few students seemed to be graduating to full mage and then immediately leaving the tower. It was getting awfully quiet around here.

  It wasn’t until it got close to Chadwick’s 11th birthday that things went wrong.