Cerulean had warned me to take caution in revealing details of my history—the academy knew that releasing powerful ancient relics to the custody of students for study carried dangers should they lose control of the enchanted objects in question. No matter my justification, knowing that I'd cast a man who tried to wield me into a freezing river might make someone uncomfortable and doom us back to the museum. I'd mentally prepared myself for whatever questions the students might ask of me, to dance around any discomfort and cooperate in any way I could.

  I hadn't prepared for the silence. As we walked away from the group, we were still in earshot of Darien and Beatrix, each bombarding the other spheres with curious queries about their powers, but Rynelle's focus had shifted away from me entirely. She held her hands in front of her, curling her fingers like she was holding an invisible ball. With a twitch of her index fingers, a fme ignited between her palms, growing, growing… until she bumped into a passerby along the bridge from Vega Hall toward the dormitories, nearly burning the papers in his hand.

  "Sorry, sorry," she said as she stumbled for a moment, clenching her hands into fists to extinguish the fme before it could escape her control. The stranger gred at her, but he kept on his way, as did Rynelle.

  "Are you sure it's wise to cast magic on the go like that?" I said, wondering which of us was truly the dangerous one to worry about...

  Rynelle shrugged, shaking her hands out to loosen them up. "I haven't had time to practice anything with all these exams tely. Every little bit helps, I think. Could you maybe warn me if I'm gonna run into something?"

  "I suppose..."

  Via my mist-form, I kept an eye out for obstacles though our winding travels across campus. Rynelle had pnned her route back to the dorms with ways to exercise each of what I presumed to be elemental spells. With different shapes to her hands, she'd freeze the water in the birdbaths along a garden detour, or create a small tornado out of the flower petals that had fallen on the ground, or leave a scorch mark from an electric jolt on every metallic mp post we passed. With no magic circles, nor runes suspended in air, nor auras of energy, this magic appeared raw and uncomplicated, if a little unrefined. Despite years of exposure to magic, I'd not seen anyone cast magic in a manner simir to Rynelle. How odd.

  We crossed a gss concourse overlooking the domed sporting arenas and popur dining spots in the student end of the academy campus, heading into one of the gargantuan towers that served as dormitories. Despite expressing friendliness to one another, most of the other magicians we encountered along the hallways gave Rynelle a cold reception, if they acknowledged her existence at all. She had to weave around more than a few crowds who couldn't be bothered to make room for her to pass by. Once we reached an archway in the back, Rynelle tapped a series of runes on the wall, stepping through the shimmering blue portal that dripped down from the archway...

  ...and into an unmitigated disaster zone. Or more accurately, into Rynelle's dorm room.

  "Sorry about the mess," she said as she stepped over piles of books and undry that covered the majority of the floor. "I didn't know I'd be bringing a sapient relic back home with me until this morning."

  "It's... charming." I found it hard to make sense of the cramped room at first, other than the unmade bed on the far wall. Every horizontal surface y buried beneath textbooks, loose papers, and takeout boxes from restaurants.

  Rynelle uncsped me from her neck, setting me on top of a pile of textbooks atop a piece of furniture that hinted at being a desk beneath the clutter. "So, I don't know how this works, you're the first relic I've had to deal with before. Do I, uh, offer you something to drink? Or what?"

  I wondered if she was making a joke, but her tired eyes looked serious. "That's kind of you, but I don't require anything," I said.

  "Good, that simplifies a lot of stuff." Rynelle opened up a chest next to the desk, rifling through potions with bels like Awake or Focus, along with an arming number of bottles beled No with a doodle of a skull. "You can just, y'know, settle in right there for a bit. I need to finish up studies for tomorrow's exam."

  "What about getting acclimated to one another? Getting to know what I can do so you're ready for the project? All of that is important for a temporary champion."

  Rynelle crossed her arms with a long, drawn-out exhale. "I can't, not tonight. Maybe not for a while. First-year me would have put everything else on hold to work with a relic no matter what it did, but I'm a little busy trying to not fail just enough csses to survive one more year here. So, if you don't mind."

  I perused the items on the sleep-deprived woman's desk as she sat on her bed, opened another textbook, took a long swig of a Focus potion, and resumed her studies. A few books caught my attention, as I'd seen them on Tobias' shelves before. "You're studying Arcane Kinematics?"

  "Not by choice," Rynelle said, "I can't channel arcana, but there's not a lot of csses on my discipline these days. The arcana studies are pretty advanced stuff."

  "My champion's uncle taught it to his daughter when she was nine."

  Rynelle shot me an irritated look. "Well, I'm a te bloomer. Please, I have to focus, Viridian Sphere."

  As she returned to her reading, I continued to roam, having at least more freedom than the museum's gss prison. I found a stack of her exams, drowning in red ink from each professor's markings. Concepts in multi-state enchantment scripting, history of W-system magics, magic ward vulnerabilities, each topic was more complex than the st—and as far as I could tell, completely irrelevant to an elementalist.

  Hours passed and night arrived, and I'd run out of things to look at in the messy dorm room. That Focus potion must have been extra potent, as Rynelle hadn't looked up once since, despite fatigue gripping her tighter with each passing hour as evidenced by her drooping eyelids. Outside the window, other academy students gathered, ughing and roaming the concourse as they traveled together to dinner or to show off fshy new spells to one another.

  More or less alone again, I decided I might as well practice my own techniques that Cerulean and Amethyst had been helping me with. Maybe the right shapeshift would draw some attention and spark a conversation if I was lucky enough.

  I started with the familiar shapes, swords and shields and hammers embellished to reflect some of the light from the gems lining the room and catch Rynelle's eye, but nothing piqued her interest. I tried new shapes, mimicking little trinkets and figurines scattered on her windowsill, again with no response.

  Maybe a robe might interest a wizard? I hadn't tried the cloth-forming techniques the other spheres showed me, but it seemed like as good a time as any to try. My mist billowed out with enough matter to condense and weave together, picturing a robe in my mind...

  A pile of slime formed out of my mist instead, oozing all over the papers underneath me. That level of fine control over the mist shape proved harder than I'd expected, and in the end, I only added to Rynelle's mess.

  "Augh, what is that?!" Well, at least it got Rynelle's attention. She snapped her book shut and raced over to scrape the slime off the papers before the mess spread. "Come on, I don't have time to clean up messes tonight!"

  "I didn't know it would do that," I said. "My apologies."

  I retracted as much mist and slime as I could back to the neckce, leaving only a slight green stain to her coursework. Rynelle sighed as she shuffled through the papers to make sure everything was still intact. "No more shapeshifting for tonight, okay?" she said.

  "What would you have me do instead?"

  "I don't know. Keep an eye out for sunrise in case I fall asleep." Rynelle held a hand to her head, gripping a tuft of her messy hair she fretted about how little time remained for study. "I can't fail this next test, which means I can't miss it either. Relics are meant to help people, right? That's what would be helpful to me."

  Relegated to the equivalent of a rooster...

  I missed Janine.