“Line up,” Hamil called out.

  Lucian stood with Emma on his right and Damian on his left. He risked a glance in her direction, and their eyes met for a moment. She offered a small smile, but before Lucian could return it, the Talents came back.

  Lucian judged this small island to be more desolate than even Transcend Mount. For one, it was smaller and didn’t have a single building or even a tree. There were likely tens of thousands of such islands scattered across the face of Volsung. It was cold, too. Whatever warmth the sun had cast earlier was now hidden behind a layer of clouds. Lucian longed for the warmth of his home city that he had always taken for granted.

  It was only a little past midmorning, and the only sign of life on the island was the odd patches of pink lichen clinging to rocks. The sky was heavy with clouds and seemed ready to unleash a tempest of snow or ice at any moment.

  As the Novices huddled closer, Isaac and Hamil found a fist-sized stone. Facing each other, they held the stone together, staring at it intensely. When the hairs on Lucian’s arms stood on end, he knew it had nothing to do with the cold. The Talents were streaming.

  The stone glowed with orange light. Subtly, at first, but then with increasing brilliance. A collective gasp escaped the Novices as they shielded their eyes. Lucian didn’t see how the Talents could hold that stone without their hands burning. The rock should have been scalding by now.

  When the brightness receded, Lucian tried to blink the spots in his vision away and noticed other Novices doing the same. The world that returned was dim in comparison to the stone’s former brilliance.

  What was once a plain stone was now a small, yellow, and glinting nugget of what had to be pure gold, much smaller than the original stone but probably of the same mass.

  Before Lucian could even marvel, Isaac chucked it as far as he could. The gold nugget sailed in a wide arc toward the water below. Even the cloudy sky couldn’t keep it from glimmering before it was lost to sight.

  "What did you do that for?” Damian demanded.

  Isaac shrugged. “We can always make more. This is for demonstration purposes.”

  “But . . .”

  “Gold isn’t even worth much anyway,” Talent Hamil said.

  “It is on Luddus!”

  Lucian wasn’t sure why Damian was trying to argue with the Talents. Pointless didn’t even begin to describe it.

  “This is but a taste of the power of Atomicism,” Hamil said. “Now, pay attention. See that outcrop out there? Watch.”

  Hamil took a few steps until he stood at the southern precipice of the island. He focused on a rock rising about a hundred meters away. That craggy outcrop had been battered to hell and back. It was thinner toward the center, where entire chunks had been ripped out of it. This could be seen from the rocky flotsam piled at its base, through which the surf churned.

  The Novices stood, watching. Not a moment later, the outcrop became a fountain of earth and rock, shooting high into the air. Everyone ducked, even though the rain of rock had no chance of hitting them. Most of the debris shot straight upward, and many of the stony pieces were already splashing into the gray ocean below. Once the dust settled, Lucian could see that the outcrop had a new hole blown in it. It teetered for a moment before steadying. After that treatment, even the slightest wind might be enough to crumble it for good.

  “Thought I might kill it this time,” Hamil said. He turned to face the Novices. “Any guesses on what I did there?”

  Novice Elia raised her hand timidly. “An explosion?”

  Some of the novices laughed at that. But Hamil surprised Lucian by nodding. “That’s right. No need to make an answer more complicated than it needs to be. This demonstration was to show you that you don’t need to use fission or fusion to create a lot of havoc with Atomicism.” He licked his thin lips. “I focused on the middle of the rock and transmuted some of the atoms into carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. I bound these atoms to create a modest amount of trinitrotoluene. Which I heated with a thin flow of Thermalism to cause an explosion.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “What’s trinitro . . . whatever you called it?” Emma asked.

  “TNT, as it’s more commonly known,” Talent Isaac said. “A somewhat primitive explosive that’s still sometimes used in mining operations. As you can see, Atomicism is as much about chemistry as it is about magic. Of all the Aspects, it requires the most study. Get one atom in a molecule wrong, and things can get deadly amazingly fast.”

  “What about atomic reactions?” Rhea asked. “How are those done?”

  “If you mean fission or fusion,” Isaac said, “that is beyond either Talent Hamil’s or my abilities. We understand the theory of it, of course. A lot of complicated reactions occur within a short time. If you don’t know what you’re doing or get one of the steps wrong, you’ll end up doing a lot of damage, or even getting people killed. As such, it’s forbidden magic here at the Volsung Academy.”

  “What about simple transmutation, then?” Emma asked. “Why can’t we try that?”

  Isaac chuckled. “Simple? No, nothing is ever simple. It took a couple of years of intense study for me to do something as simple as transmuting hydrogen into helium.”

  “Wouldn’t that be fusion?” Emma pressed.

  “No,” Hamil answered. “That would be combining two atoms of hydrogen, for example, to create helium. That’s not what we mean by transmutation. Through the Manifold, we can use magic to bend the rules of the Shadow Realm. The closer two atoms are to each other on the periodic table, for example, the easier the process. It’s easier to trick hydrogen into being a certain isotope of helium, for example, rather than tricking it into being tungsten. And there are two types of transmutation—flux transmutation, which lasts on the order of nanoseconds, and permanent. Permanent transmutation requires more magic, plus the setting of a ward, usually Dynamistic in nature.”

  “Now I’m even more confused,” Emma said.

  “That is beyond the lesson for today,” Hamil said. “Suffice it to say, it took two of us combining our streams to create that gold earlier, and it drained most of our ether. Talent Isaac is better at supplying the ether, while I’m better at rearranging molecules, the actual chemistry of it. The point is, you have to feel what’s there. Atomic Magic requires sharp senses, as well as being skilled at other Aspects. That’s why there are so very few of us. Of course, it’s better to use what’s there rather than transmute raw material. Much less dangerous and ether-intensive.”

  Hamil and Isaac continued to lecture the Novices for the next hour. When the sun had reached its zenith, the Novices were still huddling from the biting wind. The Talents ended the lesson, and everyone returned to the boats. After rowing out to sea, they lifted the vessels back on board. Once all was secured, everyone crowded into the bridge as the ship set sail. Isaac brewed some hot tea for everyone to share in the wardroom.

  The water grew choppier. The wind blustered against the hull with powerful gusts. The storm that had threatened all morning was now falling upon them. The ship flew across the water as dismal sleet pelted the deck, coating it with ice.

  The cold filtered through the cracks of the door, and ice coated the windscreen. Lucian was grateful the ship was completely automated, or they might have been in trouble. The wardroom was cozy, and the tea did a lot to refresh him.

  “In a few months,” Hamil began gruffly, to an audience of Novices hanging on his every word, “the entire Northern Ocean will freeze over. It gets cold out here. Damned cold. It’ll freeze the blood in your veins if you’re out too long in it. You’ll know true cold a couple of months after the Trials are over; that’s when the worst of it happens. And you better believe they’ll have you training out on the lawn, even when a blizzard’s blowing.”

  Hamil took a sip of his tea, hardly having time to swallow before Emma pelted him with yet another question.

  “How long does the ice last? What happens if someone needs to leave?”

  He looked at her with an amused expression. “You don’t. You can expect half the year to be completely impassable. This very ship modifies into a hovercraft. It will do that once the ice is thick enough to hold it at rest.”

  Transcend Mount would become an island of life in an icy desert. Then Lucian would be truly stuck here. For some reason, the iced-over ocean seemed a greater barrier than boundless waters.

  Lucian was relieved when the ship pulled into the short dock. Once Lightsail was moored, the party made the long climb back to the Academy. The weather was still foul, snow mixing with freezing rain. All was a monochrome gray; the visibility was too poor to even see the ocean from the trail. This cold was nothing Lucian had ever experienced—it even hurt his nostrils to breathe.

  Once they were back inside the cavernous entrance of the Academy, Lucian heaved a sigh of relief. This place that had seemed so strange and forlorn at first had quickly become his refuge. It was hard to completely hate it, as he had just a few weeks ago.

  There were positives he had never considered. There was the daily discipline he had been lacking before. And even if the training was difficult, his devotion made other worries fall by the wayside.

  There were new worries too, however. There was always the fear of not being good enough, and the consequences of that were very real.

  This place, his training, was all he had left to live for. What kind of life was that?

  He realized, with growing coldness, that the question didn’t matter. This was his life now, for better or for worse.

  The sooner he accepted that, the better.