300 years later…

  I appeared on the teleportation platform of Senica’s demesne, just as I’d done every decade on schedule for the last few centuries. In the early days, she’d been there to greet me, but she was far too busy now. It used to be that she at least sent someone to meet me, but for the last fifty years, she hadn’t even bothered with that much.

  It was a bit rude of her, if I was being honest. But then, I supposed it wasn’t unreasonable to expect me to just take care of myself. It wasn’t like I didn’t know exactly where she was. The whole demesne’s mana flows warped around her, subtle as the effect might be. For anyone with the skill to read the pattern, it was like having an arrow pointing the way.

  I took a few seconds to study the latest wards. She’d mentioned upgrading them since my last visit, citing something about needing a more modular design with multiple levels of authentication as things had grown too cumbersome for the old schema. Well, that was what happened when she’d turned her demesne into an entire city.

  Really, she’d missed the point of having a private sanctum entirely.

  I realized there was another person on the platform with me a moment later when I caught him gawking at me. I turned to look at him directly and asked, “You need something?”

  “No, I was—that is, I mean…” he trailed off with a gulp. “No, sir. Sorry for being rude. I didn’t mean to stare.”

  I grunted. At least someone on this stupid rock had some manners. “No harm done.”

  I stepped off the platform and rose into the air in a slow flight. At about three hundred feet up, I passed beyond the ward’s range and the screaming winds of the upper atmosphere ripped past me. Below, Senica’s demesne, the floating city known as Skyhaven, sprawled around me. It was about eighty square miles, with a considerable portion of that given over to the academy grounds, but there was still plenty of space for the city proper.

  It was a craftsman’s paradise, home to a hundred thousand enchanters, alchemists, scribes, golemancers, and more. Professors lived and taught at the academy, thousands of students resided in its dorms, and its hundreds of teleportation platforms saw traffic from all over the world. There was even a two-mile-wide lake that housed a small population of sapient aquatic golems.

  Those were my fault, supposedly, but how was I supposed to know they’d evolve like that when I’d dumped them all into the ocean? I still maintained that something or someone else had interfered there.

  For all that I had disagreed with the whole idea in the first place, the demesne was impressive – entirely too wasteful, and there was absolutely no reason it couldn’t have been built on the ground, but impressive nonetheless. I sometimes wondered how things might have been different if I’d never told Senica about Grandfather’s idea to throw a mountain up into the sky and keep it there.

  My sister was in the academy, as always. She literally lived there, but running it also kept her so busy that I doubted she left more than a few times a year. I flew straight to the sixth-floor window that led to her office, setting off a dozen wards in the process when they detected me. A squadron of guardian golems flew up to intercept me, but they were too slow to actually do anything, and besides, Senica threw the window open at the same time.

  A pulse of mana shot out from her, traveling down the invisible web of connections that tied her to her demesne, and the golems abruptly turned around and flew back to the ground. She sent a withering look my way and stepped back from the window to give me room to land.

  “You could have just walked through the front door like everyone else,” she groused the moment I was inside.

  “No thanks. You built this place entirely too large for me to want to walk all the way from the teleportation platform.”

  “Then why didn’t you use the platform on academy grounds?” she asked.

  “Because then I wouldn’t be able to trip all your alarm wards by flying through them.”

  Senica, Headmistress of Skyhaven Academy, archmage at the ninth stage, dressed in full regalia and with the staff of her office floating beside her, scowled at me like the petulant six-year-old I still remembered her as. “You’re an ass. How old are you again?”

  “I don’t even keep track anymore,” I told her. “Besides, you’re only as old as you feel, right?”

  I felt, and looked, like a man in the prime of his life, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. And I planned on staying that way for at least another thousand years. To be fair, Senica looked barely forty, and that was a deliberate choice to appear middle-aged. She’d told me once that it added some weight to her appearance, made people treat her with more respect.

  I’d told her that any idiot who couldn’t see past a youthful face to understand how powerful she actually was wasn’t someone whose respect she’d needed. It turned out we had very different outlooks on how to deal with the rest of the world. That was probably why she was respected as one of the most powerful archmages on the planet, and I was a reclusive hermit that some people weren’t even sure had ever existed.

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  “You know that look doesn’t work on me,” I said, pointedly ignoring the expression of utter disappointment she was directing my way. I’d seen our mother do the exact same thing too many times for Senica’s version to have any effect. “Save it for your students.”

  “Ugh. You’re impossible. How is it that you get even more troublesome every decade?”

  “Lack of responsibilities keeping me grounded,” I said. “I haven’t had to deal with anything really problematic since that leviathan tried to flood the southeast coast of Jeshaem fifty years ago.”

  “That was eighty years ago,” Senica said.

  I shrugged. What was three decades in the grand scheme of things? I wasn’t sure why she was even bothering to keep track when she was already… Actually, I wasn’t sure how old Senica was anymore. It had to be close to four hundred.

  “What?” she asked, taken aback. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just considering a question I know better than to ask.”

  “Then don’t ask it,” she said flatly.

  “I wasn’t going to!”

  “Good.”

  Our mock fight ended with us both laughing, and she came forward to hug me. “It’s good to see you again, little brother, even if you refuse to ever grow up.”

  “There was a time when you thought otherwise,” I reminded her. “A time when you couldn’t wait to grow up faster.”

  “Oh, that was so long ago, who even remembers?”

  A knock at the door interrupted our chatter. Without waiting for an answer, a golem poked his head through the door. “Headmistress, it’s time for the scheduled city core examination.”

  “Thank you, Veln,” she said. Turning to me, she added, “For someone who claims to not be able to keep track of time, you certainly managed to get here at exactly the right moment.”

  “Querit reminded me,” I admitted.

  “Hah. I knew it. Well, come on, let’s go get this taken care of. I’ve got a thousand things to do before the new semester starts in three days.”

  * * *

  Our success in reigniting the world core all those centuries ago had inspired us to experiment with smaller versions of the same thing. Living stone, turned to magma and pressurized inside a shell of mysteel, as it turned out, produced far more mana than it otherwise might have for the same volume. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for what Senica wanted, so we’d delved further into the process.

  It had taken a bit of tinkering, but eventually we’d figured out the missing ingredient: a mana resonance point in the center of it. Those three pieces together were the secret to forming a world core, or, in this case, what we’d dubbed a city core. It was a much, much smaller version of the same thing, not even a thousandth of the size of the one in the center of Manoch. But it was devoted entirely to keeping this massive slab of stone stable and floating through the sky.

  This was accomplished through an immense and intricate series of ward stones, enchantments, and literal miles upon miles of inscriptions, all of which needed regular maintenance. That was performed by a full crew of mages whose job was to do nothing else, but once every ten years, I came to Skyhaven, and the two of us descended into the bowels of the island to where the city core was embedded in the bedrock to confirm its stability and mana production levels.

  “Everything looks good,” I said, somewhat reluctantly. “Somehow, this unsightly blight upon the night sky is still running smoothly.”

  “It had better be,” Senica told me. “You have no idea how much effort goes into keeping it that way.”

  “Well, whose fault is that? I told you to just build it on the ground.”

  “But it’s so much more amazing up here.”

  “Pointless,” I muttered.

  “For a man who’s nearly three thousand years old, I’d think you’d appreciate the novelty of it all. And as someone who professes to love magic more than anything else, you could show a bit of wonder at the feat of engineering Skyhaven is.”

  “Alright, fine,” I admitted somewhat grudgingly. “You’re not wrong. It’s an amazing piece of work. I should know, considering I did all the initial designs for it.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” Senica said primly while I rolled my eyes.

  We stared at the city core for another minute through the divination window. The mysteel shell was as perfect as always, unblemished by so much as a single scratch, and the core of living magma inside it glowed red and white, pulsing with mana that slowly emanated through the shell to be harnessed by the immense crystalline pillars that formed a cage around it.

  “How’s the moon project coming along?” she asked.

  “Slowly,” I said. “It’ll be probably another forty or fifty years before I even have the mana built up to try.”

  “That’s what you said three decades ago.”

  “I decided to change the orbital path and increase the size.”

  “Ah. That would certainly delay things. I guess you’re not in any hurry, though.”

  “I’m not,” I agreed. “It’s more of a ‘to see if we can’ sort of project anyway. If it works, the next step will be creating a whole new planet, and that would be the work of thousands of years.”

  “In the more immediate future, what are you doing for the next decade?” Senica asked.

  “No,” I said instantly.

  “Gravin, come on. I haven’t even—”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Just for a few years, then? Five. Give me five.”

  “Nooooope.”

  “Fine. I hate to do it this way, but you owe me. I’m calling in my favor,” she said.

  “Favor for what?” I demanded.

  “Remember at Nailu’s hundredth birthday party, when you stuck your foot all the way into your mouth and he had to restrain Mom while I calmed her down?”

  I blanched. “Oh. That. When I said, ‘I owe you one,’ I didn’t mean…”

  Senica was merciless. “Time to pay up.”

  “Damn it. Fine,” I grumbled. “What subject?”

  “Divinations,” she said. “Cheer up. I know how much you love the discipline.”

  “I wouldn’t say I love it, just that it’s important.”

  “It is,” she agreed, “which is why the students should have the very best professor for it. Don’t you think?”

  “No,” I muttered, somewhat petulantly. With a great sigh, I asked, “When does the semester start, again?”

  “Three days. I’ve already got some rooms furnished for you. There are faculty robes in your size hanging in the wardrobe. Veln can show you the way once we’re back topside.”

  “Damn it, Senica,” I muttered. “Five years, that’s it. We’re even.”

  “Thanks, Gravin. You’re the best. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  The End