I ate my porridge and looked at my notebook tucked inside my robe and thought about the intricacies of Spark casting and the three clear objectives written in my own hand.

Spark was not truly pursued by Acolytes as it took a while before it showed its strength, and most would focus on Surge, which was the bread and butter of most mages and Acolyte because it was one of the few spells that could hasten the development of Anima Depth and it was the basis from which an Acolyte selected the Discipline they would be pursuing all their life, either elemental or any other magical fields like space or even time.

Surge was raw Anima expelled outward as force, heat, or light.

It was high cost, high impact, and very terrible for a beginner’s soul reserves.

After I had brought my Surge level to Acolyte, the process for selecting my Discipline was next; however, Acolytes were supposed to select their Discipline in their third year, but I always believed in early preparation and decided to focus on three Elemental Disciplines and one Occultic Discipline to find out which one suited me the best and pursue it all my life.

Whether by luck or coincidence, I had selected Spark to be the first Discipline I learned, knowing that it fell under the Lightning Elemental Discipline, and decided to practice with it until it was around level 20 Initiate before moving on to another Elemental Discipline.

My plan was that before the third year began, I would have practiced all four Disciplines to a sufficient level and then choose the one that I was the best at and was most passionate about pursuing until I could become a full-blown mage.

As it turned out, Spark became the only tool that had the most effect in delaying these demons in my skill list, and I decided to go through the understanding of the spell in a corner of my mind. I was lucky that it was a rather simple one, but even the simplest spells also contained profound depths.

My head was bowed, and I did not look at the pyramid yet because I was not ready, and I did not tell anyone what was coming because I did not yet know how, and the morning carried on around me exactly as it always did.

Even if I told them, what was the use? I did not think I would survive the next hour, yet, and until I could make meaningful changes, there was no need for me to bother.

I had work to do.

The bowl was empty before I tasted the last few spoonfuls.

My mind was already elsewhere, running through the sequence of violence that was coming, checking the variables, organizing the hour into sections the way my mother organized her thread by color and weight before beginning a new piece of work.

She always said that the preparation was half the making. I was beginning to understand what she meant in ways she had not intended.

I realized that the most important thing I needed to do was to gain more information and not die so quickly, without this, I was just flailing around like a headless chicken.

Cleaning my mouth with the back of my sleeves, knowing that any stain would simply slide off my Acolyte robe, I set the bowl down and looked at the pyramid.

I am ready now... I think.

®

It was the same pyramid it had always been, black, smooth, enormous, drinking the morning light without returning any of it, but I looked at it differently this morning than I had the two mornings before.

The first morning, I had looked at it with awe. The second morning, I had not even seen it, and this morning I was looking at it like a complicated equation that needed solving.

It was still larger than my ability to fully process. It was still ten thousand years old and made of something that was not quite stone and had no seams and no weathering. None of that had changed.

What had changed was that I now knew what was underneath it.

I wonder if everything that was happening to me, the loop, was related to this pyramid.

A thought entered my head at this moment, too: what if I was not the only one experiencing this loop?

"You have that look again," Bari said, from beside me.

"What look?"

"The one where you are thinking about something you are not going to tell anyone."

He collected my empty bowl with the easy efficiency of someone who had decided that tidying up after people was simply part of how he moved through the world. "You had it yesterday, too, right before we were assigned to our researchers. Mage Torvin noticed. He mentioned it to me."

I arched my brow, surprised that a Mage would be interested in me enough to mention it to Bari, "Oh, what did he say?"

"He said..." Bari adopted a voice of excessive gravity... "that young Voss has the look of a man carrying a weight he has not yet decided to put down."

He dropped the voice. "He has a gift for description, Torvin. It comes with the mustache, I think. Men with mustaches like that develop an eye for the human condition."

I almost smiled, but I could not. Something about what Bari said to me seemed innocent and funny, but I could not help but feel a chill at the same time; it was as if my soul had picked up a subtext that I was still not comprehending.

Finally, I looked to the distance before turning to Bari,

"I am going to do something this morning," I said. "Before we report to our researchers."

Bari waited. With Bari, waiting was not passive; it was an active and generous thing, the deliberate clearing of space for whatever came next.

"I want to get closer to the pyramid," I said, which was true and also not the full truth, and was as much as I was prepared to say. "The south face. The ground near the survey markers."

Bari looked at me for a moment, then at the pyramid, then back at me.

"Commander Rel said the south face was off limits to Acolytes until the primary measurements were complete," he said.

"I know."

Another pause. Then Bari stood, brushed invisible dust from his knees, the hole in his sock caught briefly on a splinter of the crate, and he freed it with the patience of a man long reconciled to the relationship between himself and that particular sock, and said: "Well. I have nothing better to do for the next twenty minutes."

"You don’t have to come."

"No," he agreed, pleasantly. "I don’t, but I am coming anyway."

®

We crossed the camp in the early morning light, moving with the purposeful casualness of people who had somewhere to be and had not yet been told they were not supposed to be there.

I had learned in two years at the Academy that purposeful casualness was the single most effective tool available to a person of limited authority who needed to be somewhere they were not strictly permitted.