I was hoping for more gifts like this in this month-long expedition, and with these warm thoughts in my head, I ladled two bowls of porridge and handed one to Dara, and she accepted it without ceremony, which I had already learned was how she accepted most things, directly, without fuss, as if gratitude was implicit and therefore did not require performance.

It was not hard to see why I was deeply attracted to her, and it helped that she was one of the prettiest girls I had seen. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

We stood at the fire, and the camp woke up around us, while slowly eating, and I felt a brief flush of happiness in my heart. I am happy to be here.

The sound of the flap of a tent opening drew my attention, and I glanced at one of the people I saw every morning and actively wished I had not, Rex Aldran.

He emerged from his tent, which was notably larger than the other Acolyte tents, a detail that had not been accidental, already fully dressed, his field coat spotless despite four days of expedition travel, his dark hair arranged in the careful way that required either a mirror or a considerable amount of personal vanity. Probably both.

I wore my Acolyte robes because of the enchantment on them that kept them clean and cool, thereby saving me a lot in cleaning costs and time, but Rex brought a whole wardrobe with him.

He was ranked 31 in our cohort, which made him the highest-ranked Acolyte on the expedition, a fact he managed to communicate without ever quite stating it directly, which was its own kind of skill.

Rex was from House Aldran, one of the six founding families of the Academy’s patronage council. He had been doing magic since he was eight years old, had been taught privately before his formal enrolment, and his Surge was at 52 before he even sat his Acolyte evaluation.

He was, by every technical measure, exceptional, and he was also the person who had told Master Seravyn, two weeks before expedition selection, that my Cartography scores were too low for fieldwork and that the Academy would be taking a reputational risk by including me.

I heard he did this just to ensure that all the fellow Acolytes that came on this expedition were all girls, so he could live his harem fantasy, but even if those rumors were untrue, I would not be surprised if there was still a note of truth to it.

Seravyn had included me anyway, and Rex had not forgotten.

He spotted me at the cook fire, and his expression did the thing it always did, a small adjustment, almost imperceptible, that moved it from neutral to the particular variety of pleasant that meant he was calculating something.

"Voss," he said. "You’re cooking."

Yeah, and he did not like to call me by my first name.

"Apparently," I replied.

"Is that wise? We have an actual cook."

"Aldis stepped away."

"Mm." He accepted the cup Dara held out to him and took a sip. She had poured a third without asking, which told me she was paying attention to the dynamic and had decided to smooth it before it became a thing.

His expression shifted again, this time with less calculation in it.

"That’s better than yesterday."

"Thyme," I said.

"Hm." He looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable, then turned toward the pyramid with his cup in both hands and said nothing further, which was the closest Rex Aldran ever came to a compliment.

Bari arrived last, as he always did.

Bari Sohn was ranked 38 in our cohort, between Dara and me, and he was the only one of the four of us I would have called a friend without reservation.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, from a merchant family in the northern provinces who had been mildly astonished when their eldest son manifested Anima sensitivity strong enough for Academy enrolment.

His Surge was almost as high as Rex’s. His attitude toward this fact was the precise opposite of Rex’s; he found it mildly interesting and moved on.

I did not believe that Bari wanted to be a mage, but he was so talented that he had no choice but to become one.

He came out of his tent with his boot in one hand and his sock in the other, hopping slightly, his dark hair pressed flat on one side from sleep.

"There’s a hole," he announced to no one in particular, holding up the sock.

"In your sock," Dara said.

"In my sock. Yes. Thank you, Dara."

He sat on the nearest crate and began the complicated negotiation of putting on a boot over a sock with a hole in it.

"Is that porridge? Is it good today?"

"It’s better," I said.

"Elric fixed it," Dara said.

"Good man." He pointed at me with the sock. "You’re a good man, Elric."

Rex said nothing. He was still looking at the pyramid.

Naturally, my eyes were also drawn to it too, but I was always looking at this pyramid with my peripheral vision since I came out of my tent.

There was something about the morning light at this angle, or the particular quality of the air in this bowl of land, that made it feel closer than it had yesterday. Or perhaps I was simply more awake.

At its base, arranged along the eastern face, was the reason we were here.

Six Adept-level mages in field coats, the dark blue of the Academy’s research division, were working in a line across approximately thirty meters of the pyramid’s surface.

Each had a set of instruments on a folding table beside them, brass and glass devices I recognized from textbooks but had never seen in operation. Resonance meters. Anima density gauges. A calibration array that was used to measure the depth of magical structures embedded in stone, or in this case, whatever the pyramid was made of that was not quite stone.

At the center of the line, moving between the other five with the unhurried deliberateness of someone who had designed the experiment and was now checking that everyone else was running it correctly, was Scholar Orath.