Chapter 8

  Magic & The Institute

  I had a book open in front of me. One of the many pieces of ‘assigned reading’ that I have been given in order to prepare myself for the institute in the fall. Only three months away at this point. Alaric had left it on the kitchen table with the same casual certainty he was becoming known for.

  The apartment was quiet for now. That breakfast smell still lingering, my sugary coffee cooling. The only sound was the low hum of the fridge and the occasional creak of the wind blowing against the windows.

  I told myself I’d just skim a few pages for now. Take it easy at first.

  I didn’t.

  The words caught on pretty quick. It was all so insane sounding. Like I was reading something straight out of a comic book.

  ‘Magic had been “discovered” less than a century ago.’

  Discovered.

  It sounded both civilized and scientific. Making it sound as if humanity had flipped a switch and documented a phenomenon they encountered in a lab; then filed it neatly beside atomic power and antibiotics.

  The book didn’t buy its own euphemism though, not really. It lingered on that word and let the irony sit there.

  Why?

  Because even historians and scientists couldn’t agree on where magic came from or what it even was—at least in the beginning.

  Some said it had always existed, dormant and rare, until something—some trigger, some shift—woke it. Others argued it arrived all at once, like something that just poured itself into the biosphere. And then there were these groups of people with wild theories. They read more conspiracy theory than anything, the idea that magic was something that wasn’t found but something that found humanity.

  I stared at that line longer than I meant to.

  Because it implied intent. Was magic really something that could look at a world and decide it was time to change the rules? Shake things up?

  Needless to say, clearly there was plenty of debate about origins, the book said. There was almost no debate about what came after.

  With magic, the impossible became possible—sometimes beautiful, sometimes catastrophic, and far too often both at once.

  At first, the world treated it like any miracle: awe, fear, opportunism. People always loved a miracle right up until it ruined their week.

  Those who could interact with it were labeled Magic Sensitive—clean language meant to keep panic from spreading faster than the phenomenon itself. As if “sensitive” made it sound manageable; a mild condition you could treat with warning labels and support groups.

  These ‘Sensitives’ started appearing everywhere as the text explains it. All over the world, all around the same time. From cities to small towns. Rural enclaves, Islands and Mountain villages.

  There was no warning. No universal applicable profile or consistent onset.

  Some were kids who lit candles without touching them. Some were adults who heard voices and swore the thoughts weren’t theirs. Some woke to broken glass and floating furniture, having no memory of what they’d done the night before.

  No neat symptom list. No clean onset curve.

  A teenager in a coastal fishing town might pull water out of the air and hold it in a trembling sphere. A retired engineer started seeing reality in vectors and lines, like the world was made of blueprints only he could edit. A little girl might cry and make streetlights explode one by one until someone learned to keep her calm.

  It didn’t present like a disease so much as a type of lottery.

  And like all lotteries, it created winners, casualties, and predators.

  Some Sensitives were terrified. They hid themselves, prayed and denied it all. Tried to pretend their hands weren’t shaking when the air got thick around them. Others embraced it immediately—and as people do, they embraced it in two familiar directions. Some tried to be responsible, others tried to be important.

  The book listed early incidents like a string of footnotes that collectively felt like a warning siren: a house in Ohio collapsing in on itself, with zero structural explanation. A church in Brazil burning without any noticeable heat or fire signatures. A passenger plane landing at an airport in Berlin and then blinking out of existence before it hit the runway, never to be seen again.

  At first, it was all localized chaos. Easy to bury under freak accidents and mass hysteria.

  But that was quickly subverted, because it wasn’t local anymore.

  Governments realizing a single unstable Sensitive could equal the power of a natural disaster. And once they start on a hysteria driven crash out, how would you tell them to stop other than killing them on the spot? How can you tell when one of them is about to go off? What measures can you take to prevent such scenarios? All these thoughts and more were all spelled out across this book. Evidently at the forefront of the efforts for containment.

  In the end, it boiled down to a race. Not a race to understand magic—understanding takes patience—but a race to get ahead of it and work toward containment.

  There was no rulebook. Everyone’s relationship to magic was personal, shaped by biology and psychology and environment; things which—at this time—didn’t have a name yet. Two people could be exposed to the same concentration of magic, live in the same city, even share genetics—and magic would still take differently. It was all so baffling.

  Researchers tried anyway.

  They introduced measured clumps of magic concentrate and monitored the body like it was a machine exposed to a new type of fuel: heart rate, blood chemistry, neurological patterns, heat displacement, electromagnetic noise. The earliest institutes built entire labs around this. Measuring everything that could be measured within the human body.

  And still the results were inconsistent enough to make the science feel like guesswork at best with more expensive equipment.

  Because magic didn’t behave like physics, as much as it was able to manipulate it.

  It behaved like temperament.

  It could manifest as telekinesis—subtle, precise, surgical—or as violent bursts that turned a room into splinters. Telepathy appeared, but rarely as clean mind-reading; more often it was bleed-through: emotions that weren’t yours, intrusive thoughts, visions that felt like memories but belonged to someone else. Pyrokinesis, hydrokinesis, cryokinesis, electrical manipulation, gravity distortion, spatial folding—it was all listed here. Everything you could imagine, it had probably been seen and tested.

  And then there were others. Outcomes that didn’t fit categories at all—light bending wrong, shadows moving out of sync with their owners, sound shaped into pressure, matter behaving like it had forgotten its own rules. The worst example was a woman in Tokyo in immense grief. She folded an entire city block in on itself, leaving nothing behind except herself, standing in tears.

  The list of examples and horrors wasn’t endless.

  But it might as well have been.

  Every new Sensitive was a new reality.

  And the world had to gamble, every time, that the person carrying that reality was stable enough to be trusted with it.

  For a brief stretch, people believed magic was a gift. A touch of the divine, proof that humanity had been noticed for once and blessed beyond measure. The rhetoric itself varied by culture, but the shape of it was always the same: we have been chosen.

  That belief for the most part didn’t survive first contact with consequence.

  1952.

  The book didn’t dress it up. It didn’t need to. It described the original outbreak like an unfolding catastrophe that refused to fit the language people had available. Crystalline growths erupting from both soil and flesh. Towns evacuated in a day. People who didn’t simply die, but changed—bodies reorganized themselves, eyes clouded, voices replaced by guttural sounds that resembled feral beasts.

  Entire regions became uninhabitable within weeks.

  Millions displaced.

  Millions killed.

  And for the first time, the world understood that magic didn’t just grant power.

  It carried a consequence, an infection.

  The Rot.

  That word entered vocabulary the way plague terms always do: rumor first, then dread and lastly doctrine. What made 1952 worse—what made it feel less like tragedy and more like an omen—was that it didn’t stay contained. Within months, outbreaks followed across the world like sparks jumping continents. North America flared along the west coast, the Rot decimating everything in its path. South America, Europe, all major population hubs that should have had nothing in common except density and ambition.

  It all happened too close together to be just coincidence.

  And it all took effect to the point it was impossible to manage.

  Governments responded the way they always did at first—quarantine zones, evacuations, humanitarian corridors. But what good did it do? The Rot didn’t stop, it behaved unlike anything humanity had fought before. It wasn’t a virus that could be tracked cleanly. It wasn’t radiation that could be mapped and avoided. It could bloom from a single failure: one unstable Sensitive overreaching, one magic concentrate exposure mismanaged, one containment line broken from a horde of infected monsters.

  And once crystal fields formed—land hardened into glittering expanses of Rot growth—there was no sanitizing it. Some places were simply lost, carved out of the map and left behind, like scars.

  The question that haunted nations wasn’t just how do we fight this?

  It was: what are we allowed to do to survive?

  By the 1970s, survival had become policy. Drastic measures were taken.

  Throughout the late 60s, the adjustment had finally kicked in. Reality was hitting hard now, there is no waiting for this stuff to go away. Humanity accepted it was living in a permanently altered world. Rot containment became a science, then an industry. Councils, task forces, accords—paper walls built around the problem that could not be fixed with policy.

  And then the book hit the part no one liked to say out loud.

  Culling.

  Once infection passed certain thresholds, people were beyond saving. It was easy to recognize it after so many years. They were unsalvageable—not in the moral sense, but in the practical sense. The infected didn’t merely succumb; they physically became hazards. Things that could spread Rot faster than anything else.

  So people did what desperate people always do.

  They killed what they couldn’t cure and burned what they couldn’t contain.

  Through this policy and approach, humanity started holding its ground a little bit better.

  But even among the uninfected, danger remained. Sensitives pushed themselves because the world demanded it. They reached too far without understanding the cost. The more intensely they operated, the more the Rot “noticed.” The more they pulled from the unseen well, the more it pulled back.

  Power didn’t just carry risk. No, this sort of power came laced with it.

  In the mid 70’s—in-between the gaps of panic and control—privately funded organizations formed. At first, presenting as support networks for the ostracized Sensitives. These groups provided protection, training and in some cases employment. These organizations became safety nets for populations that the world had decided were both necessary and frightening. Places where governments could keep an eye on them, but at an arms length. Close—but not too close.

  Then money arrived, as it always does in these sorts of situations.

  Contracts were signed and these organizations slowly became what we now call guilds today. Guilds became private armies with boardrooms. Recruitment became extraction. Talented Sensitives vanished from small towns and reappeared under logos and uniforms, having signed their rights away to non-disclosure agreements.

  The New York Times called it the Guild Rush—a phrase that made it sound romantic, like a gold boom.

  It wasn’t.

  It was a power grab conducted under the language of opportunity disguised as survival. A new economy built around the fact that humans could now function as weapons, assets, deterrents… or disasters depending on who held the leash, which was usually the highest bidder.

  Even in a world imbued with the inconceivable, money and influence remained the first instinct. Power was the objective.

  And so the pipelines formed: cadet academies identifying potential early on sprung up all over the country, funded by the guilds. Higher education followed suit, adapting to accept the Sensitives and refine them further. Finally, the service that would follow—military service under your nation's flag or guild contracts to fill your pockets.

  It wasn’t elegant. Hell, it didn’t even sound ethical, but it was the closest thing anyone had to a system for containing the Rot.

  Now, in the present, that system was strained to its limits. The Rot still claimed land. Guilds still competed more than they protected. Governments still pretended they had control. And every year, more Sensitives emerged—each one a new variable, a new possibility or risk.

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  I didn’t realize my fingers were gripping the edge of the book so hard until the paper creaked.

  The apartment felt too quiet. Like the sound of my breathing was the only thing proving I was still here and not just another piece of narrative being arranged into place.

  A thought kept trying to surface—one I didn’t want to name, because naming it made it real. If the world was this unstable… and this new. Then what the hell did Alaric mean when he said we could guide it?

  My phone buzzed aggressively on the table, hard enough to make me jump.

  The screen lit up. Incoming call.

  Yvette Sousa.

  The name alone pulled me out of the book like a hand yanking my collar. For a half second I just stared at it, caught between the weight of history and the reality of right now.

  The phone kept buzzing of course.

  I swallowed, wiped my palm against my jeans without thinking, and answered.

  “Hello?”

  “You dick!”

  The words hit loud enough that I pulled the phone away from my ear on reflex, heart thudding once like it had been slapped awake.

  I blinked at the book, still open in front of me, like it could explain why my morning kept escalating.

  “...Hello?!” Yvette’s agitated voice called out again through the phone.

  I exhaled—slow, resigned—and put the phone back to my ear.

  “Hello to you too,” I answered cautiously.

  ~~~~

  Alaric eased the car into the faculty entrance lane and rolled to a stop beside a security booth. The glass in the little box was smudged from a thousand hands and a thousand mornings, and the Institute hadn’t even opened up yet officially. A heater rattled inside, working overtime to fight back against the chill in the spring air.

  He cracked his window.

  “Morning, Bill.”

  Bill’s head appeared like a slow sunrise—older, rounder than he used to be, with a mustache that had gone mostly gray and a face that always looked mildly apologetic. He leaned out far enough that his gut pressed the edge of the booth window.

  “There he is! Professor Parks, howdy sir.” Bill’s eyes flicked to the passenger seat, then back. “Good to see you.”

  Alaric held out his badge without ceremony. The plastic was warm from his palm.

  Bill took it, squinted at the photo like it might have changed overnight, then gave a pleased little sound. “Hey—congratulations. Your boy, right? He graduated.”

  Alaric’s jaw tightened in a way that would’ve gone unnoticed by most people. He kept his voice level.

  “That he did. Thank you.”

  Bill grinned, delighted to have landed on a topic that sounded personal. “Well, it must be nice. Makes you feel old, huh? My niece just started at the cadet academy—”

  The badge reader chirped. Bill broke off, tapped a button, and the boom gate rose with a reluctant mechanical groan.

  Alaric took his badge back with a nod that was polite enough to pass for warmth.

  “Have a good one, Bill.”

  “You too, professor! And, uh—good luck today.”

  Alaric didn’t ask what he meant by that. He already knew.

  He drove through, tires clicking over the seam in the pavement where the campus wards began. You couldn’t see the boundary unless you knew what to look for—just a faint shimmer at the edges of sunlight, like heat haze on asphalt. But you could feel it if you’d spent enough years around enchantment: a pressure behind the eyes, a subtle insistence in the air.

  The faculty lot itself was already crowded. Rows of cars sat too neatly aligned, like a parade ground formation. Most of the folks hired on were all overachievers, at least Alaric thought so—and not kindly.

  He found a space anyway, eased in, and killed the engine. For a moment he stayed there with his hands on the wheel, listening to the tick of cooling metal, letting himself exist in the quiet before the day began in earnest.

  Then he exhaled, put on his hat, and reached for his briefcase.

  Two hours until the first official faculty meeting. Two hours until everyone in the building pretended they weren’t angling for influence at the first chance they got.

  His job title still felt like a joke when he said it out loud: Professor of Magical Phenomena. Not Theory. Not Applied Wardcraft. Not even Arcanic Systems. Phenomena—broad enough to cover anything, vague enough to be blamed for everything. Still, it was his in and he took it gladly.

  The Denver Institute sat at the edge of the city like a self-contained compound. The public saw clean stone, curated lawns, bright banners, and student tours with practiced smiles.

  They didn’t see the engineering under the ‘skin’ of it all.

  Alaric did. He saw the ward pylons disguised as tasteful landscaping. He saw the glyphwork threaded into metal railings, the careful polarity adjustments so the barrier stayed invisible to the naked eye. The campus didn’t just have defenses—it was a defense. A fortress designed with the help of guild engineers from Aegis Works—people who had watched magic go wrong and swore it would never happen here.

  Millions in funding, years of development and planning made this all possible. Guild money, mostly, parceled through clean channels and friendly foundations so the state could pretend it wasn’t taking private donations. Frontier Charter’s fingerprints were the clearest of them all. They wanted first pick of the graduating talent, and they didn’t bother acting modest about it.

  Alaric could already envision their recruiters practically circling the student commons like vultures.

  He climbed the front steps toward the main doors, legs burning a little more than he would’ve liked. He told himself it was the altitude. He told himself a lot of things. Just never that it was his short stature.

  Inside, the building smelled aggressively clean, like lemon polish had been doused in every corner. The receptionist looked up as he walked through the doors.

  “Good morning, Professor Parks.”

  He tipped his hat and kept moving before she could ask him anything he’d have to answer.

  The corridors were pristine and too bright—sterile. The sort of cleanliness that felt more like surveillance than actual cleanliness. Here and there, placards honored donors with cheerful, sanitized gratitude.

  Alaric reached his office, unlocked it, stepped inside, and shut the door behind him with a thankful sigh.

  He put his briefcase down, sat, and let the chair take his weight. His desk was exactly as he’d left it: neat stacks, perfectly aligned pens, nothing out of place. Order was a form of defense and this was his castle.

  He’d barely managed a full breath when a knock came.

  Alaric frowned at the door.

  “Yes?” He asked loudly, not bothering to get up.

  The door opened.

  His frown quickly turned into a question mark when he saw who it was.

  President Justice Fields stepped, as if she owned the square footage—and technically, she did.

  An African-American woman whose very presence alone made people straighten up without realizing. Her suit jacket was immaculate, the Institute’s sigil pinned on it proudly, but her eyes had a faint redness about them.

  “Alan,” she said more as a greeting than anything.

  Alaric’s mouth twitched at his name. He answered in a formal tone. “Madam President.”

  Justice made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a threat toward his tone. “Oh, please. I don’t need shit from you this morning. You got a minute? This is important.” Justice asked, already closing the door behind her, deciding the answer for him.

  “Of course,” he said, the formality now completely dropped from his voice. “What can I do for you?”

  She set an iPad on his desk with a blunt thunk and slid it toward him.

  Alaric had quickly turned into one of her confidants in his time here. His highly competent behavior and his way of reading situations—and people—made him someone that Justice had no reservations about trusting.

  “Well, for one you could shoot me and save me the trouble of attending this meeting today. I’ve had nothing but suggestions cramming my inbox from all the departments. I’m sick of it.” She sighed, then pointed toward the tablet. “But seriously, just take a look at this.”

  Alaric looked down.

  It was a report. At least, at a glance. Upon further inspection it confirmed it. This is the new student intake profiles. The formatting was clean, professional, and just smug enough to be Elias’ work. Alaric scrolled with one finger, eyes tracking names, scores and if they had any notes.

  He didn’t stop on the promising ones. Most of them were fairly predictable: high aptitude, decent background checks, guilds would flock for their signatures fairly quickly.

  No, he was looking for someone…

  …and then he saw him.

  White hair. A mask that hid everything below purple eyes. The profile, stark and incomplete: Xankoris. No surname. No scores. Nothing besides an age with no date of birth attached.

  Alaric’s thumb paused.

  Justice watched his face like she was waiting for the exact moment the irritation would hit. When it didn’t, she clicked her tongue and supplied it herself.

  “Elias has secured thirty-eight commitments so far on his Northwest tour,” she said. “I know that probably means nothing to you but—”

  “It means he’s doing his job,” Alaric said mildly, still reading.

  Justice exhaled through her nose. “Doing his job in the way Elias does his job. Loudly. And getting me phone calls from angry parents asking why their perfect brat was not picked up for recruitment.”

  She leaned forward, bracing both hands on the edge of his desk, and tapped the screen beside the masked student’s picture.

  “One of those thirty-eight has a special request attached to it that’s giving me even more grief than angry parents. Elias wants us to open the residence hall early for this student. ‘Special circumstances’ he tells me.”

  Alaric flicked his gaze up. “That is unusual.” Playing along with the surprise he should be feeling.

  “Evidently,” Justice continued, voice flattening, “Elias is bringing back this Russian kid from Alaska already with no documentation, no ID, no paper trail. I mean it's like this kid's a ghost, we literally have nothing we can find in any database.”

  Alaric made a quiet sound of consideration. “Well. That’s not the worst outcome.”

  Justice’s eyebrows rose. “Excuse me?”

  “Usually,” Alaric said, scrolling again, “the type of databases we access for overseas students generally have convicts and wanted criminals in them.”

  Justice stared at him for a beat, then clicked her tongue, equal parts disbelief and reluctant amusement. “You would say that.”

  He kept his eyes on the report. “Which student?”

  Justice reached over without asking—an invasion, but a controlled one—and scrolled back with a sharp, practiced motion until the masked boy’s profile filled the screen.

  “This one.” Her nail tapped the photo once, like a judge’s gavel. “Xankoris. No last name. Elias says he is soft-spoken and won’t share much about his background.” She tilted her head. “But he already has Elias obsessed with him.”

  Alaric’s mouth tightened a fraction. Obsessed was a strong word. Justice didn’t waste strong words unless she meant them.

  She paused, then added, almost too casually, “Do you remember a month ago—before Elias left—when he had me get all those Northern Chain route statistics from LunarChain?”

  Alaric nodded once. He remembered the headache. The phone calls. The thinly veiled questions from people who did not like being asked about their precious shipping lanes.

  “Apparently it was all because of him,” Justice said. “Elias says this kid is a prodigy. ‘Once-in-a-decade,’ or whatever catch-phrase he’s using now. Kid was busy saving people from shipwrecks”

  Alaric studied the photo again. The last photo he had of Xankoris was from when he was fifteen. Now, he is twenty-one. He looked a little more rough around the edges, which is no surprise. Seems like he has been through a lot.

  He pushed the iPad back slightly, not pushing it away, just… returning it to the center of the desk.

  “We should take him,” he said.

  Justice didn’t move, she just looked at him as if waiting for his reasoning to surprise her.

  “It will be good publicity,” Alaric continued, unruffled. “A star pupil can only strengthen our reputation.”

  Justice’s lips pressed together. The irritation was there, but beneath it was something heavier. “Yeah,” she said finally. “You would say that, wouldn’t you? Both you and Elias.”

  Alaric’s eyes lifted to hers. “You came here knowing what I would recommend. Surely, you did.”

  “I came here,” Justice said, voice sharpening, “because I needed someone competent to hear the problem and tell me I’m not losing my mind.”

  She gestured at the iPad. “Did you miss the part where I said he has zero history we can look into?”

  Alaric sat back a fraction, chair creaking softly. “My answer won’t change. We could have just the headshot and a story, I would still say we should take him. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Justice’s gaze didn’t blink. “Well, sometimes even the right answer is a stupid one when it comes with consequences.”

  “A fine point.” Alaric replied, calm as a stone. “However, sometimes, consequences are the cost of doing the job.”

  Justice’s jaw flexed.

  Alaric continued, measured and irritatingly reasonable. “We exist to educate. To prepare the next generation. That means we cultivate the best talent available. I trust Elias. As should you.”

  “Well, it also means,” Justice said, voice lowering, “that we don’t bring an unknown quantity into a campus designed to contain disasters.”

  She pointed vaguely toward the walls, toward the hidden wards humming underneath their feet. “Those wards aren’t just a safety net. They work both ways for a reason.” She paused and held Alaric’s gaze. “Plus, they serve as a promise. To the state, to families… people who send their kids here. We owe it to them to keep them alive.”

  Alaric didn’t argue. He let the silence sit long enough to mean something.

  Then, quietly: “Does Elias believe he’s dangerous?”

  Justice hesitated—just a flicker.

  “No,” she said. “Elias doesn’t think he’s dangerous. He thinks he’s valuable.”

  Alaric’s eyes returned to the photo.

  “Then we should evaluate him,” he said. “Carefully. As you have explained, we have protocols for a reason. Give the boy a medical, a psychological evaluation, magical screening. We will cover our asses.”

  Justice’s mouth curved. “Jesus, you really want me to pull the trigger on this.”

  “Yes, I believe you do as well.” Alaric said with a smile. “We should have the opportunity to decide whether the talent is worth the risk.”

  Justice held his gaze. For a moment, the president wasn’t a hard-edged administrator; she was now a woman balancing knives while an audience demanded she smile.

  Justice exhaled. “God help me.”

  She straightened, picked up the iPad, then paused at the door like she’d remembered a final thorn.

  “Alright,” she said over her shoulder. “If we do this… I want you involved, and Elias. Understood?”

  Alaric’s expression stayed neutral, but something cold and pleased moved behind it.

  “And if the kid turns out to be exactly what Elias thinks he is,” Justice added, “I’d rather you be the one who can look me in the eye and say you saw it coming. Elias is too much of a smug asshole when he’s right.”

  “Understood.” Alaric replied with a soft smile.

  He was confident he had played his part well enough today.

  Then she opened the door. “And Alan?” she said, without looking back.

  “Yes, Madam President?”

  She frowned for a second. “Don’t make my migraine worse today.”

  The door clicked shut, leaving no room for reply.

  Alaric sat still for a moment, staring at the blank space the iPad had occupied.

  Then he reached for his pen, and began making notes—Xankoris will get his place in the Institute.