Aldric looked up from his desk when Clyde knocked and entered, the particular look of someone who had already assessed from the knock alone that this was not an emergency.
"You wanted to see me?" Aldric said.
"Actually I wanted to ask you something." Clyde sat down across from the desk without being invited to, which was something he had started doing recently and which Aldric had not commented on. "I want to take a few days off. A short trip."
Aldric looked at him. "Where."
"Matrix."
A pause.
"Matrix is fifty kilometers," Aldric said.
"I know. I've done the arithmetic. Coach fare both ways, a few nights accommodation, meals. I have enough saved." Clyde kept his tone straightforward, the tone of someone presenting a reasonable request rather than asking permission for something they expected to be denied. "I want to take Luchian. He has never been. Neither have I."
Aldric was quiet for a moment, looking at Clyde with those tired brown eyes that were always doing more assessment than they appeared to be doing.
"How long?" he said.
"Four days. Five at most."
"No active commissions pending for you right now." Aldric looked at the papers on his desk briefly, confirming something. "The Academy situation is contained. The Bleeding Court has the Echo card." He picked up his pen. "Fine. Four days."
Clyde felt something loosen slightly in his chest. "Thank you, Principal."
"Before you go." Aldric set the pen down and opened his desk drawer. He produced a small card, not an Astral Card, not a Divine Ichor Card, something more like an identification document, its surface carrying official-looking text and a formal seal pressed into the material. He placed it on the desk and slid it across. "You turned twenty-two recently."
Clyde picked it up and read it.
It was an enrollment card. His name was on it. Cristae Lunar Academy of Applied Mysticism was on it. And a start date that was approximately three weeks away.
He looked at Aldric.
"College?" he said.
"Yes."
"I just finished college."
"You finished Cristae Academy," Aldric said, with the patient tone of someone who had anticipated this exact response. "That is a general institution. This is different."
"How different."
"Entirely." Aldric folded his hands on the desk. "The Lunar Academy teaches applied mysticism. Ichor theory, combat applications, wave mechanics at an advanced level, divine ichor history, elemental studies, ascension preparation. The curriculum is designed specifically for Ichorborn and those working in the field." He looked at Clyde directly. "You have been learning everything on the job so far. Soren has been filling gaps as they appear. That approach works up to a point, and you are approaching that point faster than most people do."
Clyde looked at the enrollment card again.
A college for magic. There is apparently a college specifically for magic and nobody mentioned it until now.
"Why didn't anyone tell me about this earlier?" he asked.
"The minimum age for enrollment is twenty-two. We have had you for less than a year." Aldric picked his pen back up. "You are now twenty-two. The next intake is in three weeks. Your enrollment has already been processed."
"You already enrolled me."
"Yes."
Clyde sat with that for a second.
He already enrolled me. He just told me about it now. This is very Aldric.
"Is it residential?" Clyde asked.
"You can commute if you prefer. The campus is in the northern district, accessible from here without significant difficulty." Aldric was already writing something. "You will not be the only person from the Lunar Sentinels attending the new intake."
"Who else is going?"
Aldric looked up briefly. "Follow Aurelian. He will explain the rest."
He found Aurelian in the training hall outside the Sentinel building, sitting on the steps with his coat off despite the cold, eating something wrapped in paper that smelled like it had come from one of the market stalls.
Aurelian looked up when Clyde arrived and immediately grinned. "Aldric told you."
"He enrolled me without mentioning it first."
"Yes he does that." Aurelian took another bite of whatever he was eating. "He enrolled me the same way. I walked in to report a completed commission and walked out with an enrollment card and a start date." He gestured at the step beside him. "Sit down."
Clyde sat.
"You are going to the Lunar Academy," Aurelian said, with the easy certainty of someone stating something that was simply a fact now. "So am I. So is Eira, though she has been before and is going back for the advanced track."
"She has been before?"
"Eira has been doing this longer than either of us." Aurelian folded up the paper from his food and tucked it into his coat pocket. "She does not talk about it. Don't ask." He looked at Clyde with genuine enthusiasm, the kind that arrived naturally rather than being performed. "But the Academy itself, Clyde, it is genuinely good. I went through the first two years before I left to form the Faction. The things they teach you there, wave mechanics at a level Soren has been approximating with you in a lab, combat theory that actually accounts for how fights work rather than how they are supposed to work, divine ichor history that goes back to sources most people have never read." He paused. "You are going to find it very useful. Especially given whatever is happening with your wave."
Clyde looked at him. "What do you know about my wave?"
"Eira's report," Aurelian said simply, which answered that question and several others simultaneously. "She is thorough. You know that." He stretched his arms above his head. "She noted the frequency anomaly. She noted the acceleration of your development relative to your phase. She drew a hypothesis." He glanced sideways at Clyde. "She is probably right, by the way. She usually is."
"She thinks my ichor mutated."
"She thinks your ichor mutated," Aurelian confirmed. "Which is rare enough that most of the theoretical frameworks for it are incomplete. The Academy has better resources for that than Soren's lab does, which is saying something because Soren's lab is genuinely impressive." He stood and picked his coat up from the step. "Three weeks. We go together, since apparently Aldric has decided we are each other's problem now."
"He said to follow you."
"He says that to everyone he doesn't want to explain things to himself." Aurelian pulled his coat on. "Come on. I want to show you something before you leave for your trip."
Clyde stood. "How did you know about the trip?"
Aurelian grinned. "Aldric told me."
Of course he did.
They walked through the city for a while, Aurelian moving at his characteristic easy pace, hands in his pockets, occasionally greeting people he recognized in passing with the natural warmth of someone who simply liked people and found it easy to let that show. Clyde walked beside him and thought about enrollment cards and magic colleges and Eira's report and the anomaly in his wave that everyone apparently had opinions about except him.
"What is the Lunar Academy actually like?" Clyde asked. "Day to day."
"Structured but not rigid," Aurelian said. "Morning sessions are theory. Afternoon sessions are practical. There are individual tracks depending on your ichor type, so Hollow Star would put you in the perception and analysis track, which is smaller than the combat tracks but more interesting." He thought for a moment. "The instructors are a mix. Some of them are retired Sentinels. Some are academics who have never been in a real fight in their lives but understand the theory better than anyone. You learn to take what is useful from both." He paused. "One instructor there, Professor Nox Aldenne, she teaches divine ichor history. She knows things about the origins of the thirty-five ichors that are not written down anywhere publicly. Go to every single one of her classes."
"Noted," Clyde said.
"And stay away from the third floor laboratory until you know what you are doing. Something happened there before I left that nobody fully explained and the room has smelled strange ever since."
"What happened?"
"Nobody fully explained it," Aurelian repeated, with the tone of someone who had asked the same question and received the same non-answer. "Just stay away from it initially."
They stopped at a crossroads near the canal district. Aurelian looked at Clyde with an expression that was warmer than his usual easy grin, something more genuine underneath it.
"Enjoy your trip," he said. "Matrix is worth seeing. Take Luchian somewhere good for dinner. The city has restaurants that actually have menus longer than three items, which is something Cristae has not managed to achieve." He turned to head back the way they had come. "Three weeks, Clyde. Then we go learn things properly."
He walked off with his hands back in his pockets, unhurried, already greeting someone across the street.
Clyde stood at the crossroads for a moment.
A magic college, he thought. Three weeks.
He turned and headed home to tell Luchian about Matrix.