The bath helped.
He'd filled the tub himself and stayed in it longer than was strictly necessary, letting the heat work into muscles that had been holding tension since before the entrance exam. Probably longer than that, if he was honest. The road, the forest, the five households. The exam itself, which had gone exactly as planned and still managed to be exhausting in the particular way of things that required careful performance. He hadn't realized how tightly wound he was until he finally sat still and felt the knots in his shoulders for the first time.
He stayed until the water went lukewarm, got out, and dressed.
He'd been told there would be a guided tour of the academy grounds later in the week — one of the upper-year students showing the new intake around. But that was days away, and he'd always found it easier to form a real sense of a place by walking it alone first. He wanted to know where things were before he was told where things were.
He remembered the notice about uniform measurements and added it to his mental list. Then he went out.
---
The academy was enormous.
The main paths were well-signed — arrows pointing toward the Training Grounds, Main Hall, Library, Administration, Dormitories, Market Square, and several others. But beyond the signs there were more buildings: large stone structures with no obvious markings, smaller workshops with their doors open, things that might have been specialized classrooms or storage or something else entirely. He passed one long low building with no sign at all and could hear voices inside, though he couldn't make out the words. The grounds had the density of a small city that had grown around a central purpose rather than been planned all at once.
He followed the main path in a loose circuit.
The training grounds he recognized immediately — the open flagstoned area where the entrance exam had taken place that morning. In the low afternoon light it looked different, quieter, more spacious without the cluster of anxious applicants. A few older students were using it now, working through spell drills with the easy repetition of people for whom casting had become routine. He watched briefly and kept walking.
Past the main hall the path continued further than he'd expected, and eventually a fork appeared. The Library sign pointed left toward a heavy stone building with high narrow windows and a set of double doors. He turned down that path without deliberating.
The doors were unlocked. He pushed inside.
The entrance hall was cool and smelled of old paper. A reception desk sat at the far end with a woman behind it, perhaps fifty, looking up from whatever she'd been reading.
"Are you lost?" she asked, pleasantly enough.
"No — I saw the sign and wanted to have a look. I'm a new student, just arrived today." He glanced toward the archway that led into the stacks. "Is it open to students?"
"It is. You'll need your academy badge to get past the entrance. It comes with your enrolment paperwork — should be ready in a few days."
"Ah." He looked at the archway again, the shelves just visible in the dimness beyond it. "That's a shame. I was hoping to get a head start."
She smiled slightly. "Everyone does."
He thanked her and went back outside.
---
The market square was broad and cobblestoned, with a fountain at its center — food stalls, equipment traders, a blacksmith's workshop, what looked like an apothecary, clothing suppliers, and scattered among them several book shops. He stopped at the clothing supplier first, had his measurements taken, and moved on.
The book shops each had a small customer area near the entrance — just enough space to stand and speak to the clerk. Everything else was behind the counter. You didn't touch the books, didn't browse the shelves on your own. You told the clerk what you were looking for, the clerk decided what to bring out and how much of it to show you, and the book stayed on their side of the counter throughout. A few pages at most, sometimes less. If you wanted more than that, you paid.
He worked through several of them, asking about science wherever he went, skimming what the clerks were willing to show him and trying to decide which ones were worth buying. None of the decisions were easy. What came to the counter was a mix — some useful, some disappointing, most somewhere in between — and his funds were limited enough that every purchase had to count.
What he found, across all of them, shared the same limitation. The books were built on what could be seen and measured with available instruments — accurate at the surface, sometimes genuinely careful, but silent on the underlying mechanisms. Combustion described in terms of what it needed and what it produced, not in terms of what was driving it. The body described in terms of how its parts moved and connected, not in terms of processes taking place at a level smaller than any lens had yet reached. He had fragments of that deeper knowledge from another life — imperfectly remembered, full of gaps — and the books here could fill in some of what he'd observed without fully understanding, but they couldn't give him the precise language he needed to work with confidence. He'd have to close that gap through experimentation. Slowly. The hard way.
He bought what seemed most useful — an anatomy volume with detailed diagrams clearly derived from serious dissection work, and a text on compounds in medical practice that was the most specific thing he'd found all afternoon. In one shop, while the clerk was showing him a volume, the man set it aside mid-conversation and leaned across the counter slightly.
"While you're here — I have something else you might find interesting. Not like anything else in the shop. It's about finding your inner self — understanding your true nature, unlocking your potential. A lot of students find it life-changing."
Oryth looked at him.
"No thank you," he said, and left.
He hated that. The pivot mid-conversation, the suddenly intimate tone, the promise of something life-changing. He'd heard variations of it in his previous life in every form imaginable — seminars, subscription services, supplements — and the packaging was always different and the core was always the same. He'd rather spend his money on bad science than good salesmanship.
The next shop he entered, he found himself alone at the counter. No clerk visible — just the small customer area, the shelves behind the counter, and a boy his age standing behind it with the uncertain posture of someone who'd been left in charge of something they didn't fully own. Along the back wall, a small magic section — a handful of volumes, each one clearly treated as something that couldn't be replaced. There weren't many, and he suspected that wasn't an accident. The academy had likely accumulated most of what circulated in the capital, leaving the open market with only whatever slipped through.
"The owner stepped into the back," the boy said. "He'll be out in a minute. Can you wait?"
"Sure," Oryth said.
A brief silence.
"Do you work here?" Oryth asked.
"Yeah. My father's friend owns the shop — part of the arrangement for my enrollment." He said it plainly, no particular weight to it. "I help out when I'm not in class. Or before class starts, I suppose."
"You're enrolled?"
"B-class. Just got in."
"Same." Oryth nodded. "Oryth Morvhal."
"Cael Torm."
They shook hands across the counter.
Cael glanced at the magic section behind him. "Looking for something specific?"
"Magic books mostly. Science if anything decent turns up." He gestured toward the spines lined up behind the counter. "What do books like that go for?"
Cael told him. Oryth kept his expression neutral, but the numbers landed hard.
"Are the prices always like this?"
"Always," Cael said. "I've been working here for months and I still feel sick looking at some of them. The non-magical books are bad enough — but the magic ones..." He shook his head. "I can't even dream about owning one. Maybe after graduating and actually earning something as a mage."
"At this rate I'll need to find a job too," Oryth said. "Sooner rather than later."
Cael laughed. "I'll put in a good word."
The owner returned from the back. Cael stepped aside and the conversation shifted into the formal territory of a customer being shown merchandise — the clerk bringing out the healing text, opening it to the first pages, standing beside it.
Oryth read what he was permitted to read. The runic sequences were there, but what caught his attention was something else — the way the book described the body's response to injury. More detailed than anything he'd seen in the anatomy texts from the other shops. More precise about what was happening beneath the surface of a wound, the processes involved in recovery. He found himself wondering whether the author had simply been exceptional, or whether this level of knowledge had been more common once — whether texts like this were remnants of an era before the Collapse, when human civilization had been at its height and knowledge of all kinds had run deeper.
The clerk closed the book and named the price.
Oryth kept his expression neutral. With that amount he could probably build a residence.
He thanked the clerk and moved toward the door. Cael glanced up from behind the counter.
"See you around."
Oryth raised a hand and went back outside.
---
He stood at the fountain for a moment, thinking.
The science books were a partial solution at best. The magic books were out of reach entirely for now. What he actually needed was money, and the obvious way to get it kept surfacing no matter how many times he pushed it back down.
He could produce gold. He'd always had reasons not to — in his previous life those reasons had been genuine, built on actual belief that systems mattered, that rules existed for reasons worth respecting, that you didn't take shortcuts that undermined how things worked. He'd paid taxes, followed laws, never taken what wasn't his.
And he'd died at thirty in a hospital bed while the woman he loved fell asleep in a chair beside him.
The thought arrived with a sting that hadn't dulled. He'd turned it over enough times that he'd learned to set it aside quickly, but the edges were still sharp when he touched them. He'd followed every rule, and the outcome had been what it was. He was here now in a different body in a world built on scarcity and the hoarding of knowledge behind prices designed to keep it out of reach of anyone born into the wrong circumstances.
Why was he still holding himself to rules from a life that was already over? What had it gotten him, at the end of it, except a hospital bed and the loss of the love of his life?
He watched the fountain for a moment.
And then the other side of it surfaced, the way it always did. He'd been given a second chance. Another life, another body, magic, time. Was that random? Or was it connected to something about who he'd been? He didn't know. Couldn't know. But dismissing the possibility felt careless in a way he couldn't quite shake.
And there was the practical side too. He was a child. Producing gold meant explaining where it came from, and people were greedy, and he was twelve years old in a world where that combination had already gotten people killed on his behalf once. He'd need a legitimate source of income as cover regardless. Which meant a business of some kind. Which meant the gold didn't actually solve the problem cleanly — it just moved it.
He'd think about it more. For now, he still had a few shops he hadn't entered.
---
He was making a final pass when he found himself in front of a shop he didn't recognize — he must have missed it on his first pass. He went in without much hope, more to be thorough than anything else.
The clerk looked up, and his expression shifted through surprise before settling into something carefully neutral.
"I apologize," the man said, before Oryth could speak. "For earlier. The way I approached you — I shouldn't have done that. It wasn't professional."
Oryth hadn't expected that. "It's fine."
"It isn't, really." The clerk leaned on the counter slightly. "I should explain — the book is my own. I wrote it. I suppose I get a little... eager, when I think someone might find it useful. It doesn't excuse the approach."
Oryth looked at him with new interest. "You wrote it."
"While I was studying here, and in the years after. I graduated about eight years ago." He said it without particular pride or embarrassment. "I stayed. I love books. Having my own shop was always what I wanted — and maybe someday writing another one."
"You're a mage," Oryth said. It wasn't quite a question.
The man smiled slightly, raised one hand, and a small air sphere appeared above his palm — compact, clean, no visible effort — and dissipated. "I am. I know it seems strange. But this is what I wanted to do."
Oryth looked at him for a moment, then at the shelves. "Show me the book."
The clerk brought it out and set it on the counter. The cover was well-made but plain, the title in careful handwriting: The Mindflow Archive.
"The hardest part for most students isn't the casting. It's holding onto everything they're supposed to remember." The clerk hesitated, searching for the words. "I stumbled onto something during my studies that made it click. It's... difficult to explain. I wrote it down as best I could, but I'm still not sure if it applies the same way for everyone." He gestured at the book. "I'd rather you judge for yourself whether it's worth your while."
Oryth opened it.
The clerk watched him read. A minute passed, then another. Oryth turned a page, and whatever was on his face made the clerk lean back slightly, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. He looked satisfied—nothing more than that—but it was the look of someone who'd seen that expression before and knew what it meant.
Oryth didn't notice. He was somewhere else entirely, eyes moving across the page with the kind of focus that shut out everything around him. He couldn't believe what he was reading. The guarded neutrality he'd worn all afternoon had fallen away, replaced by something rarer. He felt like he was holding a treasure.
The clerk cleared his throat.
Oryth looked up, blinking. He'd read too much already, and he knew it.
"How much?" he said.
"Fifteen gold."
Oryth stared at him. "Fifteen?"
The clerk said it with the slight tension of someone who had named this price before and watched people put the book back down. "I know how that sounds. But it's the first book I'd recommend to any student, and I've priced it accordingly."
More than any other non-magical book in this shop, Oryth thought. But he didn't say it. He was still processing the number—not because it was high, but because it was low. Too low. If what he'd just read was true, if the rest of the book delivered on what those first pages promised, then fifteen gold was nothing. But he understood why. The clerk had priced it for students who might find it useful. He couldn't have known that someone would walk in who would find it worth ten times that.
"I'll take it," Oryth said, already reaching into his pocket.
The clerk blinked. He looked like a man who'd been bracing for the usual back-and-forth and now found himself wondering if he should have started higher.
Oryth counted out the coins and set them on the counter. He picked up the book, feeling the weight of it in his hands—heavier than it should have been for its size, or maybe that was just the afternoon catching up with him.
"I'm Oryth Morvhal," he said. "And I'm sorry for walking out earlier without a word."
The clerk waved it off. "I would have done the same." He paused. "I'll see you around, then. If you have questions about it—I'm usually here."
"I'll hold you to that," Oryth said.
He left the shop and walked toward the food stalls as his stomach reminded him that he hadn't eaten since the exam. He was aware of the book with every step—the solidity of it, the promise of it. He looked down at the cover, at the careful handwriting.
The Mindflow Archive.