[One Month After The Events of Chapter 11. Lymur's First Day As Professor.]
Lymur stood in front of his open wardrobe at seven in the morning and stared at it as if it had gravely wronged him.
He'd been standing there for ten minutes.
What does a professor wear?
What do professors look like?
What is the visual language of a person who teaches things to other people?
He'd looked it up in books the night before, even cross-referenced several accounts of what Xyrus Academy faculty typically wore and had come away with a general picture of smart, formal, put-together.
Which he could totally do.
He had clothes, after all — tons of them.
The problem was that every fit he tried made him look like a student who had robbed a professor's wardrobe, which was the opposite of what he needed given that he was going to walk into a lecture hall full of students who were almost certainly older than he looked.
He decided eventually on dark trousers, a fitted black turtleneck, and a long designer coat, and even threw on the most academic-looking glasses he had.
Simple.
He looked at himself in the mirror and nodded in satisfaction.
"I look twenty at best. This is fine, right?" he said to his reflection.
His reflection gave him no reassurance.
◢◣◢◣◢◣
Cynthia had arranged everything for him as it turned out, which he thought was the least she could do.
Of course, that included his office, course schedule, faculty pass, the whole thing. She'd handed him a folder a month earlier on the beach at Etistin Bay and told him everything he needed to know was in it, and he'd spent the past month going through it in between adventurer work and trying to design something hopefully resembling a curriculum.
"Though I hate how it feels like the old hag already knew I was gonna accept. It's like I played right into her hand!" he complained at one point.
Ethics and Magic was a second-year compulsory minor subject. Twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday, at ten in the morning. Forty students, give or take. The professor before had retired mid-semester supposedly because of "health reasons," but everyone on campus described it as a complete breakdown, which Lymur found slightly alarming and then decided not to think about.
He had an office on the third floor of the humanities building. Room 304. He went there first.
It was small and smelled like old books and the window looked out over the eastern courtyard. There was a desk, a chair, two bookshelves that were empty except for a single sad plant that had been left behind by the previous occupant and appeared to be dying.
Lymur sat down in the chair and looked at the plant.
"I'm going to call you Gerald," he said.
Gerald did NOT respond.
"We're going to get through this together, Gerald."
He put his lecture notes on the desk, looked at them, felt slightly anxious for the first time in a while, and then stood up and went to find coffee.
...…
The faculty lounge was on the second floor. Three people were in it when Lymur walked in. An older man with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead who looked up briefly and then went back to his papers. A woman about the same age eating something at the small table by the window. And a younger man, maybe late thirties, who looked up when Lymur entered and then kept looking because everyone always kept looking.
Lymur found the coffee, poured himself a cup, and turned around.
"You're new," the younger man said.
"Yeah," Lymur said. "Ethics and Magic."
"Ah." The man nodded. "Filling in for Prentiss."
"Was Prentiss the one who — "
"The breakdown, yes."
"Right…" Lymur drank his coffee. "Is there something I should know about the second years?"
The man and the woman at the table exchanged a look.
"They're fine," the woman said. Something in her tone convinced Lymur it was, in fact, not fine.
"They're second years," the man said. "They've survived the first year so they think they know things. They don't know things. They just know more than they did, which they've confused for knowing things."
"That's all of us though," Lymur said.
The man looked at him. "That makes sense. I'm Aldric, by the way. I teach Theoretical Mana Systems."
"Lymur."
Aldric's coffee cup stopped halfway to his mouth. He put it down. "Lymur. As in — "
"As in, yes, probably."
"Huh." Aldric looked at him with a new, transparent interest. "You're smaller than I expected. You're tall but small."
"I get that a lot."
"And younger."
"I get that too."
The woman at the table had put her food down and was now also looking at him with full attention. "I'm Sera. Languages and Cultural Theory." She paused. "Why ethics?"
"Someone thought it was a good idea," Lymur said.
"Who?"
"Cynthia Goodsky."
Both of them were quiet for a second.
"Okay," Aldric continued. "Welcome to Xyrus, then. We, the faculty, welcome you."
...…
He had twenty minutes before the lecture. He spent fifteen of them sitting in his office going over his notes one more time and talking to Gerald, and five of them walking to the lecture hall, which was in the next building over and took him four minutes to find because he went to the wrong building first and had to double back.
He stopped outside the lecture hall door for a second.
Forty students, he thought. It's fine. I've faced far worse things than forty students.
He didn't want to admit that years of horrible social life apparently inflicted him with a mild case of social anxiety.
He opened the door and walked in.
The lecture hall was tiered, forty seats arranged in a wide arc, most of them filled. The noise of forty people talking dropped about fifty percent the moment he walked in, and then dropped the rest of the way as people processed what they were seeing.
Which was an unusually attractive person who looked about nineteen walking to the front of the room in a long coat and setting a folder on the lectern.
Someone in the third row asked, "Is that the professor?"
Someone else said, "Has to be."
A third person said, "He looks like he should be sitting out here with us."
Lymur put his notes on the lectern and looked up at the room.
"I heard that," he said pleasantly.
The third-row section went quiet.
"To answer the question — yes, I'm the professor. My name is Lymur. I'll be taking over Ethics and Magic for the rest of the semester." He looked around the room. Most of them were looking back, mostly with curiosity and skepticism, which was understandable. "I know what you're thinking."
"Do you?" someone said. A young woman near the back, dark hair, arms crossed. She said it like a challenge more than a question.
"You're thinking, 'oh why does this person look like a first year, and what could he possibly know about ethics that's worth sitting here for?'" Lymur leaned against the lectern. "Which is, also, fair. So let me put it this way. I'm, hm… older than I look. I've done things I'm not sure were right and things I knew weren't right and things I was certain were right that turned out to be more complicated. And I've thought about all of it, probably more than is healthy. That's what I'm bringing into this room." He paused. "Whether that's useful to you is something you can decide by the end of the semester."
The room was quiet.
"Okay," he added. "Let's start with something easy. Does morality exist independently of people, or do people create it?"
Silence.
Then the young woman in the back said, "That's not an easy question."
"No," Lymur agreed. "It's not. I lied about that part. Who wants to go first?"
Before anyone could answer, he held up one finger. "Actually, first. Does anyone know what a Grimthorn is?"
The room exchanged glances.
"It's a flower," someone from the middle said.
"Correct. Does anyone know what it symbolizes?"
Silence.
"In Salian tradition, it symbolizes the beginning of an argument that will never fully resolve." He set his notes down. "I'm going to bring one in next week and put it on the lectern. Just so we're all oriented correctly." He looked at the room. "Okay. Back to the question. Go."
...…
Her name was Mira Ashcroft and she argued with him for forty minutes.
Not badly — she was good at it, had a clear foundation and stuck to it, and pushed back on every point he made. By the end of the first lecture, the rest of the class had mostly given up pretending to take notes and were just watching the two of them go back and forth.
"You're saying morality is constructed," she said, for the third time. "But that doesn't mean it isn't real."
"I didn't say it wasn't real," Lymur said. "I said it wasn't independent. Those are different things."
"If it's constructed then it's contingent. It could have been otherwise. That undermines the whole—"
"Language is constructed," Lymur said. "Math notation is constructed. That doesn't make the things they describe contingent." He looked at her. "You're conflating the map with the territory."
Mira opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "That's — okay, that's a fair point, but—"
The bell rang.
"Okay, time's up."
The entire class seemed to exhale at the same time.
Lymur straightened up from the lectern. "Same question next week but with reading. I'll put the list on the board before you leave." He picked up his chalk. "And for what it's worth, Ashcroft, that was a good argument. You've just got one structural problem and I want you to find it yourself."
Mira looked at him. "What's the problem?"
"Huh? Find it yourself, girl," then he started writing the reading list.
The class filed out. A few of them looked at him on the way past. They seemed to be expecting something easy and hadn't gotten it. One boy stopped at the door.
"Professor Lymur."
"Yeah?"
"Are they all going to be like that?"
Lymur thought about it. "Probably."
The boy nodded and left.
...…
He ate lunch alone in his office, which he'd brought from home, because the faculty dining hall needed navigating another building and he wasn't ready for that yet. He sat at his desk and ate and looked at his plant Gerald.
"First lecture," he told Gerald. "Went pretty well, I think."
Gerald was looking better already. Lymur had watered him that morning.
He finished lunch, marked some preliminary observations in his notes, and then spent the rest of the afternoon in his office reading.
Around four, Aldric knocked on the open door.
"How'd it go?" he asked.
"Good, I think. One of them argued with me for most of it."
Aldric smiled. "Ashcroft?"
"You know her?"
"She argued with Prentiss every week. He took it personally." Aldric leaned in the doorway. "She's the best scholar-mage student in the second year. She's just — " he searched for the right word, "— combative."
"I liked it," Lymur said. He glanced at Gerald on the windowsill. "Do you know what a Mournveil fern symbolizes?"
Aldric looked at the plant. "No?"
"Workspace suffering." Lymur watered it. "What a coincidence, right? I named him Gerald. Seemed fitting given the guy before me."
Aldric stared at the plant for a second. Then at Lymur. "You'll be fine here," he said, and left.
Lymur looked at Gerald.
"He's alright," he said.
...…
He got home at half five, made dinner, ate at his kitchen table reading through one of the texts from the course reading list, showered, and went to bed at ten.
He lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling.
That was a good day.
It had been a genuinely good day. It was simple but full of actual things to do and think about. He'd talked to more people today than in a typical week of adventuring. A student even called one of his points reductive and she hadn't been entirely wrong about it.
He fell asleep faster than usual.
By Thursday, he went back.
He found the building correctly this time. Made coffee in the faculty lounge where Aldric was already sitting with his papers, and Sera was eating the same thing she'd been eating on Tuesday and he was beginning to suspect she ate the same thing every day.
"How's your course treating you?" Sera asked.
"Pretty well."
"Did Ashcroft eat you alive as well?"
"She tried." He sat down with his coffee. "How's yours?"
Sera made a face that conveyed a great deal without needing words.
"Seniors?" he guessed.
"Yes. Seniors. They know everything. It's exhausting."
"Juniors think they know things," Aldric said without looking up. "Third years know they know things. There's a difference."
"What about graduating students?"
Both of them were quiet for a second.
"Tired," Sera said. "Graduatings are just tired."
◢◣◢◣◢◣
By Wednesday, he got a note slipped under his office door.
It was a single card, handwritten, no envelope. It read,
My office. 2pm. —C.G.
Just like that. There was no explanation, no context, just the time and some initials that obviously meant Cynthia Goodsky.
Lymur looked at it for a second, then at Gerald.
"She could've just knocked," he said.
Gerald had no opinion on this.
Cynthia's office was on the top floor of the administration building, which was the tallest building on campus and had a view of most of Xyrus on a clear day. The door was open when he arrived. He knocked on the frame anyway.
"Come in," Cynthia said.
Lymur sat down across from her without being invited to. She didn't comment on that.
"How's the academy treating you so far?" she asked.
"So far so good. Why am I here anyway?"
Cynthia smiled. "I'm just checking in."
"You sent a card with two words and a time on it. Rather than a check-in, I assumed that was a summons."
"And you came anyway."
"Yeah, well, I was curious." He looked at her. "What's going on?"
She set her tea down and looked back at him. "Nothing is going on, Lymur. I wanted to see how you were settling in."
"You could've asked me that in the hallway," Lymur said. "Or left a longer note. Or knocked on my door like a person." He leaned back in the chair. "You wanted to talk about something specific and you wanted to do it here, which means you wanted it on your ground. So what is it?"
Cynthia was quiet for a moment. "You're a perceptive one, aren't you?"
"My students keep saying that behind my back. I'm starting to think it's not a compliment."
She almost smiled. "It is a compliment."
"Just get to the point."
"What even makes you think something is going on?"
"Oh, I don't think something is going on," Lymur replied. "I know something is going on. I've been feeling it for months — this uncanny 'calm before the storm' in the air, you know what I mean? And I don't just mean that metaphorically." He looked at her. "And then you appeared on a beach in Etistin with a job offer and a magic teacup, which in hindsight is a strange thing for the director of Xyrus Academy to do. So I thought I should ask you directly. What do you know?"
Cynthia picked up her tea. "That's a lot of inference built on very little. You're reading too much into things, Lymur. You should relax a little."
"It's a lot of inference built on very good instincts," Lymur said. "Do you know something or not?"
"I don't know what you're referring to," she said.
He looked at her, annoyed.
"Okay," he said. "Let me try something else, then. About a month before I registered at the guild some three years ago, I ran into something near the Grand Mountains. It was a humanoid thing with grey skin, red eyes, and horns and it was standing over a dead dragon. And more recently, something that called itself an Asura attacked me in the Glades." He kept his eyes on her. "And what they both had in common was power well above any white-core mage I've ever seen. I assume you get where I'm getting at?"
Her teacup didn't move. Her face didn't exactly undergo a dramatic change out of surprise. But when she heard Asura, her brows did something that didn't go past Lymur's eyes.
There it is. So you do know something, huh?
"Of course, I drove them both off," Lymur said in a joking tone. "It's me we're talking about, after all. But you and I both know those two aren't the only ones out there. So, where were we?" He looked at her intensely. "Ah, Asuras. You know what they are, do you not?"
"I've read broadly," Cynthia said carefully. "The term appears in some historical—"
"Bullshit," Lymur said. "You can't excuse yourself out of this. It's not even believable."
Cynthia set her tea down. She looked at him across the desk with an expression that was, for the first time, becoming increasingly impatient.
"What exactly are you asking me, Lymur? Or are you accusing me of something because it feels like you're very intentionally trying to get under my skin."
"I'm just asking what's coming," he said simply. "Because something is and I happen to not like that."
"Ha~. That's a big speculation."
"I have enough common sense to know what the early signs look like." He looked out the window at the city. "The students of this school are exceptional, but good and exceptional don't mean much against something clearly superior to an S-rank, which is what I ran into out there, and I'm probably the only S-rank in the world who's had that experience and walked away from it."
"You're one data point, then, Lymur," Cynthia said.
"And I'm fucking telling you that the data is concerning."
"…What would you have me do?" she said. "Shut the academy? Stop training mages because you have a bad feeling?"
"What? No, no," Lymur leaned back on his chair. "I'd have you be honest with me. That's all. I'm not here to cause problems. I'm not going to run around telling people the sky is falling. But if you know something, I'd very much like to know what it is. Or maybe a secret agenda for inviting me to work here?"
"I came to you just to offer you a job," Cynthia said. "Because I thought you'd be good at it."
"And probably because having me here suited something you're already thinking about, yeah?" He looked for her reaction. She said nothing. "I'm not angry about it. I actually like it here. But I'm not going to pretend I don't see what I see."
The silence was prolonged for a few seconds.
"You're being very difficult," Cynthia said finally.
"I know I am. Sorry," Lymur said. "I don't take most things seriously. I want to be clear about that. But I'm asking you to take me seriously right now."
Cynthia looked at him for a long time.
"I don't have anything confirmed," she replied. "Nothing that rises to the level of certainty, anyway."
"But?"
"But." She picked up her tea again. "There are patterns. There are things I've been watching for a long time. Movements that individually mean nothing and collectively mean something I don't have a name for yet."
"What a spectacular way to say a lot of bullshit."
"It's a spectacular way to say what I can say.
"Okay, then," Lymur said. "That's a start."
"It's not an invitation to push further."
"I know." He stood up. "For now." He picked up his coat from the back of the chair. "And Cynthia."
She looked at him.
"Just know that I do hope I'm wrong and that I'm just reading too much into things." He held her gaze. "But if I'm not, and something comes, and the students get put in front of it without being ready — I'll want to know who decided that was acceptable."
It wasn't quite a threat.
It also wasn't not a threat.
Cynthia stared at him without blinking.
"Goodbye, Lymur."
"See you around, Seabird~," he replied, and left.