Chapter 1
Two dozen desks sat in neat rows, each bearing a freshly printed class schedule and a thin quiz paper edged in red ink. Third-years — old enough to have opinions, young enough to still be forming them. The room carried the usual mix of chalk dust and quiet anticipation.
I waited as the last pair of boots crossed the threshold and the final backpack hit the floor. Pens appeared, tablets were arranged, papers were squared against desk edges. Then silence, the kind that settles when people are genuinely uncertain what to expect.
“Good morning,” I said. “I’m Mal. Your new Tactical Theory professor.” I let the name sit for a moment. “We’ll start with roll call, then I’ll explain how this class runs. If anything I cover today — or any day — doesn’t track, say so. I’d rather address a question in the moment than have half the room silently lost for the rest of term.”
A few shoulders dropped. Brows that had been drawn together loosened. I moved through attendance without ceremony, marked each name, and set the list aside.
“Grading,” I continued. “This class uses a secondary point system alongside the academy’s standard scale. You each begin with fifty points.” A quiet exhale moved through the room. “Good work earns more. Poor performance or conduct costs them. Points can be redeemed — extended deadlines, one-on-one sessions, offsetting a weak exam score. Spend them and your total drops accordingly.”
A hand went up in the middle row. Dark hair, practical braid, eyes that had already decided to be unimpressed.
“Miss Lora.”
She stood without hurry. “With respect, sir — a separate point system for third-years feels a bit infantilizing.”
A murmur of agreement moved through the room. I’d heard the same objection before, in rooms that looked nothing like this one, from students who had gone on to become some of the sharpest people I’d ever trained.
“I understand why it reads that way,” I said. “It’s designed to make this course work better, not to manage you. Any adjustments to how it runs will be communicated as they become relevant.” I shifted my tone. “The papers on your desks — complete them at your own pace and hand them in when you’re finished. This isn’t graded. It won’t appear on your record. It tells me where you actually are so I’m not wasting your time covering ground you’ve already cleared, or skipping over something you needed.”
Reluctant pencils began to move. I folded my arms and watched.
Some students worked with quiet confidence, strokes clean and certain. Others slowed at particular questions, lips pressing together, working through the unfamiliar. That was what I needed to see.
This system had been producing results long before any of them were born. It was straightforward in the way that things which actually work tend to be — perform well, earn something; struggle, get the support to stop struggling. It had worked in rooms with stone floors and no heating. It would work here.
What it couldn’t do was reach students who had already decided the class was beneath them. Lora’s pen moved too casually. A handful of others mirrored the same deliberate disengagement — bodies present, attention elsewhere.
I noted their names.
Tomorrow, they’d find this class considerably more interesting than they expected.
The last paper hit my desk as the bell rang. Students gathered their things and filtered out, the door swinging shut behind the final pair of boots. I collected the stack, set it aside, and began laying out the next set of schedules and quiz papers — one to each desk, same positions as before.
My planning period fell during Zerion’s class, which gave me a proper window to work through everything before the day was out. I had just set the last booklet down when the second-years began filing in.
They were younger, and it showed — not in ability, but in how they carried themselves. Less performance, more genuine curiosity. I ran through the same setup: roll call, names to faces, the point system explained. The second-years took it better than the third-years had. No challenges, no visible offense. Most of them simply picked up their pens when I told them the quiz was a baseline assessment and got to work.
I returned to my desk with the first stack of papers and began moving through them, one eye on the room.
Nobody tried anything they shouldn’t have.
One student caught my eye.
Not because she was struggling — the opposite. She finished quickly, but not the way students do when they want the thing over with. This was the speed that comes from genuine familiarity, the kind built from experience with things a second-year shouldn’t have encountered yet. Black hair, forest green eyes — the same shade mine currently wore. When I glanced at her hands I noticed a fully formed circle, which meant she was already in Zerion and Kira’s class.
Her name surfaced after a moment. Zera. No surname, which meant commoner-born.
She turned her paper in without a word and returned to her desk, settling into the particular stillness of someone who had spent a long time trying not to be noticed — and had somehow managed to draw my attention anyway.
Worth watching.
The rest of my classes had produced variations on the same theme. Some closer to the third-years, some closer to the second-years, but the throughline was consistent — every student I’d seen today was working from secondhand knowledge that had been passed down often enough to lose its original shape. The entire curriculum would need rebuilding from the foundation.
I pushed open my office door and went straight to the desk.
The booklets took time to move through properly. Most told me what I needed to know about where each class was starting from — which concepts had been taught correctly, which had been simplified past the point of usefulness, and which had simply been forgotten between the lesson and the page. Manageable. Expected, even.
Zera’s answers were something else.
I set her booklet down and looked at it for a moment. The question wasn’t how to teach her — it was whether she needed teaching at all, or whether the most honest thing I could offer her was a passing grade and the use of the hour. She clearly hadn’t come to my class for the material.
Lora’s booklet I nearly put face-down on the desk and left there.
Some of the answers were correct. Most weren’t — and the ones that weren’t didn’t read like confusion. They read like someone who hadn’t tried. That was a different problem entirely, and not one I intended to sort out today. I set it aside and kept working.
The staff meeting was this evening, after the students cleared out. The other professors wanted to hear about the first day, which was fine. Mortis had mentioned Kira was bringing sweets, which told me more about the two of them than anything he’d said directly — they were closer than I’d initially read, and I filed that away without examining it further.
There were larger things sitting at the edge of my attention that the papers weren’t quiet enough to drown out.
Silvina was gone, but gone wasn’t the same as resolved. The God of the Abyss had intervened in a way I still didn’t fully understand — putting her into stasis rather than destroying her, which raised the question of why, and what that arrangement looked like from his end. The counterweight of Order and Light was still sitting empty. The rest of the pantheon was still out there, some of them owed answers and some of them owed more than that.
I had been back long enough to get my footing. That window was closing.
I turned to the next booklet and kept working.
By the time the last student cleared out, I wanted to go home and sleep.
One day in an actual classroom rather than sitting in the back of someone else’s had made things clear in a way that observing from Max’s seat never could have. I knew the curriculum was weak before I walked in this morning. I hadn’t fully appreciated how deeply that weakness ran until I’d watched two dozen third-years struggle with concepts that should have been settled in their first year.
I picked up Lora’s booklet on my way out.
The meeting room was already full when I arrived — the long table surrounded by familiar faces, the low murmur of end-of-day conversation filling the space. I took my seat and set the booklet on the table in front of me.
“Looks like your first day put you through the ringer,” Alexander said, nodding toward it. “Were the kids that bad?”
“The students I can work with,” I said. “What’s harder to address is that most of them don’t understand that tactical theory isn’t an academic exercise. In a rift, that knowledge is the difference between coming home and not. That’s going to take time to correct.” I turned the booklet so it faced the table. “I also have a student who’s decided the class isn’t worth her effort. Not because she doesn’t understand the material — she does. She simply hasn’t bothered.”
“Lora?” Kira asked.
I nodded once.
“She does it in every class.” Kira slid the plate toward me. “Have a cookie. I want to know if I’ve put too much sugar in them — everyone else at this table is too afraid of my cooking to give me an honest answer. Except Mortis.”
I took one. Partly because refusing would have been rude, partly because Kira’s expression made it clear she was going to watch me eat it.
The first bite told me exactly what she’d missed. Salt. The sweetness hit without anything to balance it — overwhelming in the way that things are when one element is doing all the work alone. Good for Mortis, whose sweet tooth was well documented. Less good for anyone expecting something closer to edible.
“They need a little more salt,” I said, “but other than that, genuinely good. Thank you, Kira.”
I finished the cookie out of courtesy and nudged the plate toward Mortis, who accepted it without ceremony and began working through them with quiet contentment.
“They’re not that bad, Mal,” he said, not looking up. “You just don’t like sweets.”
“That’s also true.”
I let him have the last word on it and turned back to the table. “Has anyone addressed this with Lora directly? If it’s consistent across her classes it’s worth asking whether anyone’s actually spoken to her about it.”
“We’ve tried,” Alexander said. “She doesn’t listen. At the rate she’s going we’ll have to hold her back again — second time. Her grades aren’t where they need to be to justify moving her forward.”
The conversation shifted after that, broadening out into the rest of the term — plans, schedules, what the returning student intake was looking like. I listened more than I spoke, which suited me fine.
