1 One Week Before

In seven days, twelve of them would enter the Magebane.

If they were lucky, six of them would make it out.

Only one of them would earn the right of First Mage, and earn their staff. All who failed would either be lost to the Wandering Halls, or be forced to repeat their final year again, and again, until they took first place.

No one knew what lie inside the Wandering Halls save the spellgineers who designed this years challenge, and all of them, for the duration of the year preceding the contest, were bound by curses of Silence, liftable only by Head Magister Mystera Runus herself.

There was no way to know for sure what to prepare for, so a mage was supposed to prepare for anything. And everything. Once inside, there was no guarantee that more spell components or survival supplies could be found, so a mage had to bring everything they though they'd need with them. The longest it had ever taken a First Mage to make it out of the Wandering Halls was 97 days. The shortest, just two. The first, Archmage Hollen Mysoren, now served as the Dean of Transmutation Studies. The second, Alistair Garnath, hadn't been seen or heard from since the day of his graduation.

Of the twelve students entering, only Eleanor Agnicyan was attempting the Magebane for the first time, and at fifteen, she'd be the youngest mage to do so in over a generation.

It would the pinnacle of her achievements, and the greatest test of her abilities she'd ever faced, regardless of if she was First Mage or not.

That was if she made it out alive. And there were more than a few of her fellow graduate students who likely had every intention of ensuring she didn't.

So here she in the East Wing scriptorium, pouring over dusty tomes by candlelight and hastily scribbling formulae into her spellbook. Outside, the late night rain pounded steadily against the stained glass windows, and inside, several other students, third- or fourth-years by the embroidery of their robes, studied furiously for their end of year exams.

Eleanor dipped her quill into the inkwell again, and contemplated the blank page in front of her. Graduate students were given free access to the entire collected library of spells the Coltriss Academy and its alumni had amassed over the millenia when preparing for the final test, but every graduate student was only ever supplied one spellbook. 500 parchment pages was all one was allowed to take with them once they left the academy. And with literally tens of thousands of spell formulae, many of which took several pages when written out, a student had to be very selective about which they chose to keep and take with them.

Initially, the task of selecting spells had been a daunting one. Did she specialize in a couple schools, or did she take a little bit of everything, at the expense of depth? The deeper one's research into a specific school, the greater the rewards, but the lower ones arcane flexibility became. The decision stymied her for the first several weeks of her final year, until she hit upon an unconventional idea- instead of recording complete spells and memorizing them, she would spend the entirety of her last year dissecting the formulae of hundreds, even thousands of spells, and assemble them as needed to generate the effects she desired. Four-hundred and eighty-seven pages later, and she was nearly finished.

She had not a single spell memorized, outside of a few useful cantrips. She would be leaving the academy with a book full of fragments. She knew that if she didn't have her spellbook, she would have almost no ability to use her magic once she started forgetting what she recently used.

But that didn't matter. So long as she had it, she had an entire library's worth of spells at her fingertips, and so long as she had time to sit with it for a bit, she'd be able to prepare any of the formulae she could assemble and store them away mnemonically until they were needed.

She wasn't sure if anyone had ever considered doing such a thing, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Why limit oneself when the problem can be solved through unconventional thinking? Of course, when asked, as far as everyone else was concerned she was specializing in Evocation magic. That had always been her best school anyways. No one needed to know what she was actually planning, least of all her fellow grad students.

Once she finished writing out the last formula fragment into the page and magically bound it in place, she closed the book and leaned back into the chair. She rubbed her eyes. It was late, and all of this staring at endless lines of Draconic, Celestial, Infernal, and Abyssal script was making her eyes hurt. As she sat there rubbing them to stop the aching, the chair to her left slid out, and someone sat into it with a casual flop.

Tyren Malakist appraised her with a smirk as he propped his elbow on the table and rested his head in his hand, his lemon-yellow sixth year robes seeming almost to glow in the dim candlelight.

"Well, you're working late." He said.

Eleanor snorted.

"Well of course, stupid. I've got one week left to prepare until I get thrown into a demi-plane filled with gods know what." She said, glowering at him playfully.

"I missed the part where impending threat to life and limb merited working harder than usual." Tyren said. "Especially for someone as clever as the esteemed prodigy Eleanor Agnicyan."

Eleanor sighed and closed her spellbook.

"You know I hate it when you call me that." She said, wiping the residual ink from her quill on the hem of her robe.

"What, Eleanor? Or clever?" He said, raising an eyebrow at her.

"Prodigy." She said, sliding her spellbook into the Bag of Holding on her side. "Don't call me that."

"Oh? And why shouldn't I, miss 'I'm five years younger than the next youngest seventh-year'? You gonna put a hex on me? I'd like to see you try." He said, standing up as she did.

Eleanor snorted.

"If I wanted to, you couldn't stop me. I don't care if you ARE specializing in Abjuration magic." She said, walking around the table and towards the large wooden double doors at the far end of the scriptorium.

"I think I'll have to take you up on that bet sometime. You might be pleasantly surprised how difficult it would-"

He stopped short as his lips and mouth suddenly fused together and refused to part.

Eleanor turned around, traces of flickering blue energy fading from the tips of her fingers.

"I'm sorry... you were saying?" She said.

When he grunted loudly and starting making spellsigns in the air to dispel the hex, Eleanor cupped her hand around her right ear and leaned in towards him.

"What? I can't hear you!" She said, raising her voice.

With a final flourish and a flash of golden energy, the hex broke, and Tyren glowered at her.

"You're rude, do you know that?" He said, and then added "And since when did you know how to silent cast?"

"Since I uncovered that using certain alternate somatic gestures in combination can serve to replace the verbal components of specific spells. You know, the kind of thing a prodigy would know." She said with a mischievous grin. Before he could reply, she turned and continued to walk, her blue devil's tail swishing gently behind her.