“Osmian? The archmage?”

“Yes, the archmage! The founder of the Institute!”

“This is his door?” Vivi raised an eyebrow at the cracked-open entrance. “How so? And what’s the big deal? Why are you so flustered?”

“I’m not flustered,” Saffra said defensively. “But I thought we were just grabbing some books. You—you went and opened Osmian’s Door?” She hurriedly looked around, checking to confirm that nobody was nearby. A lumbering golem didn’t spare them a glance. “Don’t you know what that means?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“I—well—neither do I, really.”

The two of them stared at each other.

Saffra flushed. “But it is a big deal. It’s supposed to hold Osmian’s legacy. His inheritance. Or some kind of treasure? I don’t know, really, I don’t think anyone does. It’s basically a folk tale. How did you open it? Only Archmage Lysander ever has.”

That caught Vivi by surprise. “Lysander? What about Aeris?”

“Er…no?” Saffra seemed confused by the question. Vivi had only asked because she’d thought Aeris would be the more talented between the two…but even Aeris had told her that Lysander was phenomenally skilled for his age. “Just the Headmaster, I think? I’m not sure if the door has ever presented itself to Archmage Aeris, though.”

“What does that mean?”

“It shows up everywhere. Randomly. Usually only to full magi, but sometimes the upper-year students, or the archmages. I think the library is one of the most common places?”

Interesting. “But what is it, exactly?”

“I…don’t know. It’s Osmian’s Door. There are trials inside, I think. And some kind of reward. That’s what the rumors say.”

“Did Lysander fail, if it’s still showing up?”

“He never said.” Saffra’s bafflement at the situation morphed into a smirk. “But if he did pass, he totally would’ve bragged about it. So he must not have.” She wrinkled her nose. “Then again, he’s the only person to ever get the door open in the first place.” Her gaze drifted back to the ajar slab of wood. “I guess there’s two of you, now.”

“It was just a moderately difficult puzzle.” But even Vivi knew moderately difficult must mean outrageously challenging for most magic users. If not impossible. “Most people aren’t familiar with gravity spells, I suppose.”

“Is that what that is?” Saffra’s brow furrowed as she peered at the design etched on the door. She lost herself for a moment, then jolted. “Never mind that! We have to go. Someone will see us.” She half-turned to scurry away, then froze. Slowly, she faced back to Vivi. “But…you can’t not go in. You opened Osmian’s Door!”

“What’s inside?”

“As if I would know!” Saffra protested.

Vivi mulled over the situation. “Alright, let’s go find out.” Though this event was a diversion, and she was busy, she was too intrigued to ignore the development.

Saffra blinked. She pointed at herself. “What? I’m not allowed inside.”

“Why not?”

“I’m—I’m just not, obviously.”

“Where does it say that?” Vivi made a point of searching the door and surrounding area. “Come.”

Vivi beckoned for her to follow, walking up to the threshold and pushing the slab of wood further open with her foot. A dark void met her. She stuck a hand in, felt no adverse effects, and nodded to herself.

Seeing how she was entering a strange archmage’s personal ‘room of trials’, or whatever was going on here, she double-checked that the appropriate defenses were on Saffra, then grabbed her by the elbow to be safe. Physical contact would make splitting them up more difficult.

“This ought to be interesting,” she murmured to herself.

Vivi leading, they plunged into the inky blackness. Immediately on entering, teleportation magic tried to grab them. She allowed it. She could only assume that the spell intended to ferry them from the library to wherever the trials took place. This was Osmian’s Door, allegedly, and Osmian was a heroic archmage of ancient history. He wouldn’t teleport them into the middle of a volcano. Probably. Even if he did, she could deal with it.

In a single footstep, they passed through the boundary and appeared—

—in an astoundingly mundane office.

The room wasn’t spacious, but not cramped either, and was lit by a single floating white orb that bobbed near the ceiling. Bookshelves lined three walls, packed with faded brown leather tomes. A large mahogany desk dominated the center, behind which sat a high-backed chair with worn cushions. The desk held three items: an inkwell and quill, a brass astrolabe, and a leather journal bound with a silver clasp. The fourth wall, the one behind them, from which there was no door they could have emerged, held a large window where stars wheeled across the night sky. Where was this office, anyway? Were they even in Meridian anymore?

Vivi released her grip on Saffra and looked curiously around. The journal magnetically drew her attention—not by some magical ensnarement, but because she, personally, felt the urge to read through it. Archmage Osmian’s personal journal. Who knew what she might find inside? The bookshelves would be her next targets; millennia-old tomes were equally exciting.

Just as her fingertips brushed the journal, though, a papery voice grouched from behind her, “No respect for a man’s privacy, I see. Why did you bring the brat?”

Saffra spun and faced the voice. Vivi turned slower, withdrawing her hand from the journal. She wasn’t quite as caught by surprise, since she had felt a presence manifest a moment earlier through a short-range teleportation spell.

There, on the other end of the room, his gaze on an open book and not them, stood a silvery ghost. He thumbed through the tome, flipping pages idly, and not sparing them so much as a glance. The man bore a clear resemblance to one of the towering portraits Vivi had seen on the first floor of the Institute—those of the scant few prior Headmasters.

“Archmage Osmian,” Saffra breathed.

Vivi stood there, stunned. But not because of the sudden presence of a legendary archmage’s ghost. Honestly, what else would she expect from this sort of situation? No, her surprise came from something else. An ethereal, crystallized shard hovered inside the silvery essence of the ghost, and, recognizing what it was, she was nothing less than astonished.

“How did you do that?” Vivi asked in fascination, gaze locked not on the man’s eyes, but just beneath his collarbone, where that fragment lay.

Osmian’s lip pulled up in distaste, still not dignifying her with his full attention. “If even that impresses you,” he said, “you’ll be even more of a disappointment than that last boy.”

“Not the teleportation,” Vivi said. “You ripped out a piece of your soul. That vessel isn’t a projection; it’s alive. It’s you, in some sense. How?”

The ghost of Osmian froze. His head turned slowly toward her, the bored disdain in his eyes turning to curiosity. He closed the book with a snap.

“My,” the old man said. “You have sharp senses indeed, to read that with a glance.”

“Thank you.” Vivi hesitated, remembering what he had said earlier. “But don’t call my apprentice a brat.”

Osmian frowned. His attention slid over to Saffra, who was watching the exchange with wide eyes. “Why bring her?” he asked again, that obvious hint of irritation returning.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Demon or not, if you’ve walked the halls of the Thaumaturgical Institute, much less passed my filter, you surely know where you stand. My room of Trials. Why bring a child to such a place? She doesn’t belong.”

“I’m thirteen,” Saffra interjected, her awe for the ghost washing away to annoyance of her own.

Osmian gave Vivi a significant look, and Vivi had to admit Saffra had made his point, at least in part.

Instead of addressing that, Vivi said, “How did you stabilize a soul fragment?” That was the only truly intractable problem with this vessel, one that even she struggled to come up with a solution to. “Splitting a soul without killing yourself is an astounding achievement itself, but not, theoretically, impossible. A fragment, however, can’t survive outside of the whole. Fundamentally. How did you do it?”

“You’re well versed in necromancy,” he said mildly. “Your specialty?”

She wasn’t especially knowledgeable in that field, no, but neither was she particularly weak. “I’ve studied every branch of magic to some degree,” she responded vaguely. “Necromancy more than some.”

“Every field?” He snorted. “That’s a bold claim. Hm. You’re correct: this vessel will expire, and the shard is not truly self-sufficient; it will destabilize and decay. Simply much slower than under natural conditions. And so, no, this vessel is not as indefinite as other, more artificial workings. But more whole for that fact. As any living creature, death is what defines us.”

“But how?”

“Even I couldn’t give a satisfactory answer,” Osmian admitted. “That particular genius was Lucorius’s.”

The answer hit Vivi like a slap in the face. Osmian continued, oblivious, the sort of man far too interested in his own words to concern himself with another person’s reaction.

“The sum project,” he said, waving at his ghostly form, “a collaboration, but the most insolvable aspect his. I’ve wondered about it myself on many an occasion.”

“Lucorius?” Saffra asked, and Vivi almost held a hand up to stop her, but it was too late.

Osmian looked at her oddly. “From what backwaters did you venture, if Lucorius’s

name hasn’t graced your ears? I understand many centuries have passed, but his was not a legacy that would fade. A peer of mine, easily. Perhaps greater, mm, it is debatable. You are a mage, are you not? Have you no shame in knowing so little of your forebears?”

Saffra most definitely knew of Lucorius. Just not by his original name. The Institute did not, apparently, teach the truth behind one of their greatest failures. Saffra, and the rest of the world, knew that man by a different title: The Umbral Regent.

Vivi diverted the conversation before the confusion on Saffra’s face manifested into a question that would bring the truth to light. That was far too heavy a topic to broach with Osmian’s shade. He clearly thought well of Lucorius. Had trusted him enough to perform joint soul-surgery. He had no idea his well-respected archmage-in-arms had absorbed the souls of hundreds of thousands to claim the cursed immortality of lichhood.

Though how could he not know the fate of his colleague? An educated guess supplied itself readily: this ghost, and the fragment of a soul within, had been born before Lucorius’s ambition had led him down that path. His memories were thus limited to the time before Lucorius’s transgressions.

“The puzzle on the door was a gravity spell,” Vivi said. “That was your specialty, wasn’t it? Gravity?”

The man didn’t think twice about the deflection, though Saffra looked curiously at Vivi.

“Indeed, it was.” Osmian lifted his chin and said arrogantly, “As I’m sure you’re aware, I was the one responsible for setting aloft the very grounds the Institute stands upon.”

Vivi hadn’t known that. She’d been obsessed with Seven Cataclysms, but she didn’t have a perfect memory. From what she could remember, Osmian had merely been referenced as ‘the founder of the Institute’; he hadn’t been a prominent character. She supposed that as a founding father, it was logical he had been the one to lift the campus.

“But that is neither here nor there,” Osmian said. “I am not interested in chitter-chatter. This form has an expiration, and I must seek out my inheritor before that time comes.” He grimaced. “With how the search has gone across a millennium, I fear the worst. That I will have to settle.” Genuine disgust warped his wrinkled features, but it didn’t seem to be aimed at Vivi herself. “Now. I will present three trials and determine your suitability to inherit my personal grimoires and be named my apprentice post-mortem.”

That was the purpose of this room? Had he really not found someone he wanted to name his apprentice in life? Osmian had been ancient by human standards—more powerful than Aeris, and thus, longer-lived. How could he not have found someone to call his apprentice after so many centuries?

Vivi suspected his standards weren’t ‘high’, then, so much as ‘completely unattainable’. Even Archmage Lysander had apparently fallen short.

“What if I don’t want them?” Vivi asked.

“Naturally, in the course of those trials, I will appraise—” He cut off, recognizing what she had said. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t think I should be the one you give your life’s work to, assuming it’s instructive or symbolic in nature,” Vivi said. “Though I’m definitely interested in a conversation. I have questions you might be able to answer.” She paused. “And the trials would be interesting to take, if you’ll allow it,” she added. “I just don’t think I’d make a suitable apprentice or inheritor.”

Saffra stifled a snort to Vivi’s side. Osmian was too flabbergasted to take offense. “You’re not interested in the personal journals and grimoires of one of history’s supreme archmages?”

“I am,” Vivi said, though she found that description rather self-important. “It just wouldn’t feel right if you’re expecting me to consider myself your apprentice. Or follow in your footsteps somehow. Continue some project or grand working, maybe? I’m very busy. But I’d love a conversation between peers.”

“Peers!” He gaped at her. “And who are you, might I ask?” His tone took on an aggressive hint. “I skipped an introduction because I care not for titles and reputation, only the merit one displays in front of my own two eyes. But clearly you see yourself as a mighty master of the arcane indeed, to be so dismissive of this opportunity!” He huffed, missing the irony of his words, then hesitated and grimaced. “It was well-spotted, your appraisal of this form. No applicant before deduced my nature so quickly. An archmage yourself, and a studied one, I presume, but any who would pass my first filter would be—I have little interest in training those a thousand levels beneath me.” He flicked a borderline disdainful look at Saffra, who shifted uncomfortably. Thɪs chapter is updated by novel·fire.net

Vivi’s eyes narrowed. The arrogance was a bit exhausting, but she didn’t mind if he insulted or cast doubts on her. Saffra was a different matter. That comment bordered on what she would allow, so she didn’t push back—yet.

“I agree. My name doesn’t matter. Call me Nysari, or Vivi.” She considered him. “I have questions on an esoteric branch of magic where your insight might help. If I face these trials and pass, can you reward me, instead, with a conversation?”

She, of course, wanted to pick his brain on the topic of the dimensional anomaly. She didn’t have great hopes he would actually be able to help, but the possibility turned this detour from ‘distraction’ into ‘possible boon’.

“An esoteric branch? Which?”

“Do you agree to the terms?”

The ghost of Archmage Osmian seemed torn between annoyance, indignation, and unbridled interest. He likely sensed that Vivi’s claim of being his peer was not entirely hot air. Identifying the obfuscated soul fragment hovering in his chest had proved that beyond any doubt. And any academic, which this man certainly was, would be intrigued by a mention of ‘esoteric magics’.

“Very well,” he said after a long moment. “Let’s see if this arrogance of yours is founded; you have interested me. We will discuss inheritance—or a reward—afterward. Your apprentice will not be coming, however; as I said, she does not belong. Behold, then, the first trial.”

He snapped his ghostly fingers, and magic filled the air.