After a couple of minutes of resting on the floor, I felt it before I heard anything.
A disturbance in the mana around me, subtle but distinct, followed immediately by the unmistakable formation of a teleportation point somewhere near the center of the room.
"Did Viserys forget something?"
A purple teleportation circle bloomed open on the ground and then, without any warning, a flash of light erupted from it that was so blindingly bright it felt like staring directly into the sun from three meters away. I threw my right hand up over my eyes and turned my head to the side.
"What the—"
"So bright…"
The light held for a few seconds and then collapsed in on itself, leaving the normal muted glow of the mana stone chandeliers above feeling almost dark by comparison. When I lowered my hand and blinked the spots out of my vision, a person was standing where the circle had been.
She had hazelnut hair done entirely in braids that fell loosely over her shoulders. Her eyes were the color of charcoal but they carried a kind of warmth and openness to them that made the dark irises look less sharp than you would expect. She was pretty in a way that was entirely approachable rather than intimidating, somewhere in her mid-twenties, and she wore large white mage robes that swept all the way down to her black boots. On the back of the robe, stitched in careful detail, was the design of a white sun.
The emblem of the White Magic Tower.
There were several magic towers scattered throughout the empire, each one affiliated with a particular element and responsible for training the best practitioners of that element in the world. The White Magic Tower handled light magic exclusively. Research, development, training and anything else that touched the light affinity passed through their hands. They were one of the most prestigious institutions in the empire, which meant the woman standing in front of me was not some casual appointment.
The teleportation circle behind her was already fading out as her black eyes found mine. She crossed the distance between us quickly and then bowed her head so sharply I was briefly concerned for her neck.
"G-good evening, Second Prince! I hope I am not terribly late, I am so sorry, please forgive me, I was buried in paperwork at the tower and completely lost track of time and I should have left earlier and I really am sorry—"
"Good evening." I said, cutting gently into the stream of words. "You are not late. And even if you were, a good reason is a good reason."
She was not late by any meaningful margin. Five or ten minutes at most. And only then did it register that she had said good evening, which meant I had been in this training room long enough for the day to have turned over into evening without me noticing. There were no windows in here. Time had genuinely gotten away from me.
She lifted her head and her eyes went wide. "O-oh! Really?!" The relief on her face was immediate and dramatic. "Thank goodness. I really thought I was going to be fired. I cannot be jobless again, I absolutely cannot—"
Tears were visibly forming at the corners of her eyes.
I blinked. "Fired?"
"Yes." She nodded urgently. "Earlier today the third princess dismissed one of her instructors for arriving late. I heard about it right before I left the tower and I have been panicking ever since."
Something cold moved through my expression before I could stop it.
"Of course she did." I said. "Of course Londres fired someone over that."
That girl. I had been managing to not think about her for most of the day and here she was, inserting herself into my evening secondhand. The most self-important, casually cruel person I had encountered in this entire world, and she had managed to ruin someone's livelihood over a few minutes.
Someone really needed to put her in her place eventually.
That someone was not going to be me though. Too much effort and too much political headache. But someone had to.
I looked back at the woman in front of me and made sure my expression had settled before I spoke. "You do not need to worry about any of that here. I would not dismiss an instructor over something like being a few minutes late, and certainly not when they had a real reason for it."
"A-alright! Thank you so much, Second Prince!" She bowed again, several times in quick succession, muttering something under her breath that sounded like she was giving thanks to at least three different deities simultaneously.
"You do not need to bow that many times."
"Okay!" She straightened up and took a breath, visibly resetting herself. "I will give you everything I have, Second Prince. You will not regret this. I will teach you everything about light magic that I possibly can." She paused. "Ah, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Nephis. Nice to meet you, Second Prince. I hope we get along well and please, please do not fire me."
I could not entirely hold back the quiet laugh that came out.
She was endearing in a completely chaotic way.
I reached out a hand. "Nice to meet you, Instructor Nephis. And no, you will not be fired."
She grabbed my hand with both of hers and shook it with an enthusiasm that I had not been prepared for and that showed no signs of stopping on its own. I eventually had to apply some effort to retrieve my hand.
"Wonderful! Then let us begin, Second Prince! I will show you how genuinely fascinating light magic is!" She clapped her hands together with the energy of someone who had been waiting to say that for a while.
Then she stopped.
Looked at the floor. Looked at the ceiling. Then she hit the side of her right fist against her left palm.
"I need my books."
She reached into her spatial ring and withdrew something that I was not prepared for. A large brown bag, roughly the size of a vending machine, hit the floor with a thud that I felt through the soles of my feet.
She crouched down, unzipped it and immediately buried the top half of her body inside it with the practiced confidence of someone who had done this many times before and was not embarrassed about it.
Things began emerging from the bag.
Food, first. Several items. Then a folded set of clothes. A handful of rocks that I could not explain. Several large sheets of paper covered in hand drawn magic circles. A candle. What looked like a preserved specimen of something I did not want to examine closely. A wooden carving of a bird.
Then a cat.
It came out hissing.
Nephis looked at it briefly. "Not this one." she said with a look of disappointment, threw the cat away and continued searching the bag.
My eyes were on the cat that was yeeted out in the air.
I stared at where the cat had come from.
Why the hell does she have a cat in her bag?
I was still forming the thought of what else could possibly be in there when Nephis pulled out a dog. Small, white-furred, fluffy to an almost architectural degree, blinking placidly at the sudden change in environment.
She looked at it. It looked at her.
"Cute," she said. "But not today."
It went back in. The zip closed over it without protest.
I had stopped trying to understand what I was witnessing and simply watched.
Several more minutes of rummaging produced various items I could not identify, two things that were almost certainly alive, and at one point something that glowed briefly before Memphis decided it was also not what she was looking for and put it back.
Then her face changed. The focused searching expression gave way to a bright, unguarded smile.
"Found it!"
She surfaced from the bag holding a large, heavy book bound in brown leather. It was worn at the corners from obvious heavy use and covered in small puppy stickers that had been applied with what I could only describe as sincere commitment. She set it on her lap as she pulled a chair from her bag as well and sat down, reached into a pocket of her robe and produced a pair of circular glasses which she put on, licked her index finger, and began flipping through the pages with the focused energy of someone who knew exactly where they were going.
She found the page. Nodded. Looked up at me.
"We can start now, Second Prince."
"I am ready, Instructor Nephis."
She cleared her throat with a deliberate and somewhat ceremonial ahem, and then began.
"The light element is one of the rarest, most valuable and most sought after affinities in the entire world of magic. And the reason is not primarily its offensive applications or its defensive potential, though both exist. The reason is healing." She said it with the weight of someone who had thought about this a great deal. "In a world defined by conflict, the ability to repair the body from injury is worth more than almost any weapon. A light mage healer in your party is not just useful. They are the difference between surviving a battle and not surviving it. That is why light mages are considered precious, not just capable."
She was right and I already knew it. Healing was arguably the most broken application any affinity could have. A skilled light mage working at a high enough level could make an entire group nearly impossible to put down as long as their mana held. Add any kind of buff or mana restoration trait on top of the baseline healing and they became the kind of asset that battles were won or lost based on whether you had one and the enemy did not.
Traits were rare. An extra ability layered on top of an element's natural function, something specific to the individual rather than the affinity itself. Virgil's lightning dealing soul damage was one example, even if that was something he had developed deliberately rather than inherited. Most people never awakened a trait at all.
But even without one, the light affinity alone was something I had been looking forward to understanding properly. The other affinities I had ways of using already, at least in the martial arts sense. Light was the one gap. I could produce a basic light construct, a ball of light, a brief flash, things like that. But I had no idea how healing actually worked from the inside and that was the piece I actually needed.
Why rely on having a healer available when you could be your own?
"You already know, Second Prince, that the origin rune for light magic is Lux." Nepphis continued, settling into the rhythm of instruction with a quiet confidence that was quite different from the flustered energy she had arrived with. "All light spells are built from it. And because healing is the most important application of the light element, it is where we are going to start."
I nodded.
"The first spell I am going to teach you is a basic first circle healing spell. It handles small cuts, bruising, minor fractures, things like that. Nothing catastrophic at this rank, but a solid foundation and genuinely useful in the situations you will find yourself in most often when you are not near someone who can help you."
She held the book out to me, open to the page she had found, and pointed to a hand-drawn magic circle with written notes filling every available margin around it.
I looked at it properly. Then I looked at the notes.
"Did you write all of this yourself?"
"Yes." She nodded, adjusting her glasses slightly. "It is my personal study book. I use it to rewrite the official spell descriptions in my own words with more detail about how each component actually functions."
I read through a section. She had broken down each rune's role within the circle, explained the function of the shapes, noted the approximate mana cost and flagged the situations where the spell performed at its best versus where it started to lose efficiency. It was thorough without being dense, clear without losing accuracy, and organized in a way that made the logic of it easy to follow rather than something you had to fight through.
To write something like this you had to first understand the original material well enough to take it apart, and then understand your reader well enough to put it back together in a way that actually communicated something. That was not a small thing.
"This is genuinely impressive." I said, looking up at her. "I mean that."
Nephis blinked. Her expression shifted into something slightly flustered and pleased at the same time, as though she was not entirely sure how to receive a straightforward compliment.
"Really? I never thought much of it, I just did it because the official texts were giving me headaches." She laughed quietly and then straightened up. "But if the Second Prince says it is good then I suppose I will take that."