The Sceptre of Samnos

The University Part 10

     Jerry also passed that same day, but Lirenna had to wait another day until she could join them as fully qualified wizards, and then the three of them had their own private celebration in Thomas’s room, each of them demonstrating their new spells to the others until the small room was so full of randomised, waste magic that it began to interfere with the spellcasting.

     They stayed at the University for another two weeks while some of the other apprentices who had failed to learn their first spell tried a second, a third, and, in one case, a fourth, but finally the last apprentice passed and the preparations were made for the graduation ceremony. On the morning of the tenth day of summer, the word went out to all the one thousand, one hundred and twelve apprentices to gather in the playing field that separated the school buildings from the research buildings half a mile away, where some of the most powerful wizards in the world carried out original research into new and improved forms of magic. In the field, one thousand five hundred chairs had been arranged in front of a wide stage, on which duplicates of the twelve chairs in the Grand Assembly Hall had been arranged.

     It was a miserable day, with dark clouds covering the sky and a light but steady drizzle that was whipped up by a stiff breeze, but no rain fell on the graduation field as it was covered by a dome of force that evaporated any drops of water that fell on it, sending a cloud of vapour back up to the clouds from where they’d come. Openings in the dome allowed people to enter without suffering the mild discomfort they would otherwise have experienced if they'd stepped directly through the wall of force. This small demonstration of power served to remind the graduates of what they stood to gain if they continued their education, pursuing the study of magic into the higher levels.

     As the students took their seats, arranged by class and year, some were surprised to see an apparently ancient wizard sitting in a wheelchair to the right of the stage. There were several retired wizards there, come down from their mansions and castles perched high on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the valley, but this one stood out from the others in being almost impossibly frail, little more than a skeleton wrapped up in skin as thin and fragile as tissue paper.

     There was no look of malice on his face now, but the arrangement of lines and wrinkles around his thin, slitted mouth and rheumy yellow eyes gave clear testimony to its usual presence. He looked as though a child could break him over his knee, but there was an aura of power surrounding him that terrified the apprentices, and even most of the graduated wizards.

     He wore the grey robes of an unspecialised wizard, ornately decorated with arcane symbols and sigils of power sewn in silver, gold and platinum thread. Plain gold rings gleamed on the second finger of each hand, he wore a diamond the size of a hen's egg on a chain around his neck, and he held a six foot long metal staff, decorated with gold and platinum in swirling spiral designs up and down its length. Some of the more senior students recognised him as Malefactos, a legend in his own lifetime, and considered by some to be the most powerful wizard now living in the world. Once, anyway. Frequent use of high level magic had aged him prematurely. Although he looked well over ninety, he was in fact only fifty eight, and so frail that the use of any magic above the intermediate levels would probably kill him outright. Nowadays, he relied primarily upon his unparalleled collection of magical items and weapons, many of which he had created himself, including the Staff of Lorenzium, and the Vestilon Gem.

     He had graduated from Lexandria forty years previously, and had almost immediately taken the world by storm. The tales of his deeds, his battles, and his discoveries were told all over the continent, growing with each telling. He had created many new spells, most of which were now used by dozens of other University graduates, and only by University graduates, being taught in the advanced classes. The official story was that as he had grown old he had retired to the University, to set down all that he had learned on imperishable denarium paper, to go into the library for posterity so that all he had learned would not be lost, but there were whispers that he had another, much darker reason for returning to the world's greatest bastion of wizardry, that he was pursuing forbidden lines of research to restore his youth and buy himself a new lease of life. Whatever the reasons for his return, he rarely emerged from his castle, perched high on the ridge that was now named after him, but he never missed a graduation ceremony.