Just a Bystander

Mania

There are times when I absolutely have to be alone.

It's something my family is intimately familiar with. I can be generally sociable most of the time, but when there's something that bothers me and I need to work through it, I must have the mental space to do it. And conversations with anyone generally are not helpful. I become irritable and withdrawn until I've worked things out satisfactorily in my head.

Of course, my dorm mates have never seen this side of me before, this being only our second day together. I was actually hoping that they wouldn't ever have to see it and that maybe being with more people my age would help me function a little differently. At the very least, I had hoped not to fall into one of these moods until we were all sufficiently familiar with each other, so that they wouldn't shy away from me.

But that just goes to show that you shouldn't put too much stock in hope.

I thought I had managed it well enough with Reeves' memory weaving, which was still really bugging me, but then Ambrose's behaviour brought in a far bigger mystery to untangle.

My recollection of that lunch is rather hazy. I don't think I even bothered to make any excuses. I think I simply got up and left, leaving a confused silence in my wake, and went straight back to the dorm where I locked myself in the room.

I slumped into the chair in front of the small study table that belonged to me and started mapping out all the impressions and thoughts in my head, trying to string them into something cohesive.

First, was Ambrose really the Chosen One, or was I jumping to conclusions?

His level of arcanic control is far beyond a fresh arcanist. This could be raw talent, substantial training, or a combination of both. Major Prophecies deal with exceptional cases, which means the presence of any one of these factors raises the probability that he really is the subject of a Prophecy. If multiple factors converge, that is an even stronger sign that he is the Chosen One, because Prophecies skew probabilities and make such favourable convergences more likely.

There was a growing pit of unease in my stomach. I tried to find ways to disprove that hypothesis.

Maybe he's from a really wealthy family who has arranged tutors for him well before his arrival in the Academy. If the gap between him and the rest of us can be explained by sheer practice, then this makes it unlikely that he's the Chosen One. It's just down to the good, old-fashioned benefits of being well-heeled.

My eyes landed on Ambrose's rucksack. The fleeting impression I had when I first saw him walking into the dorm with it wasn't one of great wealth. Now that I was actually looking more closely at it, I realised it was really quite well-used, to put it politely. I doubted that a family that could afford tutors to raise someone to Ambrose's level would then go on to skimp on school essentials. And now that I thought about it, his clothes were a touch on the shabby side. Definitely nowhere close to the quality of Devon's, who was probably from the wealthiest family out of all of us. And even he didn't have tutors.

So... not wealthy. Sheer talent, then.

But that definitely wasn't true either. He had just admitted over lunch to having had combat-worthy training for over a month. That was well before we had even started at the Academy. On top of that, he was familiar with the duelling chambers, which the first-years still hadn't been introduced to, even in our Thaumaturgy classes. Unbidden, the picture of the duelling chamber logbook flashed across my mind - Ambrose had entries there dating back at least a week, and that was just on the page I had seen.

Ok, shit. So he definitely has talent, because he hasn't been trained for years. But he's also got training. And when he gets training, he receives it from... someone in the Academy, judging by his familiarity with the duelling chambers. He gets special access to facilities that others do not know about. And he can't seem to afford that training, so it's given free, or at least the financial barrier of entry is removed somehow, maybe by an exchange of services, or something else. What's important is that he has access. That means the Academy is actively investing more resources in him. Which is very unlikely to happen for a normal person. So the odd probability skew here favours the existence of a Prophecy of some kind, again.