The Last Daughter -- Dragon-Blooded Sorcery School Quest

Well, that wasn't supposed to group up like that, I must have set the tally wrong.

It's the same result regardless, but just in the interests of accuracy, I'll switch the threadmark to this one.

Ascending Air, Realm Year 759

"This was the worst Calibration of my life," Maia moans, before stifling a yawn. To her credit, she's waited until the lecture is already over to really wilt to this degree.

You give a bare sound of acknowledgement, still bent over the notes you're trying to finish. It's hard to disagree with the sentiment. For a Dynast, Calibration — the five days between one year's end and the next year's beginning — is usually spent in lavish feasting and festivities. This year, you were certainly thinking wistfully about the celebration that would have been taking place back in the Imperial Palace. Whatever Maia had at home would have been similar in nature, if a great deal less lavish.

Unfortunately, Calibration is also the time when the veils between worlds are thin, when the rules that govern the supernatural forces of Creation relax. There are countless rituals and sorcerous undertakings that become easier during Calibration, and a rare few that are only possible then. You all spent the past five days in sleepless nights, observing magical phenomena on the Isle, assisting with elaborate rituals, and taking detailed notes on special demonstrations from various instructors. The older students mostly took this with the grimly determined air of hardened veterans plunging back into the breach. Many of your yearmates, however, still have yet to recover days later.

You glance down at the floor of the lecture hall — the instructor has already left, along with a number of the students. You still have a concept that you need to work through on paper in order to make sure it won't vanish from your head, however. That deceptively bookish looking woman had explained to you all some of the finer, bloodier points of shadowland formation with an air of almost ghoulish good cheer. The metaphysical processes at play between Creation and the Underworld are hardly your primary point of study, but you're hardly going to pass up the opportunity for such a rare, firsthand account.

"I'll never get the observations for that summoning formalised in time," Maia says, sounding nearly at the point of despair.

L'nessa has been in conversation with a second year boy. Whatever she said makes him laugh as he rises from his seat. Now, she turns back to the two of you. "Well, I suppose I could let you look off of mine, if that would help," she tells Maia, the picture of benevolent grace. It's a look she always adopts when she wants to feel good about the grand favour she's doing someone. It would be less endearing if she didn't have reason to employ it so often.

"Oh, really?" Maia sags with relief, even as she continues to shove materials into her bag. "Thank you!"

"None of us would make it if we didn't help each other," L'nessa says. She glances at you, still hunched over your notes. "Are you coming, Ambraea?"

"I'll catch up," you say. After five months together, they understand well enough when you want to be left to focus on something.

"Alright," L'nessa says, things gathered up in her arms. She's bounced back from the Calibration ordeal faster than most of your peers, which is incredibly annoying — she doesn't show a hint of fatigue as she and Maia leave, along with most of the students. The two of them have their assigned lecture hall seating near to yours, a typical setup with roommates, especially before the year's drop outs begin in earnest. Which should be any month now, from what the older students have been implying.

You're almost alone in the circular chamber when you finally finish. As soon as you carefully stow your notes away, you hear a cry of alarm.

Looking around, you see Sesus Amiti kneeling in the stairwell, books and scrolls strewn everywhere around her, the bag she'd been carrying them in split along one seam. You take a moment to just stare — had she been walking around with half a library? At this point, pity stirs in your heart enough to walk over to her, and efficiently begin piling up the tomes that had fallen out of her reach.

"Why did you have so many?" you ask her.

She jumps in startlement, peering up at you from her place on a lower stair. Amiti isn't quite as short as Maia, but the differences in your heights is dramatic at the best of times. This vantage point only makes it more so. "Well, I... have a hard time choosing, sometimes," Amiti admits, attempting to rise with half of the mess piled in her arms. You'd worry about her falling backwards down the stairs, if she weren't an Air Aspect.

"A hard time choosing." You pick up your own half of the mess a lot more carefully, rising to a standing position.

Amiti flushes bright red, the only sign of colour in her unnaturally pallid face, nearly the same shade as her hair. Her Aspect markings are particularly striking — even her eyes have been drained of all colour, leaving them an eerie, washed out grey. "Yes! There's just... so many interesting things to go through in the library tower," Amiti says, breaking eye contact to look down at her feet. Or maybe at the reading materials cradled in her arms. "I might have overdone it, this time."

"I can help you bring what you don't need back to the library tower," you tell her, already turning toward the nearest exit to the lecture hall.

"You... really?" Amiti scurries to catch up with you, looking more than a little surprised.

"Don't look so shocked," you tell her. "None of us would make it if we didn't help each other." L'nessa is rubbing off on you.

Amiti nods, clutching her books tighter to her chest as she works at keeping up with your longer stride. She's quiet all the way out of the lecture hall, up until you get to the first stairwell.

"That lecture was fascinating, wasn't it?" she asks. She doesn't actually wait for you to answer before going on: "I didn't realise that there were so many different circumstances that could make a shadowland!"

"Isn't it mostly just the same circumstance?" you ask. Namely, a great number of people dying in the same spot, most likely in pain and fear.

"Well, yes," Amiti allows, "but, it's like instructor Sai was saying! It's not always about sheer quantity. There are so many more things that factor into it than just the number of deaths! And you can manipulate those things to make sure that it happens!"

"Do you mean 'to make sure it doesn't happen?" you ask, casting her a deeply dubious look.

Amiti blinks, caught up short by the question. "Well... well, aren't those the same thing?" she asks. "If you know how to do one, you can figure out how to do the other. And it's so interesting just academically, specifics aside! It's taking a piece of Creation and forcing it to merge with the Underworld!"

"It... certainly is." Amiti doesn't seem to have entirely parsed the discomfort in your tone, or your incredulous look. She's far too lost in recollection of the many finer points of a lecture that, for you, had been more of a grim warning than a source of delight.

You're sent reeling, a little when she changes the subject: "And weren't instructor Sai's eyes a little amazing? I couldn't help but notice while she was talking."

"Her eyes?" You try to recall the guest instructor in question. She'd been tall, powerfully built, but still bearing such an undeniably scholarly air around her that the details of her appearance barely stand out in your memory. You have no idea what's so special about her eyes. "What about them?"

This time, it's Amiti's turn to give you a look, staring up at you with a puzzled frown on her face. "They were purple," she says, as if spelling out that the sky is blue.

Well. Maybe that should have been more memorable than it apparently was. You chalk it up to fatigue, and only offer her a shallow sort of shrug. The two of you fall into silence again.

As you approach the library tower, you find yourself glancing down at the library materials you're holding. What you all call the library tower is, in fact, a vast collection of reading rooms, specialised collections, and archives on a variety of subjects, more on every floor, many difficult to find or access for a first year student. The texts Amiti is reading seem surprisingly advanced, considering all that. Especially when she's made such an abysmal showing in her practical training.

It's at this point that you notice something entirely incongruous amid the rest of your stack of books. "What's this?" you ask her.

"What's wha—" Amiti follows your gaze, her eyes locking on the thin, cheaply-bound volume near the top of your pile, and she briefly goes pink. Somehow, she manages to snatch it out of your pile without losing hold of any of her books, or sending yours spilling onto the floor. "That's nothing! That one's just... mine!"

You unavoidably catch sight of the cover as she tries to obscure it from view, the title prominent in cloyingly ornate calligraphy. "My Heart Goes with You?" you ask.

"It's a romance," Amiti admits, hunching in on herself a little. It's with a slightly defensive tone that she offers more of an explanation, as though she can't help herself: "It's all about a young Water Aspect and her handmaiden, who secretly love each other, and they dance around it for ages, but then they admit their feelings! But when the handmaiden admits her devotion, it's so true and so pure that it moves even Sextes Jylis, and so the handmaiden Exalts! But then they'll be separated for ten years while she's at Pasiap's Stair, and then fifty while she's in the Legions, but they swear an oath to always..." she trails off, looking even more mortified than before. "Well, it's a very sweet book! I've read it five times this year."

Your first reaction, rather than condemning her taste in trashy novels, is simply surprise. "How do you find the time to do anything other than your studies?"

"Well, if I didn't, I'd probably go crazy! And the readings and writing assignments aren't that hard, so far. I'm a fast reader." Then she continues blithely onward, as if this isn't a particularly remarkable thing to say.

You feel a stab of irrational jealousy at the fact that, when she says that, you actually believe her. The jealousy doesn't last long of course — even if your own progress is much slower than you'd like, it's at least been faster than Amiti's, no matter how smart she seems to be.

You find yourself hoping she manages to turn it around, somehow.

---

Resplendent Air, Realm Year 759

Despite the Heptagram's arcane focus and extensive academic facilities, the Dragon-Blooded of the Dynasty are, at the end of the day, a martial aristocracy. Sorcerers still need to be able to defend themselves through conventional means as much as anyone, and more than that, there needs to be a space to practice the more destructive or combat-orientated forms of sorcery.

Still, you're not entirely sure how you were talked into this.

Your opponent's blunt practice sword strikes at you again and again with hurricane force, and you strain with the effort of blocking each blow against the shield you've been handed. Tepet Usala Sola handles the weapon with a single-minded intensity, moving dancer-like through an elaborate set of sword forms. Her feet barely seem to touch the ground as each elegant strike leaves your arm a little more numb.

When it's over, she's left grinning and exuberant, eyes alight and long, brown hair blowing in a breeze that simply isn't there for anyone else. Up close, you realise she's actually slightly taller than you, which isn't common for another girl. "You're better at that than my usual partner," she tells you. "He flinches."

"How have you convinced more than one person to do this with you?" you ask, passing the training equipment to her in order to rub at a wrist. The two of you are nearly alone in the training room — there's a fifth year student going through a martial arts kata at the far end of the long, curving room, and a fourth year who seems to have fallen asleep against the wall a ways away, no matter how much noise you and Sola were making.

"Oh, the trick is to ask forcefully enough," Sola says, hanging up the training sword on a nearby rack, and the shield beside it. Her tone is joking, but you also believe it's the truth. She glances over her shoulder, looking at you curiously as you take a long gulp of water. You've done your best not to let the recent experience disturb your composure, to mixed success, you think. "That's an odd stance you were using," she says. "Who taught you?"

Despite your goals in life not necessarily being as martial as Sola's, it was always vital that you be able to defend yourself in a pinch. "My father," you say. It's been your most frequent source of contact with him in recent years, in fact. He hadn't taught you specifically to fight with a shield, though.

Article:

What style of combat did your father, Burano Maharan Nazat, instruct you in? Vote for as many options as you like, the top answer wins.

[ ] [Fighting Style] Brutal and pragmatic hand-to-hand fighting, taught to him in secret by a mere Caravaner Caste soldier. Your Essence-hardened body is the only weapon you need to rely on.

[ ] [Fighting Style] Spear fighting, such as he picked up during his stint fighting in wars of conquest in the Burano Legions. Speed and reach balance out your defensive magic.

[ ] [Fighting Style] Prasadi saber fighting, taught to him by his own father. Distinct in style from that common to the Blessed Isle, but both practical and elegant.

"Oh, the ambassador," Sola says, real curiosity in her voice.

Your father is not, of course, actually an ambassador. He is officially nothing more than an Imperial consort and the scion of a Cadet House located in a faraway satrapy — the polite fictions between the Realm and Prasad don't allow it to be officially acknowledged as anything else, an arrangement few are actually eager to change. Still, your father has made himself available as a point of contact between the Realm and his family, or other notables back in Prasad. He's also never shied away from quietly advocating for the interests of his homeland in matters of tribute and regional trade. You sometimes suspect this was why your mother chose him... but it's always impossible to tell where the brutal political pragmatism ends and the human whims begin, with her.

Instead of satisfying Sola's implied question, you only nod, and change the subject. "Do you train like this every day?"

"I alternate between different exercises," Sola says. "But, yes, I train every day. If the body is a blade, then the mind is its edge. Neglecting one weakens the other." She says this with the utter surety of someone who has had this lesson drilled into her skull, and still believes in it with her whole heart.

"I don't think I would be able to find the time," you say, skeptically. You're already going over what your next task should be in your head.

"We're all busy," Sola says. "We don't get anywhere if we run ourselves into the ground. Most students don't initiate in their first year."

You think back to that trip to the library tower with Amiti last month. It is like an Air Aspect to lose sight of practical realities in favour of ideas about how things should be. "Before I left, my mother also made sure to stress that 'most students' don't initiate in their first year," you say.

Sola pauses, taking a lingering moment to mentally process that you're referring to a private audience with the Empress, before arriving at the implications of the words. That you would be falling below expectations if you progressed at the pace of most of your peers. Just for an instant, she looks mildly horrified, which if nothing else, feels vindicating. "My mother was against my coming here at all," Sola admits, in the spirit of sudden solidarity.

This catches your curiosity. "How much against?"

Sola grimaces at the memory. "She wanted me to go to the House of Bells, like my sisters. I could learn battlefield sorcery there, if I still wanted to. We had a fight about it." She kneels down, rooting around in her bag as if looking for something. "A shouting match, really."

You have, in fact, met Matriarch Tepet Usala before, if only briefly. Even that much experience made you absolutely certain that she isn't a woman you'd want to cross or anger. "Why the Heptagram?"

Sola has produced the kind of ornate box one might purchase from a high end apothecary. You catch sight of the mon of Daana'd burnt into the lid, before she cracks it open and pulls out a small, rounded pill that she swallows without fanfare, washing it down with a long drink of water from a flask. You've seen her take these before, around the middle of the day, if usually at more of a distance. "I don't want to just be a great general and an adequate sorcerer," she says, as if the former is a foregone conclusion. "I want to be great at both. This way will be much harder, of course, but sometimes, we do what we have to to achieve what we want from life."

You nod, thinking you understand. There's a reason you've been going as flat out as you have, after all, and it hasn't just been to please your mother.

As Sola straightens, though, she cocks her head to the side, looking at something from out a nearby window. The training room is along the outer wall of the lowest levels of one of the seven towers — set up outside of it is what could be considered a testing range, of sorts, for the kind of spells you don't want to throw around in an enclosed space. You immediately catch sight of three figures there:

One of them is Simendor Deiza, her Aspect markings instantly identifiable. She's listening to, of all people, Mnemon Keric, who is attempting to regard her with a sort of haughty disdain. Whatever he says to her, it makes her throw back her head and laugh, much to Keric's displeasure.

Looking on with her arms crossed is the imposing, scarred visage of instructor First Light. Even in the perpetual gloom of the Isle of Voices, the light the sun casts on her shimmers as though it's passing through water. As ever, she's as easily read as the depths of a calm ocean.

All three of them are standing a dozen paces in front of the gnarled bulk of an upright boulder, blackened and pitted, an obvious victim of countless years of target practice by enterprising young sorcerers, now whittled down to a narrow, vertical pillar. At First Light's stoic insistence, Deiza casts one last smirk at Keric before she turns to face it. You're too distant to hear what she's saying, but you've seen her work sorcery before — she chants in a bastard mixture of Old Realm and archaic Flametongue, her fingers flashing through a series of mudras to sketch out a strange sign in the air.

"Is that the Messenger?" Sola asks, her eyes clearly following the motion as well as yours are.

"No," you say, frowning, "... the Hooded Headsman, I think." Which was an obscure and worrisome thing to conjure with even when it wasn't Deiza doing it.

A breeze stirs the metallic shimmer of Deiza's hair, against the wind, and the hauntingly inhuman laughter that it carries with it is piercing enough that you hear it plainly, carrying with it the sense of a hot, Southern summer. Silvery light leaps from her outstretched hand, solidifying into a fine metal chain as it whirls through the air. It wraps itself neatly around the very shattered peak of the target stone, and passes through it, the chunk of stone tumbling heavily to the blackened earth, cut cleanly as though by an impossibly sharp blade.

Sola lets out a low whistle. "The Hooded Headsman, huh?" You grimace, acknowledging her point. Clearly, that spell was not intended primarily for stone cutting.

Through the window, First Light seems grudgingly impressed, based on her bearing. She gives a jerk of her head in Deiza's direction, clearly asking her to follow. Grinning, Deiza actually reaches out and gives Keric a pat on the cheek as she passes. He flushes bright red, looking furious.

"Is there something going on between those two?" Sola asks, more as a joke than a serious suggestion.

"Deiza and Keric?" You can't suppress a short laugh at that. Much more likely, he was present at the impromptu demonstration for a less friendly reason. Still, it was funny to imagine.

"I've never heard you laugh before," Sola tells you, smiling.

You shrug. "I laugh when something is funny."

It was a companionable enough diversion, in the end. But seeing Deiza like that, working sorcery so easily, only serves to stoke the frustrations burning in your chest even if she is using a strange, foreign tradition. You are making progress, and good progress at that, if your instructors are to be believed. But it's not enough.

You're going to need to take more serious action.

Article:

Nearing the halfway point of the year, you are starting to hit your limits, but you refuse to allow that to stop you, against more even-headed advice.

What drastic measures do you take to overcome these limits? There is no right or good answer here. All of these are probably a bad idea, as they involve progressing very fast and often with less supervision than the Heptagram would prefer for first year students. You're a young Exalt under immense pressure in the throes of Essence fever, making a desperate decision.

This is a character defining choice, and one that will affect the storylines you get in the future.

You may vote for as many options as you like. The top answer will win.

[ ] [Initiation] Names Plucked Like Blossoms

You seek out the wisdom of the demon Yoxien, the Directory Bound in Crimson, as he invited you to. Yoxien's great powers are severely restricted by his millenia old binding, rendering him all but harmless. But he has his voice, and his vast stores of knowledge, and if he's adequately intrigued by a young Exalt, he will share secrets with her that he hasn't gifted another in many centuries.

Pick this choice if you're interested in:

• A unique sorcerous initiation for Ambraea with strange parameters
• A focus on demons, demon-summoning, and hell
• Subplots involving Yoxien, his history, and figures from his past

[ ] [Initiation] A Tribute of Gems

In her desperation, Ambraea catches the eye of a greater elemental, who assists her with revelations of sorcery, but not for free. Her patron will be a powerful, unbound entity with their own agenda and motivations, which she will not have an opportunity to understand beforehand. Their presence will not be a surprise to the Heptagram's staff, but their taking an interest in a first year student will.

Pick this choice if you're interested in:

• A rare sorcerous initiation for Ambraea, involving offerings of mineral wealth
• A focus on elementals and spirit courts
• A powerful and active patron who will choose to meddle in Ambraea's life

[ ] [Initiation] Geomantic Mandala

Ambraea throws herself into the Heptagram's famed geomancy techniques, seeking to access material far above her beginner level, intent on breaking through to true understanding even if it kills her. She succeeds on the one hand... but also nearly succeeds on the other.

Pick this choice if you're interested in:

• A sorcerous initiation for Ambraea that taps into the raw elemental power of Creation's dragon lines
• A focus on geomancy, artifice, and the structure of Creation
• Subplots involving crafting projects large and small, affecting Ambraea's future plans — this will draw the attention of certain parties earlier than she'd prefer