Fifteen years ago, Lutz Schaefer was a Sergeant of the Hornau Crossbow Regiment in his late twenties with a single child. After Stirland's crossbow regiments were disbanded as the new Elector Countess attempted to modernize her military, he and his squad joined the Karak Eight Peaks Expedition in the hopes of earning enough money to buy some land or purchase a commission in order to secure an income for his nascent family. The Expedition proved successful beyond most expectations, and instead of returning home with gold, he brought his wife and child down and established himself as an officer of the Undumgi. Today, Lutz Schaefer is a Lieutenant and a father of five.
The only part you know of this initially is his rank, because he's currently dressed in his ceremonial best as he very insistently batters at your door at a time in the morning that is only seconds after the point where it would have been rude to be battering at your door.
With your unplaited hair tied up in a hasty bun and hidden away under your hat, and your nightwear securely tucked away under your robes, you have the man brief you as you make your way down the stairs towards his residence. "Some of the children like to fossick in the lower levels," Lutz says to you, slightly out of breath. "Usually they only find a few bits and pieces, and the Dwarves humour them and give them fair value. But the lad has been finding a lot more than anyone else, enough that the Dwarves had started to take notice, and yesterday he dug his way through to what the Dwarves said is a..." He frowns and thinks. "'Dramatic upthrust of sheared selvage that was overlooked during the founding excavation', they said. But they also said that to their eyes, there was nothing to indicate it was there at all. He beelined straight towards it in a little tunnel he dug over weeks, saying the whole time he was sure there was something there, and he was right."
You carefully don't frown as you consider that. "He could have a Minor Talent for detecting metals - there are dowsers out there able to do that or something similar that make a very tidy living from it. But it could also be a subconscious expression of magical ability. If it is, that's a dangerous sort of thing to be doing without any instruction."
"That's what we thought," he confirms. "But he'd be able to learn to do it safely, right?"
"It's possible," you say cautiously as you try to decipher his tone. It takes you a moment not because it's especially cryptic, but because you're not used to the idea of a father being excited to learn that his son might one day be a Wizard. You adjust the planned arc of this conversation. "If he goes to the Colleges, his level of ability would be measured and he'll be given the level of training appropriate for his capabilities, as long as he's willing to learn. From what you've told me, it sounds like he could have a strong affinity for the Wind of Metal, that we call
Chamon. If that is the case, he could one day become a Gold Wizard, like Johann and Maximillian."
"That's great news," he says with complete sincerity, and you very deliberately prevent yourself from lingering on how rare that reaction is, and how much more welcome it might have been for some than what they actually got. When you were one Apprentice among many, you'd heard many of the stories of your fellows awakening to their magical ability, and the reactions of their families. Some had stories that rivalled your own for traumatic experiences, but the most common version was of a family reacting with muted despair, as if being told that their child was crippled or dying. The only positive receptions you've heard of previously was among magical families like Panoramia's, or among those who had grown up in orphanages or on the streets.
Okay, maybe you weren't fully successful in keeping yourself from lingering on it.
"What was that?" you say to Lutz, who had just asked you something.
"Is a Wizarding education expensive?" he asks again. "We have some savings, but I don't know if that's, well, Wizard levels of money, you see..."
"I can say with confidence that it will be within your ability to pay," you respond, "and there are other options if you don't have the money on hand."
He seems more reassured by that than perhaps he should be. It's a complicated topic, the fees that students of the Colleges are charged and can sometimes accumulate over the length of their education. The Colleges would theoretically be able to sustain themselves from funding from the Emperor, tithes from their members and the various income streams specific to each College, but they charge Apprentices varying but always significant amounts for their education anyway. The amount is carefully calculated to be burdensome but not crippling for the student's family. If the family pays it, the theory goes, then they are made materially invested in the student's success and are less likely to get cold feet about it years later, when an Apprentice has been ensconced within the College for years and finally emerges with strange new quirks and physical properties. If the family does not pay, then it drives a wedge between the Apprentice and their family early on, bringing the matter to a head immediately instead of allowing an influence opposed to a magical education to linger in that Apprentice's life for years or decades. In either case, when the Apprentice becomes a Journeyman, they are more encouraged than they would otherwise be to pursue the more profitable paths available to them, and in doing so they not only repay the debt to the College or their family, but also have a larger income for the College to take its tithe from. The College may not directly prohibit someone with the potential to become a Magister from spending the rest of their life making a very safe living keeping a forge burning for a blacksmith or something, but it will give a nudge or two to try to prevent it.
You're not sure if you're entirely convinced by this logic. You suspect it may have come about in a time when the Colleges were less established and more in need of funding, and that it continues on at least partly because the Wizards making this decision had to deal with student debt in their youth, so they feel affronted at the idea that future students will not have to. Undoubtedly there are those that would argue it builds character.
Your musings on the topic last until you arrive at the family's dwelling, where you are introduced to a wife and an array of successively smaller children. Your attention goes straight to the boy whose feat had brought you here today, who very clearly doesn't know what he should be doing with himself, and he's fiddling with what you take to be a chunk of silver-bearing ore taken out of the deposit he discovered. You only need a glance to spot the ambient
Chamon within the ore stirring at his touch. It takes a longer look to determine that the stirrings only partially correlate with the boy's movements, so it can't just be a natural physical affinity for the Yellow Wind - there must be an unseen variable exerting force upon the Winds, and the most likely candidate is the boy's will.
Right now, it's harmless. He can move it around, but without instruction it would take years for that to develop into enough grasp over it to twist it into the form of a spell. No, the actual danger is that his receptivity to
Chamon will not necessarily remain restricted to
Chamon. All it would take is some sort of meaningful event to give him even a small level of affinity for one of the other Winds - a nasty burn or beast attack, or the death of a loved one awakening his awareness of mortality, or something else along those lines - and he'll be inadvertently juggling two Winds within his soul, Winds that will have additional speed and turbulence for being within the soul of a nascent Wizard, propelled to and fro by the emotional turmoil of youth. That would put him on a gradual but inexorable path towards
Dhar poisoning.
You explain as much to the parents, and while they're certainly concerned to hear it, they seem accepting of the reality of the matter - perhaps not unexpectedly, considering his most likely trajectory had been to follow his father into professional soldiering. You'd expected to face resistance when you explained that it would be best to get him into the mono-Wind environment of the Gold College as soon as possible, and that a delay might be fine but might also be disastrous, but they agree with it immediately. You're not sure whether you were especially convincing, or whether they just want to leap on what they see as a great opportunity for their son as quickly as possible. So you give them the rest of the day to say their farewells and prepare the boy to uproot his life.
---
That evening, you, the child, and Max board your Gyrocarriage to set off to Altdorf. Johann might have gotten along with the child more easily, but his example of Alchemical Thaumaturgy is perhaps a bit intense to be a child's first example of their future.
After some hesitance and awkwardness - not least of which because of the necessity of having to speak quite loudly to be heard over the sound of the engine - the two settle into a discussion about the theorized origins of mountains, from the passé 'the Gods did it' to the outré 'enough stone in one place causes gravity to reverse'. The two spend quite some time mocking the fringe belief in simple physical forces shaping the world over millions of years. The child perks up as the conversation touches on the relation between stone and
Chamon, when he says something that causes you to turn your full attention to the conversation.
"The opposite of water?" you ask, prompting him to elaborate on his theory.
He blinks up at you. "Water likes to flow around on the surface, but if it can't do that it'll start sinking into what it's on. The looser it is, the easier it sinks in and moves around, and that's where you get well water. But it'll still sink into stone, just slower. The energy is the other way around - it'll sink into stone if it can, and if it can't then it'll sink slower into soil if the soil doesn't already have another energy in it, and only if there's nothing else for it to do does it flow around on the surface. The opposite of water." He smiles proudly at his theory, and looks closely at you for a reaction as you consider it.
The child is clearly only familiar with
Chamon out of the Winds, which for his current circumstances is for the best. Once he's taught a more rounded understanding of them, 'water' could be easily replaced with
Ghyran, which flows either like water or with water - the exact cause and effect there is debated. And from there you have an alternative theory of Wind cardinality, one where
Chamon and
Ghyran are cardinally opposed. The mainstream theory puts
Chamon across from
Shyish and
Ghyran from
Aqshy, putting the permanence of metal against the finality of death and the growth of life across from the consumption of fire, but while this depiction can be found in many places in the Colleges, it is far from unassailable, and other theories tend to find a ready audience. An alternate cardinality theory around the way the Winds interact with and flow through the physical world would be an intriguing beginning to a Wizard's career - it's very unlikely to one day rival the Elemental-Mystical-Cardinal triune that currently dominated Collegiate magical theory, but it could very well join the ranks of the numerous other models that have all kinds of niche uses in specific areas.
"That's a very interesting way of thinking about it," you say to the child. "You should keep it in mind, and develop it as you learn how the other Winds work."
From the expression on his face you feel confident that he'll do everything within his power to do so, and you smile. Despite the lack of an extended family, the child shows no evidence of the precocious maturity of an older child of a large family that has had to serve as an additional parent to his juniors. That speaks well of the support structures within the Undumgi - or, you hedge, at least the formerly Stirlandian portion of it. You'd say he has a better chance than most of taking well to the sudden change of environment into the alien structure of the Gold College.
You make a mental note to try to remember his name so you can follow his career with interest.
---
When you delivered a substantial bounty of Ithilmar, a metal with only one known source in the entire world, you were offered several methods of payment that would have made you fabulously wealthy. Each and every one of them has been spurned in favour of feeding the endless appetite of your beloved and growing library. The Queen has formalized your previous means of securing a trickle of Elvish wisdom and employed vast swathes of Tor Lithanel's comfortably bored underclass in churning out a copy of almost the entirety of the Library of Mournings. While you're kept quite busy organizing the incoming flood of Eltharin instruction into some semblance of proper organization, you're not so busy that you can't spot what is missing, and it turns out to be substantially less than you expected. While most books on strategy are notable for their absence, tomes talking about combat at smaller scale are numerous. Books on magical concepts are present but generally low-level, which you're mostly sure is a reflection of Laurelorn's power dynamics rather than a deliberate choice - the greatest understanding of magic belongs to the Grey Lords, and the penultimate tier to the local Temples of Hoeth and Hekarti and the Houses that dominate them.
It all amounts to a bounty of knowledge you could spend a lifetime perusing, and that you intend to spend a lifetime at least leafing through. You suspect that in your future, there will be very little you put your mind to that won't be assisted by some measure of Elvish insight.
While your library's security, having been constructed by Dwarven architects and residing within a Dwarven Karak, was judged as good enough for most purposes, there was one part of the Library of Mournings that requires a greater dedication to security, including a failsafe to destroy the contents should the vault that will contain them be forcibly breached. The scrolls in question are the largest you've ever seen, and covered with carefully-copied diagrams and notes in a language that seems entirely alien, even after you catch a glimpse of both Eltharin and Khazalid in its patterns. You get the impression that mere ink and vellum should be entirely incapable of containing the message within, and that it condescends to be contained in a merely mortal medium as an act of generous benevolence. It is beyond the peoples of the current era to even measure how many steps they are removed from the original lessons of the Old Ones, those that joined forces with the Dragons to shape this world and held back the onslaught of Chaos for long enough for life as you know it today to grow strong enough to take up the fight themselves.
In a letter to the Grey College, you briefly summarize the bounty of knowledge that you have acquired, and leave to them the titanic task of figuring out who in the Empire deserves to know about the secrets that have become available to anyone willing to make the journey to the edge of the continent.
Library Purchases:
[ ] [LIBRARY] Colleges of Magic
Name four magical, non-divine topics to acquire all available Empire books on.
[ ] [LIBRARY] Barak Varr booksellers
Name three public topics to acquire all available Empire and Dwarven books on.
[ ] [LIBRARY] Library of Mournings
Name two non-magical topics to hire Cityborn scribes to copy all available Laurelorn books on.
[ ] [LIBRARY] Back-fill.
Instead of seeking books on specific topics, give a very broad direction and have your bookselling contacts grab everything on it that you don't already have, with special attention to existing but incomplete topics. Possible categories: Dwarven religion, human religion, geography, war and combat, social science, natural science, applied science.
Dwarf Favour Purchases
Aethyric Vitae can be spent instead of favour at an exchange rate of 3 favour per gallon; for Rune-related purchases, this will also guarantee the cooperation of Runelords who may otherwise be disinterested. To use this, simply add 'paid by Vitae' or similar to an item you are voting for.
[ ] [DWARF] No purchase.
[ ] [DWARF] Write-in.
College Favour Purchases
[ ] [COLLEGE] No purchase.
[ ] [COLLEGE] Write-in.
Other Purchases
[ ] [PURCHASE] No purchase.
[ ] [PURCHASE] Write-in.
- There will be a fourteen hour moratorium.
- Despite the magical children that keep happening around Mathilde, the typical age for magical abilities to awaken in someone is 15 to 20. This kid rolled a 2 on a d100. Mathilde just keeps getting surrounded by outliers.
- The initiate's natural affinity for magic was rolled here.
- The library as it currently stands can be found under the Organizations threadmark. I have not constructed a list of what was acquired because doing so would have meant this would have taken even longer to be written. If someone is willing to perform the hard work and/or apply the technological know-how to derive said list, I'll be posting the current library and the library as it stood before the most recent additions shortly after this post. The list of new additions can be found in posts further down this page, with many thanks to @Abby Normal and @picklepikkl .
- Some of the Eonir-sourced books are listed as Eonir where they have developed significant unique insights of their own, and Asur where they have merely retained the knowledge they brought with them from Ulthuan. Undoubtedly there will be topics that should be present that I've overlooked, and if you think you've identified one, let me know.
So the below is incomplete even for the 'original' changes. Probably around lunch time i'll check back and if it looks like boney's about done adding new things i'll go about finishing this 
