I mean have you considered we could just ask Panoramia to come with us? It's not like she desperately has to be in Eight Peaks, she has been in a holding pattern for the last three or four years since about the end of the Dum expedition.
She's doing a very thorough, long-term study of basically creating a breadbasket farmland out of wasteland from Step 1 to completion. Her graduation was from publishing a paper on her masterwork, which was turning the Eastern Valley into a breadbasket, albeit with a ton of skilled labor and years of work...which is viable in some parts of the Old World. But Panoramia is aiming for something more achievable with practical levels of labor, so it may be that she's incorporating the Caldera's transformation into (possibly) grazelands into her work.
But unless this upcoming social action with Panoramia clarifies one way or another, we don't really know what Panoramia's current plans are. Just that the last we heard word on the subject, it was implied that her work with the Eastern Valley wasn't finished.
There's the possibility of learning Anoqeyån , Old Nehekharan, and Arcane Khzalid, and then trying to reverse engineer the parts of language of the Old Ones all three are probably derived from. That project is apparently a good enough justrification that we could probably persuade a Grey Lord to teach us Anoqeyån.
That's probably deeply unrealistic, given that arcane khazalid seems to be a closely-kept secret of runesmiths, Anoqeyan would require elven mages willing to teach us, and Old Nehekharan would probably require getting
Tomb Kings to teach us, which, uh, good luck.
Similarly, I've been growing more in favor of taking a pure sabbatical following the Waystone Project, because it would represent an opportunity to churn through some old projects (languages! spell creation! arcane mark control!) and go on fun small adventures, on our own schedule when the mood strikes us, without duty hanging over our heads that we want to do a good job at.
That does sound appealing. We have a lot of potential for spell creation and established in-character reasons for wanting to blaze that trail for our College. Mathilde has remarked at how few options for offense Ulgu has, with Shadow Knives being pretty much the only battle-viable offensive magic that isn't deeply conditional until you delve into the risks of outright Battle Magic. Knightbringer is Mathilde's first attempt at addressing that shortcoming, but she's got potential for more.
A sabbatical would also give us more time to do Windherding enchantments/studies, or even bolder possibilities like Windherding
spells--the easy possibility is a combination of a flaring light and Burning Shadows done in combination to create a "Burning Shadows in any direction out to significant distance, even during the day". But the idea of creating a new spell outright using two Winds wielded by two or more wizards sounds really cool to me, provided it's actually possible.
Though I do admit that being Loremaster-at-Large to the Karaz Ankor, or the Empire's chief ambassador to the Karaz Ankor, would be a really fun time.
