“May I?” Adrissu said, gesturing toward the scroll. Caemar nodded, and Adrissu rolled it open, scanning the runes quickly. It was a circle, as he had described, with a series of symbols all along the inner and outer edges, markings for essence and containment and the spark of life. Intricate and complicated, but not unexpected. He glanced up quickly, noting that Caemar was watching his hands closely. He probably would not be able to copy this in his notes, and certainly would not be allowed to keep it. He dropped his eyes back to the chart, memorizing as much as he could. His memory, while not eidetic, would be enough to copy the instructions down later in the evening when Caemar was gone.
“It’s all very interesting, isn’t it?” Caemar said as Adrissu looked it over. “We speculated perhaps medical uses, taking a person’s consciousness so as not to suffer, while they were injured or gravely ill. The body does not seem to age or decay while the soul is outside of it, but imagine being able to do a surgery without the danger of the patient waking up, or a negative interaction with the sleeping draught... It could completely revolutionize medicine as we know it.”
“Could the body still die, though?” Adrissu said, frowning. “If it were injured, as you said—what if the body succumbed to its injuries while the soul was outside it?”
Caemar hesitated. “Well. In the case of death, the soul should be released to join the body.”
“You don’t think the soul could be put in a different body?”
There was a long moment of silence, as Caemar seemed to process the question. When Adrissu briefly flicked his gaze upward to peer at the elf’s face, he had an almost absent expression, his unfocused eyes remaining on the scroll in Adrissu’s hand.
He finally spoke, his voice quiet and conspiratorial. “Theoretically this would be possible. But I do not see how it could be done without extremely questionable moral practices, at best.”
It was a dangerous topic of discussion, but Adrissu pressed on while he still could. “Not necessarily—perhaps a man wished for a female body, and found a woman who wanted a male body. In this case both would be willing subjects. Would such an exchange work, do you think?”
Again Caemar was silent for a long moment, before answering, “I suppose so, yes.”
“So do you think the soul might survive being placed in the body of a different race entirely?” Adrissu asked, keeping his eyes carefully on the paper in his hand, his tone light and speculative. “Like a human soul being placed into an elf body?”
Caemar laughed at that, shaking his head. “These are dangerous ideas you are suggesting, Adrissu.”
Adrissu plastered a pleasant smile on his face, setting down the scroll to lift his hands in a placating gesture. “This is all purely theoretical, of course. I am only curious as to the limits of such magic. Much of my research has pertained to what the nature of magic truly is, and so far it seems to me that it is inexorably linked to the living soul of the magic-user. There may be implications that the souls of more accomplished arcanists, such as ourselves, are made of more resilient stuff than the souls of those less talented in the arcane arts, which would cast an interesting light on my own studies.”
“Regardless, you should be cautious of the things you’re saying, and who you’re saying them to,” Caemar said. His expression had become less jovial the longer Adrissu spoke; there was no open hostility, but the elf seemed concerned more than anything else. “I understand that what you’re discussing is entirely in the realm of hypotheticals. But others might be less open-minded. The very notion of taking an elf’s soul and putting it in some other body is...” He made a face, shaking his head. “I am not especially pious, and the thought even makes me uncomfortable.”
“I understand,” Adrissu said smoothly, rolling the scroll back up and sliding it back across the table to the old elf. Better to end the discussion now, before he became suspicious; and after all, Adrissu had gotten the building blocks of what he truly needed. The rest of the theory he could work out himself. “So what have you been working on more recently?”
Caemar smiled, clearly eager to move on as well. He chattered for a long while about the research that he was currently conducting for the royal library, obviously content just to hear himself talk. Adrissu barely listened, going over the list of runes that he had observed over and over in his mind. He had all the pieces of the puzzle: all that was left was to put them together.
This was, of course, easier said than done.
The population growth of the academy meant that Adrissu’s attention was constantly needed, organizing classes, assisting instructors, and adjusting the curriculum as the school term went on. The original three-room schoolhouse had expanded with three more rooms already, but the promise of more students in the future would require further expansion, which meant Adrissu had to secure all the necessary funding and permits. While he was still liked by the Lord Representative, Benit Pallestride, he was not as closely involved with civic duty as he had been in the past, so it would be a more tedious process than simply bringing up the idea to whoever on the council wanted to be in his good graces and letting them do the footwork.
He put together a proposal for a new school building entirely, this one larger than the previous, and dormitories to house their larger student body. They would be built adjacent to the hill where his tower overlooked the rest of the city, which would have the added benefit of ensuring that no unknown neighbors would encroach any closer to his home. The council might still deny this location, so he chose as an alternative a larger plot of land on the outer reaches of the city, which would still be a short walk from Saltspire Tower.
Benit considered his proposal for several weeks before giving him a straight answer.
“As it is now, you just don’t have the attendance to justify this much expansion,” he explained to Adrissu, gesturing at the papers that had been presented to him. “If you had a hundred students I could consider it. But sixty? I couldn’t justify building something the size of the mercenary guild’s hall for less than half their students.”
“Of course,” Adrissu said stonily, taking back his papers.
Garnering more students was necessary, so he doubled his efforts, spreading word of the academy and providing incentives to current students in hopes of attracting more. He cut the price of tuition as much as he possibly could for the following year, funding almost half of his instructors’ salaries out of his own pocket.
He was not sure why he was so hellbent on seeing the academy grow and succeed. Continuing his research on soul transference could very well be a better use of his time and money, but when faced between prioritizing the two, his instinct always drew him toward his work expanding the academy. There would be time for both, he supposed, so for now he focused on the school.
His efforts paid off, but not as quickly as he’d hoped. The following year, they grew from sixty students to just over eighty. It was not until the next year that they finally broke one hundred. But it was also that year that Ederick finally died, an old man asleep in his home. Adrissu was sorry to see him go and worried that whoever took his place at the mercenary’s guild would not be as staunch a supporter of the Academy as he had been. Without the funnel of warriors who had some aptitude for magic filling the ranks of their offensive and defensive magic tracks, their student population was likely to stall, or even drop back below one hundred.
But they did have over one hundred for now, so Adrissu approached Benit again with his proposal. This time the human took even longer to consider it, and some modifications were made—the worst was that the dormitories Adrissu proposed were slashed to house only twenty students, instead of fifty—but he gave his approval in the end. With the funding secured and construction begun on the plot of land that Adrissu could see from his tower, some of the stress eased away.
Partway through construction, the Federation of Autreth decreed a standard of living for all city-states within its jurisdiction—namely, that all Autrethian cities with more than one thousand residents were to pave their roads with stone, and every building needed meet the new standards set by a group of architects in Gennemont.
Because of this decree, construction was paused until the roads were re-paved, and the building plans reassessed. The decree benefitted Polimnos at large, driving an unprecedented level of business to the mines; but it meant that every available laborer in the city was now preoccupied with harvesting the stone, readying it to be laid, and paving the new roads. The skeleton of the new academy, now left unfinished indefinitely, was an eyesore from his tower: a constant reminder of everything that was just out of his reach. Adrissu seethed, but it could not be helped. All he could do was wait.
Each existing structure in Polimnos was inspected according to the new standards, but Adrissu could not let anyone into the tower who might discover the entrance to his secret lair. So when the inspector came to his door—a young human man wearing thick spectacles and tight, fashionable robes—Adrissu did something that he had never done before; as he allowed the inspector through the door, he grasped him by the shoulder, reached out with a tendril of magic, and planted a false memory in the human’s mind that he had inspected the tower thoroughly and found nothing that needed altering.
“Please, no need to leave so soon,” Adrissu said quickly, the moment the spell had taken effect. “Why don’t you stay for tea?”
The human smiled widely at him, though the way his eyes darted around the room betrayed his disorientation. “Well, I’m running a bit ahead of schedule, so I don’t see why not.”
