The spell was called Spatial Gate. It was, as Sirath put it, "the first word in the language of space magic" — a foundational technique with applications that started simple and became, at their highest development, a matter of crossing distances that had no business being crossed.
At Aaron's current level, a Spatial Gate was a circular aperture between two points in space, through which matter could pass. The size of the gate and the duration it could be held open were direct measures of the mage's control over the space element. The spell itself was not complicated — the manual Elder Thorn had given him was less than ten pages — but the execution required a quality of fine motor control over elemental energy that Aaron had not yet developed.
"This is different from the compatibility training," he told Sirath, on the first morning, sitting at the summit. "The compatibility training was about volume. This is about precision."
"Correct. And which do you find harder?"
Aaron thought about it. "Precision. Volume I can brute-force with repetition. Precision requires me to notice when I'm wrong."
"And the gap between noticing you're wrong and correcting it?"
"That's the part I have to develop." He looked at the manual. The diagrams showed the required shape — a circle, particles arranged in a specific configuration, rotation applied in a precise direction. "It's like the difference between being strong and being dexterous. They don't automatically follow from each other."
"A useful metaphor. Now stop metaphoring and try the spell."
He tried.
The first attempt produced a circle that lasted approximately four seconds before collapsing. Not because he ran out of mage force — he had considerably more than the average nine-year-old — but because the configuration slipped as soon as he applied the rotation. The particles scattered, the circle dissolved, and Aaron sat looking at where it had been.
"The left quadrant loses tension when you apply the rotation," Sirath said.
"I noticed."
"You need to load slightly more pressure into the left before you begin rotating, so that the tension equalises as you turn."
"That's a very small adjustment."
"Yes. Spatial precision is made of very small adjustments. This is why most mages never develop it past a functional level — they are not willing to care about very small adjustments for the amount of time it takes to master them."
Aaron reset and tried again.
The second attempt lasted nine seconds.
"Better," Sirath said. "The left quadrant held. You lost the bottom."
"I felt it. The rotation was slightly fast."
"Slower is better at this stage. Speed comes after control, not before."
"Everything comes after control," Aaron said. "That seems to be the theme."
"The theme of all skill development, yes. What did you do in your previous life that required this kind of fine precision?"
Aaron considered. "I played an instrument. In my third year of secondary school."
"And how were you at it?"
"Initially terrible. Competent eventually." He readjusted his particle configuration. "The principle was the same. Small mistakes, identified and corrected, repeated until the correction becomes default."
"And the patience for that process?"
"I have considerably more patience now than I had then. That was a different life." He activated the rotation. "Motivation helps with patience."
"What motivates you now? Be honest."
The gate formed — three seconds, four, five — and held.
"Understanding," Aaron said. "Not power. Power is a means. Understanding is the end." He kept the gate stable. "I want to know what the ten of you did. What you found. What went wrong. And I can't get there from Ivory Village."
The gate held for twelve seconds this time before he lost it.
"Good," Sirath said. The word was small but specific.
— — —
The year passed in the rhythm of that work: dawn on the mountain, hours of practice, rest, rebuild, try again. The Spatial Gate grew from seconds to minutes, from a wavering circle barely a hand's-width across to a stable aperture nearly a metre in diameter. Aaron tracked the progress the way he tracked everything — with precise, honest numbers and no rounding up.
By month three: thirty centimetres, five minutes.
By month six: seventy centimetres, fifteen minutes.
By month ten: one metre twenty, twenty-eight minutes.
"The academy's elite class threshold," Sirath said, when Aaron asked, "is roughly a one-metre gate held for twenty minutes, based on what I can extrapolate from the standards of similar institutions in my era. The academies raised their standards as fewer students could meet them."
"So I'm already past the threshold."
"You are past the old threshold. The current one may be higher." A pause. "I recommend you enter the test showing one and a half metres held for thirty minutes. Not two metres. Not your maximum."
"Why not my maximum?"
"Because you will be at this academy for ten years. You will be tested and measured and observed continuously. If you begin at your maximum, you have nowhere to climb that your peers can witness. Better to show excellence that is clearly not your ceiling." Sirath's voice was dry. "Revealing all your capabilities at once is only useful when you need to end a situation immediately. Otherwise, it is simply a gift to the people who would prefer to know exactly how much they need to surpass you."
Aaron considered this. "You think like a strategist."
"I think like someone who survived being the strongest person in a room full of people who resented it." A brief pause. "The strongest person in a room is also the most threatened person in a room, unless they have the wit to obscure the distance."
"Noted." Aaron stood and stretched. The morning light was long and cold, the mountain exhaling mist into the air above the ridgeline. "One more thing. Show one and a half metres, thirty minutes — and then what? What do I do in year one at the academy?"
"Year one: master the Spatial Gate to the point of instinct. Begin advanced theory. Begin artifact refinement."
"Artifact refinement?"
"You are inheriting a mage's legacy. I was not only a spell practitioner. I was the foremost artifact refiner of my era. The things I built with my hands outlasted my body by three thousand years, which is more than most people's bodies manage." A note of pride, very precisely measured. "You will learn the craft. It requires the same qualities as your spatial precision training — fine control, patience, willingness to care about small mistakes."
"And it has practical applications."
"It has practical applications that will become apparent." A pause. "Also, I simply would like someone to continue the work. It would be a waste for it to die with me entirely."
Aaron looked at the horizon. In the distance, in the direction he'd be travelling next spring, the sky was pale and clear.
"All right," he said. "We have two months left. Let's make them count."
— — —
His mother packed his things the night before departure.
She was economical about it — a practical woman, she saw no reason to pack what he wouldn't need, and she'd quietly researched what academy students typically brought by asking every mage-adjacent person she could find in the village. The pack she assembled was compact and sensible. She set it by the door and didn't say anything about it.
In the morning, at the village gate, she gave him a small carved stone — smooth, dark, shaped like nothing in particular. He turned it over in his hands.
"It's from the mountain," she said. "From up near where you always went. Your father found it years ago. I thought —" she stopped.
He closed his hand around it.
"I'll have it with me," he said.
She nodded once. Stepped back. The chief was already talking, presenting the small amount of silver the village had collected, making arrangements with the caravan driver waiting at the path's foot. The other children who'd qualified for academies were saying their own goodbyes.
Aaron stood at the gate a moment longer than he needed to, looking at the village — the stone buildings, the terraced farms, the mountain rising above everything — and felt the weight of it settle into him like something he was carrying forward.
Then he turned and walked down the mountain.
"You are quieter than usual," Sirath observed.
"I'm thinking."
"About?"
"About how long 'the first place I go after I graduate' actually is." He picked his way down the switchback path. "Ten years."
"Yes."
"She'll be older."
"Yes."
He let that sit. Below him, the caravan waited at the mountain's foot, and beyond that, the road wound southeast through the empire toward a city he'd never seen.
"Tell me about the Five Elements City," he said. "Everything you know."
Sirath began to talk, and Aaron listened, and the mountain receded behind him, and the road stretched ahead, and somewhere in the back of his mind the tower of the Void Catalog lit one more window against the dark.