August 28th 1017
My hands are shaking, but it's not from fear. It's the adrenaline. It's almost done. The summoning Array is complete.
I hate this school. I hate the smell of cold granite and burnt mana. This isn't a place of learning; it's a factory for the Crown. They call it Arcturus Academy—supposedly founded by a King who valued knowledge. Now it's just a bureaucratic nightmare, designed to squeeze every drop of output from anyone too poor to pay cash.
My problem isn't the Runic Protocol Theory (RPT 101). I can recite the entire syllabus backward. My problem is that I'm built for elegant, esoteric magic—the structure of souls and the logic of dimensions—while they want me to be a plumber. I'm a genius, but my mana flow is garbage. I can't hold a simple heat spell to warm my damned hands, much less stabilize a full array without blowing out a circuit.
And that's the knife at my throat: the R.I.S.
The Royal Indenture System. Everyone here is trapped by it. Every hour we spend freezing in these barracks, every single drop of mana we use, is calculated into a colossal, impossible loan. Fail to specialize, fail to graduate—and you're immediately signed over to the Guilds for decades of labor. I'm one Contained Chaos Response (CCR 101) failure away from being a debt slave.
The worst of it is the company I'm forced to keep.
Kaelen Varrus, that insufferable Artificer prodigy, acts like he owns the air he breathes. He looks through me as if I'm just bad math.
Rikkia Stone-Pelt—the Beastkin girl with the stupid, honest eyes—treats me like dirt. She works hard, yes, but she's judging me constantly because I'm not physically strong or stupid enough to endure the cold with a smile. She thinks I'm lazy because I don't bleed for a pointless task.
The only one who makes sense is Lyra Vayne. Even though she's a noble, she sees the beauty of chaos, the art of magic, and she hates the system as much as I do. I wish I could tell her about this.
But I won't. I don't need allies; I need a shield.
The Familiar Summoning is the answer. It's reckless—it's third-year magic, and I had to substitute human blood to account for my poor control—but the calculations are sound. I will bind a powerful entity that can easily cover my weaknesses.
When I walk into class on Monday with a bound familiar, the narrative changes. I won't be Wyatt, the fragile loser. I'll be the genius who dared to succeed where masters feared to tread. The R.I.S. debt won't matter, because the Crown will need me.
It's time. No regrets.
I am not a slave. I am an artist
August 12th 1017
I haven't written about this since it happened. I don't know why I'm doing it now. Maybe it's because the pressure here feels so much like the cold of that night.
We lived in a place called Aethel's Cut, nothing but flat land and wind-blown dust. Everyone I knew there was low tier labor, just like my father—low-tier labor, keeping the local farm runes running. It was a good life, quiet. My father was meticulous, my mother was kind. Our entire worth was tied up in our work. We never wanted much.
Then, the Drain. It was a regional failure of the primary conduit—an energy siphon that went totally unstable.
I was 13. I still remember the sound: not an explosion, but a sudden, vast sucking emptiness. It wasn't loud, just wrong. I came out of the maintenance shed, and everything was collapsed. The conduit had failed, and the raw backflow of aetheric energy was so dense it turned toxic.
My parents—they weren't physically strong mages. They were runic agriculture specialists dropped out of Arcturus academy in their second year. They tried to set up a containment array, but the sheer force of the residual energy was too much. They were gone. Just... gone. Vaporized by unstable Aether, protecting the last of the local infrastructure.
I survived because I was outside the hazard zone, hiding in the shed. I was found a couple days later by a Rune Instructor from the Academy. He wasn't there to save me; he was there to document the loss of assets.
He saw the scrolls my father had left scattered—pages of high-level transmutative geometry. But I hadn't just seen them; I could recite every single line and sigil, perfectly, without understanding why. The formulas were etched into my mind, and I couldn't forget them even if I tried.
That's how he discovered me. My memory isn't just good; it's a perfect repository. He called it a cheat. after that he ran some tests. And I had A talent, he said, for the magics concerning soul-binding and dimensional anchors. The kind of math that moves worlds and folds space, not just heats bathwater.
It was my ticket out. The instructor got the Academy to enroll me, wiping the immediate debt from my mother and father in exchange for enrollment at Arcturus academy under my own debt in the R.I.S. But even with my affinity and talent it didn't help much they were both locked inside a body that can't even perform CCR on the spell equivalent of a lighter.
May 4th 1015
I don't know why I keep writing about that place, but it feels necessary. Aethel's Cut Orphanage. They didn't call it that; they called it a Crown Reallocation Center.
It was a place where nothing was wasted, least of all time. After the Drain, I wasn't allowed to grieve. I was immediately assigned to labor: sorting arcane components, inventorying salvaged runic parts, and cleaning the administrative scrolls.
The 'teachers' there were cynical Guild handlers. They weren't paid to educate; they were paid to identify useful chattel. We learned reading, writing, and arithmetic using recycled Guild ledgers—the most accurate, data-rich textbooks in the country. The learning materials weren't some child's primer; they were actual, high-level Guild asset tracking documents.
And the labor—it wasn't pointless. Every item I sorted, every scroll I cleaned, every component I tallied, was categorized by its aetheric frequency and its material composition. For two years, my mind was a perfect human database, forced to memorize the properties of thousands of magical components and the complex logistics of the Guild system.
The instructor who found me called it a waste of potential. He said I should have been studying philosophy. But he's wrong.
The other students here, the nobles and the rich ones, learned theory first. I learned industrial application and real-world inventory first. They learned what a component does; I learned where it is, how much it costs, and three ways to bypass the Guild's shipping tariff on it.
It wasn't formal education, but it was education. Maybe I'm not that far behind. I just have a different syllabus.