Chapter 1156
New
Malcolm Tent
Monkey with a typewriter.
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Today was my first day of class. Again. Introduction to Divination Principles with Professor Allegra Saunders was the secondary recommendation from Elonwy. I was still kind of on the fence about the first one, but I trusted my friend not to steer me wrong, so I packed up and headed for my first class (after stocking my scrolls for the day).
Unlike Prof Hawkins, Professor Saunders was NOT understated in terms of her living situation. In fact, even from the outside her house was a sprawling palatial estate that dwarfed most of the ones I'd ever seen. When I arrived at the gate, there was an attendant waiting for me there, ready to escort me off to the side entrance where the class was supposed to enter.
"You were expected," said the servant who met me at the gate. "Please, come this way. Lady Allegra has been eagerly awaiting your presence."
I blinked at that, for several reasons, but tagged along as the gaunt man in the robe led me around the side of the house. "So…what do you mean expected?" I asked slowly. "Like, she knew I was coming because I signed up? Because if this is another 'only one person in the class' situation I'm going to be so pissed."
He laughed at that. "Of course not. The lady deals in fate. In chance and happenstance. Some beings hold greater sway in the rivers of time than others, and those stones, when dropped into the current, produce ripples that even the most amateurish diviners can perceive. With our Lady's skill, your nature was as a sun in an empty sky, obvious and shining with a light that could not be denied."
That brought me up short. "Wait, you mean she can tell I have fate manipulation abilities?" I asked in surprise. My class in Doom Sovereign had been the Fate Walker, and even beyond that, I had always had an…interesting destiny. Even for an Ascendant I attracted strange and unique events at a rate that beggared belief. From conversations with my family and even other candidates, my advancement had been far faster than it should have been, and I had experienced far more than most.
For a while I had assumed that was because I was descended from three different gods, but comments had been made in the past that even for a divine descendant, my luck was a little bit absurd when it came to running into strange things.
Part of what had drawn me to this particular class was the knowledge that while it was time related, it would presumably allow me to learn to access the abilities of someone like Azazel more accurately. My first minister was a big fan of divination, and giving him access to an actual teacher who could show him how it worked would make that even more useful.
When we arrived at the closed door in question, the hooded man knocked heavily on the door in a strange, staggered pattern. The door opened and a dark haired girl with pale skin and black painted lips glared at him. "Oh for- Dylan, what the hell did I tell you about the whole 'mysterious envoy' persona. You look ridiculous. Did you give this one the child of destiny speech? I told you to stop doing that."
I froze. Oh. Apparently I had been overthinking things.
Dylan, aka robe boy, pouted at the girl. "Sally!" he hissed in embarrassment. "Don't ruin my reputation in front of the seekers of knowledge. The Lady is expecting this one in particular. Beyond that, my own senses foretold his arrival. The fate of this one is particularly puissant."
"No, she isn't," Sally snapped. "She said she forgot to send directions to the side door to one of the kids and that they would probably show up at the front gate. That's not PROPHECY, it's forgetfulness. And you don't HAVE senses. You've had to borrow credits from me six different times because you lost all yours in the gambling competitions. You are the least prescient human being I've ever met. I'm including Lyle in that assessment, and the other day, he walked into a HOLE because he got distracted by a butterfly."
She turned to shoot me an apologetic grimace. "Look, ignore everything this idiot said to you. He takes this nonsense way too seriously. The Prof is actually a pretty perceptive lady, but she tends to hyperfocus on the future and fail to notice the obvious. My brother has picked up ALL her bad habits and none of her good ones."
"Sally, knock it off!" Dylan whined. "You're making me sound bad to the new kid!"
She jerked her chin at me. "Come on in, class hasn't started yet. Prof said we'd be starting late today, and she's pretty reliable about that kind of stuff." Letting me in, she led me down the hall towards the front of the house. I was pretty sure. Given the obvious spatial warping it was hard to get a bead on where I was.
"Look, contrary to what he said, this isn't some hyper mystical mumbo jumbo. I know divination sounds mysterious, but really it's just like statistics. But backwards. And some of it you do without any information to go off of. The Prof is a good teacher, and if you have a knack for this stuff you'll pick it up lickety split."
"What about the whole fate thing?" I asked as we walked. "He said that some people have stronger fates. Is that real?"
"Oh sure," she nodded. "But singularities are rare as hen's teeth. The Prof says she hasn't had one in her class in a few millennia. The chances of you being one are pretty damned slim. Just…don't worry about Dylan. He's harmless. Focus on learning more about the class and making the most of your time. The Prof knows how to educate people according to their talents, so the better you do the more you actually learn."
That sounded fair enough, so I decided to just wait and talk to her about it in person. Making a bunch of half assed guesses wasn't likely to be helpful to me long term. This was a school, I was obviously here to get knowledge from experts, not to try to come up with my own solutions to problems that had already been studied.
We walked down a long, thin hallway with nothing on the walls except candles. I was pretty sure it was some kind of servant's corridor. After a few turns, we came to a large lecture hall type chamber with descending tiered seating. The hall was set up in sort of a cone, with the thinnest point being a rounded alcove with a single large table set into the floor. The top of the table was some kind of dark granite, the base was wood, and a long figure stood at the side, a placid smile on her mostly blank face.
"Welcome," she said, in a voice that didn't go above a whisper but rode the acoustics of the room to sound like it was coming from right behind my ear. To Introduction to Divination Principles. I am Allegra Saunders, and I believe you've already introduced yourself, Mr. Wyndham."
Sally sighed. "He didn't, Prof. You skipped that part."
The detached woman blinked. "Ah, my mistake. How rude of me. You may proceed, of course, I didn't mean to cut you off."
"I'm…uh, Shane Wyndham," I said slowly. "But I got by Solomon."
She nodded happily. "Of course you do. Please, come sit down, I saved you a spot by the front. You won't have to run as far when the incident occurs."
I glanced at Sally, who winced and shrugged. She did NOT, tellingly, say anything about not worrying about the proclamation. Lovely. I followed the gaze of Professor Saunders down to the front of the room and sat. I was watched by about a dozen people, mostly older. Unlike my initial class, this one was much more crowded, with plenty of people hoping to learn about divination. I could see Dylan the robe guy in the back, sulking, and Sally sat next to him, much to his annoyance. When I took my seat, I smiled up at Professor Saunders, and she nodded blithely before returning her serene gaze to the class.
"Time," she said in a smooth, empty voice. "Is a river. But not a linear one. It's more circular. Like a three dimensional river. In a ring shape. But twisted. Like an upside down eight. Because it starts before it ends, and vice versa. Everything that can happen has already happened, or won't ever happen, and if you can't tell the difference between the two, then nothing you do will ever matter. Except when it does."
I frowned at her. That was…deeply unhelpful. Elonwy had said this teacher was good at what she did. I had to assume I was missing something. Her eyes fixed on me. "You can see the infinite possibilities, can you not?"
"I can," I nodded. "At least sometimes. I have a special ability that opens up that sense. I can prune the potential outcomes. Or at least that's what I was told it's called."
She grimaced. "Sloppy," she said sourly. "Destroying timelines to focus your potential outcomes. As I said, time is a river. Rather than divert the flow, it is wiser to simply swim. Utilize your ability." She gestured for me to come up and stand beside her. "Today, we perform a small exercise." She drew out a coin. "I will flip this coin. I want you to prune the timelines where it lands on tails. Remember. Only heads. Anything else is unacceptable."
I took a deep breath, then nodded. She flipped. I reached for Limbo, incarnating my demon, and the world bloomed into an endless web of possibilities. There were quite a few nearby, but most of them were some offshoot where the coin didn't land or something else happened alongside the flip. In terms of potential outcomes for the toss, there were only a few. I lashed out, shattering a few timelines, focusing the outcome to land on heads. The last viable timeline nearby was locked in, heads was assured, and then, inside that timeline, Professor Saunders winked at me. I saw her do…something, and she reached OUT of the timeline she was in and plucked the coin from another, the motion overlapping with her coin flip as it landed…on tails.
Gaping at her, I stared down at the coin. I saw what she meant. She was saying the same thing as Professor Hawkins, about time being four dimensional. She'd moved between the timestreams seamlessly and then come back, even sidestepping the effects of Limbo entirely.
She passed me the coin, gesturing for me to sit down. I did, still staring at the golden disc as if it help the answers to the universe. Which, to be fair, it very well might. "Time," she repeated. "Is a river. Move within its flow, reverse it, swim upstream. But it doesn't stop. Not really. Not on a grand scale. Which means no matter what your opponent does, you always have a way to move. Always have another path. That is the truth of divination. For it is in divination that we illuminate our truest path. And there is ALWAYS a path to take."
Her voice was no longer serene or flat, now it was sharp, and her eyes glittered like dark chips of obsidian, sharpened to a monomolecular edge. "Welcome to Introduction to Divination Principles. Today, you enter a whole new world." I swallowed hard as I took in the excited gleam in the eyes of the other students. I wasn't the only newbie, from what I could tell, but even the students I knew had been here a while seemed excited. Now I got what Elonwy had meant about Saunders being a good teacher. I had a feeling I'd be learning a lot here.
Unlike Prof Hawkins, Professor Saunders was NOT understated in terms of her living situation. In fact, even from the outside her house was a sprawling palatial estate that dwarfed most of the ones I'd ever seen. When I arrived at the gate, there was an attendant waiting for me there, ready to escort me off to the side entrance where the class was supposed to enter.
"You were expected," said the servant who met me at the gate. "Please, come this way. Lady Allegra has been eagerly awaiting your presence."
I blinked at that, for several reasons, but tagged along as the gaunt man in the robe led me around the side of the house. "So…what do you mean expected?" I asked slowly. "Like, she knew I was coming because I signed up? Because if this is another 'only one person in the class' situation I'm going to be so pissed."
He laughed at that. "Of course not. The lady deals in fate. In chance and happenstance. Some beings hold greater sway in the rivers of time than others, and those stones, when dropped into the current, produce ripples that even the most amateurish diviners can perceive. With our Lady's skill, your nature was as a sun in an empty sky, obvious and shining with a light that could not be denied."
That brought me up short. "Wait, you mean she can tell I have fate manipulation abilities?" I asked in surprise. My class in Doom Sovereign had been the Fate Walker, and even beyond that, I had always had an…interesting destiny. Even for an Ascendant I attracted strange and unique events at a rate that beggared belief. From conversations with my family and even other candidates, my advancement had been far faster than it should have been, and I had experienced far more than most.
For a while I had assumed that was because I was descended from three different gods, but comments had been made in the past that even for a divine descendant, my luck was a little bit absurd when it came to running into strange things.
Part of what had drawn me to this particular class was the knowledge that while it was time related, it would presumably allow me to learn to access the abilities of someone like Azazel more accurately. My first minister was a big fan of divination, and giving him access to an actual teacher who could show him how it worked would make that even more useful.
When we arrived at the closed door in question, the hooded man knocked heavily on the door in a strange, staggered pattern. The door opened and a dark haired girl with pale skin and black painted lips glared at him. "Oh for- Dylan, what the hell did I tell you about the whole 'mysterious envoy' persona. You look ridiculous. Did you give this one the child of destiny speech? I told you to stop doing that."
I froze. Oh. Apparently I had been overthinking things.
Dylan, aka robe boy, pouted at the girl. "Sally!" he hissed in embarrassment. "Don't ruin my reputation in front of the seekers of knowledge. The Lady is expecting this one in particular. Beyond that, my own senses foretold his arrival. The fate of this one is particularly puissant."
"No, she isn't," Sally snapped. "She said she forgot to send directions to the side door to one of the kids and that they would probably show up at the front gate. That's not PROPHECY, it's forgetfulness. And you don't HAVE senses. You've had to borrow credits from me six different times because you lost all yours in the gambling competitions. You are the least prescient human being I've ever met. I'm including Lyle in that assessment, and the other day, he walked into a HOLE because he got distracted by a butterfly."
She turned to shoot me an apologetic grimace. "Look, ignore everything this idiot said to you. He takes this nonsense way too seriously. The Prof is actually a pretty perceptive lady, but she tends to hyperfocus on the future and fail to notice the obvious. My brother has picked up ALL her bad habits and none of her good ones."
"Sally, knock it off!" Dylan whined. "You're making me sound bad to the new kid!"
She jerked her chin at me. "Come on in, class hasn't started yet. Prof said we'd be starting late today, and she's pretty reliable about that kind of stuff." Letting me in, she led me down the hall towards the front of the house. I was pretty sure. Given the obvious spatial warping it was hard to get a bead on where I was.
"Look, contrary to what he said, this isn't some hyper mystical mumbo jumbo. I know divination sounds mysterious, but really it's just like statistics. But backwards. And some of it you do without any information to go off of. The Prof is a good teacher, and if you have a knack for this stuff you'll pick it up lickety split."
"What about the whole fate thing?" I asked as we walked. "He said that some people have stronger fates. Is that real?"
"Oh sure," she nodded. "But singularities are rare as hen's teeth. The Prof says she hasn't had one in her class in a few millennia. The chances of you being one are pretty damned slim. Just…don't worry about Dylan. He's harmless. Focus on learning more about the class and making the most of your time. The Prof knows how to educate people according to their talents, so the better you do the more you actually learn."
That sounded fair enough, so I decided to just wait and talk to her about it in person. Making a bunch of half assed guesses wasn't likely to be helpful to me long term. This was a school, I was obviously here to get knowledge from experts, not to try to come up with my own solutions to problems that had already been studied.
We walked down a long, thin hallway with nothing on the walls except candles. I was pretty sure it was some kind of servant's corridor. After a few turns, we came to a large lecture hall type chamber with descending tiered seating. The hall was set up in sort of a cone, with the thinnest point being a rounded alcove with a single large table set into the floor. The top of the table was some kind of dark granite, the base was wood, and a long figure stood at the side, a placid smile on her mostly blank face.
"Welcome," she said, in a voice that didn't go above a whisper but rode the acoustics of the room to sound like it was coming from right behind my ear. To Introduction to Divination Principles. I am Allegra Saunders, and I believe you've already introduced yourself, Mr. Wyndham."
Sally sighed. "He didn't, Prof. You skipped that part."
The detached woman blinked. "Ah, my mistake. How rude of me. You may proceed, of course, I didn't mean to cut you off."
"I'm…uh, Shane Wyndham," I said slowly. "But I got by Solomon."
She nodded happily. "Of course you do. Please, come sit down, I saved you a spot by the front. You won't have to run as far when the incident occurs."
I glanced at Sally, who winced and shrugged. She did NOT, tellingly, say anything about not worrying about the proclamation. Lovely. I followed the gaze of Professor Saunders down to the front of the room and sat. I was watched by about a dozen people, mostly older. Unlike my initial class, this one was much more crowded, with plenty of people hoping to learn about divination. I could see Dylan the robe guy in the back, sulking, and Sally sat next to him, much to his annoyance. When I took my seat, I smiled up at Professor Saunders, and she nodded blithely before returning her serene gaze to the class.
"Time," she said in a smooth, empty voice. "Is a river. But not a linear one. It's more circular. Like a three dimensional river. In a ring shape. But twisted. Like an upside down eight. Because it starts before it ends, and vice versa. Everything that can happen has already happened, or won't ever happen, and if you can't tell the difference between the two, then nothing you do will ever matter. Except when it does."
I frowned at her. That was…deeply unhelpful. Elonwy had said this teacher was good at what she did. I had to assume I was missing something. Her eyes fixed on me. "You can see the infinite possibilities, can you not?"
"I can," I nodded. "At least sometimes. I have a special ability that opens up that sense. I can prune the potential outcomes. Or at least that's what I was told it's called."
She grimaced. "Sloppy," she said sourly. "Destroying timelines to focus your potential outcomes. As I said, time is a river. Rather than divert the flow, it is wiser to simply swim. Utilize your ability." She gestured for me to come up and stand beside her. "Today, we perform a small exercise." She drew out a coin. "I will flip this coin. I want you to prune the timelines where it lands on tails. Remember. Only heads. Anything else is unacceptable."
I took a deep breath, then nodded. She flipped. I reached for Limbo, incarnating my demon, and the world bloomed into an endless web of possibilities. There were quite a few nearby, but most of them were some offshoot where the coin didn't land or something else happened alongside the flip. In terms of potential outcomes for the toss, there were only a few. I lashed out, shattering a few timelines, focusing the outcome to land on heads. The last viable timeline nearby was locked in, heads was assured, and then, inside that timeline, Professor Saunders winked at me. I saw her do…something, and she reached OUT of the timeline she was in and plucked the coin from another, the motion overlapping with her coin flip as it landed…on tails.
Gaping at her, I stared down at the coin. I saw what she meant. She was saying the same thing as Professor Hawkins, about time being four dimensional. She'd moved between the timestreams seamlessly and then come back, even sidestepping the effects of Limbo entirely.
She passed me the coin, gesturing for me to sit down. I did, still staring at the golden disc as if it help the answers to the universe. Which, to be fair, it very well might. "Time," she repeated. "Is a river. Move within its flow, reverse it, swim upstream. But it doesn't stop. Not really. Not on a grand scale. Which means no matter what your opponent does, you always have a way to move. Always have another path. That is the truth of divination. For it is in divination that we illuminate our truest path. And there is ALWAYS a path to take."
Her voice was no longer serene or flat, now it was sharp, and her eyes glittered like dark chips of obsidian, sharpened to a monomolecular edge. "Welcome to Introduction to Divination Principles. Today, you enter a whole new world." I swallowed hard as I took in the excited gleam in the eyes of the other students. I wasn't the only newbie, from what I could tell, but even the students I knew had been here a while seemed excited. Now I got what Elonwy had meant about Saunders being a good teacher. I had a feeling I'd be learning a lot here.