I stood up, Celestial... the word stayed with me. It did not feel like something the system had chosen randomly. It felt like a category I was supposed to already know about, the way someone might casually mention their family without explaining what a family was, because the concept was universally understood.
Except I did not understand it.
I wrote Celestial? in the margin of my notebook, and I paused when I noted that the objectives I had laid down in the previous loops were gone.
Right, except for my progress, everything else resets to the beginning, and the only way for me to make everything permanent was simple: don’t die.
Ah, how hard was it not to die as an Acolyte when even mages are being torn to pieces... well, that answer was not something I wanted to dwell upon for now.
I picked up my staff, and the three charms settled with a soft ring, and I pushed open the tent flap.
The camp was in its usual rhythm, one that I was unconsciously beginning to fully memorize.
How long would it take for me to soon know every sound and change that happened around me in this first hour? My Observation was growing, and I think I know why.
I crossed toward the cook fire, and Dara looked up with the expression she used when she was noting something, and Bari was complaining about the porridge, and everything was where it had always been this early in the hour.
Rex was eating his porridge and watching the pyramid.
I picked up the ladle and found the salt, pepper, and thyme, and began the small corrections I always made. Making small, minor adjustments to get the best with just these few ingredients on hand.
There was no new notification, but I knew I had reached the edge of one. I could almost taste it, but I was truly focused on cooking; it was just a way to relax my mind, and I would not sink in more time than it was worth.
Across the fire, Rex was silent in the way he had been silent every morning, bowl in his hands, eyes on the black surface of the pyramid, his attention apparently occupied by the same fascination all of us felt.
Nothing about him suggested anything unusual. He was a noble boy staring at an ancient ruin, which was exactly what a noble boy was supposed to be doing on the fourth morning of an expedition to examine one.
Yet at the moment the madness starts, he always vanishes... that right there was not normal.
I served myself and sat down.
"Good morning, Rex," I said.
He looked over. I thought there was a bit of surprise in his eyes. Usually, I went out of my way to avoid him, and I noticed a small adjustment in his expression from neutral to mildly irritated.
"Voss," he said.
Saying the first thing that came to mind, I asked,
"What discipline are you planning to pursue when we select in third year?"
I thought he was going to do his usual smirk and ignore me, and I was surprised again when he did not take his time answering, which was a bit unusual.
From what I know about him before now, Rex considered most conversations beneath the pace he would have preferred to operate at, and his replies to Acolytes he considered below his station often arrived with a slight, deliberate pause, or he would usually not reply at all.
"Flame, probably," he said. "It runs in my family."
"Oh, I thought you would be going for more occult studies?"
"I do not have the patience for it."
"Oh, with your Anima Sensitivity, even Veilcraft would be easily mastered."
"Veilcraft is not offered to Acolytes of noble houses," he said. "It is considered too dangerous for political purposes." Then he smirked, "We all cannot be like you, Voss, with no obligation but to our knowledge, we are leaders and our path has been laid out for us from the moment we took our first breath in this world."
I blinked and nodded at the heavy-handed speech that was filled with so much grandiosity it was almost laughable, but I tried not to be distracted by it, because part of what he had said was incorrect.
Veilcraft, one of the most sought-after occult fields, was restricted in the Academy, but not on the basis of family; it was restricted on the basis of Anima Sensitivity scores, which I had memorized during my second year for reasons I could no longer fully recall.
Rex’s Sensitivity score, which I had seen in the expedition roster, would have qualified him if he had applied.
It was a small error. The kind of error a person made when they were certain of something they had never actually verified.
He had probably been told the noble-house version at home and had never thought to check it against the Academy’s own documentation, because why would he?
This would have been my thinking before this loop began, because in my mind, this was the only logical reason for Rex thinking that Veilcraft was not offered to nobles.
I did not like him before now, and so I would unconsciously not think deeply about his answers and dismiss them, but now I had time to think about his answers, and they were just not lining up correctly.
House Aldran was one of the most prominent factions in our academy, as they had many Adepts and even Arcanists teaching in the Academy, and the Vice-Chancellor was from this House, and there was no way they would restrict their family members from studying Veilcraft and the occult.
Either Rex was deliberately messing with me, or there was something here that was wrong.
Then I watched him eat for a while without appearing to watch him, because I had Observation at thirty-one now, reaching the Acolyte rank, and watching people without appearing to had become something I did well.