Lith went to the Headmaster’s office and because of the queue, he had to wait quite a bit. He couldn’t say it was an emergency. Lith knew there was a traitor if not more than one inside the academy, so he couldn’t afford to alert them.
When his turn finally arrived, the first thing he did was to close the door behind himself and ask Linjos to activate all of his office protections. Only when the arrays in the room started to hum, their magic so densely packed to be visible to the naked eye, Lith told him about what he had discovered.
“Anti mana toxins at the Lightning Griffon? This is indeed a serious matter.” Linjos was about to use his communication amulet, but Lith stopped him.
“Not only there. They are also here at the White Griffon.” His words made Linjos turn pale.
“We had no such cases here. Our average of promoted students is better than the previous years…”
“Yet the grades are dropping, remember?” Lith cut him short.
“Tanash is not only suffering from the toxins, but also from wasting three months following his father’s agenda. If he kept practicing magic, he would have probably got used to the toxins over time and his grades would have just dropped.
“Have you already forgotten about the box I found a few months ago? How it was delivered from Kandria, where the plague started?”
Linjos’s brain was spinning at full gear, reaching Lith’s same conclusions and even more.
“By the gods! It would explain a lot. Before Balkor’s attack, it would have created the perfect scenario for the old noble households. No matter if the civil war happened or not, they would have crippled the competition anyway.
“Even now, the heirs of their noble rivals and the mages of commoner origin are getting expelled or being deemed as low value assets for the Kingdom. It proves their point that magical legacies beat effort.
“If the civil war starts, they only need to increase the dosage to make all the young mages useless in battle until the problem is discovered. Even worse, the poisoning could have not been exposed until it was too late, if never at all.
The only thing I cannot understand is why they made their own children receive low grades too. Unless…”
“Unless it was part of their plan.” Lith continued. “After all, the only thing that really matters is the result of the final exam of the fourth and fifth year. They can afford lowering their grades during the first two trimesters, since it has no consequences.
“During the final exam, they can perform much better and they will likely ask to be re-evaluated. That way, if the results don’t match with the daily evaluation, it will prove that your teaching methods are wrong.”
“It’s worse than that.” Linjos pondered. “By affecting the other academies, they managed to make it go unnoticed. Since the same thing happened everywhere, not even the Crown got worried. I can spot only a flaw in their plan.
“If all the students belonging to the old noble households get their grades back up at once, it would arouse suspicion. Unless of course, they either sacrifice the fourth year, using the winter break as a cover, to ‘regain’ their talent during the last year, or they make only the elite take full marks now while the others gradually recover their performances.
“Anyway, they can’t repeat the trick again. Not now that the odds of a civil war are almost zero. My only question is: why did the White Griffon receive the same treatment instead of a worse one? If you are right and I have little doubt about it, I would have expected them to strike harder.
They need to take me out of the picture, their plan ended up helping me instead.”
“My hypothesis is that they underestimated you and the control you managed to achieve over the academy. The lack of infighting and the Ballots prevented the worse from happening.” Lith replied.
“Maybe.” Linjos couldn’t stop thinking about how fast Balkor found out their hiding spot. Actually, he found the hiding spots of all those that followed Linjos’s protocol so fast that the attacks happened almost at the same time.
It had several implications. First, it meant that every academy had traitors or there was someone close to the Crown that leaked the information to Balkor. Either way, the situation was deadly serious.
Second, the attack had been the perfect opportunity to destroy Linjos’s work, if not to kill Linjos himself.
‘Why did they let it slip under their nose? Unless…’ He thought.
“Lith, be honest with me.”
Linjos had turned pale, leaving Lith surprised. The Headmaster looked like a man that had just found a venomous spider resting on his shoulder.
“How did you discover the toxin? Did Professor Marth’s diagnostic spell work?”
“I used my own spell. The one we devised during the plague didn’t work.” Lith shook his head.
“It was aimed to detect parasites rather than toxins since the latter fade away over time.”
“Just as I feared.” Linjos nodded. “Please, check if I have been infected too.”
Lith pretended to chant a spell while actually using Invigoration on the Headmaster, who didn’t miss it requiring physical contact. It was the first time Linjos had seen such a spell.
“It doesn’t make sense.” Lith was flabbergasted.
“You are poisoned too, but the amount of toxin is much lesser than the one I detected in the Tanash kid.”
“It makes perfect sense instead.” Linjos replied.
“A student may not notice the disruption of their own mana flow, but any competent magician would. That’s why they must have started poisoning me only right before Balkor’s attack, when my mind was elsewhere. I noticed being weaker than usual, but I thought it was because of the stress.
“Also, with Hatorne disappearance, the traitors have no idea how to adjust the dosage. Balkor’s change of plans was unpredictable. I wouldn’t be surprised by discovering that poisoning me and likely most of the Professors, was a last minute attempt to get rid of me.
“Since the toxins build up over time, there was only so much they could do. Not to mention it would be hard for me to miss having my powers halved in a few hours. I would contact Manohar and it’s unlikely he wouldn’t discover the truth, just like you did.”
Lith felt relieved, he had convinced Linjos of the presence of a threat to the academy despite having very little proof and without blowing his cover. The Headmaster waved his hand, making four magic crystals appear at the corners of his desk.
He put his communication amulet right in the middle, activating a secure channel with the Crown, relaying the information he had just acquired and requesting the intervention of a royal constable.
“We need to have the staff and the students examined.” Lith heard Linjos expressing his immediate worries to the King.
“I can’t do it by myself without risking to alert the culprits. It’s also necessary to have all those that failed the second semester examined. Some may actually be talentless slackers, but others could as well be innocent victims…”
While the Headmaster was mentioning Lith’s contribution, his sight blurred. Lith suddenly felt lightheaded, while images kept rapidly appearing and disappearing.
‘Good grief, finally! I managed to change the damn future!’
He watched the old vision from the beginning, the fall of the White Griffon academy, followed by the start of the civil war until his whole family was butchered. Lith didn’t feel scared by those images.
They were fading away, getting more blurred by the second until they completely disappeared. Everything went blank and for a long second Lith held his breath waiting for the new future.
What he saw was a quick series of sunrises and sunsets over the academy, the leaves of the forest’s trees became red and fell, the snow turned everything into a white landscape.
Then, the sun rose higher and higher, melting the snow while new leaves replaced the fallen ones. Lith could sense something going on inside the academy, despite looking at it from a great distance.
He could hear voices and see flashes of light coming out the windows, but he wasn’t able to understand what was going on, the distance made everything muffled.
‘Well, at least the academy is not crumbling anymore. This is a good sign.’ Lith thought.
Suddenly he was transported inside the castle. He was now able to recognize the voices as screams and explosion while the flashes of light were caused by spells. Lith watched Phloria die, stabbed through the heart by a long knife.
The culprit was unknown, the weapon looked real, but the hand wielding it was just a shadow. Rage and pain ravaged his mind.
‘Is that a f*cking Abomination or even this damn vision doesn’t know who will do it?’ Even if he understood none of it was real, Lith tried to stop the blade with spirit magic first and to heal Phloria later, but to no avail.
No matter how much he struggled, he found impossible to move from the spot he was forced watching from.
The vision moved back to Lutia. The village was quiet, but a shadow fell from the sky. One after the other, the members of the Queen’s corps patrolling the zone fell, their bodies dismembered or disintegrated.
The shadow reached Lith’s house, killing his family in the blink of an eye. This time they would not suffer, no unnamed soldier would kidnap and r*pe his sisters, but they would die nonetheless.
‘No! Why? What did they do to you, you f*cking bastard?’ Lith inwardly screamed.
The corpses of his family danced in front of his eyes. Even Rena and his husband wouldn’t get spared. The shadow was careful and meticulous, leaving no witness behind.
Panic invaded Lith’s heart. According to the new vision, he wasn’t collateral damage anymore, his loved ones were now the intended target.
“Lith, what happens? Why are you screaming?” The King asked, his voice worried.
Lith discovered he had fallen on the ground and Linjos was at his side checking his condition.
Lith froze, searching for a proper answer. The Headmaster knew of the dryad’s gift that led to his past vision, so Lith could freely share it with him.
Lith stuttered some words while recovering from the shock, not being able to make any sense. He didn’t just see things happening, the magic bonded to his soul made everything real and painful. It was like being forced to live those events before time rewinded.
“It’s all right, calm down and tell me what’s wrong.” Linjos helped him to get back on his feet. Lith pondered about the vision, searching for the best way to describe it, when his paranoia cranked up to eleven.
‘The future is much better for the Kingdom, but much worse for me. Whatever happens to the academy will surely take top priority. Between the toxins and the traitors, the Kingdom’s resources will be stretched thin.
‘I can’t trust them to protect my family out of the goodness of their heart, nor I want to owe the Crown favor that big. I need to play this smart, but I don’t know how.’
Lith was on the verge of panic. Lying about the vision to make it more convenient was easy, the hard part was finding a way to force them to help him without twisting the vision’s meaning.
It was the first time that he had to face such a big issue alone.
‘I can’t afford to make any mistake here. F*ck my pride. Solus, I need your help!’
‘Yes?’ She answered timidly. Solus was afraid it was once again a butt call that would end shortly. Lith shared with her all the memories of the last 24 hours up to that point.
‘By my maker, this is terrible!’ Thanks to the mind link the events became part of her memory too in a split second.
‘You are right, I too think that without the threat of the civil war we would be stuck in the background. The best way to get their attention is to tell them the truth, but with a few changes.’
Hearing her talk about them still using the “we”, helped Lith to regain his cool, soothing his anguish. Solus pondered for a few seconds before answering.
‘You must say that after your family dies, you will die too and so will the royal couple.’ Solus said.
‘What? Why?’ Lith wasn’t able to understand her reasoning.
‘No time, Linjos is already calling for help, you have remained still for too long, please trust me on this.’ Their mind link was fast, allowing the whole conversation to last just a couple of seconds, but they would still need the time to think.
“I’m all right, Headmaster.” Lith noticed that both Linjos and the King seemed to be extremely worried.
“Good to hear.” King Meron replied. “Bring Manohar here anyway. We need him to devise a new diagnostic spell for the infected students. He can also check on Lith while he is at it. Just to be safe.”
Lith used those few moments to decide what to do.
‘Please, explain your plan to me.’ He asked while the King was still talking.
‘Adding the death of the Royals after yours it’s a double failsafe.
‘After all, they know the vision shows what your soul craves the most. Putting the Royals in there while you are still alive would make you a suspect. If you die first, however, they will be forced to protect their investment, you.
‘Also, if you are allegedly dead, they can only think that whoever will attempt to kill your family will come for them later, making it their problem too.’
