Chapter 37: The Importance Of Heirarchy.
"Alright alright I get it, can we drop this topic now." Elian sighed, turning back to his notebook.
Darrow shrugged in return.
"Sure, though I’d love to know what the actual reason would be for such a thorough display of exhaustion."
Elian held the question for a moment, wondering if it’d be alright if he let a stranger know of his personal life.
"I was taking lectures," He settled for a half lie-half truth, deciding that it was his turn at poking at a friend.
Darrow nodded, actually thoughtful in his gesture.
"Makes sense, what topic?"
"Circle theory."
"Never mind then!"
This got a chuckle out of Elian, genuine this time, some of the morning’s leftover heaviness finally easing off his shoulders.
"It’s not that dull, actually."
"It’s circle theory, It’s exactly that dull. I say that with all due respect as someone who slept through most of it last time i tried."
Darrow leaned back, notebook still mostly blank in front of him.
"No offense to whatever mad genius came up with the numbering system, but nine circles of ’trust me, it gets harder’ isn’t exactly gripping material at seven in the morning."
"You’ll care eventually."
Elian closed his notebook, done with his work of noting down the date and important things he needed to remember for the lecture.
"I will not, actually, that’s the beauty of it. I’ve made peace with being professionally mediocre at theory for the rest of my academic career."
He said it with total, cheerful sincerity, the kind that made it hard to tell how much was performance and how much was genuinely how little he cared.
"Some of us peak in the practical stuff. Leave the numbers to people who enjoy suffering."
"That’s a very specific philosophy."
"It’s gotten me this far."
Darrow shrugged, easy as ever, though Elian caught—again—that faint half-second of something flickering underneath it, gone before he could properly name what it was.
"Besides," Darrow said, shifting. "I’ve already got someone sitting next to me who is apparently enamored by the idea of circle theory. All I need now is for you to be willing to explain it to me in a way that actually makes sense."
Elian let out a long disappointing exhale, surprised to find himself smiling at the idiot’s proposition.
He then opened his eyes to see Cordelia walking in through the entrance.
She was already taking out her books by the time she had sat next to him, greeting him with a brief ’good morning’ before she opened her notebook.
"Morning," Cordelia said, again for some reason, distracted.
She already flipping to a fresh page with the brisk efficiency of someone whose morning had clearly already involved several hours of something more interesting than sleep.
"Sorry, I know I’m being rude right now. But I had an idea about the calibration rig on the walk over and I need to write it down before it evaporates."
"By all means," Darrow said. "Don’t let us interrupt genius at work."
"I won’t." Elian chimed in.
She didn’t look up.
Darrow caught Elian’s eye when he turned to his own book, grinning, clearly delighted by how little effort it had taken to prove his earlier point.
"See?" He whispered. "Clearly enamored. I rest my case."
"I can hear you," Cordelia said, still writing.
"I’m aware. That was rather the point." A failing attempt at saving his own dignity.
She finally glanced up at that, apparently done with noting down her latest idea.
"You’re Darrow Tanner right?"
"That’s me."
"Are you—" she started, already leaning forward slightly, the same unguarded curiosity she’d shown about the Everbloom on her first day creeping back into her expression.
Whatever she was about to ask never made it out.
Because Saint Petra Sorne’s voice cut across the room, sharp and entirely done waiting for a class room to quiet for her.
"Good morning," She said, waving her hand towards a pile of papers.
Which promptly started floating towards each student in the class room in groups of three.
"Those are all the notes you will need for this semester, anything that i teach which is not included in that won’t be appearing on the exams."
A pause.
"That said, It’ll be wonderful if the lot of you are actually interested in the subject and are not here to fill the mandatory time table count. I have quite the collections of stories and anecdotes prepared in case any of you find healing magic to be fascinating."
She turned around, drawing a few words on the board with the chalk in her hands.
Basics Of Restorative Arts, Number One; Heirarchy.
"I’m sure most of you here are familiar with my title as Saint, but I doubt most of you actually know what that means beyond ’she’s apparently good at her job.’ "
Sorne set the chalk down, turning to face the room properly.
"So, why does hierarchy matter, when it looked down upon in usual mage studies?"
A pause, not exactly waiting for an answer, but giving time for the students to absorb the words.
"Because restorative Arts doesn’t rank practitioners the same way combat tracks rank casters. You won’t hear ’fifth circle healer’ the way you’d hear it about a battlemage. We use a different ladder entirely, because the two disciplines ask fundamentally different things out of a caster."
She turned, writing beneath the heading:
Novice — Practitioner — Warden — Saint.
"Novice, you’ll all start as, obviously. Most of you will graduate this school a Practitioner, capable of stabilizing serious wounds and treating chronic conditions without supervision. That’s a perfectly respectable outcome, and I mean that—most medics that doesn’t go to battlefields after graduating never rise past Practitioner, and they still save considerably more lives than any of the people they serve under."
A ripple of quiet interest went through the room, more genuine than the polite reception Aldous earned yesterday.
"Warden is rarer. It requires not just skill, but a kind of sustained, disciplined empathy most casters burn out on long before they master it—the ability to hold someone else’s suffering at arm’s length long enough to treat it properly, without either detaching from it entirely or letting it collapse you."
Sorne tapped the board.
"There are perhaps two dozen recognized Wardens on the continent currently. I trained under three of them."
She let that settle before continuing.
"Saint is not, despite what the title implies, a measure of piety or virtue. I want that understood clearly, because half the reason I still get invited to unbearable dinner parties is people assuming otherwise."
A dry note crept into her voice.
"It’s a title earned through a single, specific, brutal criterion—a healer who has, at least once, brought someone back from a wound the entire field considered fatal. Not resuscitation. Not luck. A confirmed, witnessed reversal of a textbook mortal injury, verified by other healers on site."
The room had gone properly quiet now.
"There are four living Saints on this continent, two in Selenoire, one in Meruvarsha and one in Zimovia. I am, somewhat inconveniently, one of them."
She said it the way Vale said most things about her own reputation—flat, unbothered, entirely uninterested in performing modesty about it, which Elian found comforting now that he understood the weight behind that nonchalance.
"I don’t lead with that, because it tends to make students either too intimidated to ask questions or too eager to skip straight to the impressive material before they’ve learned to stop the bleeding properly. Neither serves you right now, So..."
Her eyes swept the room, settling briefly on the front row.
"We’ll start at the beginning, same as every other class in this school pretends it doesn’t secretly want to skip. Basic triage. Assessing a wound before you touch it with magic, because the single most common way young healers make things worse is casting before they’ve actually looked and has done the necessary preparations."