I Am The Greatest Femboy Mage

Elian’s cheeks were still hot when he left the healer’s office half an hour later, the healer, an old woman that looked more ancient than the school itself, confirmed that nothing was wrong with him.

In fact, after the awakening of the second petal, his body had apparently grown stronger, durable, with more mana available than what he had before.

The old woman had muttered something about ’vitality bleed’ under her breath while running a hand along his arm, more fascinated than concerned, and sent him off with nothing more than a vague instruction to eat something substantial before evening and a look that suggested she’d very much like to keep him in that office another hour if the schedule allowed it.

It didn’t. Vale’s note had been specific about the time.

He was a whole five minutes late.

He found the east yard already—obviously, he thought— occupied by the time he arrived.

Rudra Suryanshi standing apart from the others with his arms crossed, Oizys Rosemere seated with perfect composure on the low stone wall.

Darrow Tanner was sprawled comfortably beside her like the wait cost him nothing, giving Elian an enthusiastic wave when he came.

Milena was leaning against the yard’s entrance, watching him approach with an expression that shifted, briefly, into something like surprise.

"You’re late, and why are you glowing?" she said, by way of greeting.

"Sorry... I was at the healer’s office."

The second petal’s light sat warmer against the first now, steadier, visible even in daylight in a way it hadn’t been yesterday.

"Healer’s office?" Milena prompted.

"I had to make sure that nothing was wrong after..." He glanced at the Everbloom, "After I froze the entire classroom."

"I heard." Darrow didn’t bother hiding his grin as he walked up to them.

"Ines is telling anyone who’ll listen. Very dramatic retelling, really. I think you grew ten feet tall in the version I heard."

"I did not grow ten feet tall." Elian protested, still trying to calm his burning cheeks.

"Disappointing." The taller boy shook his head. "That story was better."

Rudra said nothing, though his gaze cut toward the staff—toward the second lit petal specifically—with an intensity that lingered a beat too long before he deliberately looked away.

Vale arrived a moment later, almost like she was waiting until everyone was done with the gossip. She walked in the same unannounced way she always did, taking in the five of them with her usual flat assessment before her eyes landed on Elian and stayed there slightly longer than the others.

"Two petals," she said, her expression shifting into mild amusement. "Already?"

"It wasn’t on purpose."

"Very little worth having ever is."

She didn’t elaborate further, already turning to address the group as a whole, the faint edge of something almost like satisfaction crossing her face before it smoothed back into her usual unreadable calm.

"Good. That saves us some time." She considered something for a short moment.

"Sit, all of you. Plans have just been changed, today we start with why you’re actually here."

The earthern seats didn’t rise from the floor today, apparently having been a first day luxury. So all of them sat in a loose arc on the floor today, Vale herself sitting facing them.

Vale didn’t waste time working up to her topic. She never seemed to.

"Fourteen years ago," she said, no specific theatrics in her voice.

"Seven Resonance artifacts woke within a single season, after centuries of dormancy. You already know that much—Aldous covers it well enough, if you were paying attention instead of doodling in the margins."

Her eyes flicked briefly toward Darrow, who did not look remotely repentant.

"What he doesn’t teach, because the continental powers have spent fourteen years agreeing not to let him, is why."

Elian shifted, noticing that nobody asked why.

In fact, the yard had gone very still.

"The Sundering War wasn’t seven kingdoms distrusting each other’s intentions. That’s the version everyone’s comfortable believing, because the truth is worse."

Vale’s gaze swept the loose arc of them, unhurried, deliberate.

"There was a cult operating beneath all of it. Not metaphorically, but literally. An actual organized body of demonic worship, old enough that most scholars had stopped believing it existed outside children’s stories. They didn’t cause the Sundering. But they saw seven artifacts wake at once, seven bloodlines suddenly holding power nobody alive had trained against, and they understood something the rest of us didn’t figure out until it was nearly too late."

"Which was?"

Oizys asked, quiet, composed, though something in her posture had gone very carefully still.

"That Resonance-bonded power doesn’t answer to command, it couldn’t. It can’t be conscripted, can’t be threatened into obedience the way conventional casters can. Seven artifacts, awake and unaligned to any single crown, was the single largest threat to centralized control this continent had seen in a thousand years."

Vale’s jaw tightened, fractionally.

"So they didn’t attack the bondholders directly. They were smarter than that. They spent months feeding half-truths into every court that would listen—forged new truths, staged incidents, whispered accusations that each kingdom’s rival was harboring its bondholder as a weapon aimed at the others. By the time anyone thought to ask where the rumors actually originated, eighteen months of war had already happened, and every single bondholder from that generation was staring at death’s door, some of the having already died."

Milena’s hand had gone very still against her own knee. Elian noticed it before he understood why it mattered.

"All seven?" Rudra asked, voice low, the first thing he’d said since sitting down.

"All seven. Hunted by armies who genuinely believed they were defending their own people, manipulated into doing exactly what the cult wanted without a single soldier among them ever knowing who was actually pulling the thread."

Something flickered behind Vale’s expression, old and carefully contained.

"I know, because five of them were mine. My unit. People I’d trained beside for a decade, who I watched die convinced their own allies had turned on them, when the truth was considerably uglier than that."

The yard’s silence took on a different weight.

"The engagement at Ashveil wasn’t a battle against seven kingdoms," Vale went on.

"It was me, alone, fighting against the army to find the cult’s actual leadership before they could finish what they’d started, and making sure they didn’t get the chance to try it again for a very long time."

A pause, deliberate.

"I am not, for the record, a Resonance holder myself. Never bonded to anything. That’s precisely why I survived long enough to end it—I wasn’t a target, until I made myself one."

"You said ’for a very long time,’" Darrow said. His voice had lost its usual easy lightness entirely.

"Not permanently?"

"No."

Vale held his gaze, unflinching.

"Cults like that don’t die when you remove the head, since the head was never the source. They go quiet. They rebuild, slower, more carefully, waiting for exactly the conditions that would make trying again worthwhile."

She let that settle before continuing.

"Six months ago, we started getting confirmation they’re active again. Different name attached to the leadership this time—something being whispered in the circles that track this sort of thing as Gojira, which nobody’s confirmed is a person, a title, or something considerably less human than either."

"And they’re doing this again," Oizys said. "Hunting resonance artifact holders, and..."

"Hunting anyone who represents an unaligned concentration of power they can’t predict or control."

Vale’s eyes moved down the row of them, slow, deliberate, landing on each in turn.

"A newly-woken Resonance bond after twenty four years of nothing, Elian Valcourt. A royal heir with combat capability nobody expected, Oizys Rosemere Selenoire."

Elian, and unnaturaly enough, Milena turned to Oizys, genuine surprise in their eyes at the reveal of her status.

"A commoner sharp enough to be recruited by someone who actually noticed him. A Zimovian noble carrying old, dangerous blood-work nobody outside her own family properly understands."

A final pause, on Rudra.

"A crown prince whose death could destabilize an entire foreign power on its own, without needing an artifact attached to make him worth removing."

Nobody spoke.

"You are, whether you asked for it or not, exactly the kind of unaligned variable that got seven people killed twenty four years ago," Vale said, quiet now, all the earlier dryness gone out of her voice entirely.

"I am not telling you this to frighten you, and i am still going to tell what the original goal of the cult had been yet. I’m telling you because the five of you are going to be trained considerably harder than anyone else in this school, starting today, and I’d rather you understand why before you start resenting me for it."

She shifted.

"And It’s not like more targets like you don’t exist out there, they do. Two of my connections are personally training two different groups right now, one in Meruvarsha and one in Zimovia. You were the only five i could personally get my hands on."

Darrow raised a hand.

"Yes?" Rowan Vale turned to him.

"You told us you weren’t a resonance artifact holder. Then what exactly are you master?"

Rowan allowed a simple smile to slip onto her face, a rare occasion as Elian had come to recognize it.

"A simple old mage, I just ended up being luckier than most."

"That doesn’t explain how you managed to defeat an army made from three of this continent’s greatest ruling factions." Milena interrupted.

Interestingly enough, the answer for that came from Oizys and not Vale.

"Because she’s the only human that’s ever been recorded to not have an elemental affinity."

A pause, deliberate as the princess considered just how much to reveal. Elian guessed this was most likely the price of Vale’s earlier intrusion.

"Lacking an elemental affinity doesn’t mean you have nothing, it means the opposite, it means that mana listens to you no matter whatever you ask of it."

Vale’s expression flickered—surprise, quickly smoothed over, though not quite fast enough to properly hide it, at least from the five students in front of her.

"You did your research."

"My mother insists on knowing the credentials of anyone entrusted with my education."

Oizys said it evenly, without any particular pride attached, just fact laid out the way she seemed to lay out most things.

"There’s exactly one recorded case of true elemental absence in the continental archive. I didn’t realize it was you until i enrolled here."

"Wait." Darrow held up a hand again, visibly working through it.

"So Elian has all the elements, and you have none, and somehow that’s the same thing?"

"Somehow." Vale agreed, dry again now that the moment of exposure had passed, some of her usual composure sliding back into place. "Though I should say Elian’s case might be more strange that mine."

"An affinity is a filter, Darrow. It tells mana what shape you’re expecting from it before you’ve even asked. Take the filter away entirely and mana stops assuming anything about you at all. It simply listens."

A pause for a faint, humorless smile.

"Turns out that’s considerably more dangerous than any single element, once you’ve had a few good years to figure out what to do with it."

"And no one else has ever had that," Milena said, still visibly recalculating everything she thought she knew about the woman standing in front of them.

"Not that’s ever been recorded. Elian’s situation is different—he didn’t lose the filter, he’s compatible with every setting of it at once, which is its own kind of rare."

Vale’s gaze moved to him again, briefly.

"Whether that ends up being closer to what I have or something else entirely, we’ll find out as those petals keep opening."

She let the silence that followed sit for a moment before continuing, business settling back over her like a coat she’d only briefly taken off.

"That’s more than I intended to explain about myself today, and I don’t intend to make a habit of it. The point," she said, tone sharpening back into instruction, "is that all five of you are dealing with variables the rest of this school doesn’t have language for yet. Which means the rest of this school isn’t where you’re going to get properly trained."

She stood, brushing off her robes, the conversation’s more personal thread closing as decisively as it had opened.

"Starting tomorrow, this group trains separately through all of your classes. Combat, theory, and anything else I decide you need, on a schedule the five of you don’t get to complain about."

"And today?" Rudra asked.

"Today, you’re dismissed early, because apparently one of you already flooded a classroom with ice and I’d rather the rest of you not attempt to match him on your first day."

Vale’s eyes cut toward Elian, something almost fond buried under the dryness.

"Go eat something. All of you. I have a feeling this is going to be a longer term than most."

Before they all stood up, Vale interrupted them once more.

"Before you go though, I would like to hear one thing from you all personally, and I would prefer that none of you lie to me or hold anything back. What are all your elemental affinities?"

Darrow answered first, seemingly without any hesitation.

"Water and Earth."

Vale looked impressed.

"Duel elemental, that’s good."

Next was Elian who decided that question applied to him too.

"All of them."

Milena answered immediately after him.

"Ice."

Next was Oizys.

"Wind."

Rudra seemed to hesitating, looking like he was having some kind of internal battle with himself as he decided if he wanted to speak or not.

"You don’t have to if you don’t want to, It’ll just be more difficult without, but i can manage things accordingly." Vale offered.

Rudra didn’t act like he heard that, instead speaking on his own terms.

"I’m aligned with fire and lightning."

Rowan Vale nodded, then she turned around already starting to walk away as she dismissed class.

"That’s all for today, I will see you all tomorrow, same time."

***

Milena fell into step beside Elian without discussion, the two of them peeling off from the others without much ceremony as the group scattered toward their respective destinations.

"You weren’t at lunch," Elian said, mostly to fill the weird silence, mostly because he’d noticed and hadn’t quite let himself stop noticing.

"I ate earlier."

She said it without missing a beat, gaze fixed straight ahead, nothing in her posture suggesting the lie for what it was except the very faint, half-second delay before she’d answered—the kind of gap Elian wouldn’t have caught a week ago.

But since now he’d spent the entirety of two days learning to read the difference between people performing composure and people actually possessing it, it was starting to become easy.

"Right." He let it go, mostly because pushing felt like it would cost more than it was worth on a day that had already asked enough of both of them.

"Professor Ines was manic, by the way. After the frost thing. I thought you should know."

"I heard." The faintest ghost of a smile crossed her face, there and gone. "Bramwell told half of the scholar batch before you’d even made it to the healer’s wing."

"Of course she did."

They walked the rest of the way in something that wasn’t quite comfortable silence but wasn’t unpleasant either—the specific, companionable quiet of two people who’d both had a longer day than either was fully willing to admit to the other.

Milena peeled off toward her own wing with a short nod that passed, in her personal vocabulary, for a proper goodbye, and Elian continued on alone, staff in hand, entirely unprepared for what waited on the other side of his own door.

He pushed it open without knocking, the way he always did now, already halfway through composing a complaint about frostbite and Ines’s dramatic retelling—

—and stopped dead in the doorway.

Bellamy was very thoroughly occupied.

So was the boy he was occupied with, someone Elian didn’t recognize, dark-haired, taller than Bellamy, pinned gently against the edge of Bellamy’s desk in a way that made it extremely clear this was not their first attempt at this particular activity.

Bellamy opened his eyes at the sound, paused, then promptly ridded both of their mouths of their businesses.

Nobody moved for a full, mortifying second.

Then everyone moved at once.

Bellamy sprang back like he’d been electrocuted, the other boy nearly knocked a stack of books off the desk scrambling for balance, and Elian—face already burning, brain apparently deciding this was the appropriate moment to short-circuit entirely—felt a stray pulse of mana leak straight off the Everbloom’s second petal, reactivating his earlier, frost creeping unbidden across the doorframe in a thin, startled lattice before he managed to choke the feeling back down.

"I—!" Elian said, to the frost, to the room, to absolutely no one in particular.

"I didn’t see anything!"

"You very much did see something!" Bellamy said, voice several notches higher than his usual easy register, one hand still braced against the desk like it was the only thing currently holding him upright.

The other boy had gone a shade of red that put Elian’s own flustered face to shame, tugging his collar straight with hands that weren’t quite steady.

"I should... I have somewhere to be."

"Wren—"

"Somewhere to be, Bell."

Wren was already sidestepping toward the door, offering Elian a tight, mortified nod on the way past that Elian returned with equal, matching mortification, and then he was gone, footsteps retreating fast down the corridor.

Silence settled over the room, broken only by the faint drip of the frost already starting to melt off the doorframe.

"So!" Bellamy said after several seconds of dreadful silence, dropping into his desk chair with the particular deflation of someone whose entire carefully maintained composure had just evaporated at once.

"That’s... Wren."