"Now that you've heard what happened. I want you to tell me what should have happened. Imagine you're Seraphine's war council. You know Malachar has drained thousands, created his Void Disciples, and is growing stronger by the day. What's your strategy?" He crosses his arms.
"And before anyone says 'stop him before he starts', that option is gone. We're past prevention. I want solutions for the war itself. Different approaches. Better choices, perhaps. Think like commanders, not historians."
Several hands raise,
"Yes, Torin?" Professor Iviz picks him. "Sir, the Four Elemental Orders fought separately and were destroyed. But what if instead of creating the Prismatic Guard, which took time and killed people during training, they'd just coordinated better? Keep mages in their own elements, but fight as a unified force? Fire mages create the offence, water mages for defence and healing, earth mages for fortifications, air mages for reconnaissance and mobility?" he stated, and everybody thought on his words.
"Interesting. A unified command structure without the radical step of combining elements. What's your reasoning?"
"The Prismatic Guard had a one-in-three death rate during training. That's hundreds of mages dead before they even fought. If those same mages had just coordinated their existing powers under one banner, we'd have had more fighters and less controversy. Plus, no breaking sacred traditions means less internal conflict." Torin supported his opinion.
But learning what the professor told us, it has loopholes. But what if... That's when my mind began forming solutions that, at a certain limit, can dodge most of the professor's questions. I quickly jotted down my answer, and Selene also read what I came up with, equally agreeing with the solution.
"You should go next", she suggested. "No, I still want to see how others do first," I say and wait for Torin's turn to be over.
The professor thought over his words before responding, "A pragmatic approach. You'd preserve numbers and unity. But tell me, Malachar could reverse a mage's connection to their element. He turned earth mages to stone with their own power. How does your specialised force handle an enemy who can weaponise their strength against them?"
Torin paused. The question struck him, "You'd... need flexibility. Fighters who could switch tactics if their element was compromised." Professor Iviz goes silent before taking his scroll and marking his points, and speaks again. "Which is exactly what the Prismatic Guard provided. Adaptability. If your fire was turned against you, you could shift to water mid-battle. Your solution has merit, but it assumes the enemy plays fair. Malachar didn't." He completed and pointed towards another student who had raised her hand.
"Elara, you look sceptical. What's your approach?"
Elara stood up confidently before speaking, "Sir, I think we're focusing on the wrong problem. The whole war happened because Malachar got too powerful to stop. So my strategy would be: don't fight him at all. Evacuate."
Several students murmur in surprise, including Iviz.
"Evacuate an entire realm? Explain."
"Malachar's power came from draining mages, right? So stop giving him targets. We have dimensional magic; we proved that when we banished him to the Fractured Void. What if instead of banishing him, we evacuated everyone else? Open portals to uninhabited realms. Move the population through over weeks or months. Leave Malachar with an empty world."
"Bold." Iviz comments. "You're proposing a strategic retreat on a civilizational scale. Continue."
"Without mages to drain, he can't grow stronger. He's stuck at whatever power level he's at. Maybe he drains the planet's core and kills himself in the process. Maybe he just... sits alone in an empty world. Either way, we survive, and he doesn't get what he wants."
"And the three hundred thousand mages he'd already drained? The people turned to stone? You'd abandon them?"
Elara finally hesitates. "If bringing them means risking everyone else... yes. It's cruel, but it saves the majority. And we wouldn't need the Sundering Sacrifice. No, fifty people suffering for eternity."
"A ruthless calculus, Miss Graves. Abandon the wounded to save the healthy. Some would call that pragmatic. Others would call it cowardice. What do you call it?"
"Survival, sir. Sometimes the only way to win is not to play the game on your enemy's terms."
Professor Iviz nods slowly, "You'd make a difficult general, Elara. The kind who wins wars and loses sleep. Anyone else?"
The professor looks again at the class after marking Elara's points in the scribe. That's when I raise my hand.
"Yes, Miss Kaya? What's your point of view?"
I take a deep breath before standing in my seat and facing the professor. "I have an idea, but it's... dark."
Iviz's eyes spark from curiosity, "War is dark. Speak."
"What if we'd used Malachar's own strategy against him? He drained mages to grow stronger. What if we'd created our own... controlled version of that?"
The classroom suddenly went silent. I guess they didn't understand what I meant. "Hear me out. The Sundering Sacrifice required fifty mages in eternal stasis, channelling their power constantly. That's a permanent loss of fifty lives' worth of magical energy. But what if, instead, we'd gathered volunteers to temporarily donate their power? Not drain them completely like Malachar did, but siphon enough from thousands of mages to create a few champions powerful enough to match him?"
"You're proposing consensual power-draining. Creating anti-Malachars." The professor said.
"Temporary ones, yes. If every mage in the realm donated even ten per cent of their power to a champion, say, Seraphine, she'd have the combined strength of tens of thousands. Enough to fight him directly. After the battle, the power returns to its sources. No eternal prisons. No Prismatic Guard casualties. Just a temporary sacrifice."
The professor leans against the desks and takes his time to analyse and react. "That's... disturbingly clever. And morally complicated. You're using dark magic, the very thing Malachar pioneered, for light purposes. The road to hell, Miss. Kaya is famously paved with good intentions."
"But if it works? If it means no fifty people trapped forever, no Prismatic Guards dying in training, no abandoning our realm? Isn't it worth considering?"
"Perhaps. But tell me, who decides which mages donate power? What if someone refuses? Do you force them for the greater good? And these champions, imbued with godlike power, what happens if they decide they like it? What stops your anti-Malachar from becoming the next Malachar?"
I frowned at the professor's counter question but stood strong before replying, "You'd need safeguards. Time limits on the power transfer. Multiple champions, so no one person has everything. Strict oversight."
"All of which requires trust, organisation, and time, three things notably absent during a civilisation-ending crisis. But your core insight is valuable. You've identified that the Sundering Sacrifice was essentially a permanent power donation. Making it temporary could have changed everything."
He walks to the centre of the room.
"Let me share something. After the war, Seraphine wrote extensively about alternative strategies. She examined dozens of scenarios. Want to know which one haunted her most?"
Students lean forward
"Kaya's approach. Almost exactly. She calculated that if the realm's mages had each donated fifteen per cent of their power to ten champions, those champions could have defeated Malachar with a seventy per cent probability of success."
"Then why didn't she do it?" Timarthus spoke up.
"Because it would have required three months to organise. Convincing every mage in the realm, creating the transfer rituals, and training the champions. She had six hours before Malachar's core-drain spell activated. In theory, it was the perfect plan. In practice, there wasn't time." Iviz meets everyone's gaze as they realise the shortage of time.
"That's the cruelty of war. The best strategy means nothing if you can't execute it. Torin's unified command? Brilliant, but would have required decades of political negotiation to overcome elemental rivalries. Elara's evacuation? Logistically impossible with the portal capacity available then. Kaya's power-sharing? The ideal solution, discovered three months too late."
"So Seraphine's choice was the only realistic one?", youna asked.
"It was the only one executable in the time available with the resources at hand. That's what command means, not choosing the perfect solution, but choosing the possible one. However..." The professor looked at me.
"Kaya's answer is the one I want you to remember." His sentence shocked me.
"Because you identified the fundamental problem. The Sundering Sacrifice was wasteful. Permanent when temporary would suffice. You looked at the conventional solution and asked, 'What if we modified the core mechanism?' That's strategic innovation."
He conjures a small illusion of flowing energy
"After the war, Kaya's approach, consensual and temporary power-sharing, became the foundation of our emergency response protocols. We call it the Distributed Aegis now. If another existential threat emerges, we have frameworks for exactly what you described. Time limits. Multiple recipients. Strict oversight. Your idea, Kaya, is literally modern doctrine."
"But it didn't exist then," Torin said.
"No. And that's the tragedy. Fifty people suffer eternally because we hadn't thought of alternatives. But it's also the lesson. We honour those fifty not by saying their sacrifice was inevitable, but by ensuring it never needs to happen again. By thinking of better solutions now, in peacetime, so we're not improvising in crisis."
He dismisses the illusion.sion
"Torin, your unified command approach was adopted, too. The Council now has a wartime hierarchy that supersedes elemental boundaries. Elara, your evacuation strategy influenced our dimensional refuge protocols. We maintain emergency portals to three uninhabited realms."
"So they were all partially right?" Selene says.
"You were all correct within different constraints. Torin optimised for coordination. Elara for survival. Kaya for innovation. Each strategy works under specific conditions. A good commander knows multiple strategies. A great commander knows which one fits the moment."
He walks back to his. desk
"The reason I give you this exercise isn't to criticise Seraphine. It's to train you to think beyond the obvious. War, magical or otherwise, rewards creativity. The Prismatic Guard shouldn't have been possible; tradition said so. But Seraphine thought beyond tradition. I want you to do the same." The professor goes back towards his desk, probably marking today's output.
"Okay, so today's lecture is over. You all are dismissed," Professor Iviz said. The history of the realm's evil sorcerers made me suddenly think of that dangerous man who had invaded my mind, and I realised that I have to face him, or he would search for me if he came out, and the chances of this happening are rising. Even if I don't face him, he will come after me as he did after my- I mean, the fire queen. And I'd rather die first than meet him when I'm weak and have no control over my power.
"Miss Kaya?" My name was called out, forcing me to stop my overthinking. I saw Headmaster Orien standing at the door of the lecture hall, looking straight at me. I looked around to see that almost all the students had left, and even Selene was about to finish packing her stuff, but stopped when she also saw the headmaster. I looked at her and gave her a nod to head out without me, and I walked towards him.
"Yes, headmaster?" I answered. "I need you to come with me. We need you to start training on your powers. Please follow me," he said, and I followed him. We went back to his office, and he allowed me to step in first before closing the door behind me and putting up a cast spell. He then went towards the wall where Silas had pinned me when my powers were out of control. Still gave me chills whenever I thought of it. Orien whispered something, and suddenly a staircase opened up leading downstairs. The staircase was dark, and there was no light, when suddenly Orien flicked his fingers, and the staircase was filled with lanterns burning. "I thought fire had disappeared?" I asked Orien. "It's wildfire made from ice and air. Do you notice the change of colour?" he asked, and I saw that the fire wasn't anything near orange or red. It was blue.
"Come, my child," Orion said and entered the staircase, heading downstairs with me behind him. "What's down there?" I asked. "It's one of the most ancient libraries of Aradox. It contains everything about the entire magical galaxy and realms, including Earth. Here is where you'll start learning control of your powers under my training," he said.
"But my powers are wild and untamed, what if it destroyed your library?", I asked, getting scared that most of the ancient and important scrolls and scribes containing dangerous and important spells would be destroyed.
"You'll do well, and I will be here guiding you all the time. So don't be nervous. We are here to make you strong," he said and opened the wards which were protecting the library. "Kaya, but promise me, you won't tell a single soul about its location or that it exists," he said. "I promise, I won't tell anyone about this if it is for the safety of the entire galaxy," I said, becoming self-deterred. Orion smiles at me, looking at my confidence, and suddenly the wards are removed, showing the biggest library I might have ever seen in my entire life. Slowly, we both step inside the furnished library with over a thousand sorted shelves and racks of books and scrolls.
"Kaya, to control your powers, you must have a clear knowledge of your roots. This is the birth of a fire elemental. And this library will give you all the answers that you require."