I found it eight months later.
Not an academy. Not an instructor. Not anything so clean.
What I found was a man named Crost who sold secondhand goods out of a room behind the potter's yard, and who had, among the candle stubs and dented cookware and bolts of faded cloth, a folded scroll that he did not know was anything other than old paper.
I knew because the paper was wrong.
Not visually. Not in a way that would have caught an untrained eye. But I had been watching the market with different attention since the scholar's wagons left, and I had read everything I could find in Ashfen's modest lending collection about practical and theoretical magic, which turned out to be three texts and one pamphlet from the temple that was mostly about ward-marks and how to renew them.
Not enough to actually understand magic.
Enough to recognize that the scroll's surface had a quality that mattered.
I bought it for four coins, which was everything in the jar except the reserve I kept for emergencies.
I took it home and read it for six hours.
At the end of six hours I had two conclusions.
The first was that I had been right. It was a spell fragment. A piece of something larger, almost certainly copied from a proper text by someone who understood parts of it but not the full system. Based on what I could extract from the terminology and the structure of the marks, it was part of a fire-invocation sequence. Possibly one of the simpler ones. Possibly the kind that trained practitioners learned in the first or second year of foundation work.
The second conclusion was that I could not understand it.
Not through lack of intelligence. Through lack of everything underneath it.
The text assumed I knew what a flow-channel was. It assumed I knew how the body's internal structures related to the invocation geometry. It assumed I had practiced foundational breathing patterns until they were automatic. It assumed a vocabulary I did not have and a physical preparation I had not done.
I was holding the middle of a sentence in a language I had not learned the alphabet for yet.
I read it again.
And again.
The section I kept returning to described what the scholar's pamphlet would have called source contact. A moment of internal alignment where the practitioner's body became briefly continuous with the fire concept being invoked. The text described it in terms I found frustratingly inexact, but the shape of it was: you reached inside for something, you shaped it into the invocation geometry, and you pushed outward.
I did not have the geometry.
I did not have the vocabulary.
But I thought I might understand the reaching.
I thought about the scholar's warning for a long time.
*Those paths produce more damaged people than they produce practitioners.*
I thought about what the scholar's case had sounded like when it opened. That brief absence of sound.
I thought about Brindle Hollow.
I thought about fire arrows coming through shutters.
Then I folded the scroll, put it carefully between the back boards of my footlocker, and told myself I was not going to be stupid about this.
That lasted two weeks.
Then I started practicing.
I began with the breathing work, because it was the one part of the foundation I could approximate without the formal theory. I spent an hour each night sitting in the corner of my room going through patterns I constructed from what the text implied about the structure underneath it. This was probably wrong. It was almost certainly incomplete. But it was the only door I could reach, so I kept walking toward it.
I told no one.
That was also probably wrong.
But the thing about standing at the edge of a door you cannot open from the right side is that you keep your hands on the wood even when you know you should step back. The memory of the scholar's case was too clear. The gap between what I could do with a body and a blade and what I needed to be able to do was too large.
I was not trying to become a mage.
I was trying to close a gap.
Those are different things, and I understood the difference, and kept going anyway.
The breathing practice started producing small results by the third week. Not fire. Nothing visible. Just heat in my palms, faint and inconsistent, that I could sometimes call up intentionally and sometimes not. Like finding a loose thread in a cloth and not yet knowing whether it was the right thread.
I kept the scroll out less frequently after that.
I did not need to look at the marks. I had memorized them.
What I needed was the thing they described. The alignment. The reach. The moment where the body and the concept stopped being separate things.
I did not have it yet.
But I could feel the shape of where it was supposed to be.
That was either progress or the first stage of exactly what the scholar had warned me about.
I did not stop to find out which.