Chapter 62: Vex’s Departure
Vex left the Academy on a Tuesday morning, which she chose specifically because “Tuesdays have the least dramatic energy and I’m trying to avoid a scene.”
She failed. The entire student body turned out to see off the woman who had turned mana absorption from a disability into an art form, who had created the field of Synthesis Studies, and who had once accidentally absorbed the Academy’s entire heating system during a particularly stressful faculty meeting.
“I’m not leaving leaving,” she told Jake on the eastern wall—their spot, Null’s spot, everyone’s spot. “I’m going exploring. Lyra’s team found a dimension where the dominant form of energy isn’t mana—it’s something new. Something I might be able to absorb and synthesize into forms we’ve never seen.”
“How long?”
“A year. Maybe two. Long enough to discover something worth bringing back.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“You’ll be fine. You have Sol, and Pi, and Kael, and four hundred students who worship the ground you walk on.”
“They worship the craters my teaching creates in the ground.”
“Same thing.” She hugged him. It was warm—literally warm, because Vex always ran hot, a side effect of carrying so much absorbed energy. “Thank you, Jake. For teaching me that my power wasn’t a curse.”
“It was never a curse. It was just misunderstood.”
“Like you.”
“Like all of us.”
She stepped through the portal. The Academy felt a little dimmer—not metaphorically. Vex’s departure left an actual decrease in ambient light levels that took three days to normalize.
Jake taught his classes. He missed his friend. And in the evenings, he climbed to the Spire and told Null about it, and the dimensional fabric rippled with a response that felt like a hug from the sky.