Alisa had never been so excited. She had a whole new branch of magic to explore, and she had it all to herself. This was exactly the kind of breakthrough that she had always dreamed of! Doorway magic wasn't even a rumor, it was a fantasy. Stable doorways between different locations didn't exist. Except, they once had. And they'd been hidden away so effectively that no one even realized it.

Whatever had happened to bring that room into disuse, whatever people had set it up and then abandoned it, the fact remained that Alisa had rediscovered something which to the modern mage would seem absolutely unbelievable.

This was so much better than anything she'd imagined. She couldn't keep the giddy smile off her face the whole following day, so absorbed in mentally dissecting her new powerscript that she barely paid attention in class.

Alisa was surprised when the end of the day arrived without her being reprimanded, but in most of the lessons students were more distracted with their dragons and at least Alisa had the reputation and appearance of studiousness. Even if she was behaving more absentminded than usual, that could be attributed to the usual exhaustion of raising a young dragon.

She did have enough presence of mind to conceal her marked wrist until the red mark could heal over. Even now, it was beginning to fade. She'd copied it down into her notebook exactly, and practiced it until she could duplicate it on demand without using the trigger array.

That was another thing. The array was set to simultaneously provide authorization if not already present, check for authorization, and activate the doorway if it was present. If Alisa weren’t already intimately familiar with the use of conditional layers, the format would have been unbearably confusing.

But even though some pieces of the doorway spell felt obvious and intuitive the rest of the stages were mysteries to her. The authorization section was linked to two different conditionals, one incoming and one outgoing. She separated them out, figuring that one meant 'if authorization present' and the other 'add this authorization to user'.

Could she come up with her own authorization mark instead of using the one provided? Well, the power had used the mark itself as part of the activation of the door, so maybe she should hold off on tampering with that just yet. She had heard about keyed spells, that used multiple pieces and only activated when aligned, but those were usually with a physical piece. Using a temporary powerscript on a person’s body? That was old, dangerous magic. That was the sort of thing wild people in jungles did, not something taught or practiced at modern academies.

Of course the excitement couldn’t last. However enthusiastic she was, however diligent in dissecting the pieces, there remained the fact that this was ancient, foreign magic. It wasn’t built on modern principles, wasn’t organized according to neat layers. All its functions were mixed up with the others. Part of Alisa admired the compactness, the way such a detailed piece of powerscript was fit into so little space. But mostly it was an exercise in frustration.

The weeks slipped past as she experimented with the new circles. Every free moment was spent on trying to discover the meaning of every part of the array, though at the rate Zen was growing and the amount of time he demanded, those free moments were scarcer than she’d have preferred.

Zen grew startlingly fast, his growth seeming to only increase week by week. He grew longer, he grew thicker. His wings stretched longer and longer, until he could no longer fully unfurl them indoors at all. Before long his days of sneaking through pipes were well and truly behind him.

Unfortunately, Zen wasn't the only one growing up, and Alisa wasn't the only one noticing.

Wild dragons tended to keep away from the academy most of the time, scared off by the high concentration of magic and intimidated by all the dragons that unnaturally congregated together. And that was just great until mating season came around, and all of a sudden there were a lot of highly desirable young dragons who were from so many different parts of the world that no self-respecting wildling could resist having a pass at them.

Francine's Grandus, Gold, suffered particularly extreme harassment, flocks of little wild dragons pestering her every time she took off. Alisa grinned and enjoyed the show, because it felt surprisingly good to see her rival popular for all the wrong reasons. Francine herself hadn't gotten around to outfitting Gold for riding yet, but from the size of her it wouldn't be much longer. Alisa couldn't wait to see her try to go for a fly, only to be swarmed by horny wildlings.

Zen grew even more ridiculous, of course. Fates forbid he should do anything sensible. The presence of so many wild dragons brought out a whole new side of him. Alisa had thus far only ever seen him trying to woo Raxi, but now he seemed eager to catch the attention of as many females as possible. It became an increasing struggle to keep him focused, or even present, for more than a few minutes.

Alisa did not entirely appreciate the tracks his thoughts tended to take, and when he frequently abandoned her to go chasing off with someone new for several hours, she worried. Zo Rienna, the dragon tutor, insisted Zen’s behavior was normal.

“Azendandor is growing into himself, and this is a joyous time of play and exploration for him,” she explained.

“But he’s gotten so wild, is it really okay to let him fly off wherever he wants?”

“There’s no need to be concerned. He has instincts and desires, and it’s not healthy for us to force our dragons to repress themselves at this age. None of them here at the academy are old enough to actually sire a brood of eggs, so there will be no harm done regardless of what they get up to.”

Alisa didn't like the idea. Zen was maturing faster than the other Aelaniri, breaking records for size and learning fast. She didn't doubt that he could easily break the rules in this area as well, and she did not need another complication in her life. Not when she was so close to getting away.

Thoughts of her upcoming escape from the Traitor's mage army loomed larger and larger as the weeks passed. She wasn't sure whether it would be an ordinary departure, or if she'd be disgraced and expelled, or if Tay would pull her away into a private apprenticeship - and she didn't care. Her reputation didn't matter to her. Well, it did, but not as much as getting out of the potential disaster that was the Traitor's upcoming war. Why he thought he needed four times the usual standing force of dragon mages, and all at once, was beyond her.

From the rumors she'd heard, arrangements had been made to buy up surplus dragon eggs from nine different countries, all shipped to Renand independently without the other countries realizing until too late that the Traitor had been buying all of them, not just theirs.

The expenditure required for the hundreds of students to all have their own dragon was unbelievable. And that wasn’t even counting the huge increase in groundskeepers, dragon attendants, the construction and complete revamp of the academy - it was being expanded again, to make room for yet more incoming students, taking up easily ten times its original size, expanding out into the open area east of the city - plus enough animals to feed the massive population of dragons? It couldn't possibly be cheap. Whoever provided the increasing quantity of sheep and cows and everything else necessary to feed hundreds of growing young dragons had to be making a fortune off this.

Clearly the Traitor had bigger priorities that simply didn’t take expense into account. But whatever he planned to get out of this investment, it scared Alisa to even contemplate. She wanted nothing to do with it. Let him train his dragons, let him build his army; let him do it without her. And especially without Zen. More even than her own safety, she didn't want to see him fight, see him injured, see him in pain. She didn't want to see him lose his innocence, turn aggressive and violent; become a beast for slaying rather than the playful creature he was.

Alisa’s hopes for the future had been sold out from under her, and Zen was her sole recompense. She’d made the trade grudgingly, taking a long time to really accept it.

But Zen was hers now, not the Traitor’s. He was hers and she would protect him just as fiercely as she would have protected her own future. The exchange had been made and she was not going to give him up for anything.

Yet she was still a lone student. Without help, there would be no way out for her or for Zen. So she clung to Tay's promise, sometimes imagining how it may come about, sometimes worrying that he'd back out or be unable to fulfill it in the end. He seemed to have connections. She could probably count on him. But would he really remember a promise to a random girl he'd helped out one time?

But most of her free energy remained focused on her secret project. She was most eager to figure out how to change the destination setting of the doorway. She knew it was theoretically possible, as she had two examples going to different places. If she could return to her own room instead of the basement of the library, that would be so much more convenient.

As it was, she had to carefully scout the place every time she wanted to actually test her new spell arrays, which would become untenable the moment anyone else found the door. She didn't believe it could possibly stay hidden forever, and as the debris clearing grew nearer and nearer completion she felt time was running out.

Alas, as skilled and dedicated as she was, she could not duplicate an entire branch of magic in less than a month. Even with two functional examples to work with, there was too much she didn't know. How it designated location, for one thing. She didn't see any way for the circles to provide enough data to precisely position a doorway's exit. She'd used offsets herself, with Francine's prank spell, and knew how to position the doorway itself - those were similar enough to be translated almost directly. But the place the circle went to?

She narrowed it down to the set of circles that didn't match, then ruled out one after further consideration and decided it was a second authorization type. But the similarity between the second authorization and the first made her loop back to the fact that it was part of the whole activation of the spell. So what parts were the same between authorizations, the necessary components of the activation process, and which were simply there to designate who was using the spell?

It was too complicated, too detailed, too refined. There were no tags to indicate circle type, multiple scripts running overtop each other at the same time, and she simply didn’t have enough information to work with.

Then the day she'd dreaded came about: the cleaning crew discovered the doorway. They opened the secret room, hauled out the ancient equipment, and it was the gossip of the school. A secret storage room under the library, sealed for over a hundred years! What could it have been for? Surely it hadn't been simply for storage. It must have had some more arcane use at some point.

After that, slipping in and out to experiment became a questionable endeavor, since the students took to using it as a 'secret' hangout location for late night rendezvous. Alisa had no interest in emerging to the sight of her fellow students' idea of how to properly employ a 'secret' room.

So, for the time being, she reluctantly set the whole project aside. Until she could properly test the return spell and get it to come out anywhere but that specific room, it would be largely useless.

Ah, well. It had been fun while it lasted, and she felt certain that someday she'd be able to put the knowledge to proper use.

She memorized the array to reach the cave, practicing it again and again on her practice slate until she could do it blind from memory. Just in case she ever needed to disappear somewhere. Though leaving behind a conspicuous doorway did put a damper on that particular idea's utility for escape.

So she expanded the array, adding in fast-decay timers in what would be the stabilization layer on a hand-cast spell, to dispel the magic fueling the doorway behind her. It had to be long enough that both she and Zen could get through it before it closed, but short enough to evade anyone who might try to follow her.

By now she wasn't even sure why she was doing any of it, ‘because she could' she supposed; because it was there to be explored, and besides, who didn't want a secret escape spell at their disposal at all times?

But once that was done, she had to concede that she'd reached her limits as a researcher. Without more data than the two examples she had to work from, she couldn't reverse engineer the doors completely. And with the library destroyed, there was no way to look up the missing pieces in her knowledge.

Back to ordinary, mundane life it was.

At least the whole affair had kept her distracted for almost an entire month. Time flew when engrossed in a research project, even if there was in this case very little research involved. She only needed to survive one more month of tedium and boredom.

One more month. Then Tay would get her out.