“Baekhyun! Hey, Baek! Where are you?” A young boy with an unruly mop of bronze curls called out as he attempted to negotiate his way through the dense flock of mages traversing the narrow walkway. Realising he had no choice but to stand by the side and wait for the crowd to dissipate, a wide Cheshire grin broke out on his handsome face when at last his eyes landed upon the object of his search. A little further down the corridor, gazing intently into the horizon and oblivious to the flurry of activity around them, stood a slightly shorter boy with shaggy midnight black hair. Like him, the boy was clothed in the royal blue tunic that was the compulsory uniform for all novice mages. However, unlike the solid gold belt boldly clasped around his middle to symbolize his Affinity with the Order of Fire, a far less ostentatious sash of iridescent material encircled the slender waist of the other, the rays of the Midday sun causing a muted kaleidoscope of colours to bloom across the fabric with every slight shift in movement. The sash symbolized an Affinity with Aether, the fifth Order, to which those with the rarest abilities belonged.

Delighted to have found his elusive friend, the boy cheerfully skipped the remaining distance to the preoccupied figure and leaned in to shout in his ear,

“Baekhyun!”

Startled, the boy called Baekyun cautiously turned around, revealing a small, comely face with delicate features. Vivid green eyes thinly lined in kohl contrasted beautifully against porcelain skin. “Oh, Jongdae! You surprised me! What’s up?” Baekhyun smiled brightly upon seeing his mischievous classmate.

“Just wondering what you’ve been up to all this time since you ditched this morning’s lessons. Thought it would have been something exciting, but here I see you’ve just been admiring the plain ol’ view. Has anything changed?”

At the innocent question, the sparkle in Baekhyun’s eyes abruptly vanished, and his lips pulled into a thin grim line.“…No, of course not. It’s the same as always.”

Despite noticing the sudden darkening of his expression, Jongdae declined to comment, putting it down to just another of the many peculiarities that made up the inscrutable Byun Baekhyun.  The other boy had always been one to keep to himself, but of late, he seemed to be harbouring even more secrets than usual. However, rather than pursue the matter, Jongdae instead joined the other male at the bannister in surveying the all too familiar landscape. Exactly as he recalled, directly beneath them spanned the lush, verdant expanse of the Conservatory’s magically cultivated gardens, right up to the Conservatory’s pristine sandstone walls. Outside the grounds sprawled the organized chaos of the terracotta city of Akash, the clamour of its bustling marketplace still faintly discernable even from their vantage point. Beyond Akash however, only endless bleak desert stretched for as far as the untrained eye could see. For the young mages, the splendid isolation of the Conservatory was both an oasis and a prison, and like many others Jongdae yearned for the day when he would finally don the emerald green robes of a full-fledged mage. Unfortunately in his case, this would not be for at least another two years.

The companionable silence between them was broken when Jongdae asked with mild curiosity, “You planning to skip the next lesson as well?”

“Yeah, it’s arithmancy, right?” Baekhyun frowned at the thought of the dreary subject, which in his opinion involved the very futile exercise of attempting to predict the future through mathematics. “What’s the point in going? You know I’ll only fall asleep.”

“Oh, of course. Well I suppose it’s all right since it’s you. Only the oh so brilliant Byun Baekhyun can skip innumerable classes, nap in the ones he does attend and still come out on top in every exam. I don’t see why the Elders don’t just allow you to graduate and call it a day.”

Baekhyun rolled his eyes at his friend’s "praise." He had forgotten how snarky the boy could be sometimes. Nevertheless, the common but mistaken belief did persist amongst his peers that he was some sort of prodigy, a label which Baekhyun fervently denied, preferring to attribute his aptitude to his status as the godson and ward of Lu Han, famed Archmage and Dean of the Akasha Conservatory for the Gifted. That, and his love for reading. Baekhyun could count on a single hand the number of days in his childhood that had not been spent curled up in one of the cool recesses of the Conservatory’s library, pouring over ancient tomes from the world’s greatest collection of magical works.

In fact, Baekhyun had been on his way to the library this very morning when from the corner of his eye, his magically enhanced vision detected something amiss in the usually stagnant landscape, causing him to stop dead in his tracks. Where there should have been an unmarred stretch of azure sky, in the distance, a plume of sickly green smoke could be seen spiraling into the heavens. A blight on an otherwi