By the time their teacher showed them the Dreaming Sphere, Simon had all but given up on this place. Ironically, after months of patience, it had taken less than a week in this new role to burn him out. He'd had a great deal of understanding for the initiate phase, despite his overwhelming sense of boredom, because he understood how rare literacy was in this world. He'd even tolerated the culty messages they gave for those barely literate children to read.

If you wanted to give people this much power, then you wanted to make sure they were loyal, too, right? All of that he could accept, with the idea that he would eventually learn magic himself. Even the cruelty, while distasteful, was something closer to a cultural difference than a reason for him to quit.

What he couldn't stand was how wasteful all of this was. What he'd learned here could fit in a thimble, and they weren't just teaching the children poorly, they were lying to them the whole time they did it, making the whole thing even more counterproductive.

He could have built a school in Ionar inside a shack and trained a dozen mages a year to a better level than anything the Magi were offering. The only thing that might have prevented such a thing was the amount of blood magic that would be required and his fear about the number of unforeseen consequences he'd unleash into the world.

You sure you want to stick around here, Simon? he asked himself every time something awful happened. Only like three more years of this cesspool, and you might actually learn something.

Simon was seriously considering how he might bring the pyramid down in the middle of the night to kill as few people as possible by his sixth day, and it was the idea of murdering children more than anything else that stayed his hand. Then came the giant, evil-looking orb. The magi used a word of force to slide her lectern aside and then another to raise some mechanism in the floor, causing the stone stand that held it to climb out of the floor.

The thing was huge, and the way the older students squirmed nervously, Simon was certain that they'd seen it before, but to Simon, it was the first interesting thing he'd seen all week. It was a giant sapphire sphere twice the size of a man's head, wrapped in wide, unevenly spaced bands of gold. The thing had to weigh hundreds of pounds, but none of that was the interesting part.

That was the fact that both the bands and the facets of the titanic gem itself were inscribed with words of power. Simon could see that from where he stood near the back of the classroom, but it was too far away for him to read them.

Magi Karala offered no explanation; instead, once the strange orb was in place, she simply called out the names of two acolytes at random and ordered them to the front of the cavernous classroom that they met in every day.

Simon barely noticed them, though. He was too busy studying every detail. He only paid attention to the boy and the girl as they arrived at the front of the room. Then, after a nod from the teacher, all three of them placed their hands on the orb.

This time, he saw the thing flare to life, glowing a brilliant white deep inside the crystal. Is it hollow? He wondered. He didn't have a chance to answer that. As soon as he focused on the white light, some part of the magic made it expand across his sight until it took up most of his view. Even as the details started to solidify into what looked like three people, Simon looked away, and the magic faded.

How in the hell does that work, he wondered, resisting the urge to look a second time as he glanced surreptitiously around at all the other students.

Everyone but him, which luckily included the Magi, was staring at the orb, and all of them had that strange white light reflected in their eyes. No, it was more than that. Their eyes were glowing, too. He would have been able to see them in the dark.

Does that mean they're powering whatever's happening, or— Simon asked himself as he saw the girl touching the orb flinch as though she'd been struck. That made him raise his eyebrows, and it was enough to make him return his eyes to the orb and let its magic embrace him.

What he found, when the glow consumed him a second time, was a battle of sorts. The room had vanished, and the world was replaced with a vast white plane that went on forever but contained only the teacher and the two students touching the orb. The rest of the class, including him, were nothing but disembodied spectators.

"Again!" the Magi barked. "How can you expect to understand a spell if you can't endure its sting!"

The girl looked determined, but the boy looked unsure. It was easy to see why. She looked like a burn victim, and though the blue robes she wore must have looked lovely once, they were scorched in several places. Simon saw why when the boy hit her another time, a small jet of flame after using a word of lesser fire.

This time, she took the burn stoically, and the teacher said, "Better, now show me lightning!" before the boy launched into a new attack of his own, but none of that interested Simon. He could cast lightning and fire whenever he wanted. What mattered was that they were doing so in this sphere, and it wasn't hurting their physical bodies.

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They're simulating magic combat? He thought, gapping. Inside a magical item? What in the hell is going on?

The two traded blows as they cycled through a few more simple spells at the teacher's direction. Sometimes, they cast them at each other and sometimes at targets that the teacher would manifest into existence with a wave of her hand. Unfortunately, they never dueled in a real sense, and the magical combat that Simon was hoping for never materialized. Really, she seemed more concerned about whether students were able to take it as well as they dished it out. That was distasteful and more than a little cruel, considering the average age of the room was 15 or so, but it wasn't entirely unreasonable.

Not even those disappointments were enough to overcome his wonder as he watched the whole thing. Simon had built any number of magical items over the course of his many lives, but all of them added together lacked a tenth of the complexity of whatever this thing was, and as he watched the spectacle, he was filled with questions.

Did the users power it, or did it have another source? How complex was the magic that allowed this to work? How did it simulate magic? Simon's mind boggled at the ideas contained within it. Up until now, all he'd wanted to do was lock himself in the library and devour all of the books he wasn't allowed to read. Now, even more than that, he wanted to study every inch of the thing.

When the teacher was satisfied, she released both of them and chose two more students. They did better than the first group and were soon replaced with a third, giving Simon a chance to study the predictable interactions with detail. Though he didn't like watching his classmates scream in pain, he took solace in the fact that when they returned to their seats, they were unharmed.

Their teacher seemed much less happy with the third group of students than she was with either of the previous two. Both of them were doing what they were told, and the spells seemed to be decent. It was only after a couple of minutes, when Magi Karala said, "No, the goal of magic is not to cast the spell but to work your will with its effects!" that he understood.

They were doing what they were told, but the boy on the left was pulling his punches to some degree. His fire flared, and his lightning arced, but it was all flash and no heat.

"But Magi, I did as you said," the young boy started to protest.

"Silence! You must learn to embrace your pain!" she roared, crackling with unjustifiable fury. "If you are afraid to hurt your opponent, then I will do it for you."

She didn't say any words out loud. She whispered them as she always did, but what followed was almost certainly greater cold. It was an interesting version of the spell that Simon had never thought to try before. With a wave of her hand, a ball of throbbing blue light appeared. It reminded him only vaguely of the crystal they were all touching, but as soon as it drifted between the three of them, it exploded in a maelstrom of frost.

Simon worried that the ice shards at that range would shred everyone, but instead of ice, all three of them, including the teacher, were enveloped by waves of supercooled mist, and he watched all of them freeze in place in real time. "If you let go of the orb, your time here will be at an end," the Magi gasped stiffly as they slowly all slowly froze solid.

To their credit, neither child released their grip on the icy orb, even as their frozen bodies began to crack and fall to pieces. Simon looked away, then. He could endure a lot of things, but watching children play at blood sports and torturing them was a bridge too far. So he was watching from the real world when the teacher finally released her grip on the sapphire sphere and stepped back.

She seemed stiffer than she'd been before the demonstration, which was enough to tell him how much what she'd endured had hurt, but that was clearer when she canceled the magic, and the two students that had been gripping the orb both fell to the ground instantly, like their strings had been cut.

For a moment, Simon worried she'd killed both of them capriciously, and he felt a rage boiling up inside of him. You built a toy so you could have your students hurt each other without getting hurt, and you kill them anyway? He wanted to scream.

That rage abated a little when one of the two students tried and failed to rise to their feet, but when the other one lay still, Simon knew that his first instinct had been correct. This was an amazing tool for teaching, but it was being used to murder students who Magi Karala decided weren't good enough.

"You must all understand," she lectured the group as a pair of gray-robed slaves came in to fetch the body and take it away. "Inside the dreaming sphere, or outside of it, the world is the same. You use magic in service to the God-King and him alone. You carry out his will and the commands of his servants, and if you are weak… Too weak to finish your opponent or something as trivial as pain, then you have no place in his plan."

Simon's heart grew cold at her words. He knew why the bodies they left at the base of the pyramid died without a mark on them now, and he hated it. Even as he wrestled with that hatred, though, he realized something else, too.

While he might be able to endure all of this for long enough to rise to the level of true acolyte, he was never going to be able to get called up to the front of the class for that thing. The second he did, he would be revealed.

He very much doubted that his mental image of himself was anything close to the boy he was pretending to be. None of the students he saw in the Dreaming Sphere, as his teacher had called it, looked anything like the hollow, sunken-eyed acolytes they'd become. They didn't even wear black robes in their mind's eye. They'd all seen themselves as children, still.

Outwardly, Nijam was short and young, with dark skin and hair, but Simon's mind probably wouldn't reflect much of that disguise. He almost certainly still saw himself as a fat white thirty-year-old deep down, and the second that Magi Karala saw that she'd kill him.

Looks like you're never going to graduate, Simon told himself as he watched the orb slide back into the hole it had come from before the lectern slid over top of it again, sealing it away. As did, he reflected on the travesty of it all. He'd wondered for a long time what was getting people killed, and now he had his answer.

It wasn't magic, blood sacrifices, or even the orb in front of him. It was sadism and negligence. That made sense; it seemed to power the entire priesthood of the Magi, and he was going to have to do something about that.

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