Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1233: A Provisional Writ

Elias did not answer at once. He studied Lucavion instead, for the tell that would say this was a price meant to come down: a glance toward the blank space still marked Conditions, a flicker of the earlier humor, some alternative offered before Elias had finished refusing the first.

None came.

Lucavion settled further into the chair and let his attention drift to the window, the posture of a man who considered this round finished either way. If Elias pushed, he would simply leave, without resentment and without the appointment. Continued pressure, Elias understood, would not lower the price. It would only end the meeting.

He changed the question instead of repeating it.

"If the Academy records no destination, what does it record?"

Lucavion looked back from the window. "That I left."

Elias waited.

"When I’m supposed to be back," Lucavion added. "And when I actually come back."

"Nothing else?"

His fingers shifted against the chair arm. "Nothing useful to someone following me."

He had given Elias the motive without a word about who, or why.

"If you fail to return," Elias said, "the Academy will know you’re missing and have nowhere to begin looking."

"Then don’t look."

"You say that very easily."

Lucavion’s attention dropped to the form. "I’ve managed before."

It was the smaller answer, and it carried more behind it than the larger ones had. There was a history in it that Elias had no invitation to ask after, and did not. The relevant fact was plain enough without it: this man would accept personal risk far more readily than institutional eyes on his back.

Elias built the safeguards instead of arguing the point. The gate would log departure and return. A maximum duration would bind the absence. Compulsory instruction stayed compulsory. A formal summons suspended the privilege outright, a late return froze it pending review, and repeated misuse ended it for good. Lucavion heard all of it without interrupting once, and none of it touched where he actually went.

"A region," Elias tried.

"No."

"City. Beyond it. Nothing narrower."

Lucavion shook his head.

"You didn’t think about that just now."

"Did earlier."

"You expect me to put my name beneath a blank space."

"No." Lucavion tapped the line where the return interval would sit. "Put it there."

He would answer for the time he took, the obligations he missed, whether he came back at all. He would not answer for what filled the space in between. The Academy could punish him for being late. It could not turn the privilege into a leash.

It was, Elias realized, the Wayfarer principle exactly as written, only borrowed early, on a record that did not yet exist, with Elias’s own judgment standing in for it.

"I cannot give you Wayfarer standing," he said.

Lucavion’s hand left the page.

"I can sponsor a provisional writ. At most."

Lucavion waited, rather than taking it. Elias had described what could be done and had not yet said what it would cost.

"Everything on that paper would carry my name," he said.

"I assumed that was about to become expensive."

Elias did not dress up what came next. He explained it the way he explained anything with moving parts he meant someone to trust. He could not create Wayfarer standing himself, and he could not guarantee the writ outright, because no president could, however tidy the sheet on his desk looked. What he could do was attach his sponsorship to the field-response appointment and put the whole request in front of whoever held the countersignature.

The examinations and the diagnostic record already established what Lucavion could do. The appointment gave the Council a reason to need him doing it. What was missing, the second-year review history no one on that desk had ever compiled, Elias’s own name would stand in for, at least long enough to be read.

It would have to survive being read, of course. Someone would have to look at a man competent enough for external Council work and decide, on the same page, that he was too dangerous to walk to the gate alone. Elias did not think that argument would look well in writing. He was gambling that whoever held the seal would agree, or would at least rather not be the one to write it down.

"So you don’t grant it," Lucavion said.

"I indeed don’t."

"Then yo—"

"I sponsor it."

Lucavion tipped his head. "Sponsor. That feels oddly familiar."

Buried somewhere under a term’s worth of Council paperwork and his own second-year schedule, Elias had let a detail slip past him. Magister Selenne already sponsored Lucavion’s standing in the Magicians’ Block, the arrangement that let a Martial-Block commoner sit in on lectures no one of his rank should have reached. It was not a coincidence Lucavion had missed. It was one Elias had.

"Oddly familiar?"

"Yep."

Elias declined to follow it any further than that. He filed the coincidence, and did not care for how neatly it filed itself.

"The countersignature isn’t mine," he said instead. "The request would be."

Lucavion’s thumb moved along the paper’s edge. "And if they refuse?"

"Then the appointment doesn’t begin."

That brought his attention fully back to the desk. "You’d tie them together?"

"I’d give the same office both decisions."

He would not have called it generosity. He meant the two requests to share a signature, so that refusing one meant refusing the other in the same stroke. An office that wanted Lucavion answering emergencies would find it considerably less convenient to explain, in the same breath, why it would not let him leave the grounds to do it. The Academy could decline his service. It could not conveniently accept the service and deny the condition he had accepted it under.

"One assignment," Elias said.

Lucavion waited.

"Before the semester ends." Elias let the rest follow in order. "Academy-sanctioned. Within what your record already shows you can do."

"I already get assignments."

"Those you may refuse." Elias set the word down like the last figure in a column. "This one you take."

"No."

"Then there is no writ."

Lucavion looked at him for several seconds, irritation flattening what remained of his amusement. "You haven’t even chosen it."

"No."

"I see."

Elias spoke before the silence could turn into a list of objections. He had watched Lucavion draw boundaries around every yes before anyone else could shape them, and he did not intend to sit through it a second time.

The assignment would carry a genuine Academy purpose, not a manufactured one. It would fall inside what Lucavion had already shown he could do. Elias would disclose the objective, and the risks known at the time of issue, before Lucavion left the grounds to carry it out. The tactics would remain his to choose. Difficulty would not excuse him from it, and neither would inconvenience.

"The objective you write down," Lucavion said, "or the one you actually want?"

Elias’s pen stayed still. "If those differ, you receive both."

"Before I leave."

"When the assignment is issued."

"Earlier than the door, then."

"Yes."

"And don’t get clever with people I know."

It was said lightly, like the rest of his conditions, but Elias understood exactly which names it was meant to cover. He understood, too, that his own dealings ran uncomfortably close to some of them. Selienne, whom Lucavion had already turned away once, was the princess Elias’s own name was publicly attached to. Priscilla was an imperial princess whom no office of the Council could treat as an ordinary student. Neither fact made the boundary easier to promise cleanly.

"I can’t promise that."

Lucavion said nothing.

"But."

Elias could not choose him for an assignment merely because the choosing was convenient, because knowing him opened a door to Selenne, or Priscilla, or whoever else stood close enough to be used as a lever. The work could not be built to exploit what Lucavion cared about, dressed up as duty. It could not be a punishment wearing a Council seal, and it could not be a way of buying his allegiance to anyone’s banner.

"If one of them is in danger," Elias said, "I will inform you."

Lucavion held that for a moment before he answered, and when he did, the humor had gone out of it entirely. He would not promise to fall in line against someone he protected, not in advance, not on Elias’s word alone. But he would hear it, when it was true, and decide then. Elias did not press further. Another inch here would cost him the whole agreement over a danger that did not yet exist.

The rest he did not litigate. No assignment built around what Lucavion cared for. Nothing sold to him as one thing and delivered as another. Nothing past what his record already proved he could survive. The choosing itself stayed Elias’s, and Lucavion did not ask for it back.

Lucavion read the empty Conditions field once more. His thumb passed over the page’s lower edge and stopped.

"One," he said.

Elias uncapped the pen.

"One assignment."

"No need to repeat."

Lucavion leaned back while Elias began to write. He did not look satisfied, and that was the first thing about the agreement Elias found reassuring.

Elias wrote without speaking. There was no reason to reopen terms that had already cost them enough time to reach.

The old release clause went first. He struck the Council’s unilateral language and replaced it with a fixed provisional term, terminable by either party between assignments. Ordinary requests could be refused. The single mandatory assignment could not, provided its purpose and known risks were disclosed before deployment and remained within what Lucavion’s record already demonstrated.

Beneath that he entered the sponsorship conditions for the writ: departure, permitted absence, return. No destination. A late return suspended the privilege; misuse ended it. Final issuance remained subject to countersignature.

He reread the additions once. Lucavion did the same from the other side of the desk, slower near the lines that concerned the gate and faster near the obligation he had just purchased them with.

The exchange was expensive, although Elias no longer considered it uneven. Lucavion received movement beyond the walls. Elias received a capable responder, ordinary access to his service, and one assignment that could not be declined simply because the request arrived at an inconvenient time. More important, the arrangement placed Lucavion within reach of the Council without pretending he had joined it.

Familiarity could begin there.

Elias placed the pen beside the signature line. "If the countersignature is obtained, these are the terms."

"For the first condition."

The pen had already left his fingers. He closed his hand around it again.

Lucavion was still reading the page.

"You have another."

"I did say conditions."

Elias waited. The pause no longer served the purpose it had earlier. Then, he had used it to test whether Lucavion would fill it. Now he used it to decide how much he already regretted asking.

Lucavion finally looked up.

"One time," he said. "While we’re both at the Academy. When I ask, I want your authority behind me."

Elias did not move.