The Authority Arrives

Seltherin was already signaling with quick, precise gestures. The double doors at the back banged open, and three figures swept in wearing slate robes with silver-threaded insignia on the chest: a broken circle over a steady line. The Arcane Anomaly Authority, if Eric had to guess, and not on their first rodeo.

The lead officer was a woman in her fifties maybe with storm-gray hair twisted into a severe knot and an expression that said she didn’t believe in fun. The second wore spectacles that flickered with tiny runes. The third had the compact build of a retired sprinter and carried a satchel that clinked ominously.

“Where is the summoned entity?” the lead demanded, already scanning the space with a focus that made Eric vaguely nervous.

Eric raised a hand from inside the coat. “Yo. That’s me. The naked—uh, formerly naked—bald confused guy in the bubble.”

She stopped, took him in, closed her eyes for two beats, and exhaled through her nose. “Why does it have to be a sapient. I hate my job,” she murmured, then louder: “Containment status?”

Seltherin tapped a glyph with the end of his chalk. The dome chimed. “Stable. I propose controlled release for transport.”

“Propose?” the officer said dryly. “Professor, your array tripped half our campus alarms.”

Seltherin stiffened at the word your. “The array is standard. The outcome is not.”

Eric, who was still cataloging the room for exits out of sheer habit, cleared his throat. “Quick clarifying question for the people with badges—do I get to keep the coat?”

“Absolutely not,” the satchel man said, deadpan.

The lead officer cut him a look. “Yes. For now,” she amended. She flicked her fingers in a pattern that made the barrier unfurl like a curtain. “Step out. Slowly.”

Eric did. The stone felt warmer outside the dome, as if the barrier had been keeping more than him at bay. The Authority pair fell in on either side with professional efficiency, subtle wards shimmering across their forearms like film over water. Seltherin matched their stride with reluctant compliance, his outline still buzzing with affronted academic pride.

As they moved, Eric’s gaze snagged on the array’s lines. He didn’t know what he was looking at, but he knew enough about systems to recognize when something had been stressed past its design. Hairline fractures spidered through the thinnest glyph-channels, healing sluggishly like ice melting backward.

He filed that away with the part of his brain that recognizes a system at work.

They hustled through arched corridors that seemed to have been designed by a gothic architect. Students parted ahead of the moving knot of Authority robes like a wake in a lake. Some stared outright. Most pretended not to, which was worse. Eric caught his reflection in a polished column — tall-ish, lean, coat flowing around him, and wearing the exact expression of someone wondering if this was really happening.

“Arcane Anomaly Authority?” he asked, pitching the new not-English carefully. “Do you people have… a slogan? Like ‘See Something, Spell Something’?”

The spectacles officer made a noise suspiciously close to a snort. The lead ignored him, eyes flicking to a hand-slate whose surface flowed with runes like mercury. “Hmmm… odd.”

“Odd how?” Seltherin asked, unable not to.

“Odd as in not from here,” she said. “Which is what you’d expect from an unexpected arrival. Which is also not what we expect from a tier-three demonstration array, Professor.”

“Believe me,” Seltherin said tightly, “I am acutely awareof what we expect.”

They burst into an antechamber tiled with dark stone that drank sound. A counter waited behind a lattice of carved wood, the kind that exists solely so officials can tell you to come back with the right form and two proofs of identity. Two clerks in slate robes glanced up, clocked the procession, and simultaneously reached for different piles of paperwork like a choreographed dance.

“We’ll need scan authorization,” the lead said.

“You’ll have it when you tell me what scan you intend to run,” Seltherin said, as if he owned the building.

“Full octave mapping, and—” She broke off. “No. First, triage. He’s still harmonizing.”

“Still what now,” Eric said, because someone had to.

“Harmonizing,” the spectacles officer supplied, pushing open a door marked with a softly glowing sigil. “You’re not… settled yet. If we hurry, we can read your home octave cleanly enough to plot a back-route. Step in.”

The room beyond the door was a circle within a circle—floor inlaid with interleaving rings of metal and stone, ceiling hung with a mobile of glass fins that turned without moving. The air hummed faintly, the way an old CRT monitor hums. A ring much like the summoning circle on a low pedestal stood in the center with a palm-wide plate raised to hand height that pulsed like a resting heartbeat.

Eric eyed it. “This isn’t going to, like… pop me like a soap bubble, right?”

“If it does,” the satchel man said, “I’ll write the report.”

“Geral,” the lead said without looking. “Mouth.”

He shut it. Eric stepped in and put his hand on the plate.

The room breathed in.

Light unfurled from the ring under his feet and braided up around him in ghostly strands. It didn’t touch him so much as measure him, a soft brush against the edges of whatever he was now. The coat’s runes glowed in sympathy and then calmed, like a well-trained dog obeying a firm tone.

Eric kept perfectly still because moving felt like it would smear his outline. He was suddenly, acutely aware that whatever counted as his self was being read like a passport by a machine no one here would call a machine. The engineer in him cataloged the steps anyway.

“Baseline… stabilizing,” spectacles murmured, eyes behind the lenses flicking as if reading a billboard only he could see. “Octave resonance, foreign. Mana density… thin?”

“Thin how?” Seltherin asked, voice a little too tight.

“Like paper,” spectacles said. “Or like a newborn’s. But the resonance is odd” He frowned and adjusted an invisible dial. “He’s harmonizing faster than I like.”

“Then map him,” the lead snapped. “Now.”

Eric stared at the glass fins overhead and imagined his wife’s face. Anna. The way she tilted her head when he came through the door like she was letting herself meet him halfway. He saw Eli’s messy hair falling over his brow while he built a redstone contraption with the solemn focus of a bomb tech. He saw Heather’s small, horizon-wide smile and heard the guilty little gulp before she yelled DADDYYYY and launched herself like a missile.

Home. The word hurt.

“Hey,” he said, carefully steady, eyes still on the ceiling. “Professor said if we hurry, you can send me back. Is that… a thing?”

“Possibly,” Seltherin said immediately, from the doorway like a knight volunteering. “If your baseline can be read—”

“Don’t promise,” the lead said. Not harsh. Just flat. “Not yet.”

Eric felt the floor shiver under him. The braided light tightened to a finer mesh, then withdrew like a tide reversing.

“Map recorded,” spectacles said. “Octave… obtained. Readability…” He hesitated, and in that hesitation was the kind of silence engineers always learn to hate. The silence of a number that doesn’t fit.

“Readable now,” he said finally. “But I don’t like the slope.”

The lead looked at Eric, then at Seltherin. “We can talk in the hall.”

“No,” Eric said. Not loud. Iron nevertheless. “Say it here.”

There was a beat in which the Authority decided whether to steamroll him. The lead didn’t steamroll. She nodded once. “Fine.” She tucked her slate under her arm like a shield. “Here’s what we have: your resonance is not native to our plane. That’s expected.” Her eyes flicked to the coat, to the bare edges of his wrists, to his smooth scalp, connecting dots she did not say out loud. “Good news: we can read you cleanly enough to know where you came from.”

Eric’s lungs remembered how to be lungs. He swallowed and didn’t look at anyone. “And you can send me back.”

Seltherin turned toward the lead, as if willing her to say yes by glare alone.

The lead Authority official did not say yes.

“We can’t send you back,” she said.

It wasn’t the word. It was the way it landed. Flat. No softness to catch it. Eric’s stomach went hollow in a single tilt. He gripped the edge of the pedestal, because that was better than punching something.

“You just said you can read where I came from,” he said. “What am I missing?” An edge of anger slipping from his cool facade.

Spectacles cleared his throat. “It’s… not a matter of not being able to send you back,” he said. “It’s a matter of mana. Our world sits in a… high mana saturation. Yours—” He hesitated, hunting a word that didn’t insult a thing he didn’t understand. “—doesn’t. Not yet. Sending you there, after you’ve adjusted to mana, would be like sending you into a desert with no food or water.”

“You’d starve in seconds,” Geral supplied helpfully from the wall.

“Geral,” the lead said. “Mouth.”

Eric shut his eyes against a bright, useless burn. He saw highway glare in the afterimage, the shape of a steering wheel in ghost-pressure under his fingers, a house that would not have him now and a family he could not call. He let the breath go because holding it would not fix his current problems.

“Okay,” he said, and somehow it sounded like a word useful people say. He opened his eyes. “So… not back. What about getting them here?”

“Absolutely not,” Seltherin said, reflex so fast his own brain had to catch up to his mouth. He winced at himself and did not retract it. “Summoning sapient beings is prohibited without Council sanction.”

The lead didn’t soften, but she was not unkind. “Even if it weren’t, you should not have survived the trip,” she said, “your parents would not… likely have the same luck. Not without knowing how you managed to survive the trip. And surviving the trip between realms requires… circumstances.”

Eric didn’t correct her. Parents landed like a bitter pill in his throat; the truth had other names. He swallowed it and said nothing.

“And consent,” spectacles added quickly, like an apology thrown into a street fight.

“Which you have,” Eric said, because that was the only joke left in the room and someone had to defuse the bomb. It fizzled and died right there on the stone.

Silence expanded to fill the the room and then kept going, as silences will.

Finally, the lead tucked the slate tighter under her arm. “We can stabilize you,” she said. “We can register you. We can make sure the… adjustment doesn’t tear you up from the inside. We can place you where you’ll learn how not to get yourself or anyone killed.”

She couldn’t imagine how he really felt, how absolute his sorrow was and how being here and not there was slowly killing him. He promised himself, mostly to keep himself sane that he would in fact find a way some how.

“Back at the Arcanum,” Seltherin said. He did not look at Eric. He looked at the idea of Eric, the way a man looks at a problem he will solve out of spite if nothing else. “How old are you, I would guess 16 or 17, I know humans have short lives typically.”

Eric thought about this, he wasn’t sixteen but if they think he’s sixteen maybe they’ll look at me as less dangerous, or maybe feel a need to protect me, yeah that could work.

“Yeah, I’m sixteen,” Eric said.

“Very well, I’ll fill out the paperwork and at the Arcanum you shall learn about the world you find yourself in, we will supply you with accommodations so you may adjust without concern.” The lead said.

“He may stay with me,” Seltherin said. “The new semester begins in half a cycle. Until then, I will prepare him as best I can.”

Eric let out a breath that might’ve been a laugh from a certain angle. “Fantastic,” he said. “Great. I love starting from nothing.”

The lead nodded once, decisive. “We’ll finish the stabilizers here. Then Seltherin can escort you to his home, you will stay there until we can find you something more permanent. Professor, you’ll file incident form AA-7 and an instructional deviation report.”

Seltherin looked like a man who had never deviated from instruction in his life and resented the implication.

Geral—mouth blessedly closed—produced a thin silver ring from his satchel and offered it to the lead. She turned to Eric. “This will keep the worst of the resonance bleed in check while you settle,” she said. “It will also tell us if you try anything interesting.”

“Interesting,” Eric repeated. “Like tap dancing?”

“Like casting without a license,” spectacles said blandly.

Eric extended his hand. The metal was cool and hummed faintly against skin that still sometimes felt like borrowed clothes. The ring shrank to fit and hummed harder, then faded to a background sensation like a distant transformer.

“I don’t even know how to cast,” Eric said trying to get into a sixteen year old character, “Wait will I learn how here?”

They ran two more scans that felt longer than they took, injected him with something that smelled like hot cinnamon but didn’t hurt, and signed enough papers to pave a driveway. Eventually the door sighed open again and the hallway’s cooler air reached him.

On the way out, he glanced once through a window slit at the city beyond: spires like harps, bridges like the ribs of sleeping whales, banners moving in a wind that didn’t exist at ground level. It was beautiful the way equations are—perfect, sharp, and just a little smug about it. Somewhere in that impossible skyline, he’d have to start from scratch. Again.

He looked down at the ring, at the coat. He had the keen and deeply unwelcome sense that both would be with him a long time.

They retraced their path through the quiet administrative warren and then out into an evening that had the decency to be a different color from the inside—less white, more copper. Seltherin’s stride shortened a fraction, enough to bring him even with Eric instead of a half pace ahead.

“I shouldn’t have said ‘possibly,’” he said abruptly, not quite looking at him. “About sending you home. I should have said nothing at all until the Authority had results.”

Eric rolled the ring against his finger. “Yeah,” he said. Then, because it wasn’t Seltherin’s fault and because the man had given him a coat: “But if you hadn’t said it, I wouldn’t have walked as fast.”

Seltherin huffed something that wasn’t a laugh and wasn’t not. “You are very irritating,” he said, almost approving, and then: “We’ll make use of you.”

“Story of my life.”

They reached the arch that led back toward the Arcanum’s main quadrangle. An evening bell tolled from somewhere.

Eric tugged the coat tighter. Too warm, too heavy, but at least he wasn’t naked anymore. Small mercies.

Behind them, the hallway swallowed the last of the Authority’s murmurs. Ahead, students crossed the open courtyard in bands and pairs, like a busy street in New York. Nobody looked at him and everyone did. Eyes slid away just a breath too late, cheeks pinked, shoulders turned, whispers were definitely not whispers.

Naked. Bald. Bad accent. Lightning affinity.

Tonight, a bed that wasn’t his. Tomorrow, who knows.

He breathed out and tasted copper in the air, or magic, or both.

“Alright,” he said to the space ahead. “Let’s see how this world works then.”

Seltherin didn’t ask what he meant. He didn’t need to.

They walked.