Kallum could barely contain his delight as his brother returned, but contain it he did. After all, Kyle wasn’t supposed to be back home (weird how ‘home’ was now a huge palace…) anytime soon.

Yet here he was, in the dead of night, sneaking about the palace hallways like how he did back in the farm when he had to find time to practice his magic. And like before, it was only pure happenstance that Kallum caught his brother, because he was still brimming with excitement from the day’s training with the powerful dwarf lady and wanted to sneak out to do some practice of his own.

“Kal?”

“Hey, Kyle.”

Kyle let out a soft exhale as he quickly ushered Kallum into a darker corner, hissing with disapproval. “What’re you doing out so late? You’re supposed to be sleeping!”

“Me? What about you?” the younger brother countered in a harsh whisper without missing a beat. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

Clear embarrassment flashed across Kyle’s shadowed face for a moment before he glared back. “Yeah, well… I have magic to bring me here and back real quick, so it’s not a problem for me.”

“And I can’t sleep.” Kallum retorted. “So I decided to be productive, as you say.”

This time there was a huff from the older sibling as he shook his head, Kyle’s silver eyes glinting from the dim light leaking in the main hallway. “You’re too young to be turning my words against me,” he said dryly, and Kallum could almost picture his brother’s lop-sided grin hidden in the darkness. “How’s things going so far? Everything alright? Ma and Pa doing good?”

Kallum nodded his head. “We’re all good. Pa’s spending time farming a garden, and ma’s do-”

The words died immediately and both brothers froze as they heard the shuffle of footsteps approach. Neither made a sound and they instinctively held their breaths and hugged the walls. It was like they were avoiding the town guards again.

Even if the guards here were supposed to be following Kyle’s orders, Kallum absently noted.

And this time, Kallum was old enough to know how to stay really quiet. No weak lungs or upset stomach tonight.

The guards eventually passed, none the wiser, allowing the brothers to resume their conversation. “So why are you here?” Kallum asked again, doing his best to emulate his older brother’s intense tone. To his delight, it worked, because Kyle gave a sighed and conceded the battle of wills with a slump of his shoulders.

“Look, I just need to get back to my room for something, alright? It’s a quick thing.”

“So why d’you gotta sneak in to do it? You could wait for tomorrow or something.”

Kyle leveled a heavy stare that seemed to pierce the darkness, causing Kallum to almost wince. “Why are you sneaking to do more training when you can wait until tomorrow or something?”

Crud. He got him there.

Hearing no answers from Kallum, Kyle’s lips twitched into what must be a grin. “I’ll make you  deal: You pretend you didn’t see me, and I’ll pretend I didn’t see you.” 

“Deal,” Kallum answered without hesitation, aware that dallying here further would waste precious training time.

His brother gave a pleased nod and prepared to leave, pausing at the last moment. “Next time I come back to Alterac properly, if you’re doing good enough with your lessons, I’ll have the smiths make you a sword.”

Kallum’s eyes went wide. “Promise?”

“Only if you promise to be worthy of it.”

The younger boy nodded with determination. “I will.”

Kyle reached out and ruffled his hair before fleeing into the shadows, leaving Kallum alone to slink off in the other direction with barely suppressed delight. He had a sword to earn, and even if not, he had to convince the dwarf lady that he could handle more than simple routines with a stick.

*****

Ever since the meeting with Uther, Kyle had gained a drive that propelled him to researching various topics and paying full attention in his classes. Not that he wasn’t doing so before, but now he actively asked questions, and spent time after classes to discuss the lessons with the professors.

He even applied himself in the practical lessons, ignoring his own poor innate arcane abilities to focus on how everyone else conducted their spellcasting. From the whys and hows of somatic gestures, to the finer details of wand usage, Kyle observed everything intently and sought clarification when required.

Which was a lot of times. To the point that half the practical teachers were highly impressed with his pursuit of knowledge, and the other half were annoyed at having to provide thorough answers to satisfy his questions. There was a kind of frantic urgency in his studying, as if Kyle was trying to gorge on what he could before a drought came.

If he was not interrogating his teachers or locked away with Archmage Krasus, he was poring through the libraries’ stock of knowledge. And if he wasn’t in any of the libraries, then he was in some lab or another working on…something.

Jaina would be lying if she didn’t find his research highly curious. She’d worked with Kyle in scouring the archives for his mysterious green gas, and it didn’t take too many guesses for them to stumble upon something that met Kyle’s specifications.

Corpse gas. That was all to it.

Well, corpse gas from decomposing matter transmuted by Kyle’s magic. They initially tried a rare breed of mushroom, an exotic ingredient taken off an alchemical treatise. Then after a thought - and considering how hard it was to procure the mushroom - they tried other fungi, and when that worked, they moved on to green plants, and then to various meats. It was one of the uncommon cases where an ingredient didn’t have to be novel or exotic to work.

Kyle had been ecstatic, and Jaina had to admit sharing some of it as it was a marvelous result to a joint research project conducted outside of her normal curriculum. There were no professors to herd them down the right path, no real clue as to where to begin, no clear priority list. It was, academically, highly exciting.

What bugged her though was after the findings, in the end it was merely just an ingredient; Kyle hadn’t told her what the green gas was actually for.

“In due time,” was the infuriating answer the boy gave when Jaina asked about it, and any attempts at even sneaking a peek into Kyle’s notes came up with nothing relevant. His current research was focused on more banal things like arcane foci and counterspells, probably finding workarounds to allow him to actually cast such spells.

The niggling curiosity was mildly frustrating, enough for Jaina to entertain the idea of grabbing Kyle really hard by the collar to shake out an answer. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that, because a week later, Kyle actually approached her.

“I’m gonna call in the favors,” he said in the seclusion of a library corner.

Jaina blinked and played dumb. “Favors?”

“For the scrolls I’ve been passing you.”

“I didn’t ask for them.”

“But you still kept them instead of returning them or reporting me.”

“Point,” she conceded before narrowing her gaze at him. “What kind of favor?”

“Your secrecy, and your assistance with some spellwork. I missed something blindingly obvious.”

“Uh huh. And that involves…?”

Kyle sighed. “Nothing warlocky, I promise.”

Jaina ended up meeting him again that evening in the same library, using the excuse of long research as a cover. She spied Kyle discreetly placing a palm-sized, pyramid-shaped object of the same gold as his summons in a crevice between bookshelves. He noted her noticing, and simply shrugged.

“You’ll understand in a bit. All set?”

Jaina couldn’t help leveling a look at him. “We’re going somewhere?”

“It won’t be long, I promise.” Kyle glanced about, making sure that they were truly the only ones in that particular section of the library, and then huffed somewhat nervously as he quickly produced a small chunk of blue quartz wrapped in a band of gold. “Hold on to this please. Good. Good, it works.”

She couldn’t help it. “What works?”

“Attunement. Now, don’t panic, we’re just-”

Jaina stifled a gasp as light began to bathe her, the same light from Kyle’s failed summon more than a week ago. She also realized that she couldn’t move, not even her eyes. Caught mid-gasp, the blonde novice noted how the world beyond the curtain of light around her seemed to stretch before there was a blinding flash and she found herself completing her gasp.

“-going for a jump.”

It all took maybe a couple of seconds, and as the light faded away, Jaina realized she was no longer in the library. She immediately recognized being inside a massive cavern, bathed in a soft blue glow. Crisp, sparking sounds echoed seemingly from all about, and the air was thick with the sharpness of freshly unleashed lightning.

Then Jaina turned to look behind her, and she almost jumped back when she realized the massive golden pyramid with a large, floating crystal on its tip filling up the cavern’s space. A probe zoomed past with a stump of wood caged in thin lightning hovering in front of it. Jaina tracked it as it flew towards another structure behind the underground pyramid, a grand arch of sorts made of the same gold.

“Kyle! What- How…?”

“Welcome to my outpost.”

“Outpost? Where are we?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. You’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

Jaina gawked at the pyramid looming over her, and then stared at Kyle. “When…how did you build this?”

Another infuriating shrug. “The same way I built my probe. Harvested loads of minerals, and then…voila.”

Jaina blinked, and the receding island of reason picked up the significance of his words. The transmuted quartz was somehow a…catalyst to create more things? So his probe wasn’t a real conjuration, a real summon then?

“So…” Forcing herself out of her shock, Jaina nodded towards the pyramid. “What’s that?”

Kyle offered a weak smile as he answered. “Nothing that I can really explain right now. I can say that the interior’s remarkably bare, though.”

She simply stared at him again, and eventually Kyle shrugged. “Anyway, we don’t have much time. If you’ll come with me?”

Jaina followed Kyle past the golden pyramid, finding more fantastical structures as she rounded the corner. Just beside the large arch, there was a building with an oblong, glass dome and chimneys where the probe flew into and deposited the stump. Jaina noted how wisps of the green transmuted corpse gas spewed out the chimneys at intervals, as well as what looked like a growing pile of compost within the transparent dome.

Not too far away, there was a lobed structure with pools of blue light spilling out on its roof, as well as a cluster of cylindrical formations with jagged spikes sprouting out of it. What really caught Jaina’s eyes though were the dozen or so floating crystals spikes scattered about the cavern, glowing and hovering idly above the ground. Just as impossibly, rings and leaf-shaped structures orbited them.

It took a few seconds before Jaina had the idea to look into the palm of her hand and notice that the crystal Kyle gave her was practically a miniature of these floating crystals. Come to think of it, the small object Kyle placed between the bookshelves earlier seemed like a miniature of the pyramid behind her…

“I built this outpost before I summoned my first probe, if you can believe it,” Kyle spoke, drawing Jaina out of her shocked musing.

“How?” was all she could manage.

“I convert blue quartz or citrine into…uh, blocks, and with enough blocks, I’m able to…I guess, transmute them into these buildings.”

Jaina blinked. “But how?”

“Uh… I don’t really know. Yet.”

The Kul Tiran princess let out a frustrated sigh at the answer.

“I mean, how exactly are arcane missiles formed? There’s theories, but everyone’s happy to settle for the fact that it simply works.”

She glowered at Kyle, who took the hint and continued leading her. They cleared the gilded buildings and reached what seemed to be a field of sorts. Jaina spied flakes of blue and gold crystals in patches glittering on the barren cavern’s ground and wall like glassy moss. Finally, Kyle stepped up to actually provide some explanation here.

“So, somehow my magic - psionics, I call it - interacts with blue quartz and citrine to turn them into different sorts of crystals. From those crystals, I can further refine them into blocks that are used for, well…” He trailed off and swept an arm to the buildings behind them. “Anyway, these crystals can grow, but very slowly. And I’m running low on blocks to use.”

“So you want me to help summon more quartz to turn into blocks?” Jaina guessed, though Kyle shook his head.

“I was thinking more that you summon the quartz so I can seed the ground with the raw, pre-blocked crystals. Should speed up the mineral patch growth a bit.”

Jaina frowned at him. “Still, you brought me all the way here…to summon more crystals?”

At least Kyle had the decency to look sheepish. “Well…yeah. Plus maybe I wanted someone to show off all this to?”

The annoyance faded from Jaina a bit, and she blinked before turning back to the buildings glowing and glittering within the cavernous space. With the shock bled away, the underground outpost was a spectacular sight, beautiful even.

“Nobody else knows?” she asked, turning back to Kyle.

“Archmage Krasus might have a glimpse or two from his scrying, but…yeah.” He shrugged lightly, offering a smile. “You’re about it for now.”

Jaina blinked again, and glanced over her shoulders once more to take in the sight of the buildings and floating crystals, and finally returned her attention to the glittering field. Suddenly, she didn’t feel so annoyed and frustrated anymore.

“How much quartz do you want me to summon?”

“As much as you’re comfortable with; doesn’t have to be a lot.”

The novice princess let out a soft sigh before nodding. “Come on then. I’ll get started.”

It only took two conjurations of blue quartz for Kyle to be satisfied, and then Jaina spent the rest of the time admiring the cavern. Somehow, she managed to withhold from asking further questions. The whys and hows were held back as Jaina began to appreciate the air of serenity offered by the soft blue illumination, and admitted to feeling some sense of marvel at watching more probes fly in to deposit logs or lumps of grass into the chimneyed ‘assimilator’ as Kyle calls it.

They left after Kyle was done tending to his crystal garden, returning to the library in the same, frozen light-bathed method as they left it.

“Thanks for the help, Jaina.”

“Not a problem,” she answered, finding herself genuinely smiling with satisfaction. “Thanks for showing me around.”

Kyle shrugged sheepishly at that. “If all goes well, I can bring you there again later. Hopefully by then there’d be more improvements to wow you some more.”

It was well into midnight when they left the library, and Jaina found herself still smiling as she returned to her dorm. Her smile grew as she brought up the small crystal Kyle had gifted her, noting how it glowed faintly in the dark.