Jerry also passed that same day, but Lirenna had to wait another day until she could join them as fully qualified wizards, and then the three of them had their own private celebration in Thomas’s room, each of them demonstrating their new spells to the others until the small room was so full of randomised, waste magic that it began to interfere with the spellcasting.

     They stayed at the University for another two weeks while some of the other apprentices who had failed to learn their first spell tried a second, a third, and, in one case, a fourth, but finally the last apprentice passed and the preparations were made for the graduation ceremony. On the morning of the tenth day of summer, the word went out to all the one thousand, one hundred and twelve apprentices to gather in the playing field that separated the school buildings from the research buildings half a mile away, where some of the most powerful wizards in the world carried out original research into new and improved forms of magic. In the field, one thousand five hundred chairs had been arranged in front of a wide stage, on which duplicates of the twelve chairs in the Grand Assembly Hall had been arranged.

     It was a miserable day, with dark clouds covering the sky and a light but steady drizzle that was whipped up by a stiff breeze, but no rain fell on the graduation field as it was covered by a dome of force that evaporated any drops of water that fell on it, sending a cloud of vapour back up to the clouds from where they’d come. Openings in the dome allowed people to enter without suffering the mild discomfort they would otherwise have experienced if they'd stepped directly through the wall of force. This small demonstration of power served to remind the graduates of what they stood to gain if they continued their education, pursuing the study of magic into the higher levels.

     As the students took their seats, arranged by class and year, some were surprised to see an apparently ancient wizard sitting in a wheelchair to the right of the stage. There were several retired wizards there, come down from their mansions and castles perched high on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the valley, but this one stood out from the others in being almost impossibly frail, little more than a skeleton wrapped up in skin as thin and fragile as tissue paper.

     There was no look of malice on his face now, but the arrangement of lines and wrinkles around his thin, slitted mouth and rheumy yellow eyes gave clear testimony to its usual presence. He looked as though a child could break him over his knee, but there was an aura of power surrounding him that terrified the apprentices, and even most of the graduated wizards.

     He wore the grey robes of an unspecialised wizard, ornately decorated with arcane symbols and sigils of power sewn in silver, gold and platinum thread. Plain gold rings gleamed on the second finger of each hand, he wore a diamond the size of a hen's egg on a chain around his neck, and he held a six foot long metal staff, decorated with gold and platinum in swirling spiral designs up and down its length. Some of the more senior students recognised him as Malefactos, a legend in his own lifetime, and considered by some to be the most powerful wizard now living in the world. Once, anyway. Frequent use of high level magic had aged him prematurely. Although he looked well over ninety, he was in fact only fifty eight, and so frail that the use of any magic above the intermediate levels would probably kill him outright. Nowadays, he relied primarily upon his unparalleled collection of magical items and weapons, many of which he had created himself, including the Staff of Lorenzium, and the Vestilon Gem.

     He had graduated from Lexandria forty years previously, and had almost immediately taken the world by storm. The tales of his deeds, his battles, and his discoveries were told all over the continent, growing with each telling. He had created many new spells, most of which were now used by dozens of other University graduates, and only by University graduates, being taught in the advanced classes. The official story was that as he had grown old he had retired to the University, to set down all that he had learned on imperishable denarium paper, to go into the library for posterity so that all he had learned would not be lost, but there were whispers that he had another, much darker reason for returning to the world's greatest bastion of wizardry, that he was pursuing forbidden lines of research to restore his youth and buy himself a new lease of life. Whatever the reasons for his return, he rarely emerged from his castle, perched high on the ridge that was now named after him, but he never missed a graduation ceremony.

     The newly qualified wizards sat in the first two rows, in front of the stage. Thomas sat near the middle of the second row, behind a tall, dark haired man wearing large gold earrings. Probably a Fu-Nangian, Thomas thought, from the look of him. Lirenna sat to his left, and Jerry sat on her left. Technically they were supposed to be seated by class, which would have put them dozens of seats apart, but they'd decided to sit together and no-one seemed to mind.

     They were all trembling with excitement. This was the culmination of five years of hard work, the goal they had only dreamed of attaining, and it still didn't seem real to them. It wouldn't really sink into them that they were wizards now, real actual wizards, until some days later. They were still wearing their white robes, though, the garb of apprentices, for one last time. They didn't really have any choice, as none of them owned any other clothes. There were a hundred and fifteen of them, more than in any year that any, except the oldest wizards, could remember. Last year, only ninety two students had qualified, and the year before there had been only eighty nine. Those who had failed were sitting in the audience, watching enviously and vowing to try harder next time.

     Once all the apprentices were seated and the noise and hubbub had settled down, the graduation ceremony began. The twelve chairwizards, dressed in their splendid ceremonial robes, strode slowly and solemnly onto the stage, led by the Head Proctor, the leader of the University's wizardly police force, the most senior of the elite cadre of wizards whose job it was to see that the University's rules were obeyed. Beside him was the Master of Ceremonies, muttering silently under his breath and his eyes flitting to all the other participants in turn to make sure they were all playing their parts correctly.

     The University, being five thousand years old, had a great many rituals and ceremonies, many of whose origins had been long forgotten and were carried on only by sheer force of tradition, and the graduation ceremony was the most important of all, being the culmination of the University's very purpose, the passing on of its values and ideals to the next generation. For that reason, the ceremony was also the longest, the opening of which alone took over an hour and in which the Master of Ceremonies asked each of the chairwizards in turn a series of ritual questions, each of which had to be followed by exactly the right answer.

     Now and again the master, or one of the elaborately dressed proctors stationed around the stage, would raise a cry or strike the ground with his staff, re-enacting an event that had occurred at some point in the distant past and which had somehow incorporated itself into the proceedings. The Casting of the Deathspell, for instance, in which one of the proctors caused a lance of fire to soar into the sky, bursting into a blossom of orange fire, had originated as an assassination attempt against the Director by a disgruntled underling seven hundred years before, and the Shielding of the Hall harked back to the day when the ceremony had been carried out indoors and a meteorite storm had almost brought the event to a premature conclusion.

     Finally, however, the opening ceremony came to a close and the time came for the main business of the occasion to begin. Justarian Westin, the director of the university and absolute ruler of the valley, cleared his throat as he took his place before the large podium and shuffled a thick wad of creased, yellowing papers on which his speech was written, the same speech he gave every year, without fail. Some of the other chairwizards groaned, and a couple of them nodded quietly off to sleep. The Master of Ceremonies nodded in approval. This, too, was all part of the ritual.

     "My fellow wizards and apprentices, once again we are gathered together to pay tribute to this year’s crop of fine young people who have achieved that highest of all human achievements, graduation as a wizard. When they go out into the world, they will take with them the knowledge that they are the elite, the most highly trained...." The speech drifted off into a long winded recitation of all the virtues and qualities that a wizard had to have, and that Lexandrian wizards especially had in abundance, and most of the other wizards present resigned themselves to a long boring repetition of what they already knew by heart, having heard it many times before.

     The speech took almost an hour to complete, and by the end of it even the first year apprentices, who had never heard it before, were struggling to stay awake. The applause, when it finally reached its conclusion, was more due to everyone trying to rouse themselves to full wakefulness than appreciation of its content.

     The Director carefully returned the speech to an inside pocket, keeping it safe for next year, and pulled out another sheet of paper, this one containing the names and details of all the graduates. "And now, we come to the main reason for this gathering, the honouring of this year's graduates. The first, in alphabetical order, is Clara Antanovin, all the way from Callinia. Come on up please, Clara."

     An attractive young woman sitting in the front row stood up, wobbling a little in her nervousness and excitement, and climbed the steps to the stage, where she stood in front of the director. Justarian Westin was a small, mousy looking man with nothing about him to suggest the immense powers he was capable of commanding. He looked like a man born to have people pushing in front of him in the queue, but the girl was still terrified to be standing before him, because this insignificant looking man held one of the most important offices in the world, an office that added political power to his impressive magical abilities.

     He held out his hand to the wizard seated next to him, who handed him a diploma bound with a thick scarlet ribbon, which he handed on to the woman. "It is with great pride that I give you this, the symbol of all you have achieved here. I wish you good luck in your future life, and hope that one day you will return here, to increase even further your already considerable store of knowledge and wisdom."

     He touched her robes, and spoke a word in the language of magic. The ring he wore on his left hand flashed, and her robes changed from brilliant white to dull grey, the colour of a fully qualified, unspecialised wizard. That was the colour they would all be wearing within the hour, except for Jerry who, already being a specialist in the school of Illusionism, would wear robes of grey and gold.

     There was a round of applause as the young wizard returned to her seat, walking as if in a strange and wonderful dream, and the Director called out the next name on the list.