Vasilran the Elder
Vasilran
All students on the Isle of Stars were assigned to a specific professor for the final year of their training. That year the entire university was all in an uproar because the famous scholar Vasilran had condescended to come and impart his great wisdom.
Melita met with the instructor in charge of student affairs and was given her assigned professor, for whom she would be both assistant and apprentice. Unfortunately, to her mind at least, she’d been assigned to the great Vasilran. The instructor assured her that she should be very conscious of the great honor. There had been several other students they'd hoped to place with the eminent scholar, but he'd specifically asked for one with her gift and she was the best they had to offer. The instructor had frowned and narrowed his eyes.
"So be grateful."
Melita sighed and tried to look properly grateful. But she'd read the blasted man’s compendium—it was required reading for half her lore classes—and all she could imagine was an ancient toad full of himself and his own self-importance. Figures she’d get stuck with an old horror like that. On top of which, he had to go and pick the most gods-awful office on the entire Isle, a set of rooms at the top of the southern tower. The wretched thing wasn’t even part of the main building complex. The rooms there hadn’t been used for anything more than storage in almost a century.
But of course the great Vasilran couldn’t be bothered to consort with ordinary mortals. No. He had to be set apart.
All of which meant she’d have to trek from the students’ quarters, down through the great hall, past the kitchens, through the lower courtyard, across the outer ward, and up three flights of stairs to the top of the cursed tower several times a day. And if he ran her around like all the other professors did with their apprentices—fetching books from the archives, hauling trays of food when they didn’t care to dine in the great hall—she’d be worn half to bone before a sennight was out. Of course once the rainy season began, the daily routine would become even more pleasant.
Melita muttered and cursed all the way to the top of the tower—how had the old goat managed to climb so many stairs?—and knocked on the door. A low voice murmured entry and she pushed it open to see a blond man barely in his middle years frowning at the wall behind the door.
“I’m so sorry. I was looking for Professor… Vasilran?”
“Yes. Yes.” He waved her in, still frowning at the wall. “Do close the door.”
She did and saw his frown was directed at a wooden statue as tall as a man that had been draped with a number of scarves. A velvet hat sporting an enormous plume was slouched over the thing’s head.
Oh, dear. If this was the great Vasilran's idea of decor she was in for an interesting year.
“Um…”
“Well, that’ll do for now, I suppose.” The man snapped out of his fierce aura of concentration with a sharp shrug and marched around a desk littered with papers and books. “Did you bring the water?”
“I… what?”
The frown returned, narrowing his oddly blue eyes. “I specifically asked the cook to send up a kettle of hot water.”
She blinked. “No one mentioned water.”
He sighed. “Fine. I suppose you might as well run and get it now.”
“I—excuse me?”
“You are my apprentice I assume? Isn’t that what apprentices do? Fetch what they’re told?”
“I—You’re Vasilran?”
“What were you expecting? A decrepit old ass who couldn’t even see straight to lace up his robes?”
“Yes.” Melita flushed and snapped her mouth shut. Oh fates and gods, she was in for it now.
Something like a smirk spread slowly across his face. “Well, how fortunate you got me instead. Now, then.”
She stared.
He raised his brows. “FETCH.”
She fled.
Vasilran the Elder has long been considered one of the most prolific scholars of the present age, only to be rivaled by his grandson, Vasilran the Younger. Although many of his views were considered, shall we say, unorthodox by his contemporaries, and several powers and principalities attempted to have his treatise On the Nature of Shifters banned along with certain of the more heretical statements in his Compendium of the Gods and Their Gifts stricken from the text, his works are now considered classics of scholarship. Even if somewhat eccentric classics.
His grandson, Vasilran the Younger, appears to be following in his predecessor's footsteps. Indeed, the tone and style of writing of both scholars is so similar that some have claimed the works of both to be forgeries, a hoax perpetrated by a single individual. If so, he or she must be an exceedingly long lived scribe, for the earliest works of the Elder are referenced in outside sources beginning some 350 years ago. Most notably in Trebeiza's Compleignte Agenst the Heretiks. While the stronger Gifted are notoriously long lived, it seems an unusual prank to dedicate oneself to for several centuries.
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