New Horizons recap

Elaine, Auri, Artemis, Julius, and Amber emerge from the Fae realm thousands of years after the age they knew. Guided by Iona, they contain a voler infestation and reach the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft, where Elaine wins a combat scholarship. Artemis and Julius become hunters, Amber builds a gem-trading career, and Elaine spends several years studying healing, wizardry, and biomancy while beginning a relationship with Iona. She graduates the biomancy track, permanently strengthens Iona, completes an extensive survival-focused redesign of her own body, and chooses Bookworm as her third class. Elaine plans to seek Knight and Night through a vampire empire, but an imperial clerk accepts a false accusation that she is a Sentinel impersonator and dispatches Rangers to seize her for trial and execution.

Previously: Elaine was an accomplished healer, Sentinel, and combatant traveling with her phoenix companion Auri. Her allies included Artemis, an earth-and-lightning mage, Julius, an experienced commander and speedster, and Amber, Elaine's apprentice. Together they entered the Fae realm, leaving behind the people and world Elaine had known.

Elaine, Artemis, Julius, Amber, and Auri emerge from the Fae realm into a forest dominated by extremely dangerous spiders. System messages show that thousands of years have passed in the outside world, although the travelers experienced only a short absence. Fae bargains have changed Amber's name from Autumn, altered her body, and given her abilities involving value and truth. The group tunnels out beneath the forest and follows a road through Lyon toward Roland, struggling with unfamiliar languages and laws. In a tavern, Elaine restores the limbs and health of Iona, a badly wounded Valkyrie traveling with her frost wyvern, Fenrir. Iona can understand English and read status information through divine blessings. She accepts the party's account of Fae displacement and warns that Auri's phoenix nature must remain concealed. She also explains that Artemis and Julius need recognized authorization to travel openly as high-level fighters. Elaine faces the greatest risk: exposure of her true level and her ability to provide immortality could make her a target for capture or political conflict. Iona becomes the group's first informed local guide.

Iona reveals that the voler Elaine killed is a weapon whose eggs can spread through creatures eating its remains. The party returns to the spider forest, destroys the corpse, kills the tyrant tarantula and infected creatures, and burns the bodies. With the outbreak contained, Iona leads the travelers toward Lyon and the flying School of Sorcery and Spellcraft, a neutral refuge where Elaine might study safely. Artemis and Julius still need lawful work, while Amber plans a trading career. At the school, Elaine passes a healer examination despite major gaps in modern medicine and non-human anatomy. Admission alone is useless because she cannot pay tuition, so she enters a combat-scholarship contest overseen by Mormerilhawn, the Black Rose. Elaine uses her regeneration, defenses, concealed level, and Radiance attacks to dominate much of the event. Although a lightning strike eliminates her near the end, the judges value her battlefield skill and tactical judgment. They award her a full combat scholarship, giving her a viable place in the new age.

Elaine accepts tuition support in exchange for competing on the school's combat team. Amber turns wagers on Elaine's performance into enough money to help the group, and everyone travels to the school's flying island. Elaine enrolls with Auri as her dependent and Iona as her roommate, while Artemis, Julius, and Amber prepare to leave for their own work. Professor Marcus is assigned as Elaine's adviser. Marcus recommends broad medical study, wizardry, and biomancy, which can make lasting bodily alterations. He also shows Elaine the Medical Manuscripts. Elaine recognizes them as an expanded descendant of the six volumes she wrote in her former age, proof that her work survived for roughly twenty thousand years, but she keeps her authorship secret. Artemis and Julius join the Hunters Guild, and the friends part with no expectation of a quick reunion. In her soul-world library, Elaine reviews many exceptional third-class offers. Rather than commit immediately to healing, combat, or wizardry, she chooses Student of the Ages as a temporary class. It will let her sample the school's disciplines while preserving important learning and memory abilities for a later permanent choice.

Elaine builds Student of the Ages around language learning, study, organization, and controlled experimentation. She joins combat practice, works in the library, and fills an extreme schedule with medicine and many forms of magic. Mormerilhawn calibrates competition shielding for her unusual defenses and discovers her complete fire immunity. Auri begins formal schooling. Elaine learns that wizardry uses linked runes and prepared mana structures, then gains Runic Scribing through her Radiance class and creates her first working rune effect. Biomancy proves especially attractive because it can make permanent physical changes, but it also carries strict medical risks and divine limits against creating species. After sampling a wide curriculum, Elaine narrows her studies to medicine, wizardry, biomancy, enchanting, arrays, companion work, abjuration, zoology, and related subjects. Her pace remains damaging. Auri notices Elaine's grief and exhaustion, develops new fire magic, and begins baking to comfort her. Iona confronts Elaine about nightmares and burnout. Elaine finally reduces her course load, postpones major self-modification until she has the necessary expertise, and acknowledges mutual interest with Iona without rushing a relationship.

Elaine begins therapy with Grandmother Lynette and gives more room to friendship and rest. She develops a long-term goal of eradicating disease, while continuing to explore wizardry and safe biomancy. Her dormmate Skye explains that bonding with the unicorn Vruna made her immortal, and the archivist Ratcatcher helps Elaine investigate an ancient document whose Fae history defeats ordinary dating. A possible lead to other phoenixes remains uncertain. Iona also enters therapy and works through her fear of losing anyone she allows close. Elaine and Iona eventually agree to become girlfriends. Their school life continues through classes, combat training, and a skinwalker attack in which Iona fights while Elaine saves injured bystanders. Elaine's concern about a hostile ogre classmate is not resolved after the school issues only a warning. Over the following years, Elaine gains extensive medical and magical experience, develops stronger Radiance and runic skills, and keeps her old authorship secret. Auri advances in magic and baking, while Fenrir grows into a larger, partly speaking partner. Prepared at last for practical self-modification, Elaine replaces her student class with Better, Faster, Stronger, a purpose-built biomancy class, and raises it immediately to level 128.

At a school fair, Elaine opens an inexpensive biomancy clinic to gain supervised experience. She repairs a child's cleft lip and palate, makes minor alterations, performs a permanent physical transition for a teenage boy, and refuses work that exceeds her mana or medical judgment. Complications teach her that technically correct changes can still overwhelm a patient's senses or nervous system. Marcus warns her against spreading dangerous knowledge about combining bodies and accumulated statistics. By the end of the fair, Elaine considers herself better prepared for larger projects. Artemis and Julius return as successful hunters based in Lyon and are now married. Amber has grown into a prosperous gemstone merchant whose class lets her trade skill-infused gems and use some acquired abilities. She reports a wealthy moon cult expanding across the region, but Iona knows of no divine authority behind it. Elaine's old friends meet Iona and learn about the relationship. Elaine gives Artemis and Julius permanent engagement-ring tattoos, then discusses her eventual third class and post-school destination with the group. Elaine and Iona consider Roland after graduation, but neither their home nor Elaine's lasting class is settled.

Elaine devotes a school quarter to planning comprehensive survival-focused biomancy for herself and a more conservative protective redesign for Iona. Her proposals combine stronger bones and muscles, redundant organs, improved senses, internal runes, and other adaptations, but repeated review exposes dangerous interactions. Marcus learns from the blueprint that Elaine is immortal and recommends eventual refuge in a vampire empire. Elaine still intends to find Night despite Marcus's doubt that any vampire could have survived since creation. A five-professor panel awards Elaine bronze for biomancy knowledge and silver for her design, completing the track at bronze level. She revises the plan, abandons a flawed second-heart design, and first performs Iona's supervised full-body alteration successfully. Elaine then undertakes her own much larger transformation. Severe oxygen, coordination, and sensory problems follow, but a new awareness skill helps her integrate the incoming information. After several stable days, she makes the redesign permanent and spends weeks retraining. Testing confirms major gains in strength, speed, endurance, and perception. Elaine replaces the biomancy class with Bookworm. Research also convinces her that Emperor Knight, founder of the vampire empire, is the same Knight she knew, giving her another reason to travel there.

Elaine finishes school transformed, qualified in biomancy, and committed to Bookworm as her third class. Iona's protective alterations are also complete, and the two remain together with Auri and Fenrir. Elaine plans to investigate the vampire empire as a possible haven and as her best lead to Knight and Night. Elsewhere, her growing prominence attracts several kinds of attention. Marcus notices that someone has accumulated an extraordinary number of levels in only three years and begins checking whether other professors or vampires have detected the same anomaly. In Roland, the queen allows the weakened Valkyrie Order to remain legal but removes its unprotected territorial holdings, depriving it of the revenue that supported its former scale. A white-robed witch connected to the school notices Elaine of Remus in graduation records. Finally, an imperial clerk receives an old report that falsely identifies Elaine as a Sentinel impersonator. Believing the accusation, the clerk orders a roving Ranger team to bring Elaine back alive for public trial and execution. Elaine's intended journey toward the empire is therefore shadowed by an active lethal warrant she does not yet know about.

Elaine completes her bronze biomancy-track graduation, successfully performs Iona's protective full-body modification, and then makes her own far more extensive redesign permanent. Her new body is dramatically stronger and more resilient, although she must relearn movement and sensory control. She replaces her temporary biomancy class with Bookworm. Elaine and Iona remain together, with Auri and Fenrir still part of their close household. Artemis and Julius are established as married hunters in Lyon, while Amber is a successful gemstone merchant who has also reported an unexplained expanding moon cult. Elaine identifies Emperor Knight as the Knight she once knew and intends to investigate the vampire empire, both as a possible refuge for immortals and as a lead to Knight and Night. The Valkyrie Order remains legal in Roland but loses its territorial income. Meanwhile, Marcus investigates an extraordinary surge in accumulated levels, a white-robed witch notices Elaine's graduation record, and an imperial clerk acts on an old false report. Rangers are ordered to capture Elaine alive for a public trial and execution, leaving her intended destination as the source of the immediate threat.