The title of Magus was less about magical prowess and more about political positioning within the labyrinthine structure of the Imperial Magisterium.While the rank certainly required demonstrated competence—specifically achieving master-level proficiency in at least one of the seven fundamental schools of magic—the real qualification was something far more nebulous and infinitely more valuable: access.One could reasonably think of the Magisterium as an exclusive club where the membership fees were paid in decades of your life, carefully cultivated relationships, and an almost pathological devotion to bureaucratic procedure.Most mages spent their entire careers playing an elaborate game of political krozball, jumping from one administrative hoop to the next, collecting stamps of approval from increasingly pompous officials who had themselves spent decades collecting similar stamps from their own pompous superiors.The average timeline from apprentice to master was five to ten years, assuming you didn't accidentally offend someone important, get caught in a political scandal, or make the mistake of demonstrating too much competence too quickly.From master to senior positions within the hierarchy, another ten to twenty years of carefully orchestrated brown-nosing and strategic committee memberships. From there to magus, if it happened at all, required both exceptional circumstances and the sort of political backing that most people could only dream about.Adom had compressed that entire journey into roughly five years, which was rather like completing a marathon by taking a flying broom to the finish line. The flying broom, in this case, was his strategic partnership with Archmage Gaius Emris.Both regressors shared knowledge that made most political maneuvering seem like children arguing over toys in a sandbox. They knew how the current trajectory would end: the collapse that waited if nothing changed, the darkness (...)