The Acolyte will help with the restocking at the islands. He suspects he might be able to deduce their positions if tried, given his sense of momentum over the past days and excellent memory, but he will respect the privacy.

He will also discuss with his students what they plan to do while they're in Marienburg. He himself will be visiting any accessible libraries and perhaps providing some knowledgeable services.

Marienburg, like Erengrad, is a fortified city built on the delta of a major river, surrounded by cursed swamp. Unlike Erengrad, there are in fact any portions of the Riek river basin which are only slightly cursed, whose grain exports allow Marienburg to be far larger than Erengrad. Also unlike Erengrad, the swamp is *extremely* cursed, and there isn't a jot of construction outside the city walls, save for roads leading away in various directions. 

The ship will be docking in Elfsgemeente, a self-governing section of the city which is arguably the largest High Elf settlement outside of Ulthuan in this era (albiet, this is largely because any settlement larger has at this stage seized legal and cultural independence, whereas Elfsgemeente is legally a refounded version of the ancient elven colony of Sith Rionnasc'namishathir.). 

The Acolyte has a lot of places to visit, and only a couple days to visit in. Many of the greatest cathedrals and temples in the world are here, including Verena's Great Library. Baron Henryk's College of Navigation and Sea Magicks is a locally famous university on both mundane and magical matters, and perhaps is less uptight than the Sigmarite Colleges. 

Those definitely seem like the top two on his list! He'd turn over every stone in the city if he had the time, any self-respecting knowledge-seeker could only say the same, but without Knowledge of Speed, he only has so much time to work with, and thus priorities are a necessary skill, and one he's quite familiar with. He's had some contact with the Verenites before, and touching bases with the local branch may reveal important information that he couldn't gather whilst on the sea, so after giving his students his plans and ascertaining their own, he'll head to the Great Library first.

This great temple is, perhaps, the temple whose shadow inspired the temple in Erengrad, or at least, considering the climate is still not great for the architecture, it was at least built by those with a greater budget. It is a grand thing made from imported marble of the most beautiful sort, a façade of precise columns and ornate statuary, with recurring motifs of scales, swords, and owls. The centrepiece of the temple's main area is a grand statue of Verena herself, seated on her throne, with a spear in one hand, a set of scales in the other and an owl seated on her shoulder. It's painted in lifelike tones of stunning quality, and it gives the distinct impression that one is being watched - judged, even - by the goddess herself. There are several priests and priestesses in robes, bustling about the nave as they travel to and from the other, less grand, parts of the building, as well as a number of lay folk here to pray or visit the various facilities deeper in the church. 

The central statue may, in fact, merely be a remarkably well-crafted piece of art, but the Acolyte knows of more than one god back on his homeworld that could extend their perception or even their full divine presence through any sufficiently accurate portrayal of their likeness. He gives a quick bow towards the statue, just in case, before asking around among the priests and clerics for whether they might have use for an Acolyte of Fire, and whether any sections of the Great Library are open to public perusal?

One of the clerics knows what an acolyte of fire even is, having read some very concerning reports from the north. They would like the Acolyte to swear before the altar and the highest powers that he does not serve or pact with Chaos. It wouldn't be a certain thing, but it would be meaningful reassurance.  

The vast majority of the Great Library is only open to non-clergy after a dragging bureaucratic process to verify your moral charecter and the significance of your purposes. There is a public section, containing only approved texts on history and law? 

The Acolyte will so swear! So far his experiences with Chaos and associated persons have been mostly quite negative. Not that he'll mention it, but the only real exception he can think of is Klomm, honestly, and he remains hopeful that with time Klomm will be sufficiently tempted by Determination to pursue it despite the pain it seemed to cause him.

As for the relative limited extent of the public section, he's a bit disappointed to hear it, but he'll still take a moment walk through it and see if there's any historical or legal documents that might be relevant to either his brief stay here in Marienburg or his journey overall.

Trying to redeem the servants of Chaos and Destruction, while foolhardy and often illegal, is not actually service to those powers. The statue's judgement seems to fade, slightly, to approval, and whatever miracle (or it's absence) the cleric was praying for seems to satisfy them. They say they'll be adding it to the report. 

A brief skim of the titles does reveal a book on the history of magical practice in Sigmar's Empire, which does technically include The Wasteland (or Westerland, as it is sometimes spelt, especially in old documents). 

That certainly sounds relevant, as a strange foreign wizard traveling through (or rather, circuitously around) Sigmar's Empire! He'll sit down read it, or if it's more weighty tome maybe just the parts of it that seem most related to Marienburg (and maybe the other cities he plans to stop at, if any of them perhaps were once part of the empire).

Once he's done with that, unless any of the verenites make further requests of him, he will move on from the Great Library. If there's still good daylight left he'll visit the College of Navigation and Sea Magicks, but if not he'll simply retire to the hostel where he and his students are staying. If they're present he'll ask about their own days, but otherwise he'll continue working on his manuscript before eventually getting some sleep.

The history book is not terribly long, and it's quite informative. 

The history of magic in Sigmar's empire starts with Sigmar, founding his empire, and, when laying down his code of laws, forbidding witchcraft. Witchcraft was imprecisely defined (the book speculates that this is because it was based on dwarvern law, and there are no dwarf spellcasters), and thus, for a long time the law was inconsistently enforced, with many magic users (especially those with claims to divine power sources) going unprosecuted, or more often, erratically persecuted, and the forces of chaos having an ever-shifting morass of semi-legitimate cults, hedge witches, alchemists, court magicians, and majikers to hide themselves amongst. Many magical institutions existed in this period of time, but many of them fell to, or were revealed as tools of, the forces of chaos, and the rest hid themselves from persecution. The text disapproves strongly of this situation, clearly preferring either extreme to the ambiguity. 

Then, Magnus the Pious decided, that, due to the great aid that elven spellcasters, especially the archmage Teclis (the text assumes you know who these people are) in defeating chaos, that the Empire should legalise magic in a controlled, careful way, in order to bring the human spellcasters who unambiguously existed into the fold. He asked Teclis to create a legal and magical framework and to teach it to the people of the empire. Teclis gathered the greatest human spellcasters of the era and founded the eight colleges of magic in Altdorf. Despite the extremely restrictive terms of the charter (the full text of which is provided), this was an extremely controversial decision only possible in the wake of Magnus's reunification of the Empire, his defeat of an Everchosen, his extreme levels of general popularity, and several cases of extremely conspicuous divine intervention. 

So it continued until the reign of Dieter IV, one of the most despised Emperors on record. The night of a thousand arcane duels (when increasing tensions between the colleges resulted in them unleashing a storm of magic and erupting in outright warfare between the colleges, ending only when the Grand Theogenist of Sigmar stormed their towers and left no less than six of the eight college Patriarchs dead occurred early in his reign, and subject to pressure from the cult of Sigmar, he revoked the college's charter and outlawed magic, leading to a decades-long siege on the colleges, which never fell due to the truly terrifying danger that a building full of desperate archmages with no laws holding them back can pose. Dieter also sold a lesser charter to the elementalists of Nuln permitting them to practice magic in an attempt to make up for the lack, but they were for many reasons less effective. His final act of significance to this book was selling Marienburg its independence, which it has retained to this day, a decision which got not only him, but his dynasty dethroned. 

His successor managed, with some difficulty, to have the colleges reinstated, but only after losing several wars to Marienburg due to its superior magical support (both in the form of the students of the newly founded college of sea magics, but also high elven mercenaries working alongside Marienburg, whose continued independence they favoured due to its prominence in maritime trade.)

The final chapter is a summary of the legal situation as it stands. In the Empire proper, users of arcane magic without a charter or similarly strong evidence in favour of their virtue are not permitted. Divine magic is permitted except from the worship of explicitly forbidden gods, of which there is an extensive list not attached. There is a substantial grey magic community nonetheless, the details of which the author was not aware of, but witch hunters and chartered wizards alike have a much stronger legal mandate to hunt them down and burn them or demand they join a college respectively. In Marienburg, there is a similarly long list of forbidden religions and magical practices, but unknown magical traditions come through with the foreign sailors often enough that it increases profitability to assume they are permissible unless there is any evidence to the contrary.

Well, they're clearly important historical figures. The Acolyte imagines it won't be hard to find more mentions of them in future reading and he can build an ongoing profile of them as his reading progresses.

Well, that's certainly a very convenient circumstance for the Acolyte, at the moment at least. It's also rather enlightening as to things ended up as they are. He'll try and keep this context in mind if he does business with the empire at some point, as well as committing the text of the law to memory. He's hardly practiced in interpreting laws in this world as a whole, let alone in the empire specifically, but being able to recall its details might be useful if he manages to land himself in legal trouble. It might also be valuable to see about visiting these Elementalists, if he's ever passing through Nuln.

Regardless, given the brevity and directness of the text, it seems plausible that the Acolyte will still have time in the day for establishing contact with the local College.

Indeed, it's only early afternoon, the Acolyte should have plenty of time to go check out the College. 

Off to the college he goes! Ideally, if they have some manner of tour available he might like to take it, but otherwise a library, information center, or public gathering space might be good to start with.

The college was, in distant ages past, the elector of Marienburg's palace, given to the founder as a site for his university, and while it has been a long time and the campus has expanded and built new buildings (student residences and windswept spires alike), it has retained the beautiful facade and expansive gardens kept carefully despite the salt-damp that infests the entire city. They do tours for tourists, or alternatively he could bother magisters between classes, or go the the reception that handles student applications.

He'll see about finding a magister to talk with. He doesn't expect to be here for long enough to meaningfully audit any classes, let alone actually complete any sort of course, and he's as much interested in sharing his own knowledge as he is acquiring what knowledge they have here.

The first magister he finds teaches law and has another class to get to, but the second one teaches eastern languages and has the afternoon free. 

Oh, excellent! The Acolyte will happily trade information about Knowledge for information about more languages, especially if 'eastern' goes as far as Cathay, since he's quite rusty with the closest language he knows.

Study of eastern languages is in fact largely "study of eastern languages spoken by humans who won't try to kill you", so he speaks Cathayan well, teaches it often, and spends his reaserch time trying to get good academic sources on why everyone seems to think Indic is one language when it's clearly at least three based on his attempts to converse with sailors. What's Knowledge and how might it be useful to the heterodox linguist? 

Knowledge is a special kind of thought which, when your mind creates it, manifests in the world around you, causing it to be altered in accordance with the Principle of the Knowledge and your own understanding of it. The Acolyte of Fire is, naturally, a specialist under the Principle of Fire, and in particular within Fire in the aspect of Flames, which is the aspect of division and separation.

The Acolyte is happy to provide simple demonstrations of Flames, if the magister likes!

Flames do not seem that useful to a linguist, to be honest. He owns a knife, and is not so eager for evidence that he'd go wandering the darklands, even with magic for self defence.

That's fair. While Flames is his strongest aspect and Determination his weakest, the particular understanding of Determination that the Acolyte is familiar with, that of coming to and holding onto an understanding of Knowledge itself, could still of meaningful value, perhaps? In particular its function as a memory-aid might be useful, since it might allow this linguist to retain the exact intonations and inflections of speech rather than having to transcribe them as best he can into text.

That does sound useful! How do you do that? Isn't magic only usable by like, magic people? 

Knowledge does has lots of similarities with the local magical traditions, but as time goes on the Acolyte becomes less and less sure that it's fundamentally the same thing! Knowledge does not require any sort of inherent gift, aside from some very basic mental capacities. Even some mundane animals have managed to pick up Knowledge, in the Acolyte's experience, though generally only under the guiding hand of a Knowledgeable animal-trainer.

In his experience so far, people generally take a couple days of consistent but not urgent practice to pick up the very rudiments of Knowledge when he's taught them here, though it can be quicker with the right motivation. Still, the Acolyte is happy to explain the general process of finding and focusing one's previous experiences which resonate with the Knowledge. With this particular example, the Acolyte's staff can also be useful, since he's imbued it with his own Determination. Holding it and feeling the impression of his understanding pressed into its metaphysical substance might give the linguist a better starting place for arriving at his own Knowledge.

In the few hours he has to practice, he doesn't manage to get it. Is the Acolyte sure that this isn't a trick? Or like, a divine blessing that only a few chosen can actually wield. There's only one anointed for every hundred ordained priests of Manaan (or thereabouts), after all. He's not trying to imply the Acolyte is a fraud, but there's something wrong about this story.

No, the Acolyte managed to teach Determination to a literal troll fairly recently, so he's pretty certain it's teachable. It'd take a stellar genius to pick it up in less than a day, though. The Acolyte will understand if the magister leaves it by the wayside, but will encourage him to devote maybe an hour or two it each day, just focusing on the memory of the feeling of the Knowledge, in the spare moments between tasks, over meals, whenever he feels free to do so. If he does, the Acolyte expects he'll be able to manage the smallest expressions of Determination in a few weeks, maybe a little more than a month, and that his abilities will continue to grow from there as he continues to use his Knowledge.