Late summer in Cambridge, Alice Law arrives for her first meeting with her new advisor. Nervous and eager, she enters Jacob Grimes’s office, where Grimes immediately puts her at ease, calling her application the strongest he has seen and telling her she belongs. His confidence and attention steady her and make her feel seen.

Grimes urges Alice to remember her unique spark and welcomes her with a promise to take apart the world together. The deliberate encouragement functions as initiation; Alice, newly arrived and insecure, interprets his praise as validation and commits herself to him with undying loyalty.

The narrative then surveys Grimes’s background: a difficult upbringing, self-education in libraries, enlistment, and a scholarship that led him from Texas to Oxford, where he was mocked as an outsider but chose to stay. His persistence and ambition position him for larger stages.

During the war, Grimes serves in the War Office’s research division, developing sustaining magicks and briefly achieving national celebrity. Afterward, he becomes synonymous with analytic magick, shaping agendas and granting his students unparalleled access. For Alice, his belief opens every door. Cause and effect crystallize: his patronage confers power, and that early faith becomes a debt she vows to repay, cementing her enduring loyalty.