More responses! Huzzah!

I think even if it feels awkward, I'm going to wind up having progress marched on - the core of the setting is that Arkis created a great school of magic so that knowledge could be spread and proliferated, and it would feel odd to have that concept in the setting and NOT have progressed from Arkis's time.

As for Arkis's immortality, I was thinking that Arkis mainly survived assassination attempts by dint of staying under the radar. Nobody knows that Arkis is Arkis, they just think that they're a caster from the Academy.

And my memory is _generally_ good enough that I don't run into "Got that in my notes somewhere". Even if I ran into it, I'd still prefer it to the "uhhhhh" response.