Had Master sent the promising apprentice because even if new blood is something that we desperately need in order to preserve our tradition of passing down our knowledge of the arcane secrets of the long-forgotten past because a loss of a more skilled scholar such as himself would be even harder to recover from.
Such thoughts filled the mind of the Grand Master Mage who would have been responsible for a Tower if not for the troubling times that mages faced not that Dragons once again roamed the world. Now he was reduced to being an errand boy for the great master who was unfathomably old and incredibly powerful. So powerful that even the extremely few remaining arcanist level mages barely qualified to be his disciples.