by Tom Early
For a moment he lay there, and then got up and dusted off his suit. “Very good” came the creepily bland reply. “Next is Elemental.” I watched with some alarm as the man’s face altered slightly, the bridge of his nose widening and his jaw shifting until the face was someone else’s.
I kept my Ward up as the homunculus finished changing, trying to remember what I knew about Elemental casters. They were kind of like Evocation casters and Change casters put together—they took control of the entire space around them, and their attacks tended to be on a pretty giant scale, like Aria’s windstorm during the Trials. And that meant I had to change my Ward.
I held out my hands in front of me until they stretched out to the edges of the invisible shield my Ward formed, and then started to stretch it around me, moving my hands in a slow circle and then above my head, until my Ward was more of a dome than a wall. I was pretty sure it’d do a better job of keeping me safe against a giant, from-all-sides attack, but the drain of keeping it there was a lot bigger. I didn’t even want to think about the power it would take to maintain once the attack started.
I glanced nervously back at the homunculus, who appeared to be chanting something in what sounded like Latin, or maybe Italian. Whatever he was saying, it was taking a while, and I waited for a few seconds before realizing that, yeah, I should probably be attacking too. I started to summon up a Minor Orb and the bubble shape of the Ward around me wavered, ever so slightly. I gritted my teeth and tried to focus on keeping my Ward up as well, and it took a full five seconds for the orb to form in front of me. I directed it at the homunculus with a pointed finger and watched as the orb shot out at him, slamming into his chest hard enough to make him gasp out but not knock him backward. I frowned and started to make another orb, and that was when the homunculus finished his incantation.
A wave of brackish water poured out from beneath the man’s feet and roared in my direction, covering the distance in the blink of an eye. I had half a second to throw my hands in front of me and try to add a little more oomph to my Ward, and then it hit me. The sheer pressure of it was insane as the wave slammed into my little dome, throwing up spray in every direction and effectively blinding me. Even worse, the water level was still rising. It was up to my waist now, and I could almost hear my Ward groaning under the stress. All of my focus was required to keep it going, and even then I lasted barely ten seconds before I felt something crack in my mind and found myself blasted backward by a wave to the chest.
Then I was suddenly standing, bone-dry, without the faintest ache from being hit by a giant wave. The homunculus was still fifty feet away and once again wearing a different face.
“Now for Evocation,” he intoned, and then orbs of whirling air and crackling fire began to pop into existence around it as it advanced toward me, fists raised.
I threw up yet another Ward, and this time kept it to just in front of me. If sparring with Sam had taught me one thing, it was how to deal with straight-on attacks. I began to mutter the Reflection incantation under my breath, resolving to wait until he got close enough to feel the hit himself. When his orbs flew toward me, it was easy to let the Ward take the damage, now that I only had to maintain it from the front. I even countered with a quickly formed orb of my own, but the homunculus dodged out of the way with enough speed that I suspected he’d used a quickness spell on himself as well. Then he was on me, throwing a wild punch right at my forehead. I spat out the last syllable of the Reflection cast and watched with ugly satisfaction as his fist connected and his entire body was thrown backward.
The homunculus stood up a few seconds later. “Illusion,” he said, and then there were ten of him, all of them shimmering in and out of sight.
I groaned and got ready to go again.
IT FELT like hours before the homunculus finally concluded my testing and let me leave Limbo, utterly exhausted. I’d passed in my fight against Summoning and Evocation. Elemental and Change overwhelmed me, and it turns out that it’s really hard to block an attack you can’t see coming. Infusion had been an awkward five minutes of both of us blocking each other’s attacks until my cat sídhe finally broke through his shields. I got the sense that if I’d been facing a real student in any of those fights, I probably wouldn’t have won.
Sam was waiting for me as I staggered out of the Arena, a happy grin on her face.
“Let me guess,” I said, flopping myself down on the marble stand next to her. “You won at everything.”
“How’d you guess?” Sam asked, her eyes bright.
“You’re happy,” I said. “That usually means violence.”
Sam favored me with an extratoothy smile. “Fair. How’d it go for you?” I gave her a tired look, and she drooped somewhat. “That bad?”
“Not terribly,” I admitted, “but it’s really weird to fight without my”—I winced—“his, magic. I’ve got a lot to learn before I get any better than ‘hide behind a shield and occasionally throw a giant cat at you.’”
“That’s what the year is for,” Sam said, unconcerned. “Besides, it’s not like Didas is going to expel you if you do badly. You’re his secret weapon. Hell, you could probably get excused from the Arena stuff entirely if you wanted to.”
“I’m not going to be the one to ask that,” I said, grimacing. “I’d rather not get squashed like a bug for being impertinent or whatever he finds offensive about my attitude at the time.”
“I’m going to have to hurt him for that,” she said, examining her nails. “You know, just a little. A few broken bones or something.”
“Maybe wait a few years before trying that,” I said, feeling my eyelids droop. “How long do we have to stay here?”
“I was just waiting for you to finish. Want to head out?”
“Let’s. I wanna dive into a couch and just never leave.”
“As long as I get to use your arm for doodling purposes, I like this plan.”
Chapter Eleven
IT TOOK me a solid three days of searching for classes on my tablet and dealing with a surprising number of time slot conflicts, but I finally had my schedule for the semester. I was taking a history of Gaia course on Monday and Wednesday mornings because I was so very done with being clueless about everything. Sam was taking it with me, but I think that was more because it was required for non-Gaia students than any personal interest. I had my weekend meetings with Speaker Alferon, and I had Infusion Basics on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Beyond that I had a Gaian Mythology and Other Worlds course on Fridays that apparently discussed how to determine what was and was not real in a world of magic, and that was it. The cutoff was five classes, not four, but given that I also had to deal with the whole combining with Winter thing, I figured I would need the extra downtime.
The Sunday that classes started was also the day everyone got their Arena standings back. I was, to my surprise, not ranked last. I was in the bottom third, yes, but I had around thirty people beneath me in the rankings.
“You should figure out who those people are,” Aiden said when I relayed the results to him. “The people closest to your rankings are the ones you’ll most likely be fighting, and anyone in the bottom quarter of the rankings will be desperate. Learn their fighting styles before you get challenged, and you’ll be at an advantage.”
I frowned. “Wait, what do you mean, challenged? I thought the only time I had to fight people was during the Arena matchups.”
“That’s the only time you’re required to fight, yes,” he said, continuing to sip his coffee. “But students can issue challenges to each other at any time, so long as a supervisor agrees to be present. You can turn down the challenge, of course, but do that enough times and you may gain a certain reputation.”
“You mean as a coward,” I said. Great.
Aiden gave me a level look over his mug. “Precisely. The best thing you can do is make sure you’re equipped to deal with such challenges efficiently and brutally. Once you show those below you that you are not so easily trifled wi
th, the challenges tend to stop coming.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then your ranking and your reputation suffer,” Aiden said, and something in his eyes flared. “And when your reputation suffers, so does mine. So if it comes down to it, I will personally take action to ensure that doesn’t happen.”
I tried not to flinch and left Aiden to whatever old book he was reading and his coffee. Sam, unsurprisingly, scored near the very top of the rankings. In Obsidian it was her, Septimus, and Sofia battling for the top. Lailah, Sam’s roommate, was also way up there. I wondered what she’d done to merit such a high score, given that she looked like even more of a bookworm than me and didn’t have that actively threatening aura that so many people here seemed to. All the other Houses had their front-runners as well, though I didn’t recognize any of their names. No one person had been given the number-one ranking for our grade yet, however. Apparently that only came when people were actually pitted against each other. I was pretty certain Sam was going to become as insanely competitive about this as she did with karate and tae kwon do back home. I was just going to try to stay afloat.
I spent that last day before things really kicked off trying to relax. I tried reading a book for a little while on my bed, but I had just a little too much nervous energy to stay still, so I got up instead. Obsidian seemed kind of weirdly quiet to me, but it was around six. Maybe everyone was out getting food or something. I headed downstairs and passed by the empty lounge, stepping outside and heading for the Garden. It was supposed to bring peace, after all—maybe it could help me with my nerves as well.
The moment I stepped foot onto the soil of the Garden, the air changed, like the charge it has before a storm. And then the signs of change became a little more obvious. A sweet and delicate scent filled the air as every single flower in the carefully planted beds started to unfurl, even the ones that weren’t due until spring. It was fall, so some of the trees were starting to lose their leaves, but I could see tiny buds emerging and small, emerald-green leaves appearing. Some of the trees full-on blossomed as well, the petals swiftly shaking themselves free to flutter through the air as fruit swelled up and hung heavy on the branches. Birdsong echoed through the treetops, and a beautiful, throaty voice answered them. I kept wandering down the path in a daze, and in the corner of my eyes I could see a beautiful, dark-haired woman dancing between the trees, her feet bare in the loamy soil and bright shoots of life sprouting up from wherever she lifted them. Every part of my body felt like it was humming, bright and new and full of potential. The dirt beneath my feet had become a flowerbed. I wondered idly where my shoes had gone and kept walking.
The forest—and it was definitely a forest now, trees stretching out in every direction, no sign of the careful patterns in the Garden—felt older now, stronger. The leaves were full, unfurling to greedily drink in the brilliant sunlight that dappled the forest floor. The underbrush was thick around me, and the air was hot and humid, sweat making my shirt cling to my skin. Vines snaked through trees in a forest that all of a sudden seemed a lot more like a jungle than I remembered. Birds shrieked in the canopy, and a leopard calmly stepped out onto the path in front of me, fixed me with a level gaze, and then disappeared back into the thick of it. If there was a song in these woods, it was rich and lively. Everything here was at the peak of its life, from the smallest ant to the most dangerous predator. I felt more than saw the woman walking through the jungle, somewhere out of sight. I could sense the weight of every step her sun-browned body took, no carelessness in her movement. Every motion of her body proclaimed her ownership of this place, proud and regal. Her voice was a roar without words, and my feet carried me farther still.
Wherever I was now, the forest was even older. The trees were tall and wise, their foliage the brilliant reds and golds of autumn. A wind blew between them with enough bite to make me shiver, a second gust pushing me onward. A stream ran parallel to the leaf-strewn path beneath my feet, adding its bright noise to the birds calling warnings to each other. A crow fixed its gaze on me from a low branch, and I saw the familiar V of a flock of geese flying south overhead. The sky above alternated rapidly from bright blue and cloudless to a roiling gray that charged the air with the potential for a truly deadly thunderstorm. I had to step over a squirrel running over the path, an acorn clasped tightly in its mouth, and the leaves its charge sent spiraling into the air never came back down. There was no singing here, but a sense of urgency as those not ready to die prepared for the cold—and a quiet satisfaction from those old enough to wait for the snow to come and take them with it. Someone was watching me, from behind the trees and up in the branches, their hair all at once jet-black and somehow curly and bronze in a way that reminded me of the many colors of the leaves. I could feel gray eyes watching me, but whoever they belonged to, their step was silent in a way that spoke of a true understanding of the changing forest, a mastery through friendship instead of power. And still I continued on, until at last beneath my feet was snow.
Something was wrong here. I could feel it immediately. I was still in the woods, and they were barren and cold, the branches bare and everything covered in snow, but… somehow the entire forest felt off. Hollow. Like it was missing something. The path was gone, and I was left feeling confused, like there was something I ought to have been doing, but I wasn’t sure what. And then the pain came. Raw lines of it, tracing down from my neck across my chest and down to my wrists and ankles, and everything hurt. I tore off my shirt and grabbed a chunk of ice to hold against my skin, sobbing, anything to stop the pain, and then I saw my scars. The ones Didas gave me. They were open and bleeding, great gushes of blood that ran down my torso and coated every inch of me in red, staining the snow as well. There was way too much of it, enough to kill me three times over if I’d lost that much, and just as something inside of me started to stir and add its ancient voice to the snow and the ice, just as my eyes began to glow and everything about this strange forest started to make sense, I was falling. My scars were scabbed over, having bled me through the path itself, and I was falling in darkness until finally I came to rest on something, every last inch of me hurting as I rose to my feet again.
Wherever it was, it was somewhere without light and circulation. The air was dead here, and I had to feel my way against a cold stone wall to lead myself forward. There was a strange metallic rustling, like chains being dragged across the floor, and what sounded like two people sobbing from the exact same spot, somewhere in front of me. Then all of a sudden there was light, and I saw a giant of a man, arms and legs chained to a massive wall, head bowed, strange light sparking from his fingertips. Every so often one of the sparks would hit the floor and pool like wax there, before straightening up and unfolding into a faceless man in a suit, who would swiftly walk away. Another spark hit the wall and formed a gleaming oaken door, complete with a key in the lock. I could see words written on the wall in a language I shouldn’t have known but did anyway, speaking of desire and determination, all focused around a single goal. It was a command, over and over again, to go and learn no matter the price. To not question the desire to go, to not question your loyalty to the place that taught you. I must have made some sort of noise then, because the giant looked up at me, both of his faces visible beneath a curtain of bloodied, matted hair. His eyes widened and his faces screwed up in fear.
“You can’t be here,” both voices said in a hushed, urgent whisper. “He’ll be back soon. Don’t let him catch you. Save yourself,” one of the faces let out brokenly. “Save me if you can,” the other one added, a thread of hope in his tone. “Look below. Now go!” The giant threw out a hand as far as he could with the chains holding him back, and a spark flew toward the floor, opening up a door that sent me falling through, screaming.
I woke up in my bed with a start, clutching at my pounding heart. My clothes were soaked in sweat and blood, my scars covered almost entirely by scabs. What the hell had just happened?
Chapter Twelve
When I’d finished toweling myself off, I took advantage of the full-length mirror in the bathroom to check out what had happened with my scars. The shower’s water pressure had been enough to peel the scabs off, easily and painlessly enough that I hadn’t worried about accidentally bleeding out. The mirror showed me what was beneath them. Where my scars had been thick and ropey, protruding from my skin in a grotesque fashion, now they were thin, silvery lines that I couldn’t even feel when running my fingers over them. The result was actually kinda cool to look at, but I was too busy trying not to fall to the floor in a complete panic to really appreciate it. If my scars were fading, that meant Winter was getting stronger. And that meant… no. I wasn’t going to let myself hurt anyone else. I’d stop myself before that, whatever it took.
