by Jade Alters
“Cece left the Academy, Bryant,” Thise tells me. It’s so matter-of-fact, like I’m expected to just accept it. It inspires just the opposite reaction in my chest. Orange magma courses hot in the cracks between my armored skin.
“What do you mean, left?” I dig in. I don’t recognize the voice that says the words in my head. It’s saturated with a level of anger that I’ve never experienced. There’s a different word for this potent feeling, if I recall my teachings well. Rage. Even in my first, most destructive days in this Realm, I felt no such passion. The sound of it from my lips makes even Dragonlord Thise shift uncomfortably in her seat.
“She is no longer here. Physically, or as a student,” Thise tells me straight. Like I’m some sort of idiot! Like I wouldn’t get it without such specific wording. The truth is, I would have needed it to be spelled out for me, letter-by-letter, if it wasn’t for Cece. And now she’s gone. Everyone’s gone. The only people who weren’t afraid of me. My friends. My girlfriend, I believe is the term for someone I’ve been on multiple dates with. “The others went with her. Only Serge remains faithful to the Broken Academy.”
“Who…is everyone else faithful to?” I growl. A new sensation stirs my guts. It’s like they keep switching places, one over the other in an infinite coil. I want to reach in there and undo it before my insides are in a knot, but that happens before I can hope to blink. It’s so unsettling, I think I might feel better if I just bent over and spit them out. I almost go for it, when Thise’s answer stops me dead.
“The Kyrie,” she says.
“After everything we’ve been through here, most of which at the Kyrie’s hands, Cece decided to switch sides?” I snarl. But the angrier I get, the calmer Thise seems. I didn’t even notice myself move closer to her desk, but now my fingers dig into its edge. A stain of corruption creeps out from beneath each one, across the stone of the Dragonlord’s desk. Yet she sits upright, relaxed.
“It’s a bit more complicated than that, Bryant. It’s not exactly my story to tell, but I will if you need to hear it,” Thise tells me. “It wasn’t safe for Cece to stay here any more. Not for her…or anyone else.” The rage inside me only fights to expand. It seeps through every inch of my body and mind, escalated more than anything by the Dragonlord’s calmness. Why didn’t she try something? To stop Cece, or make it possible for her to stay, or… She looks upset, but she let Cece go!
“You decided this?” I ask.
“She did,” Thise says.
“And no one thought to tell me…” I murmur. My fingers clamp tighter around the stone already softened by the corruption of my touch. They cut right through the surface of Thise’s desk. Fist-sized chunks of it pop free and crumble in my hands. Black and orange coals rain down around my shoes.
“Bryant…try to stay calm,” Thise tells me at last. Fear finally creeps up on her. I can see in her eyes she remembers exactly what I’m capable of. But back then, I didn’t get angry. “I know this is hard to understand.”
“They left me behind,” I grumble, hardly hearing the Dragonlord. Her words might as well be interference in the static of a radio. “She left me behind.”
“Bryant,” Thise stands to call my attention back. She doesn’t quite realize this is about the worst place to direct it. “Please…” I’m not sure exactly what it’s connected to – Thise’s body language, or her please, but something snaps the last restraint I have.
“Shut up!” It’s all I can do not to reduce her to corrosion particles. A cone of corrupted spires shoot up from the floor in front of me, boxing Thise in at her desk. They stop less than a few inches from her on either side. When I see her hands come up in a defensive stance, I summon a thick column of corrupted stone up from her desk to wall us apart.
By the time the Dragonlord blasts through, I’m long gone.
Bryant,
The Sierra Nevadas, Academy Training Zone
I’m hardly sure where I’m going. All I know from Cece’s reports is the Stronghold is somewhere in the outer reaches of the Sierra Nevadas. At least it’s the perfect place to let off some steam. I need all of ten minutes on the other side of the Tether Teleporter to get a taste of why Cece loves it here so much.
I stomp out my anger across the cracked clay. Black stains and orange cracks spread from each hard impact. I make for a rise on a poorly marked trail over a mostly-bald mountain. I’ll find the Stronghold. Even if I have no idea how. I’m too angry to care just now.
I’m angry with Thise for letting Cece go. I’m angry with Cece for leaving without a word. I’m angry at the others for not even thinking to tell me. Perhaps more than anything else, I’m angry with myself. How could I have been so distracted that I didn’t see what Cece would do? How could I be so unfathomably inept?
“Grah!” I stomp and throw my arms out. Three pillars of jet black stone climb from the earth, only to crack apart and crumble to orange, glowing bits. It leaves a wound in the ground beside a sharp-leaved bush.
I stand there, heavy-breathing through my bewilderment at myself, until I realize I’ve seen this bush before. The green-yellow pattern. The shape of it. Now I stare at it for a few seconds, I’m sure I’ve walked past it at least three times. This concerns me mostly because I’ve only walked in a straight line from the Tether. Therein lies the answer to one of my lingering mysteries. The whereabouts of the only member of the ASTF to stay loyal to the Academy.
“Serge!” I scream into the sky. My voice booms out twice, quieter each time. Just when I begin to doubt my initial judgment, a face peers through a translucent veil in the air before me.
“Wow, perceptive,” Serge admits. He steps out from behind the shield of his trick one leg at a time. “Where are you going, Bryant?’
“Nowhere, thanks to you,” I growl.
“Yeah, well… Thise sent me out here to watch for anyone who might follow Cece out. Wasn’t sure if I’d see you or not,” Serge admits. The shame in his voice only serves to reignite my rage. If he feels so guilty, why didn’t he just go with Cece? I tremble from the effort it takes to contain the dark impulses hammering against the inside of my skull.
“Serge…help me understand. Why did she go?” I ask. “Why join the Kyrie?” Serge kicks a pebble from its place near his foot. We both watch it tumble, like our brains inside our heads.
“The Council did something terrible to Cece’s family, before she was even born… Killed her mother. Tried to kill her,” Serge tells me. A hint of ire is forced out of me by a gasp of air.
“If that’s true…then why are you here defending them?” I ask. I see the truth of it written in the deep lines entrenched over Serge’s face. “Why are you trying to stop me from following her, instead of coming with me?”
“I can’t go back to my family. That bed’s been made. Even though there are others in the Kyrie… Whatever the Dalshaks are up to is bad news,” Serge shrugs weakly. His rises and opens towards me, though he squints his eyes almost completely shut. He winces away from what he’ll do to stop me. What he feels he has to do. But there’s something I have to do, too. “I’m sorry, Bryant. Any chance you’ll just turn around? Go back to the Academy?” I raise my own arm at him in response first. Orange light crackles down the underside of my plated skin, to my fingers.
“Any chance you’ll step aside and let me past?” I answer. Both of us know the other’s answer, the same as our own. Serge unleashes a wave of illusory energy at the same time I raise a black-orange wall from the ground.
His trick hits my wall and wraps around in an attempt to lasso me. I crouch beneath it and make a break for the edge of his initial perimeter trick. Serge flings a glassy disk at me – an airborne portal. I dig my heels in to snag it in my palm. In my crushing grasp. I corrupt even the solidified light of his trick. It becomes a clump of solid, orange matter, something like a metal. I hurl it right back at Serge as hard as I can. I’m hardly surprised when he elects to remain still, and it passes clean through him. Serge’s appearance ripples until th
e metal thunks into the clay behind him. I have, after all, been inside one of his tricks all along. Of course he wouldn’t show his physical body. But I don’t need to find it. I don’t want to hurt Serge. I just need to get past him.
I sprint straight for the spot where he first emerged from, knocking tricks away left and right with my corrosive touch. The ricocheting portals open orb-shaped voids in the ground all around me. I reach out to dig my fingers into the ripples in the air. An almost invisible seam in Serge’s trick. Both hands in it, I begin to yank it apart.
“Bryant!” Serge calls to me from behind. I look back to him over my shoulder while I pull. He holds his thumb and index finger ready to snap. He has the chance. But I can’t go back. I’d be imprisoned again. I’d never see Cece. I decide to place the biggest bet of my life on the work I put into intuition. I see – at least I think I see – in his eye the limits of Serge’s loyalty. Hesitation. I pop a few illusory stitches, and the seam becomes a tear. I slip out before Serge can bring himself to do whatever he planned to do.
I hide my back from him with a shield of corruption, and sprint out into the mountains.
Cece,
The Kyrie Stronghold, Fey Forest
My tongue hangs out of the side of my mouth. I keep one eye cracked, trained on the deer. The other clenches tight as per Stephanie’s instruction. We’ve been tracking it all afternoon, though it’s not particularly hard to find one in the Fey Forest, since Fey Rorelia kindly opened the door for us to use it as a training ground.
“Find the energy trail,” Stephanie reminds me again.
“I know, I know,” I hush her. It’s not for the deer’s sake, either. It can’t hear a thing from our Astral forms. It took all morning, but I finally got myself out of my body. Sure, it’s possible I just fainted from fatigue, but hey, I’m out here stalking a deer as a cloud of energy. Not bad for day one.
“Well, that is why you botched the last three,” Stephanie tells me. “It’s easier to get into a building through a door or window than the wall.”
“Alright, Mom,” I mock her. A snicker escapes us both at the absurd truth, before I focus up again. “Alright,” I hum to myself. I close one eye again, and this time I actually see it! There really is a trail of spiritual resonance following the critter around! Everywhere the deer wanders, it leaves a little trace of its essence in the Blue Plane. There’s my door.
I float over, my lower half hardly more than a flickering tail behind me. I put a tender hand in the deer’s energy trail. I start to tighten.
“Gentle now. You don’t want to grab onto her. You want to let yourself go. Assimilate your energy with-”
“Agh!” I scream as the deer jerks away, lifts its hind legs and bucks at me. Had I been a physical person, it would have knocked a few ribs in. As I am now, though, it just whispers through my blue, smoky frame.
“Relax,” Stephanie chuckles. “Let’s try it again.”
“I don’t know if I have the juice…” I pant.
“Cece, if…” but Stephanie stops herself when a small troop of Fey dashes between us. We both turn our heads to follow. Fey don’t just run without good reason. I think this might be the first time I’ve seen it, actually. Stephanie and I share a nod, then shoot back to where my body is, about a quarter-mile toward the other side of the forest. I burst awake, leaning up against a tree just in time to catch another group of Fey running by.
“Hey… What’s…going on?” I manage to force out, despite the grogginess. One of the Fey glances back as he sprints.
“There’s a Demon on the outskirts of the Forest, toward the Dragon Quarter,” he tells us.
“A Demon?” Stephanie echoes, helping me up to my feet. “You don’t think…” But I do, and she knows it by the look in my eyes. I stumble into the fastest trot I can manage, to the edge of the Fey Forest, into the fields around the Obsidian Cave.
That’s where I see him. There are dents in his armored skin. Orange light glows brighter from the cracks between his plates than I’ve ever seen before. The look in his eyes is completely unfamiliar to me. He turns about to face one crowd, Fey, then another, Dragons. More, Vampires zip in from all around him. With every turn, the black stain on the earth spreads wider.
“Bryant!” I roar down over the infinite calls to action around him. People demand he gets on the ground. They command him to stop spreading his corruption. They warn him this is the last time, before they neutralize him. Over it all, I scream, “Bryant! Do as they say!” then to the others, “Don’t hurt him!” For a second, my sight dims. When it returns, I catch the last flash of blue dying in Bryant’s eyes. His arms relax. The corrosion returns to the area near his feet.
I leap over the fringe of the crowd around him with a few wing flaps to drop me right in front of him. I throw my arms around his rocky neck.
“Cece… What…did you just do to me?” he asks.
“I... “ holy shit. I know exactly what I did. What I’ve been trying to do all day. But that’s going to be a bit much for him to handle now, with everyone surrounding him. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you later, I promise. What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to ask you that,” Bryant counters, too tired to be angry, though I get the feeling he still is, somewhere deep beneath the armor. “And why you didn’t tell me?”
“I…I couldn’t ask you to leave the Academy. Not after everything they did for yo-”
“You didn’t have to ask. I just wish you’d told me you needed help… I’d have been here sooner,” Bryant manages to say. Then, all at once, the very last ounce of his strength runs out. He falls forward into my waiting ams. I wrap them tighter around him, a shield from the suspicious Kyrie members closing in all around. His glowing orange eyes close on my shoulder.
“Oh, Bryant…” I whisper. I jump when I feel a hand on my shoulder, but it’s only Stephanie.
“You did it,” she smiles at me just before Bart zips onto the scene.
“No one touches the Demon!” he announces for his confused cohorts. “He’s with us, now.”
Stolen Witch
Cece,
The Sierra Nevadas, Academy Training Zone
I can’t linger outside the training zone too long. An alarm system might pick me up, or worse, a student could walk by. The last thing I want on my first operation is violence with Academy students. I can hardly believe I’m working with the Kyrie – I’m not ready to fight my classmates of two weeks ago. So I close my eyes and reach out through the blackness that all Dragons share.
I glide through a steady rain of embers across the vast abyss, in search of one in particular. One I hadn’t planned on reconnecting with so soon, or at all. But it was me who broke our connection, so it is me who mends it. I reach out as soon as I see her bright, perfectly crimson flame.
“Cece?” Dragonlord Thise calls into the Soul of Fire. But I can’t bear to answer. I only do what I reached out to do. Like Stephanie theorized, the Soul of Fire entangles Dragon consciousnesses – eliminating the need to do it myself before possession. All I need to do is will it, and my sapphire ember flares out to swallow Thise’s red one. I open my eyes in a completely different place than I closed them. The Dragonlord’s office.
I look down at my hands, spotted with lines and stains of years and wisdom. I slide those hands out across the cool surface of stone – her desk. I fear the first mirror I’ll pass, and the face I’ll see in it. The body of my mentor, being worked like a puppet from outside the Academy. By me. But possession through the Soul of Fire is hardly a tested art, so I have no idea how stable the connection is, no idea my time frame. I sift through the student files under her desk for the one I need. Helena. I stand and rush from the office with her file tucked under my arm.
I clack my classy heels all the way down the administrative sector to the Academy courtyards. It’s the oddest feeling. It wasn’t long ago at all that I called this place home. Now I feel every stare that’s meant for a different woman, the one I hijack
ed, like a silent accusation. Like they just know it’s not Thise moving this body around. I wonder if I’ve been labeled a fugitive or outlaw yet.
Heavy thoughts and panic, as it turns out, are a great way to pass the time. The door to the Adjustment Lounge appears before me. I throw it open and walk through, closer to my physical body with every step. But I haven’t come to reunite with myself. I walk Thise’s body to the far end of the Lounge, where french doors bar the Academy’s connection to the earth. I check behind me to make sure I’m alone, then perform the ritual, just as Horace showed me.
One hand flat against each side of the door frame, I press in. I gasp when I feel the wood give a little – two secret panels pop in. Were it not the hands of a Councilmember, it would do nothing. But in the body of the Dragonlord, I’m able to click in part of the door and slide it down. I send the signal back to my body. Its lips move to drone out a message for those who wait alongside it.
“Alarms down,” I tell them, and zip right back into the Dragonlord’s body before she can wrestle back control. I pop out Helena’s file on my way back to the other side of the Lounge. I thumb through it for her current class schedule. Right now, she should be in Natural Energy Studies. All that’s left is for me to get under her skin.
I walk the Dragonlord back to her office before anything else. With the recent revelation of my heritage, there’s no way she wouldn’t connect the dots after waking up somewhere else with no memory of moving. No, it has to be seamless. I fold Helena’s file up exactly as it was and tuck it away. I close up Thise’s desk and position her just the way she was when I first jumped into her driver’s seat, as best I can remember. I untie us in the Soul of Fire, before rebreaking our connection.
My Astral body lifts from Thise’s physical one. Suddenly, instead of being her, I’m beside her, floating above the office I’ve spent so much time in. But I hardly have time now to marvel at how surreal it is. I have a Witch to nab.
