by Gage Lee
I planned to split everything equally with my students. It wasn’t much, yet, but the purified vials of jinsei and containers of aspects would make a nice nest egg for those students one day. And it was all hidden from everyone else at the School. We got the polluted jinsei from the School’s waste containment unit and used old vials and jars to store the jinsei and aspects in a hiding spot that Hahen had found.
When we weren’t training the hollows, Hahen and I looked for a delamination solution. While I was in class he spent his days in the library poring over alchemy texts that had been ancient when he was just a whelp, and after dinner we’d put our heads together to see if either of us had discovered anything new. I’d had high hopes that my advanced alchemy course would offer some insights into elixirs or serums I could use to heal my core.
That hadn’t panned out, and by the middle of October, I was beyond frustrated. I’d gotten stronger since the episode, but I still wasn’t strong.
I was in such a funk that I hardly paid attention in my Soul Scrivening course, even though I needed all the help I could get with any kind of scrivening. I was hopeless at it, and without Clem or Rachel in my class to help me along, it was easy to imagine Professor Ishigara failing me out.
“Stop daydreaming.” Hagar nudged me with one sharp elbow and flicked her eyes toward the front of the room, where Professor Ishigara was outlining some obscure technique that made absolutely no sense to me. “You need to learn this.”
“Whatever,” I whispered back.
“Mr. Warin,” Ishigara called from the blackboard. “Perhaps you would like to demonstrate since I see you’ve been so attentive during my class.”
“Honored Professor,” I stammered, “I’m afraid I may not be the best example for the other students.”
“Nonsense,” she snapped. “Any errors you make I will correct. It will be a learning experience for us all.”
“See?” Hagar snickered as I squeezed past her toward the aisle. “You should have been paying attention.”
She was right, and that irritated me even more than getting called out. Things weren’t going my way, but that wasn’t a reason to give up. I’d always pushed myself to reach my goals. Delamination shouldn’t stop me from working toward advancement. I straightened my shoulders, stiffened my spine, and marched down to the professor.
“Very good,” she said. “As you can see from the notes on the board and the reading you were assigned last week, soul scrivening is not complex. It is, however, rather delicate. Grafting the wrong aspects to your core can be very unpleasant.”
“Uh, yeah,” I agreed, suddenly nervous. I should have paid closer attention in class.
“We’ll only be doing a temporary graft today,” the professor said. “Let’s start with something simple. Please graft an armored aspect from this helm to your core, Mr. Warin.”
With that, Professor Ishigara produced an old-fashioned plate helmet. It was composed of a durable, yet lightweight alloy and its surface was covered in flowing waves of scrivened protection. The item’s aura held dozens of armored aspects. Any one of them would have been sufficient to stop a sword’s blow or an arrow’s strike.
The professor watched me warily, as if she wasn’t sure what I might try. I glanced at the notes on the board. Most of them were indecipherable to me. The few I did understand were related to aspects, a subject that I was practically an expert in. It looked like the first step involved pulling the aspect into my aura. Easy enough.
I took a deep breath and extended my hand toward the helmet. I stopped at the point where my aura overlapped with the helm’s. Before I’d been injured, it would’ve been easier to do this with my serpents. Now, I needed to be close to the aspects I wanted to take.
I steeled myself against the pain I expected and activated the Thief’s Shield technique. Fortunately, the technique alone didn’t require much jinsei or pressure my core enough to cause further damage. In my prime, it would’ve been a simple matter to rip every armored aspect out of the helmet’s aura and into mine. At the moment, though, it was a strenuous effort to transfer even one aspect.
There was no pain, though, so that was a relief.
“Very good,” Professor Ishigara said grudgingly. “You may begin the grafting process.”
Which I totally would have, except I had no idea what the grafting process entailed. I tried to imagine a scrivening stylus drawing simple binding loops between my core and the armored aspect snared in my aura. It seemed like a logical way to go about it and netted me absolutely zero progress.
“You’re overthinking,” the professor explained in a condescending tone. “I can see your jinsei flickering all around your core. Bring the aspect closer to your core before you begin the binding circuit.”
That, of course, made perfect sense. It was one of the reasons I had trouble with scripting. There was a conceptual element to the art that I had a difficult time wrapping my thoughts around. I always wanted to do things the hard way, when I should’ve been looking for ways to make every task simpler.
My undamaged aura was at the same level as my core, so manipulating the aspect trapped within it wasn’t difficult. After a few seconds I’d maneuvered the armored aspect into position. Then I imagined a thread of jinsei stitching the aspect to my nearby core.
The sacred energy flowed out of my wounded core, pierced the perimeter of the aspect, then looped back around. A second loop, then a third bound the aspect even tighter to me.
“You’re almost there, Mr. Warin,” Professor Ishigara said, sounding faintly surprised. “Not the most efficient work I’ve ever seen, but I suppose it will suffice. Do you have enough jinsei to complete the task?”
I did not.
There was enough sacred energy in my core for another loop, maybe two. From the progress I’d made so far, I’d need at least four more binding circles to completely anchor the aspect. To further complicate matters, the binding circuit I’d created took up space in my core. There wasn’t room for me to cycle any more jinsei into my core without straining it and risking further delamination.
I mulled over the problem in search of a solution. There had to be some way to increase my core’s capacity.
Advancing to the next level of mastery would do that. It might also shred my core into itty-bitty pieces. I needed something simpler, and safer.
The Borrowed Core technique would let me connect to a rat or other small animal and use its core to gather aspects and channel more jinsei into my own. If I did that, though, I’d overload my core and damage it even further.
And then it hit me.
I reached out with the Borrowed Core technique and found the biggest, healthiest rat in the area. Through our bond, I convinced the rat to come closer until the only thing between us was the floorboards beneath my feet. Our auras overlapped just slightly.
Perfect.
I very carefully directed a thread from my reserves of sacred energy toward the rat. The Borrowed Core technique seemed to help the process, and it took only a fraction of the jinsei I’d used on the aspect to stitch a binding pattern around the rat’s core.
Just like that, I’d added a spare gas tank to my core. With the rat’s core tied to my own, I had more than enough capacity and wouldn’t have to worry about straining myself. Finally, I’d figured something out.
“Mr. Warin!” Ishigara’s voice sliced through my thoughts like a knife. There was a flash of light in my mind’s eye, and a jolt of pure jinsei shattered the bond I’d forged to the rat.
The professor’s attack stunned me, and I fell back from her with one hand raised defensively. My aura was filled with aspects of fear and anger and frustration, and they fueled the serpents that exploded out of me in all directions.
Ishigara danced back from my reflexive defense, and her fusion blade appeared in her hands. The weapon had a long and slender shaft tipped with a narrow, slightly curved blade like a scalpel’s. The weapon was at my throat in the blink of an eye.
“I yiel
d,” I said loud enough for everyone in the classroom to hear. I didn’t know why Ishigara had attacked me, and I didn’t want to give her any excuse to carve open my throat.
The professor and I watched each other warily. My serpents coiled above my shoulders, ready to strike if she pressed her attack.
Ishigara withdrew her blade an inch at a time, then leaped back out of my serpents’ range.
“Class dismissed,” she snapped. “Except for you, Mr. Warin.”
She’d banished her fusion blade, though it didn’t really matter. In my current condition, there was no way I could overpower the professor even though our cores were at the same level. She had the advantage of speed and experience over me, and she knew it.
We remained frozen until the last of the students had left the classroom. Both of us were ready to fight if it came to that, though I certainly didn’t want to lock horns with my professor again. Even if I won the fight, it would be difficult to explain why I’d killed one of the School’s staff.
“Relax, Jace,” she said when the door had closed behind the last student.
“You attacked me, honored Professor.” My words dripped with sarcasm and venom. “It is fortunate that I am not at full strength.”
“I suppose that it is,” Ishigara mused. “I didn’t attack you, though. I saved you.”
She turned her back on me and stalked over to the bookcase behind her desk. She plucked one of the tomes off its shelf, carried it back across the room, and dropped it on the lectern between us.
“Look at this.” She’d opened the book to a drawing and tapped it with one long nail.
The illustration she’d selected depicted a nightmarish creature with too many heads, too few legs, and more tails than I could easily count. A lolling ram’s head drooped over its right shoulder, while an all-too-human face peered out from between a serpent’s gaping maw and a bird’s beaked head.
“A chimera?” I asked. “I thought those were a myth.”
“They are. This is a cursed amalgam.” She turned the page and read a line from the book. “After numerous attempts to imbue himself with a multitude of beneficial bestial traits, the fallen soulscribe Aaron the Accursed was afflicted with a mutilated core. His body attempted to adapt to the unwholesome grafts. Ultimately, the rapid changes in his physical form led to his untimely demise.”
I took a deep breath and swallowed hard.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Obviously,” Ishigara said wearily. “Perhaps I should have warned you not to attempt such a foolish exercise. In my defense, I’ve never had a student attempt anything like that in any of my classes. Let me be clear from this point forward. We do not graft the cores of other living creatures to our own. Nor do we graft the cores of living creatures to each other.”
“I understand, honored Professor,” I said with a deep bow. “Am I dismissed?”
Ishigara sighed and leaned forward onto the lectern. She studied me with a raptor’s gaze.
“We don’t have to be enemies, Jace,” she said. “I don’t appreciate what happened to Grayson, and I don’t think any of us will ever know the full story behind his involvement with the Locust Court. I know I’ve been hard on you because of that. But you have more talent than most students. If you’d stop trying to fight everyone, and focus on your studies, you might realize that. I could tutor you in scrivening if you’d like. It would save us both a lot of grief.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I am honored by your confidence in my abilities.”
Not that I believed her for a second. Ishigara offering to help me was like a spider volunteering to have a fly over for dinner. If I took her up on the offer, it would almost certainly go poorly for me.
She had, however, given me a valuable piece of insight. I needed to learn more about Aaron the Accursed.
“Have a good night,” Ishigara said. “You’re dismissed.”
I left the classroom with a lighter heart than I’d had in days. A soul graft might be just what I needed. It might be possible to bind the peeling layers of my core to one another. A few loops of jinsei, and then—
“Out of the way,” a rough and strangely accented voice barked at me.
A small cluster of students I didn’t recognize was headed in my direction. They wore strange robes with unfamiliar insignias. They also had patches of scales on their faces and the exposed skin of their arms and bare feet. Long, serpentine tails whipped the air behind them as they glared at me with slitted pupils.
“My apologies.” I stepped aside to let them pass.
They were all much taller than I was, their bodies muscular and lithe. The claws on their hands and feet looked sharp enough to shred the meat right off my bones if they put their minds to it.
The backs of their robes displayed large embroidered circles filled with a surprisingly detailed mountainscape. A series of ornate letters in Empyreal calligraphy formed a border around the circle.
Shambala.
The fabled city of dragons.
The competition had arrived.
The Competition
THE DINING HALL BUZZED with excitement and apprehension at lunch that day. The students of the School of Swords and Sorcery had all heard of the new arrivals. I filled my plate and tried to sift the common sense from the nonsense I heard from the other students’ conversations.
“They were ten feet tall with horns as long as my arm,” an initiate from the Disciples of Jade Flame swore to her classmate. “One of them breathed fire at me.”
“They marched straight down the hall with their axes,” an older student said. She demonstrated what she’d seen by holding one hand over her head and the other down past her waist. “They weren’t even fusion blades. Just dirty old axes.”
The other snippets of conversation I caught didn’t make any more sense than the first two. Some people swore they’d seen the walking dead roaming the corridors. Others claimed to have spotted fish people from Atlantis cavorting in our fountains.
“Did you see anyone from another school?” Clem asked when I arrived at our usual table.
“Dragons from Shambala,” I said. “Where’s Eric and Abi?”
“Abi got pulled off for PDF work,” Clem explained. “He’s been on portal duty helping the other schools get their students here. Eric’s been working with Professor Song on some new maneuver. You didn’t really see dragons, did you?”
“I wish I hadn’t,” I confessed. “There were five of them. Not like the one that delivered the message, though. These were humanoid, but they did have tails and claws.”
“Juveniles.” Clem nodded and took a bite of pizza. “That makes sense. I can’t believe this is really happening. Humans and dragons haven’t fought for eons.”
“And how’d that work out?” All this stuff about dragons and humans fighting over the fate of the world seemed almost too fantastical to be real. It was easier if I thought about the Gauntlet in simpler terms and focused on what I needed to do, rather than everything else that was at stake. Still, I’d rather know more about the competition than less.
“Poorly,” Hagar said as she plopped down in a chair at the end of our table. She had a spooky way of arriving unexpectedly. “One to one, dragons are just plain stronger than humans. In pretty much every way.”
A loud, braying horn blast crashed through the air.
“Students, please make your way to the Gauntlet Courtyard.” Elushinithoc’s unmistakable voice boomed through the school. “It is time to meet the competition.”
Once again, the professors had been caught off guard by the dragon’s unexpected demand. They scrambled to guide all of us out of the dining hall, down the school’s twisting passages, and into the courtyard, where the dragon waited for us between the statues. We marched to the beat of the groans and grumbles of our half-fed stomachs. Why couldn’t the dragon at least try to work with our schedules?
“Move toward the front,” Elushinithoc called out as we filed into the courtyard. “I don�
�t bite. Unless provoked. Make room, everyone must be in attendance before we can begin.”
Clem clutched my hand and pulled me through the students toward the front. Hagar grabbed a fistful of my robes and was dragged along behind us. No one else was crazy enough to want to get any closer to Elushinithoc than necessary, so we ended up at the edge of the dragon’s platform. We were so close I couldn’t see the creature’s whole body without craning my neck back.
The Lord of the Scaled Council was terrifying at close range. The smallest scales on his tail were the size of my open palm, and the largest would’ve made excellent breastplates. Each of his claws was the length of a scimitar’s blade and looked even sharper. A powerful, feral smell mingled with the scent of old pennies wafted from the dragon. That scent triggered a primal fear that urged me to run far and fast away from this beast.
Clem and Hagar looked even more frightened than I was. They couldn’t take their wide eyes off Elushinithoc, even as we were jostled and pushed from behind by other students squeezing into the courtyard. Despite the number of students crammed together in that space, no one spoke.
The dragon basked in the fading brilliance of the sun’s rays, and his golden scales sent spikes of glinting light across the crowd. The regal creature commanded attention, and the sweep of his eyes was enough to hold us mute. Unlike the rest of us, Elushinithoc didn’t seem the least bit nervous. In fact, the dragon looked bored.
Finally, everyone was in the courtyard. The dragon raised his head even higher, and an enormous scroll of creamy vellum unfolded at his eye level.
“Greetings, students,” Elushinithoc called out in a voice so deep I swear my teeth rattled in their sockets. “We have arrived at the eve of the Empyrean Gauntlet. Tomorrow, the teams will enter the first challenge. As is customary, I have arrived to both adjudicate this event and to introduce the local students to the visiting teams.”
The professors applauded faintly at that, prodding the rest of us to join in with half-hearted claps of our own. It would’ve seemed rude not to bang our hands together, but it also seemed silly to cheer on our opponents. Still, I clapped my palms together a few times and then waited for the other shoe to drop.
