by Jade Alters
“Oh shut up. Don’t go getting all humble now. That’s not the Dalshak way!” Helena and I say the last part together, then immediately crack up.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Fey Deller tells us. Big surprise, I think to myself as I unclasp from Helena’s arms.
“I…used to be male. I took hormones and got a few operations to make myself female. I used to be called Harry,” Helena explains, as bluntly as she can. Fey Deller’s eyes flicker between the two of us, as if in search for something.
“I fail to see why a human would want to change their gender…but then I also fail to see why humans assign particular roles to particular genders,” she concludes.
“Hop on the train, sister,” Helena chuckles.
“I think we can work with that,” I say to Helena. She smiles back at me.
“Well, come on! Let me show you around the Wing!” Helena says, guiding me with an arm around my shoulder. “Or maybe you should show me around. You’ve probably been studying a map of this place since you could read.” She walks me towards the door and helps me stay steady.
“Shut up,” I chuckle, and let her take me along for whatever ride she has planned. I never thought I’d see Harry again, and I won’t. Yet my friend remains, and she can walk me wherever she wants.
The Girl From B-22
Hoster Rowsen,
The Broken Academy, Room B-11
I lay on my back, counting the dimples in the paint on my ceiling. It’s the only thing I can do to keep my mind off of it. Maybe if I don’t focus on it too much, it won’t happen. Maybe I’ll actually get some damn sleep.
It would help if my roommate didn’t snore so damn loud. He’s a Dragon though, so I guess I should consider myself lucky he doesn’t snort puffs of smoke with every deep breath. I can’t even begin to humor how ridiculous this all is, or I’ll never get to sleep. I mean a Dragon, a Demon and an…Astral, living in one tiny dorm room? I’m still getting used to calling myself that. I wouldn’t even believe it, if I hadn’t stumbled into the bodies of a few unlucky neighbors when I thought I was asleep, back home.
My folks at least tried to be supportive, which is more than I hear some students here get. Dad says his mom claimed to “walk in the Spirit Realm”, but everyone thought she was nuts. Guess it skipped a generation, because Dad went pale when Candace from two doors down woke up on our front yard…and I dreamed of walking her there. I can’t imagine. He went his whole life thinking his mother was certifiable, only to find out that she really was walking in some other Realm, and now his son was too. It’s a miracle the man managed to compose himself for the trip to the Tether, to see me off. My parents were two of the only - whatyoucallits, oh yeah, Normans - at the send-off.
“Spirit Realm” isn’t exactly correct though, according to what I’ve heard here. Blue Plane is more like it, and I’ve been there every night since I Awakened to my latent powers. Powers, I almost laugh out loud, despite the two others sleeping nearby. Since my Astral nature began to show itself for reasons unknown, I’ve felt anything but powerful.
I get torn out of my body seemingly at random. If I bump into someone, I better be damn sure I want to literally walk in their shoes. My body drops and suddenly I’m someone else. What I do at night when I close my eyes can’t be called sleep anymore. I just rise up out of my body, into the Blue Plane, and drift around until my alarm yanks me back to my body. I don’t wake up feeling particularly tired. Not physically. It’s the mental battle I’m losing. No human is equipped to understand exactly why we need sleep. Not until you’ve been deprived of it. There’s a certain mania that turning your brain to black for six or eight hours a night chases away. Maybe this is the real human condition, and sleep is just the control mechanism to keep us contained? But then again, I suppose I’m not human. Not really.
“Damnit!” I shout, knowing full well the others won’t hear me. That’s because I’m halfway to the ceiling now, and still rising. When I look down at my body, I find it shimmering a translucent blue. My fingers fray out and flicker like luminescent smoke. Everything below my waist twists around like a cloud in the wind. My real body is about three feet beneath me, limp and useless without the essence inside. Lucky bastard. What I wouldn’t give to be the one asleep, while some poor bastard is left to haunt the halls of the Academy until morning. But this is how it’s gone every night for the five days since I’ve come here, since Fey Rorelia came to my house to tell my parents there was actually a place I could learn to control these strange new phenomena. That’s all I have to look forward to, now.
I roll over in the air and drift across our room. It looks even smaller from above. At least my roommates are easy to get along with. But watching them sleep isn’t exactly going to make the night fly by. I drift on straight through the wall of our room into the hallway. I still get the urge to brace for impact whenever I head for a solid surface. My human upbringing and my Astral brain haven’t yet had their complete reconciliation about how the Blue Plane works. According to a few of the older Astral students I’ve met, I should be able to interact with the physical world in Astral form, eventually. For now, the extent of my abilities involves floating aimlessly and wooing at the people beneath me, purely for my own entertainment. They can’t hear me. I can’t possess them either, not when I want to. It only seems to happen when I’m not trying.
“Where to tonight?” I sigh to myself. Voices have an oddly ambient quality in the Blue Plane. Sometimes, just hearing my own voice fill the emptiness helps. I drift from one side of the hallway to the other, then back, just to test my spiritual agility. I spiral around hanging lanterns and dive into low glides along the floor. It’s fun, for about half as long as it was last night - ten minutes or so.
My flying joyride brings me to one of the outer corners of B-Wing. I dare go no further. This is where my own residential Wing borders with D-Wing, and there are two other Astrals there. Stephanie is nice enough, but she’s a little odd. I’ve been told that can happen, when Astrals are completely disconnected from their bodies. I’m not desperate enough to seek her out for company just yet. I’d be stuck with her all night, and I don’t know if I could handle that. I haven’t met the other Astral yet, but I can sense her presence. There’s a certain resonant hum when I fly near someone else in the Blue Plane, and the sound of an Astral is uniquely unmistakable. It sounds almost like a flute with a reed stuck in it. Beautiful and jarring at once.
I try a maneuver a little ahead of my paygrade to turn around - a backflip into an upside-down glide - and careen off-course instead. I shout in panic, as if something catastrophic would happen if I knock into something, before I remember just where I am. I can’t help laughing at myself as I pass right through the door to room B-22.
“Brief pitstop,” I chuckle to myself. “Maybe I’ll try the Library. If I’m lucky, someone’s left some books out I can…” There are plenty of things at the Broken Academy I’ve never seen before. Plenty of them are surprising, but none of them strike me as hard as this one. The only word that escapes my puzzled psyche once I lay eyes on it is “Whoa…”
I’ve stumbled through the wall of a room of three girls. One of them is Fey. One I recognize as Helena Bartos, since she came through the Tether the same day as I did. The third, however, is the one that catches my eye and won’t let it go. I float cautiously over towards the edge of her bed. Her skin is a shade of dark I can’t quite place. It’s like the darkest chocolate you can imagine, with the slightest dab of cream. Even while she sleeps, her silken black hair swirls out from her head like the wild tentacles of a Kraken. Her lips purse in a smile - or a scowl - it’s hard to tell. But, even more striking than the girl is the distortion of the Blue Plane around her.
What looks like a spiraling stormcloud of gray and white energy encircles her bed. Every so often I watch a little stream of smog slither from her forehead to join the cyclone, to keep it spinning. A hum sings from her essence, like all living things, but it’s not that of an Astral. T
here’s no flute tone. No, hers is more of a low bass chord, the kind you’d only appreciate in the background of a song if you were really listening for it. I lean an inch closer to get a better listen. I get one, for all of a second, before a tiny lightning bolt jumps out from her spiritual twister. It stabs the back of my hand.
“Damnit! What the hell?” I mutter as I shake out my spectral hand. It hurt - and not just my hand! My whole Astral form starts to sting with the static burn that spreads from her tiny lightning. Then, before I know it, I’m moving towards her. More lightning jumps out at me. It singes my cheek, my side and my other arm while I flail in an attempt to turn around. “Hey! Hey, wake up! I… I didn’t mean! Please, don’t…” I stop myself because I have no idea what to ask the girl not to do. I don’t know what the hell is happening. Bolts jump out at every inch of me as I move closer, even while I fight to turn around. “Please!”
It’s sucking me in, I realize all too late. The last thing I get a glimpse of is the gorgeous brown-skinned girl, sleeping peacefully. Then one of her bolts strikes me straight in the eye.
Emery
I lean until my back flattens on my cool, stony bench. Under the shade of the massive oak, it’s the perfect temperature to combat the oppressive heat of the summer at Clearlake. Harry prunes some of the overgrown holly behind me with the lightest touch of his fingers and a bit of magic. I’ve got our instructor’s latest puzzle challenge in a vice grip. I stare into the seemingly endless cascade of smaller boxes inside the clear box, wondering how I’ll ever separate them all. I’m twelve years old, and life is perfect.
That is, until lightning strikes the pond in the heart of the gardens. Dark clouds swirl in to blanket the blistering sun, dropping the temperature an easy ten degrees. I spring upright and move for the pond instantly. Its waters float up and congeal in a giant, floating pearl. Inside of it is a suspended body. When I arrive in front of my watery prison, I’m twenty again, and well aware that everything up until the lightning was a memory. Those I shared it with are gone. Only me and my prisoner remain in a very different rendition of the Clearlake gardens. One designed to strike fear into intruders.
“Hey- wha-wha-what the fuck is this?” the body inside my watery orb screams. He sounds genuinely mortified, but that’s not what freezes me up with my hand in front of me. I was ready to induce sick levels of torture at a single finger snap, until I noticed that he has no legs. In their place is a twisting cloud of teal smoke. His hands are much the same. I let my hand down an inch or so while the young man in front of it flails for his life, despite the fact he can breathe just fine. I suppose it would be rather disorienting to be suspended in water you can breathe under.
“A trap I set for anyone trying to invade my mind while I’m asleep,” I humor him. I reassert the threat of danger by cocking my hand up straight at the intruder’s mop of blonde hair and brown eyes. He winces away from it with just too much fear. He’s got no idea what I can do. He’s too clueless to be a spy or an assassin. I let my hand halfway down again. “How’d you get in here?”
“I don’t know, you tell me! I just found out I’m an Astral last week! I haven’t even gotten the hang of floating around yet, and- and I saw…” the young man chokes up, “Oh my God… I’m under water… why am I not drowning? Am I? Is this some kind of weird trick where I talk until my lungs fill up with-”
“Alright, alright, relax. You’re not drowning,” I wave him off, letting both hands completely down at my sides. “What’s your name?”
“Hoster Rowsen,” the young man spits out like a piece of food stuck in his throat.
“None of this is real, Hoster. You’re in an illusory prison. It’s a trick my family taught me to put on myself before bed. To keep out…prying eyes.,” I tell him.
“Prying… What are you, some kind of magic spy?” Hoster blurts.
“You ask an awful lot of questions for someone who just found out they were an Astral a week ago. How do I know you’re not some kind of magical spy?” I warn him. I put both my hands up in a configuration that means absolutely nothing. I couldn’t even blow a feather with the fake hand sign I give him, yet Hoster cringes for impact. That’s how I know.
“Alright, fair enough! No more questions. Except maybe…could you get me out of here?” he asks with such frightened innocence, I’m tempted to comply. If not for Father’s voice in my head, I’d have let him go right away. Innocence is the most common mask a threat will choose.
“Maybe…” I tease to put him even more on edge. Part of me feels terrible torturing him like this. Another part wants to crack up, knowing how very safe he is. “If you can explain to me how you got here.”
“I saw this… It looked like a storm, around you. I wanted to know what it was, so I got a little too close, I guess. It zapped me with lightning, sucked me in and then I was here,” Hoster recounts.
“So you were in my room,” I conclude from his alibi.
“I-I-I…I was,” Hoster admits. He deflates with an admirable degree of shame. “But not on purpose! I mean it, I’m still figuring out- well, pretty much everything about being an Astral. I flew through your wall by accident. Then I saw the storm - your illusion prison or whatever - and I got too curious is all!”
“I can respect that,” I admit. With a snap of my fingers, the orb of water pops like a balloon and splashes back down into the pond. The clouds spiral back out of the sky. The sun heats the scene back up, and bodies blip back into existence all around us. Hoster floats up out of the pond, not a drop of water on his ethereal frame. “This trap was really intended for other Magicians… I didn’t think it would catch an Astral.”
“Yeah, well, you dangled the right bait,” Hoster tells me. The very second he’s out of my watery prison, he seems oddly comfortable. “I’ve got squat to do but float around the Academy in the middle of the night. Mystical stormcloud girl? You can bet I’m checking that out.” I almost cover my mouth when a snort of laughter escapes me before I can stop it. The composure’s gone now, it’s too late to play the proud Dalshak card. Besides, this isn’t even real. Hoster’s such a newbie, he might not remember it in the morning either.
“Yeah…I might do some peeping too, if I had all night and no one to spend it with,” I admit. Hoster gives me a hard breath of laughter and floats around between the denizens of my memory.
“So…what is this? Like where are we, specifically?” Hoster asks.
“Forgive me if I don’t trust you enough to explain that,” I warn him through implication to remember that, moments ago, I was his jailer. Somehow, this seems to soar right over his head. Hoster’s ghostly body floats towards the wall of Clearlake.
“Right, right. Your family taught you to set traps before bedtime every night, so…that kind of makes sense,” he concludes. The accuracy of his assessment, coupled with how casually he gives it, pinches a nerve I’ve never had pinched before. He has no idea who he’s talking to. But then, he wouldn’t. Dalshak isn’t a name one outside the world of the Academy would know. “If I had to guess…”
“Please don’t,” I interject while he scratches his spectral chin.
“I’d say this is a memory,” Hoster concludes, regardless. “I mean if you’re asleep, this is a dream. It has to be. I read somewhere you can’t dream up people you’ve never actually seen before. And the level of detail here…” Hoster runs his glimmering sapphire fingers along an overgrown blade of grass on the ground. “Yeah, this is definitely a memory. Definitely one I’d say you like, too. Sunny day. People all around…plus why would you pick a bad memory to hang around in all night-”
“Hoster,” I interrupt him. He cocks his head at me without saying anything. “Get out.”
“Alright,” he concedes surprisingly fast. In the next second, I see just why. Hoster clenches both of his fists in concentration. He looks more like he’s going to shit his spectral pants than leave me be. “Can’t,” he tells me, when the moment of immense effort passes.
“What do yo
u mean?” I demand.
“I mean…I’m really new to this, remember? I’m not even sure how I got in here. Can’t you just throw me out?” Hoster asks. My hand hits my forehead before the end of his sentence.
“No…I can’t. This trap is designed to keep people in. I can do whatever I want in here, but I can’t affect the world outside,” I tell him, “not until I wake up.”
“Seems like a pretty faulty prison, honestly,” Hoster tells me.
“Thanks for your honesty,” I scowl. That face quickly turns to laughter, however, at the sheer absurdity of it all. My first night in the Academy. Trapped in my own mind with the Astral from down the hall. Mother doesn’t need to hear this in my report.
“So we’re stuck here till morning?” Hoster asks. I flop back down on the stone bench I started the night on. Hoster floats over near me.
“Yeah,” I tell him, shaking my head at the absurdity. Hoster sinks down to the bench beside me. Though he can’t actually feel anything beneath him, he imitates sitting there for reasons I can’t understand.
“So…your family’s pretty rough, huh?” Hoster asks. I shoot him a loaded glare, which he doesn’t seem to catch the gist of. Right. He doesn’t know.
“You could say that. The Dalshaks were the Magicians who founded the Academy. Tradition is pretty important to them,” I tell him with a bite.
“On top of training their kids like sleeper cell agents,” Hoster says.
“I can put you back in the orb,” I warn him. Hoster puts his hands up in surrender.
“Alright, no family talk,” he acknowledges. Both of us put our eyes forward, quiet for a while. We watch the birds of my memory flutter by. We listen to the winds sweep through and the other kids chatter. “So…wanna tell me what happened on this day? Or where it was?” I fill my chest deep with breath and let it out with the beginning of a story.
“I was twelve on this day. It was so hot…but this bench was cool.” Hoster faces me and listens with the wide eyes of a child. I’ve never had someone listen to me like that. After a few minutes, I can’t stop talking. I curse myself, but I think I even enjoy it.
