Arcane Dropout 3

by Edmund Hughes

  Lee watched in mute fascination as the entire Seruna Center began to shake and shift. The adjustments were small, a few inches here, half a foot there, but calculated and precise. He shifted the foundation upward on the side where geomancy had rendered it crooked. He tilted the walls back into a structurally sound state. He fixed the bones of the building, saving what would likely be an ungodly amount of money and time had the college been forced to tear it down and rebuild.

  The class was gathered near the building’s entrance. Instructor Daniels noticed Lee as he tried to covertly rejoin the rest of his peers. Daniels shook his head with the same precision he’d used to reorient the Seruna Center’s foundation.

  “Another one,” said Daniels. “That makes, uh, two. Two? Yes, two. Two volunteers for tonight’s observation research.”

  “I was just running an errand,” said Lee.

  “I was not born in the day most recently previous to this one, Initiate Amaranth,” said Instructor Daniels. “You and Eliza will both spend tonight in the Outer Watch Tower. I’ve been concerned about the integrity of Primhaven’s outer wall and illusion veil. Your task will be to observe it and take notes.”

  “For the entire night?”

  “Yes.”

  Lee sought out Eliza’s eyes amongst the rest of the students. She looked away, still clearly annoyed from his earlier mishap. He did his best to taper his frustration as he considered that not only would the two of them be stuck together for the night, but he’d also be unable to keep watch for the lich and its specters. He hoped that Kei was up to the task alone.

  Instructor Daniels dismissed the class. Lee shared in Toma’s clumsy commiserations for a few minutes before heading off to the dining hall. He didn’t feel like sitting down to eat, so he grabbed a turkey bacon sandwich along with a bag of chips before heading to the Spell Range.

  “I’m surprised, Lee,” said Tess. “I can’t remember the last time you’ve been this proactive about your studies.”

  “I don’t really have a choice,” he said. “On top of honing my skills for the Midterm Trial, I also need to be at my best to face this lich. If Kei is right about it being nearby, Primhaven’s in serious danger. I don’t think even he would be able to do much against an attack.”

  The Spell Range was always underpopulated around lunch time, so Lee had managed to score a casting lane to himself. He rubbed his hands together as he stood behind the lines demarcating the various standard spell casting distances. Short, medium, and long range.

  “I’m ready whenever you are,” said Tess. “Naka was brimming with essence, as you can imagine.”

  Lee nodded. He clasped his wrist, focusing his awareness toward the spell he had in mind. The fact that his magic drew from Tess’s essence meant that he needed to be much more cautious about casting freely than a real mage. The obvious result of his spellcasting limits was that he didn’t have the same reflex for slinging spells that many of his classmates had developed. It was always a process for him, like building from a blueprint on a budget.

  He thrust his palm forward, letting his will form into a pure burst of rushing force. His target was the ancient, enchanted suit of armor at the far end of the casting lane. Normally, his force spell would knock the metal mannequin down, occasionally splitting the pauldrons apart from the plate mail.

  The armor split apart at a velocity that was borderline dangerous, sending the component pieces ricocheting off the ceiling and walls. Lee ducked under a metal full helm that shot past his forehead at a velocity which would have reversed its intended function, had it not missed by a few inches.

  “Wow,” said Lee. “That’s not normal.”

  “That’s Naka for you,” said Tess. “Her essence has an underlying power of physical strength. Now, if you could cast alteration spells to enhance your strength, the synergy would be perfect.”

  “If only,” muttered Lee. “Though I doubt that’ll help much with the trial that gave me the most trouble. I need a counter to that fear simulacrum. I need a way of…”

  He trailed, suddenly sensing someone watching him through one of the casting lane’s windows. Lee looked toward the perpetrator in time to see Eliza surreptitiously slipping out of view.

  “What is it with her and spying on me, anyway?” he said.

  “She cares about you, Lee,” said Tess. “Try to see it from her point of view.”

  “Her point of view is probably a mixed bag right now. But that doesn’t mean she needs to become a stalker.”

  He turned his focus back to his spell practice. As much as Lee knew he needed to ration his essence, he also knew he needed to put in work if he was going to have any hope of passing the Midterm Trial. He spent a few minutes working on a basic water elemental spell, creating a small, somewhat boring globe of liquid which he suspected would be too small to help with much.

  His phone vibrated as he received a call, which had become a rare occurrence since he’d first arrived at Primhaven. The number wasn’t one he recognized, and Lee answered fully expecting to hear an automated voice or insistent telemarketer.

  “Hey Eldon,” said Zoe. “It’s me.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Lee shifted his phone against his ear, as though part of him thought that what he’d just heard had been an artifact of the angle of the speaker.

  “What?” he said. “Zoe…?”

  “Yes, Zoe, your sister,” she said. “Please don’t tell me they decided to wipe your mind with dream weaving already?”

  “That’s not even funny.”

  “It wasn’t really meant to be,” she said. “How have you been, little brother?”

  Lee sighed and leaned against the wall of the casting lane. Tess had politely given him some space, wandering down toward where the scattered pieces of the training dummy had landed to amuse herself.

  “I’ve been okay,” he said. “I guess.”

  “Have you been staying out of trouble?”

  “Yes Zoe, I’ve been staying out of trouble.”

  “And you’ve been eating healthy?”

  Lee let out an annoyed sigh. “What is this about? You called me for a reason, and somehow I suspect it doesn’t have much to do with my diet.”

  “I’m your big sister, let me fuss over you for a minute before getting to the point,” said Zoe. “But yes, you are technically correct. I heard a rumor from one of my associates that relates to Primhaven.”

  “One of your associates?” asked Lee. “A member of the House of Shadows, you mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just shut up and listen. A powerful undead lich has taken an interest in something at your school.”

  “Yylex,” said Lee. “I’m aware.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah.” Lee frowned and shifted the phone into his other hand. “He’s been sending specters, his servants, onto campus to do, well, I’m not exactly sure what.”

  “You need to be careful,” said Zoe. “This isn’t like the ghosts you used to banish while you were a freelancer.”

  “How would you know? You weren’t around back when I was taking clients.”

  A hesitant silence on the other end of the line told Lee that he’d poked Zoe in a sensitive place. She hadn’t been around, and perhaps the edge he’d put into those words had cut more sharply than he’d intended. It had been years, more than half a decade, since Zoe had taken this kind of direct interest in his life.

  “I’m sorry for that,” she said, softly. “You’re right. I wasn’t around. But I was… still looking out for you, in some ways. I kept aware of your activities, Eldon. This lich is unlike anything you’ve faced before.”

  “I’ll be alright,” he said. “I’ll have help, this time around.”

  “You will?” asked Zoe. “From who? Other than your little ghost girlfriend, that is?”

  Lee was almost distracted enough by the disdain Zoe showed for Tess to fall for it.

  “From someone,” he said.

  “Someone as in who?”
r />   “Zoe,” he said. “I appreciate your warning about Yylex, but I’m not going to be your spy.”

  Zoe let out an exaggerated sigh. “You’ve always been too smart for your own good, Eldon. I prefer the term brother, but yes, I was calling to see if you knew anything. I’m not going to lie. It would be immensely helpful if you shared the occasional relevant piece of information on what’s happening within the walls of Primhaven.”

  “Zoe, I—”

  “I’m not asking you to betray anyone or do anything that would strain your conscience,” she said quickly. “All I’m asking is for you to, well, be you. If Harper ever announces that the Order has decided to go on a not-so-proverbial witch hunt, can you just give me a heads up?”

  “I will, but Harper isn’t at Primhaven right now. Mattis pushed her to take some time off, and now she’s on some secret Arcane Striker mission.”

  Zoe was silent, and Lee knew he’d already said too much.

  “When you see her next time, will you…” Zoe cleared her throat. “Will you give her this phone number?”

  Lee cringed. He hadn’t been expecting the conversation to take a turn in this particular direction, but now that it had, he needed to come clean.

  “Zoe,” he said. “I have to tell you something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Harper and I sort of… had sex.”

  He’d never gotten the full details on how, or even if, Harper and Zoe had officially broken up. Things had happened that he wouldn’t deny and couldn’t take back. Several heart-wrenching seconds of silence held across the line. He waited, knowing that saying anything else would only be an excuse to assuage his own guilt.

  “You really are all grown up, aren’t you?” said Zoe. She let out a small, sad chuckle, followed by a much sadder-sounding sigh.

  “It wasn’t planned, I swear,” said Lee. “It was also just only one time.”

  “Eldon, it’s fine,” said Zoe. “Really. I’ve been with other people since I left Primhaven. I’d always assumed she had as well. It’s a little weird to hear that you’re one of them, but I suppose that just means you and I have similar taste in women. Ahem, that was supposed to be a joke.”

  “Ha ha,” said Lee dryly.

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “Thank you for calling in the first place,” said Lee. “Can I reach you at this number?”

  “Only if it’s an emergency. This phone is only temporary, and it’s better if we limit contact for… obvious reasons.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Well, I should probably get going,” said Zoe. “I love you, Eldon. Stay safe.”

  “I love you too, and likewise.”

  He hung up the phone. Tess had crept closer at some point during the conversation and she let out a dramatic sigh.

  “Brother and sister, reunited at least,” she said, smiling. “It sounds like she took the revelation about Harper fairly well.”

  “She’s always been surprisingly mature,” said Lee.

  “I guess one of you has to be,” said Tess. “Why do you think she doesn’t like me?”

  “It’s not that she doesn’t like you, she just doesn’t know you.”

  “Really? So you think we’ll be best friends once we get a chance to spend more time together?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “What? Lee, you’re so mean!”

  CHAPTER 17

  Lee pivoted toward basic academic studies as the afternoon wore on and Tess’s capacity for spellcasting diminished. She still couldn’t manage more than approximately three medium-level spells per day, more if Lee focused on simple arcane workings, less if he tried to get fancy.

  The more he considered his situation, the more he realized how much of a handicap it would be in a testing scenario. He would have to ration Tess’s essence, and the only way to do that effectively was to go into the exam knowing exactly which spell he’d need for each obstacle. He would also need to think carefully about which parts of the test he could push through relying on Tess and his mystic abilities in lieu of real magic.

  Toma was nowhere to be found, and Lee assumed that Eliza was still probably irritated with him, so he ate a quick supper with Tess in the dining hall. He made his way to the school’s gate a few minutes before the time that Daniels had instructed him to be in the watchtower by, hoping he could catch Eliza on her way out.

  She didn’t show up. Lee waited until five minutes past the allotted time before giving up and heading through the gate. The cold greeted his ears, eyes, and face with its freezing, bone-dry intensity. He’d forgotten just how intense the weather was outside Primhaven’s climate oasis, especially so late in the fall.

  The sky was cloudy overhead, and snow was already falling at a swift pace, though the unusually still air left each crystalline flake descending on a perfectly straight trajectory, accumulating on the ground like video game puzzle pieces that never found their match.

  He was wearing his winter gear: a heavy parka, snow pants, gloves, and boots. It felt woefully inadequate as he hurried forward. The watchtower, which also doubled as the college’s modest air traffic control station during the months of the year when the weather allowed for that sort of thing, was only a short distance from the school’s outer wall, but the snow hadn’t been cleared from the path leading to it.

  A trail of footsteps through the powder all but confirmed that Eliza had gone ahead of him. Lee trudged forward, making it to the watchtower’s cold metal door. It barely opened for him, the bottom edge catching against the snow, which only packed together as he pulled harder instead of being shoveled out of the way.

  He managed to get it open just far enough to squeeze through and entered the space beyond. The watchtower was reminiscent of an oceanside lighthouse, with most of its inside space taken up by a single vertical chamber with a long spiral staircase running around the edge.

  “Eliza?” called Lee.

  No response came. He glanced over at Tess, who shrugged unhelpfully. After making sure the door was closed and secure in its frame, Lee began his ascent.

  There was another door at the top of the stairs. He managed to get it open with more ease than the one leading outside, though the small room on the other side was barely any warmer. It was octagonal in shape, with large windows along every wall, all of which were currently occluded by frost.

  A small bed lay against one wall, with a desk that had a laptop and some ancient-looking radio equipment next to it. Eliza was present, as expected. She was in the middle of trying to defrost one of the windows that looked out toward the college, which would be necessary if the two were to take their night watch seriously.

  “Eliza,” he said. “Hi.”

  She didn’t turn around to greet him. Lee’s breath was still coming out in plumes of white. He frowned at the small electric heater in the corner of the room, which seemed woefully undersized for heating up the space it was designated to even under the best circumstances.

  “She’s still mad at you,” whispered Tess. “Who would have thought that someone would hold a grudge over a silly thing like holding a knife to their throat?”

  Lee scowled and swatted an arm through her ethereal form. He took his gloves off and rubbed his hands together for warmth, trying to ignore the awkward tension that filled the space as effectively as the chill air.

  “Look, I really am sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know it was you in the jail. I never would have done that, otherwise. You know me.”

  Eliza finally turned around and fixated her gaze on him. Her hair was hanging in a ponytail, with a few loose auburn strands in front. Her cheeks were flushed, and despite the way her green eyes were narrowed at him, she looked more hurt than angry. Vulnerable, even.

  “You can apologize all you want,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything if you’re not going to explain exactly why you reacted like that.”

  “It’s complicated,” he said. “It has to do with my apprenticeship with Harper, a
nd a few things that are going on at Primhaven right now.”

  “But you can’t tell me about them, can you? You can’t tell me the truth.”

  No, he couldn’t. Of course his apology was going to sound empty and meaningless to Eliza, and why shouldn’t it? She was his friend, more than just that, and the closer she tried to get, the more the distance he insisted on keeping chafed at anything resembling trust.

  “You didn’t come to Primhaven for the same reason as the other initiates, Lee. I can tell that much.”

  She spoke her words with such confidence that Lee was momentarily at a loss for how to respond. He saw her then, he really saw her, possibly for the first time in the few months they’d known each other.

  She was his friend. She was talented and pretty, so much so that Lee had let himself think that she was lacking in awareness, like most people their age were.

  It was an easy mischaracterization to make: the pretty prefect, blinded by her own radiance. But that wasn’t Eliza. She was genuinely intelligent and observant, and with her attention focused on him, he was a fool to not have expected her to follow the trail of stray clues eventually.

  “You’re right,” he admitted. “I had another reason for coming to Primhaven. You’re right, Eliza.”

  She blinked, looking a little caught off guard by the kernel of truth, but pressed on. “You were always so aloof during class. I thought maybe you were just a slacker, or lazy, or you had some type of learning disability.”

  “How kind of you.”

  “That’s what I thought, but only at first. You didn’t care about what we were learning because your focus wasn’t on becoming a mage, it was on her. Tess.”

  Hearing Tess’s name on Eliza’s lips was like taking a punch to the gut, and Lee felt physically winded and utterly dumbfounded for several pained seconds. He wasn’t the only one. Tess was staring at Eliza, eyes wide, mouth moving as though she was relearning how to form words.