Chapter 30 | PoV: Aisha
The caravan rolled to a stop.
“We're here!” The wayfinder called.
Camels grunted.
Aisha stepped out of her wagon, hopping down onto the sand beneath her, staff in hand.
She winced, her back still hurt.
She wore new temporal mage robes, hiding the bandages all around her torso. The back of her other ones had been shredded into oblivion.
She stepped away from the caravan and looked in the direction they—
Woah.
The remnants of a building pierced the sky—a cathedral.
Aisha had no words for it.
Ancient. On an unprecedented scale. It hit her with strange emotions and feelings. A forgotten structure of a long-past era. Bigger than all of them. Barely clinging onto the world through time, yet enduring anyway. It had seen things . . . through hundreds of years of human history.
On a caravan . . . and the tempest raging just out of reach . . . Aisha recalled the snapped necks of the two mages she had killed. The image forever burned into her mind.
Unsettling. Murder.
“You okay?” Mutamid stepped up beside Aisha, carrying a crate. “Nice view, isn't it?”
Aisha turned her head towards him and blinked. “H-huh? Oh. Yeah.”
“Since you're here, mind helping us carry supplies? Looks like you've got enough muscle to wrestle a sand shark.”
Sand shark . . .
Fazl's leg . . .
Aisha had been out cold and her caravan had been attacked by sand sharks. She could hardly believe that something terrible had befallen her crew while she was asleep. Asleep because she had been beaten up by two assassins . . .
. . . that she had murdered.
Those necks . . .
“Hey. Reality to Aisha,” Mutamid waved a hand in front of Aisha's face.
Aisha shook her head and rejoined reality. “Crates. Yeah, I can help.”
“Girliepop's seeing ghosts,” Mutamid muttered.
. . . Girliepop?
Aisha set her staff down on a crate and picked it up, staff resting on top.
“Let’s go see the students!” Mutamid sang.
The two of them headed towards the cathedral.
“Hey kiddos!” Mutamid caught up to a group of five . . . nope, there was a sixth kid there now that Aisha didn't recognize. When did she join them?
“Is mommy going to be in there?” The sixth kid asked.
Mutamid paused. “Mommy . . . Mommy is not there. She . . . She’s gone.”
That wasn't ominous at all.
Where was “there,” anyway?
Oh.
Aisha cleared the wagons. That was when she saw the big gaping hole in the ground, sloping towards a large set of double doors. The doors lay agape.
“Oh . . . What is for me here? Is that man with the palace here? I liked him. Can I go see him again?” The sixth asked.
Mutamid sighed. “That man is bad. Come on, let's go meet your new friends.”
“Friends?” She echoed.
What? . . . What? This girl was seeing the Prince? Or someone working at the palace? Why would a kid work with the Prince, one who was here now? . . . Mutamid himself admitted to the Prince being bad . . .
Aisha’s mind was connecting dots she did not want to connect.
Mutamid walked towards the maw. One of both aeolian and thermal mages followed. The six kids followed Mutamid. A aeolian, thermal, and the temporal mage stayed behind to keep the wagon from being blasted away. The wayfinder tended to the camels.
Aisha followed the group.
They descended into the maw and slipped into the cave through the open doors. Llumifruits lit up the cave.
Mutamid set his crate down. Everyone else followed.
“You two,” Mutamid pointed to the aeolian and thermal mages. “Keep unloading the wagons. Everyone else, let's go!”
They all followed Mutamid into the middle tunnel. Aisha felt as they all entered into a temporal bubble.
Curious.
Aisha stopped and gasped—with the kids.
The tunnel opened up into a very green room. Llumifruits covered the ceiling. Plants grew to the sides of the room, where benches sat away from an intersecting pathway to a tunnel on each side of the room. The room sloped downward from both Aisha's side and across, creating depth and scale.
Mutamid laughed. “You think you've seen gardens? Wait until you see the gardens! Wow, I missed this place.”
Aisha did not forget to see the kids wandering around either. Often in groups of three of the same gender, sometimes mixed or in groups of two. Seldom alone. They were all clad in ashen-gray robes, like mage robes rather than government ones.
“You weren't kidding,” Aisha said. “. . . Unless this is a front.”
Mutamid smiled. “Not a front. Just actually really great!”
Aisha also did not forget to see the mood.
The students wandered around silently. Tension hung in the air.
Mutamid scratched his chin. “Huh. I thought they'd be in class by now. Yeah, they should be. I wonder what's up with that. Um. Let me go find the headmaster. Or the other headmaster! Wait here, kids. Stay with Of-Jinan.”
Oh no. She had to babysit. Aisha groaned. “Mutamid!”
He already took off. He waved to her without looking back.
☆ ☆ ☆
Mutamid came back with a hooded figure, in darker robes than everyone else. They were someone of importance—right, the headmaster. Probably? There was a chance they were unavailable and he grabbed someone else.
Sanya gasped. That staff! It was purple and warped the air around it.
It was like the staff of the mage that had attacked her. Except it was a different style. It ended with a more complex half-circle design instead of plainly ending in a jagged crystal. Were they in cahoots with each other? Was this person an enemy?
Aisha readied her staff.
“Woah!” Mutamid cried. “You have no enemies here! This is Headmaster Nur.” So it was the headmaster . . .
“It's that magic . . .”
Mutamid tilted his head. “Huh? . . .”
Mutamid tilting his head reminded Aisha . . .
It reminded Aisha of the tilted heads of the aeolian mage and then the thermal mage.
The ones she had snapped.
Aisha shuddered. She shook.
She got a hold of herself.
Nur leaned in and whispered a lot into Mutamid's ear. Aisha stood around awkwardly for a minute.
“Ah! You met his filthy brother! The attack dog of the Prince! Same magic, yes, but nothing evil here!”
Woah. What. This information was just being thrown around now?
So, the mage that had covered up the missive and attacked Aisha was under the direct command of the Prince? The First Prince of Glorestra, Jalal Of-Ghalib, the Royal Seat?
Well, Aisha already knew that the Prince was a walking glob of slime. No surprise there. It was just interesting Mutamid would casually throw that out there.
This headmaster was . . . the brother to that mage?
Huh. Two of these mages were in the same family. Not that it was uncommon, but . . .
“Want a tour while Nur gets the new students settled?” Mutamid offered.
“Uhhhhhh. Sure?”
☆ ☆ ☆
Aisha found herself in the library. Other students wandered around or sat and read books.
Aisha had her head in her hands and stared at the stone table beneath her gaze.
What in the name of Heliux?
She . . . She needed to process all of this.
So . . .
So!
So, Nur and Mutamid had been negotiating for kids from orphanages to bring to this place. Most of them without any magical ability at all.
To turn them into mages—specifically, “abyssal mages.” They did not describe their actual range of abilities though. Only ten of them were actually abyssal mages. Yet, they seemed to have confidence that they could turn normal people into abyssal mages. Was there a way to turn anybody into a mage? How?
Why? Who did this benefit? What was their end goal?
They obviously had massive funding from somewhere. There were, like, a hundred people wandering the halls or maintaining the rooms.
Aisha suspected that the hole in Glorestra's budget the size of two entire palaces was this place.
Did that mean the Prince was in on it? Were Nur and Mutamid lying when they said there were no enemies here?
How could Mutamid diss the Prince while also receiving funding from him. Did he know? Maybe only Nur knew. In that case, was Nur an enemy? Was this school an enemy?
What would the Prince want with a bunch of abyssal mage kids? A loyal army? No—they could not directly be in contact with each other . . . What was it?
Now that Aisha knew all this, were they going to let her go? Maybe they could kill her here. Or trap her.
Where were all those other kids going? The ones not “saved” by Mutamid and Nur? It had government involvement.
Was the Prince . . . taking kids? Was that where that sixth girl was from? Why come here then? Did they find out she was an abyssal mage without making her one through the secret technique?
Oh, and the mood. The elephant in the room.
There was currently an incident at the school. Like, capital-I, Incident.
Allegedly, some crazy kid had murdered a fellow student and mutilated a second.
This was—supposedly—the second day of classes, and one of the classes had been canceled. The second headmaster—Barakat—had run off somewhere due to a disagreement with the headmaster, Nur, over the inciting student. Also, because Nur was getting the six new kids oriented, Nur's class had come to a halt.
Aisha groaned.
She had stumbled into a mysterious, dysfunctional academy with concerning sources of funding and ties, over some weird shuffling around of orphans.
Oh, yeah, and the Prince was raiding orphanages indiscriminately? . . . Like, even the good ones? And also the homeless population was declining? Along with all measures of wealth as they poured out more money to the cavernous cities? . . .
Someone slid into a seat at Aisha's table, a stack of books thumped down.
“Hey,” the person said.
Aisha looked up.
A woman in dark robes sat down. Dark, like Nur's. Another staff member? Her hair was braided by the dozen, complete with bangs. Pretty and refined were two good words to describe her.
“Yeah?”
“You on break? Looks like you could use some lesbian literature,” she winked.
She slid a pile of books towards Aisha. Did she just say “lesbian literature?” Wh—what made it look like Aisha was a reader of that stuff? A hint of red threatened her face.
Aisha blinked. “I'm sorry?”
“It seems to be pretty popular with the students. Sorry, only the dregs are left unborrowed. This one girl, Mai, borrowed, like, five . . . with that one girl . . . who is now a murderer? . . .”
What was Aisha supposed to say to that? Was she hearing correctly today? Maybe she was still out of it after nearly dying to assassins. “Oh.”
“Yeah. A lot to think about. Lesbians make it all go away though. Minus the fact that the current Queen of Chaos at our academy is a lesbian, of course.”
“I'm not . . .”
“I could be your Queen of Chaos—ah. Sorry!” The woman stretched her hands to retrieve her books.
“I meant—I'm not on break. I just got here—I got a tour. For some reason.”
“We . . . We don't hand out tours?” She added in a mutter, “I could hand out a tour of my—” She put her hands to her mouth, flushed.
“Well. Mutamid did . . . for me,” Aisha shrugged. Aisha pretended she had not heard that late addition. “I'm Aisha Of-Jinan.”
The woman gasped, she threw her hands out. “Of-Jinan! I love your essays.”
“Oh. You know,” Aisha grumbled. Why would the librarian be interested in Aisha's essays? Was the librarian magical? Or did she just read essays on magic for fun? If she was a mage what was she doing being a librarian?
“Is the librarian . . . flirting with a temporal mage?” Aisha heard a student whisper.
This . . . was the librarian? Oh. She probably should have figured that out sooner.
“Every girl in this academy is a lesbian. Even the staff!” Another gasped.
“We don't stand a chance.”
Aisha let out a snort. The librarian giggled. Those poor boys . . . They might stand a chance if they turned into girls. Just a thought.
“Are you . . . a mage?” Aisha asked.
The librarian casually put her chin on one palm. She held the other up. “Something like that.”
Water swirled in the air an inch above her palm.
Aisha's mouth gaped, eyes wide. “You're joking.”
The librarian gave her a mischievous smile. “Aquatic mage.”
“Five . . . That makes five.” Aisha could hardly believe this. In fact, she could not believe this.
“Six.”
“Six?”
“Yeah—the—oh, I don't think I should share that.”
Aisha's shoulders slumped. How could the librarian drop that and then not elaborate?
The librarian glanced left and right, probably more for dramatic effect than actually seeing if anyone was nearby. She leaned in and cupped her mouth.
She whispered. “The First Prince is a necrotic mage.”
Aisha blinked at her. “You're joking.”
The librarian remained still. She gave no hint as to whether she was joking or not.
“Oh!” The librarian jumped back. She moved every book in her stack except the last one. “I have to get back to work, I was in the process of moving these down—but here, have this book.”
She slid it over to Aisha and winked.
“Is this ‘lesbian literature?’” Aisha glanced down at the book.
The librarian put a finger to her mouth and winked again. She picked up her other books and left.
Huh. She had not given her name.
The other books—the ones the librarian had taken away—had looked newer, nicer, and had drawings on the cover.
This one, left for Aisha, looked older, ancient. It did not even have words on the cover, only something vague and cryptic on the spine. It looked worn with time. Edges fraying, dust newly cleaned off. The pages inside looked brittle, as if so much as a breath would make them fly away as dust.
Was this, like, lesbian literature for great-grandmothers? Aisha was only twenty-nine!
Aisha read the title.
She opened it.
It was not, in fact, lesbian literature.
She began to read it.
She . . . wanted to faint.