The Academy [BOOK ONE COMPLETE]

“We begin,” Falar said. He brought his palms together, and magic started to tingle on my skin, trilling faster and faster. The mana shone through his parchment-like skin, a spiderweb of shining blue ending at his fingertips. The trilling turned into a single note, the whistle of wind through the gaps of my safe house.

I hadn’t thought about that abandoned shed for months. I lived in a real room now. This wasn’t the time to get lost in memories, but I had to grasp at something to distract myself from Jextor standing next to me, massive with a set jaw, Falar splaying his hands, light pouring out from the tip of each finger, Minnelil, Grit, and Fek all looking with eyes wide.

Hector lit a cigarette, leaning on his cart. The light glinted off his eyes as he inhaled and the tip of the cigarette glowed orange.

Falar slammed his palms to the floor. The blue light poured out, flowing along the rune circle. The runes lit up one after another. The black goo Grit had drawn the runes with started to shine and rose from the floor, floating at knee-height.

“I will finish the second part of the matrix,” Jextor said. “Stay close to me at all times. Do not touch the runes.” His chunky fingers flicked around, leaving surprisingly thin lines in the air. “Expectation, Assumption, Suggestion,” he kept muttering as he drew more runes, each more intricate than the last. I watched the runes as he drew, trying to figure out how he wove the runes together. The lines blurred together no matter how much I squinted, and the tingling and buzzing didn’t help. If I didn’t tone the reaction down, I would shake apart before the ritual even started.

I breathed in and out, quieting my mind. Flashes of the entity’s voice cut through. The way it had said YOU to me. A world of hate and the absence of love in the single word. “If I wanted to get a dog, I’d get a dog,” Minnelil had said. Why did I think of that stupid sentence? The point was, she wanted me too.

I breathed in again, letting the air out slowly. The air vibrated all around me, shaking and rattling with power, but I didn’t mind. I let the magic move through me, myself move with it.

The lights shifted behind my eyes, cold spiking to warmer hues. I opened my eyes and saw the web of power, magic weaving its way through the hovering runes and taking detours to pass through the runes Jextor had drawn.

It was beautiful. The runes formed the path, and the mana drew more runes as it flowed and followed the maze those two idiots had built for it. I had no idea what the runes were or did, but the design was far beyond what I had expected or could even begin to understand.

“Damn,” I muttered. “So you actually do know what you are doing.”

“Bah,” Falar said. He was even paler than usual. I already recognized the signs of pulling hard on the Null. The mana kept flowing from his fingers into the rune circle, even brighter than before. What was he doing? How could he do both at the same time?

Grit crouched next to the circle, peering close at a rune. She drew its shape again, reinforcing it even though I hadn’t seen it starting to tatter yet. “Careful, Lecturer,” she said, glancing at Falar, but returning her gaze to the rune immediately.

“Hmh,” he said, skin of his face cracking as he flashed a small smile.

The mana streamed along the dizzyingly intricate path. Not mana, magic. The flow started to turn into a spell, gaining the hard, slick feel that existing enchantments had. Falar’s ward back in the beginning had felt like a living thing, veins of power anchored on me, but most spells sat outside the bubbling stream of life and mana and noise and everything. The bear trap had been an accurate way to describe what they were building. The power felt like steel coils, wound and held, ready to snap around anything that disturbed them.

“Now the obfuscation,” Jextor said, starting a new set of runes.

The shape of the spell shifted again, mana finding new paths to follow, leaving the original spell hanging in the air.

“I see your eyes trying to follow the shape. Do you grasp what you are seeing?” Falar called.

“I thought so, but you made it even more complicated,” I said, squinting at the tangle. I didn’t see it with my eyes exactly, but squinting at least made me feel like I did something to understand what I was sensing.

“Weaves within weaves,” he said. “Pay attention. This is how true wizards work. Forget the sorry excuse for a ritual we cobbled together on the mountain and understand this is the bare minimum you should be striving for.”

My temples throbbed and my eyes ached. At least my skin wasn’t trying to crawl away from me anymore, as I had got the reaction under control. “Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to show him how impressed I was. I wouldn’t have had time to say more anyway as Jextor grabbed hold of my arm.

“It is done,” he said. “We begin.”

“I thought we—”

The room winked out, like someone had drawn curtains on the only window of a cellar. I felt Jextor’s massive fingers wrapped around my wrist. “We are beneath the skin of the world, peeled back to make us observable and approachable.”

“Could have warned me,” I said, blinking, even though I didn’t see anything anyway.

“Hah! Timing is paramount when enacting rituals! You have much to learn,” his voice boomed from the darkness.

“Are we still in the room? What are we going to do now, wait in the dark?”

“Precisely. The magic might change our perception of the flow of time, so we might be here for a while. And yes, our bodies are still standing where we left them.”

“Did you kill me again? Damnit, Jextor.”

“No, no. Our perception has just been relocated. A vastly different experience.”

“If I end up spending years here, in the dark, with only you for company, I’m going to be angrier than the undead thing on the mountain.”

“You know that happened to the Lecturer and me once? I rather enjoyed the time to think aloud. The first three weeks were rather hard on Falar, I fear. I think he wrote a book about me afterward. I should read it one day.”

“Maybe you should,” I said. There was something in the black. Something purple, somehow even darker than the blackness. “Do you see that?” I asked. “Do you smell that?”

“Ah, shame,” he said. “Introspection will need to wait. We’ve been found.”

The purple bubbled and stretched, pushing closer. The stench of mold and rot hit me in waves. The purple was like a bruise, bulging and gangrenous, and I could sense the rot inside it.

The purple washed over me. Jextor’s fingers clenched tighter. Normally I would have winced or feared for my wrist, but now the vice-like grip felt reassuring. If he let go, I would have been washed away. There were no words this time, but I knew it for what it was. The rot howled wordlessly, the tone carrying nothing but hunger and rage.

“What do we do?” I gasped, trying to speak without breathing in.

“Our part as bait,” Jextor said. He sounded way too happy about the idea. “We weather and observe the storm.”

The darkness had turned solid purple, but blue streaks of lighter color ran through it, like veins under skin. They pumped light, dirty and clotted. The smell became even worse, hostile. Would it affect the ritual if I threw up?

“Do you see that?” Jextor asked. I still couldn’t see even him, only felt his hand around my wrist. The pulsing purple with its sickly veins engulfed me, pressing itself against my brain. The sensation was unclean, worse than the skeletons, or zombies, or anything rotting decently underground as they were meant to.

“I can’t see anything,” I said. “Just purple and veins.”

“Excellent. Make note of the patterns. They might be important.”

Patterns? The veins clustered, forming bunches that spread out, reminding me of multi-forked lightning bolts or birch branches. I followed the veins as they ran into the distance, if such a thing could be said to exist in the purple haze of rot. They continued into infinity, turning into constellations of bright nodes and spidersilk-thin lines between them. Out of everything, the blue veins felt important, like they meant something or were more real than the haze or the stench trying to suffocate me.

I followed the veins in the other direction and startled as they all ended suddenly, cut off by a boundary in the purple. The boundary curved and I followed, trying to gauge its size and shape. A circle. Massive like the world. There was a gash in the middle of the circle, a horizontal line trickling brighter purple.

“Is that an—” I said.

The eye opened, yawning wide.

The boundary gaped, revealing an ocean of bright purple. A black bruise sat in the middle of the purple, a hole in the universe.

“It sees us,” Jextor breathed out.