Vayal Academy

Every year, the Gauntlet ends with a race. A hundred miles, across a random array of hostile landscapes — the first team to have all their members dead or across the finish line wins, and ritualised suicides once that first team member crosses the finish line aren’t uncommon. The Cross Country is the highest scoring competition, worth 100 points to the winning Temple — it can make or break the competition; and so only the very best compete.

Which is exactly why, during signups a week ago, I was so shocked to see Alyx Fartrot scrawled decidedly across the tablet. The utter genius of the move struck me a second later though: 25% chance she gets carried to victory by her Fifth Year teammates and wins a free point. She thought she’d be a part of Drive, of course, but Reason is just as strong.

Despite the fact that it’s about the fastest way to make the rest of Diligence hate me, I signed up too — Mae matters to me more than any of them.

But on my way to the Dome’s competitor entrance on the day, the tall, feathered form of Tailina appears to block me.

“Hattie,” she says — her voice is identical to always, but for some reason a chill runs through me, “I need you to remember you cannot lie to me.”

How could I forget? Whenever those huge eyes fix you, you know they see right through, down to your soul. I nod meekly.

“Good. Then I need you to answer me true: did you mean to break the signup tablet?”

“Break it?”

“Yes. I assume you did not do this intentionally, and I have said as much to the others, but… Well, I must be sure.”

“It’s broken?”

She lets the silence hang for an unbearable minute, just staring with her huge eyes, head tilted just slightly. “Hmm. It would seem you are telling the truth.” She turns to leave, and I, hopelessly confused, follow.

“Professor, wait! What do you mean? How did I break it?” It certainly didn’t look like there was anything wrong with it!

“Well, Mystic Hare… people can see it.”

“What?”

Tailina sighs, massages her brow with a feathered claw. “Do you think Miss Fartrot was the first to think of this? There’s a trouble-maker every year; usually we just gently pull them aside and give them some kind of pin, badge, or other sundry as a small reward for creative thinking — but they’re never allowed to compete. The names are invisible precisely to discourage the kind of avalanche that’s happened this year.” I open my mouth and she silences me. “Ask no more questions. Go prepare for the match — you will see. That is, after all, what you’re good at. The seeing.”

My confusion lasts until I enter the Sky Dome; there, it’s obvious what she means.

Alyx stands under the sunshine, leaning her elbow on Nym’s shoulder and talking casually yet conspiratorially with Princess Indel. Katarina and Mathilde, my Diligence comrades, are far too busy with each other to bother warming up. The group looks out of place amongst the ferocious Fourth and Fifth Years, eyeing us with annoyance.

Leaving the others behind, Alyx stalks over with a grin. “Hattie,” she says, amidst the smell of exertion and the reedy scent that lingers after spells. “Looks like the deck’s in your favour.”

And it is. It’s 2-1, so even if Reason wins, it’s a tie. If any other team wins, I get Mae’s heart… I’ve been trying not to think about it, because the sheer excitement’s sure to put me off my game. I’m so close.

“My love!” Indel — who I haven’t seen since she handed my free point away to Alyx — attaches herself to my side as Tailina’s voice brings our eyes forward.

“Students. As some of you may have noticed, an unprecedented number of First Years have signed up for the Cross Country this year, in a blatant attempt to be carried to glory by their Temple. It’s been decided that while these students will be allowed to compete, they will be removed from their Temple groups and placed together for the event instead. How to score this team will be decided in the unlikely event that they win.

“As always, you will be teleported to distinct starting points equi-distant from the finish-line. You will have five minutes to strategise, and then,” she points toward the horizon, painted by beautiful colours, “head toward the end of the rainbow.”

A moment later, there’s a roaring in my ears and the soft grass beneath my feet is replaced by stone. I wobble, and I’m actually grateful for Indel glued to my side — she holds me upright.

I stand on the flat edge of a cliff surrounded by Indel, Nym, Alyx, Katarina, Mathilde — and I realise with a shiver of rage, the racoon girl. There are no diplomatic relations to maintain this time: I collide into her full force, slamming her into a massive pine tree. She chitters, looking up at me with big, wet eyes. “You are displeased?”

“After what you-” I’m not prepared for her to whip her head forward and kiss me. I’m certainly not prepared for it to send a wave of heaviness through my body, to bring me to my knees. Her hands go to either side of my head as she considers me like I’m an ant pinched between her fingers.

“Your animosity is childish, but your rage compels me. I-” A ball of orange light strikes her forehead and she goes down like a suddenly switched off golem.

“Do not touch my Hattie, Abana.”

I try to turn, and while I manage to get myself twisted around I end up collapsed in the grass the way cats do for pets. It gives me a good view of Alyx, who reaches out and closes her fingers around a suddenly materialised dagger of polished bone with a thick root hilt. “Well, if we’re all on the same team and I can’t fucking beat Hattie,” she says, trying unsuccessfully to sound like it’s not bothering her, “then I may as well get outta here.” She wrenches Nym’s head back and presses the blade to her throat. “Wanna go hang out?”

“ENOUGH!” A lightning lash knocks the dagger from Alyx’s hand. Katarina, parasol twirling in her free hand, seems to tower over all of us. “Enough of this embarrassment. We are to win!”

Mathilde smiles lazily, “C’mon, Kat, you don’t really think we can-” Katarina fixes the werewolf with a look so fierce that she cuts herself off, closes her mouth and straightens her back.

“I’m a mage with almost a century of experience. These Fifth Years are children to me. The fact I got stuck on a team with all of you is-” she clucks her tongue, taps her foot. “Never mind. We can still win this.” Behind her Alyx looks bored, still stroking Nym’s stomach (Nym, who clearly pays attention to nothing but the touch).

“Mathilde, confiscate the wood elf girl. We need to focus.”

A second later the short blonde woman is yanking Nym away from Alyx by the hair and tossing the shocked elf onto her ass on the stone. “Break it up. Listen.”

“You gonna make me?” Alyx replies, but her playfulness vanishes when lightning whips across her shoulder. “Fuck!”

“No more!” Katarina warns. “You all listen. The Princess Indel is a teleportation savant — as we in Blaze unfortunately learned. We are not out of this.” She lashes the whip against the ground to get Nym’s attention (her eyes keep wandering back to Alyx, hissing in pain against the rock). “The Princess will carry us as far as she can. Abana will restore The Princess. Repeat. The rest of us shall remain prepared for any obstacles.”

A rather brute force strategy, but as I try to find faults with it, I start to feel hopeful. It’s irrelevant to the competition, but think of the bragging rights — and I’m sure Mae will think it’s cool.

“There is one problem with your plan,” Indel says, drawn up to her full height, looking down on Katarina.

“That being?”

“I will not follow you. My darling Hattie is obviously team leader.”

My cheeks flame purple. “No- I mean… I really don’t even want-”

Katarina interrupts me. “No. That’s fine. As team leader, Hattie, if you could instruct the Princess to do what needs to be done. Illusionist, I want us hidden, we’ll have a target on our back.”

Nym squeaks on the ground — clearly only here to get close to Alyx, it takes her brain a few seconds to compute. “Full camouflage is — well it’s tricky. I mean… hiding myself is pie, but all of us? I could manage a few miles, maybe.”

The vampyr, floating two inches off the ground, twirls her parasol impatiently. “Fine. Solutions?”

There’s a foot shuffling silence. Eventually, mostly just to say something, I try: “Indel, you have a way of sensing caves, right? Could we travel underground?”

Tailina’s voice cuts Katarina off before she can reply. “Competitors, you may leave your starting areas… now!”

Katarina doesn’t let the shock linger long. “No time! Princess, take us away.”

We flash, flash, flash, totally bypassing the cliffside forest until we’re in waist-deep purple water, a swamp ringed by fleshy soil speckled with fat, reaching mushrooms.

“Fucking gross, Princess,” Alyx says — a throne of roots rises out of the water beneath her, supported by a wriggling mass of vines. One scoops Nym up by the waist and deposits her in Alyx’s lap. “Now, make me forget we’re covered in fetid ooze.”

“Idiot!” Katarina curses. “Conserve your mana!”

Mathilde wrenches Abana — still paralysed — out of the water before she drowns. “Princess?” Indel releases the spell without a word, and the raccoon stands in the bog with a faraway, doped up smile.

“Ready to jump us again?”

“A moment.”

She doesn’t get her moment. The water explodes below her, and by the time my eyes have adjusted, it’s too late — the beast already has her in its mouth.

But the next moment she stands there, unharmed, beast nowhere to be seen. I know better than to argue with visions, so I throw myself against her and tackle her out of the way just as the massive mouth emerges, water disappearing down the greedy throat like a whirlpool. Two tentacles rip me and Indel both from the water — not Alyx’s vines, but this thing’s, covered in barbs and suckers. Red mixes into the purple muck.

Alyx gets the others in time, though, plucking them to the dais below her throne. “Vamp, cut ‘em down. Dog, go for throat.” She leaves Mathilde no time to argue; a vine propels her forward, and it’s only the werewolf’s quick reflexes that get her arms and legs wrapped around the monster’s bulbous, hinged mouth, clinging to its back jaw as it snaps open and closed wildly.

Lightning frees us; I plummet to the swamp, am caught by one of Alyx’s vines just before I’m fully submerged in filth. Mathilde is still twisting ferociously with the monster, and I just catch her dropping a glob of red mana down the thing’s throat as I twirl suspended in Alyx’s vines. A moment later, smoke slithers through its thousand teeth like an escaping prisoner. The thing deflates, then dissolves; Mathilde lands on her feet in the waist length water with a splash.

“My love! You saved me!” cries Indel.

“Celebrate at the finish line,” an increasingly irate Katarina spits. “Abana, refresh the Princess.”

The racoon, thankfully plucked from the scuffle by Alyx before she could be hurt, (I still hate her, but Katarina has me really believing we could win) blinks sedately. The Princess is delivered in front of her a moment later by one of Alyx’s vines.

The golden light has only just touched Indel’s feathers when the magical harpoon explodes out of Abana’s stomach. A spider-like claw on the tip activates, preventing her from removing the spear — the racoon heals around it instead, golden light surrounding the weapon just as she is yanked backward, toward a humanoid woman with downturned fox ears.

All this happens in a split second, and in the next, the rest of the ambush is upon us. Enemies are everywhere — conjured skeletons clatter towards us, flames streak past my head. One of the largest women I’ve ever seen, a barrel-chested human with shaggy black hair, charges forward with an axe in each hand. The vines retract, pulling us all inward like a flower closing up. Mathilde and Abana remain in the water, the wolf girl with a slimy, scaly woman with a ragged mop of seaweed hair and the raccoon being drowned by the hybrid girl.

None of us knows what to do — but Katarina’s quick thinking keeps us in the match, thank the Gods. With a shout and a sneer she thrusts her hand straight down, sending a shock of lightning directly into the water. There’s a few short cries as the bog crackles with electricity, and then the spitting sizzle of Katarina’s magic is the only sound. Mathilde and Abana lie dead in the bog alongside the ambushing team. We have no time for relief or regret though.

“Hey! The First Years!” comes a different cry from across the swamp. I can’t help but let out a whimper of dread as I dangle uselessly, a living pinata.

Why in the worlds did I sign up to be murdered by Fifth Years for sport?

“My love!” cries Indel, her voice distraught. There’s a blinding flash of orange-

And suddenly everything is quiet, dark, there are no vines straining painfully against me or bolts of terrible magic. I’m lying flat on my back on the cool, flat stone, staring up at a murky stone ceiling. I rub my head as I sit up, processing this new reality.

Katarina’s cold arm is pressed against me, and I yank away instinctively — the vampyr girl is very pretty, but I’m a one-woman-Orc now.

Indel, of course, wraps her wings around me from behind and twists her neck around mine, but that can’t be helped.

“You couldn’t have done that earlier?” snaps Katarina. Mathilde and Abana’s bodies lie in the centre of the cavern.

“Hearing my love so frightened gave me a desperate rush of energy. I wouldn’t expect you to understand, leech.”

“Indel!” I feel oddly responsible for everything the Princess says, and my face is burning so brightly in the dark that I may as well have insulted Katarina myself.

“Forgive my rudeness, love, but did you not see how she sacrificed the life of her mate to save herself? Such heartlessness!”

Katarina sputters. “That beas-” looking at the werewolf’s body, Katarina stops short, her eyes softening slightly. “Mathilde is not my mate. My lover waits for me at the finish line. Which is why it’s so vital that we make it there. We must regroup.”

The golden glow surrounding Abana draws our attention. It starts off weak, faltering, but rapidly gains strength and brightness, and after a few moments the pale raccoon is sitting up, harpoon sticking out of her rib like it’s a part of her.

“Abana!” says Katarina, voice revealing surprising emotion. “Can you heal the wolf?”

The raccoon throws a leg over Mathilde’s lifeless corpse and pulls one of her eyes back to reveal only whites. “Can’t heal death, sweetling,” she says, inspecting the dead face closely, nose almost touching skin.

Abana jumps to her feet brightly, as if there isn’t a foot long harpoon jutting from her gut. “I thought your ilk would know more about curing this sort of thing than little old me.”

Katarina tilts her head, corpse hair flowing over her shoulder. “She’s a strong player,” says the vampyr thoughtfully. “Illusionist, get over here. Help me.”

Nym, who has been whispering to Alyx through this entire exchange, points to herself incredulously. “Now,” snaps Katarina. “Hold her mouth open.”

So Nym holds Mathilde’s head up while Katarina pricks her own wrist and lets her vampyric blood trickle between Mathilde’s lifeless lips. The red splashes over her face and neck.

It’s several minutes of Katarina bleeding freely before Mathilde’s eyes flutter open. Katarina pulls her wrist back triumphantly, licking the wound to seal it as the infant vampyr reaches weakly toward Nym. The wood elf jumps back with a cry when Mathilde grabs her arm violently, sinking her nails in. Nym is almost able to extricate herself, Mathilde being as weak as she is, but Katarina’s hand grabs a chunk of the elf girl’s hair and forces her violently down, throat bared.

In a moment, Mathilde has attached with her new fangs.

“What are you doing?!” I cry, and Katarina throws me against the cave wall with a lance of wind.

“Shh! She’s hungry.”

“Hattie!” Indel shouts. A moment later she joins me against the wall with a thud. “Wretched leech,” she hisses, preparing a spell. I stop her with a hand on her elbow — we need to help Nym, of course, but we also can’t tear the team apart. Not when we might win.

“Just don’t kill her,” Alyx says, lazily enough that Katarina doesn’t sling any spells at her. “I’ll help the racc with her thing.”

Okay, time to think. Nym’s got time, but only a bit, with how greedily Mathilde’s slurping up her blood. It’s so hard to put thoughts in order over that horrible gulping sound, or Nym’s pitiful whines.

The harpoon clatters to the floor, freed from Abana’s chest. “Haha, alright,” Alyx says, “she’s probably fed enough, yeah?”

“Sacrifices must be made,” Katarina replies. “But yes, the deer is right. There must be blood left over for me. You have left me quite hungry.”

Mathilde doesn’t hear her, or doesn’t care.

“Well, there you go,” Katarina says. She turns to Alyx with a face of lecture. “We have destroyed Drive. Victory is within grasp. While the others fight each other on the surface, drawn to our battle, we can be victorious. But you must be willing to play to win! To make the sacrifices that need to be made. The elf provides us no utility while we hide in the caves. She will make better fuel for Mathilde.”

Alyx says nothing but a calm “guess so.” The two stare at each other for a moment, only a meter or so between them. I realise too late what’s about to happen, yell out a second after their hands both fly up…

Alyx moves just that half a second faster. A sharpened branch materialises inside Katarina’s chest, and her body vanishes in a puff of smoke, the branch clattering like dropped silverware. It’s enough to break Mathilde out of her trance; she tosses Nym aside and hurls herself at Alyx — only for a tight ball of Indel’s sunlight to appear before the deer, forcing the fledgling to turn just as fast, springing for the safety of shadows.

I move with Indel to the centre, where Abana cradles the unconscious Nym with grim fascination, like a mother with a sick child. Her finger traces the still bleeding punctures in her neck; she licks the blood off her thumb and smiles. “Just heal her,” I say.

Indel’s light floods the cave, twisting around the crags and divots, but there’s no sign of Mathilde. “The dog ran off with its tail between its legs.”

“We should look for her,” I begin, but Alyx cuts me off.

“No time. Down to the five of us? Let’s get moving.”