Over the next couple weeks, things settled into a routine that, despite the abundance of technicolor psuedo-elves surrounding me, bore a passing resemblance to what I had always imagined college to be like.

  House Essentials continued to be my favorite course. Millan, who I learned bore the title Precise Magister, was an excellent teacher, and every day, I felt a little more like an actual rogue–even if many of my grademates didn’t share my opinion on the course. It was a few days before I asked Calum about this.

  “Not all of our grademates wanted to be in Vigilant House,” he explained. “Many of them failed the physical exam for the Iron Curriculum, or the written for the Conspectus. Vigilant House was their safety–and they want out as soon as they can.”

  “Why though?” I asked. “Is being a warrior or a mage that much better than being a rogue?”

  “I don’t think so,” he told me with a shrug. “But you and me and Fen are in the minority. Most of the school looks down on us as a support class. Take Gwyn–she’s a central noble, so she expected to get in the Chorus. When they turned her down, she was stuck with us.”

  This information made me reconsider my lack of invitations from any of the other colleges, seeing it for the snub it was. As far as I could tell, the Magisters as a whole saw Fallon as the human they actually wanted–she had woken up in the central chamber, where she should’ve been easily rescued, if not for me leading her away from it. I was just the second human, the accident, the one none of them–except Elbexas–had cared about.

  My rivalry with Gwyn had simmered over the course of the first span–I had woken up a few times to the sound of someone trying my door in the middle of the night, only to be foiled by my desk blocking the way, but otherwise, the girl apparently hadn’t come up with a way to get back at me for messing with her boots yet.

  I wasn’t so naive as to think that there wasn’t something coming, though.

  Fortunately, I simply didn’t have many personal items for her to mess with.While I had spent some credits on my clothes and sundries, Gwyn simply had a lot more to lose than me when it came to messing with each other’s rooms.

  Basic Lore continued to be a tedious nightmare of a class, with Almara apparently taking it as a personal challenge to ensure that no students could follow along with her monotonous lectures. While Fennia proved less and less of a distraction over time, the course remained a daily reminder of Fallon.

  Our third day, she had actually noticed me for the first time. Or, I suppose, I at least caught her looking at me for the first time. After class, I found her just outside Rambles, as if she had been waiting for me, along with her two perpetual hangers-on.

  “Hey, Dani,” she greeted me, as casually as if we had passed each other in a hallway.

  “Fallon,” I replied curtly. Behind me, Fennia paused, looking between the two of us, then (bless her heart), waited behind me, her stance and position obviously mocking Fallon’s followers.

  “Are things going… good?” she asked. She was obviously fumbling, casting constant looks for support to the two girls behind her, but neither of them apparently caught the signal.

  “Good as they can be,” I told her. “Sorry, we’ve gotta make afternoon meal, it’s our only chance to eat before Training. Fennia?”

  The sea ellid followed me–then, to my surprise, slipped her arm through mine.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered in surprise.

  “Making her jealous,” Fen said simply, giving me a wink.

  I couldn’t help a grin in return, and the two of us walked confidently away, my eyes determinedly fixed forward.

  Calum was a bigger help than Almara in learning about the history and shape of Elida, and he donated an hour or so of his patience every night to helping out myself and Fennia. The sea ellid somehow knew little more than me about Elida’s history–she wasn’t exactly the most academic person I had ever met.

  Physical Training continued to be a low point in my days, as the Senior Delvers had taken a dislike to me that I found very difficult to break through, enough so that I wondered if Gwyn had somehow poisoned them against me even further.

  On our fourth day of courses, though, we got a surprise.

  We were an hour or so into our normal routine, and Senna and Mell had distracted one of the instructors just long enough for me to grab a drink of water, when a loud whistled echoed over the drillyard.

  “Pupils, fall in!” one of the instructors bellowed.

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  All of us abandoned our laps to run towards the central field, forming into our ragged formations, made only more disordered by everyone’s exhaustion. To my surprise, a new Magister was standing with Olgin now, a man I had never met before. He was extremely tall, even for an ellid, nearly seven feet, and as thin a pole. He wore light, breathable clothes, and had the white-blue coloration of a frost ellid.

  “Today we start weapons training,” Olgin gruffly called out, his voice sweeping over both groups of students and provoking a small,excited stir. No one had apparently expected conditioning to last three full days, and the idea of getting to practice with our weapon conjurations seemed to excite the rest of the group just as much as it filled me with anxiety.

  “Iron Curriculum, you’re with me,” Olgin continued. “Vigilant House, you’ll go with Razor Magister Dahl.”

  The new man, Dahl nodded to us all, and turned with little further explanation. “Follow,” he ordered.

  All of us jumped to it instantly, having to nearly jog to keep up with the towering man’s long stride.

  Across the track, opposite the central field we had been working out in, was a fenced area, set up with a handful of leaning archery butts on one side, a similar number of hanging sandbags on the other, and a slender shaded awning.

  Once we passed the fenceline, Dahl turned to face us, sweeping a glance over the seventeen of us.

  “You, you, and you three, you’re group one,” he said, indicating Fennia, Senna, and a few of Gwyn’s circle. “From here over, you’re group two.” This group included Calum, Mell, Essern, and a few others. “The rest are group three.” That left me with Nenis, Gwyn, and the rest of her circle.

  “In a moment, I’m going to ask you to conjure your weapons. Before I do, let me be very clear–you are conjuring weapons, not toys. If I see any joking, playing, fiddling, or other idiotic behavior with your weapons, I’ll be sending that entire group back to the track for more conditioning. Understood?”

  Gwyn scowled and flicked a look at Emmet, one of her closest offsiders. As if commanded, the boy promptly raised a hand. “You can’t be serious,” he complained. “You can’t just keep us from learning weaponplay-”

  “That’s where you're wrong, Pupil Emmet.” A few students took a breath–even though we had never met the Razor Magister, he apparently knew our names on sight. “My job within Vigilant House is to make sure all of you are able to fight effectively when or if you’re permitted access to a dungeon. Why on Elida would I let someone who can’t even take their own weapons seriously participate in those lessons?”

  Emmet swallowed, and when he opened his mouth again, Dahl cut him off. “No more questions, Pupil Emmet. Continuing.” The tall man waved a hand at each of the practice stations behind him. “Group on, you’ll start in the awning. Catch your breath and watch your peers closely. Learn from their mistakes.”

  “Group two, you’ll start with archery. Your goal is to put three arrows in the central circle of the butt. Group three, you’re on the sandbags with your daggers. In the middle of each bag is a sleeve of red sand–your goal is to puncture that. You’ll have twenty minutes, then you’ll rotate to the next station–and to be clear, today's practice is only about weapon skill. I don’t want to see any Swift Strikes being used.” Dahl swept his eyes over us again. “Now listen up, because this is the important part: If every member of any group completes both goals, that entire group will be released from Training for the day.”

  Now that brought a gasp out of the group. Classes at Primevus never ended early, especially not the gruelling drills of physical training.

  Dahl smiled, the expression as cold as his coloring, and he nodded. “You heard me right. I like to make sure my students are motivated. Now–get to your stations, conjure your weapons, and let’s begin.

  We did as ordered, Dahl watching with a sharp and critical eye even as we all began to manifest the daggers, shortbows, and arrows all level one rogues had access to. When he didn’t say anything, even after Nenis dropped one of her freshly conjured blades, I began to grow a sneaking suspicion, once that was quickly confirmed as we took our places.

  I knew my daggers were razor sharp. I had cut down multiple shadows with them, at one point, and I knew from experience that they were always conjured as sharp as ever, as if they had just had a whetstone run over them. Despite that, my first cut completely failed to even cut through the thick cloth of the sandbag I was practicing on.

  I frowned at the bag and cut harder, hacking and chopping at the bag. Only one desperate and frustrated stab managed to make it through, but even then, the dirt on the other side was packed so hard that the tip of my dagger barely slid into it.

  Looking down the line, I saw my grademates having similar troubles, although only Nenis seemed to be doing quite as badly as I was. Gwyn had actually managed to make a razor thin cut in the bag, only to find that under a few inches of sand, there was another bag.

  I shot a look over my shoulder, and saw Dahl watching both our flailing and the (mostly) inaccurate shooting of the second group. There, only Calum had managed to hit the target, and even he had only gotten one arrow into the centermost of the butt’s three circles.

  Yet still, the Razor Magister hadn’t moved or made any comments. That did it for me, confirming that, today at least, Dahl wasn’t interested in teaching us anything. He wanted to gauge our skill levels without any actual training from him.

  After an hour, we had all spent a shift at each of the three stations, and not a single person had succeeded. Only Gwyn and Calum had gotten anywhere near either goal, and even they hadn’t managed more than a trickle of red sand or to put a third arrow into the center circle.

  Dahl shook his head with obvious, and obviously feigned, disappointment. “I expected better,” he lied, the rest of the class not buying it anymore than I did. “You can all head back to conditioning, and we’ll try again tomorrow.”

  Everyone seemed frustrated by that, but few as much so as me. With everything said and done, there was no getting around that I was the worst of the group on both activities, having barely made it through the first layer of the sandbag, and having only gotten three arrows to even touch the butt. It turned out, life in Elida involved a lot more archery and knifeplay than life in twenty-first century America had.

  My successes in Essentials and Lore had given me a false sense of security, but after only an hour of weapons practice, it was obvious just how much of a gap existed between me and the rest of my grade.