Only Torma was left in the room when I returned from the bath wrapped in towels. I’d folded my old, dirty clothes just in case I needed them, but I really didn’t want to put them back on if I didn’t have to.
The Grunir was stretched out on his bed, snoring gently. His huge arms behind his big block of a head. I scanned the room hoping Ressa would be back with a change of clothes. It was only then that I noticed an extra bed had materialized, complete with a uniform and a selection of underwear, piled neatly. There were no shoes, but I could live with that, and the sandals the Unalarans had supplied me with were still reasonable.
I was beyond pleased that I had something else to wear, but also a little surprised that someone had gone to such efforts for me while I had lounged in a bath.
Still, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I headed over quickly and began to get ready as quietly as I could, determined not to wake Torma. As I lifted the long-sleeved t-shirt, a handwritten note fluttered to the floor.
I finished dressing first, the uniform sitting a little big on me, but not horribly so. Then I read the note.
I’ve never known anyone take so long getting washed. We’ve gone down to the canteen for evening meal. Torma said he’d wait behind for you, because he wanted some beauty sleep. Once you’re ready, wake him up and he’ll bring you along.
I looked over at the sleeping Grunir and sighed. A meal sounded fantastic. Waking this guy up did not. Still, this was about the best situation I’d been in since being captured, so what the hell.
I pulled on the shirt, noticing the brand on my shoulder for the first time since it had happened, and growing irritated that it had been done. Twenty-one years I’d navigated life without tattoos, and now I’d been branded.
I studied it a little longer, and now that the redness had gone down, I could see that it was the same insignia the Warden and Mage had worn on their jackets. A circle with a columned building, with a lightning bolt behind it. I guessed it was the emblem of House Garazal.
I was glad to cover it up, and if I could help it, never think of it again. I had enough on my plate without that constant reminder of my slavery.
Once I’d pulled on all the clothes and slipped my sandals back on, I checked myself in a bedside mirror. I looked thinner than I had been, and my short fuzz of slowly returning hair a similar length to the growing beard looked a mess, but otherwise, I looked healthy.
I spent longer than I should have staring at my reflection, trying to gather my thoughts. When I failed, I turned to the sleeping Grunir and headed over.
Not wanting to shock him awake, I walked over and shook him gently. “Hey, Torma. Time for dinner.”
He might as well have been dead for all the reaction he made. I went back over to the kitchen, moving noisily now. I turned on the tap and looked over. Still nothing.
I pulled a knife out from the drawer, looked forlornly at the missing bread, then took hold of the yellow fruit Yoru had suggested after tricking me. I cut it in half with an over the top hack which cut through in one and smacked into the stone counter. Wincing at dulling the sharp blade like that, I looked up hopeful that it might have had the desired effect on the drooling Grunir.
“Well,” I said, looking at the two pieces of fruit, badly halved, “Looks like it’s just me and you for dinner.”
With a tentative poke, I tested one of the halves. It had the texture and consistency of an orange, or any citrus fruit really. But unlike them, it had no segments. It was just one solid mass. Gingerly I lifted my finger to my mouth to test it.
“Ooh, I wouldn’t eat that one. That’s the worst of all.”
I looked up to see Torma watching me, grinning. There was something about his general demeanor that prompted me to lick the end of my finger anyway.
To nobody’s surprise, it tasted delicious. It tasted like a sweet grapefruit, with an unusual but lovely taste of coconut. Torma chuckled to himself as I scooped some more of the flesh out from the skin and shoved it into my mouth.
“Good, huh?” He laughed as he pulled on his boots.
“Very,” I mumbled over sticky lips.
“Dinner will be better. Gotta hand it to this place, it might be full of pompous pricks, but they know how to feed us.” His eyes seemed to go distant for a moment, then he added, “Not as good as home cooking from Svadelhem, but decent.”
“That’s good to hear. What meals do we actually get served here?”
“Breakfast and evening meal. All this stuff here is just for a snack if we get hungry through the day. Basically, a fruit basket, loaf of bread, and some ham.”
“I didn’t see any ham.”
“And you never will, because I pop back in between lessons and eat it all before anyone else gets any. Ress doesn’t care, Yoru doesn’t eat meat, and Ellaazi doesn’t know we get it or I’d have a fight on my hands. If you’re really eager to see it, I’ll have a steamer after evening meal. I’ll leave it in the pot for you to check over and see what you’re missing.”
“I’m good, thanks. I can live without ham if they’re feeding us morning and night. Unless, of course, they bring more to make up for me being here.”
“Nah, I’ll eat that as well. No stop button when it comes to smoked meats. Speaking of which, are you ready to go eat?”
He was out of the door before I could answer, and I had to hurry to catch up with him. I was glad to have the company as the halls so empty on my arrival here were now teaming with uniformed Archons. Most of the women were similar height to me, and generally there wasn’t much range of height among them.
The men were all similar to the Warden, around six-six. I expected to be stared at like an oddity, especially with my hair and beard still looking like a fuzzball, and my sandals flapping on the floor. Nothing could have been further from the truth. We were ignored so completely that I started worrying I might be invisible.
To his credit, Torma ignored them with equal amount of skill and made no special effort to avoid collisions.
It didn’t take long before I heard a growing clamor. The kind of wall of sound that only a busy cafe or bar without music could create. A few more turns and we strode into a massive canteen. Hot counters lined the center. I could have done with a moment to take it all in, but Torma was a moth to the flame and charged headlong to the plates.
I was hungry, and I wanted to eat everything that smelled good. But I only had one plate, and I was conscious that some of this stuff might be absolutely foul. That said, taking in the smells and general appearance, I suspected that the Archons’ taste in food might not be too dissimilar to my own.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
I ladled a steaming meat dish that smelled of beef and onions, followed by a cream-colored grain that looked like rice or wheat. Finally, I grabbed a couple of warm bread rolls.
Torma stacked his plate with all sorts and everything. He seemed to know exactly what he was getting as he made Jenga towers on his plate with roasted animal parts. He handled the plate with expert skill as we navigated our way through the tables.
There was one long table, right at the back of the canteen. There sat around eighteen non-Archon students, including my roommates. A brief scan of a few of their levels showed they were all higher than the four I knew. I guessed they were from higher years. There was only one race that I hadn’t seen yet. Extremely tall and thin, with pale blue skin, I wasn’t sure if they were male or female, but they reminded me of the aliens in avatar, only without the hair and neural connectors.
The most numerous race by far was whatever Ressa was. There were eleven of them, four Grunir and another the same race as Yoru.
“You made it then?” Ressa said as we came in to sit. “Not that I should be surprised. Torma’s body clock for dinner is legendary.”
“You’re not wrong,” I agreed. “How on Earth did you get a bed into the room so quickly?”
“There was spare bed linen in the closet,” Yoru said.
Ressa nodded and then ran a lazy finger up and down in my direction. “The uniform was the hardest thing. Fucking Archons try to make everything difficult for us. If it wasn’t for the Dean walking by the reception at the time and overhearing, you’d have been in your old rags. Someone somewhere must like you, because with a few sharp words, they had porters sprinting around to get you a bed and a uniform delivered. Dunno who guessed your size, but they weren’t far wrong, and we can get you more later. And some shoes that fit.”
“Thanks. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem. Life’s hard enough here without standing out like a sore thumb for the wrong reasons.”
“Agreed,” Yoru boomed, before grabbing a hand full of cabbage and potato cubes—at least that’s what it looked like to me—and ramming them in his mouth.
Ellaazi, I noticed, still hadn’t spoken to me, and sat silently with her arms around her meal like she was protecting it from thieves.
After Yoru finished chewing, he waved at me to get my attention. It was completely unnecessary, but some people were just weird. “What lessons have you chosen?”
I frowned and saw a look of exasperation on Ressa’s face.
“Of course, they haven’t covered that with you yet either,” she snapped. “Did they literally just say, yes you can join and then threw you in our room?”
I thought about it, then nodded. “Yep. That’s exactly what happened. What classes are there? I suppose I expected fighting classes and magic classes.”
That brought a snort form Torma, but he didn’t stop eating.
“There are many classes, and it’s a big decision. I’d focus on what your weakest with at base level.”
Ellaazi shuffled and grunted at that. Something in what Ressa had said had annoyed her.
She was easy enough to ignore as I thought over Ressa’s words. “Toughness and Mental Acuity were my lowest.”
Yoru leaned forward with a smile. “Then it’s simple. Focus on your Physical until it’s not a weakness.”
Ressa shook her head. “That can’t be right, though. I’d have expected a low Mental Acuity. How else could you have pulled off an Unalaran Hunter’s helmet in the middle of a battle.”
All three of our roommates turned to watch me at that news.
“You heard about that, huh?” I asked, full of suspicion.
She gave me a wide smile, eyes darting about to check if anyone was listening. “Nothing stays secret here very long. And I have good contacts.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t half so impressive as it sounds. We fought, I managed to mount his back, and grab his helmet rim. Then another Hunter grabbed me and dragged me off his back like a baby, and the helmet came with me.”
Yoru cleared his throat. “For an unascended to achieve a feat such as that, and your Toughness is your lowest… Something is not right.”
Ressa picked up the slack. “What’s your background? What did you do on your planet?”
“I’d just become a soldier. Before that, I was a boxer… a fighter. Fists only,” I clarified. “Though, I’ve trained in a number of different disciplines. Sometimes it feels like the only thing I am good at is fighting.”
“Being a boxer sounds horrible,” Torma grumbled. “Why would anybody restrict fighting to just fists when there are weapons to be used!”
I shrugged. “I never found it restrictive. I enjoyed it. I felt freedom in it.”
Ressa leaned in now, eyes glinting as if she’d found some clue to a mystery I hadn’t realized she was trying to solve. “Sounds like you were good at it. So why did you quit?”
“I was good, very good. Why I quit… well, that’s a long story that I don’t much feel like reliving right now.”
To her credit, she backed off immediately. As curious as a cat, but seemingly very respectful too.
“You will show me boxing,” Ellaazi said with zero respect but with the eyes and instincts of a cat. “I love all fighting forms—this sounds like something I could get into.”
“Me too,” Torma said, saving me from having to go to deep into a conversation with Ellaazi.
“Of course, but I think we’ve deviated from the point. We were talking about classes. Is there anywhere I could learn to make portals?”
That brought a round of laughter from all who were listening.
Ressa stopped first and calmy explained, “You won’t learn that here. You’d have to go to a pure Mage academy for that. For a start, it’s not a single spell, but a combination of skills and items. You need navigation magic, a portable portal stone, be at least Level 25 in your mage class, and… I think it’s around Level 30 in Harmony to put them all together, but I’d have to check my facts on that. All I know is that you won’t be learning anything like that here. In the Irala Academy, if it isn’t offensive or defensive magic, then we don’t learn it.”
I fought to keep the despair from my face. But I felt like I’d just been kicked in the gut, and I struggled to recover. My one big hope to get home had just been brutally torn from me. I still burned her words into my memory of what I’d need to make it happen.
“Are you okay?” Yoru asked, while Ressa just looked concerned and Torma and Ellaazi ate their rapidly diminishing heaps of food.
“Fine. And I know what classes I’m going to take. I already know how to fight, but I know nothing about magic, so I want to put all my focus on that. I’ll take any and all magic lessons.”
Ressa winced and shook her head. “They won’t let you. You need to choose a mix. Military History, Healing, Unarmed Combat, Military Strategy and Command and Leadership are mandatory. There are seven lessons every cycle, and you must choose at least three mage- and three military-based lessons. It gets really complicated when you have to balance conflicts. Rest assured, you won’t get to do everything that’s available.”
Torma growled and smacked the table. “Like Enchantment and Defensive Weapons. It’s like they’re trying to exclude Grunir, pulling that shit.”
“Well, this sounds like a minefield. Can you give me a rundown of the lessons?”
Ressa shook her head. “Better to just show you a timetable. I only have mine, but between us, I’m sure we can fill in the blanks.”
“I have the original,” Yoru said. “And if you can choose tonight, we might be able to get you signed up for classes tomorrow. It appears to me that you have a great deal of catching up to do.”
After dinner, we headed back to the dorm with Yoru leading the way at a fair old march. Like Torma, none of my roommates paid the Archons any mind.
The moment we entered the dorm, Yoru made for his bedside unit and set to work raking though the papers stored inside. It took a minute, but he finally pulled out a sheet and brandished it for all to see.
“The complete time table!”
He thrust it at me, and while I still hadn’t gotten over the mocking disbelief when I said I wanted to create portals, I still scanned through it with an eye on doing just that. Better to be prepared, should the opportunity present itself.
