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Chapter Twenty: Weak-Willed
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2024-10-29 19:42:56Morning found Kilvic and his friends in the headmaster’s office mere moments after their lesson under Haru’s tutelage. The morning was cold, and while winter was still weeks away, a month at the least, it could be tasted in the air.
The room, walled in bookshelves, which though almost imperceptible, were covered in more books than the last time he’d been here, smelled of a type of incense he couldn’t name. The point of the summons was as clear as day. Deidrich, who now stood beside the headmaster’s chair, had come for them at some point during their training, and Haru had ended the lessons rather than release them to the guard’s care and have them miss any other thing he would’ve felt important enough to teach.
‘And none of you recognize your captors?” Headmaster Skanriv asked for the second time since they’d entered his office, his old voice weary.
Even now, Kilvic had not heard any question directed s
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Kilvic’s time at the headmaster’s office caused him grave delay, and in order not to prove tardy to the second lesson of the day, Kilvic was forced to forgo his breakfast, crashing through a quick bath and a haphazard dressing.The lessons for the day proved a bore and a tasking ordeal, as linking sphere, the only class which he attended easily, wasn’t on the timetable for the day. He was forced to bull through the mental class, where the instructor continued to teach them how best to link with each other’s minds without corrupting their targets and themselves, which was all well and good when it was considered that the final test of the semester would involve linking with four students of their choice.Elemental class came immediately after, and like the one before it, Kilvic struggled to excel at the task required of them. Like the linking, summoning, and mind classes, it was the only other class where they actually indulged in practical exerc
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Fyodan stood with one of the widest smiles on his face, topless and in Kilvic’s way where he stood a few feet from the door to the head student’s room, obstructing him and delaying his goal. “So tell me,” the hall representative was saying. “Do you think I’m pretty?” Kilvic swallowed his impatience. Being the last of his two friends to leave the training hall this morning, Haru had sent him to find the head student and give the boy a message. This had been his purpose for knocking on the door of a room he had been to only once before so early in the morning. Sadly, it was also the reason he was having to deal with another of Fyodan’s pestering. Gyra hadn’t been the one to open the door after his patience had begun wearing thin. And now Fyodan stood before him, topless, with a boyish grin. His hair was a disheveled mess and he still had his morning breath seeping through each word while he smelled of sex, but despite that, there was an appeal to his ap
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The thought that an exercise in mind melding required a pen and a book was a tough concept to wrap his mind around. But the book before Kilvic was as unmistakable as the pain in his back from his morning lessons, and the pen, fueled with blank ink like burned wood twirled between his fingers, holding his focus.The instructor for the class was the same man who’d brought him to Skanriv’s office on his first day; the same man who’d been displeased for having been expecting him. That day, he’d looked mean and old in his robe and wrinkled frown but the first day he’d walked into the class and Kilvic had set eyes on him for the second time, he could have easily been mistaken for someone else. His smooth skin, the glint in his eyes, the smile always teasing his lips as if holding back the most exquisite of allusive jokes was the sharpest contrast to what Kilvic had seen. It was also the most perfected expressive lie he’d ever come across.
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Kilvic found it a tad surprising that a boy who’s magecraft was focused on the nature of blood would never have thought to drain a heart off all it had.The exercise on mind melding went on at a steady pace with Havldec supervising, walking amongst the students and checking their works. When he got to Kilvic and Sharmin, he stopped, a crease in his brows. Gently, he took Kilvic’s book, reading its contents.“I thought I said to start slow?” The man frowned then cast his gaze around. “Who’s your partner?”Kilvic poked a thumb behind him and Sharmin offered the man a smile. Even now, their connection remained unfazed.Havldec took Sharmin’s book and read through it, then his frown turned to confusion. He’d instructed they write each other’s thoughts on paper, but Kilvic had written in a mess, his thoughts jumble with the boy’s, and judging from the man’s confusion, so had Sharmin.
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“Same as last year.” Lacra made a grunting sound like gravels scraping. She coughed, turned her head to the side, and spat out a blob of blood stained spittle. “Same as last fucking year.”She was seated on the sand. Her tattered clothes did not leave much for imaginations, but the necessary parts were covered and she cast the perfect look of a warrior from battle. Gyra and Kilvic stood in front of her. Around them the others were beginning to rise groggily. It had been roughly fifteen minutes since Lacra had surrendered and Kilvic noted her injuries were gone, completely healed. He turned his head to Fyodan where he stood, the first to come to his feet. Behind him the crack in the arena wall was also gone. Healing or reconstructive, he wondered. They did not have an arena like this in castle Grey. They did not have an arena that fixed itself… or those within it.Its effects were slow, but each of the students were comin
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