NOVEL NEXT Chapter Eighteen: Playing at the Future
The following morning, as I exited my room to head downstairs for breakfast, I nearly slammed right into Salem as he was lifting his hand to knock on the door.
"Hey," I said, pausing at the last second. He gave me a tight smile.
"Hey. My ma' and Da' told me about last night."
"I should have asked you," I said. "I shouldn't have just made a token effort then listened anyways."
"I should'a told ya' already," Salem said. "T'was cruel for me ta' not already. S'not like I don' trust ya', I just… Don' like to talk about it."
"Maybe we both messed up a bit."
Salem nodded, and we were quiet for a moment.
"Are we good?" I asked after a moment. "And are your seals improved?"
"Aye," Salem said, then his face lightened a bit. "Ma' and Da' are already in the carriage. They're lookin' forward to the play."
I smiled and took his hand, then we began heading downstairs. The trip back to the university started off slightly awkward, but Salem quickly started to fill us in on the improvements that Elder Tywyll had made to his seals – namely, she'd managed to build them entirely within his spirit and internal organs, rather than in silver piercings like her initial design. Unlike the seals that the school had provided, they weren't tethered to a specific number of psychic knots.
"An' we've undone all but one a' my dreamshield knots!" Salem said proudly. "Took me a year ta' get just a few'a them, but wit' Tywyll helpin'..."
"Have you developed empathic senses?" Moira asked curiously.
"Not yet, bu' I should be able ta' do it soon, an' then I'll be able to be a real psychic," Salem said, and there was a note of excitement in his voice. We spent much of the rest of the ride talking about Salem's potential future, my goals at school, and what we'd been up to in the last semester.
After we arrived, Salem and I gave his parents a tour of the grounds, at least partially. Neither of us had been everywhere on campus – frankly, with how large it was and with how often dimensional magic was employed to bend space, create dimensional pockets or transport people somewhere else entirely, I wasn't sure that even most of the professors had been everywhere.
We started out with some simple, safe things: our dorms, the cafeteria, the observatory, and the dancing fountain of reflections. I offered to lead them to the pixie castle where I had my summoning course, much to the amusement of the couple, who were from an area where the fae were so common that it was a completely mundane sight to them. Still, we stopped in.
"Professor Toadweather!" I called out when I saw her and her giant – possibly normal-sized but not distorted by the castle's magic – toad. The pixie turned around and buzzed over to us, smiling.
"Ah! Hello Emrys, Salem, and Salem's mother and father."
"Elder Tywyll of Hydref requested that I 'tell that old castle breaker hello from me the next time you saw her. And that frog as well', so I just wanted to pass the message along."
At the name 'castle breaker', professor Toadweather blushed a bit, and Alloren stood a little straighter.
"You're She Who Shattered the Ten Castles?" he asked, conjuring a grimoire, which floated in the air next to him, a pen drifting out of nowhere an instant later to start jotting down notes. "I have so many questions!"
Moira placed her hand on Alloren's shoulder and spoke softly.
"Perhaps now is not the best time, dear? We should finish our tour."
"That was a long time ago anyways," professor Toadweather said breezily. "I'm not sure I could so easily break the wards, tear out the throats of all of the soldiers inside, and melt through the granite and limestone blocks nowadays. I'm too old, and have let go of too many of those compacts. I was just a spry fifty-four mortal years at the time…"
She said it all with a dazzling smile and complete sincerity, as if she were talking about nothing more mundane than no longer being able to run a marathon due to a knee injury.
"Of course," Alloren said, nodding his head. "That's completely reasonable, considering the way you've found power through contractual summoning. I'm not much of a summoner, but I was–"
"Alloren," Moira said, her voice warning, while Salem just hung his head in his hands. It took Moira a few more minutes to pry Alloren away from professor Toadweather and we left the castle. Salem headed to the bonfire where his divination classes were held, which I actually hadn't been to yet.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The term 'bonfire' didn't do it justice. It was a ten foot tall edifice of flames, sustained through perpetual flame imbuements mingling with an artificer's work. I could swear that I could see shapes of creatures and people swimming within the flickering flames of the bonfire.
"The whole thing's'a massive amplifier for divination magic," Salem explained proudly, leaning against the flames. Seren let out a burble of warning, and I started to move, but the flames licked over his frame harmlessly, teasing at his strands of black and white hair.
"Ah, aye, yeah, the fire's harmless," he said as an afterthought. "S' actually a good place ta' meditate an' focus on divination. Between usin' my affinity to expand the range an' workin' with the fire, even a locate object spell can reach out for close to three miles if I cast it 'ere."
Alloren and Moira let out impressed sounds, and I raised my eyebrows. We spent a while longer at the flame as Salem talked about his classes, and then we moved on to the snapping gardens. We didn't actually go in – according to Salem, most of the plants would be more than willing to bite off an arm, dissolve it in ether-enriched acid, and then drink the liquified remains.
"Why in all the hells do they allow something like that on campus? Without so much as a guard on the gates, at that?" Moira asked, crossing her arms over her chest. Salem and I exchanged a look, and he let out an awkward cough.
"Well, s' good for alchemy an' such. Yushin's apparently uses it in 'er class. An' there is a warning sign," Salem justified, pointing at a 'keep out' sign posted over the gate. "An' anyways, is'a pretty sight."
He was right – it was a pretty sight. The flowers that we could see through the entrance ranged from the size of a grain of rice to the size of my entire torso, and they were a riot of a thousand different shades and hues. There was one flower the size of my head with leaves so black that it seemed to bleed the colour out of the plants around it. I spotted a patch of moss that looked like it was growing swords, an entire tree that was the size of my thumbnail, and more things besides.
We didn't spend much longer looking at the gardens, however, as it was starting to get late. Salem and I led his parents to the theatre, where they purchased some tickets for a few silver. Salem and I headed back stage, and while he cast a flight spell and joined the other techs up in the rosters, I put on my costume.
When Sandara approached, I tensed up. We hadn't spoken much since her attempt to kiss me. I hoped that the early signs of the Creep had been driven off by her working with a mind healer, but I also wasn't going to risk her thinking she could just take me, like she was one of my siblings taking people for their hoards.
"What do you want, Sandara?" I asked, the coldness of my voice surprising even me.
"To apologize for what I did. I won't shove all the responsibility onto the Creep. I think I was letting my self-confidence in being able to do anything go to my head, " she said. "I'm going to play along with my role tonight."
A touch of the fire she'd held when she introduced herself to Salem and me appeared again as she continued.
"That said, tomorrow? I'm going to smoke you and your team on the faerie firefight and the treasure hunt. You're not winning."
"You're welcome to try, at the very least."
She snorted and walked away, leaving me feeling… nothing. I wasn't relieved, and I didn't really want to befriend her just because she'd apologized. But I also wasn't about to pursue a grudge against her. I'd try my best tomorrow, but if she beat me, so what? I wasn't going to start a vendetta against her.
I finished throwing on the overly elaborate costume, and headed out of the play, flicking my wand subtly as I did to draw attention to me as I began my opening monologue. As I walked forward, and illusion spells faded to reveal the set of the Argentflame Emperor's Castle – though, honestly, the depiction was more of a chateau or palace than a castle – and the lights shifted to focus on it.
At least, they were supposed to. One of the amplified weirlight beams lingered on me for a moment too long, and I looked up to see Salem, who quickly shifted the orientation of the light to Sandara and the throne.
The rest of the night went off without a hitch. Sandara and I danced through the air using our magic, much as we had during the disaster where Salem's seals had weakened, but this time she didn't actually try to kiss me, merely a stage kiss.
When the second act began and I revealed myself as a dragon, I unleashed a wave of dragonfear over the audience as planned, doing my best to keep it muted, though I still heard one child break out into tears and felt a pang of sympathy and annoyance at the theatre professor.
I battled against the three failed attempts to kill me, casting illusory infernos across the whole stage, before ducking backstage to see Jackson putting on his farmer outfit. It was essentially just a pair of denim overalls built to show off his arm muscles, and I was fairly sure that if Yushin had seen him, she might have developed a nosebleed. One of the thin straps had broken, and his mending cantrip was too weak to fix it.
He and I hadn't seen each other much during practice, as he was only in the second act, while I had to attend practice for both, but I gave him a cheerful nod and reassured him that everything had gone well as I pulled out my wand and used greater mending to fix the strap.
He headed out on stage, and eventually I got my cue and headed out as well, battling one another with illusions, and I even tapped my bloodline briefly to move at superhuman speeds, before finally he put a prop sword through my chest and blasted me with wave after wave of illusionary flame. I staggered, then collapsed to play my role of a corpse for the remainder of the scene, as Jackson rescued Sandara, and then everyone came out to bow.
Despite my worries, the night went off without a hitch – or at least, no worse of one than could usually be expected in a theatre production. I met with Salem and we headed out into the lobby to mingle with the audience, cheerfully speaking to family members of the cast, people from the city who came out to see a cheap play, and members of the staff looking for entertainment, while platters of food were set out. It was late in the evening, but I'd had to skip dinner for the play, so I ate my fill and then some. Midnight was long past by the time I wandered back to my room and passed out, prepared for the full day of festivities tomorrow.