The Deployment Qualifiers have begun.
The school and the testers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to separate the trials by year. It makes sense, I suppose. The Fourth Years the ones closest to graduation now that the fifths are gone are the ones with the most polished skill. They are currently being run through a gauntlet of tests designed to determine which ones are component enough.
Which means I have time.
The First and Second Years aren't scheduled until later this afternoon and evening. We are the dregs. The "Maybe" pile. The Proctors are still arguing over whether we should be sent at all, or if using us as cannon fodder is a waste of Awakened blood. Supposedly the General is arguing that if they don't send us and we lose Verion completely it's all for nothing.
I lean my head back against the cold stone wall, closing my eyes. Let them argue, I think bitterly. I hope they argue until Verion is won back or lost for good.
I disagree with Vihaan. Last night, he was one again practically vibrating with anxiety, terrified that we wouldn't be sent. He wants to fight, despite how smart he is he genuinely believes in the Empire and their mission for the most part. Most of the others agree with him.
I scoff, the sound loud in the empty hallway.
I would rather not go. They can call me a coward if they wish. I don't really care. Anything that delays me being used as a weapon.
I would rather stay here. I would rather stay in the relative safety of the Sinwade Mountains, enduring Evanora's beatings and Melnyk's lectures. I want to accumulate power. I want to master the Shadow battle art until I can walk through a battlefield unscathed. I want to control all three of my marks of power to the best of my ability.
Safety?
The word triggers a reaction deep in my skull. The voices, which had been relatively quiet since my ephianany last night, suddenly hiss in outrage.
You want... safety? they mock, the tone dripping with incredulity. We offer you the world, and you want to hide in a library?
I want to survive, I think back annoyed. Dead kings don't rule anything. They just rot.
Conquer! they shriek, a sudden spike of aggression that makes me wince. The invaders are at the gate! They are glory! Go to the front! Tear them apart and build a throne from their ribs! Why do you hesitate? Are you a God or a mouse?
"I'm a student," I mutter out loud, rubbing my temples to soothe the sudden migraine. "And right now, I'm a student who is waiting."
I have been sitting outside this door for the better part of an hour.
The door in question is a heavy slab of dark, carved wood, set into wall. It depicts a scene of the night sky, the constellations inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It is beautiful. It is imposing.
And it is firmly shut.
Proctor Juliet Deng had informed me, via a nervous Second Year messenger earlier this morning, that she would agree to see me. The message was specific. Immediately following breakfast chow right after dawn
I arrived at dawn.
Now, my legs are going numb from sitting on the floor.
I seethe silently, staring at the intricate carvings.
What is the gods-damned point of a meeting time? I wonder, my irritation rising. Is this a test? Is she watching me through the keyhole to see if I leave? Is this some sort of psychological power play?
It probably is. Everything in this Academy is a power play.
"Five more minutes," I tell the door. "Five more minutes and I'm leaving. I have refuse to be disrespected this much I don't care how much I want your help."
Kick it down, the voices suggest helpfully.
I ignore them.
I sigh, resting my head on my knees. I try to occupy my mind by reviewing the steps of the Shadow Style. I visualize the girl from the vision the slave dancer. I trace the lines of her movement.
It helps. It keeps the boredom from turning into destructive impulses. Finally I hear the sound of a heavy lock tumbling.
I scramble to my feet, brushing the dust off my uniform. I straighten my collar, taking a deep breath to compose myself. I need to look like a disciplined awakened, not a bored teenager who's been lounging in the hallway.
The door creaks inward.
There is no "Enter" command. No voice beckoning me in. Just the open door, revealing a slice of darkness beyond.
I hesitate for a second the briefest feeling of paranoid alarm slicing through my body.
I step across the threshold.
The first thing that hits me is the cold.
It isn't just chilly. It is freezing. It is the kind of cold that lives in the deepest part of winter, the kind that snaps moisture out of the air and turns breath into ice instantly. It hits me like a physical wall, biting through my uniform, making the skin on my face tighten.
I suppress a shiver, forcing my body to adapt. I step fully into the room, and the door clicks shut behind me of its own accord.
My eyes roam around, adjusting to the gloom.
The room is... perfect in the exact sense of the word.
This room looks like an operating theater. Nothing is out of place.
It is aggressively, surgically tidy. The floor is black marble, polished to such a high sheen that it looks like a dark pool of water. The walls are lined with shelves of books but there is no trash. No dust. No personal effects. It feels sterilized. Dead.
The room is dimly lit, illuminated only by a few torches and candles. The far side of the curved room is dominated by massive floor-to-ceiling windows that should offer a stunning view of the Academy grounds and the mountains beyond.
But they are covered.
Thick, heavy blinds are drawn tight, blocking out every photon of the warm spring sunlight outside. It creates a perpetual twilight in here, a sealed capsule of cold and shadow.
In the center of this refrigerated tomb sits a chair.
It is a reclining chair, covered in thick fur, looking strangely out of place amidst the hard surfaces. And curled up in that chair is Proctor Juliet Deng.
My breath catches in my throat.
She is buried under a mountain of furs. White wolf pelts, bear skins, thick woolen blankets she is a nest of textures. Only her head and hands are visible.
She has a book in her lap, her slender fingers resting on the page.
I stare. I can't help it.
She is beautiful. Not in the traditionally sense that some of the other women in my life are, and to be fair most awakened are good looking it's a perk of awakening.
But Proctor Deng is more so, she is haunting.
She still looks young to me. impossibly young to be a Proctor. If I saw her in the cafeteria, I would assume she was a student. Maybe nineteen? Twenty at the most?
Her skin is pale. Not just fair, but translucent, like fine porcelain or milk glass held up to a light. It looks fragile, as if a harsh word might bruise it. Her hair is the color of starlight white, but with a metallic, silvery sheen that catches in the light. It falls in loose, waves around her face.
But it's her eyes that hold me.
They are silver. Bright, liquid mercury. They reflect the dim light of the room, shining with an intelligence that feels ancient and detached which is completely at odds to her appearance.
She looks divine. Like a statue of a forgotten goddess carved from ice and moonlight, left here to freeze the world.
I feel a sudden, stupid heat rise in my cheeks. I blush. I immadelty groan to myself cursing the reaction on my biology. Twice have I eyed a proctor gods I am ridiculous.
She is perfect, the voices whisper, their tone shifting from aggression to possessive obsession. She is yours
Shut up, I tell them biting my tongue to focus.
I walk forward, my boots clicking sharply on the marble floor. The sound is intrusive in the silence.
I stop three paces from her chair and bow my head low, showing the respect due to a Proctor.
"Proctor Deng," I say. My voice sounds rough, scraping against the silence of the room.
She doesn't move immediately. She finishes reading the sentence she was on. Then, slowly, languidly, she marks the page and closes the book.
She looks up at me.
Her gaze is heavy. It feels physical, like a weight pressing against my forehead. It isn't the Fearmonger's terror. It's something else. It feels like she is reading the table of contents of my mind.
She speaks.
"Hello there, Awakened Ayato Daath."
Her voice is quiet. It is barely a whisper, yet it is crystal clear. It sounds like wind chiming through icicles.
She tilts her head slightly to the side, a few strands of silver hair falling across her cheek. She doesn't brush them away.
"What do I owe the pleasure of this meeting?" she asks. "Julian told me you wished to speak but not about what."
I straighten up, meeting her gaze. The cold of the room is seeping into my bones, but I don't shiver.
"Maybe some perspective," I reply dryly. "And perhaps a bit of sanity."
"Sanity is boring," she murmurs, a small, ghost of a smile touching her pale lips. "And highly overrated in our line of work."
She shifts slightly under the furs, pulling a white bear skin tighter around her shoulders. She looks like a queen on a throne of winter.
"You waited outside for fifty-eight minutes," she notes. She didn't look at a clock. She just knows.
"I did," I say, keeping my tone neutral, though the annoyance still simmers in my chest.
"Impatience is a flaw," she says softly. "But persistence is a virtue. I was curious which one would win."
"And?"
"You didn't leave," she says. "So, you are either desperate, or you are stubborn."
"Both," I admit.
She studies me. Her silver eyes drift over my uniform, my face, and then they seem to focus on something just behind my eyes.
"You are loud, Ayato Daath," she whispers.
I blink. "Excuse me?"
"Not your voice," she says, tapping her own temple with a long, pale finger. "In here. You are deafening. It is like standing next to a screaming choir."
My blood runs cold. She hears them. How could she hear the voices??
"Most students come to me outside of my lessons with them because they are stressed," she continues, her voice drifting through the freezing air. "They have nightmares. They miss their mothers. They are afraid of dying. They wish for me to make their sleep easier"
She leans forward slightly, the furs sliding down to reveal the collar of a white silk blouse.
"But you... you aren't afraid of dying, are you?"
"Well I'd prefer to avoid it," I say an involuntary smirk crossing my face
"No I think not," she corrects me gently. "You are afraid of becoming."
She stares right into me.
"You are afraid that the choir will stop singing to you, and start singing through you."
I take a step back involuntarily. It's an instinctive reaction to being flayed open so casually.
She knows of us, the voices hiss, sounding agitated but also excited. She's wrong though we don't sing through you we are you.
"Can you help me?" I ask, my voice dropping to a rasp. " I can't control them"
Proctor Deng watches me for a long moment. Then, she sighs. It is a small, tragic sound.
"Help is a strong word," she says. "I cannot silence them, Ayato. They are a part of your soul." "These voices you hear are an accumulation of the most violent parts of your subconscious twisted into their own entity by divine power."
She gestures to a sleek, metal stool sitting near her chair.
"Sit."
I sit. The metal is freezing against my legs.
"I cannot silence them," she repeats. "But I can teach you how to conduct the choir."
She reaches out a hand from beneath the furs. Her skin is so pale it looks blue in the dim light. She holds her hand palm up, waiting.
"Give me your hand."
I hesitate.
"I don't bite," she says dryly. "Unless asked."
I blush but I reach out and place my hand in hers.
Her skin is ice. It is shockingly cold, like touching a corpse.
"Close your eyes," she commands.
I close my eyes.
"Deep breaths," she whispers. "Imagine the cold in this room Imagine it freezing everything, all you feel all the anger you harbor. It freezes everything until nothing exists inside your head anymore"
I do as she says feeling the cold of the room on my skin. I take deep breath after deep breath ignoring the voices imagining the cold seeping into my body like a blizzard.
She squeezes my hand.
And then, I am gone.
The sensation of the chair, the cold room, and Juliet's hand vanishes.
I am falling.
I slam into the metaphysical reality of my own soul.
I am standing on the surface of the dark ocean again. The water is still, black, and oily. Above me, the Black Orb hangs in the void, churning with the galaxies of my memories.
I look up at it.
I see the damage. The cracks in the orb's surface, jagged fissures glowing with a sickly dark light scars from the battle with the monster.
I turn my gaze to the constellation burning at the edge of my soul orb. The wolf etched in fiery planets with two burning suns of malice as eyes.
It senses me instantly.
It stops pacing. It turns its massive, celestial head toward me. The Wolf snarls. I can almost hear its disbelief, the idea that I will attempt to cage its hunger again.
"I don't deny the hunger," I say, stepping forward across the black water. "I just decide what we eat."
The Wolf roars in outrage. It bunches its muscles, fire spilling from its mane.
It lunges.
It is a terrifying sight a mountain of burning planets in the shape of a wolf flying at me with the intent to devour my consciousness whole. This is not like last time where we merged wills to stay alive and fight the monster. This is intentional discipline.
I don't run. I stand firm.
As the Wolf crashes into me, I use my Will.
I reach out and grab the constellation.
My hands burn as I dig them into the fiery mane of the beast. The Wolf thrashes. It snaps at my face, its jaws inches from my nose. The heat is unbearable. The voices in my head slither in outrage. "You don't have what it takes just yet little Ayato, you need us!"
"I am the King!" I roar back, channeling every ounce of my spite, my anger, and my pride. "And you are my dog!"
I slam the Wolf's head down and planets around me explode from the impact.
It fights me. It burns me. But I push back with the weight of everything I have survived. I pour my hate into it. I pour the cold rage of the boy who grew up in the gutter, the boy who killed his classmates, the boy who is tired of being afraid.
The Wolf's struggles begin to weaken. The outrage turns to confusion.
And then... triumph.
Yes, the voices whisper in awe. Yes. That is the key. Ther is the hate. There is the will.
The Wolf dissolves into me.
I gasp as the power floods my system. It isn't a trickle anymore. It is a dam breaking.
My mind expands. The separation between "Me" and "Them" vanishes. Our wills merge. They still exist in my mind but they no longer attempt to fray my conscious and take over my body.
But in result of the control I feel portions of my humanity slip away like sand through my fingers. The empathy, the hesitation, the small, soft parts of me that worried about morality they are burned away by the fire of the Wolf.
But in exchange... I feel the power. Just like before when I joined wills with the voices I received a physical augmentation.
A predator cannot be slower than its prey. A predator cannot be weaker. To instill fear, one must be the thing in the dark that is faster than thought.
I feel my physical prowess double. Then triple. I am 200, maybe 300 percent stronger than a normal Awakened.
I open my eyes in the Soul Sea.
I smile. It is a dark, ugly thing.
The voices are rejoicing. They are singing a song of conquest, and for the first time, I am singing with them.
Finally, they think. The King is awake.
I turn my gaze to the other mark on the orb.
The Ring. The Regenerator.
It hangs there, a golden band of light, dim and locked tight. It is a fortress I cannot enter. It is a power that saves me, but refuses to obey me.
I walk up to it. I can feel the immense, silent power radiating from it, mocking me with its dormancy.
I lean in close, my face illuminated by its golden glow.
I snarl, the sound echoing with the dual resonance of a boy and a beast.
"I will unlock you one day."
My eyes roam across the planets and stars the make up my soul sea. I leave the Regenerator and approach the Möbius strip the single surface of light folding in on itself in perpetuity. What control can I claim over my illusions from this I wonder.
I reach out and grab it.