It spread like a contagion. First Shoreshell, then Starravius and Windsong, even Fletcher too. “This might be on your exam,” they all said, appending it word for word onto their lesson introductions. Always exam in the singular. One exam. What would be on it? None of them would know before we students did. What might be on it? Everything under the brightness, apparently.

  So my professors were setting us up for the end-of-semester exam already as if I didn’t have plenty enough to contend with. The war? Gathering strength week on week from the sparse comments I caught. The hospital? Growing and getting fuller, despite all the nurses and the meagre help me and Robin could add. Robin himself? Doggedly keeping himself going, inexplicably seeing the best in me despite what little of it I showed to him. My work for him, to pay my semester fees? Thrown off by the weirdest woman I’ve ever met and a strong hesitancy to stumble across her again up there. I could solve that by letting Kaspar pay for it since he’d offered because sure, if he already funded half my life, why not let him cover the rest? He gave far too much to me already. The material goods were lovely, but I really needed things no money could buy. As did Holly, and I’d do my best to support her the way she’d supported me all these weeks. My schedule? Already full. My life? So demanding. Morrigan? Really getting fucking tired of it all. I needed escapes from the escape.

  I floated through my classes. I ate three times a day, though exactly what I couldn’t remember. I studied in the evenings to try to catch up on what I’d missed. At night, reprieve came in Kaspar’s form, dream after dream of him, increasingly surreal. Once, he took me back to Avernorria which my sleeping mind decided was built on the back of a colossal swimming ray, the ground of the city gently undulating as its fins waved through the deep cerulean ocean. We sat in his garden of motley corals and patted his nodding seahorses, and together we designed new shapes of bubbles as our jobs.

  No one seemed to mention when he was absent from classes. Gave me chance to let my head drop, rest a mind that felt as if I’d scrubbed it raw. I made it all the way to Hesserday before anyone bit me on the scruff for doing the bare minimum. And I knew it was coming from the way Field strode towards me. “Elected for a premature sign-off for the weekend, have we, Oakley?” she declared. I mumbled, didn’t meet her eye. “Halfway through and your candle remains resolutely flameless. Not for lack of talent: I recall you perfectly competent at it.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  I kept my head down and she wouldn’t leave. “If I light this,” she said, “will you show me a result? Will you at least try?”

  I wanted to tell her I could do it, I just really didn’t feel like it right now, and especially not with everyone’s gaze pinned to me now she’d drawn the attention, but the candle was already lit, Field setting it expectantly before me, and I knew she wasn’t going away until I did something. Behind her, around the room, sights fixed on me. Crowding around me. Stifling me, pressing into me. Felt like the training sessions in Dreadfall, only difference was knowing I could do this just fine if they all backed off from me.

  “Oakley? Any time today, please?”

  I didn’t want to. My bones were lead and mercury ran through my veins. I needed a break from it all.

  “You’ll need to do this eventually. It might be on your exam.”

  I couldn’t breathe. My chest crushed inwards.

  “Oakley.”

  “You’re not gonna leave till I do it, are you?” I managed to spit out.

  “I know you can. Everyone else,” she said, glancing back, “can stare if they like, but I want to see the progress I know is in you. So show me, please. If you’d be so kind.”

  Teeth gritted, I dragged my last reserves up from the depths inside me and fired what I had left at the candle. It snuffed out instantly, a melon-sized river rock in place of the flame, one oddly like the ones I’d used to tempt the gripweed so many weeks ago. The briefest surge of excitement was brutally quashed by the dozen sets of eyes on me. “Happy now?”

  “Jubilantly so! Inarguably elated!” A flicker of hope sprang up as she turned elsewhere, but then came the sound I’d dreaded hearing:

  “Great job, Muncher!” Smarmy. Snivelling. My shoulders tightened. That awful self-satisfied snicker of his. “Someone like you could pay for a week’s tuition with that rock!”

  My vision flashed red and Kaspar wasn’t here for me now and with the rock on my desk, right by my clenched hand, I –