Callie

  Useless.

  She put another book back in its spot, opening the next one in the section and quickly skimming its table of contents.

  Useless.

  An hour had already passed with no leads. Last semester—when she had last seen the book—felt like ages ago, even if in reality it was only a few weeks. It had been somewhere in the history section, and the cover was brown and leathery, that much she could remember.

  I wonder if Darius knows, she pondered absently as she reached the end of the shelf, making her way back to the front when something caught her eye.

  A red ribbon, a brown book.

  “Oh—oh, does this look that weird?” Walking up to Ty, Callie self-consciously raised her hand up to her hair, which was neatly tied up in a ponytail instead of hanging down past her shoulders.

  Ty blinked a few times.

  “I-I knew it, I shouldn’t have—”

  Before Callie could undo the ribbon holding her hair in place, Ty raised her hand and shook her head. “No, no. I was surprised because you weren’t wearing that earlier. It looks nice.”

  Callie blushed nervously. “Oh, I…thank you. I-I got it from the village. I only remembered after I started looking for books, it gets the hair out of my eyes…”

  “Ah, I see,” replied Ty, wondering if maybe, just maybe, Callie was the one from her dreams. “Just wondering, do you have any other ribbons?”

  “Oh, oh no, I don’t. Do you—do you want one?” she stammered.

  Completely missing Callie’s question, Ty lost herself in her own thoughts. “I didn’t issue you a sword, did I?”

  The support replied to her best of her ability despite her nervousness. “No, you’ve never issued me one, but I know how to use one.”

  What am I doing?

  “I’m sorry, it just reminded me of something,” explained Ty softly as she chased the thought out of her mind, having felt scatterbrained ever since the night before. “Did you find something?”

  “Oh, yes,” she answered, holding the book out to Ty. “I think this is it. I found it in one of the to-be-shelved piles in the back.”

  “Huh,” mumbled Ty, taking the book and then flipping past the generic title page to get to the contents.

  Pyre rituals. Chapter 36.

  “This is it.” She looked up at Callie, feeling a mixture of relief and twisting in her gut. “Thank you so much, Callie. I can’t believe you found it.”

  “No problem,” Callie said with a sweet smile. “Glad I could help. Anything else you’d like?”

  “No, I think I’m just going to find a place to…sit and read this,” thought Ty aloud as she looked up at the top floors. “Maybe at a study table.”

  Absently fiddling with the ribbon in her hair, following Ty’s gaze, Callie also seemed to be deep in thought when the class lead finally looked back down.

  “Would you like to join me?”

  Even if she had tried, Callie would not have been able to hide her pleasure at hearing those few words.

  * * *

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the book for?” inquired Callie as they sat down at a desk in the corner of the fifth floor, beside them a nice window that overlooked the dorms and the forest.

  Looking away from Chelsi, who sat at the coordinator’s table today with an empty chair beside her, Ty set the book on the table and flipped to Chapter 36. “It’s something Korinna told me yesterday during her report,” she prefaced, reaching into her book bag for her notebook. “Do you remember the Ancient from the village who refused to speak to you?”

  The color drained from Callie’s face. “Oh goodness, yes. Korinna told you. I—I didn’t know what to—”

  “Do you remember what she said?”

  A bit of color returned to Callie’s face as she looked away, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “She had to make some preparations. A special occasion, an Ancient rite. They have many. I thought little of it.”

  “I think they were talking about me arriving.” Ty skimmed the pages, looking for the passage she had recalled the night before. “They’re going to invoke a sacred rite, but I don’t know why. That’s why I was looking for this book. I think they mentioned it here.”

  “Seal rites?”

  “Mhm.”

  “It was a custom, wasn’t it?” recalled Callie quietly, eyes glued to the window and hands folded neatly on her lap. “It had been a secret; they would burn certain members of the community to prevent them from reincarnating. Some even mentioned a special magic-fire…” She trailed off for a moment before refocusing her eyes. “They considered it a mercy for those who did not want to return to the Earth Mother.”

  “Or people they didn’t want coming back,” mused the tactician, flipping the page.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “But the Earth Mother deems everyone is worthy of life, which is why we always bury the dead…with their flesh and anima…to be made new again. If you burn them, everything scatters and is lost…so would sealing rites trap their souls, keep them wandering on Chloris? Would that be…mercy?” Callie asked uncertainly, still focused on looking at the cloudy sky outside.

  “Not quite.” Ty flipped forward several pages. “Rather than sealing on Chloris, they’re to seal them with the Earth Mother. They called it an act of love.”

  Callie nodded, feeling slightly ashamed for having made the mistake. “Ah, yes. I forgot. I’m sorry; I should have known that.”

  “That’s alright,” mumbled Ty, tracing the lines of words with her finger as she skimmed them.

  “You—you mentioned it was because…because of you arriving. You really think so?”

  Ty’s finger stopped at the passage she had been looking for, reading it aloud and hoping it would provide them both with answers. “‘The contentious tradition was still spoken of behind closed doors, however. An interview with one of the few remaining descendants of the Northfield tribe revealed that the revered individual who had been burned at the stake was more than just a community elder. The individual spoke of several bodies, all of which were gathered there to burn. Only the village elders were permitted to watch, and all others were informed that the sacred rites had to be invoked to protect their souls; it was considered a merciful death.’

  “‘I could not locate any other remaining survivors of the Northfield tribe, as many have either gone into hiding or have been exiled, so what this individual told me next I cannot corroborate and hesitate to add because of its possibly far-reaching repercussions should it be confirmed: the ones who had been sealed, they had been children.’

  “‘They told me of the word ‘shame.’ How it governed the people, how it was what caused their people to disband, what caused the others to look down upon them. They repeated the word several times, even when I asked them why it was shameful to carry out the rite when they believed it was according to tradition. When I tried to rephrase my question, asking them what part of it could be shameful to cause their entire tribe to disband, they finally looked me in the eye and laughed, ‘No one believed it shameful to carry out the rite. It was shameful to have been caught by you commoners.’”

  Ty finally looked up at Callie regretfully. “See, it was uncorroborated data. I didn’t read past the disclaimer, but when I heard Kor tell me last night what the lady told you two, I…had a feeling.”

  Callie met the tactician’s stony eyes. “The child she spoke about. They knew who you were.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “The Spell Cleanse.”

  “What gave it away?”

  “The emptiness.”

  Yes, the emptiness. That had been her life for so long.

  “There was…a hollowness. You probably know, but…everyone has a small space for magic. Like a little room that represents…” Callie turned back to the window. “For everyone, it’s filled with things. Things they love, things they want to keep. Things that remind them of home, things that they can’t forget. Things that are a part of the magic they cast, things that are a part of who they are. When Spell Cleanses are performed, usually you check for anomalies, and you can tell what’s wrong pretty easily—but you…it was hard not to notice. Your room was so big. It was so big, yet so empty. It was then…that I realized. Magic must have been your whole world.”

  “…and then you remembered what Cyril said the day before.”

  “Yes, what he had said about the anima pools.”

  Ty smiled to herself and closed the book. “It was a long time ago, but thank you for believing in me. And for keeping my secret all this time.”

  “We won’t let anything happen to you, rites or not. You’re our tactician.” Though Callie smiled as she uttered her promise—that burning, compassionate warmth that never ceased to emanate from her—Ty could see that her eyes were unfocused, glassy.

  Before Ty could thank her again, never feeling like it was enough for all her classmate’s kindness and concern, the support whispered ever so quietly, “Hey, Ty. I wonder…if you could do a Spell Cleanse on me.”

  “Right…right here?”

  Callie nodded, reaching into her bag on the ground and pulling out the same tome she had used to perform her Spell Cleanse on her. “Here.”

  Hesitantly, Ty took it, opening it up to the cover. There were authorizations for it, of course. She had made sure of it for their exams, and there had been no need for it over the break.

  “Okay,” Ty said after a few moments of staring at the page.

  The truth was that this was only the second time that she had ever performed a Spell Cleanse. She had studied the text, knew what it did, and had said the words aloud. Her own mother had forbidden her from performing it on her, so a MATS notary had been called in to certify her on the spot. Her mother was that certain of her ability.

  Of course, for a sheltered child who knew nothing other than her home on that hill with her mother, books, spells, and monsters, the results had made her realize she had been living in a bubble. Never had she seen the outside world before this point, and perhaps it was then that she realized she wanted to see it; to go to school and learn, to experience the warmth of friends and the rest of the world. Its hills and valleys, its towns and villages full of life and sound. No longer would she have to be confined in her cage of loneliness and secrecy.

  Slowly, like Callie had done for her, Ty watched her classmate’s eyes close with complete trust before she recited the words on the page. The initial passages were long, but when they started getting more twisted and repetitive, Ty could feel something stir.

  She closed her eyes and saw darkness at first. And then the darkness moved, and she felt like she was swimming toward something, floating in the air even though she was stationary at her library desk. There was nothing around her, just the dark void as she floated and swam forth in that narrow room.

  Was this what emptiness felt like?

  Bathed in the darkness, Ty recited the next passage and saw the shadow finally move away.

  In that narrow space, she could now see windows. Windows that endlessly stretched on in the same passageway, windows that she could turn her head and look into as they went past her.

  Just as she was expecting more darkness, she caught a glimpse of something in one of the windows. It was small, and it looked like it was being swallowed by the darkness, but there was something there.

  She leaned closer, making a conscious effort to recite the same words steadily to not break her mind’s illusion.

  A plate. There was a clean plate with a knife on top of it.

  Ty turned around to the other window and looked in.

  Nothing. No matter how hard she tried to crane her head, all she could see was the darkness.

  Desperate to find something else, Ty suddenly watched the darkness cease moving. The windows remained where they were, but the hallway was no more.

  Instead, in front of her was now a wall. Behind her was a wall. The room felt like it was closing in on her, so small it was suffocating, the windows larger than she had remembered them being a few seconds ago. The plate and knife had grown tenfold, threatening to swallow the room behind the window entirely. Within those four walls, there was no escape or relief in sight; there was only the darkness she floated in.

  And then she thought to look up.

  A blue sky.

  Escape, it beckoned.

  But no matter how much she tried to move upward toward the opening, toward the light, she found herself rooted to her spot. Watching the magical sky above her glimmer with hope, helpless. And as she solemnly watched it, she felt something suddenly fall into her hands and looked to see what it was—a book. Barely the thickness of half a tome, its decorated, ornate cover refused to open.

  Ty did her best to memorize the designs on the cover, its color and size—until she felt another item fall. She jumped back this time as she looked at the new item, taking only a second to realize what it was.

  And when she figured it out, she stopped reciting entirely, stunned into silence, severing the spell of trust between the two students.

  There was no doubt about it—it was a practice spear she had seen not long ago. In the middle of a burning world, she had held it over the dead body of her friend. Her friend, who had died for her.

  M/W/F schedule. There will sometimes be an extra chapter (like when there's a short one) in order to balance stuff out, but there will always be a normal-sized chapter on main release days.