Chapter 2
He wasn’t led to a chamber with rows of floating candles and a bunch of magical tables, leaving him wondering whether he was relieved or disappointed. Instead, he found himself in a room that looked like a shop; a wide counter ran across the front of the room and a vast array of silver rods hung on the wall behind a very, very large man. The ten-foot-tall individual had gray skin, a trio of stubby black horns, and a single crimson eye. He was bald and muscular, though Levi had to bite his lip to avoid giggling when the man addressed him.
“Hey there!” he said with a high-pitched voice, reminding Levi of inhaling helium at a birthday party. “I’m Helios the armorer here, and I have two jobs. The first is to equip you with your focus, the second is to fit new arrivals with a House. I assume you’re going to need both services, since I have never seen you before?”
Levi nodded, though the man wasn’t looking at him—he was looking at Regina. Levi turned to look at the house mistress of Toad, or whatever she was called, and she rolled her eyes in what appeared to be exasperation. “Yes, Helios, he needs the test,” she said impatiently.
The man pulled what looked like a slot machine out from behind the counter and set it on the wooden surface. The machine was gilded, enhanced with clear crystals, and had a silver arm extending from the side. The face had been molded to look like a rough palm print with the words APPENDAGE HERE in huge bold letters. The fact it also said PULL over the lever made Levi wonder about the intelligence of the average person who got drawn to this Academy. While the faculty members stared at him, he put his hand on the panel and used his other hand to tug the lever; that was when the machine started to shake, clang, and then blow steam out the top.
A shimmering blue energy emerged from a crystal on top of the machine. The blue field spread until it resembled a flatscreen TV. Different animal shapes began to flick rapidly by, one after another. Levi registered seeing a toad, a crane, a wolf, a bear, and then it stopped dead on a raven, the black bird staring at him, or seeming to. He was distracted from it the moment a searing pain blossomed in his palm, feeling as though a dozen needles had been jammed up into his flesh. Black formed on the back of his hand, then took on an amorphous shape and crawled up his arm. When it reached his forearm, the blob solidified into the image of a raven: the bird was tattooed onto the inside of his forearm in vivid detail. He smelled smoke, disturbingly delicious smoke, and realized his hand was on fire.
Levi lunged away from the machine and his palm came off with a sickening pop as he flicked his hand up and down to try and extinguish it. The flames snuffed out the moment his skin peeled away from the device but the pain took longer to fade. He rounded on Regina with a scowl. “What the hell? That was agonizing!” he protested, though a moment later he noticed the sympathy on her face.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Walker, but we’ve found it very difficult to get a candidate to put their hand and activate the machine if they know how much it’s going to hurt. Best to just get it over with quickly. Besides! You’re now a member of Raven House! That is delightful, they’re the smallest of our Houses. Ravens are known for their quick wit and cunning strategies. Now, I promise this next bit won’t hurt, just turn to Helios there and accept the focus he’s offering. The magic of the focus will transform it to best suit your magical potential,” she explained quickly, then shooed him to go on and turn to the towering figure on the other side of the counter.
He turned cautiously toward the huge man and was relieved to see the damned slot machine had been put away. The gray-skinned figure held out a silver rod to him, but Levi hesitated—his hand still hurt and he wasn’t sure he wanted to get set on fire again. Helios just laughed and shook his head. “This one is painless, I swear,” the man said in his high-pitched voice.
Levi sighed and wrapped his hand around it, then stared down at the eighteen-inch length of silvery-steel. He thought it was steel since it felt too dense to be pure silver. He held the metal rod for several minutes before something happened. A chill ran up his hand to his tattoo, cluing him in to the object activating. Regina and Helios stared at him expectantly and he stared back, not sure what they were waiting for. He also wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, and he was beginning to feel remarkably silly holding a silver stick in his hand. Almost as though his decision to give the rod back triggered it, the metal suddenly grew icy and then extended into a cane. Levi stared at the metal shaft in his hand: three-and-a-half-feet of silver etched with something similar to Celtic mazes topped by a flattened globe that had a dragon engraved on it. It looked like something a very wealthy Englishman might take with him to the opera… and Levi had no idea what to do with it. He looked at Regina and she offered him one of her patented kind smiles.
“Well, that is different… Usually if they’re not weapons of some sort, they’re magical implements like wands or staves. Helios, have you seen this before?” she asked, though her cheerful voice sounded somewhat… forced… to Levi’s ears.
“It’s a walking cane, a beautiful one at that. They’ve been used in the past, usually for those whose magic is more complicated than simply lobbing fireballs and hurling lightning bolts. The founder of Wolf House—” Regina Applebottom cut off his excited rambling with a wave of her hand and turned to Levi.
“Well, there we go. A walking cane. I’m sure you’ll figure that out with the house mistress of Raven. How about we head to her now and get you into uniform?” Her quick redirection confused Levi; he had wanted to know more. Levi shrugged and rested his cane on his shoulder. He was ready to follow her. Levi didn’t notice the bashful look that crossed Helios’ face at being cut off—he never looked back as the stout woman started leading him down another one of the seemingly endless stone hallways.
“How important is this uniform thing? I’m not exactly eager to start dressing like a prep student or anything. Is there any wiggle room?” Levi asked. He took in the paintings on the walls; a lot of them were of mythical creatures he had no names for, but he did see plenty of dragons, unicorns, and common animals as well. He was starting to come to terms with the fact he wasn’t dreaming, and it had him rattled. He didn’t hear Regina’s reply, however, because his thoughts turned inward as he remembered his life on Earth.
His parents had passed away just before he turned eighteen, and his grandmother had died last year. At twenty-two, he wasn’t leaving anyone behind. He didn’t have kids, and most of his friends were online, though he wouldn’t call any of them close. College had been dragging on him, and he’d never found a major that really suited him. He’d tried the job market before school, and despite working a bunch of different tasks, nothing had felt right. Frankly, if he had to choose between being dead and living with his most recent asshole roommate, this seemed like a much better option. He had always straddled the line between being a geek and a jock, never really dedicating himself to either. His dad had been a major nerd, but his mom was a dedicated camper, and he’d loved spending time with both of them. He knew the reason he’d bounced from job to job after they’d died was because he didn’t want to face the world without them.
Now I don’t have to, I can do whatever I want here… he thought to himself. His mood started to elevate, but then he realized that two women were staring at him expectantly and he had zero idea of what was going on. “Uh, hi?” he offered, and Regina snorted openly, the first sign she had a capacity for amusing the finer things in life… like the suffering of her students.
“Mr. Walker, allow me to introduce you… again… to Nox Willowbrook, one of our upperclassmen. She’ll be taking you the rest of the way to Raven House. I have more work to do, and she’s more than capable of answering your questions.” House mistress Applebottom then turned and walked off.
When he turned his attention back to the other woman, she was giving him an unhappy glower. Levi realized he had no idea how long he had been lost in thought, nor how many times Regina had tried to introduce them. He offered a more genuine smile and extended a hand to shake.
“Hi, sorry, been kind of a long day. I’m Levi Walker, from Earth,” he said. Thankfully the woman seemed to cool off. Levi noted she was beautiful, in a fiery manner. She had deep scarlet hair that descended down her back, brilliant purple eyes, and a pair of pointed ears standing out of her hair. Her uniform was trimmed in a deep purple, and she had her arms crossed under a truly impressive bust. She was shorter than he was, but not a great deal, and she let out a sigh before she rolled her eyes.
“New arrivals are always kind of clueless, so I forgive you. I’m Nox Willowbrook of Fox House, and you owe me a cupcake,” she said firmly. Levi blinked, not sure if she was joking or not. Either way, the woman seemed to be full of energy, and she immediately grasped Levi’s bicep and started pulling him down another hallway. “Come on, Raven House is located in the tower behind Fox House, which is why I’m going to escort you. Fox House specializes in combatting the Horrors, so some of us get a little prickly when we see someone without a proper uniform creeping around the Academy.” She’d whispered the word ‘Horrors’ as though Levi was supposed to know it, but he just stared at her.
“Yeah, I don’t know what that means,” he finally admitted. She sat down next to him and took a deep breath; for the moment she wasn’t seeking to drag him off anywhere. He looked at her expectantly and she gave a firm nod, like she was coming to a decision.
“Alright, so it is like this…” she began, and he raised an eyebrow in curiosity. “The dimensions are all floating around, right? Well, the spaces in between those dimensions don’t exist. Our scholars call that the Void, and even though it is… well, nothing, stuff lives in there.” She paused to see if he was following and he gave her a nod. “Doesn’t make any sense, I know. Those things are called Horrors, and basically we call them that because they just, break existence, when they get into our worlds. Stuff just stops working right. Gravity will reverse, matter can turn to gas, water will flow uphill, everything that shouldn’t happen is capable.”
“That sounds like some Lovecraft shit right there,” he stated, and she stared at him. “He was a writer in my world, talked about these things called Elder Gods, creatures that existed out in deep space and would basically drive you mad if you ran into them. Some crazy cultists were always trying to summon them, and people went insane, bunch of folks died. They were stories meant to terrify people and stimulate their imagination,” he concluded.
She nodded knowingly. “He was a scholar, then.”
“What? No, they were fiction. Just make-believe stories of a weird dude,” he protested, but she surprised him by shaking her head.
“I would say he possessed greater knowledge of the dimensions. It is good you know what to expect when the dimensions are breached.”
Levi just closed his mouth, not sure how to take that. He decided that he was not going to adjust to this new world anytime soon if he let himself get paranoid about H.P. Lovecraft being an interdimensional scholar; instead, he chose to focus on Nox. “Okay, so how many Houses are there?” he asked.
Six, as it turned out. Nox informed him that the Houses were Crane, Toad, Bear, Wolf, Fox, and Raven, and they were organized by size. Regina had informed him that Raven was the smallest, hence it had a tiny tower off of the Fox House. Nox shared that Crane, Fox, and Bear were the largest. Toad and Wolf were apparently somewhere in the middle, and each of the different Houses had some kind of symbolic role in the Academy, but it turned out Nox wasn’t the greatest student of history, so she couldn’t remember the details all that well.
At least she was fun to talk with.
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