Chapter 44: The Witch and the Rat

The locker room was usually a cacophony of post-combat adrenaline. Boastful shouting, the sizzling of healing salves on bruises, and the sharp cracks of snapping towels filled the air.

Today when Vane walked in the noise died down to a murmur.

He moved to his corner. His muscles screamed from the residual strain of the Silver Mana coating he had used in the arena. He stripped off his sweat-soaked jacket and tossed it into his locker. He could feel eyes on his back. Not the usual sneering dismissal of the elite eyeing the commoner trash. This was different. It was the wary calculating gaze of predators sizing up a new unfamiliar threat.

Vane ignored them. He grabbed a towel and headed for the showers walking with the new heavy gait that Senna had beaten into his bones.

As he passed a row of lockers he heard the whispers. They were meant to be quiet but in the sudden hush they carried like shouts.

“Did you see the wrist on the golem?”

“Clean cut. It wasn’t a crack.”

“With a wooden spear? That isn’t possible.”

“I am telling you that I saw the stone give way. He didn’t block it. He carved it.”

“If he can cut a Class-4 construct with a stick…”

“Landmine. He is a walking landmine.”

Vane turned on the shower. He let the hot water beat against the persistent cold ache in his chest where the Silver Fang resided.

He leaned his forehead against the cool tile. They were right to be wary. He wasn’t just a shield anymore. He was carrying a hidden blade that could sever steel like wet paper. But they didn’t know the cost. They didn’t know that the three-inch cut on the golem had nearly emptied his reserves.

But as he listened to the fear in their voices a dark seductive thought took root in his mind.

Let them be afraid.

He dressed quickly. He left the locker room without looking at anyone. Jax the Fire-mage was standing near the exit. He started to say something then looked at Vane’s dead flat eyes. He glanced down at Vane’s hands remembering the gouge in the stone golem. He thought better of it and stepped out of the way.

Vane just kept walking.

The Great Library was a cathedral of knowledge. It was a towering spire of stained glass and silence. The lower levels were packed with first-years forming study groups. Their laughter and panicked whispering filled the air.

Vane bypassed them climbing the spiral stairs to the upper mezzanines where the elite students studied.

The atmosphere here was different. It was colder.

He found Isole Sylvaris at a large table near the suspended astrolabe.

She was easy to find because there was a twenty-foot radius of empty chairs around her.

It wasn’t just privacy. It was a quarantine zone. Other students walked past the table with their eyes averted. They sped up as they crossed the invisible line of her presence.

Isole sat in the center of the isolation. Her back was perfectly straight. She was surrounded by floating schematics of mana-geometric patterns. Her dual aura twisted lazily around her pale hair. The loop of Emerald Life and Crimson Death was sickening and beautiful.

To Vane it just looked like magic. To the rest of the student body raised on stories of High Elven necromancy and blood-curses it looked like a bomb waiting to go off.

She didn’t look up as he approached. She simply tapped a thick leather-bound textbook sitting on the empty side of the table.

“You are late,” Isole said softly. Her voice was like wind chimes in the quiet space. “Professor Vyla’s mid-term is in two days. If you fail you will be placed on academic probation and you will lose your villa privileges.”

Vane pulled out a chair. The scraping sound echoed loudly in the quiet mezzanine. He sat down heavily.

“I got held up. Kael ran the endurance drills long.”

“Kael’s drills do not require Arcanic Geometry,” Isole countered finally looking up. Her mismatched eyes took in his exhaustion but she offered no pity. “Vyla’s exam does. Open the book. Chapter Four: Lattice Stability.”

Vane groaned dragging the heavy book toward him. “Isole, I sliced a golem today. My brain is mush. Can’t we do this tomorrow?”

“No,” she stated calmly. “Tomorrow we cover elemental resonance. Today we must ensure you understand basic lattice structure so you do not embarrass yourself, and by extension me, when she calls on you.”

She waved a hand clearing her own schematics. She pulled a blank slate of blackened glass between them.

“We begin with the anchor runes. Draw the primary stabilization cluster for a standard barrier.”

Vane picked up a stylus. He stared at the slate. The symbols swam before his eyes. He knew how to kill a man with a look now thanks to Senna but he still couldn’t remember the difference between a Fehu-rune and a Kenaz-inversion.

He scribbled a clumsy shape.

Isole stared at it. “That is a glyph for ’Soup’. If you cast that during a defensive exam you will boil yourself.”

Vane dropped the stylus rubbing his temples. “I am not cut out for this academic trash, Isole. I am a field operator.”

“You are a student,” Isole corrected. “And a student must pass.”

She erased his mistake and drew the correct rune with elegant fluid strokes.

Vane watched her hand. He looked around the empty mezzanine at the other students who were pointedly ignoring them.

“Why do you do this?” Vane asked suddenly.

Isole paused. “Do what? Draw runes correctly?”

“Help me,” Vane said. He gestured to the empty chairs. “You are a prodigy. You are royalty, or whatever counts for it where you are from. You don’t need to tutor a slum rat who can barely read ancient draconic. And you definitely didn’t need to come out to the fog sector and burn your own blood to save Senna.”

He looked at her with a serious expression.

“You don’t owe me anything. So why are you wasting your time?”

Isole slowly lowered the stylus. She looked out across the library. Her gaze landed on a group of noble students laughing together at a distant table.

“Look at them, Vane,” she whispered.

Vane looked. “They are just students.”

“To you,” she said. “To me they are prey animals. They look at me and they see the Life and they want to own it. Or they see the Death and they want to banish it.”

She touched the crimson strand of hair falling over her shoulder.

“My affinity is unsettling to humans. It is a violation of your natural order. I am ’The Witch’. ’The Necromancer’. ’The Freak’. Even the professors hesitate to touch me during corrections.”

She turned her mismatched eyes back to him.

“You are the only person in this entire academy who walked up to my table and sat down without checking for a shield first.”

Vane blinked. “Because I needed help with math.”

“Precisely,” Isole said. A faint sad smile touched her lips. “You did not want my bloodline. You did not fear my curse. You just wanted to pass a test.”

She picked up the stylus again twirling it in her long fingers.

“And when you came for me in the lecture hall… when you dragged me to the fog sector… you were covered in mud and sweat and you grabbed my wrist with dirty hands.”

Vane winced. “Sorry about the robe.”

“Do not apologize,” she said sharply. “It was refreshing. You were desperate. You saw me as a solution not a symbol. You treated me like a tool that could work rather than a vase that might break.”

She looked down at the slate her voice dropping to a whisper.

“It is very quiet at this table, Vane. You are loud. You are abrasive. You smell of cheap soap and violence. But you are here.”

Vane looked at her. He saw the wall she had built around herself. Not a martial wall like Senna’s but a wall of ice and silence designed to keep the world from hurting her.

And he realized he had just walked right through it because he was too ignorant to know it was there.

“Well,” Vane said picking up his stylus again. “I am not going anywhere. Mostly because if I lose the villa I have to sleep in the dorms and I snore.”

Isole’s lip twitched. It was almost a smile.

“Then draw the rune correctly,” she commanded tapping the slate. “Or I will tell Professor Vyla that you think her subject is ’academic trash’.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.”

Vane groaned and bent over the slate. He drew the anchor rune. It was sloppy crooked and ugly.

“Acceptable,” Isole judged. “Now the vector flow.”

They worked into the night the High Elf and the Rat alone together in the center of a crowded room.

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