With my eyes still closed, I opened my sphere of perception. It was small, its radius less than half a meter and when I tried to expand it, everything felt vaguer. From it, I could sense objects the same way I could sense my arm when my eyes were closed. I could point in the direction of an object but I didn’t know what it looked like. Straining my mind, I expanded my bubble further, wincing when the mental pressure began to build. After a certain point, the bubble just popped.

“Ah,” I winced and rubbed my forehead. Even with the backlash from my first test with my Gift, I was still ready and excited to try something new. I reopened my sphere of perception, expanding it until it enveloped the pillow I was lying on. I connected with it like I had created a link with the chair before. A string connected it to a finger on my left hand. A tried to touch the string and realised that while I could move my hand through it, there were slight tingles.

I smiled. I hadn’t felt the joy in using my Gift for the longest time. Since I was a child, I had merely treated it like an extra limb. Sure, it was useful, but the magic of it had long been sucked dry. This though? This is fun. Grinning happily, I moved the string around mentally. I grunted as the pillow flew from the bed and my head fell onto the bed without warning. From my sphere, I could ‘see’ the plain white pillow hanging in the air, dangling from the string I was moving. I dragged the string to the side and watched as the pillow followed it. I twitched my lips happily as I moved the object around.

Deciding to try something different, I attached a string to the table next to the bed. This time the string took more effort to move around. Still, I was able to move it around the room with relative ease. Moving the object back to where they were originally, I cut off my connection to both of the objects and let the strings fade out of existence. Tired, I collapsed my sphere and let myself rest.

I fell asleep quickly. Probably a mix of all the stress of the Culling and the use of my Gift. I quickly found a comfortable sleeping position and before I knew it, I woke up to light from a window I hadn’t noticed before. I squinted and allowed my eyes to gradually adjust to the light.

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Pulling myself up, I sat on the ledge of my bed and waited for a beat. The dim light implied an early morning and I didn’t want to wake up anyone. With my eyes open, I tried to access my sphere of perception but found I couldn’t. I closed my eyes and practised moving things in my room with my mind. While it took more focus, I found I could attach more than one string to an object. By the time I had finished playing around, I realised I was parched and hadn’t eaten anything for a while.

Groaning, I left my room and went out to find Vera. I saw the Academy grounds in a new light now that I had passed the Culling. Everything felt warmer; safer.

By looking at the minds around me, I quickly found Vera. She was munching happily on a pastry and waved for me to come over when she saw me.

“Hey,” she said, shaking her arm to grab my attention.

“Hey,” I replied once I knew she was in earshot.

“You should try the food here,” she mumbled with her mouth still full. She swallowed her bite. “They have these like–” she mimed wildly when just gave up, “Here, just try one.”

She handed me an unfamiliar pastry. I took the strange food and ate it in one bite. She frowned at me. “Your supposed to savour it,” she insisted, every bit of what she said from her tone to her words screamed Noble.

I frowned at her half judgmentally. “Why are you acting like one of them?”

She shrugged. “There’s no point antagonising the Nobles when we’re going to be living with them for the next three years,” she said, picking up another pastry.

She handed me another pastry and I took it silently, nibbling on it slowly instead of gulping it down. “Things are great here. You’ve been asleep for really long so you wouldn’t really know. I can show you around if you want,” Vera insisted. She took the last pastry and began to eat it.

I nodded at her suggestion. “I would like that.”