Following a long conversation with Karst and Kline, Fyn was shown to a cavernous room along one of the many halls that lined the house.

By the time he got settled in, It was night, and he lay in a bed too big for him - struggling to get to sleep.

Growing up in the cramped concrete cages that some called government housing, Fyn had never had much in the way of room. He had never had much in the way of anything, but room was one of the things he had least of.

So, lying in a sprawling king-sized bed with curtains, Fyn felt extremely small. It was almost like he could get lost in the towering folds of the sheets or perhaps drown beneath the heft of the duvet. The bed was the sort of thing a wandering prince might find a sleeping princess in, and the room was made to match.

'I don't belong here.' This was the thought Fyn had continued to have the second he set foot in it.

On a grander scale, he didn't belong in the capitol district, but he belonged even less in this house and this room.

He felt like a fish out of water. Like he had stepped on the wrong bus and realised far too late that it was headed in a completely different direction than what he wanted.

And the direction that he was headed in... well... Fyn still couldn't quite believe it.

"Valince Academy," he mumbled. It sounded impossible, but, according to Karst, they needed Fyn to infiltrate the place and help guard a number of students on behalf of Kline, the Priest. They had also given him a few decidedly more... illegal tasks, but those seemed even further-fetched than his already ridiculous mission. After all, Valince Acedmy only let those under the age of fifteen enter, and Fyn was twenty.

He lay back - his mind a blur as he stared up at the ceiling. No mould. No damp. No cracks in the paint. Strange. The room was so pristine it was alien to him... and not the new kind of alien. Not the kind of alien that dragged your planet out of its orbit and brought it a billion miles away without asking first, but the kind of alien that didn't make sense. The kind where you had no reference points upon which to communicate.

Everything just seemed out of whack. Whether it was the silken bedclothes he wore or the towers of books on the wooden desk opposite his bed.

He wasn't supposed to own books. That had never been on the cards for him. And yet, Fyn was staring right at three mounds of leatherbound paper that indicated otherwise.

And it was thanks to these books, not just the uncomfortable bed, that Fyn found sleep elusive. He had always had trouble sleeping, and tonight seemed like one of those nights where it remained distant. At first, he had tried calming his mind and all that meditative crap, but there was too much to think about, too many revelations to unpack. Sleep would not come no matter how relaxed he pretended to be.

He thought back to the conversation he had with Karst and the Priest. The pair had spent hours asking him about the details of the experiments Fyn went through and then almost twice as long explaining where he went from here.

None of it felt real, though. Not the bed, not the abilities, not even the life he had lived up till now. Because… if what the two men had said was true… every damn human on earth had been living a pointless lie.

It seemed he truly knew so very, very little. Just one conversation with the pair of humanists had revealed he was not a frog in a well but a microbe in a water droplet. His horizons hadn't just expanded; they had exploded. It was like his world had transitioned from two into three dimensions.

And, knowing that he knew so very little, Fyn couldn't help but hunger to read those books. Knowledge was power - or, to be more precise, knowledge would teach him how and when to apply the power he now possessed. And he so very desperately needed that.

Fyn glanced at the books on his desk. The room was gloomy, lit only by the soft glow from the ornate lamps that lined the garden's perimeter. They were twisted old iron things that flickered like oil lamps, housing sputtering, ghostly flames. Earlier, he had glanced through a few of the books containing details on the Aegis, and… they had said the same things as Karst and the Priest had… they said that this world… these worlds… were not as they seemed.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The Aegis, simply put, was a vast array of planets that surrounded a huge tear in space known as the Breach. All these planets were summoned by the god of the Aegis - The Lighthouse - and their people were given star seeds, and thrown into battles against the twisted blight that broke through the Breach and into this reality.

Or that was the official story, anyway. Other sources claimed that the situation was not quite so black and white. These sources being Karst and Kline.

They claimed that the Lighthouse was not protecting them from the Breach, but causing it. They claimed that the reason the Lighthouse feared humanists, and ordered their eradication, was nothing to do with their inherent evil. But the simple fact that humanists had the potential to surpass the Lighthouse.

Fyn found this hard to believe. He had seen glimpses of the great god before. The shadows of its mighty branches cast Earth into darkness from time to time. How was a humanist supposed to surpass that?

Pushing such thoughts to the side, Fyn focused on something that more directly affected him. His mission.

The question that kept popping into Fyn's mind was, could he do it? Could he pull it off? No other humanist had ever managed to enter one of the academies. They were too easy to spot and far too easy to kill.

Fyn was well aware he would be in immense danger if he agreed to what Karst and Kline were asking, but there was certainly treasure buried deep beneath that mountain of peril.

If he could graduate from one of the academies, he would be a Sentinel. The Aegis would be open to him like never before. Anything he wanted, he could get. Anything he needed, he could take. Anything he disliked, he could destroy. There was a certain prestige that came with becoming a Sentinel, an almost royal status, that would lift him so far from poverty that he wouldn't be able to smell it anymore.

And the first step on that odyssey lay on the desk before him. All he needed to do was read those books, and his crusade would begin...

With his attention on the books, his eyes were drawn to a slight motion in the shadow behind them. It shifted like it was breathing, constantly expanding and contracting.

Fyn frowned, squinting at the patch on the wall where the darkness was thicker than anywhere else. It was like a bucket of ink had been poured over that spot, deepening the velvety shadow.

It moved again, twitching to the left minutely.

"Hello?" He whispered

Fyn's voice sounded excruciatingly loud in the deathly still room. Loud enough that the shadow stopped moving. It froze like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck.

"I can see you, yunno?"

The shadow pulsed - getting darker - which only made it stand out further - like a drop of tar had been smeared on the wall.

Fyn sat up in bed, moving with all the slow, methodical care of someone walking through a minefield. He inched upwards and swept his legs to the side, rolling out of bed and onto his feet in one fluid motion.

The shadow seemed to wince, shrinking back like a frightened cat.

"What… are you?" Whispered Fyn. His breathing was heavy, and his heart was racing. All thoughts of the future had been banished to some far-off corner of his mind. Now there was only this strange blackness.

The shadow froze and then bolted. Black blurred across the room towards the door, but Fyn was faster. He moved with an efficiency that would frighten a robot. Not an ounce of energy went misplaced. Every pump of an arm, stretch of a leg, all of it was optimised to an impossible degree. None of it was conscious.

Fyn was at the door in a flash, slamming into the shadow and hitting something solid. He crashed to the floor and landed on top of something soft. Something human.

Fyn peered down at the person as blue eyes peered back up at him. They were piercing in the dark. They were terrified.

"N-no," rasped the boy. "P-please."

'He can't be older than ten,' Fyn thought. The boy was nothing but skin and bone. Fyn had seen plenty like him growing up. If you threw a stone near his apartment building, it would probably hit a street urchin just like this kid. Hair like a wire brush and a feral look that only stray dogs should have.

But what was he doing here? A robber, perhaps?

A thousand thoughts passed through Fyn's mind as he looked down at the boy. For a second, he considered turning him in, but… That wasn't in the spirit of where Fyn was from. One look at the emaciated kid told you he could use a lucky break... or ten.

The room was quiet save for the boy's breathing. It was raspy, crackling a little. Only people who worked in the refineries had throats like that. Popcorn lung, they called it.

With a sigh, Fyn rolled off the boy and stood up. He gave the kid a knowing nod and gestured towards the door with his elbow.

"Shoo," said Fyn. "Go rob someone else with your magic."

The kid practically sprung to his feet, standing on an edge so thin it was see-through. "Not magic," he mumbled.

"Huh?"

The boy pointed towards his feet as darkness began to creep up them. It was like he was being swallowed by liquid shadow. "Not magic. Sentinel."

Fyn frowned. "Sentinel?"

But the kid was gone. He had melted into blackness and slipped through the door. In the aftermath, Fyn was left with but one single thought.

'Now I definitely won't get to sleep.'