Shoved onwards, Casimir fought to make his way through cramped hallways without being crushed. Getting to Room Five was like swimming upstream, pushing against the flow to make it in. The room filled up quickly, with some familiar faces even: Lau Jia, Sergei Astakhov, and Faustino Barone.

“Take a seat.” Proctor Eleni Vassos said. The female Academian was just walking in with Luka Kaczmarek. Already, Casimir was on edge. What wicked schemes did the faculty have up their sleeves? How would they try and screw him out of his rightful place at the Academy? Some student assistants followed the two in with wheeled carts, the second of the three wobbling from a broken wheel. He winced at the squeaking. When Casimir stood up from his seat and peered in, he saw that the carts were filled with slabs of pottery clay.

What is this? Where are the written exams? Do they expect us to carve our answers into the clay? Casimir wondered. And with what tools?

“I’ll let you take the lead, Eleni.” Kaczmarek said to his colleague.

“Applicants, your test has been changed to something more… experimental this year. You will make three items and only three items from your allotment,” she said to the classroom. “These objects are a bowl, a fish, and a man.”

“Allotment of what?” A candidate asked, not having seen what Casimir had.

“Clay.” Proctor Eleni said.

“I don’t understand, what does this have to do with our testing?” A boy with long hair said.

One of the assistants slammed a hunk onto that boy’s desk in response. The act was repeated until everyone had gotten a share.

“You’ll have thirty minutes from now, so do your best.” Eleni said.

Panic swept Casimir as he tried to work with an unfamiliar skill. The tests were supposed to show something of worth, but what was the point of sculpting clay? Were they supposed to fingerpaint next?

His face itched. His nose wrinkled. Casimir still had dried splatters of mud on him from when his share of the clay had been thrown onto his desk. It was irritating that he had nothing to wipe it with, his hands already too caked in dirt to not smear even more on his face. His shirt wasn’t an option either. Not without staining it or his coat further. Using his clothes would ruin two things rather than fix one.

At least I’m not as unlucky as poor Jia. Casimir thought.

Lau Jia was blinking away tears as she kneaded, her eyes red with inflamed blood vessels. The mud spray must have gotten into them. It must have hurt, but like Casimir she had attempted the tests multiple times. Jia knew better than to ask to go to the restroom to wash them out.

What I would do for a bath right now. Casimir thought as he squished clay around in his hands. The first item they had been told to make was a bowl and Casimir’s reminded him of the fisheries and their eyeless fishes’ gaping mouths. It was just as greedy and misshapen.

The second item, ironically, was a fish. Around him, others pressed indentations of scales into their projects with their fingernails. No tools were given, and anything that was taken out to improvise had been confiscated. He glanced to the corner of the room. Scattered there were a pile of hairbrushes and pens, as well as pins and door keys. The proctors had even snapped some items in half. There would have been spare change as well, but the student assistants had pocketed that.

Casimir’s fish mirrored the confiscated trash, torn in two and scrunched into blobs, while he worked on the man. That one mattered the most. An ugly bowl could be eaten out of, a fish might even look better with fewer details, but the man was either worth the clay it was crafted from or…

Or it was worth nothing at all. Casimir thought, sagging in his chair.

His clay figure had many of the qualities of a human being: it possessed two arms and two legs, a torso and a head, it even had little marks that suggested the eyes and a mouth. And yet, it was a mockery of a real person. An insult to humanity. It reminded him of himself.

You’re a vile, crude little thing. Casimir thought, knowing it only mirrored its maker’s flaws and he hated it more for that. He moved to squeeze it back down into raw clay, his thumb pushing in its forehead.

“Five minutes!” Proctor Eleni announced.

That’s too soon. That can’t be right. We should have three times that left.

“What? We’re supposed to have fifteen more!” Sergei said, beads of sweat dripping from his chin and falling like rain into his bowl. Casimir had been around Sergei enough to recognize his voice without looking, but not enough to know anything more than their shared origins. Both families had joined the Exodus from an abandoned land called Russia.

“The time limit has just been changed.” The female proctor answered Sergei. The poor trusting fools. Even those who had never been here before would be learning the Academy’s truest teaching was never trust them to be kind. It should have been a warning sign that the staff were not going to be fair when Luka Kaczmarek concluded the entrance ceremony and expecting reason now when they were not given tools for a seasoned craftsman’s job was a step in the wrong direction. Truly revolting. And Casimir needed to convince these creatures he would worship the ground they walked on. The span remaining was not enough for him to be keep restarting. It took a mountain’s worth of energy to resist driving his thumb all the way through the little sculpture’s forehead.

There’s not enough for me to redo both my fish and man together. There might not be time for a half decent fish at all.” Casimir thought. He let go of his creation, uncovering the damage. It was even uglier than before. What should I do? Should I pull off the head and do that part from scratch?

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

His stomach heaved and he tasted salt. This was shaping up to not only be his final brush with Academy’s exams, but his most pathetic try yet. No matter what, this was not enough to stand out. This was just going to be one more failed attempt, one more disappointment to try and tell his father. To have to go and tell his twin that he had let her down again, and there was nothing more to be done. Casimir did not even want to think about what his mother would do.

There would be no waiting another year to retry, he would be out of chances. Maybe he had never had a real opportunity at all after his first failure. The Academy hungered for young minds to twist into their image, not jaded ones like his. He could not give up, could not give in to them, but what was there to do? All Casimir was doing was letting seconds pass by and making himself more panicked. He shut his eyes, thinking, and then began the Radicalists’ mantra once more.

I am the Burrower, and the Burrower is me.

I am the Burrower.

“And the Burrower is me.” Casimir said quietly. Unbidden, his hands worked the clay. He had never taken part in the ritual, and had only seen it done with hard stone, but maybe there was more than madness in the method. Recalling the crazed sculptor in the tunnels, Casimir felt a warm rush of gratitude. Today, they would both be fools fighting for meaning.

In a fair world, what would this test have been made for? To show who had existing experience? To see who picked the hobby up the quickest? Or was it deeper, a way to pick apart hearts? If it was a judgment of his soul rather than just his talent, he needed to make a statement. Something bold. Visionary, even. Luckily, Casimir had been exposed to the vision of heretics and lunatics, and that was something few others had. The bowl, set aside previously as complete, he compacted in his hands. In his peripheral, Casimir could make out the slanting motion of Jia glancing his way.

He ignored the screeching of chairs as sculptors shifted in their seats, the wet smacks of flesh and bone against clay. The whole world fell away from his senses, as forgotten as involuntary breathing; utterly processed away by the brain until remembered. There was only the Burrower’s mantra and an image that was bleeding into his mind. A scheme to defy the way things were and a plan to put them back to how they should be.

Kaczmarek might have been using this idea, but something told Casimir that someone else had designed it with a purpose, a point to it all beyond a way to stress out the candidates for the instructor’s amusement. That point? The act of sculpting revealed the sculptor. Art was meant to be seen. It was intended to be felt. Whether it was awe or shock, it caught the attention. With little time remaining, Casimir would have to hope for both. If he could contrive a way to make himself impossible to disqualify but impossible to be ignored, maybe the real exam maker would hear about it and intervene.

First, Casimir kept the abused head but bent the figurines at the knees and the elbows as if the little man was kneeling in prayer. A pious peasant. Second, a new bowl was fashioned, not one sized for a real person, but for a miniature counterpart. Casimir slipped the bowl into the clay man’s hands, contorting the image into a mimicry of someone receiving a meal. Or someone offering one.

Into that vessel went a lumpy fish, and then he rushed to the last step. A fourth item which would break the rules that were set, yes, but also a blasphemous item as well. Hopefully it would get some awe too and not just shock.

The vast remainder he beat and warped into something shaped like a man but of far bigger stature than the first. The rough details suggested a terrifying physicality in comparison. Alone, each of the four pieces were a childish mess destined to be thrown away, together they said something. Or at least Casimir hoped they did. Something that might get him beaten to unconsciousness, but he was tired of the constant bait and switch.

“Time’s up!” Eleni Vassos yelled. “Please stand up.”

The awful squeaking of chairs and creaking of desks being pushed against to stand made for a demon’s choir.

“Let’s start with—"

“Hold on, Eleni.” Luka Kaczmarek said. “One of them has four items. Boy, were you deaf when the terms were set?”

The proctor seemed very, very happy to get to fail Casimir. Someone snickered behind Casimir’s back, but he kept his head forward and shoulders straining to be the straightest they had ever been.

“No.”

“Then you are disqualified. You weren’t supposed to go past three.” Proctor Eleni said, shaking her head.

“I didn’t make four objects.” Casimir said.

“Child, I have eyes. I count two men, a bowl, and a fish,” she said.

“I would say to toss one of the clay men and we would let you go on, but that would be too much flattery for your work, Shuisky.” Kaczmarek said.

“The second man, the larger one, is not an object.” Casimir replied.

Outright laughter filled the room.

“Just take your loss and leave with some dignity.” Sergei said. There was no loyalty there from their shared homeland apparently.

“It isn’t an object.” Casimir repeated himself.

“How do you figure that?” Proctor Kaczmarek inquired, smirking.

“Because the first man is making an offering to his lord.”

“A large fellow.” The proctor remarked.

Casimir took a breath. “He’s making an offering to his lord, and under the Ascendancy’s tenets, a representation of a god is their physical embodiment. There are four works of art on my table but only three are mere objects.”

It was so silent that the only thing he could hear was the pounding of his own heart. The Academy hated their twin branch, the other half of humanity’s leadership, but even these pompous intellectuals were terrified of breaking the Ascendancy’s commandments. The warrior saints and priest kings of the Spire were rarely seen but not to be trifled with. Not when they had been given the ultimate control over the gods’ System.

The proctor held his hand over the idol, ready to condemn it with a blow.

“And how would I know whether this truly counts as such an exalted piece?” Kaczmarek asked pleasantly, a darker undertone in his body language. No doubt that hand would be placed in anger on the sculpture’s maker as soon as it was finished with the idol. Casimir fully believed that all the mud on him would get smacked off by that wrathful hand. No bath required.

“It is considered a lesser blasphemy to create a false divine replica, but it is a greater one to destroy a true one once it has been endowed with grace. Destroy it if you are sure that you won’t face punishment for it.” Casimir challenged him.

“And if I refuse to harm it, that amounts to admission that you met the requirements?” He said.

“Yes.” Casimir said, fighting the blistering glare. Without the mantra, things no longer seemed clear now that the work was being scrutinized. Where had he been going with this? The sect said to trust in the teachings and they would reveal all, but they were also insane.

“That’s not my only option. I could call for a priest to examine this. If it failed to meet his regard, then you would have failed also. And then you would be charged with blasphemy for the attempt.” Proctor Kaczmarek threatened.

All that was in his mind was the feeling that it was all rigged, the look his mother would give when he got back, and the carver in the tunnels claiming that it was worth dying just to see if the Ascendancy thought your soul glowed.

“I think you should.” Casimir said, floating on the feeling of defiance. There was something wonderfully freeing about the risk of it all.

I’m all out of cards after this one. I can risk the beating. Maybe even death. There is nothing left for me except to try.

//////

Casimir Maksimovich Shuisky

Stats: Locked

Skills: Locked

Traits: Locked