I awoke to the sound of knocking. “Come on Cal, it’s time to wake up! It’s not everyday that you get assigned a class!” The voice of his mother hounded him from the other side of the door along with more knocks.
“Alright, alright. I’m up. I’ll be out in a minute.” My head was spinning as it attempted to make sense of everything that had happened and reconcile two lives of memories. It was strange, I now had two childhoods, two bouts of puberty, two sets of parents, but at the same time it seemed completely normal. Guess this isn’t just some elaborate dream. Not that I’m particularly looking forward to being 16 again, I don’t even get to drive this time around. Maybe this time I won’t make quite as many stupid mistakes since I know a bit better now. Another series of knocks interrupted my thoughts, so I shouted out, “Okay Mom! I’m really up this time, let me get dressed and I’ll be right out!”
I stood up and felt a surprising amount of soreness coming from my right thigh. I looked down and saw black ink in the shape of a large warhammer. When did I get a tattoo? Could this be one of those ‘soul marks’ the status was talking about? I reached out to touch it and felt a hum of power generate between my hand and the mark. I immediately knew what to do on instinct and placed my hand flat on my leg and gripped the haft of the hammer as I slowly moved my hand away.
It was the strangest sensation. I could see the mark disappearing from my body and becoming reality but it felt as though someone had poured cold water down my leg. The other odd thing was that the size of the hammer in my hand was much larger than the size of the tattooed hammer on my thigh. When it had fully come into reality, the haft was about a foot while the rectangular head had a square face roughly five inches to a side. It felt good in my hand, but not quite right. I gripped the haft with both hands and began to pull them apart. The shaft grew in length until it stood at a comfortable 4 feet, with the head growing proportionally. Now this was a hammer. I hefted it in both hands and felt every bit the warrior.
“Cal! Stop messing around, your breakfast is getting cold and we can’t be late today!”
Right. Class assignments today. Not everyone gets to choose their class. I wonder what will happen when I’m assigned a ‘hidden class,’ I can’t remember anything like that happening before. Bigger question though. What am I supposed to do with this hammer? I guess I had to experiment a bit. I held the hammer up to my chest and tried to will it back inside of me. Didn’t work. I tried to push it back into my thigh, but it was too big and I nearly dropped it. After a few other attempts, I decided to shrink it once more and attempt to push it back into my leg. This time it worked as it turned to ink and flowed onto my skin.
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Getting dressed, I hurried out to the kitchen where a larger than normal breakfast waited. “Morning, Mum. This looks delicious.” I looked around and saw all of my favorites: crispy bacon, pancakes, scrambled eggs. I was practically drooling.
“Thank you. You barely made it into class assignment this year, so I wanted to do something special after it overshadowed your birthday yesterday. But honestly, this is the best part of turning 16, so it deserves a bigger celebration.” She was right, if my birthday hadn’t been yesterday, I would have waited until the next round of assignments, a year from now. “You look much more calm than when I was your age, I was a mess. Couldn’t stop shaking from excitement. And your father would never admit it, but he was nearly as bad.”
“Where is dad anyway? I expected him to join us this morning.” It was odd, he almost always joined the family for breakfast before heading to the lumber mill.
“He’ll be back soon. He just wanted to get one last thing ready for you. He better be back soon, and you had better eat quick, we have to get a move on.”
I began shoveling food into my mouth even faster than I was before. I was a growing boy and could eat almost my body weight at each meal. She’s right though, we have a bit of a journey into town where we’ll be meeting the other families with children of the right age before the local magister will begin the proceedings.
It wasn’t long before I heard the nicker of horses and headed outside to greet him. But as I stepped outside, my jaw dropped. There was a third horse that I’d never seen before. A beautiful black gelding with a white patch upon his chest. I approached cautiously and held out my hand so he could get used to it. With a proud voice my dad spoke, “Happy Assignment Day! We wanted to get you a little something to celebrate the occasion. This is Duon, and he’s all yours! Now why don’t you climb up so we can head into Trefi.”
It didn’t take much encouragement for me to climb into the saddle and begin riding a bit, letting him run and enjoying every minute of it. Even though I already knew my class, I had still felt nervous about being presented before the entire village, but riding Duon washed all of that away as I laughed and let the wind blow in my hair.