Namu stared at the door. He wanted to leave it alone. He needed to ignore it.
But he couldn’t.
There was a hole in his wall that had fallen away to sand with magick moments ago. Namu stared into it, sitting where his small dresser had been before he moved it. He peered into the small room that contained a petrified wooden door that was much like the trees in the world behind it. Its handle kept shifting and changing the type of metal it was made of every few seconds. Sometimes it was black, sometimes gold.
He hated it. Even though the door and that world had made their world a better place.
Once technology revealed that magick was real, witches knew that people resistant to the idea of magick would react. Hiding in plain sight would no longer be possible.
Witches from all over the world found a way to contact each other through the internet. They put aside their own strife and their own wars, for one thing. To work together to eliminate the objects that had killed many of their kind in the past. The items that were impossible to fight against.
Magickal people were the minority then; they still were even today, even though more people than before in the last twenty years have taken advantage of learning magick. Before magick became a world topic most would allow themselves to be hunted or killed in order to protect the secret that magick existed, so it wouldn’t turn the world on its head.
But now, with the secret out, they decided to make a spell that only their combined knowledge and talents from all parts of the world could create. A spell that still lingered today and would most likely last forever.
That spell got rid of all the weapons in the world. The spell disintegrated any weapon held with any intention of violence.
But all those disintegrated weapons had to go somewhere.
With their skills, the magickal people had created a door to a different dimension. One where the cycle of death and rebirth roamed in the form of petrified things and black matter that they didn’t understand. One where creatures fed off any kind of soul.
It was a place of nightmares.
All the chaos of future death had been sent there and still was there, in the form of disintegrated metal, warped and black, creating something new. And they locked that place away, closed that door, in a child’s room surrounded by more children in a school.
Namu had been told that the school would decide by way of keys who would be sent to the room and who would find it. He was told that since he didn’t die when he had found it, he was meant to watch over it next.
He was meant to give up his life to watch over a door that had taken bits of himself.
He was expected to toss out all of his dreams and stay at the school. To be like Mr. Vero was. And for what? Did they have a plan for it? Was it just supposed to sit here?
He sighed. He had every reason to hate that door. It did not belong here. It was a terror, a danger, not to mention all the kids in the past who had gone inside it and perished.
And the stupid school had not done a thing. They had never even warned them.
Namu looked down to see a glimmer of its chaotic metal now crawling up his arm. A silver thin snake slithering through his veins fed by anger. One of the fights between him and Mr. Vero spun through his head as the door continued to linger in front of him.
“Why can’t the school just get rid of the key!?” Namu had yelled in Mr. Vero’s face.
“From what I was told, that’s not the way of the school. The school will start to break. Cracks will form. Don’t suggest things when you don’t understand. Tell me, what would happen if everything behind that door were released back to the world? Chaos. It would be worse than it would have ever been before. The non-magickal people who are already furious, you want to give them back what could destroy so many so easily? This is unmanaged chaos we’re dealing with. I don’t know what would happen if that door were opened and it began to leak to the outside. We need to watch the door and keep it closed. If you can’t do that, just ignore it, and move on when you’re done with your schooling. I’m sure the school will find someone else.”
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Someone else to be tortured the way Namu had been?
“Why can’t you just stay in the room?”
“It would be too obvious that something is there. Do you not think students are not already suspicious as to why I live in the hall above that teachers don’t occupy? Thankfully, my room is a normal room. If any students were curious and decided to break in, they wouldn’t find anything. And at some point, the job of protecting the door needs to be passed on anyway. This is a sacrifice to make this world a better place. Stop asking—”
A knock at his bedroom door tore Namu away from the memory.
He knew it was Lily coming to get him for breakfast before their classes. He couldn’t allow them to see—
“Hold on!” Namu yelled, crawling to the dresser to drag it back into place.
All it had taken was his eyes to dart away from the spot for the wall to reform itself.
The dresser screeched across the ground as Namu pushed.
“What are you doing!? Come on!” Lily knocked harder.
“Hold on!” Namu repeated, pushing the dresser against the wall. He looked down and realized he wasn’t dressed in day clothes yet. In a panic, he looked to the door and then to the bigger dresser that had come with the room and back to the door again. There was another violent knock.
He didn’t have time.
He opened the door, and Lily barged in.
“What took you so long? What are you—” Lily went from looking around the room to staring at him. Perplexity had their brows drawing in. “You aren’t even dressed yet.”
Lily smelled like cheese puffs. Even though they had tried to hide it under perfume, they still had some residue on their fingers. They must have been watching sci-fi movies either that morning or last night. That was the only time they ate those.
“And you smell of junk food and junk movies.”
Lily waved him off, going to his dresser. “Sci-fi is not junk movies. If anything, especially with our world, I would say fantasy movies are junk movies.” They turned and eyed him.
“Too bad I’m not the biggest fan of the fantasy genre anymore,” he whispered. He hadn’t been since he had entered the magickal world.
Lily opened one drawer, threw him a pair of underwear, then pulled open another and tossed him a tight pink shirt and cargo shorts. He hated tight shirts, Lily knew that, but Lily had bought him some this year anyway, along with the cargo shorts.
“Are you going to tell me what you were doing? I heard noises. Like you were moving something around.” They eyed the room again and turned away from him so he could get changed.
He was used to this and stripped behind them, then tugged on the tight shirt. “I was just rearranging things.”
Lily waited for a few more breaths before they turned around. “Everything looks the same.”
“Lily… it’s none of your business… What if I were doing something you wouldn’t want to know about anyway?”
They gave a short laugh at that. “You’re quieter when it comes to that.”
He rolled his eyes, knowing they wouldn’t even know.
“Does it have anything to do with how you’ve gotten so good at spirit magick?” Lily asked.
He turned away to put his dirty clothes in his hamper. “No.”
“Because it’s strange to me that you had no background whatsoever in magick, and then, ever since the middle of last year, you’ve had your own tutor for no reason at all. You never told me why they gave you one.”
He clenched his jaw, annoyed. “They just decided to.”
“But why?”
“It isn’t your business, Lily.”
They looked taken aback. Lily’s eyebrows shot up, and they pushed their lips to the side. “Why have you been panicking?”
What was he supposed to tell them? He couldn’t tell them about the door. They would try to go into it, study it, or even tell their dad. But if he didn’t say anything, Lily would never back off.
He went for an easy lie. One that he could maybe convince Mr. Vero to go along with later, too. “I’m practicing for a special exam for an apprenticeship….”
This time Lily’s eyebrows drew inward. “What kind of apprenticeship? I didn’t know there were special exams. I didn’t even know you were interested in any magickal divisions.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he tried to feign defeat as if he were scared of the prospect of failing. “If I make it, then I’ll tell you. Hell, if I fail, I will tell you. But not before. Not yet.”
Lily only stared at him.
And stared.
Finally, they opened their mouth. “Ok… when is your exam?”
“I don’t know. Mr. Vero will tell me when it’s closer.”
“Can I ask you questions on what it is about?”
“I would rather you didn’t.”
“Does it have to deal with spirit magick?”
“I would say that’s obvious.”
More silence.
Namu sighed. “Are you ready to go to breakfast?”
Hopefully, the kitchen witches would be there today, so the food would actually be good. Sometimes the kitchen witches traveled to learn from elders worldwide as a perk of their job. When that happened, the students were left with sandwiches they had to make themselves and popcorn or chips. Namu could use some distraction like real food, not popcorn or chips. Really any distraction at all.