I was dead on my feet as I hauled myself up the mountain. Being trapped in place by Sectus’s magic had been the furthest thing from rest, and the numb state I’d fallen into in the dark had been closer to madness than sleep. I should have been back in my cell trying to recover, but after the night trapped in Stillness I couldn’t bring myself to stop moving. The only attempt I’d made to lie on my thin straw mattress had ended with ceaseless tossing and turning, and when I’d tried to sleep I kept imagining the vulture spirit moving around in the darkness of my closed eyes. I couldn’t settle, and movement was my remedy. I’d started walking aimlessly, after a few minutes I realized I was walking up to the wooded part of the highest terrace.

Adrian was waiting for me, like he’d known I’d come. I found him sitting on a log in his little camp, plucking the feathers from a dead bird he’d caught. The sun was out, shining through the leaves of the short trees, making pools of light and shadow that shifted as the wind pushed branches back and forth.

It might have looked idyllic, except that the mountain peak was visible above the canopy; ice-crusted crags and angled peaks jutting up like the spikes of a torture device, reminding me exactly where I was.

He heard me coming and looked up from the bird, watching me approach without moving.

I had to step over mud pools to get into the camp, winding my way around stacked branches to sit next to him on the log.

His fire was still lit, and his lean-to looked in better shape than before.

He waited until I sat down, then went back to the bird. It was a ground bird, the Antorxian version of a pheasant, black with red tail feathers and a long pointed beak.

“Hi,” I said, watching him.

“You look like you need some sleep,” he said, not looking at me.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Well, it beats being dead, which is what I thought had happened.”

“Not dead,” I said. “Just frozen.”

Adrian was quiet for a minute, with just the sound of feathers pulling free from the bird’s skin to punctuate the silence. Over the seconds, the sound became the sound of tearing skin and cracking bones. My vision filled with black feathers.

“Are you going to tell me how you got that way?” he asked. “If you leave me guessing, I’m going to guess you got yourself stuck playing around with new magic.”

I took a few seconds to put together an answer.

“Master Sectus left me like that. After I attacked him.”

Adrian stopped working on the bird and looked up at me. His eyebrows were halfway up his forehead, and there was the twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Dorian! I didn’t know you had it in you!”

“Not just him,” I said. “The soldiers too. I killed them.”

The expression froze on his face. He put the bird down in the dirt by the fire and turned towards me.

“What do you mean you killed the soldiers?”

“They were there to take the failed students,” I said, numbly. “They were going to give them the Failure’s Fate.”

“They were going to kill them?” he asked quietly.

“I thought I could stop it. If I pushed hard enough, fast enough, I thought I could distract him. Sectus, I mean. I thought it might be enough that they could run.”

“But it wasn’t?”

“No.”

Adrian lowered his eyes, looking at the bird on the ground.

“So, I guess the other student’s are already dead by now,” he said.

“That’s not the Failure’s Fate,” I said.

“Expulsion?” he asked, hopefully.

“They’re going to be changed,” I said. “Antorx uses war beasts. Monsters that can use magic—”

“I’ve seen them,” Adrian cut in.

“They’re fleshcrafted creatures. They make them out of failed sorcerers. They make us obedient somehow, then transform them into monsters.”

Adrian went quiet. When I glanced up at him, he was staring at the fire. He looked ill. Pale, nauseous.

“That’s awful,” he said quietly.

I didn’t need to voice my agreement. We were both on the same page.

“Did I fail my second task?” he asked.

He tried to make the question light, but I could tell he was afraid.

“No. Yours was to fight a duel. You fought one.”

He was quiet for a few seconds, then said, “Thank you.”

We watched the fire in silence for a few minutes, thinking our private thoughts. There were no sounds except the crack of burning wood and the rustling of wind.

“I guess attacking the Reeve didn’t go well,” Adrian said eventually.

“I barely ruffled his robe.”

“And the soldiers? How did you kill them?”

“Force aspect,” I said flatly.

“Magic?”

“Yes.”

“The same thing you used on me?”

“That I used on you accidentally. Yes.”

“I should probably be glad you didn’t kill me, then.”

I twisted to look straight at him. “Now that you know what will happen, are you going to start doing what they want?”

Adrian avoided my gaze. He didn’t reply straight away.

“Seriously?” I said after a minute. “You won’t do it, even now you know what’s at stake? They won’t only kill you if you fail.”

“It feels like playing into their hands,” he said.

“It is,” I confirmed. “It absolutely is. That’s what this whole punishment is about. It’s worse than anything we could possibly imagine. It’s meant to shock us. They know we’ll do anything to avoid that. They know we’ll even die to avoid it, but they’re probably counting on us wanting to live. In my case, they’re right. Because I do want to live.”

He turned to face me. “Why do you want to live? If it means working for them?”

“If I’m alive I can stop it happening to anyone else,” I said.

“How are you going to do that? Fight a Reeve?”

“The assignments. I’m going to help the others. We’re going to help each other. Nobody else is going to fail their task, even if I have to do all of them myself.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“So your big heroic act is going to be doing their homework for them,” Adrian said.

I didn’t respond to that, and he turned away stiffly.

“So this is it,” he said after a minute. “We serve them willingly, or they put us under some kind of mind control and we serve them anyway.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

He was silent for a while, then said, “Let me think about it.”

“I could use your help with the others,” I said. “I’m not sure how much they’ll trust me after what I did. It was a mess.”

“I’ll think about it,” he repeated.

The words were the same, but his voice was softer.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come up tomorrow. I’ll bring your new assignment, just in case you want it.”

He didn’t say anything to that, but he took a deep breath that came out as a long, tired sigh.

He was lost in thought as I turned to go, and my mind was tumbling through dark alleys of thought as well.

What I’d said to him about the other students had been true. I wanted to help them, but I wasn’t sure they’d let me, not after what I’d done to the soldiers. I would be lucky if they didn’t run away screaming at the sight of me.

A bitter part of myself told me they’d be right to.

How many people might I end up hurting by accident, in a fit of emotion, or experimentation, now that I had actual power?

I was lucky that Adrian hadn’t seen the results of what I’d done. By then, the vulture spirit had cleaned up the evidence. The vulture spirit, which was somehow following me, even in this den of sorcerers, apparently able to come and go as it pleased. It was on me like a rash. How long would it be until I woke up to find it picking at my flesh?

And I wouldn’t be able to defend myself from it. Not anymore.

I’d spent every last drop of my maja in that one, mad moment of violence. I had barely enough left to throw a stone, and I had a long path of slow accumulation ahead of me just to get back to where I was.

I was starting to realize I’d been looking down on the other students for their undeveloped magical skills, but now I was lower than they were.

And now I had to go back to the barracks, and eat in that room, and sleep in a cell alongside those people I’d terrified. People who might react to fear in the way that people often reacted to fear.

“Dorian,” Adrian called from behind me.

I stopped, turning to look at him.

“Your riddle,” he said.

“Yes?” I said.

“I had an idea about it.”

“Oh.” Oh, that. “Okay, what?”

He jumped up off his log and walked to the edge of his little camp.

“Come and look, this way.”

I couldn’t imagine what he’d found, unless he’d found the answer to Lectuous’s riddle chiseled on an obelisk somewhere. I followed him anyway.

The wooded area on the upper terrace wasn’t large, but it felt large as I walked through it. The trees grew together, meshing with thick bushes and undergrowth.

We were following a kind of path, in that the worst of the twigs and thorns had been brushed down or to the side, but it was clear it wasn’t any more than a path that Adrian had stamped out himself.

After a couple of minutes of walking we broke through to another clearing, this one shadowed by a dense patch of foliage. At the center of the clearing was a muddy pool, about six feet across, surrounded by shrubs and messy with water reeds.

“In a forest, by a pool, two figures crouch face to face,” Adrian said, holding out his hand as if he’d solved it.

He gestured at the pool.

“I don’t think it was meant to be this literal,” I said.

Adrian stomped over to the pool and crouched down, facing me. He gesutured at the ground in front of him.

Deciding to humor him, I followed, taking up a position in front of him and sinking onto my knees.

We sat there, face to face, separated by inches, with damp earth soaking into the knees of my robe and insects landing on my hair and clothes.

Adrian stared at me for a few seconds.

“Does this help?” he asked.

I sat, looking into his eyes. I thought about the riddle.

In a forest by a pool, Two figures crouch face to face. One knows the other’s mind, The other knows nothing.

I didn’t know Adrian’s mind, not really. I couldn’t really even guess. And as critical as I might be about his decisionmaking, he didn’t know nothing.

“Not really,” I said.

We sat there for another minute, both thinking about the riddle, probably, before Adrian stood up and stretched.

“Well, it was an idea,” he said. “I’ll see you at the cells.”

He spoke casually, as if he hadn’t just told me that he’d made up his mind, that he was coming back to the barracks, that he’d decided to join in, then he left the clearing, leaving me alone.

I slumped down onto my rear end, shifting to face the pool. I put my face in my hands.

I hadn’t slept since my pointless act of rebellion, not through the frozen night or the long grisly morning. Even now, I didn’t think I’d be able to.

I opened my eyes, staring down at the pool. My reflection stared back up at me.

I was a mess. The infirmary staff had set the nose that Adrian had knocked sideways, no magic or fleshcrafting required, but my face was still a mass of bruises and scratches. My eyes were a pair of deep, horrified wells, set in the dark rings of sleep deprivation.

If I’d seen this face a month ago, I wouldn’t have recognized it. Even knowing it was me, I couldn’t recognize it. The person in the reflection had done things I’d never imagined, things I didn’t know if I could live with. It might as well have been a stranger.

I felt a strange moment of detachment as I stared at the image; a sense of unreality, a complete feeling of disassociation from myself and my surroundings. For a moment I was looking at a stranger, and I had ceased to exist.

And Lectuous’s riddle clicked for me. It could have been describing this exact situation. A mirroring. Looking at someone and knowing they shared my thoughts, despite seeming to be a different person; my thoughts behind someone else’s eyes. I knew my reflection’s thoughts, but in reality it knew nothing for itself.

I couldn’t believe that this was the answer that Lectuous had intended his students to come to. It’d come so specifically out of my situation, and my life over the last few weeks. I felt like maybe Lectuous had intended me to come to the realization that other people were just mindless images waiting for my thoughts to be pressed onto them, but even if it wasn’t the answer, it was my answer, and that might be enough.

I turned and looked at Adrian.

He was a dozen feet away, picking his way through the woods.

I pulled up the tiny amount of maja I had left, pushed that strange feeling of mirrored unreality onto it, and glared it out at Adrian’s departing body.

Adrian tripped, falling face-first into the undergrowth. He vanished into the shrubs with an alarmed cry.

“Did you hear me?” I called after him.

He appeared above the undergrowth, looking around.

“You worked it out?” he called

“I worked it out,” I confirmed. “Thank you. This helped.”

He got up, rubbing his head.

“I’m glad.”

He didn’t stop to congratulate me, just continuing on the path back to his camp.

I turned back to the pool. I dipped my hands into it, cupping them, pulling out a handful of clear-looking water. I washed my face and pushed my hair back. The dappled sunlight on my neck felt warm, and the ground was soft. I could hear Adrian moving around in his camp, cracking branches for his fire. The ground was soft and suddenly felt inviting. I lay down with my head on my arm.

The filtered sunlight was bright enough to shine dully pink through my eyelids, banishing any darkness. The swaying of the branches was enough to leave me with the impression of movement. Despite the damp ground and the open air, I fell asleep more easily than I had in any bed.