The hallway back to where he came from was long. It was demarcated by constantly repeating archways that went on forever. It was new to Ezril, and he had no memory of ever being in this part of the seminary. In fact, neither was the room he had stepped out of. But what caught his attention was the ever present mist that spanned the floor, covering it so that his feet disappeared beneath it. At this rate I’m surprised the mist hasn’t overthrown the seminary.

The test had taken up the whole day but the darkness proved more of a shock. The night was pitch black, without star or moon.

Ezril increased his pace as he walked. The world seemed to darken the more he moved, encroaching all around him. It sought to embrace him but not in the way a mother would seek to embrace a child. One thing was certain of the darkness: it was wrong. Soon, Ezril found himself in a panicked run as the darkness seemed to chase him. The archway seemed to go on forever, heralding something new with each step he took. The mist rose above the ground. It wetted the calves of Ezril’s trousers, and crawled up to his knee. It took him a moment to remember that the mist never entered the seminary. For it to be this deep into the seminary and this much, it meant something had gone wrong. There was no other explanation.

Then he heard it. The growl, accompanied by the sound of paws on the ground.

No, fear consumed his mind, it’s not possible.

The hallway went straight, with no discernable intersection. So he ran with all the power he had, consumed by a fear he understood all too well. If he was right about what was happening, then the possibility of sound was impossible. But here it was, present in the growl and paws on dirt. He knew what came next. It was something he had dreaded for so long—something he experienced almost every night.

The words echoed all around him. “You cannot save her from what is to come.”

Ezril ran faster, and harder. The hallway finally disgorged him into an open field.

Running into it, Ezril stumbled and crashed into a rolling fall. He roused himself to his feet quickly and before him stood a smiling face all too familiar. Blood dripped from its lips. It mouthed a soundless phrase: It’s coming.

Ezril rounded on it with the fury of a mistreated child. “YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE!” he roared. Rage filled him and he turned, spurred by it. He faced the bear as it came charging towards him. When he spoke again, it was in a louder roar. “NONE OF YOU BELONG HERE! You can have my dreams. but YOU CAN’T TAKE MY TIME AWAKE! you cannot have THIS!”

he shoved a vehement finger at the ground where he stood. Somehow it sufficed to indicate everything here as his domain. They could torture his dreams, scare him out of it and into the waking world, but he would not have them making him hallucinate. He would not have them making a madman out of him in the eyes of everyone else.

the night dropped suddenly, and everything was swallowed in darkness. The only other element present was the mist, and it seemed to take up all the space. It was a soft white as mists tend to be.

Ezril, still feeling the presence of the open field, found the world congested. How did this happen?

Tears wetted his cheek. He found himself mourning a loss he could not understand.

What are we?

He turned abruptly, panicked. The words echoed around him.

Tolin was the first person to ever ask him that question. It had been years ago in his earlier days in the underbelly. Ezril had hidden himself in the closet one night after the first time one of the children from the underbelly had struck him. Fearing what else the child might do to him, he had found himself running for the closet in Tolin’s room in The Plank. He hadn’t wanted to go home because he feared Teneri would stop him from going to the underbelly if she had found out. Or worse, go herself in search of retribution. It had taken barely thirty minutes before Tolin had found him. But with every word Tolin had offered, he’d refused to leave the attic. Then Tolin had uttered the words.

Ezril’s answer had been delayed, hesitant. For fear of a displaced trust he had bitten down on his lips to hold back the words, but Tolin’s patience had coerced them out of him eventually. It had been something the boy had told him after their first year as friends. Tolin had said it out of kindness as far as Ezril had been concerned. After all, it had been said after he’d informed the boy of the fact that he was an orphan and how Teneri had refused to allow him call her mother.

In the darkness, Ezril gave the same answer he had given his dead friend in the closet.

“We are family,” Ezril murmured, just as he had done then.

The air shifted and he felt the presence of someone else… something else. He was no longer alone with the mist. He focused in the dark and saw what else stood with him. It seemed to be a seat in the middle of the field, something high, something grand… or at least something that used to be.

Its back-rest that—for reasons unknown—he knew spanned high enough to challenge the skies had come crumbling down. It left a wide slab the height of a man and a seat wide enough to hold two men.

Ezril found himself drawn closer to it with no recollection of having moved his legs.

A throne? he wondered.

The seat of stone was surrounded by rubbles of stones. They served as a stairway, elevating its position, and narrating a tale of loss and defeat. And yet, Ezril found himself craving such a loss, craving such a throne.

Something about the throne before him proved forbidden; something he was not ready to have. Two hilts protruded from each side of it, black as night and deep as shadows. Ezril knew them without knowing how. They presented themselves as objects not to be drawn in this moment, but something he would need to return for. After all, the throne was reminiscent of the old man’s tale. As for the hilts beside it, he knew them all too well. He had seen them once when he was younger. touching them had been a great mistake once. It was a mistake he was unwilling to commit a second time. The simple fact that he had an inkling of what they were seemed to ground him. For some reason he knew the throne belonged to the king of the scorned in the old man’s story from the winter test. Ezril didn’t like it, but he knew it. And that was enough.

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Calmly, he turned away from the shattered throne to face his nightmares. As they retook their forms, emerging from the darkness as if being born from it, he found himself with an answer he couldn’t imagine he had forgotten.

No, Tolin, he thought as he took a step towards his watchers in the dark. An odd sense of authority compelled him and the mist swirled around his feet.

You will have to forgive me, Tolin, he thought. We are not family… not anymore.

He was well aware of what stood behind him as a new answer came to him. He wasn’t a boy turning his back on a mere throne. He was a boy who had the shattered throne of the old man’s tales behind him. An existence of a story so old it could be called a myth. For some reason his mind had conjured it… or perhaps it had conjured itself.

Whatever the case was, there was no disregarding that the throne was exactly what it was, and how it came to be did nothing to diminish the weight of its presence. It was a shattered throne in all its glory. It might have been something else once, but this was what it was now. It was a sign of survival even in defeat. Broken, it continued to stand proud, even if not tall.

Teneri had sent him here to learn, and to learn, he needed to accept. Fueled by this simple fact, Ezril gave his answer as the question came again, encompassing the world he stood within.

What are we?

Hallowed, he answered. Sacrifices of Truth.

………………………………………

Ezril awoke, sucking in a deep breath of fresh air. He was welcomed to the sight of a dark hole.

“An eye?” he asked without thinking.

“No, boy,” a voice came and he realized he stared at the eye concealed beneath a hood. “That one is lost for good,” it assured him.

A silence hovered over him and the man staring at him. Ezril laid on the ground, propped up in the man’s arms.

“It would seem you have passed.” There was a smile in the words. A sad smile. Within the hood the man had an ear that was far too pointy for a human. It reminded Ezril of one of the old man’s description of a Scorned during the winter test. This man’s face, however, contained none of the other features that had been described. His eyes were a deep forest green but he was not beautiful. Although the lack of beauty had a reason. Half his face was scarred, marred in burn marks Ezril recognized. Still, it was clear as day to see. The man was a Scorned, a greater abomination in the eyes of the Credo than even the Tainted.

He was a Scorned, the first Ezril had ever seen. The Scorned had also been burned by shadow fire.

Ezril rose to his feet. He did his best to keep his wits about him. If the Scorned was here, then the seminary was aware of what he was. Thus Ezril would have no reason to worry for his safety. He knew the story of the Scorned, of how they ate human flesh and committed unforgivable abominations. Their very existence was killing Vayla. They were also the ones who showed humans how to manipulate nin. They were the reason humans were tainted.

Ezril wobbled ever so slightly on his feet. He reached for the man, seeking purchase. He was surprised to find a hand waiting for him.

The man watched him for a while and his smile was replaced by a complete sadness.

“You were gone for a while,” he said, then paused. After the span of two breaths, he spoke again. “The mist does not take people’s minds for so long. And it doesn’t react so desperately. I don’t think anyone can help you with what haunts you, child. I fear it is an unending part of you.”

Ezril always knew this. It was not news to him. So offering his helper a smile he knew was all too weak, he said, “At least I’ll never be alone in the dark.”

The man tried for a friendly smile and failed. It came out as strained, and not really even a smile. Perhaps it could be mistaken for a grimace. He left Ezril alone. He turned and walked away. Where he was headed was none of Ezril’s concern and he let it bother him not.

Ezril walked the dark compound of the seminary after the encounter. Finding the silence of the night discomforting now that he did it legally, so to speak, he wondered if he had only liked it because it was against the rules.

The dining hall proved unfavorable. Being the only one left, his mates had left him something, be it cold. He had no appetite for a meal but forced himself to eat.

“You never know when your next meal will be,” Father Talod had often told them. “Always eat like it may be your last.”

Ezril didn’t like the priest, but sometimes the man said reasonable things.

The test of awareness had everyone sitting and lying in silence when Ezril got to the room. Understanding all too well, he retired to his bed in silence, noting the added distance between it and Darvi’s bed.

Divine seemed to have taken a greater blow from it. He trembled in his bed like a child in the snow. Ezril found himself wondering what Salem had experienced that he was not comforting the boy, or if it was Divine’s choice to remain alone. The room was austere, gloomy. Tonight his brothers were not the boys he knew. They were not the boys he’d grown to understand. In the silence of the room there was something dark about it. It seemed everyone had seen something they had not wanted to see. These tests will make monsters of us.

Before long they all slept.

Ezril wondered how they could sleep so easily after what they had been through. He was fully aware of what awaited him in his dreams, and he cursed the tests in silence.

Deep into the night, while he laid awake he heard the scraping sound of bamboo against stone and knew someone had risen. At one end, Divine sobbed. It seemed it was what roused Salem. Divine cried in silence as Salem joined him in his bed.

Ezril listened to sounds of murmured consolation from Salem as he calmed Divine. He felt guilty for thinking sleep had been anything but easy for any of his brothers. He wondered how many more laid awake. He turned to check on Olufemi. Olufemi slept with the wild abandon of a dead thing.

He envied the boy.

In time, Divine’s sobbing ceased, and so did Salem’s consolations. Ezril found himself with the silence of the night again. Then Divine’s bed creaked in a rocking sound, slow and constant. It filled the room like a gentle murmur, like lies untold in the minds of men. Ezril succumbed to sleep soon after. To him the sound served as an obscured lullaby, but a lullaby, nonetheless.

……………………………………….

Morning saw the exit of more children from the seminary. They were left at the gate with no guidance through the mist, as was the way of the seminary. Ezril found himself wondering how ironic it was that upon failing a test they would have to undergo the first test once more. This time, however, they would need to find a path away from the seminary where they had once found a path to the seminary.

Those who learned to return home would have to leave with the same knowledge.

Beside Ezril, as they sat high on the balustrades of their tower, Olufemi spoke.

“I guess the worst is over,” he said.

It was a collective agreement. The others didn’t believe the seminary could subject them to worse than it just had. They were accustomed to physical pain, but a mental manipulation such as what they had gone through was new to them—alien. None of them had been prepared for it. It made Ezril wonder just what his brothers had seen—what fears haunted their minds.

Olufemi believed the worst was over, and the others believed the same. But Ezril believed the worst was yet to come. The seminary seemed a place capable of beating their own record of cruelty.

“Let’s hope so,” Ezril answered Olufemi. “Let’s hope so.”

As they made their way to the dining hall for breakfast, Ezril walked with Darvi. All Darvi chose to speak of was the training they underwent. He said nothing of the test, and Ezril indulged him. Darvi spoke, and smiled, and gestured, and lied. He did things that were unlike him. The calm and collected boy was missing, hidden in the rubbles of what the test had razed in him. Ezril did not hold it against him. People handle things in different ways.

Unkuti, however, seemed less burdened. He walked past them with Raylin as they came down the tower stairs. Gently he uttered words Ezril believed were intended for him.

“I got to see her again,” Unkuti said quietly. “I got to see grandmother.”

In the words, Ezril heard gratitude.

There was a part of him that was glad for it. At least one of them came out of the test better than they had gone in.