He was terrified. Ashamed. A mix of anger, dread, and wanting to be normal simmered in his head as he stuttered his name. “I— I’m Rosaldo.”

He sat down and melted in his cushioned, too comfortable seat.

“Yes?” the professor said gently, a woman with round glasses and bouncy pink hair. “Could you tell us one of your hobbies?”

In his peripheral vision, some of the students guffawed, shook their heads.

Rosaldo composed himself, stood back up. “I… like to write. Stories, like fantasy?”

“I love fantasy,” the professor gushed. “What are your stories about?”

He’d written stories since he could write, since he was four. Sometimes he could see things. Visions, his mother told him. Sometimes he would get seizures from them. His father told him they weren’t real. They felt real enough to write. So Rosaldo wrote them instead, and took his pills to stop his seizures, and the visions.

He shrugged. Everyone kept looking at him. He fixed an uneasy smile. “I write about the same old thing, really. Mostly horror stories.”

Rosaldo didn’t tell her they were about the time when he saw a bone-thin hand creep up his bed sheet one night, or when he was seven—saw himself in the mirror with hollowed, feral looking yellow eyes and a bloody grin. Nor did he talk about the time he’d seen a hulking, wolflike form howling after him when he broke his leg running down a hill in his family’s farm. He’d seen, and felt, other visions as well. Where he had become an elf prince and experienced the firsthand view of marrying a fae princess in a ceremony to bring peace between two kingdoms. Or where he’d seen the softly glowing Orishas bless a dry, cropless season with rain and harvest for a small, worshiping village. Or a journey across time, people and continents, when countries had no name and magic was a word understood as what simply was.

Rosaldo said none of those things.

“Oh,” the teacher said, crestfallen. “I was hoping for some epic fantasy stuff, with dragons. Dragons are a blast. Who’s next?”

Rosaldo sat down, realizing his hand was trembling.

He sat at the end of a row while the others said their names, their reasons for joining the program, and their favorite hobby outside of art. It was a community college in Toronto that had a program for illustration. Rosaldo had always wanted to move to a big city. He’d grown up in rural Ontario, surrounded by farmland and woods and not much else, on the fringe of a small town better off forgotten, he thought.

He wondered how his family was doing, his father and mother and twin sister—farming and spending time outside, while he would rather be inside, writing and drawing the things he’d seen. But he took pills for that. It had been years since he’d experienced his last vision.

Now, he spent his time drawing, sketching, and painting. Through countless hours, he had refined his skill enough to get a scholarship into this program. He was determined his visions would prove to be something he could turn into a living, a life of being normal.

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Once class was finished, Rosaldo shuffled out, head down. He had always been closed off, carrying a shy hunch and wearing a hesitant smile beneath his thick tortoise-rimmed glasses. He didn’t look directly into people’s eyes. Usually they looked away first. It was because, Rosaldo felt, he could see a person how they truly saw themselves, could get lost in the secrets they told looking back at him. Like the janitor with a newfound sense of purpose, a secret pride he held inside with every step. Or the barista, growing a wider smile for a certain returning customer during her work shift. He knew people felt it too, and it would usually either alienate or anger them. So he remained looking down. He saw it clearly in the puddles he skipped over, the whisperings of the wind, and the crackling of the subway announcements on the way back to his apartment.

There were countless mysteries within each person, a world hidden in their thoughts, their minds, their dreams. Rosaldo jotted them out in his sketchbook. A girl had lost her balloon, but gained a friend in the faery who had brought it back to her. He saw that the girl marveled as the tiny winged fae whizzed around her in the subway tram, and she giggled and clapped her hands while her mother told her to be quiet. The girl noticed that Rosaldo saw the faery too, and nodded, beaming. Rosaldo smiled back and returned to his sketchbook, trying to catch the likeness of the darting fae.

These weren’t visions, but occurrences. Rosaldo had learned long ago from the “intervention” of his grade school guidance counselor to stay quiet about such supernatural realities. He didn’t even tell his parents, or his twin sister about the magical things he’d see daily. Others could see them, if they truly believed in them, but most would never admit to what they’d seen. Perhaps they knew, too, that some things were better off left alone, left untouched from the shared world.

The hidden world was something Rosaldo could touch, feel, and see in his drawings, his illustrations. They were glimpses of what couldn’t be explained, until he put pencil or brush to paper and the other world bloomed into view on the canvas.

He closed his sketchbook and exited the subway. When he got out of the tram and the doors slid shut, he paused.

A man stood between the knots of commuters, still. He wore a dark hooded cloak, his face partly shadowed from the light panels overhead that blinked in an unpredictable staccato rhythm. The subway screeched out, wind rushing behind Rosaldo.

Still the man stood, a statue before a moving crowd. There was a hint of a smile in the shadow of his hood, white teeth glinting from the brightness overhead.

Rosaldo noticed then that nothing else was moving now either: papers suspended in the air, a crumpled paper cup caught in the train’s backdraft, people rushing nowhere, caught in space, time. The air itself was still, soundless.

He looked into the man’s eyes, dark and unfathomable. Before he realized what he was doing, he was walking toward the man, toward an unrelenting pull, a voiceless call.

“Who are you?” Rosaldo asked, strangely calm despite the unnerving stillness.

“You see me,” the man said, his voice slow, steady and deep. “So who are you?”

“I’m Rosaldo.”

“No,” the man said. “Who are you really?”

“I don’t know,” Rosaldo said. “I just see things.”

“No,” the man said. “You know things. But that is not enough to understand the world. You should visit my office sometime. Perhaps I could help you understand a thing or two.”

The man turned away and disappeared into the crowd, suddenly moving again, the air blowing back again from the tram’s exit. Rosaldo brushed past the people, whirling round in search of the hooded man. He looked down.

On the floor was a pristine white card with an inked symbol: an equilateral downward triangle lined with a cross at its middle. In clean text below read an address and a title: Order’s Academia for Mancers.