Victory was a hollow, corrosive lie. It was as bitter ash and as the metallic tang of Kael’s blood, a taste that appeared to have stuck permanently at the back of Leo’s throat. No glorious celebration, no slapping of backs in the antechamber of the competitors, all of sterile and white light. The silence which had taken the place of the deafening noise of the stadium was literally a weight, pressing them down to gasping shallow pain. Even the air was heavy and full of smoke, a mixture of exhausted ozone of unleaved magic, the metallic odor of fresh blood, and the acrid stench of pure, undiluted horror. Her Kael had passed, his ecstatic, tumultuous vitality disappeared, and the dead, cold competence of the medics whose skill had lifted his hideously motionless body to the Infirmary. His life was now suspended by the thinnest of thread, a thread of desperate loadless weaving on the part of Mira and the icy unemotional and frighteningly progressive medicine of the Academy. The psychologic

The triumph at the arena had been a hollow, pyrrhic echo with such deep and burning wounds upon them all, deeper burns than bodily. Their secret exploration had revealed an ugly, fundamental tear, in their vision of their solitary master, a secret which Kael now is bearing, like a loaded explosive roughshod, codded against his heart, which its timer they do not know, and its devastating power they cannot estimate. The atmosphere in their little, besieged party was cloying and thick, filled with the silent fears, the metallic flavor of betrayal, the crude, uncut nerve-endings of trust which had been rudely cut away. It was in this oppressive mood of false, shattering tension that the second, closer, psychologically more shattering strike was dealt, a salvo that was not directed at their physical being, but at what we might call the very essence of the self that they both were.They had taken refuge in the library that is a so-called refuge of silent minds and organized knowledge, and h

There was no transition. One moment, Leo's body was a rigid prison of light and pain in the vault, his muscles screaming in silent protest, the cold of the obsidian floor a distant memory against the searing invasion of the System. The other, the anchors of his physical self just... vaporized. His mind was ripped off, a fibre of the carpet of the real world, and thrown into an empty, starless vacuum.The screams of his comrades, the hum of the vault, the metallic flavour of fright in his mouth,--all of it had disappeared, and in its place had come a complete, choking silence not only the want of sound, but the active, sucking thing. He was nowhere. He was nothing. Only a naked sense of presence, a single wavering candle in an edifice of unimaginable blackness. This was the in-between, the space between the streams of data, the silent core of the machine.This was the actual Codex network. It was not some library of cold, dead information, but living, breathing pattern woven of the tho

It was not a mild wakeup when he came back to his body. A violent, breaking reassembling was it.One moment Leo was a headless, floating spot of mind, drifting through the quietness, starlessness of the Codex network, the brand name of Prima Fractured scalding his very soul. The second, reality interfered with the first like a tidal wave upon a cliff. The feeling came back not as a trickle-trickle, but as a torrent of screams.The chill of the obsidian floor was a bodily trauma, oozing his robes. The odour of ozone and the coppery taste of blood filled the air. The alarms of the vault whining through his ears, like a lancet into the brain, was a physical stress on his ear-drums. The hostile Codices with their crimson, hellish light had pierced his eyes, and made them feel raw and newly-created.It was the surface impressions only. Below them, there was a sound of deeper, more frightful cacophony. He felt the screams of the thousands of Codices which were haunting him, which are silent

The roar of the crowd was a physical force, a tidal wave of sound that crashed against the shimmering barriers of the Duality Arena. The air was crackling with magic that was exhausted, with wailing, bleeding anticipation. This was the culmination of the Duality Games, an event which was covered on both sides of the divide, a gladiatorial battle to congratulate the most compatible student of the Academy. It was a golden slaughterhouse in the eyes of Leo, who was in the combatant circle.The theater was a masterpiece of magic construction, an ideal division on the middle. One was in the blazing, pure light of the Astral Realm, and the air was vibrating with strong, systematized energy. The other half was deep down in the liquid shadows of the Umbral Realm, where magic was writhing and twisting in unpredictable, volatile manners. Their line of demarcation was a transparent shimmering tear, a streak of maize energy which promised to separate anything passing over it with panic.Leo could