MAGE ACADEMY : LEO'S FRACTURED SYSTEM

(Immediate Conflict)

Leo wasn't supposed to be here.

The "CONDEMNED" signs plastered on the bolted main doors were plain enough. However, the loose floorboard in the rear of the chemistry part, the one he had found after a month of careful research, was a less noisy, more comfortable sort of mischief. It branched off into a maintenance tunnel, a black alleyway to the depths of the forgotten wing of the school.

His excuse was pathetically banal: his father's silver pen. A graduation present of a man who believed that he was bringing up an engineer and not a fantasizer. Leo had lost it here yesterday, running away under the custody of one of them, and abandoning it. He couldn't go home without it.

On his hands and knees, he had to work in the light of his phone as a flickering shadow over cobwebs and broken walls. The tunnel opened into what must have been the head librarian's office. It was a vault, and was ruled by an enormous, frightened oak desk and shelves sagging with water-rotted books.

And in the center of the decay, something clean.

A stand made from a single block of obsidian seemed to absorb the light from his phone. The only thing on it was a ball of milky crystal, opaque and big as his fist. It was pristine where everything else was filth.

And there, on the floor next his pedestal, his pen.

Relief was a bodily warmth in his chest. He'd grab it and get out. He moved forward and his sneaker scuffled at the gritty floor. As he bent down, his shoulder bumped the sphere.

The feeling was brief and completely unnatural.

There was a jolt of pain up his arm, cold then, almost numb, not as electricity, but as when you plunge into an ice-cold lake. A nanosecond later, a burning pressure ignited in his core. His muscles seized. His breath caught in his throat. He was frozen in a torturous half-crouch, a puppet with cut strings. The world faded into darkness, and the crystal sphere was the last thing that he saw as burning with a light that it seemed was scalding the back of his skull.

Awareness returned in a slap.

Leo gagged and threw himself down on the dusty floor. His heart beat against his ribs was as a caged bird. Once more the sphere became lifeless and dark.

But something was wrong. Deeply, fundamentally wrong.

The world was different.

A rich, lustrous UI glowed at the edge of his vision a tapestry of gleaming, unintelligible characters, and graceful lines of form in a low, golden light. There was a warning in a language unfamiliar to him, blinking on one side.

'What the hell is this? A concussion?'

Then a voice spoke. It wasn't in the room. It was inside his head. Chilled, dainty, and cold as drawn steel.

"Master! Run! The seals are failing!"

Leo clutched his temples. "Who said that?"

There is a loss of structural integrity of this chamber. You must move. Now."

It was a dictum and not an appeal. It was a voice of a general who wanted blind obedience to happen immediately. Pure terror, cold and sharp, lanced through him. There was someone in his mind.

"Get out of my head!" his voice, said in the vaulted room and thin and reedy with screaming, he screamed.

"Make mobility a priority rather than hysterics." Move. "Sixty three percent possibility of a ceiling collapse."

His vision showed in red, the UI representing accusing arrows at the sinking beams of the ceiling. The fear at the phantom in his head and the wonder at the data that was superimposed on his eyes crippled him. He attempted to stand, though his legs were rubber, and his equilibrium destroyed by the psychic invasion.

The voice did not say politely enough, "There is an unacceptable dearth of motor functions. Recalibration will have to be done."

The world moaned, and Leo had not time to make a reply. There was a crack of a gun from the decorated plaster ceiling above. Dust and debris rained down. A great splintered beam, freed from its hundred-year-old moorings, was falling directly toward him.

Time seemed to slow. His body cried out, be it movement, be it to dive, to do anything. But he was ice. A deer in the headlights.

Then the voice bellowed in his head, a psychic shockwave. "LEFT! NOW!"

It was such an imperative that it started his nerves. His body jerked down in a desperate, stumbling plunge. His right arm instinctively jerked his palm open as he was falling. Curious, warm energy, his panic, his adrenaline, flew through him, along his arm in unseen channel. There was a slight blue-white light in his hand.

A minor impulse, a concussive movement of unknown energy, flew out of his palm. And it was not so much to stop the beam, but it was enough to give it a slight push. The huge pine-tree tore by his side, just one inch too short, the blow bursting up a suffocating puff of dust.

Silence. Thunderous and absolute.

Leo was lying on the floor, still reaching out with his arm, with his hand numb with the aftershock of the current that had been flashing through it. 'His' power. He dropped it gradually, looking at his own hand with the eyes of a strange man.

The silence was broken by the voice--the Warden--and it was furious.

"An unacceptable delay. A fraction of a second more of your indecision would have resulted in catastrophic system failure. Your neural latency is that of a common grub. This will be corrected."

Leo discovered his voice, a moaning, wailing sound. "You... you moved me."

"I provided the necessary stimulus. Your body complied. This vessel is the legacy of the Aethelgard Order. My primary function is its preservation."

"Vessel? Order? What are you talking about? Get out of my head!" Rage hot and sharp flaked him. The violation was absolute.

"I am a permanent fixture, Master. A symbiosis. You will acclimate."

"Go to hell!"

His legs scrambled up, and, seizing the silver pen which lay on the floor, he ran off. He was not worried about the noise, was not worried about anything but getting away out of that room, that sphere. He screamed in the maintenance tunnel, pushing the floorboard into its position with a mad push, his heart attempting to break through his chest.

He was safe. In the open air of the common solidly lit modern library.

However, the UI remained, a cool, golden haze at the periphery of his vision. And the Warden was a cold silent thing at the back of his mind.

He went into his little bedroom and banged the door, as if the phantom would be held out by it. He was sitting on the end of his bed shaking with his arms covered round himself. The adrenaline had disappeared and him hollow and shaky.

"Okay," he said aloud, his voice raw. "Talk. What are you? And what is this 'Order'?"

The voice of the Warden was instant, and its cold conviction was stuffing at the core of his skull. "I am the Warden, the holder of the Legacy. You are the Master, the reincarnated soul of the last Paladin of the Aethelgard Order. Your awakening was... delayed. And your present condition is... not optimal."

"Reincarnated? I am a seventeen year old girl failing in pre-calc. You've got the wrong guy."

"The spiritual and biometric resonance is unquestionable. This is not a choice, Master. It is your destiny. The Order legacy should not be forgotten. You bring the wisdom of a million battles, the resonance of a million spells, that wisdom sleeps in this world, though that wisdom is slumbering in thee.

That term living weapon slipped out of the mind of the Warden, and it was a chilly, unspoken specter which stood between them.

"Destiny? Legacy? I don't want it! I never asked for this! Just leave!"

"I cannot. Your soul and my function are linked. To deny me is to deny a constituent of your own being. A painful, and likely, fatal endeavor."

He felt a wave of despair, so great that it had taken away his breath. This object was incapable of reason. He was trapped.

"Your body is an instrument, Master," the Warden continued, its tone shifting to cold, practical instruction. '"Learn to wield it, or I shall."

The UI was shown with a new window that was not as complex as others are. It had one elegant glyph that had a stylized spark like appearance. There is text scrolled next to it: mana channels, somatic trigger, incantation stability.

"A basic lumen spell. A simple light generator. You will practice. Now."

No, said Leo, and his voice became harder. "I won't."

"You will. The right of autonomy is obtained via competence. Prove nothing, and I will then assume complete authority whenever it is needed to make sure that we survive. Begin."

The threat was clear. Perform, or become a puppet. A collar of his neck was his free will. He measured the dreadful possibility of exercising magic against complete lack of self.

Leo raised his hand in a groan of pure frustration, and gazed at the glyph. He attempted to reproduce the feeling he had had there in the tunnel, the warmth within, the flow of energy. It was as dumb as an attempt to act as a movie wizard.

He focussed, his teeth set. He pictured light. He willed it to happen.

For a moment, nothing.

Then the faintest warmth in his palm.

And the world shattered.

It wasn't a memory. It was an explosion. Not his, a strangling, screeching flashback.

The smell of ozone and blood. The chillness of wet steel in his fingers,--of his,--no, not his. The hand which held the hilt of a sword that ached with strength was a gauntled hand. Before him was a battlefield in a bruised twilight sky, which was swarming with not quite human figures. And a voice, not his, but his sometimes centuries-old, filled with a tiredness, a cold command, said: 'Hold the line. Not one step back."

It was less than a beat of his heart but it was impressed on his soul. It was a concrete and overwhelming alienation of the senses.

Leo screamed, recoiling from the phantom odor of blood. The embryonic warmth in his hand snuffed out instantly. The incantation did not work and the UI showed a muted, derogatory text; "Connection Lost."

He fell back against his bedroom wall and slid to the floor, his whole body shaking. His knees to his chest he rocked forward, trying to make himself small. The room was silent. The Warden made nothing, said nothing.

A central mystery now gaped before him, a chasm of horrible possibility. The Warden claimed he was a reborn hero, a Paladin. That recollection, that bloody fragment of a past life... was it proof? Or was it a hoax, a dream that had been put in to make him obedient?

Was this force that which a glorious past bestowed, A fate to repossession? Or was it a curse, the reverberation of a life which never belonged to him, and which brought him to battle-fields and chilled orders?

He had no answers. Only the cold, silent presence in his mind and the specter of a battlefield haunting his vision. Leo was alone, more confused and terrified than he had ever been in his life. The lost annex had not merely been holding a lost pen; it had been containing a key to a cage, and he had opened the door foolishly, by accident, on the inside.