MAGE ACADEMY : LEO'S FRACTURED SYSTEM

Chapter 3: The Mark of the Chosen

The silence in Leo's bedroom had taken on some physical form, and it was full and dense and close to the unsaid words and the phantom presence which made its home within his skull. Three days he had been playing his own life, going through the motions of school and home in a hollow-eyed fashion. The world had not yet put back its focus since his experience with the reliquary. It had just been permanently modified, as a plain piece of glass which had been marked with a subtle, unshifting frost.

The UI was the frost. It was suspended on the fringes of his perception, a cluster of glittering, alien symbols which glowed of a gentle, golden light. He had been taught by trial and error, to turn a blind eye to it ever since. To see through it, as one may see through the dirty window. Yet it was always present and it was there to remind him that his reality was no longer his.

And then there was the Warden. It was dumb since the broken recollection of the battlefield, a cold, alert boulder in the flow of his mind. He might have known it, a burden of ancient attention stuck somewhere in his mind. It was not to sleep, but wait. Its silence was even more threatening than its orders. it was the silence of a predator, or a master looking on at a bad pupil.

He was sitting at his desk with a textbook on history he was reading about the Industrial Revolution. The letters flashed in front of his face and he no longer knew what they meant under the superimposition of the UI that was now showing a slow undulating rhythm beside a graphic image that resembled a stylized heart. Essence Stability: 98.7 which is a small, translated sub-glyph which is usefully given. He did not know what that was, and he was too fatigued to care.

The atmosphere of the room started to shift.

It was subtle at first. The distant moaning of the cooling fan in his computer appeared to grow louder, then intensity faded completely. The city at night with its muffled noises, a passing car, a dog, were absorbed in a deep, unnatural silence. Leo had an erection of hairs on his arms. It was not the silence of night; it was that silence of a vacuum, of a kind of emptiness in reality, that had deprived sound itself of existence.

The Warden stirred. It was no word, but a feeling-- some sharp, nipping concentration, as though a soldier were rousing himself.

"Incoming resonant carrier wave. Source: Mage Academy. Priority: Alpha."

Leo jerked his head up, and the ache of his heart made him painfully feel his ribs. "What? What? he said, and there was much loudness in his voice in the crashing silence.

The object appeared before the Warden could develop a reaction to it. No flash of light, or crack of displaced air. At one point, the bed on his battered blue comforter was bare. The next, it was not. It was an accomplishment of being so smooth it was unphysical, a declaration of strength which was beautiful and frightening.

It was a letter.

The envelope was made of a substance which was neither quite parchment nor quite vellum. It was dense, cream, and had an impression of soaking up the low light of his desk lamp, instead of reflecting off it. It was closed with a big, liberal portion of wax of the colour of arterial blood, a deep, rich crimson, which I thought beat with some slow, internal rhythm. The sigil that was stamped in the wax was of astonishing design: a geometric eye in the centre, framed in an outer ring of many layers of gears, and surrounded by an ouroboros--a serpent swallowing his tail. It was a representation of periods, of observation, of eternal, grinding order. It was the head of the Mage College.

An icy knot of fear knotted in Leo's stomach. The first feeling was one of bewilderment, which was in turn succeeded by the strong instinctive denial. This was it. The other shoe dropping. The after-effect of handling that damned crystal. He didn't want it. He didn't want any of it. He was Leo, the boy with pre-cal problems, who cared about his father, who had a crush on a girl, but he was too shy to speak with her. He was not a Warden-bound Candidate. Even his unspoken words seemed ridiculous and foreign to his mind. He was not special. This proved to be a disastrous mistake.

"No, no," he said, and pushed his chair away at the desk. The wooden floor John had screeched on, the sound in the quietness too unnatural. "I'm not touching it."

"The summons was coded to your personal signature, Master," and the voice of the Warden was flat and without feeling, the very opposite of the fright which was mounting to Leo. "The parameter of non-compliance is not known. The transmission shall be done with the completion of a protocol."

"I do not even care about its protocol!" Leo snapped, his voice rising. "Make it go away!"

"I cannot. This is a guiding principle, which takes the place of my existing working parameters. You must accept the summons."

"Or what?"

The Warden did not answer. It didn't need to. The fact of his body shifting without his will, of the kinetic energy bursting out of his hand was answer enough. There was no "or." It was a matter of compliance one way or another.

His breath, in his throat, Leo approached the bed hesitantly. The letter was there, dead and ill omenous. He felt a kind of throbbing energy emanating out of it, a vibration that had not been felt in air, but in his skeletal structure. His right hand, on which he had pointed the spell, was tingling.

He extended his hand, and his fingers were shaking. This was where he was not coming back. To feel this was to understand that his past life had come to an end. He branded his index finger on the wax seal. It felt warm.

He tightened his teeth and sank.

The response was immediate and bloody.

The sigil burnt with the heat of a small sun, blinding, white light that underwent his eyes. A wave of burning internal tension, which was both severer and more concentrated than the first union with the Warden, leapt within the palm of his hand. It was not pain, but a writing. He could touch the intricate outlines and contours of the crest of the Academy being marked into his body, into his flesh, into himself. With a rough, creaking scream he pulled his hand away.

But it was too late. The message, the end accomplished, swept out into a cold, noiseless fire. It was swallowed in a second heartbeat and not a particle of ash remained on the comforter. The only thing it had ever known was the mark that was imprinted upon his palm. The sigil flamed a molten gold a moment and became cooler into the look of an old, silvery scar. It was permanent. Unmistakable.

His world shattered to bits as he stared at it, his mind reeling. This was no longer an inward haunting a voice in his head. This was a non-debatable, external brand. He was marked property.

Partnering, gripping his branded hand against his chest, he made his escape to the little bathroom which was connected with his room. He threw the door hard, as though, with such a weak bit of wood, he should be safe, and fussed about the light switch. In the unnatural light of a fluorescent lighting he desperately wiped his palm. He applied scalding water, tough soap, a coarse nail brush and scraped till his skin was bleeding. The sigil was there, still and untouched, clean and shiny, a perfect, silvery scar on the red, abraded flesh. It was part of him now.

He was defeated and with clutched edges of the sink, hung his head, breathing in ragged gasps. He drove himself to raise his eyes, to stare horrified at himself in the glass.

And he saw them.

Shadowed watchers.

Right there, in the reflection, were they standing in the darkness of his bedroom behind him. They were not real so much as human figures cut out of the cloth of reality, created out of solidified shadow and stasis. There was no recognizable feature about them, just a more-or-less, towering outline and a sense of far, immense power. They were watching him. Not ill willed, but with a disturbing, unemotional attention, such as guards on a prisoner.

He turned and struck the sink with his back, the cold porcelain. The bedroom was empty. His heart beat was like a mad drumming in his ribs. He turned back very slowly and fearfully to the mirror.

They were still there.

"Escort detail," the Warden said, it was a matter-of-fact. "They make sure that the transition is safe. Its state of the art policy on high-value assets."

Go away, make them go, cry, I said, and my voice was a shallow whisper. He was shaky with excitement.

"Go away, Make them go away," Leo pleaded, his voice was a shallow whisper. He was shaking uncontrollably.

"They have to stay there until they get through."

Trapped. He was held a captive in his own bathroom tormented by his mirror image. The physical agony in his chest was the emotional cliffhanger to his situation. He was just a boy. He did not feel selected, he felt damned.

He closed his eyes, a pointless attempt of a child to make the monsters fade. In fact, he opened his eyelids when the pressure behind the eyes was too great.

His reflection was smiling.

This was his face, only it was with a hideous smirk. It wasn't his smile. It was a cynical, familiar smirk, with a kind of old-fashioned certainty and a fatigued interest which Leo had never known. The reflection in the mirror, which was his eyes, had a flashing of keen, intelligent gold, the gold of the Warden and his UI.

The world in the mirror distorted behind the smirking reflection. There was a portal which opened in mid bedroom, a hole in the reality of his world that revealed a bottomless view of the other world. An immensely violet sky, shot through with nebulous silver and emerald clouds. And framed in against that unimaginable sky, the jagged, twisting towers of a castle which would not even have been thought of, a bridge between worlds. The Mage Academy.

It was such an enormous sight, so otherworldly as to be merely a short-circuit to his heart and brain. This was the great eye-opener--they were not a mere secret society. They were inter-dimensional. They had lived in an intermediate existence, and had been watching him, waiting on him, long before he had ever blundered into the forgotten annex.

His seizing power was spiritual rather than physical. It was an implant in his soul, and the rope was being drawn. He had a horrible, tearing-at-his-seat feeling as though he were being pulled out like taffy. The immediate experience the bathroom, the smell of soap, the noise of his own anxious breathing, all started to distort and its sounds stretched out to a maddening cacophony, its appearance melted away into a whirlpool of screaming colour and light.

It was the last thing he looked at; his own image, with that alien, knowing smile. The voice of the Warden, the parting word of vanishing anarchy, was the last that he heard.

"Transition initiated. Prepare for orientation, Master."

His awareness, with all the sense-flood upon it, with the deep displacement of being violently selected, of being deprived of all agency, could not endure any longer. The world went away, into a white, painless light, and Leo forced back on his knees. He was not conscious of striking the cold tile floor. He had already died, swept away in the current, a dilemma of fight or acceptance made once and once again a far-fetched one. He had been selected by the Academy.