MAGE ACADEMY : LEO'S FRACTURED SYSTEM

Chapter 5: The weight of a thousand stars

The infirmary door was not leading to a hallway. It led on to a vertigin balcony that stuck out on the side of a tower so elevated that the bottom of the tower had been lost in a carpet of cloudy opal swirling. Leo's stomach lurched. The air was cool and fresh, and had the smell of ozone and night-blooming flowers. In front of him, across an abyss which appeared to divide the sky itself, lay the Mage Academy in all its inconceivable splendor.

It was not a building, but a system of buildings that contradicted the laws of gravity and construction. Towers of white stone rolled like the horns of unicorns, and were linked together by fine, clear bridges that glowed with energy contained within them. The Domes of crystalline lattice work fluttered with light within and complete parts of the campus were upon floating islands of rock levitating and hung with waterfalls falling down into the abyss. The sky above was a continuous, intense dusk, shot through with shimmering auroras which were no other than the background of the Academy, but its roof. This was the Arcane Veil, and he was in its very centre.

Professor Riven, awaiting him on the balcony with the countenance of extreme dullness, gave him a wave of the wrist. "The Grand Athenaeum. Try to keep up." He stepped off the balcony.

Leo experienced a gasp, yet Riven did not fall. He came down on a platform of solid air that was not visible, and shook a little under his feet. Ways are purposeful among the initiates. You just do not question your ground, Riven, and I am not looking back, as I move out over the nothingness.

Shaking, Leo made himself walk out. His heart throbbed as his foot struck a vacuum--and struck hard, unyielding mass. He sighed, and went on, taking each step with a struggle against the savage terror of falling. And they made their way along a path visible neither to the floating islands nor to any but themselves, a vast building, high above, round like the eye, exposed to the sky, and the levels of it teemed with life. The Grand Athenaeum.

At the first stroke it struck him--a wild, tumultuous symphony of thousands of voices, clustering in the huge space. Then, the sight. This time thousands of students crowded the concentrics of the Athenaeum, a crowd of young faces and robes in an astonishing variety of colours, indicating various houses or affinities. They were large and small, with pale, smoldering skin, with hair that waved like water, some with small, gnome-like pets.

However, what mattered most of the space, what took the breath out of the lungs of Leo, and nailed the sense of inferiority in the depth of his soul, was the display of rank.

Fluttering in the very center of open-air arena, there was a huge, three-dimensional composition of light swirling and shifting. It was a leader board, a list of names and types ever-changing, in the same beautiful glowing character of the Codex. He read such places as pyreheart Adept, Stormweaver Initiate, Stone-Souled Apprentice. Their names were to be accompanied by real-time flickering and changing numerical scores. There were those names of a bright, arrogant gold, and there were those, which were lowly, stable blue. Some, very at the bottom, glowed dimly with a warning crimson.

This was no ordinary school. It was a competition that was regular, open and cruel.

"Find a seat. Anywhere," Riven said, hardly heard through the noise, and became lost in the press of other robed members of the faculty standing at the edge.

Leo felt like a speck of dust. He had his own jeans and t-shirt on, which was clean, but now pale and anti-glamorous compared to the world of magic robes. He was a man with no name, no record and a phantom in his brain. He moved up to the upper, least crowded, level, and wished to be unseen as much as possible.

He took a vacant stone bench and sat back with his eyes fixed on the gigantic leaderboard. A name which he saw spring a few points, in which case its colour would change to a smouldering blue, was Kaelan Kael Vor. One of the sections of students in copper-trimmed robes broke out into a roar of approval.

"Quite the spectacle, isn't it?" A cheerful intonation graced his side.

Leo jumped. On the bench beside him a boy had been subjected to the bench. His hair was a messy red mop, his face had freckles, and his eyes were gleaming with wicked vitality. He had plain, undecorated grey robes, supposedly, but they seemed to be a little large on him, and almost like something he had borrowed. "Is it the first time you see the Great Ego Display? You will be all right, you get accustomed to the nagging, soul-sucking remembrance of your own mediocrity. I'm Kael."

"Leo," he managed, stunned by the boy's easy familiarity.

"Nice to meet you, Leo. Mortal-born, huh?" Nodding at the clothes of Leo, Kael said. "Me too. Well, mostly. My grandma was able to talk to pigeons, which, according to the rules of this place, actually means something. Do not allow all this to flaunt you, he said, pointing to the magnificence which was about them. A half of these children are born to hold a silver wand in their hand and have never had to work on the farm in a lifetime. The wisdom on the streets is as good as you would expect.

Leo felt a flicker of warmth. Kael, in his comic-relief attitude, and his confidence as a streetwise guy, was a lifeboat in a sea of alien wonder.

Something on a few levels downward attracted his eye. An avenue made a way as a girl fell through the crowd. She was preternaturally graceful, and her back straight, her head high. She wore robes of deep sapphire blue, and silver thread that was worked around the edges of the robes, following arabesques of frost on a windowpane. Her hair was the polished obsidian, and hung in a straight sheet down her back. She was as much as all angles, beautiful and absolutely harsh. This was Aria.

Her eyes were not on anybody, and her concentration was solely on herself. The other students close to her gave her a very broad pass, and their whispers were a complex of admiration and anger. She was a perfectionist and her presence proclaimed it.

Her eyes, cool and evaluative, as she went by, had wandered up the higher tiers--and as she went by, briefly, met whatever eyes Leo could give her.

He froze.

Her violet eyes, a shocking colour, slipped down his face to his hand, which was trembling at her edge of the stone bench. His shirt sleeve had slipped up and the small tip of the silvery Warden badge impressed in his wrist showed.

Aria stopped dead.

Her ideal self-compose was broken. Her eyes opened, an involuntary movement of sheer, un-tainted shock--and something besides, something like recognition--passed over her face. It was gone in a moment, and in its place was an even stronger and more searching analysis. Her head jerked back and looked at his face inquiringly. It was the turn of her recognition like a deafening thunderclap. She made no speech but the slight disclosure in her face was old enough: she had observed this mark elsewhere. She knew what it was.

Then like a curtain dropped down her face was the inscrutable mask again. She walked off, and went to her place, leaving Leo feeling naked and completely disturbed.

before he had time to digest this a silence fell upon the Athenaeum. Everyone looked at the main dais. Some man had come there like he had been made of the light. He was a big and authoritative person with hair of iron colour and a handsome and most wrinkled face, full of wisdom and power. His robes were plain white, though they were apparently of pure light. This was the Headmaster.

His voice was also warm and rich, and it without difficulty filled the massive space when he spoke. "Welcome, new initiates. You enter into a millennium-old tradition. You are selected due to the fact that you are a carrier of the extraordinary. There you will blow that spark into a flame, into a flame that will enlighten all of creation.

His gaze went round the group, a kindly, paternal motion. but as he continued his glance over the elevated levels, he lingered on Leo. It was fair, a little longer, a moment, a fraction of a moment. No shock, no recognition. It was a look of… confirmation. A mute recording of a foreseen variable. The predestination was weak yet shivering. The Headmaster was aware of his presence. He had been expected.

The road will not be smooth, the Headmaster went on, and his voice grew deeper. Through your Codex you shall have a guide and a measure and a judge. It will give you a level, a place to begin with. There is no need to despair that you start humble. Big trees out of small acorns grow.

Just as he uttered his last word there was a chime in the Athenaeum, a very bold, bell-like note, which gave a shiver of response to the bones of Leo. Students were around him looking at their own wrists, or at the place before them, and their own Codices were going on.

Leo's own Codex flared to life. He waited with sore heart in his throat, when he saw his name, LEO ARIS. The text was gleaming, interpreting. It listed his paltry stats. And then, his designation it gave him.

STAGE: UNBOUND INITIATE.

TIER: NULL.

A shiver of cold fear shook through him. Null. Nothing. Zero. He stared at the large leader board. His name wasn't even on it. He was under the lowest student with crimson rank. He was off the scale entirely.

One or two students who happened to pass nearby snickered. "Null? What's that mean? Did the System reject him?" somebody, not too softly, muttered.

It was an emotional cliffhanger that was suffocating. He was branded, but unbound. He was here, but he was null. His discovery was a dull and empty one: each and every other student, up to the golden-ranked prodigies, down to the bottom crimson flunkies, had a place. They had a Tier. They had a counsel, a way however hard. He possessed only a Codex, partially finished, silent, a hostile Warden and blank file.

The battle was going on in him--a whirl of self-doubt and the hurt of popular scorn. He was an acorn which had not been set, and which was on barren soil.

The Headmaster was bringing his speech to a close and his voice was booming with inspiration. But Leo heard none of it. An essential battlefield of his own failure was already taking its hold on him. His whole existence now was the dilemma. In an environment that is based on competition, on the basis of being publicly ranked and having quantifiable power, how did he possibly have to compete when he began with less than nothing?

He could quit. He might insist to be taken home, to whatever remnant of his former life that was left.

But while he sat there the brand on his wrist appeared to burn with some cold fire. Still, all were chains, and the shrill realization of Aria, the knowing stare of the Headmaster, the silent presence of the Warden--all these were links, tying him to this spot.

Quitting wasn't an option. He was trapped. And he himself had to make a living.