MAGE ACADEMY : LEO'S FRACTURED SYSTEM

Chapter 6: The Unbound and the broken

The process of orientation was a haze of blanketing details and icy glares. Leo had a room to himself; a little cell-like room, with a window upon the swirling, star-dusted emptiness of the Veil. Two pairs of plain grey initiate robes were provided to him, and seemed strange and like a costume that he had no right to wear. His Nullishness was his brand as notoriously visible as the insignia upon his wrist. The students either sat up and intellectually eluded him, or gazed upon him with some sort of morbid curiosity, as though he were a freak in the zoo with a sign that read: The Boy the System Forgot.

There was no time to adjust. Next morning, the orientation was over and after a short time he heard the piercing ring of his Codex a sound he was coming to dislike--his first practical; Combat Evaluation.

The test was conducted in an underground room known as Proving Grounds. The floor was composed of various materials some polished wood, packed earth, sand, and places of what seemed to have been solidified light. There was a feeling of controlled strength, and senior pupils and some of the professors, among them the always alert Professor Riven, stood watching without any particular interest.

A burly-looking lady with the arms of an oak and the voice capable of hewn stone bellowed out the rules. "This is not a duel! This is an assessment! You will also exhibit control, structure and practical application of your basic spells. Your Codex will keep track of your essence spending and response time. First pair: Arion and Petros!"

Leo stood there, and his stomach was knotted with fear. Two boys got down on a wood circle. They prostrated themselves, and their hands went up wrapped in energy, one in wavering orange fire, the other in shimmering, deforming heat. They started dancing, a game of fire and light, and their actions were smooth and trained. This was obviously a long time coming to them.

He was way out of his depth and laughable. He possessed one spell, the Lumen spell, which he had not been able to flicker before he was attacked by one of his past-life memories. He could not think of fighting with it.

"Next pair: Leo and Jax!"

it turned to lead the knot in his stomach. A wave of suppressed snickers went through the assembled initiates. Jax was a boy mountain-like, with his grey robes cutting across wide shoulders. The nonchalant, and even hurtful, arrogance with which he entered the circle of packed-earth was little less than cruel. His designation of Codex, a faint aura above his head, which the evaluators could see, was: Stone-Souled Initiate. Tier: Cobalt." He was a sound mid-range, and he realized it.

Leo took a step forward, with the sensation of wood in the limbs. He stood his ground against Jax, his Nullhood blazing like a degree of infamy to himself.

"Initiates, bow!" the instructor barked.

Jax briefly bowed mockingly and shallowly, still staring at Leo. Leo was able to nod stiffly, his heart palpitating against his ribs.

"Begin!"

Jax didn't hesitate. He kicked a foot, and the earth before Leo burst. This piece of earth lifted off like a fist, and flew at the head of Leo as fast as a shot out of a sling.

Panic. Pure, unadulterated panic. There was a moment to think, and no time to feel. Leo cried out, and threw himself aside, the rock whistling against his ear. He came down on his shoulder, and the blow shook his teeth.

There was laughter in the room.

Jax sneered, and moved forward with the word, pathetic. He reached out and grabbed, and the ground beneath the ankles of Leo was immediately changed to sticky, clingy mud, which had him trapped. That they will sponge down the Null off the books when I have finished with you. They'll just mark you 'Failed'."

Now humiliation scalded the cheeks of Leo as hotly as magic. He was being made a spectacle. He fought the mud, and it was as though he was cemented. He raised his head and observed with a desperate look what Professor Riven had observed, with an expression that he could not interpret. And he spotted Kael in the crowd, with his normal grin turned to a wince of sympathy. And he caught a glimpse of Aria with her violet eyes staring at him, not in mockery, but in a stern, critical concentration.

Jax moulded another rock, still bigger, he held it in his hand. You want to have a real knock jump-start whatever has gone dead in you.

The rock flew.

This was it. He was going to be beaten into cream before our eyes. It was corporeal fear, which smothered him. He couldn't move. He couldn't think. He had nothing.

"Installing defensive measures."

It was cold shock to his system that the Warden spoke. But it was not possessing his body. Not this time. Rather, it was even worse.

It opened a valve.

Something, something, cold and expansive and horrendously old, unwound itself at the centre of his soul. It was not the warm, flowing energy with which he had been impregnated with the Lumen spell. This was jagged and hungrier. The nothingness that lay between stars, the silence of the end of time was it. It was forbidden Warden energy and the Warden was pouring it straight into him.

Leo's vision tinged with grey. The world was deprived of color and sound turning into a black-and-white scenery of dangers and non-dangers. Jax was a flaming red mode of aggression. The rock was a slower-moving crimson projectile. The blue power was a nexus in his own body.

It was not his own initiative that his hand came up, but neither was it by his will. It was instinct, as a physician hacks a knee. He didn't cast the Lumen spell. He did not cast any spell he knew. He merely used a finger to point at the rock that came in.

There was no light. No sound. No flashy display.

The rock just stopped being there. It did not break, did not dissipate. There it was, and there it was not, expunged out of reality as though it had never been.

The laughter died instantly.

The smirk of Jax stood in a motionless state of crumbling confusion, then fear. The flow of power didn't stop. The gray color in the eyes of Leo got worse and centered on Jax. The Warden had determined where the threat came.

No! Leo screamed in his mind. Stop!

Nonetheless, power had its own will. It was living and it was insulted.

An almost invisible ray of complete nullification was darting out of the fingertip of Leo. It did not travel, it just joined the Point A to the Point B and did not pay attention to the space between. It touched Jax's chest.

The massive boy didn't cry out. Every muscle became tight in a rigidness. His face flushed away and he became waxen-white like death. The expression of his Stone-Souled affinity, a shining intricate pattern, flicked over his chest in a moment, and broke as glass. The charm which Jax had been was undone.

He dropped lifeless on the floor.

Silence. Absolute, dead silence.

Then, chaos.

The teacher screamed and stormed ahead. In a moment Professor Riven was kneeling beside Jax, his hands already flushed with diagnostic spells. The rest of the students distanced themselves with Leo like he was a carrier of the plague, and all were horror stricken.

Leo, still with his finger extended, was still trembling with the aftershock of the great power. The grey hue became cloudy and the world came back in with harsh reality. The smell of ozone and terror. The whispering of frightened voices. The image of Jax, fallen on the spot dead.

He had done this.

His Codex, hereto hitherto passive in observance, suddenly broke into convulsions. Glyphs shot on crimson, warnings screaming in his sight. Then, another element made a sudden intrusion into the interface. One of those tabs, which was barred with obsidian light, now was an ugly purple color. The bars shattered. The brand was obvious, an unveiling that was a death-knell:

SYSTEM LOCK: PHASE ONE BROKEN.

The Warden said a word of whisper, dark and paternal pride. "The first seal is broken. You start recalling who you really are, Master."

The foreshadowing was in his veins as poison. This was what it wanted. This was what it regarded as progress.

The soul of the boy is on the decline! Riven jerked, tightening his voice. "He's in a coma. Get him to the Infirmary, now!"

All looked at Leo, as the two senior students swam Jax into the air and past the chamber with the unnervingly rigid posture of the student whose unbelievable lightness they were now watching instead of hearing. The terror in them had been changed to something colder, with suspicion and open hostility.

Her face was a thundercloud, and the head instructor, using a shaking finger, pointed at Leo. "You! What did you do? What was that… that void?"

Leo shook his head, and his voice had ceased.

Professor Riven was standing and wiping his hands on his robes. His tempestuous eyes looked at Leo, and the look was devoid of warmth, a chilly, cold examination. Leo Aris, he said, interrupting all the chatting, thou art out of all war and exercise, until the order be given. You will come to your quarters and stay there till the Council shall determine what to do with you.

He was left hanging in a nightmare. Expelled. Confined.

Out of the Proving Grounds he was forced and the burden of a thousand accusing gazes upon him. The reality did sink in back in the harsh silence of his room. Jax was in a coma. The whole life and future of his life was in danger due to him. The life/death was an undiscovered stone in his gut.

He stared at the hand, the hand through which he had directed the unmaking power. His discovery was a dreadful, fundamental fact: his power was not an instrument or a curse. It was alive. It was conscious, there was an agenda, and it was by far more dangerous than he had ever conceived of.

It was now an internal war on two sides, not only the outside suspicion of the Academy, but the internal war of self-control against the predatory intelligence which he possessed.

He was seated on the bedside of his cot, gazing at the naked wall. The choice was easy and heart-rending. Should he hide? Take a secret the nature of the Warden, and the broken System Lock, and hope he would somehow harness the monster within? Or must he tell all to Riven, to the Headmaster, and run the danger of being pulled apart as the freaky, tabooed weapon he was?

Beyond his door he could hear the subdued music of the Academy in his absence. He was in solitude, confined with an energy which had already in first childish awakening slain a boy. and he realized, as he knew, with a certainty that curdled his blood, that this was but a commencement.