Before the enormous door had slowly swung open in full, the sharp sound of heel hitting the wooden floor silenced the quiet murmurs. When my second step onto the landing echoed through the circular hall, the sea of students stilled. My hair flowed in the draft that ascended the stairs from the tall window by the lecturer’s stage. My third step followed, the clack against the stairs cutting through the silence for a moment.
The head of the first human I passed was bowed, the breath held in the lungs, as I moved down the next step toward the next tier.
As I approached the second row, someone in a needlessly traditional robe in deep blue steered a bag out of the way. The shoe was scuffed from years of use.
Disgraceful.
I let my gaze wander across the seats and took my time to consider my seat for this lecture in Advanced Principles of Causation Analytics. The sun would set during the lecture and the light slowly moved through the hall, illuminating only a section of the seats. It fell upon the wooden benches at a lower angle with every held breath of the class. I calculated which seats I would benefit from using during this session and, after internal deliberation, decided upon which seat I fancied.
As I descended the stairs about two-thirds down, I studied the tapestries that hung at the back of the stage. They shimmered faintly in the glow that fell upon them. Each of them sported the coat of arms of Featherweight Academy of Phenomenon, a round shield with a rich plum colour as its base, and a silver feather with ancient runes beneath it. Every time I saw it, my eyes would inevitably fall on the banner with the symbol of the Department of Theoretical Phenomena lower down and the nonsense that was alleged to be a representation of an ancient spell circle.
No one dared to move as my black coat fluttered behind me with every step closer to the tier I had decided upon. Their eyes were on me when I had passed them, and the exhales released when they saw I would not turn around.
Once I stopped, the steps still bounced softly off the stone walls. I turned to look at the seat I had chosen.
My eyes landed on the neatly worn navy shirt of a human.
What a bother.
I raised my eyes slowly, from the hem to the sleeve to the shoulder. The jaw was prominent, the cheekbones high. Brown eyes stared back at me. I narrowed my eyes at the unpleasant stench of burning wet wood that was reaching my nose.
I meant to turn away when the vaguely familiar human stood up.
“I was, uh, I believe I am in the wrong lecture hall, I think. Theoretical Black Magic, was it? Hahahah! Look at silly me! I really got my classes messed up today. I do not even study magic!”
I looked up at this rash human’s face.
The laugh echoed emptily in the silence, as if the lecture hall itself was laughing at this creature. It was clear that the hundreds of students had their attention focused on what was occurring, although none of them interfered with the matter.
I merely stepped aside, allowing the tall human to hurry out of the hall, needlessly opening up the seat I had liked to use, but had no true need for. I gave the back clad in blue a perfunctory glance.
The steps distanced themselves from me as I removed my knapsack from my back and sat down.
I did not find the many years of this sort of treatment from my supposed peers unpleasant. I would even have rather claimed that I was quite privileged as there were only benefits involved when I was left alone in this manner.
There were many reasons as to why they may have chosen to act this way towards my person. One’s initial thought would naturally be my nature, or potentially what my presentation was, but this hardly could matter less to me.
In fact, as long as it caused me no grief, I could not care any less what benefitted me so. Whether they feared me or favoured me was none of my concern.
With great care did I place my luggage on the angled wooden surface of the desk before I slotted myself in onto the bench of their section of the row, ensuring the bag and its contents would not fall onto the floor as I focussed on my preparations for the four-hour lecture about the dissection of repercussions of a spell and its moral implications. I removed my coat, folding it, and put it onto the empty shelf below the writing surface and book stand. I opened my knapsack and took out my phone, a black hardcover leather notebook, my laptop and finally the two books that were relevant to the topic of the day’s lecture.
Only once this much had been prepared could I finally hang my knapsack on the side and sit down proper.
I knew I stood out among the sea of other students, dressed in black as I was. On this particular day, I had chosen an ink black shirt and a void black waistcoat and pant combination. I looked excellent in this sort of colour combination, especially with the snow silver buttons and tie pin I wore. It brought out my icy complexion and red eyes perfectly. I had received marvellous features from my parents that made me especially suited for all the potential shades of black.
Featherweight Academy had since long adopted the permission of use of modern garments, though at the Academy it was still preferred to see its student body in the traditional colours that showed what level of education one was pursuing. Some even opted for the traditional robe, and this was, in fact, most encouraged by the educators themselves.
Thus, someone studying for a Novice degree, such as myself, traditionally, ought not to have worn the colour black but a shade of deep blue, as a reflection of the sea of knowledge that we had just stepped into.
I found that humans had quite ridiculous ideas about minor matters such as this.
My kin, however, was expected to wear black, and so I opted out of a human tradition for a completely different tradition that I was not quite fond of either due to certain reasons that were, in the overall scheme of the matter, irrelevant.
Such is irony.
I opened my laptop and noted the power was running low. The lecture hall was too old to have any power outlets to charge the power stone of it.
I felt irritation prick my heart.
If one were to say I had any sort of favourite pastime activity, sitting four hours through a lecture taking notes by hand was certainly not my what I would choose. As electricity was not quite my element, and no human with any sense would choose a purely theoretical subject, such as Black Magic, as their field of study were they to know magic, I had little choice but accept that there was naught I could do about the matter at this time. I ought to have checked in advance to ensure I had charged the power stone in the past few days.
Using this particular lecture hall was, however, reasonable considering the subject.
I closed the laptop and put it away, opening my books. I had only recently reached the advanced level on my Novice degree, meaning we only handle advanced fundamental theory of Black Magic, and this class I had an evening lecture on was called Advanced Principles. Ironic, as someone pursuing a Novice degree, I still had to study Intermediate to apply for Advance, and eventually Master.
Indeed, I had plans to get the highest academic degree in Black Magic.
Thankfully, “advanced” principles were not the only thing I was studying.
I picked up the textbook on Ancient Runes and Symbols: Their Connection to the Abstract Realm Now and Then, and, crossing my legs at the thigh, I began reading the assigned readings from the class I had had earlier in the day.
The lecture hall was comfortably silent, and I chose not to perceive the looks from my fellow students.
Who would put any weight on what the professor might say? I shall simply record the class today.
My professor arrived, and I only looked up long enough to start the recording on my phone and place it as visible as I could, then tuned out the lecture.
The sharp noise brought me out of my delightful session of reading by inducing a twitch in my muscles. The atmosphere shifted. I could tell, without looking, I was not the only one who rudely received this kind of interruption to the lecture. A shift of weight by the lecturer made the stage below him creak, as if to purposefully interrupt the class further.
There was yet another beep from directly before me. My eyes rose from the text. The only thing in front of me that could beep in this manner was my own phone. As I looked upon it, the screen flashed and a third beep resounded sharply through the hall.
Unbothered by the looks received over this rather minor event, I closed my book and put it onto my lap. I picked up the device and noted it was the alarm I had set up previously.
At the time, it had merely been a safeguard, but curiously, it had activated at this time.
I dismissed the notification and muted the sound temporarily before I stood with phone and book in hand. Under the inquisitive gazes of the entire class and the professor, I considerably gathered my belongings and put on my outer robe.
“It would seem I am rather unwell,” I prudently announced. “I will take this opportunity to retire early. May the professor show goodwill enough not to fault me for my understandable absence.”
The professor, holding a book in one hand and a large piece of chalk in the other, nodded, his long silver hair and floor-length cloak in a deep plum both swayed from this motion, as if the draft had a say in this any more than the lecturer. Before I looked away from his person, he was already looking toward the podium where he kept a folder. I was already moving out of my seat when the sound of the elderly human clearing his voice carried over. He then, with a voice tinged with dubious discomfort, vaguely added, “Your leave is granted, honoured student. Do feel better swiftly.”
I moved away from the seat without a single word more.
The lecture hall was silent as the heels of my shoes clacked against the creaking wood of several centuries.
The giant door to the hall squeaked and creaked and wailed as I pulled it open. I stepped out onto the stone floor of the hallway, the air of the mid-September eve coming in from somewhere. Equally vehemently as it had opened, the door closed with a lot of graceless noise.
The hallways were laid empty; the students had either returned to their residences or were in lengthier final lectures of the day. Each of my steps echoed against the stone floors as I moved towards the residential housing. I opened the mobile phone application for the alarm and tapped on the glowing report symbol on the screen for additional information. The alarm settled down, and, holding the phone horizontally, an image in red spun above it.
It was a perfectly circular spell array I had created not that long ago. It had a singular purpose attached to it: find a person with whom I had a certain affinity.
The spell circle was carefully crafted; the runes, demonic incantations, circular diagram all meticulously calculated. It was the most fine-tuned engineering I had attempted to date, albeit was not running a particularly advanced engine nor an exceptionally detailed core structure.
I added a sigil onto the glowing illusion, making the array spin before the shadow of another appeared above it, barely visible.
“Oh?”
From the looks of it, my spell had unexpectedly, and most intriguingly, connected to a different circle. And not just any kind of, either — a summoning array.
Fascinating.
At the scale shown, I could discern no details of import. The summoning circle was, however, hardly to brag about. This much could be understood from the information received. Additionally, it had yet to be activated, but that was not a major concern to my person.
I tried to determine how to best utilise such an opportunity.
I could naturally merely observe, but my opportunity may be lost. And with this being rare chance of seeing this kind of array, I couldn’t treat this as something minor.
Therefore, I ought to make the most of it.
To investigate further, I needed to first return to my humble abode.
I hastened my pace, and the hallway filled with the echoes of my step bouncing between the stone floor and glass windows, breaking the silence with clack, clack, clack. My coat fluttered behind me in the draft.
Most of Featherweight Academy is connected in full. As such, I didn’t need to exit into the garden to enter the student residence building. I walked past the floor to ceiling windows, that had been placed in between formerly open columns, the ground several metres below, while the sun disappearing below the horizon casting the corridor into a dim light while the sconce crystals slowly lit up in the shade.
It was what Sunna, my eldest sister, would have considered a beautiful view, but my mind was focussed on its goal and little else.
The student residence I lived in was the largest on campus and found in the most out-of-the-way location, similar to how the town of Hearthraven had some districts that were difficult to access from the Academy if one did not know the exact way. A corridor built in recent years connected the academic building, built in tree and stone centuries ago, to the far more contemporary stone and glass housing.
The sliding doors in glass opened with a familiar jingle as I approached the twenty-floor-tall structure, and I glanced at the doorkeeper booth to find it unoccupied.
What negligence.
While it hardly mattered to my particular person, without a keeper at the door, there was ever the hazard of inappropriate parties entering uninvited. I found my way to the nearest elevator. The ascent was smooth, with only a couple of interruptions; apparently, they merely wished for the elevator door to open before they opted to walk down the stairs instead.
Reaching my floor, I walked up to the room with the number 1606F on its sign and unlocked the door.
I dropped my knapsack on a chair, which I kept by the entrance, and stepped out of my shoes while I pulled off my robe. I tossed the garment to the side. I went to the study, and from a bookcase on the long wall, I grabbed a few spell array engineering books, while I got a couple of books of research notes from the desk drawer. I flipped through the notes quickly before I decided this was enough.
Shoes back on, coat thrown over my arm, I unlocked my phone and looked for the correct spell circle in the application.
I found the one I was looking for, placed the phone horizontally on the books I held and pinched the spell circle hovering above the screen.
With a flick of my wrist, it was large enough to cover half of the door to my room, faintly glowing purple.
I opened the door and found myself not in the hallway of the dorms with crystal lights, but in a dark stone corridor dimly lit by candles.
With intent, I closed the door, and the portal faded away behind me.
Down this corridor was a library and within that library, a room that was almost entirely empty, aside from a board with exact calculations to one side and a desk with a collection of measurement tools on it to the opposite wall. A large spell circle decorated the far end of the space.
The floor was littered by scrap paper and a few corpses of pens that had since long lost their purpose.
A simple chamber, undoubtedly, but it was all I called for.
I put my belongings aside and used my phone to locate the alarm again. I was unconcerned about my own array, but rather found the awful-looking thing it resonated with intriguing. I sent the image of it to the board to properly study it in greater resolution. It could be asserted that it was not circular, and I could tell it was still in the process of being made. It appeared to be replicated in a hurry.
Such a dreadful summoner.
I grabbed a pen and circled an area which looked rather unacceptable. “This is incorrect. Furthermore, it’s outdated.”
Even an offspring with no sensibilities would have better sense than to use such outdated practice in a spell array. It couldn’t have been used frequently for several centuries, albeit the geometric shapes that it likely ought to have been, had it not been so skewed, were common.
I tried to find the core and the engine by looking at the script, but felt mildly troubled. “This makes no sense. Who even uses horrendous additions of pig Latin anymore? What happened to the Greek alphabet or Hieroglyphs? Phoenician script is also a fine choice. Although any will do, but really, that’s not Latin.”
I paused and squinted.
“Is that a rune? What rune?”
I tried to write it on the side to figure out which script it was and what it was used for.
An array such as this wouldn’t have passed even the classes of the youngest of offspring. Spell circles needed to be rather exact to be safe to use for the majority, as the abstract and physical realms became interconnected through them, but that was hardly important. To be quite honest, what happened to the summoner was none of my concern. I just made the corrections and annotations out of boredom.
I needed to do something to kill the time it took for this newling to complete the absolute tragedy of a circle that shouldn’t have been functional in the first place.
I grew tired of grading after a while, and commenced a mission to tidy the room. I found it in me to make further corrections, before I disposed of the pens. I added additional annotations, only to then begin organising the books I brought along to decide which one would be most suitable at the top of my minimal pile of literature.
Once the space was immaculate, I took notes of what the engineering books claimed, and what I had jotted down in previous notes.
It became clear that the summoning array called upon a “minor demon” whereas my person evidently would be considered a “major demon”.However, young as I was, I permitted my being to be regarded rather minor for this case of summoning in particular. Rarely has any sapient individual been known to have been summoned in at least two centuries, and even in those recent instances, the evidence is dubious at best. And yet, now I had a wonderful opportunity for personal observation of the occurrence. In fact, not just the circumstance to be “summoned”, but to be the summoner proper as well.
This was the first requirement for there to be someone to heed the call. The second requirement was “connection”.
I needed not be a prodigy of any kind to figure out that because I already had an activated array seeking someone to use for my own purposes, this second array made use of pre-existing affinity to create a connection between the caller and the called. Simply put, the core of my spell circle amplified the other one’s properties, causing it to function in a relatively stable manner despite the poor execution and build of its core, engine and anchor points.
The question, however, remained to be about why my spell circle connected to this summoner, whose skills at best could be described as unfortunate.
I determined I would have to find that out later. For now, looking at the questionable image on my board, it appeared that the summoning array ought to be nearly done, albeit a difficult task to be certain. Nonetheless, to me it meant the activation procedure would commence shortly.
I couldn’t particularly perceive the true array itself quite yet, but a notably light glow appeared at my feet, suggesting that its magic was reaching my person.
The activation of a summoning circle would use an immense amount of energy to connect between locations and naturally it would under common circumstances take some time.
These were not common circumstances.
The area of the array eventually began shining a pure white. It then flickered, sputtered, attempted to establish stability. It proved that the summoning couldn’t manage this on its own. The summoner’s circle was wholly too chaotic. Mayhap the summoner too was all too weak.
With little choice, I put my hand against the spell circle I had on the wall, activating it into a bright red with no effort necessary. Removing my hand, there was a red hand print left. I took a handkerchief and wiped the blood traces off the palm of my hand.
I couldn’t help that my body didn’t reabsorb my blood, however inconvenient it was for my own self.
I went to get my robe, and put it on, looking at the blood-red light of my spell circle on the wall and the glowing ember colour at my feet.
There was a particularly gentle tug. Barely.
It should have felt like a pull, but with such a weak summoning spell combined with the formidable spell circle, that tug was all I’d get.
I walked at a steady step toward the wall with the spell circle. I reached out, tentatively, as I approached it, seeing more than feeling my fingers disappear into the stone wall. Perhaps I should have reassessed, but at the time I didn’t even pause for a single beat, continuing my steps while watching my arm disappear. It felt no different from my regular movement through void.
With this spell supporting the summoning itself, I had temporarily turned it into a portal. It wouldn’t be that for long, though.
Finally standing before it, I halted my step and lowered my arm. My chest tingled. I could hear distant rumbling and cracking. Vibrations from the other location spilled through, making the floor quiver.
With an exhale, I stepped into the portal and, after several more steps than ought to have been necessary, I found myself in what appeared to be a very small lecture hall.
The air here felt different, unusual, as if the energies did not align right, much like the desks in the hall being scattered irregularly. The scents I was quite used to lacked traces of people in an expected capacity. The world was not scentless, but it did appear quite lacking parties with a greater amount of smell.
Right in front of me was a human with light brown hair who looked to his side, his glasses visibly askew. From my vantage point, I could tell his nose was that of an elegant straight line and his features were not clearly of any specific designation — like an elegant alpha without the air of oppression, but with the potential of charming confidence. Akin to a beta who did not plausibly blend into the general populace.
The room was lit up by lightning, green and purple mixing to give the young man an odd hue to him.
He turned, and blue eyes collided with my gaze.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!”
I flinched.
This I could hardly be blamed for. The scream would have startled anyone.
Moreover, he stumbled backward, the desks behind him clattering and screeching against the floor. I looked him up and down and settled to look at his eyes.
I was awfully displeased with this newling.
“How boorishly unpleasant.”
I approached him and squatted in front of the seated mess on the floor. I took in the subtly elegant features, mulled it over.
If my assessment was accurate, and I was fully aware that it naturally was, this thing was an alpha. Given this, his appearance was rather acceptable. He could do with not wearing such baggy bottoms, but that would not be a problem that I could not settle with ease, whether he preferred me to or not.
I decided, “You are acceptable enough.”
Barely.
The human looked at me with an uncomprehensive expression, then abruptly inhaled shakily. With a terrible stutter, he asked me, “Who, wh-who, who are you?”
This amused me. I stood up and offered him an answer.
“I go by the name of Orion Blackwood.”
Gears must have been turning in his head as he processed the situation. I could see as much. He did not seem too intelligent. That, too, was hardly an issue.
With hands behind my back with a peculiar sensation of bubbling in my chest, I bent at the waist to shorten the distance between him and me.
“I am the demon you…”
I hesitated.
Thinking about it, the human had done an awful job with the spell circle. He also had the nerve to shout at the summoned creature. He couldn’t be called a summoner anymore than I could be called a Celestial.
In the end, I reluctantly finished the sentence: “…summoned.”
Author’s Note
This took me longer to post than i anticipated, but here he is: Orion!