The investigation for the demonic student had only grown more intense over the past month since it began. At this point, nearly every student in the academy had been interrogated to no avail. Desperation slipped into the cracks of the investigation, and the administration had decided to begin limiting privileges of students to indirectly encourage the students themselves to take part. With the suspension of clubs and competitions, the student body was furious.
The most passionate students took to establishing an unofficial inquisition to seek out the student. An act that was almost certainly intentional with the administration's actions. I didn’t give a single shit about the investigation, but it still found ways to sink its hooks into me. The suspension of the clubs meant Florimancy was completely out of the question. Not that I had the bravery to go without Vyra anyway. But it quashed the possibility of working up to it. The growing paranoia of my room being searched weighed over me like an omen.
I tried to go as long as I could without being Ester in my own room, but I would usually cave once every few days when I found myself ready to break. It wasn’t a healthy routine to build the pressure until cracks began to form, but I felt I had no other options. The distinct lack of Vyra had changed everything for me at Varenthell.
I started to question what I was doing here in the first place. Was it my passion for learning that drove me here? Perhaps partly, I’d always been close to, if not top of my class ever since I was younger. But even that had its roots with my parents. They were distant people, but when I achieved the highest grades in my class when I was 8, they took me out for a special dinner. I talked to my parents, and they asked me all kind of questions about school, and what I wanted to be when I got older. The next of course, things went back to normal. They were too busy, what with being royals and all. With the amount of time they spent out of the house, you’d begin to question if it even counted as their home.
But I realized from that point on that if I managed to be the best, I would get that very same dinner. It was my favorite day when it came around twice a year. It stopped when I turned 18, but I guess old habits die hard. I still reflexively aim for the top spot, just for the chance to have one more dinner with them. I opted for Varenthell academy because it was the most prestigious academy in Kistram. What other choice did I have if I wanted to be the best?
Every day that I sat alone in my room, I did so with the lights off, as if I could pretend I lacked a corporeal form. It wasn’t flawless, but more than a few times it kept me from contemplating the unwelcome features I had. I had just finished reading a letter from my parents. It was technically a response to my own letter I had sent out week ago trying to check up on the two of them. I was disappointed and unsurprised to learn that they had responded with what looked to be an official and automatic response asking for any policy questions to instead be sent to a different address. Figures. Then again, I had been falling behind in classes over the past month, so they were most likely not willing to speak with me because I had failed to meet their standards. That makes sense.
Today was one of the days that I felt the cracks build. I could barely keep myself together from curling into a tight human sized ball and crying myself to sleep like it was a sport. A sport that would have trouble making it into the mainstream for a variety of reasons.
I pulled out my uniform from underneath my bed and got myself dressed to lift the crushing weight of Xavier off of my chest. Doing my own makeup had become natural at this point, and though it was simple, I smiled at the fact that I could now do it faster than Vyra had done it the first time.
The Vyra shaped hole during the past month was most present when I was Ester. I had no one to share my joy with. So I would simply sit at my desk and do my classwork as Ester. After all, what else was there to do?
Knock knock
“Xavier, open up! The inquisition is doing searches of the dorms in this wing.”
The blood drained from my face and I froze in place, a little train of logic rolling on a track through my body to tell me to do something, anything! But no muscles would move. Luckily, I got the confidence to speak, and did my best to rebuff the students.
“Fuck off. You’ve got no right to search my room, your inquisition doesn’t even exist on paper.”
“Ooo, here that, lads? Xav’s pushin’ back. Now why would he do that if he didn’t have anything to hide?”
“Is that seriously your argument? A logical fallacy to pry into private bedrooms lest I become a suspect on your wild goose chase?”
“Well if you’re gonna be a cunt about it, we’ll let ourselves in.”
No. Nonononono. I scrambled towards my bathroom as my bedroom door flung open, the wood by the handle splintering from the force of whatever spell had pushed it open. The second I made it to the bathroom, I slammed the door shut. Too late it seemed, when I heard laughing from outside the door.
“Oh my Gods! Xavier’s a prissy little pansy!”
“Did you see the skirt he was wearing?”
“I think we interrupted his dress up time, lads.”
I had stopped listening after that point. My ears throbbed with the rapid beating of my heart. The rhythmic thrumming captured my senses, everything had been consumed with the thump, thump, thump, thump.
I could have been sitting in my bathroom for hours. All sense of time had been lost in my fervor. Every part of my body shook, like emotions were warring inside of me for each limb. Would sadness win the battle for my neck and tightened my throat? Would embarrassment conquer my legs and force them to give out in shame? Whatever it was, I couldn’t bear it anymore. The boys saw through the illusion. How could I possibly believe it any longer.
With a seething anger tied together with a hollow sadness, I opened the door to my bedroom to find the boys had long gone. I raced over to my school supplies to pull out my polished silver scissors. I could barely see where I was cutting as I sliced into the clothing I wore. I had accidentally stabbed myself more than a few times, even drawing blood, as I desperately snipped the clothes off of my body, tearing them further with my hands if I could. It was a furious whirlwind of pain, and one that left me weeping naked into my floor as scraps of clothing blanketed the floor like winter’s first snow had descended from my ceiling.
I didn’t stop there. I needed Ester gone. She would only cause me more pain. An illusion of something I could never have was just a monument to my suffering. She will die tonight. I moved to my bathroom, sitting myself in an empty, cold, bathtub. With shaking hands and irritated red eyes, I began to cut away at my hair, snipping it piece by piece until I was left with a terribly trimmed head of hair that was so short it would only ever be identified as masculine.
I never left the tub, crying until I had passed out from exhaustion inside the tub.
It must have been exhausting, I was murdering a woman tonight, after all.
Ow. OW! I shot up with a yelp as a sharp pain blossomed from the top of my head down into the rest of my body.
“Phern, love, I’m starting to think I should take over carrying him. That’s the 4th time his head has hit the ground.”
“No no, its okay! I figured it out! I think it’s a grip thing, lemme just-”
“OW!” The pain cracked like an egg over my head, dripping down into the rest of my body with an aching soreness.
“Oh shit, he’s awake.”
“Oh gosh, that’s great! I don’t have to carry him anymore!” Phern sighed with a relief that would imply she’d been carrying me for some time.
Phern dropped me to the ground as my head hit the ground for a third time in ten seconds. The pain that resonated through me like a dinner bell was becoming uncomfortably familiar. Three dates with the head pain, and we hadn’t even exchanged names!
“Are you all trying to kill me again?! My head is fucking killing me.” I looked at the four figures standing over me with a venomous glare. They exchanged coy glances and nervous smiles to each other as if they were evaluating who to pin the blame on precisely. Not a good sign, had they all been handling me so carelessly?!
Hold on. Four figures? I noticed Sebil had a person thrown over his shoulder. It was the male Marked with the twin cornrows. The one who killed me! He was tied up in a frankly excessive amount of rope, especially considering his hands were latched together with gaudily detailed silver cuffs already.
“Why is he still alive?” A squirming hatred was slithering up my spine and into my head, telling me the man who killed me would make an excellent meal. Perhaps that was why they kept him with us? I wouldn’t complain about a fresh meal on the road.
“Ah, ah, no. Put the fangs away, bandit. Not food.” I blinked in confusion as Cecelia reprimanded me for my gluttonous thoughts. How did she know? I had my fangs out?
Sure enough, I did. Once I stopped thinking about feasting on the Marked, my teeth flattened to a human form once more. How many of my changes were becoming subconscious?
“I wasn’t gonna eat him! I-I just considered the possibility, that’s all.”
“We kept him for a reason. The Empire deployed the Marked to retrieve you. Wouldn’t you like to know why?” Cecelia asked me as she reached a hand out towards me to pull me off of the ground.
She was right, despite my hatred of my murderer, finding out why the Empire was so invested in the appearance of a nobody like myself becoming a Deathless would be great to know.
“Fine. But if he outstays his welcome, I’m getting revenge for the intense case of heartburn he gave me.” I took Cecelia’s hand and allowed her to help me back to my feet. She visibly winced as she pulled me up, and I noticed a gaping hole in the stomach of her armor with bandages wrapped around the wound underneath. Blood stained the spot where the hole in the armor was.
“Are you okay? What happened to you?”
“Cornrows there happened. We had a little rematch while you had your beauty sleep. He’s a tricky son of a bitch. I’m just lucky Sebil and Phern got to me in time.”
“Wasn’t luck, love. The signal you sent to Phern was a smart move.” Sebil gave a heartfelt smile towards Cecelia.
Seems a lot had happened while I was dead.
“S-sorry that I went and died on you. I was so focused on eating I stopped paying attention to my senses.”
Cecelia just stared at me in response. I started to wonder if I had said something wrong, before I noticed that she almost looked sad at what I said.
“Hey, cut the apology. I don’t want to hear you apologize for dying. That’s stupid. Let’s just get back to the road, we’re almost to Thrum.” Cecelia didn’t seem to have much patience for my apologies whenever I gave them. Weren’t people supposed to be happy when you apologized to them?
“Oh! Oh! I got it!!! We could be ‘The Lucky Stars’! Y’know, because we keep barely making it out of every situation that we’re in!”
Lucky? Given my circumstances, I didn’t feel like luck had a lot of nice things to say to me.
“Maybe we keep brainstorming?” I sheepishly responded to Phern, hoping that she wouldn’t take my rejection too hard.
“Okie! But we are going to have a group name soon, if my name isn’t Gronk Stumperdy!”
“...is that your name?” I questioned.
“Nope! That’s the point of the saying, silly!”
“That’s not the saying, though. It’s ‘or my name isn’t’, not ‘if my name isn’t’.”
“But Gronk isn’t my name!”
“I know! I’m saying- you know what, I’ll explain it later. The amount of head trauma you all gave me while I was dead must be messing with me.”
Phern looked to Cecelia with confusion. “You know my name isn’t Gronk Stumperdy, right?”
“Yes, Phern. I’m aware.” Cecelia said with a light smile, like she had been through this song and dance a number of times before.
Our journey to Thrum was blissfully short. I was happy to see the signs of civilization up ahead as we cleared out of the large forest entirely. Something about the presence of other people gave me the hope that things might return to normalcy. Then again, with the people I was travelling with, I could always be surprised. Thrum was much smaller than Multon, existing as exactly what it was meant to be, a small trading hub that connected a number of different towns to Multon, and vice versa.
“Any ideas how we walk a bleeding, bound Marked into the town, loves?” Sebil had opted to continue carrying the man on his shoulder the entire walk, something which I was very grateful for.
I had been dreading this. Occasionally, on the walk here I thought about how we might sneak the Marked into the town with us, but I think a part of me had just hoped the rest had already worked it out while I was dead. It didn’t appear so.
“Maybe we play it like we found him like this and we’re taking him to Thrum for help?” Cecelia suggested, letting out a sigh and then butchering her own idea moments later. “Once he wakes up though, that plan is out of the question.”
“Why don’t you just use the disguises, Phern?” I asked the eccentric woman, wondering why that hadn’t already been done.
“It requires consent to function, I couldn’t do it on someone unconscious, or even when he woke up!” Phern huffed in frustration.
Unfortunate. From what I had learned of disguise spells in the academy, consent was never a necessary part of the equation. If someone was disguised against their will, dispelling it was a trivial act. The Axis Anonimi spell would sometimes be used to prank students that had fallen asleep in the study halls. That spell would be perfect for this situation, shame I couldn’t do it myself due to my dormancy.
Wait. I wasn’t dormant anymore!
“I might have a plan!” I exclaimed with excitement, grabbing the attention of everyone in our group to look at me, a wild smile spread across my face.
“Haven’t seen you look so excited about something other than eating people, bandit. I thought I already told you we’re not letting you eat the Marked yet.”
“No, it’s not that. I’ve got a spell that can disguise him. We can just make him look like some kind of bandit that we’re bringing in for a bounty.”
“Ooooo!! Teeth is gonna cast a spell!!!” Phern jumped up and down like her childhood hero had just come to congratulate her for her actions. I was more occupied with the debut of a new nickname. Teeth? She had been calling me Xav before. What had changed since I was unconscious?
“Only one problem.”
“Don’t like the sound of that, love.”
“I’ve never cast a spell before.”
The three of them just stared at me.
Casting a spell couldn't be that hard, right? I’d learn the concepts in the academy, all that required was to get a feel for the actual sensations, right? You could just explain what to do, right Lilith?
‘The little morsel is willing to speak to me when he wants something, hm? Don’t think I haven’t noticed your lack of communication.’
Don’t think I hadn’t noticed yours.
‘You wanted to be human, yes? Last time I checked, humans did not wish to speak to Deathless.’
Oh Gods is this how it’s going to be? We’re stuck together regardless of our opinions on one another, we might as well work together so that I can get back into my own body and you can keep this one.
‘How sweet. Do you not think the administration that puts you back into your own body would kill me the second you were out? You would get your happy ending, human, but I will experience a fate worse than death in that academy.’
Her words gave me pause. If the administration transposed my soul back into my body, leaving Lilith in this one, it was highly unlikely they would just let her leave.
‘You’d never thought it through had you? It seems you’ve retained the selfish nature of humans just fine.’
I’m not selfish! I just hadn’t thought about the plan enough, that’s all.
‘Please. All you do is think. If you hadn’t considered it, it’s because you didn’t want to.’
Gods you’re so full of yourself! I could have been distracted for any other reasons aside from hating you!
‘Like what? You’re a nobody. What could you possibly have been so absorbed in that you hadn’t considered your own plan to get yourself back to your old boring life in that insufferable academy. If you want your future back, it should be the only thing on your mind!’
I DON’T WANT MY FUTURE BACK!
“Woah, bandit!” I felt Cecelia’s arms wrapped around me, one slipping under my left arm and the other wrapping around my back. I had been so absorbed in my conversation with Lilith, I hadn’t realized I was falling over. Her blue eyes locked with my red eyes. Vyra. No, Cecelia. “Are you okay? You just went silent for a minute there, started crying, and then collapsed. C-can you hear me?”
I had been crying? “I can hear you. Sorry for falling.”
“What? Why the fuck are you apologizing again? Is something happening?”
‘What do you mean, human.’
I haven’t been giving much thought to getting back to my body because I have nothing to go back to. You were right, Lilith. I was a nobody. I was planning on wading through life as a husk until I died. Now I can’t even do that. I don’t know what to do anymore! Is that what you wanted to hear, Lilith?
‘I-I, that wasn’t what I wanted, fledgling. I thought you were bringing me to my death in Varenthell. You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?’
No. I told people we were going to Varenthell because it’s all I’ve ever known.
‘I see.’
It seemed neither of us knew what to say to that. What had started as an argument fueled by hate was now cold embers of two helpless souls. Perhaps we had more in common with each other than we thought. Our mental silence gave me the chance to finally respond to Cecelia.
“I’m okay. Something about the curse must have hit me.” I gave a weak smile towards Cecelia, but out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Pherns expression went from one of concern to one of shock. Had she noticed something?
‘I’ll teach you how to cast a spell in exchange for my… outburst towards you. I will not offer an apology, however.’
I’ll take it. Time to cast my first spell.