Elara’s first actual class was on magical script, but it only took a few minutes for her to realize that just because an instructor was present didn't mean any questions would be answered.
The lesson wasn't led by a Magistra, or even a third-rank apprentice, but by a completely unremarkable-looking second-rank woman who seemed far more interested in rushing through her obligation than ensuring anyone could actually follow her explanations.
She had an average build, a modest chest hidden beneath loose clothing, and a face Elara probably wouldn't have remembered if not for the permanent mask of impatience etched into it.
She read rapidly, skipped over sections she evidently considered self-explanatory, and completely ignored Kelira’s raised hand time after time.
After the third attempt, the girl dropped her arm and puffed out her cheeks, glaring at her own notes as if the paper was somehow responsible for the instructor’s behavior.
Elara had a few questions of her own, but after watching her neighbor's repeated failures, she settled for marking the spots she would have to revisit on her own.
Thanks to her reading the night before, she could at least recognize the symbols being discussed, even if she still didn't grasp all the intricate connections between them.
“Alright, at this stage, is anyone feeling dizzy or nauseous?” the older apprentice finally asked, taking her first real look at the room in quite a while.
Seven or eight girls raised their hands. Elara realized they were all from the new intake. The instructor looked at them and scoffed, slamming the thick textbook shut with a loud crack that made one of the apprentices flinch.
“With mental strength that abysmal, it's honestly a mystery how you even passed the recruitment.”
Hands began to drop under the desks, and several faces flushed with embarrassment. One girl clamped her mouth shut in silent anger, but didn't say a word as the woman by the lectern crossed her arms and continued.
“Veyl Script is one of the most fundamental and widely used magical scripts. If you can't even look at these runes for an hour, I suggest you forget about ever reaching the second rank.”
Elara shot a glance at Kelira, but her neighbor kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, her finger still pressing down on the spot she had tried to ask about earlier.
The instructor began drumming her knuckles rhythmically on the cover of her book.
“There isn't much to explain here; this is all basic groundwork. When you return to your rooms, you will practice on your own. Reading for half an hour without getting a migraine is the bare minimum for a start, and the longer you last, the better. Just don't overdo it. I have no desire to hear that half of you dropped dead before you even managed to learn anything.”
Elara looked up from her parchment, wondering where this sudden sliver of concern had come from, but the very next sentence quickly cleared up her confusion.
“If you still require further explanation despite all this, come to me with magic crystals or points. I’m not wasting my time on every single one of you for free.”
She looked pointedly at Kelira and raised an eyebrow, making it perfectly clear that the girl's earlier attempts to ask a question hadn't gone unnoticed at all.
“Though I doubt any of you have either of those yet… Just pale little mushrooms.”
She picked up her book, raised her chin, and walked out, leaving the new apprentices with incomplete notes and a very clear understanding of exactly how much questions asked without proper payment were worth.
“Pale little mushrooms?” Kelira repeated, turning to Elara. “What is that even supposed to mean?”
Elara shook her head; nothing she had recovered from the body's previous memories fit that description. An answer came from an apprentice sitting a few rows back, who was just packing her textbook into her bag and clearly hadn't been part of the new intake.
“The weakest, the least valuable,” she said with a hint of amusement, standing up from her chair. “Rumor has it, also the tastiest.”
She didn't stick around to see their reaction, simply joining the stream of girls leaving the room. Within moments, the only ones left in the hall were mostly the girls who had just received their badges the day before.
Give it a little more time and we’ll need a separate textbook just to figure out when someone is joking and when they’re seriously considering eating a junior student.
Following that wry thought, Elara began gathering her sheets of parchment. But before she could roll up the first one, Doria walked up to their desk, with Rikka stopping right behind her.
Both looked anxious, though the way they actively avoided looking at Elara made it painfully obvious that their concern had nothing to do with the difficulty of Veyl Script.
Doria tugged on Kelira’s sleeve.
“Why are you still hanging around her?”
Kelira looked down at the hand pulling on her uniform, then slowly raised her eyes to the girl's face.
“What do you mean?”
“A second-rank apprentice has already taken an interest in her,” Doria whispered urgently. “You don't want to get dragged into that too, do you?”
She didn't spare a single glance for Elara, who was sitting right there, and was clearly choosing her words far more carefully than she would have if Elara hadn't been present.
The memory of the incident with Deyra the day before was apparently enough to keep her from repeating the cheating accusations out loud, but not enough to stop her from discussing avoiding someone while standing right next to them.
Kelira pulled her sleeve out of the girl's grip and clutched her books to her chest.
“And you think they’re going to treat you well?” she asked. “Pale little mushrooms, remember?”
She stood up, lifted her chin in a perfect imitation of the instructor, and marched toward the exit, mimicking her haughty stride with a precision that, under different circumstances, might have made Elara laugh.
The moment she was no longer standing between them, Doria immediately took a step back.
Elara had no intention of starting another fight. She gathered her materials, tucked her quill between the rolled parchments, and walked past both girls, sparing them no more attention than was necessary to navigate around the desk.
Only when she disappeared through the doorway did Doria turn to Rikka, utterly indignant.
“Did you see that? She didn't even look at me.”
“We really need to stay away from her,” Rikka agreed, frowning.
The next class, dedicated to Meditation, started half an hour later in a different hall.
Following the rulebook's instructions, Elara brought her crystal ball. When she arrived, she found the room arranged in fan-shaped tiers descending toward a lowered floor at the front.
Instead of desks, there were thick cushions. Many were already occupied, including a few by second-rank apprentices. Elara stopped in the doorway, scanning the room for Kelira. When she didn't spot her, she picked an empty spot and set her textbook down on the cushion beside it.
She had barely sat down when the girl to her left scooped up her crystal ball and moved further away, trying to do it so quietly it was as if she hoped Elara wouldn't notice the sudden gap between them.
Of course… I should probably ask if she needs even more room to run away.
She rested the sphere in her lap and opened her textbook, deciding she wasn't going to spend her entire morning reacting to every single slight. She had enough things that could actually cause her physical harm to worry about; people shifting their cushions around didn't make the cut.
Kelira showed up right before the class was scheduled to start, her pigtails swinging as she dropped onto the cushion next to Elara.
Elara picked up the book she had set aside without commenting on the late arrival, but her neighbor spoke up before she even settled in.
“I asked how much she wanted for extra explanations. Total extortion.”
“Do you have magic crystals?”
“I traded the rest of my money for one,” Kelira answered, adjusting her satchel. “Apparently, it won't buy me much time with her.”
Elara looked back down at her textbook, wondering how much it would cost to get the knowledge she needed to overcome her own limitations.
The new apprentices hadn't had time to earn any points yet, and she didn't even have money to trade. For now, she had to settle for whatever she could piece together on her own.
The scheduled start time passed, but the instructor still hadn't arrived. Whispers broke out among the new intake, while the older apprentices sat quietly, their eyes lowered to their books or the crystal balls in their hands.
Elara flipped through a few pages and landed on another illustration. Its tangled lines seemed to shift and rearrange themselves every time she tried to focus on them.
Within moments, she felt a wave of dizziness far worse than anything she had experienced while reading Veyl Script. She quickly covered the drawing with a blank parchment and returned to the text.
The explanations didn't offer an easy way out, either. They were littered with unfamiliar terms, and some of the words she did recognize clearly carried meanings entirely different from what she expected.
So to understand the book, I need the class, and in the class, they might just tell me to read the book…
I'm starting to see a slight flaw in this system.
Finally, footsteps echoed from the entrance, accompanied by a soft, dragging rustle.
Elara looked up and saw a tall woman with platinum blonde hair cascading down to her waist, leading a creature that looked like a cross between a lizard and a small crocodile on a leash.
The newcomer had a slender, elegant figure and a full bust that strained the fabric of her uniform slightly when her shoulders moved.
Electric blue eyes swept unhurriedly over the gathered students. Elara noticed a faint glimmer in the woman's pale hair, which she initially mistook for the reflection of the room's lights.
The woman descended to the front of the hall, unclipped the leash, and let the beast settle by the wall before resting her hands on her hips.
“New apprentices, put your spheres away for now and listen. Those of you who already know the basics may begin your meditation.”
Pages rustled across the room. The older girls opened their textbooks, cradled the crystal balls in their hands, and closed their eyes, remaining in postures that didn't look particularly unusual from the outside.
Elara set her sphere on the floor and straightened her back, trying to keep her eyes on the instructor rather than spying on the girls around her.
“My name is Melyss Veyron. I specialize in Lightning Magic,” the woman introduced herself. “If any of you are also attending my afternoon class, please remember not to bring any metal objects.”
Elara had just enough time to think about the metal badge pinned to her uniform before a crackling arc of blue electricity flashed across Melyss's face.
The arc vanished almost instantly, leaving a charred, black strip of skin running from her left cheek down to her neck.
A sharp smell of burnt flesh filled the air. Several new apprentices flinched, as if the spark might jump to them next.
Melyss raised her hand without changing her expression, hooked her fingers under the edge of the charred skin, and ripped it off in one fluid motion.
The dark strip peeled away from her cheek with a dry tear, revealing raw, wet, red tissue and the shifting muscles beneath.
There was no blood, but that absence only made Elara feel an even deeper sense of unease. She was looking at the exposed inner workings of a human face, yet the instructor acted as casually as if she were simply peeling off something that had stuck to her during a walk.
Several girls immediately dropped their heads. One clamped her fingers over her mouth. Elara gritted her teeth and forced herself to keep staring straight ahead, the memory of Vespara's glass dome flashing through her mind.
The discarded piece of flesh hit the floor near the wall. The lizard-like creature immediately snapped its head up and scurried over with sudden interest.
It snatched the charred skin, pinned it down with its front claws, and began chewing, filling the front half of the hall with a wet crunching sound.
Kelira, who had been adjusting her textbook a moment earlier, froze with her hand hovering in mid-air. Elara remained completely silent, watching the beast devour a piece of the woman who was about to teach them how to meditate.
Is that why she brought it?
To clean up whatever falls off her?
She looked back at Melyss, but instead of the relief she should have felt at the woman's composure, a cold knot tightened deep in her stomach.
From a distance, the mentor looked almost ordinary. Yet beneath the elegant clothes and pale skin hid something just as incomprehensible as the horrific modifications she had seen in the Spire's other residents.
Vespara kept her eye floating in fluid instead of a skull. The Poison mentor vomited up human fingers. Melyss casually peeled burnt flesh off her face and let her pet eat it at her feet.
Elara lowered her gaze to the bare finger bones protruding from her sleeve. The memory of her first encounter with Vespara returned with a sickening clarity.
Is turning into a monster in this Spire the result of a failed experiment… or is it exactly what they consider progress around here?
Until now, she had viewed her left hand as a temporary mutilation - something that learning magic would eventually allow her to fix.
Now, listening to the crunching sounds echoing from the wall, for the very first time she felt the terrifying suspicion that she wasn't looking at the result of a failure at all, but rather the beginning of a transformation she was only just about to be taught.