Cane woke to a sound he couldn’t place.
It was a low, rhythmic murmur, a steady cadence of whispered words that felt entirely wrong for the pre-dawn quiet. He lay still, blinking at the grey wash of light on the ceiling for a full ten seconds before his sleep-addled brain placed it. It was Kai’s voice. He wasn’t just talking to himself; he was reciting something, a quiet, repetitive chant that was clearly never meant to wake anyone up.
Cane propped himself up on one elbow, the bed groaning under his weight. Between their beds, Kai knelt on the cold stone floor. His eyes were closed, his hands pressed together in front of his chest. He swayed, a minute, metronomic motion, forward and back in time with the quiet sounds leaving his lips. For a solid few seconds, Cane just watched, a flicker of genuine uncertainty running through him. Was he still asleep? Was this some kind of fever dream bleeding in from the original Cane’s pathetic memories?
"The hell do you think you’re doing down there?" Cane’s voice was a rough rasp, thick with sleep.
Kai’s eyes snapped open. The trance he’d worked himself into evaporated on contact. He scrambled to his feet so fast he almost knocked over the water basin beside his bed, a cascade of frantic words already spilling from him before he was fully vertical.
"It’s nothing! I’m so sorry, did I wake you? It’s just a thing I do, a little habit from home, I didn’t think anyone would be awake to notice, you’re usually still asleep at this hour and I only ever do it because I think I’m alone!"
Cane just stared at him, unimpressed. "What’s this little habit called? Sounded like a chant. Chants generally have names."
A delicate pink blush crawled up from Kai’s collar, flooding his ears. He looked anywhere but at Cane, muttering at the floorboards. "It’s just an old thing. My people do it. A morning thing. It’s nothing worth explaining." He grabbed a pitcher, his movements jerky. "Do you want the wash basin first?"
Cane wasn’t about to let it go. Not when watching Kai squirm was proving to be a remarkably effective way to wake up. He kept his face dead serious.
"Am I rooming with some kind of secret tribal shaman? Should I be worried about waking up with chicken bones scattered around my bed? You going to read my fortune off my palm while I’m asleep?"
Kai’s face went from pink to a shade of deep, mortified crimson. He stood there, half-dressed and kneeling on the dorm floor, clutching the pitcher like a shield. He tried to muster some dignity.
"It is not a tribal chant. You need to stop. Immediately. It’s a private thing, and I am not going to explain it under interrogation."
A grin, slow and entirely too pleased with itself, spread across Cane’s face. "I didn’t say a word about a tribe. I said chant. You’re the one who went straight to tribal. Honestly, that tells me more than the actual chanting did."
Kai made a small, strangled noise and buried his face in both hands, his voice muffled. "I regret ever getting out of bed today."
Cane was fully prepared to keep pulling that thread for another five minutes. He already had a follow-up question loaded about whether the chant came with a matching dance.
BRRRRRNNNNNGGGGG!
The alarm cut through the room, a loud, jarring shriek that rattled the glass in the windowpane. It wasn’t the standard morning bell.
Kai flinched, dropping his hands. Cane, however, was already smiling. He recognised the pitch of it half a second before his memory of the novel supplied the reason why.
"What is that?" Kai asked, his voice sharp with alarm. "That’s not the wake-up bell from yesterday."
"Get dressed first. Questions second." Cane swung his legs out of bed. He was shirtless, and Kai, for all his scrambling, was still fumbling with his own clothes on the floor.
Kai hopped into his trousers, still talking. "What does it mean? That alarm?"
Cane pulled his own shirt over his head, the fabric muffling his voice for a second. "Special Exam. The academy runs them periodically. No warning, no schedule we get to see. Everyone’s expected in the main hall within the quarter hour."
Kai paused, one arm in his sleeve. "How do you possibly know we’re supposed to go to the main hall? The alarm was just noise."
Cane didn’t get a chance to answer. A voice, clipped and administrative, crackled from an unseen speaker overhead.
"All students report immediately to the main hall for a mandatory Special Exam briefing."
Kai’s head snapped toward Cane, his expression a perfect mixture of shock and open suspicion. It was the look of a man who’d just discovered his roommate could read minds. Or worse.
They headed out together. Kai was still fumbling with the last buttons of his jacket as they walked, peppering Cane with questions the entire way down the corridor.
"What does a Special Exam actually test? Is it combat? Is it academic? How are we supposed to prepare for something nobody gets warned about?"
Cane, enjoying being the one with answers for once, strolled with his hands in his pockets. "It varies. The whole design is built to catch students off-balance. Tests what you can actually do, not what you’ve had time to cram for. Complaining about the unfairness of it is a long-standing academy tradition. You’re welcome to join in, but it’s never changed a thing."
"Have you been through one of these before?"
"Not personally." Cane shrugged. "But I’ve heard plenty." It was technically true. A novel he used to read and a set of borrowed memories both counted as hearing about it.
The main hall was nearly empty when they arrived. It was cavernous and echoing, the kind of oppressive silence that made their footsteps sound too loud. It took Kai a visible beat to realise they were the first two students there by a wide margin.
"Oh." He looked almost embarrassed. "I didn’t expect to actually be early."
Cane just grunted and claimed a spot near one of the massive support pillars. "There are worse things than getting a good seat."
Slowly, the rest of the student body started filtering in. First in twos and threes, then in a steady stream of sleep-rumpled, grumbling bodies. Uniforms were half-fastened, hair was a mess, and the noise level climbed from silence to a low, institutional murmur as the hall filled.
That’s when Cane clocked the approach. He saw them out of the corner of his eye, four large upperclassmen cutting a straight line through the crowd. They were broad through the shoulders in that specific way that screamed years of actual training, not just good genetics. They moved with the unhurried confidence of men who were used to people getting out of their way.
Cane didn’t recognise any of them. He raised an internal eyebrow, briefly assuming they were headed for him. His reputation preceded him everywhere. But they walked right past him, planting themselves in a loose, intimidating semicircle around Kai. The picture clicked into place at once.
The biggest of them, blond and thick-necked, looked Kai up and down. His expression had already decided the conversation’s outcome before it even started.
"Well, look what we have here," he said, his voice loud enough for the nearby students to hear. "The little doll finally found its way to the big room."
Kai’s shoulders came up around his ears. He mumbled, his voice quiet. "I’m just here for the exam. Like everyone else."
The blond one laughed, a short, ugly bark. "I’m amazed you’re still alive, actually. A thing built like you." He leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial sneer. "Have you even hit puberty yet? Or is that just... permanent?"
A second one, a lanky brute with a crooked grin, chimed in. "A build like that means low testosterone. Has to. No other explanation." He looked around at the gathering crowd, playing to his audience. "What exactly do you think you’re going to do when you graduate? Get shipped to the front lines against actual demons? Pretty doesn’t parry a claw swing, little doll."
The blond one nodded, adding, "You’ve got maybe a season before something out there eats you. Honestly, watching you stand here, I think that might be a mercy."
Kai didn’t argue. He didn’t defend himself. He just looked down at the floor, his shoulders folding further inward, his whole body shrinking. The total lack of resistance in his posture made it clear this wasn’t the first time he’d heard some version of this speech.
Cane, for his part, genuinely didn’t care. Watching people get bullied had never once kept him up at night. Kai’s problems weren’t his. But then he felt it. The familiar, telltale prickle of a notification forming at the edge of his vision.
Come on, he thought with real specificity, a silent, greedy prayer. Give me a quest. Give me a queeeeest.