Wren plopped down onto his bed, his mind still reeling over the day’s events.
He stared up at the ceiling, the same stone ceiling he’d been waking up to for what felt like both three days and no time at all and let himself actually sit with it — the smell, the blood, the shape of a person folded into something that wasn’t supposed to be possible.
He’d expected the memory to hit harder now that he had the silence to let it.
It didn’t, not the way he thought it would.
It sat there instead, dull and distant, more like something he’d read about than something he’d watched happen a few feet in front of him.
He kept waiting for his stomach to turn again, the way it had in the room.
It didn’t.
He almost wished it would.
Is that normal?
Is it supposed to fade that fast?
He thought about Sebastian stepping around the blood like a puddle.
About Reinhardt calling a dead boy “a damn shame” in the same breath he complained about paperwork.
He’d been horrified by both of them, hours ago.
Now, lying here, he understood the shape of it a little too well — understood, in a way he didn’t like, how a person got from screaming on the floor to stepping around it like a puddle without ever really deciding to.
He rolled onto his side and shut his eyes, if only to stop staring at the ceiling.
I have chapters left to read before the new apprentices get here.
That’s a better thing to think about.
It wasn’t.
He thought about the body anyway, off and on, until sleep finally took the choice away from him.
The other apprentices arrived two days later.
Wren stood behind the mages on the first floor, waiting for the carriages to appear in the doorway.
This was, supposedly, how he’d arrived at the tower three years ago — though he hadn’t passed his evaluation, not that this made him unusual.
More than half of these hopeful new arrivals wouldn’t pass theirs either, and would be reassigned to tower maintenance instead, under Head Butler Sebastian.
I wonder how many of them will end up like I did — sent off to work as a servant until some accident happens, and they become fertilizer for the plants outside the tower.
By the time he left servant duty, Wren had been one of the oldest servant boys in the tower.
It was rare, apparently, for a boy to last longer than a year or two doing that work, let alone three — he’d heard the older servants say as much over meals, back before his reassignment, in the particular flat, joking tone people used for things they’d stopped being able to afford taking seriously.
A hallway mopped too close to an apprentice’s overcast spell.
A door opened at the wrong moment, into the wrong room, on the wrong floor.
A stray discharge from a workshop two levels up, seeping down through the stone the way water always found the lowest point eventually.
Nobody set out to kill a servant boy, as far as Wren could tell.
It simply happened, often enough that the older ones had given the pattern its own grim shorthand — going to the garden early, they called it, since nobody wanted to say the word for what the garden actually did with what was left of you.
He hadn’t understood the phrase back then.
He understood it perfectly now, having spent the last two days writing up exactly how one boy had gone to the garden early himself. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Eventually, a caravan appeared in the distance, rolling toward the tower — forty or fifty people, maybe more, spread across a handful of carriages.
Every face Wren could make out from this distance looked the same in one particular way: wide-eyed, a little breathless, staring up at the tower like it was the answer to something they’d been waiting their whole lives to ask.
Little do they know, Wren thought, and huffed something that was almost a laugh.
It caught him off guard, hearing it come out of his own mouth.
He couldn’t remember the last time something had actually struck him as funny — and this, of all things, barely qualified.
Fifty strangers walking hopefully toward a tower that had crushed a boy flat two days ago and filed the paperwork on it before lunch.
There was nothing to laugh at there.
He wasn’t sure what part of him had decided otherwise.
He didn’t laugh again.
He just watched the carriages get closer and told himself the first one didn’t count for anything.
The carriages stopped in front of the tower and began unloading.
They weren’t just carrying people, apparently, but a full resupply for the tower besides.
The new apprentices were herded into a line for evaluation.
“Apprentice Wren.
Please line up as well,” Sebastian said, in a flat, official voice that gave away nothing.
“You’ll undergo a reevaluation, to cement your spot as an apprentice properly.”
“Yes, sir,” Wren said, not even batting an eye.
He’d gotten used to simply going with things these past two days.
He wasn’t worried about fitting in anymore, not really — out of everyone standing in that line ahead of him, he was likely one of the only ones who already had a circuit drawn at all.
That alone put him head and shoulders above the rest of them, whatever this reevaluation turned out to actually test.
Wren had been placed toward the front of the line, among those wearing looks of confidence rather than uncertainty.
A blond, blue-eyed boy stood just ahead of him, turning around with a lopsided half-smile the moment the line shuffled to a stop.
“Heya.
Name’s Rian Kaiser.” He said it the way some people said their own name when they were used to it meaning something — not arrogant exactly, just comfortable.
“You’re that servant boy who drew his own circuit, right?”
Wren blinked.
“How do you—” He stopped himself, then tried again.
“Sorry, how does anyone already know that?”
“Word travels fast in mage circles.” Rian shrugged, easy about it.
“Especially about the stuff that isn’t supposed to happen.
A servant boy soloing his own circuit and living?
That’s the kind of thing that gets repeated at every dinner table between here and the capital, whether the Tower wants it repeated or not.”
“Right.” Wren wasn’t sure what to do with that, so he didn’t do anything with it.
“And you’re not going to—” He gestured vaguely, encompassing the whole unpleasant shape of the last few days: the sneering apprentice in 5-F, the “doubly so for the help,” the way half this line had already looked at his robes like they didn’t quite fit him. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“—look down on me for it?”
“Why would I?” Rian actually laughed at that, like the question itself was the strange part.
“My family name comes from a sword saint who started out as some no-name farmer’s kid with a sharp stick and worse odds than you’ve got.
Kaisers don’t really get to turn our noses up at people who made something out of nothing.
Kind of ruins the whole family legend if we do.”
Wren stared at him for a moment too long.
He’s talking about Michael Kaiser.
The name from the book.
He hadn’t expected to hear it out loud, let alone from the boy’s own descendant, delivered with the same casual warmth someone might use to talk about a favorite uncle.
“You’re—” Wren started and didn’t quite know how to finish the sentence a second time.
“Great-great-something-grandson, yeah.” Rian grinned, apparently used to that particular reaction too.
“Don’t worry.
I get that look a lot.
Doesn’t mean I’ve inherited a single useful thing from him yet, if that’s what you’re bracing for.”
The line lurched forward before Wren could think of anything to say back to that, and then they were walking — down through the lobby, toward a set of double doors he hadn’t noticed on any of his earlier laps around the tower.
“So what’s this reevaluation actually test?” Wren asked, mostly to have something to say that wasn’t I still don’t know what I’m doing here.
“Same three things they test everyone on.
Affinity, willpower, talent.” Rian said it easily, like reciting something he’d known his whole life.
“Nothing dangerous, don’t worry.
Half the kids in this line are gonna be bored by the second test.”
“That’s it?
No one’s ever gotten hurt doing this?”
“Nah.
It’s the one part of becoming a mage they actually bothered making safe.” Rian grinned.
“Guess they figured it’d be bad advertising, killing people before they even get a grimoire.”
Wren managed something close to a laugh at that, though it didn’t sit as easily as Rian’s clearly did.
The doors ahead were plain — no gold inlay, no iron veins, nothing like the ornamentation on the Tower Master’s office three floors up.
Just heavy grey wood, propped open, apprentices filing through one at a time into whatever waited on the other side.
Everyone else in this line already knows what these tests are going to say about them.
Wren didn’t.
Not really.
He had one data point — a shard of metal and a color he could name — and no idea whether the room ahead was about to confirm that or complicate it further.
He stepped through the doors anyway.