“Some days everything goes according to plan and no one behaves in an entirely unreasonable manner. I tell myself that. I invest my faith in that. I bend my will to shaping the cosmos for that to be a Thing Which Is True. There is, I am coming to believe, no greater or more powerful magic I could ever shape than to make that belief into reality for at least one damn day and despite the centuries which have shown me otherwise, I will persist in my belief till the stars themselves are ground down to dust if that is what it takes.”

-Xindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame

The screams which wrenched my eyes opened started at most a few seconds after Jalaren called for the match to begin. That seemed  remarkably fast given that the Cadets seemed to like to play with their victims. The first scream was one of simple fright, the kind any sort of jump scare might provoke. The quiet that followed was replaced by more screams only a heartbeat later.  It took me about that long to work out that it wasn’t Mellina who was screaming.

My innards were a mess still and for a moment I was left wondering if I’d scrambled the visual feed from my eyes or perhaps my brain as a whole. 

In the arena, Mellina was sitting down in the blue quadrant. Her legs were folded beneath her and her arms were outstretched in a highly dramatic and, I suspected, wholly unnecessary pose. At first glance she looked like she was concentrating fiercely, but the tremor that ran through her body wasn’t one of dire exertion.

She was laughing.

She was laughing and doing an excellent job of hiding it. The crowds seemed to fooled, with the applicants, cadets, and even most of the spectators buying her performance.

Of course said performance was helped by the Cadet who was flailing viciously at enemies that were either invisible or purely figments of his imagination. Since he wasn’t dead, or even bleeding, I assumed Mellina’s magics were messing with his senses somehow, and I gained a new appreciation of how horrifying illusions could be.

I’d ripped a Cadet into multiple pieces, but the poor fool who’d been so eager to face Mellina looked like he would have preferred it if I’d jumped into the ring instead.

Not that she was totally safe it turned out.

In a desperate bid to defeat some horror only he could see, the Cadet flung a curtain of burning tar out with a wave of his hand. By luck more than anything else, he’d picked a direction that was facing Mellina and she went from pretending to be concentrating to dodging as fast as she could.

To her credit, Mellina was pretty fast. She almost avoided the whole stream of fiery tar. Sadly ‘almost’ still meant that a fair bit splashed on her and I had to fight to stay in my seat as I watched enough fall on her arm and shoulder to give her a nasty burn.

My reward for keeping a cool head was getting to watch what the Cadet did. The moment his tar hit Mellina, he seemed to snap out of whatever spell she had on him.

Emphasis on ‘seemed too’. 

In a blink, he went from desperately thrashing at the air, to regaining his compose and focusing on his quarry.

The sound amplification spell made sure we all heard the various profanities he hurled at Mellina and the Cadet’s cheered him on as he began to stalk towards her, raising walls of burning tar on either side of her.

Or rather where he apparently thought she was. As the walls went up, we saw that the space he hemmed in was entirely empty. The real Mellina had been forced to flee from his attack into the basic green quadrant, but the Cadet was moving and throwing his attacks as though she were standing a few feet to the left in the red quadrant.

I’m not sure if he even saw it as the red quadrant though since Mellina wouldn’t have had any reason to position herself there given that her ‘attacks’ were all magical in nature.

He got about halfway into the red quadrant before he reached out, grasped empty air and mimed throwing someone to the ground.

“Beg for your life,” he said. “Beg for it and maybe I’ll let you be one of my slaves.”

I probably shouldn’t have gotten out of my seat at that point, and this time Doxle was nearby enough to do something about it. In this case he didn’t paralyze me though. He simply laid a hand on my should and said, “Watch.”

I don’t know if he could see the illusions Mellina was casting – he probably could – but he was right. If I’d jumped into the arena and disemboweled the Cadet like I’d planned to, the poor boy would have had cause to thank me.

Instead, he seemed to hear an answer to his demand that he didn’t like and struck out with another stream of burning tar, enough to drown and immolate his imaginary adversary. If Mellina had been there she would have died in agony and I would have had to make good on my threat, and then probably die after jumping into the Cadet’s box and taking out as many more of them as I could manage in an effort to purge some of the madness that had clearly gripped the world when I wasn’t looking.

Instead, he turned away and raised his hands in victory, waving his hands to drink in the cheering of a crowd which simply wasn’t there. 

His waving froze and his body shuddered as Mellina got back to her feet. 

She was in pain and she wasn’t laughing anymore.

With deliberate slowness, the Cadet began to turn back to the spot where he’d ‘’killed’ Mellina. I couldn’t see his face but every muscle in his body was rippling with the terror that was running through him.

He turned and ran and, for a moment, I thought Mellina was going to force him to run off the platform and fall to a potentially messy demise.

She wasn’t that kind though.

Before he could reach the edge of the arena, she cast something in front of him that was even more horrifying than whatever was chasing him.

I didn’t want to have a clear view of his trousers gaining a sudden pool on their front, but it was difficult to look away from the spectacle he was making.

With another, still more shrill scream, he collapsed and started scrambling backwards. Burning tar flew in front of him, to both sides of him, and (somewhat disastrously from his point of view) above him.

Casters are not always, or even often, immune to the effects they summon, anymore so than someone who lits a fire with a match is immune from the blaze they create.

The Cadet’s screams as he was covered in his own burning tar were no worse than his earlier ones had been, but they weren’t going to stop when the illusion ended, which was nice.

Or maybe nice isn’t the right word.

I wasn’t feeling terribly nice. 

I probably still needed to fix my brain. 

Or the world.

I blinked and shook my head. I definitely needed to fix my brain if that’s where my thoughts were running.

Glancing back at the arena, I noticed that I might not be the only one whose brain wasn’t firing its neurons in anything resembling peaceful harmony.

Mellina’s eyes had rolled back and she was twitching in a manner that looked neither painless nor intentional.

That was the last sight of her I had before a curtain of deepest blue rose from the platform like a geyser and washed the world away into a sea of darkness.

It was not a friendly sea either. Things lurked in its depths and the island I stood on was not going to shield me from them. 

Not going to shield me from it.

It was rising.

Vast and terrible and unknowable.

It had slumbered for aeons out of mind and it was waking.

As it rose it brought with it the shattering of the world. The sky was going to crack, the ocean boil and the land drown as madness poured from the heavens.

Of everything wrong with that, the second worst part was that the calamity to come wasn’t going to bring death in its wake.

It wouldn’t let humanity die.

It would never grant a single human release.

What was the very worst part?

The worst part was that it knew my name. 

It knew who I was. 

It knew what I was.

And it was calling me home.

Welcoming me.

The whole world filled with screams and I was pretty sure mine were some of the loudest.

And then, as fast as the darkness had flooded over us, it receded.

In the arena, a weird rainbow of light danced over Mellina as she pounded his fists against the floor of the arena, clearly fighting to regain control of herself. With a scream of her own that was amplified by the arena loud enough to ring out across the city she smashed through the magics around her and the light she was gripped by swirled one more time before pouring back into her eyes and mouth.

That she collapsed after that was not surprising in the least. What I didn’t expect was Doxle’s reaction.

“Well now that’s a shame,” he said with a wistful sigh.

“What is?” 

“That she stopped so soon,” he said. “That was rather delicious. I suppose Holman would do something unpleasant if I asked her to do it again though. Ah well.”

That told me either his experience or his tastes were very different from mine. Comparing notes to work out which was true would lead to the sort of questions I had no interest at all in answering though so I kept silent.

“This match is ended. Are there any who will speak for this applicant?” Jalaren asked as Mellina picked herself up off the arena floor looking spent and bewildered.

That last bit hadn’t been a stunt. She’d legitimately lost control of her powers and been on the verge of magic-induced madness. Or maybe more than just the verge given how wobbly she looked.

“House Lightstone will speak for her,” their representative said. His box was floating nearby to Doxle’s so I could see that he was just as stone faced as he’d been before. His scent was different though. He was hungry for her power, and not in a nurturing sense. He wanted to hurt people and he was thrilled at the idea of how well she could do that.

“House Astrologia will speak for her as well.” Astrologia’s representative was farther off so her scent was more obscured but from her tone I had the sense that she assumed Mellina’s loyalties had already been bought and paid for since she was a scion of their family.

“House Greyfall speaks for her as well.” He was close by too, and had more or less the same scent as Lightstone did. Apparently almost defeating a Cadet made her valuable and turning into a psychic bomb accentuated that, even if it was possibly something she could only do once.

Unless the “only once” was the part they desired.

“House Riverbond speaks for her too!” I said, shouting to make sure I’d be heard.

I had no idea what Astrologia’s plans for her were, but I’d be damned before I let Lightstone and Greyfall be her only options.

Apparently proclaiming yourself the speaker for a Great House was a good method of attracting attention, maybe ever more so than tearing a Cadet into bloody chunks in a berserk frenzy.

The gazes I received from the people nearest us were anything but friendly, bu if they expected me to back down, they’d never met anyone Grammy Duella had raised.

“Multiple offers have been made,” Proctor Jalaren said. “Which will the applicant accept.”

The right answer was almost certainly Astrologia’s offer. No one would question it or get bent out of shape over a daughter of the House taking the House’s offer. Lightstone and Greyfall had probably only made their offers as an opening bid towards working with her years hence once her cadet training was finished. It was never too early to start recruiting talented staff after all, and House alliances through marriage were about the farthest thing from uncommon that there was.

“Riverbond,” Mellina said. “I will accept House Riverbond’s offer.”