“What I miss most about youth is all of the ill-advised plans I never got to enact. One hears stories all the time of wild adventures and acts of phenomenal stupidity which people engaged in during the years leading up to their more sensible adulthood. 

Sadly, such was not my life. I was, be all accounts, a perfect angel of a child. 

This was largely because I was focused exclusively on the pursuit of my mystical skills. One is unlikely to cause much mayhem when one spends every waking hour with one’s nose between the pages of a book.

I was happy enough with that at the time I suppose, but in my later years I was left with the ache of all that missing childhood foolishness and misadventures.

What? No, that explains nothing about why I act as I do now, why would you imagine such a thing?”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame to the Empress Eternal

Finding friendly backup waiting to support me in my latest crazed endeavor was the worst thing in the world. I had a dozen different highly effective arguments to make in support of that too. All I needed to do was pick the best one.

“Nope. No protests,” Mellina said, silencing me with a gesture as I drew in a breath to either scream at them or just scream (those were the top two counter arguments I could think of).

“You’re off to get in trouble,” Yarrin said. “We know.”

“It’s why we’re here, we need to get in trouble too, remember?” Narla said. 

I felt my toes curl in frustration. Yes, we had talked about purposefully getting on the instructors bad sides so they’d be agreeable to sentencing all of us to the Field Work program early, and yes I had been planning to do something that would put me solidly on the instructors bad sides if they found out about it, but those two things were not connected.

“Not like this!” I said, fighting to keep my aggravation from raising my voice above a whisper. “We’re supposed to make small mistakes, or be disrespectful. Not…”

Not what? Did I really want to tell them that I was sneaking off to find the Reaving Beasts so that I could send them back to their home realms? Yes, even the mindlessly murderous ones.

“Not be a part of something that’s going to splash back onto us if and when our House leader is caught – and let’s be clear that it’s definitely going to be when she’s caught because if we can predict where she’ll be then so can a lot of others?” Mellina asked with feigned sweetness.

I glared at her, but my gaze attack bounced of her shield of Actually Being Entirely Correct. That, unsurprisingly, did not make me any happier.

“There’s getting in trouble and there’s doing something that they will definitely expel me for, assuming they don’t execute me instead.” I really did not want them being a part of what I had in mind, even though I was absolutely certain it was the right thing to do.

“If it’s something that you’re willing to do that’s bad enough for them to kill you what makes you think we wouldn’t want in on it?” Ilyan asked.

I stared at him. He’d made either one of the bravest statements I’d ever heard or one of the stupidest, and I was reasonably certain he lacked enough awareness to be properly afraid of being horribly murdered which ruled out courage.

“We’re not looking to die,” Narla said, having at least a handful more functioning brain cells than Ilyan it seemed. “Mellina and Ilyan are right though. We’re in this together, like it or not. If they put you up on the gallows for a good reason, it’ll be real easy for them to find a bunch of bad ones to stick us up there with you.”

I blinked and looked from face to face. My housemates seemed to be in agreement on that.

“But…wait, shouldn’t you be trying to stop me then?” I asked. I didn’t think they could stop me, but not even bothering to make the attempt was, I’m not sure, lazy? Irrational?

“You’re aware that we saw what happened to all those guys who tried to stop you last night, right?” Ilyan said.

I frowned at him. I was not going to turn into a Dire Wolf on them. Not yet anyways.

“We’re not trying to stop you because we don’t know what you’re doing yet,” Yarrin said. “So far you’ve saved each of us, avenged Kelthas, and fought through a bunch of jerks on House Lightstone’s payroll in the Research Quarter. None of that is anything I’ve got a problem with. Make it kind of easy to give you the benefit of the doubt and ask what you’ve got in mind this time, instead of assuming you must hate me because you wouldn’t let me be part of whatever you’ve got in mind.”

“Even if what I’ve got in mind is something you’ll hate?” I asked.

Ilyan actually laughed at that. Like burst right out in a chuckle that he clamped his mouth shut to suppress before anyone could hear us.

“You would have to try very hard to make us hate you more than we hate the Houses we come from,” Mellina said.

That was probably true, but hatred wasn’t a competition. 

“Whatever it is, we should probably do it soon,” Yarrin said. “Unless you’re planning to take off for the rest of the day?”

Doxle had warned us against that particular strategy if we had a program in mind. Skipping the evaluations would mean the instructors would assign one for us, and it definitely wouldn’t be Field Work.

“I want to free the Reaving Beasts,” I said. Yarrin was right. We didn’t have time to waste. Also, if they hated me, then they could hate me. I’d rather know that about them sooner than live a life tiptoeing around a lie.

I’d expected shock, potentially outrage, maybe even a bit of fear and/or loathing.

What I got instead was mild confusion and curious glances.

“Okay? Uh, why?” Ilyan asked.

I felt like I had as many reasons for wanting to free Reaving Beast as I had days of life lived as I was. I also felt like none of that would make sense to them. I wanted to go with “Because” or, even better, my usual response of dead silence, but neither of those were going to work either.

“They don’t deserve to be slaughtered for the amusement of the instructors and the other cadets,” I said, pulling that thread of truth out from all the others.

“Huh, I thought you were going to say because they might kill more of our fellow cadets,” Narla said.

“That too.” I hadn’t been thinking about that angle consciously but it felt like it had been part of the equation nonetheless.

“You have more of a plan that that,” Mellina said. “If you just free them, they’ll be slaughtered as they run rampant,” Mellina said. “Also more than a few of our fellow Cadets and the townsfolk at large will be slain before they’re brought down.”

“I’m not going to let them run loose,” I said. “I’m going to send them back where they belong. Back to their homes.”

“Uh, that’s not possible is it?” Narla asked, looking to Yarrin and Mellina for support.

“No, it’s not,” Yarrin said, his expression transforming from disbelief, to confusion, to questioning, to an uneasy acceptance of something he alone could see. “Not for any regular caster. You’ve done it before though, haven’t you?”

“Only once,” I said. “But, yes, I can do it again.”

I was being optimistic there. The last time I’d sent a Reaving Beast home someone else had opened up a handy rift for me to let them walk back through. I thought I could duplicate that effect if I tried hard enough, but there were roughly a million different things that could go terribly wrong with that part of the plan.

“Well now I definitely want to go!” Ilyan said, with the same stupid glee a puppy offered a fresh bone might show.

“As do I,” Mellina said, an entirely different, and far hungrier tone in her voice.

Neither of their approaches made me feel better about the idea of them tagging along, but we were at the point where I could either cripple them to ensure they stayed behind or give in and let them join me.

I considered that for a bit.

The crippling option wasn’t really a bad choice. They wouldn’t be happy with it, but they’d be alive to not be happy.

In the end though, all of us wound up in the  stables since I wasn’t sure it was even possible for me to cripple Narla or Ilyan, and the idea of causing injury to Mellina or Yarrin made me physically ill.

“Well, there’s no horses here, so that’s a good sign, right?” Narla said.

We were cloaked by Mellina’s magics which just made the twenty stall stable seem that much emptier. Given the lack of straw, and the absence of any lingering scents of horse manure, it was pretty obvious that this place hadn’t functioned as a regular stable in years.

“It’ll be a bad sign if it means we run out of time looking for the Beasts,” Yarrin said.

“There’s a more important consideration,” Mellina said. “There are no guards here.

“Why would there be?” Ilyan asked. 

“Because if they had enough Reaving Beasts to send out against our entire class, they wouldn’t leave them free to break out of their cells and run amuck,” Yarrin said.

Despite the absence of horse-scents and the assorted paraphernalia a stable should have held, I knew we’d come to the right place.

“They’re not holding them above ground,” I said.

“How do you know?” Mellina asked.

“People have been through here,” I said. “Often. And there is a lot of waste magic around us.”

“She’s right,” Yarrin said. “Most of its passing up through the floor but I can see where some of it is escaping the seals on the prison door.”

“What prison door?” Ilyan asked.

“This one,” Yarrin said and traced his finger through the dust and sand in the floor at the far end of the stable.

Where his finger passed a trail of silver light was left behind and the scent of a hundred different strain of magic rose up.

The access hatch didn’t swing up, or shift to the side, it simply vanished.

Yarrin moved his fingers backwards along the pattern he’d been tracing and the access hatch reappear, complete with exactly the right coating of dust and sand to match the areas around it.

“They’re down there,” I said, the scent of so many lost life forms hitting me like a hammerblow. “But I have no idea how they got there.”

The access hatch led to a ladder which descended vertically about twenty feet. It was wide enough that that two of us could have descended at one, but that was still too small for some of the Reaving Beasts that were waiting for us.

“You’re not going to like what they do to get the Reaving Beasts in there,” Mellina said. “But that’s probably a conversation for later.”

She wasn’t wrong about that.

“There will be guards down there,” Yarrin said. “Is sending them back going to attract attention?” 

Last time I’d been hidden by a wall of fog. I think even with that they’d noticed the Reaving Beasts disappearing though.

I nodded. I could take on a form where they wouldn’t have any idea who was freeing the Beasts. Or I could take on a well known form and let them sort it out later. The guards were going to react fairly strongly to either approach though.

“That’s our job then,” Yarrin said. “Ilyan, Narla, let’s go provide a distraction.”

“What kind of distraction?” Narla asked.

“Fire. No. Fires. Those make a great distraction. We’ll light the stables on fire and make sure it look like it’ll spread down here,” Yarrin said.

“Oh hell yeah!” Ilyan said, because of course he did.

“Count me in for that twice!” Narla said, relinquishing her claim on the greater share of brain cells between the two of them.

“But…” I tried to protest, only to be shushed by Mellina again and beckoned downwards to the hidden sublevel of the stables..

“Give them a couple of minutes,” she said after they ran off and we’d made it to the entryway of the detention level. “If the plan doesn’t seem to be working, I’ll follow them and get them away with my magics,” she said. “You can come along or do whatever you need to.”

“How will we know if ‘light everything on fire’ is working?” I asked.

The choking cloud of smoke which blew down into the detention level with tornado like force wasn’t the answer I was looking for, but it was clearly the one I was going to get.