Lies & Labyrinths
2: Into the Academy

There was the briefest of moments between stepping through the portal stones and stepping off that Lilith could dare to remember. The world had gone thin, stringy, like a piece of snack cheese pulled to its absolute limits. Lilith squinted, watching the world grow bright and the very light around them begin to appear more like bars, then curtains. She waved a hand through it, replaceing that the entire world around her was now gone, leaving only an office.

A man sat at a desk, with a clock facing outward. Lilith glanced at it; 12:58. There was a fireplace to his left, and two seats. Both leather. Both comfy looking. The room had a calming smell to it, like cinnamon.

The man was hunched over the large desk, bald and with long pointed ears. He had a birthmark atop his skull that looked oddly like the world map that Lilith had been shown once in class. Spectacles hung against his long and slightly crooked nose, balancing as he squinted his face, reading from a long scroll that had spilled out and over his desk to the floor in front of Lilith.

“ Excuse me?” Lilith called out.

“Be right with you.” The man murmured, then dotted one last I. He looked up, lifting his spectacles off his head to take in the sight of the girl. “You’re early. That’s a first. What’s your name?”

“Uhm. Lilith LaVoi.”

The man’s face furrowed first like a hound dog, then pulled back in wide surprise. “Lilith LaVoi. I’ve been wondering when you’d show up.” The man pulled on his scroll, unraveling it further as he made it all the way to the bottom. There was a small pink note with a bit of adhesive at the top, posted right at the very end. The pink note flapped as he traced his finger against it. Her signature was written exactly where she had left it.

“I’ve had this note at the bottom of this page for some ten thousand years. I was wondering when I’d get to meet you. Very well, I’ve got your name recorded Lilith LaVoi.”

“And what’s your name sir?”

The man smiled for a moment, the world starting to get less stringy as it did. “You can call me The Veil. I’ll be excited what you make of me yet.”

And with that, the man was gone, and so was Lilith.

The world grew thin, and then rubber-banded back to reality before Lilith had time to think. The conversation with the man with the bald spot shaped like the world was over before she had finished blinking. She wouldn’t recall the room with the man with the birthmark until her life went flashing before her eyes, but that wasn’t due for another couple hundred pages.

Lilith and Monsieur Arleigh stepped out into a beautiful garden courtyard in a floating spire hundreds of feet above her home. Lilith gave a gasp, immediately running to the edge.She gave no mind to the marvels of the botany world as she trembled through the garden, such as the rainbow honeysuckle or the strawberries that were blooming with slices of lemon between, just past the bubble lillies. Arleigh approached behind, carefully dodging flowers and fruits as he followed.

The black cat that had wandered into the teleporter trotted off towards the other side of the garden, seemingly unphased by the abrupt change in location.

“We’re about half a mile up.” Arleigh seemed to answer a question before it was even asked.

“Think I could hit anything if I aimed?” She asked, hocking a wad of spit in a very unladylike manner.

“The odds of that are astronomically sm- oh well there you go.” Arleigh said, shuddering at the puh-too noise of the young brunette spitting over the edge.

Half a mile down, Duncil Ditch was hit by a loogie at terminal velocity.

“Well if we’re done with leaking bodily fluids off the side, we have much to see.”

Lilith stepped back, hopping over the small rope fence barely a foot high to warn people to not walk in such places. “What’s this place called?”

“The Glowing Gardens.”

Lilith looked around. “Doesn’t seem too glowing.”

“Because it’s daytime. Come back here at night, child, and you’ll be far more impressed. And please do stay off the grass, for Emil’s sake.”

“Who’s Emil?”

“An Oshmari[5] boy.”

Lilith perked up at the mentioning of the tribe of people, wondering if he knew the Oshmari that had passed by her woods once. She had fond memories of the group, and a girl about her age who stopped to play with her one afternoon when she was six. Darry? Darcy? Darrow. That had been her name. And Maeve, and Draven. They had played in the grove near a small stone cave. They had called it their special secret place, and the trio had watched the Oshmari sanctify the area and leave offerings of nuts and berries in the stone gully that had been inside the hidden earthen room. That had been where she had found the paper with the pretty name that she had cribbed as her own. “Her name is Lilith Lavoi, keep her safe.” It had become her secret after that, a fake name for imagining such fantasies of being whisked away to, well, magical places such as this.

The memories hit her all at once, but not as much from the word as the appearance of the young figure in the tree. They had long curly brunette hair and a slender frame, their skin marked with similar tattoo markings as the family Lilith had encountered five summers ago. Blue rings and lines of a ceremonial nature. The Oshmari boy was crawling up a tree, halfway dangling from the branch of a large oak, one hand holding a bird’s nest, trying to place it back into the spot it had fallen from. The black cat lazily flicked its tail not too far away, seemingly hoping for an easy meal in the off chance the Oshmari child fell from the branch they clung to. No such luck.

“Emil!” called the the professor.

The gangly ball of limbs known as Emil fell from the tree a few moments after carefully placing the nest back. The cat stormed off behind them. “Yes professor Arleigh?” he called, jogging over to the two.

“I need you to show this student around the Great Hall for a moment. I need to inform the headmaster of the unforeseen… circumstances before the start of the assembly. Can you show them the way?”

The curly haired boy smiled. “Yes sir, I’d be happy to.” Emil stuck a slender hand out, smiling a smile that seemed to brighten up his grey eyes and warm freckles. “Emil Evosin.”

“Lilith LaVoi.” Lilith said, liking the sound of her name the more she said it.

“Right wonderful, I must be going. There are a lot of plaques, name cards and general paperwork I need to make changes on…”Professor Arleigh murmured as he trudged off across the very grass he had complained about just moments ago, adjusting his spectacles and muttering barely formed words under his breath

“Is he always like that?” whispered Lilith, eying the man and half looking to Emil.

“Always. You get used to him though.” Emil giggled. “He sticks to the Alpha wing mostly though.”

“Alpha wing?”

“Yeh, it’s that building right there.” Emil pointed off towards the northwest side from where they stood. It made Lilith take a look around, the boy continuing to point. “It’s over there, past the library. That’s the primary wing. People born with magic potential or manifest it at an early age all stay there. Beta wing is over there.” Emil’s pointed direction moved towards the east. “That’s where most of the other kids go when they show magic about our age.”

“Are you there?”

“Yes and no. I’m in a few classes there. But I’m in Gamma. ”

“Where’s that?”

Emil gave a quick gesture around at the gardens. “We’re in the Gamma wing right now. It’s sort of an under used wing. Park and recess mostly for others, but also the occasional class on nature magic is held on the grounds.”

“Wowww. You get to stay out here all night?”

“Yeah, great.” Emil beamed, leading them along the path towards the center building. They were following in mostly the same direction as Professor Arleigh now. “This is the main wing. But also it connects immediately to Delta.”

“Who’s Delta for?” Lilith asked.

“Uhm. Remedial students. Those who are on the list but don’t show talent. Late bloomers, I think they’ll call them at the assembly.”

“Assembly? They have an assembly?”

“Well, they did. There used to be enough students to show up at once that they’d have a big assembly with fireworks and magic and everything. But there really aren’t many batches of new students anymore. Haven’t been many magic kids born our generation I guess.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Teachers talk out here. They forget I’m around.” Emil shrugged. He was very mature for his age. Not something Lilith was used to replaceing in a boy, who usually were loud and boisterous instead of quiet and thoughtful.

“They have their own wing though. The Deltas. Other kids are mean.” They entered now into the main wing, Emil’s voice dropping as they walked past some classrooms and towards an intersection. “They call them the Delta Dummies. You don’t wanna end up there.”

“How do I not end up there?” There was a sudden dread in Lilith’s stomach. She was most assuredly going to end up there.

“They do a test on the first day of your first class. After that, you can’t get out unless you get a high enough score on the Weaving [6]”

“What’s that, and when’s that?”

“It’s a big test they do. It’s pass/fail.”

“What’s a passing grade?”

“You make it through the test alive.”

“Oh.” Lilith swallowed. She could guess the fail portion.

“But that’s not ’til the end of next week. You should be fine.”

“Next week!?” Lilith hissed at Emil.

“Yeah. You chose a bad time to be aetherically gifted. So what did you do to get in here?”

“I…”

Lilith LaVoi froze. Drat, it seemed lies had consequences.

Best to keep lying. That would solve things. More lies on top of the first round; the real trick was to just have a strong foundation. Simple.

“I moved something with my mind.”

“Woo-ah!” Emil covered his mouth in astonishment. “Telekinesis? No one’s naturally done that in a hundred years.”

Bollocks, Lilith thought. “Yep. Took all my strength though, so I don’t think I can do it again.”

“Well you have until the morning to do it again or end up in Delta.”

“And I don’t want to be a delta dummy.”

“A what!?” A fresh voice seethed behind her.

Lilith spun around. A dwarf girl stood behind her, roughly her age as far as she could surmise. She was short and stout, with fiery red hair pulled back and fashioned into a magnificent braid with a large carved lug nut at the end. She would have looked pretty too if it weren’t for the nasty scowl on her face.

“Dwema, she didn’t mean-”

“No, I heard it. A Delta dummy. That what you’re telling the new kid?”

The dwarf was drawing her fists, not readying a wand, staff, nor aether focus[7]. She preferred a physical fight. Lilith was briefly thankful that she wasn’t going to have to deal with any magic nonsense.

Then the dwarf reeled back a right hook and decked Lilith in the stomach, and her world went spinning.

Lilith wheezed, doubling over and gripping her stomach. She was the protagonist of her own life story; protagonists weren’t supposed to get hurt.

The knee that came cracking against her face after didn’t get the ‘don’t hurt the protagonist’ message, sending a shock of pain through her eyes that fogged her vision. The world grew muffled, as the sound of shouting echoed from four hallways at once as students spilled out of class in time to watch the burly bout.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Lilith could lie her way out of anything, but she couldn’t even get a breath in. All she could think to do was swing her own limbs in a circular motion, clobbering upwards until she could get more than two fists in the argument. More students had arrived; they were screaming louder than her temporary deafness, egging them on as they formed a ring around the two. Somewhere in the midst of it all, Lilith thought she saw that same figure in red; the same one from the woods behind her schoolhouse, where she had played with the oshmari children long ago. That vision was soon blocked by a fist, and a strong pain that shook all of the memories right out of Lilith’s noggin.

Footnotes:

[5] The Oshmari were an ecclectic group, more nomadic than naught; they spent the majority of their lives in the forests of Temrin, believing themselves to be the caretakers of nature. It meant they hadn’t ever heard of deoderant and usually could be found with bird droppings on their clothes, but they were far friendlier than the usual sort that would come wandering past the road to the most boring town in the world.

[6] The Veilweavers, for all their pomp and circumstance, really did just boil down to naming things as simply as the Wheats of Wheatsburg did.

[7] There are some of course who argue for the tradition of wands and staves, but anything can be an aether focus. A ring, a coin, a talisman of a family religion; Those that tell you it has to be a wand are usually trying to make 20 crowns off a piece of overpriced wood in a gift shop.