One of the earliest things I learned from Lord Woodman when he first involved me in his daft "infiltrate a prestigious magical school to steal things" plan was how to move quietly.
He had tied bells around my ankles and wrists with ribbons, and shocked me with a jolt of electricity every time one of them made the slightest tinkling noise. It was not, as you might imagine, an instance that gave me any kind feelings toward the red-haired bastard.
It took me the better part of a month to figure out how to move with none of the bells ringing. There's a sort of languid, predatory mindset one must adopt. It reminded me a lot of the old tomcat that used to live under my house when I was younger. He was a ragged, mangy old thing with one eye, but the way he moved was almost like a dance. Back curled and each footfall well placed and evenly timed.
It was with that mentality that I slipped out of the dorms and headed to the back of Angitia's campus.
Lord Woodman once told me, shortly before I enrolled in Angitia, in fact, that I was a bit of a rush job. He would have liked to have taken a good ten years to brush up my manners to perfection, instill better annunciation, and give me more than the bare minimum in magical teaching.
The best he'd done in two years was beat my accent and manners into something approaching an ill-bred country vicar's brat (his words), teach me a smattering of half-baked spy craft (my opinion), and drill a basic map of Angitia into my head.
The last bit was actually rather useful, because it meant I knew where the mausoleum was, and was reasonably confident I could get there without a candle.
Angitia's mausoleum was at the back of campus and was a building of pure, alabaster white. It wasn't stone, not exactly. Lord Woodman had mentioned once that it's closer to whatever material made up the labyrinth which slumbers beneath Angitia's campus. Magic made solid or something of the like.
It entered my view after only a few twists and turns across Angitia's grounds. A simple white building, it almost reminded me of a shed or an outhouse for how small it was. Not that a shed or an outhouse would ever look that elaborate. Columns rose from the ground, and a pair of stone gargoyles leaned out from either side of the door.
There was even a stone statue of Jesus on the cross hanging from the door.
If that wasn't enough to tip me off, there were also the ghosts.
Dozens of specters milled around the mausoleum, blood-stained students wandering around and moaning. One girl with a knife literally sticking out of her back walked in a perfect circle repeatedly. Near her, a boy held his disemboweled entrails in his hands and stared at the pink ribbons of flesh spilling from his torso in complete bafflement.
I could only guess a lot of them had been attracted here by their bodies inside the mausoleum, and I suppose that was a good sign for my purposes.
When I approached the white building, the spirits' eyes fell on me as they looked up from whatever story they'd been acting out over and over again. I didn't look back at any of them, but I felt a sort of hunger in the air as I silently slipped inside the mausoleum.
The first thing I realized when I entered was that the Mausoleum was massive. I walked into an entry hall with multiple hallways spinning out from it, and there was a hum of some sort of magic in the air. I could almost hear the Narrative if I listened close enough.
Grow. Expand. Encompass. Contain. Protect.
The second thing I realized was that I had absolutely no idea what to do next. Part of me hadn't expected to get to the mausoleum without something happening. Ghosts would accost me. I'd run into Sylas who'd ask me what I was doing out so late… I was sure that something would happen and I would wind up having to push the entire endeavor to another night.
But I was there, and I needed a conduit.
And for some godforsaken reason, that conduit had to come from a place like that.
Wonderful.
I experimentally scratched at the white stone that made up the mausoleum, trying to see if I could pry the tiniest piece of it off. My fingernails scraped across the smooth surface like it was made of glass.
So my best bet would probably be breaking into one of the graves and taking something from there. Even more wonderful.
A cursory look at the corridor entrances made it appear they were divided by year, and deciding if I was going to rob a grave, I'd prefer it belonged to someone who was on the "mostly done" side of decomposition. With that in mind, I moved past the most recent hallway marked with a 2020 above it and opted for the hall that marked Angitia's founding year of 1900.
The corridor seemed to bend and twist around me as I walked through it, and though it was night, everything seemed to be softly lit.
It wasn't long before I started seeing names carved into the stone in neat script.
Abigail Morganstern
1885-1900
Found drained of blood in her bed
Another neatly printed marker then followed it.
Darrow O'Brian
1885-1900
Eaten alive by Bagger-Gheists
Which was, in turn, followed by yet another.
Joel Young
1884-1900
Remains recovered in a Labyrinth expedition. Cause of death unknown.
And so on and so on; a student's name, how long they lived for, and usually the gruesome way they died. Murder, magical accident, or some other delightful way to die I was not keen to experience.
I kept putting off actually prying one of the grave's open, both because I was still incredibly uncomfortable with the thought of desecrating someone's final resting place, and I was becoming vaguely aware of the fact that I didn't exactly have a way to open up one of the cabinets holding a dead body.
Finally, I steeled my nerve and picked one particularly old marker at random, pushing my fingers around the corners and giving an experimental tug. It didn't budge.
I put a bit more force into it and pulled a second time.
Once again, it felt like I was pulling against the side of a mountain and hoping I could move it a few inches. "Of course, this is my life now," I muttered.
Then I froze at the sound of someone else's voice.
It was far off, too far off to make out the words, but it was definitely there. I was surprised I hadn't noticed it before, and I reached out again, searching for a spell. Thankfully that skill is something Lord Woodman made sure to drill into my thick skull during my two years in his keeping. I reached out with my mind, senses all on high alert as I probed for the slightest hint of Narrative.
Quiet. Silent. Speak and hear.
The words lazily drifted into my mind, a sultry and seductive feeling to them.
I took a tentative step forward. There was another branching path a few rows ahead of me, diving deeper into the mausoleum and presumably back to its earliest of residents. Since I was looking for it, I even noticed there was a bit more light coming from one of the tunnels and as I moved forward, I heard more voices talking. Or was it chanting?
It occurred to me that it might be a good time to turn around and just call it a night. But a small niggling part of me also realized if there were other people in the mausoleum, then they might have a way to open one of the graves.
And an even smaller part of me was also vaguely curious about why anyone else in their right mind would be in a godforsaken corpse box in the middle of the night.
I had always been a bit of a victim of my own curiosity.
I moved with languid silent steps doing my best impression of a tom cat stalking a mouse. When I finally hit a corner in the passageway, I pressed myself into the cover of shadows that it offered. I slowly peered around the corner into the corridor where the voices were coming from.
There were students in there, an entire crowd of Angitia students in their red coats. Some talked to each other, leaning against the mausoleum's walls. Others sat on the floor cross-legged, looking profoundly bored, and a few stared ahead like they were waiting for something to start.
The last group evidently had the right of it, because a hush fell over the assembled group of students that a booming voice quickly followed. "Alright lads, calm down. You lot should know why you're here."
I could make out the speaker well enough. A young man stood toward a wall at the far side of the passageway. His hair stretched down his back in a sort of long golden tail that would have driven my mum mad to see on me or any of my brothers. He smiled broadly and even from my vantage I could see how white and gleaming they were.
"Let's see now. Is everyone here?" The young man looked around the gathering of students with a lopsided smile. "Hmm. Most of them, I think, well good enough." He clapped his hands and a booming rush of air rippled through the area and made everyone's hair and clothes flap around a bit.
"Congratulations, you bunch are the best and brightest from some of the most promising bloodlines in the British Empire." His smile widened further. "Not that any of you need to know that, eh?"
There was silence in the room, and the speaker paused like he almost expected someone to say something. When no one was forthcoming, he continued. "For those of you who don't know, my name is Cecil Baldwin, and I'm a fourth-year."
My blood ran cold. A fourth year. Someone on the cusp of graduating from the death trap. What in god's name would he want with all those freshmen? Images of a demon summoning sacrifice ritual flitted through my mind, but I squashed them immediately. Can't let my imagination run away with me, I scolded myself. Nothing worse than jumping to conclusions and messing up royally because of it."
Cecil had continued talking during my momentary panic, but I didn't think I missed terribly much.
"This will be the first trial you lot will experience as part of pre-rush for Lion Hall," he intoned.
Pre-rush? Lion Hall?
Students didn't live in Letus Commons for their entire academic time in Angitia. We didn't even get to live there for the entirety of our first year. Students had to rush one of the seven Halls on campus to secure housing for themselves for the rest of their time at Angitia. Those who don't get kicked out of Letus Commons and are expected to either leave school or attempt figuring out another living situation. As the other living arrangements at Angitia are the labyrinth which is filled with all sorts of monsters, the woods which are evidently riddled with faeries, or the grounds which I can personally attest are filled to the brim with ghosts. It was generally better to leave school if you didn't make it into one of the Halls.
Official rush for the halls wasn't supposed to begin for another few months, and from what I understood it mostly consisted of running errands for upperclassmen and hoping they'll vouch for you when the time comes to give out bids.
I hadn't given it much thought, truthfully. A bit too busy being harassed by spirits and almost failing my classes to worry too much about licking the boots of a bunch of magical aristocrats.
"Now," Cecil Baldwin continued. "I'm sure some of you might be thinking 'well if I'm one of the best of the best,' then why is it I have to worry about all this pre-rush and rush nonsense?"
He paused and seemed to wait for a response from the gathered freshmen. A few of them puttered around and murmured to each other in something that sounded vaguely like agreement.
"Well," Cecil said. "Just because you lot are supposed to be the best your year offers, doesn't mean you actually are. Say, Lydia!"
A girl with short brown hair and a wicked scar on one cheek pulled herself out of the shadows near Cecil, almost like she was appearing out of thin air. "Yeah, Cecil?"
"How many from our pre-rush group wound up lasting to second semester?"
"Hmm. I think about ten or so?"
"How many did we start with again?"
"Good forty I think."
Cecil gestured around the room. "A good portion of you sad fuckers won't even make it to second year. Something nasty'll eat you, you'll wind up pissing off the wrong classmate who needs a live test subject, or a dozen of other bits of nonsense. Weeding the weak out and leaving the strong, it's the Angitia way, and it's why we'll one day march on the Theocracy and Shang and bring them both under proper British rule once and for all."
If the declaration of aggressive patriotism surprised anyone, they had the good sense not to show it.
"Now then," Cecil said. "With that said, we won't begrudge any of you from deciding to drop out of pre-rush. We'll even let you enter normal rush when the time comes and we'll consider you for a bid the same as anyone else. But those of you who complete pre-rush with us all the way, well now. You'll have a bid with us guaranteed."
That generated a series of excited whispers Cecil didn't wait to die down.
"Lydia," he said.
Lydia turned around and grabbed something on the wall behind Cecil. She pulled and walked backward slowly.
I leaned forward, trying to get a better look at what she was doing, also keenly aware that I was increasing my risk of being seen.
My breath caught.
Lydia had completed her task, and it was clear she had been pulling one of the Mausoleum's graves open. A skeleton, more of a mildewy yellow than a white, laid on a slab of white stone in front of the crowd of gathered freshmen.
My pulse quickened, and I knew just by looking at them that any piece of those bones would make an excellent conduit for me to use in any manner of mana gathering or spells.
"Now," Cecil Baldwin said, gesturing at the skeleton. "Can anyone tell me who this poor bastard is?"
He waited a moment, then pointed at someone I couldn't see. "You there, with your hand up."
A voice I recognized answered. "That's Richard Baillie. The first student to ever die during his schooling at Angitia."
Sylas. What is Sylas Thorne doing here? A chill ran through me, but I shook it off quickly. It was obvious why he was there, Sylas must be there to brown-nose his way into Lion Hall, just like the ear of them. Oh. That's right.Sylas had mentioned something about wanting to join Lion Hall the first day we'd met, hadn't he?
"That's right," Cecil's voice snapped my attention back to the would-be Lion Hall members. "Ole Dicky Baillie. Poor bastard was dosed with centaur blood within his first month of being here. Rotted from the outside in, they say."
I could almost hear the Narrative. Feel it stirring in the bones on the slab as Cecil Baldwin told his grim story about the dead boy. I absently wondered what Richard Baillie's ghost would do if it manifested. Would it be perpetually rotting into some sort of horrific reenactment of his last moments of life? Perhaps the last words on his lips would be the name of the person who killed him? Assuming Richard Baillie could still speak at the end, of course. From everything I'd heard, centaur blood was nasty stuff, and dying from it was an absolutely wretched way to go out.
Cecil had continued talking, but once again, I'd been thinking as opposed to actually paying attention. I caught "Now who will be up first?" before silence descended on the group.
First up for what? I wondered.
I didn't need to wait long, apparently, because Sylas Thorne was the first of the students to step forward, and, with a determined look on his face, leaned over the skeleton and deposited a wet kiss on what remained of Richard Baillie's decayed mouth.
I almost gave myself away with the squeak of utter horror that I emitted. Several students looked around in confusion at the noise, and I sharply forced myself deeper into the shadows cast in the mausoleum's walls.
I waited until their murmurings ceased, then counted to thirty before cautiously peering back around the corner, ready to pull back and bolt at a moment's notice. It was soon clear that the onslaught of would-be Lion Hallers hustling and bustling to be the next one to give poor Richard Baillie's corpse a kiss had drowned out whatever suspicion I had raised. Cecil Baldwin and Lydia No-last-name stood off to one side watching with smirks on their faces.
Those students who evidently had already kissed the dead body, including Sylas Thorne, sat in a neat row on the floor, apparently waiting for the next directive.
What in seven hells am I watching? I thought.
Eventually, the last student kissed the skeleton, and all the freshmen sat in front of the two Lion Hallers like expectant children. Cecil Baldwin's smile had never left his lips and grew increasingly predatory and cat-like as the procession reached its end.
"Congratulations, all of them went through with it this year. Lydia, isn't that wonderful?"
"Sure is, Cecil. Suppose this means we won't have to kill any of them this time."
The two of them chuckled at that. The sounds of their laughter made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
"Say, can any of you blaggards tell me why we have a mausoleum here at Angitia?" Cecil asked the group of freshmen. None of them responded. Most were doing their absolute best to wipe their lips clean and be subtle about it.
Cecil didn't seem to care much, and just kept on going. "It's so everyone here at this school, past, present, and future, has a physical reminder of them," Cecil gestured at Richard Baille's body and contempt laced his voice. "All the little failures who couldn't make it to graduation. The chaff this school separates from the rest of society so they won't drag the rest of us down. We at Lion Hall just like to test you all a bit earlier than the school will. We just want to make sure you'll float instead of sink."
He gave Lydia a grin, and the two of them laughed uproariously, and a few of the freshmen joined in with nervous chuckles of their own. It wasn't clear if they had been joking. I wasn't keen to find out what they would do to an eavesdropper like yours truly, though. I moved further back into my corridor of the mausoleum, waiting until I heard only the faintest sounds of voices and the Working of concealment.
I stood in the shadows, stretching my arcane senses out as far as I could to just barely feel the threads of the spell concealing Lion Hall's little gathering of freshmen. Sensing a spell didn't take any mana at all, and Lord Woodman did his damndest to make sure I was aces at it. Really, it's one of the few remotely useful things the man taught me.
I wasn't sure how long I waited until the freshmen started leaving the gathering. They left in twos and threes, placed a few minutes behind each other like they were trying to hide that they had been somewhere with a group of people. Sylas walked out with a pair of boys I didn't recognize.
Cecil and Lydia were the last to leave.
I almost didn't see them, and I probably wouldn't have noticed if the Working itself hadn't fizzled out. The subtle chatter it left in my mind's eye winked out of existence like it had never been there. For a moment I thought I had just lost track of it, and I probed a bit with a sliver of my own mystic awareness and found nothing. I poked around a little more and froze when I actually hit something.
It wasn't the Working I had initially felt.
Workings of stealth functioned by convincing people nothing was there. They only really worked when you didn't know what you were looking for, and I had known what, or rather whom, I had been searching for. I had known their names, Cecil and Lydia, and I had been reasonably certain they had actually been in my proximity using a Working of stealth and concealment.
I suppose that was another useful little tidbit Lord Woodman taught me.
I probably wouldn't have found them had I not known those things, and with some certainty. When the spell touched the edges of my awareness, I almost didn't realize what I was detecting.
Cecil and Lydia had placed a Working around themselves that made the one they'd used around the gathering of would-be Lion Hallers feel like something slapped together out of papier-mâché. They were shadow and stillness. An absence from the world.
I pulled my probe back immediately after brushing against the spell, utterly terrified of them realizing someone had discovered them as they left the mausoleum. A spell of that level was magnitudes higher than I could hope to cast or normally even detect. They could probably sneak up on me in the middle of the day, cut my throat in a crowd of people, then leave before I had any idea what was happening.
Slipping further into the darkness of the mausoleum, I kneeled with my back against a far corner. I counted to a hundred. Then I restarted my counting when I finished. For good measure, I did so a third time, even though my legs were aching and I my eyelids becoming heavy. The thought of my bed was becoming incredibly appealing, so much so that when I finally rose to my feet and risked moving about again, my first thought was just to call it a night and return to the dorms.
But there was a skeleton in the hall next to mine. Well, there were probably skeletons all over the godforsaken place, but they were bones that would likely be the easiest to access and pilfer from.
I tiptoed into the section where the Lion Hallers had held their initial pre-rush meeting. There was not much sign any sort of gathering had happened there, the corridor looking much the same as the rest of the honeycomb of graves stacked on top of each other, encased in unearthly white stone.
Even Richard Baillie's grave looked the same as the rest, not at all like someone had just pulled it open. I ran my thumbnail down the seam where the stone met the grave marker, half-expecting it to be sealed again like the rest, but it pulled away from the wall at my slightest touch.
Gripping both sides of the marker, I pulled the shelf open and soon stared down at Baillie's bones. A glance beneath the stone slab the body was proffered on revealed a set of wheels affixed to the bottom, likely to make it easier to move about for events like the one I had witnessed earlier.
Despite having seen a group of other students desecrate Baillie's mortal remains only a bit prior, I was not exactly keen on doing so myself. The propensity for necromancers to use such materials like human corpses for our conduits and in our spells was likely one of the reasons our fellow mages generally disliked us. It was a grotesque and morbid sort of magic that many rightfully found off-putting and in poor taste.
And for some reason, it is the only form of spell craft I seemed capable of.
I wound up claiming the tip of one of Baillie's finger bones, wrapping it in a handkerchief and placing it in my pocket before sliding Baillie back into the wall. Realistically, I should have taken longer in my selection, as some distant part of me seemed to know different parts of the human skeleton were best used for certain purposes in necromantic spell work. The body's thumb bones, spine, and jawbone all seemed to draw my eye for some reason.
But I was tired and overall repulsed by the outing, and didn't want to spend hours shifting over every single ivory scrap of the poor dead wizard boy to figure out which bits were worth taking and squirrelling away on my person.
So I took the finger bone, slid Baillie back into the wall and called it a night, beginning my trek through the mausoleum and back to the dorms. I began to slowly weave my way back through the twisting stone halls of the Mausoleum.