That night after curfew, we went to Lion Hall.
The seven different halls of Angitia were scattered across campus, and all had the same basic form of a tower rising into the sky. That's where the similarities ended, though. Each Hall had a different feel to it, a different sort of substantiality in the world that spoke of the people who had lived and worked magic in them for years on years. In many ways, it was as if Narrative itself had received a sort of physical presence in the world.
Lion Hall was crafted entirely from what appeared to be bricks of white marble containing veins of gold that shone even at night. Carvings of lion prides on the hunt were worked into every available surface of the exterior, and the windows appeared to be stained glass depictions of different famous alumni of the hall from the school's early days, such as Victor Neuburg, Mary Butts, and Frank Wenham. All relatively famous magicians, all former Knights of the empire, and each portrayed in a dazzling mosaic of glass trimmed with gold and cut gemstones.
Overall, the entire feel of the building was a gaudy opulence that made me a bit ill to look at.
Say what you will about Lord Woodman, and I had most certainly no warm feelings toward the man, but his estate had a subdued elegance I found much more appealing. The only time I ever saw gold in that manor was whenever Lord Woodman checked his pocket watch, and the walls are only sparingly decorated with paintings of nymphs, dryads, and different pagan figures: Tantalus, Lycaon, and other fancy blokes whose names I couldn't remember.
Sylas opened the door for us by knocking a pattern on it, and a rather bored looking student with a pair of lionesses embroidered on the sleeves of his jacket escorts us in. Lion Hall's interior almost made its outside look subdued, with every available surface seeming to have been covered in gold leaf.
"Oh my," Rosamund said, looking around with wide eyes.
Oh god, I thought as I looked down at the floor to see that it too was coated in gold. Part of me wondered if I should have wiped off my shoes before entering.
Sylas led us through a series of increasingly opulent rooms that Rosamund and Mason made appreciative noises at. I glanced at Iroha, and she seemed decidedly unimpressed by the entire grandiose display of wealth.
I tried my best to school my face into a similar expression to Iroha's, but I didn't think I managed it as well. The fourth life-sized statue of a golden lion with diamonds set into his mane was admittedly enough to make me a tad awestruck.
Finally, we arrived in a room with a series of gold embroidered couches where Lion Hallers lounged like indolent cats. I could feel their eyes on the five of us as Sylas guided us to a particularly large couch on the far side of the room where a young man with long hair tied back with a black ribbon sat leaning back and sipped something from a metal goblet.
I recognized him from that night in the mausoleum. Cecil Baldwin. The fourth year.
"Cecil," Sylas said. "These are some friends of mine. You mentioned you wanted me to bring in some other freshmen who'd be a good fit here? Since I was the first one to get a book from the restricted section this year?"
Sylas's voice sounded a lot less certain than it had when he first suggested we should all join Lion Hall's pre-rush. Almost like he expected it all to blow up in some spectacular way.
It did not inspire confidence.
Cecil leaned forward on the couch and took a decidedly bored sip of whatever was in his goblet. I didn't like how he looked at us as he did. It was a bored predatory expression that reminded me far too much of how some cats acted before they stalked a mouse.
"Really?" Cecil said. "What are your names, then?"
"Mason Allbright," Mason said, sticking his hand out to Cecil. "It's a pleasure to meet you, chap."
Cecil did not take Mason's hand, instead frowning at it slightly like he was looking at a dead fish. Mason held it out for a few more beats, before slowly pulling it back with a baffled expression on his face.
"Theodore Crowley," I cut in, trying to ease the tension a bit. "I'm Sylas's roommate."
Cecil's eyes fell on me. "You're the Lord Woodman's nephew?"
That caught me a bit off guard, but I guess it shouldn't have. Sylas must have mentioned me at some point. Either that or Lion Hall has some extensive list of every student and their most prominent relations, and Cecil had it memorized somehow. Though that theory felt less likely.
"Yes," I said to Cecil with a smile I hoped didn't look too forced. "My uncle actually attended Angitia himself, though he was in Snake Hall."
"And you didn't want to rush there?" Cecil asked.
"Well, I—" I wasn't particularly sure what to say to that. "My friends wanted to rush here?" I finished weakly.
Cecil cocked his head at me in a way I did not think was a particularly good sign.
However, I noticed Mason breaking out in a wide grin that made me want to roll my eyes and Sylas who… Sylas who smiled at me softly in a way that made my ears hot. I looked away from them and fixed my eyes on a painting directly behind Cecil, depicting some scene of knights on horseback hunting foxes.
"And you lovely ladies?" Cecil said, finally turning his attention to Iroha and Rosamund.
"Iroha Tsuchimikado," Iroha said
"Rosamund Ehrenfest," Rosamund said with a bright smile.
"Ah, the transfer student from Shang," Cecil said. "I'd heard some rumors about you. Tell me, is it true that you are a scion of one of the Seven Sages?"
The who?
I glanced away from the painting and at Iroha. Her face was a frozen mask of something I couldn't quite identify, but the room suddenly felt incredibly tense.
"Most magicians from Shang can claim descent from at least one of the Sages," Iroha said finally, each word sounding like it was a piece of ground glass tumbling from her lips.
"How fascinating," Cecil said. "It truly is a wonder to learn about other cultures."
He finally gave Rosamund a brilliant smile, and she smiled back, her cheeks dimpling.
"You know Ms. Ehrenfest, we'd actually thought about reaching out to you for pre-rush initially. Your family is quite well known, after all. Though I will admit we were among those who were surprised you came to Angitia for schooling and not somewhere closer to your family's lands, like Veleda Academy."
"Oh well, we talked about it," Rosamund said in a voice that oozed demureness and sweet nature. "But I desperately wanted to see more of the Isles, so my parents agreed to send me here instead."
Rosamund evidently had some notion of how to deal with people like Cecil Baldwin, because he gave her a smile that looked actually genuine if not vaguely condescending. His returning grin was all glistening white teeth.
"Well, I hope you have a favorable impression of them so far," Cecil said.
"Oh yes," Rosamund said in a voice so sugary it set my teeth on edge. "It's been simply fabulous. I can't imagine what it must have been like to grow up here."
"Me neither," Mason cut in. "I'm from the continent as well, Bourgogne mostly, though Papa liked to move us around a fair bit—"
"My own family has a manor in Wales if you are ever interested in visiting some of the scenic countryside there," Cecil told Rosamund, pointedly ignoring Mason. "Midsummer is especially lovely. You can see pixies dancing in the fields at night."
"Yes," Mason said. "I'm sure we'd all love the chance to visit your lands in Wales."
It, I decided, was going much better than I had initially thought it would.
"Hmm," Cecil said, looking us all over with a degree of boredness that was frankly insulting. "Thorne, are you sure about this lot? The point of this exercise is to give you bunch the chance to find any new promising blood we might have overlooked. Most of the others are taking a bit more time to think over their options, making sure they won't bring anybody in who'll duck out or get eaten in the first week."
"Yes, I'm sure," Sylas said, nodding. "They're all amazing magicians, and I know they'd be great additions to the Hall."
How he knew either of these things after only two odd weeks of knowing us was a bit beyond my understanding. It wouldn't surprise me if we'd just been the first group of people here who'd bothered to be friendly to Sylas and that's why he was so eager to be in the same Hall as us. Though I supposed, friendships had been built on rockier foundations than mutual interest and ambition.
"You really think so?" Cecil said, and he turned his head to the side. "Lydia!"
The same girl I'd seen skulking around with Cecil in the mausoleum, admittedly while I'd also been skulking around the mausoleum, stood up from one of the chairs facing the roaring fireplace at the other end of the room. Lydia looked decidedly bored as she walked over to us.
"Yeah Cecil?"
"Little Sylas Thorne's brought us some potential new recruits."
I bristled a bit at Cecil's tone, but a glance at the others showed only smiles, like they'd been expecting to be called something worse. Well, Mason still slumped, like he was a bit put out, but he was clearly trying to hide it.
Lydia, whose last name I still didn't know, gave the lot of us a rather bored look. Up close, her eyes reminded me of a cow's, dull and glassy.
"They don't look like much," she commented.
"No," Cecil said, steepling his fingers and leaning forward. "They don't, do they?"
Iroha shuffled next to me, evidently not liking how Cecil looked at her in particular. I couldn't blame her. Cecil Baldwin had a visage that would have looked rather handsome on someone else, sharp cheekbones and bright blue eyes, but the chronic condescension on it made Cecil's face the sort I wouldn't mind giving a good smack.
Assuming, of course, I knew he wouldn't blast me into oblivion for trying, because he was, after all, a senior and presumably had some notion of how to do that.
So instead of stepping forward to give Cecil Baldwin a good slap I was fairly confident he likely deserved, I gave him that humble smile I normally reserved for Lord Woodman when he was entertaining guests and needed me to play the role of the respectful and dutiful nephew.
"Is there anything we could do to change your minds?" I asked. "I know we'd all love to be a part of Lion Hall if given the chance."
I did my best to keep the sarcasm out of my voice, but based on the look that passed between Cecil and Lydia, I hadn't been fully successful in that. In all fairness, though, I did still struggle with keeping my true feelings hidden from Lord Woodman, and he was far more intimidating than those two twats.
"Hmm." Cecil said. A hint of annoyance had creeped into his voice.
For her part, Lydia had shifted her cowing gaze directly to me, possibly to see if I'd squirm under it. I stared back and kept my face clearly set in that humble, "I'm just a harmless simpleton who is happy to do anything and everything you could want" look, while also thinking that Lydia also seemed like someone who'd likely benefit from a good kick in the rear.
She then confirmed it.
"Say, Cecil," Lydia said, cocking her head to the side like she was thinking about something hard.
"Yeah, Lydia?"
"You know what? I think I know just how to figure out if this lot can make the cut with us."
"Really?" Cecil slid back in his seat, relaxed again. "What would that be?"
"Let's toss them in the labyrinth and see if they make it through the night."
There was a stillness in the room. Even the other Lion Hallers had stopped their idle chatter and stared at all of us. Sylas coughed, and it felt like my own heart had stopped beating for a minute.
"You know," Cecil mused. "That actually is a rather interesting idea."
Labyrinths were a staple of magical schools across the empire. It wasn't even that the schools were built over them; it was more that the moment you taught generation after generation of young mages how to harness their gifts, things got… odd.
All that mana, stray threads of spells and Narrative students practiced with every day had a habit of bleeding into the walls of a building, sinking deep into the ground, and twisting the world in bizarre ways. You see it in older manors, castles, and other buildings frequented by mages as well. Brownies pop up to clean dishes, a poltergeist finally gains enough power to throw things around a room, or the people in paintings will change their expressions and move about when they think you're not looking. For example, Lord Woodman's manor had an entire wing where the rooms were prone to trading colors with each other.
It would all be harmless, or mostly harmless, in the case of a poltergeist, if it weren't for the fact that the power also had a nasty habit of unshackling a place from the plane of reality when it hit a certain critical mass.
It's how you get houses halfway into the faerie lands or doors that open straight onto one of the nine rings of hell, neither of which is terribly appealing to most sane people. So you vent that excess power somewhere, and ideally make it do something you actually find useful.
The most popular solution was to have it build a labyrinth somewhere, an underground liminal space inhabited by all sorts of mystical creatures, and that quickly becomes filled to the brim with materials for alchemy, books of ancient spells, and all sorts of other mystical flotsam that drifted in from other planes of existence. All you need to do then is to have expeditions of people go down into your new labyrinth to retrieve all those treasures that are ripe for the picking.
Of course, the flip side to that is that Labyrinths also quickly become home to many creatures and life forms that have really no business mucking about in our reality and, by all accounts, often consider human flesh to be a delicacy. But the amount of resources and power that one can mine from a labyrinth is evidently so good the empire actively invests in keeping them around and hiring mages to conduct periodic delves into them.
The mausoleum was built entirely out of magical stone mines from Angitia's labyrinth in one of those first expeditions. Magical stone that builds out more and more space each year to accommodate all the students buried there, and it wasn't even the only building like that on campus. Supposedly, the Halls were built out of something similar that let them grow and shrink in accordance with how many students were in residence there. A lot of mages who were second or third children and not in line for formal titles made a tidy sum by signing up to help harvest those sorts of things.
At Angitia, we have practical exams in our own labyrinth at the end of freshman year and by all accounts, only two-thirds of the class annually made it out alive. It was one of the first big "trials by fire" we'd go through at school, and not one of us five freshmen standing in Lion Hall were remotely ready for it.
Sylas said as much, and a few other Lion Hallers also echoed our sentiment.
"Come on Cecil," one girl said. "It's not like getting the lot of them killed will prove anything."
"Shove off, Ariella," Cecil snapped. "You elected pre-rush chair, so I get to decide how we admit more people to it. It's my prerogative to make sure whoever winds up joining our Hall adds value as opposed to just being a parasite that rides on our laurels. Besides, it's not like I want them down there for three days, like the practical. One night on the first level should be fine."
I had vaguely thought, mistaken as it turned out, that enrolling in Lion Hall's pre-rush would be as simple as Sylas introducing us to a few members of Lion Hall, possibly showing off a few spells, then being set off on a series of innocuous errands for the rest of the semester. It appeared, though, that I was not the only one under that misimpression.
"You want us to what?" Mason all but spluttered.
Before Cecil could turn his snarling face back at us, Rosamund stepped in front of our group and said, "If this is truly what is required, then we will do it."
***
I'd never been to the labyrinth's entrance before, partially because it wasn't near any of my classes, but mostly because some of those same otherworldly abominations that liked to make labyrinths their homes were also in the habit of occasionally sticking their heads out to snatch up any stray people they found. The archway leading to Angitia's labyrinth was normally chained shut with links of enchanted silver, primarily for that reason. But they weren't enough to stop Cecil and Lydia from cracking the labyrinth open like a clamshell.
It vaguely reminded me of how easy it had been to override the Working keeping the library locked for the night when I'd broken in to steal the grimoire. It was more than a bit disconcerting. Almost as disconcerting as my evident willingness to go along with the entire affair.
I'd like to blame my willingness to go along with Rosamund and agreeing to the lunacy as a byproduct of my null upbringing, which stressed the importance of obeying mages. Even if said mage was leading you to a certifiable death trap. However, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that Sylas declaring he'd accompany us didn't factor into my choices. The thought of him willingly braving the labyrinth just so he could help a bunch of people he barely knew get into a Hall was strangely irritating to me. More so when Sylas gave us all this reassuring smile, like he'd protect us all from the unimaginable horrors that most certainly lived inside the labyrinth, or die trying.
It made me want to smack him for being such an idiot.
Cecil and Lydia opened the gates to the labyrinth with a golden key with a head in the shape of a lion on the handle. The gates swung open on hinges that didn't so much creak but screech in protest at being opened. There was a small standing area of sorts directly after the gates, and a straight hole in the center of the room with winding stairs that presumably we'd have to make our way down to the first level.
Lydia led the way, not even bothering to look behind her to see if we were following.
"You'll want to stay near the stairs, I expect," Lydia said. "Not much point in heading in too deep, or you'll attract the wrong attention from the locals. Oh, and you definitely don't want to go down any further, so I'd avoid any holes if you see them, or ladders or the like. Best to be sensible about this sort of thing."
Sensible was not remotely what I'd call any of our bloody lunacy, but by all appearances, I was the only one with reservations. The rest of my fellow freshmen had adopted calm expressions and hadn't made a peep of protest at being expected to spend a night down there. I wondered if I'd not been as discerning as I should've been when picking my friends.
Well, that and I needed to learn how to say no to people. I'd wanted to. I'd wanted to look Cecil Baldwin in his stupid, smug handsome face and tell him, "No, fuck you. There is not a chance in hell I am going down into our dangerous school's infamously deadly labyrinth just so I can join your ridiculous club."
But I couldn't. The words had stuck in my throat and despite all the wishing and desperation in the world, I'd been unable to make them leave my lips. So instead, I went along with their nonsense, going back with Sylas to our room, packing a few essentials we might need and spending the entire time inwardly alternating between rage and terror.
Cecil and Lydia held the door to the labyrinth wide open, and a breeze blew out at us. It smelled dusty and wet, the sort of stink I associated with mildew and rotting sheets.
"Sophomores had a practical lesson this morning," Cecil told us in a rather chipper voice. "Few of them didn't make it out, though. So, I suspect that means the beasties have eaten their fill for today, but you can never be too sure!"
The smile he gave the five of us made me want to knock his teeth in with a shovel.
"Last chance if anyone'd rather not go down there," Lydia said in a singsong voice.
Without a word, Rosamund stepped forward and walked into the labyrinth. There was a squawk of surprise. Then Mason jogged after her. Iroha, who let out a sigh of exasperation, followed them. It was then just Sylas and me outside with the two Lion Hallers.
I could have just turned back, I should have, but I didn't like how Cecil was smiling at us, all confident and sadistic arrogance. I also didn't like the idea of Mason and the rest being in the labyrinth all night. So with an exhale, I walked past Cecil Baldwin and into the labyrinth with Sylas at my heels.