Academy of Magic Collection

by Angelique S Anderson et al.

  Midori went on to explain that before humans, the earth was populated by beings called The Elementals: Sylphs, who governed the air, Salamanders who routed the sunshine and sparked the fires, Undines, who engineered the seas and rivers, and Gnomes, who tended everything on land. Uri had mentioned as much to me when I arrived, but Midori elaborated.

  The Undines were responsible for connecting and directing all the water in the world so that it flowed in a consistent cycle. The Sylphs brought the water into the sky and changed it into rain to support all the plants and animals, and the Salamanders were in charge of making sure the fire at the center of the earth and in the sky never went out.

  Midori went on to explain how this system evolved over thousands of years, and eventually, The Elementals became so efficient at helping each other, the Creator of All Things asked the Gnome Queen, Ghob, to grow a beautiful Garden.

  Save for a few giggles from the crowd at the odd name, Midori explained how Ghob called up fruit bearing trees, vegetable vines, and flowers in every imaginable color. She asked her sister Necksa, the Queen of the Undines, to route streams and waterfalls through The Garden, and her sister was happy to help. Her other sisters, Paralda, the Sylph queen, made sure the rain fell, and Djin, the Salamander queen made sure the sun shone and the weather was always warm.

  “And all was well when The Creator of All Things brought forth Adam and Eve from The Garden,” Midori said in an inspired tone. At this, several people started whispering their surprise that the pair had actually existed. This made me roll my eyes. We’d just witnessed two people literally sprout wings and breathe fire, and Adam and Eve was hard concept to swallow?

  “The Creator of All Things adored the new humans,” Midori said. “And because The Elementals lived in such harmony, they were asked to help the humans—to teach them and protect them. But the Gnome Queen quickly saw that all things began to revolve around the humans,” she went on, her voice growing more ominous. “The Creator had given Adam and Eve permission to kill and eat the animals, which was unthinkable to Ghob. They cut down the trees she had made, burned the wood and cooked the flesh of the animals they’d killed with the fire the Salamander queen was ordered to provide.”

  “Why didn’t they just stop helping them?” a girl several yards from me asked.

  “That’s exactly what Ghob asked Necksa, the queen of the Undines, to do. Dry up the streams and stop the waterfalls, Ghob had asked her sister. We are enslaved and must break our chains. Necksa agreed to stop delivering water to the Garden in solidarity with her sister, but when The Creator of All Things learned of their plotting, he banished Ghob and all the Gnomes from the Garden they’d created. He permanently returned the Undines to the sea, and worst of all, those who were still on land working to remove the remaining brooks and ponds from the Garden were stranded on two legs, never again to return to their lives under the ocean.”

  Midori heaved a heavy sigh and finished the story by explaining that the Sylph queen and the Salamander queen were so heartbroken for their sisters that they sneaked Ghob back into the Garden after Adam dropped the forbidden fruit. She took it and created an exact replica of the Garden from the seed—the island we were standing on now.

  “Wait, so this is The Garden of Eden 2.0?” a silver-haired boy near me asked through a laugh. A few others also laughed, but everyone waited for the answer.

  Midori smiled gently and nodded. “Our school is named for this cliff—Eden’s Bluff. The double entendre is ironic, no?”

  Everyone began to chatter, and I’d likely have done the same if there would have been anyone familiar nearby. This island was an exact copy of the actual Garden of Eden? But then a thought crossed my mind.

  “What happened to the original Garden?” I asked. The chatter died down immediately, and Midori met my eyes for the second time, the air seeming to chill between us.

  “Djin, the Salamander queen was ordered by The Creator to bring forth great gates from the molted iron deep in the earth, and an archangel with a flaming sword was posted as the sentinel. The humans, the Gnomes, and the Undines were forbidden ever to enter again.” Midori didn’t look away after answering my question, even though several others resorted to raising their hands to get her attention.

  Finally, another girl just spoke out. “Where’s the real Garden now?”

  At this, Midori finally looked away from me, a gentle smile blooming on her face as she found the source of the question. “It lies somewhere behind the veil—the divider between this plane and the next,” she said, looking around at everyone. “All Sylphs and Salamanders who were on this side of the veil when the Gnomes and the Undines were banished from The Garden were given a kind of dual citizenship. They were allowed to pass between worlds—the physical and the ethereal. All other Elementals were trapped behind the veil in their Bright Spirit form, as things can only be on the other side.”

  “So we can’t go to the other side?” I asked, trying to figure out why Leo and the others were so bent on finding the tear in the veil somewhere up here tonight.

  “The Blood has been diluted over the millennia…mixed with that of humans, and until the Red Fever catalyst, we weren’t even able to access our physical shift forms or our Bright Spirits,” Midori started, her gray gaze again filling me with a sense of vastness—of an emptiness that sent a shiver through me. “The influx of Elemental blood on this plane has torn parts of the veil all over the world. It is our hope that through training you at Eden’s Bluff in the ways of your ancestors, you will become a new generation of Elementals, capable of helping mankind heal this world.” Midori’s voice was melodic like someone reading a bedtime story, and I felt a sense of calm fall over everyone when she finished talking. It fell over everyone except me, though, because she hadn’t actually answered my question about if we could pass through the veil to where the rest of the Elementals apparently were, and from the way she just stared at me, unblinking, she seemed to know it too.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I knew I wouldn’t make it back to the dining hall in time for lunch because I didn’t want to follow the rest of the Sylphs back. It wasn’t that there was anything nefarious about them, but the feeling that they didn’t think I belonged with them was all too palpable.

  Instead, I sat near the edge of the cliff and watched the storm gathering over the ocean. I wondered if it were one of the hurricanes that was supposed to start hitting the islands soon, and if so, why no one had said anything about it yet. I hadn’t even been here two full days, but I had the sense there weren’t really any rules except a few absolute ones like don’t eat anything not in the dining hall yet. I was really starting to hate that rule as I looked around at the strange, beautiful fruits hanging on nearly every tree in sight. Skinny, bean-like purple fruits and bunches of shimmery, golden berries that looked like grapes were both within arm’s reach, and my stomach started to growl.

  I got to my feet before I was tempted beyond my willpower to try them, remembering what Alita had said about potentially being stranded out here as an eagle. Though I had to wonder if that would be so bad? I could always fly back to the main house, couldn’t I? And there had to be some way to un-shift, at least partially, as I’d seen both Ian and Leo do this morning.

  I looked at the shimmering berries that cropped up in front of some of the larger rocks facing the horizon, but the visceral, drumming sound in the distance pulled my attention away. Something was flying in the distance, diving, then rising again in a huge, looping arc.

  My heart pounded in my ears, the same sense of panic flooding my bloodstream as when I saw the shadow of my own wings overhead—an imminent predator just waiting to snatch me up and swallow me whole.

  Tingles pricked my shoulder blades and ran down my arms to my fingertips. The same feeling made its way to my lips as I tried to focus on the ominous, dark mass getting closer to land with every pass. Almost immediately, my vision sharpened, and the creature closing in wasn’t a freakishly large bird as I starte
d to suspect. The huge, black wings raised and lowered slowly, effortlessly, carrying the creature whose neck was nearly as long as its tail, and I quickly made my way into the thick brush to my left.

  In what seemed like just a handful of seconds, a deafening whoosh rippled through the air, followed by a thunderous sound when the creature actually landed. The impact felt like a small earthquake under my feet, and I gripped the tree I was hiding behind so I wouldn’t be thrown to the ground.

  The scales shimmered in the sun, partially blinding me with every step. The creature sounded like an enormous horse snorting and forcefully exhaling in short gusts that shook the branches all around me. Different kinds of fruit rained down on me from overhead, driving me out of my hiding place. I stumbled over the collection of them underfoot and landed in the clearing.

  Scrambling to my feet, I desperately tried to cover my eyes from the glare shooting in every direction in front of me, but I just wound up tripping and falling again over the fruit on the ground. The glare finally started to dissipate, and when I could finally open my eyes, Leo was crouched in front of me wearing nothing at all. His huge, black wings slowly began disappearing behind his back, and his horns carefully receded into his forehead. In seconds, there was no trace of his dragon at all.

  I gripped the grass all around me, pulling myself to my feet only to stumble over yet more fruit on the ground. I didn’t fall again, but only because a boulder just behind me was close enough to catch and steady myself. I moved behind it, and Leo met my eyes.

  “Well, this is awkward,” he said, quickly covering is more decorative parts as he flashed a genuine smile at me. Every muscle in his body tensed, keeping him fixed in his stance. “Could you throw me my pants?” He nodded to the boulder just to my right, a pile of clothes folded neatly on top of it.

  “Um, yes. Yes, I can do that,” I said too quickly and tried not to trip again as I grabbed the stack and brought it over to him, keeping my eyes on the ground the whole way there and back to my boulder. After a second, I risked a glance to see if he was done getting dressed, but he’d only managed to put on underwear that looked like biking shorts. He’d turned around to face the horizon, and I watched the columns of muscle shift in his back and legs as he stepped into his pants. After another few seconds, he turned back toward me and walked with such purpose, I had to fight the instinct to run. Heat pushed through my chest as he got closer, the hard curves of his stomach, his chest, and shoulders shifting and rolling with each step. He pulled an elastic from the pocket of his pants and raised his arms to tie his dark hair back, which made his biceps jump. I was frozen where I stood.

  He stopped abruptly and smiled at me, then stepped into his sandals at the foot of the boulder. He pulled his shirt on and started to button it up, offering me an arm when he finished.

  “I promise I won’t bite,” he said. “Despite the rows of enormous razor teeth I’m sure you just saw.”

  I hadn’t, in fact, seen any rows of razor teeth, and this being a thing I now knew didn’t do much for my current levels of anxiety and…whatever else this feeling was. I wanted to run as fast as I could in the other direction only slightly less than I felt compelled to stay with him. To get and stay as close as I could to him.

  “So, that was your dragon,” I said stupidly, which made him laugh.

  “You’ll see this for yourself soon enough, but if you go awhile without fully shifting, it starts to make you restless,” he said, glancing over at me. “It’s almost like the animal inside is trying to get out.”

  “I’ve felt like that a few times in the last week or so,” I said. “It’s been a little worse since yesterday—since the hurricane berries.”

  Leo nodded, pushing his hands into his pockets and raising his shoulders against the cold breeze coming off the ocean.

  “It’ll get worse now that the eagle is awake in there,” he said, the concept of an actual eagle living on the inside of my body sending a jolt of fear through me. “It’s all right, though,” Leo continued, chuckling a little. “It’s just another part of you, that’s all. The sooner you accept that, the easier shifting back and forth will be.”

  I looked up at him, suddenly not as anxious. “How did you know it bothered me when you said that? About the eagle living inside me?”

  He looked up and scanned the hillside in the distance, then gave me a side-smile. “I don’t know, I just felt it I guess. Like, the temperature around us changed, if that makes sense.”

  It made more sense than he knew. Or maybe he did know? I wasn’t sure if the sense of comfort I had around him was because he was the only other student on this island who knew I didn’t come from the interior wall of my city—that I came from the outside, from The Grind, just like he’d come from The Ridge. Or at least, that’s what he’d told me, and I didn’t know why anyone would confess a thing like that when they had the chance to start fresh with new people.

  I’d only known Leo a few days, but the pull I felt to him was the opposite feeling I’d had with the Sylphs. With people who were supposed to be just like me. I couldn’t even get past the initial stranger-awkwardness with them to find out where they were from…if they’d come from outside the walls of their own cities too. We never even had a chance to find out if we were alike or not, and it struck me that this was the same feeling I had back at Portland Prep. A distance of some kind that kept me back, apart from everyone else there except for Max.

  “I didn’t feel right today with the Sylphs,” I confessed. “I don’t think they believed that I was a Sylph.”

  Leo’s brows drew together. “What makes you think that?” he asked as a flash of lighting ripped across the sky and seconds later, thunder cracked in the distance.

  “I don’t know, it’s just how I felt around Ian and Midori. And being around the other Sylphs felt like a blank feed channel, all static and noise. Not actual noise, just the feeling you’d get if there was too much of it, you know?”

  Leo nodded and smiled widely. “I do,” he answered. “Spent my first year here feeling that way, but being able to help other people transition has helped a lot.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It just undoes the knots I guess—whatever they are from day to day.” He slowed our pace as we approached the dining hall, which came into view in the distance at the bottom of the hill.

  “I know what you mean. I want to be able to help people too—help them solve their problems.”

  “How so?” he asked.

  “I want to be a psychologist,” I answered. “After taking the intro in high school, I just kept taking independent study classes with the teacher so I could learn everything I could.”

  Leo smiled just a little. “No wonder you’re already in my head,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he meant what it seemed like he meant, or if he was just trying to make a joke. “Anyway, sounds like you’re probably halfway to being an expert already.”

  “Not even close,” I chuckled. “But I like puzzles, and that’s all problems are. You can’t always change your circumstances, but you can change your perception of them with the right arrangements in your head. Kind of the same thing then, I guess.”

  Leo looked at me like he was trying to decide something, then seemed to come to a conclusion after a few seconds.

  “You’re shift may be a Sylph, Halsey, but there’s a fire inside you.”

  I smiled awkwardly at the combination of the look he was giving me and the intensity of his words.

  “Thanks,” I managed, which sounded pitifully inadequate the second I said it. My mind completely blanked after that, and heat filled my chest, rushed into my cheeks, and made it that much harder to think. I opened my mouth, hoping something would come to me, but I didn’t have the chance before Leo’s fingers brushed my cheek. They moved slowly into my hair, and he took a step toward me and brought his other hand to the back of my head.

  When he brought them into view again, he was holding two pieces of plants that looked like bright gree
n, unwound twine.

  “Ripple Moss,” he said, twirling the pieces in his fingers. “Must have fallen from one of the trees somewhere on the walk back.”

  “Oh…” I said, a little relieved and a little disappointed. Prickles ran over every inch of my skin and I felt my body stiffen with the fear that wings and feathers would appear again right now, at the worst possible time.

  I took a deep breath to steady myself, the smell of him rich and comforting like a campfire. I smiled to myself because of course he smelled like a campfire. I took in another deep breath, the warm scent of him chasing away the last of the prickling sensations I’d felt.

  “What’s that look?” he asked, a smile lacing his voice.

  “Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “Um, OK, that’s a lie.” I laughed. “I just panicked a little for a second—everything started to prickle like it did after I ate the hurricane berries, and I was worried about…well, shifting again.”

  I took a step back, feeling awkward and embarrassed. Why did I even say anything?

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Leo laughed a little. “It can be controlled with some practice. You just have to find a way to connect with it,” he said taking another step toward me to close the distance I’d just created. “Otherwise, the build-up will just gatecrash you.”

  I started to reply, trying to keep my voice steady since he was so close to me I could feel the heat radiating from him. “H-how do you connect with a tidal wave like that?” I swallowed, then took another breath as I stepped back again before I completely lost my composure. ”

  “It’s funny you put it that way,” he said, clearing his throat. “When it first started for me, when I first started feeling the fire building, I’d lose control because I’d try to fight it. It just took me over until I got here and by watching the ocean, I realized it was more like water than fire. It built the same, like a swell that comes on gradually until suddenly it’s just on top of you.” He shook his head and turned to face the ocean beyond the edge of the cliff. “You just can’t fight a tidal wave. You can only watch it coming, and then find a way to ride it.”