The end of book 4
Dungeon Core Academy: Book 5
CHAPTER 1
Anna Stapes hobbled through the woods with her cane in one hand and her little brother, Jost, holding her other. The woods were dark, the day was cold and drawing short, and their foraging basket was worryingly empty.
“Woah!”
She stumbled, lost grip of her brother’s hand, and fell to the ground.
“You okay, Anna? Should I fetch someone?” said Jost.
“Don’t be silly, I’ve never been better! Just help me off my arse.”
He tugged on her to help her up, but his scrawny arms meant he didn’t have much success. Wincing, Anna forced herself to her feet.
“We should go home,” said Jost.
“Nonsense. We don’ have any berries, any shrooms, nothing.”
“Is your leg bad today?”
“It’s colder than a witch’s teats today, Jost. My leg always plays up when there’s a chill.”
“Ma will be able to make somethin’ for tea. Even if we don’ have nothin’ to give. She always thinks of somethin’.”
“I’m not going home with an empty basket,” said Anna. “What do I always tell you?”
“A fall is just a prelude to succe-”
Jost stopped talking.
He held his breath.
With his eyes widening to pure white discs, he pointed to a patch of ahead of them.
Just across the forest, sniffing at the bracken, was a bear cub. A little bundle of rust-brown fur, already big enough to crush them both yet looking at them with button-black, almost cute eyes.
But it wasn’t the cub that was the problem.
“Don’t move a single step,” said Anna, her breath catching in her chest, so cold it seemed to scold her like white ice. It only got worse the harder she tried to hide her panic so Jost didn’t get scared.
The mama bear would be around here somewhere, because they never let their cubs stray too far. Anna and Jost had already gotten too close to it, and it was too late to run; their scent would linger in the air. Even if there was no cub around to force the mama bear into protectiveness, the sight of a bear at the start of winter would be trouble. The bear should be hibernating now. Its presence in the woods meant it hadn’t gathered enough food yet, and it would be desperate.
“Anna,” whispered Jost. “I’m scared.”
“I’d never let anything happen to you,” is what she knew she should say. But that was a lie.
“I’ll try not to let anything happen to you,” she said.
The thought crossed her mind that she should hit Jost over the head and leave him here for the bear. Maybe it would get her enough time to hobble out of the woods.
She had these thoughts from time to time. Thoughts about kicking a dog when it begged for scraps, or throwing stones at a bird’s nest when the chicks chirped too loudly. Now, she did what she always did, and imagined that the dark thought was a disgusting rat and she had a broom and she was chasing it out of her mind. With a tremendous mental fight, it was gone. She knew that she could do what was expected as the big sister.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll stay here and…uh…talk to the bear, Jost. You run home.”
“Talk to it?” he said.
“Why, yes. I’ll stay and chat.”
“And it won’t eat you?”
“Go, Jost! I’ll see you at home.”
And then she saw it. A hulking mass of fur and muscle, its snout bigger than a fist, paws wide enough to swipe a girl’s head clean off her shoulders. As Jost scarpered off through the woods with his boots kicking up mud and twigs, Anna did a little trick. It was something she’d learned, though she didn’t know where.
She imagined a big, golden blanket covering her mind. Every inch of space in her brain that the blanket smothered, was suddenly calm.
Her fear floated away with the fairies.
Her nerves disappeared from this mortal plane.
The big bear jerked its head, focusing on Jost who was still fleeing the forest. It kicked up mud with its back legs. Steam rose from its nose as it snorted.
Waving her arms, Anna shouted “Hey! Bear! Grizzly!”
With a roar that sounded like a demon giving birth, the bear bounded over to her. Anna prepared to meet her fate with utter calm. Thoughts of terror pushed against the blanket in her mind, but it stayed in place, and she felt nothing, absolutely nothing, as the bear bounded toward her.
As it neared, she heard it snarl at her. She smelled the mud and dung coated on its fur. She read an unmistakable lust for blood and flesh in its eyes.
She blinked.
She cast her own thoughts out. She didn’t know how she did it, she never knew how, but she did it all the same.
She imagined a blanket in the bear’s mind. Yellow, sickly looking, colored like pee in a chamber pot. She imagined the blanket smothering the bear’s thoughts.
The bear suddenly stopped. Its jaw trembled. It whined, turned around, and fled. It didn’t even stop to make sure its cub was following it, as though overwhelming cowardice had come upon it.
The cub, either incredulous or terrified, looked at its fleeing mother and then at Anna.
Anna growled at it. “Go on, cub. Before I eat you! Grr!”
Soon, both mother bear and cub were just blurry shapes in the distance, and Anna was alone in the forest.
She took her time, filled her basket with shrooms and berries and herbs, and then set off home.
Later, in a house not far from the forest, Gretlin Stapes sat on a wobbly chair, having surrendered the best chair in the house to her mage visitor. The mage wore the white and red robes of a healer, which was the only kind of mage that Gretlin knew. When she had served with Duke Smit’s army in her teens, she had fallen deeply, utterly in love with a healer in her unit. Unfortunately, he was smitten with their sergeant. Such is life.
“You’re from the Chosen One School?” said Gretlin.
The mage nodded. “I am Haelen Bolton.”
“And you’re telling me that my daughter is the Chosen One?”
“She’s a Chosen One, not the Chosen One. The difference, as you can imagine, is quite important to recognize. Your child is special, yes, but not so special that there aren’t others like her.”
“She wants to become a ship’s mate and travel Xynnar by sea. She’s said so since she was old enough to speak. I’m not sending her to some school where her future is already decided.”
“Did I mention the annual stipend you would receive?”
“You did. Did I mention that my daughter’s feelings are more important to me?”
“How noble.”
“What, you think nobility is just for the fancy types whose chairs don’t wobble and who don’t have to send their children foraging in the forest?”
“You might be thankful you did send her foraging. If a hunter hadn’t witnessed the incident with the bear, if he hadn’t seen the magic streaming from Anna’s head, we would never have known about her.”
“I won’t send her to your school.”
Haelen stood up and walked to the window and looked out, where Anna and Jost were playing with Kole, her neighbor’s lad.
“You served with Duke Smit’s army when you were younger, didn’t you, Gretlin?”
“The old Duke Smit, the one who died a few years ago. It was before I met Anna’s father. I served for five years.”
“Hmm. And that would have been, what, twenty years ago now?”
“Something like that,” said Gretlin, starting to feel uncomfortable.
She couldn’t know. Nobody does.
So why do I feel like she’s got her hand in my head?
“There was a unit in Smit’s army. I’m sure you know of them, or perhaps you’ve heard of them. During the Blakemore campaign, they liberated Blaketown from their Tyndalese overlords. Nothing special, I know. It was a war, and territories were won and lost like marbles in a children’s game. But the curious t
hing was that this particular unit didn’t just liberate the town. They liberated the townsfolk of their lives. Blood lust, some say. Greed, say others. Whatever happened, this unit of Smit’s army killed most of the villagers and fled. Hunters paid for by the crown spent decades pursuing each and every member of the unit to the far corners of Xynnar. I wonder if they were all caught?”
Gretlin felt like she’d just been punched, stabbed, and then shot in the chest with a crossbow. She did her best to hold it in, but she felt sweat beading down her forehead.
I didn’t kill anyone. But I was there, and I could have stopped it and didn’t, because I was too scared.
“Cowardice is normal,” said Haelen, shocking Gretlin. “But it is no excuse. The king’s orders to bring each and every member of that unit to the gallows still stands, even decades after the fact. There is a reward, I am told. Some mercenaries spend their lives hunting lost members of Smit’s Golden Arrows. Of course, old Duke Smit himself renounced the unit completely, and he escaped punishment by executing those members who crawled back to his lands.”
“I’ll…I’ll tell Anna to pack her things.”
“A wise choice. Anna will be very happy at our school.”
Instructors at the Chosen One school did not always tell the truth, as it turned out. When Anna left home, she found that she did not miss Jost or her mother all that much. But when she learned that her Chosen One education would last five years, and that at the end she'd be expected to spend her life doing Chosen One things, she began to resent her change in fortune.
On her third night she ran away, only to be brought back to the school doors gripped by the jaws of one of the wrathlings that patrolled the grounds at night. It plonked her down, covered in spit, and then howled until an Instructor came.
Anna got two lashings in front of the entire school for that.
On her twelfth day, she ran away again, this time doing so in daylight after learning that the wrathlings couldn’t stand the sun. She made it away from the school and through the surrounding weeping forest, reaching a town that supplied the school with all its meat, mead, and vegetables. There, Anna sought passage on a trading wagon bound for the coast, where she would look for deck work on a ship and then make her way up from there, one day rising to the glorious rank of captain.
As it happened, the town had a deal with the school that they would report any runaways, and the sun was still shining when Anna found herself taken back to the school.
She got fifteen lashings in front of the entire school for that.
It was an oft-repeated saying that the third time was the charm, and so Anna broke away from the school on a cool autumn morning. This time she headed east, avoiding any towns and dwellings so that she couldn’t be betrayed.
A single Chosen One instructor caught up with her. It was Haelen Bolton, the lady who had brought her to the school in the first place.
Anna had prepared for such a moment. She knew that the instructors wouldn’t let her leave the Chosen One school willingly. Now that they knew lashings wouldn’t work, they would use mysterious magic to bind her, perhaps. Or they would cast an illusion to beguile her into abandoning escape. They would wield dark arts to force her back into educational captivity. And she had prepared for it carefully.
She held a very, very large rock in her hand, and she made sure Haelen could see it.
“A step closer and I’ll smash a hole in your head, scoop out your brain, and use your skull as a bowl for my oats. When I get money to buy oats, that is.”
“I quite believe you would.”
“Then you just watch it.”
“Here I am, watching it. Not moving. See?” said Haelen.
“You aren’t going to cast a spell on me?”
“Anna, we are quite tired of your crap, to be quite honest. Do you think we have nothing better to do than to suffer your repeated escape attempts and then go through the tiresome process of lashing you? Let me tell you, the pay we receive from the school isn’t worth the trouble, and job satisfaction is nil.”
“Then what’s all this? What do you want from me?”
“I’m not going to stop you, Anna, but think on this. Take a look at the horizon and tell me what you see.”
“Nothin’.”
“Nothin?’ Dear, we aren’t in the mud village now. Try to talk like the rest of the civilized world.”
“I see nothi…nothing.”
“Exactly. There’s nothing in the distance but more miles to walk, an endless slog until your body gives up. You are looking at your future if you walk away from the school.”
“I’m a Chosen One. Destiny will find me no matter what.”
“Destiny doesn’t give a rat’s arse about you, child. Xynnar is littered with Chosen Ones washing pots in taverns, or collapsing drunk outside of said taverns, their face pressed against the dirty street cobbles while gutter rain drips on their cheeks. And yet, there are thousands of successful heroes, merchants, and mages who were not marked as chosen, and yet made more of a success of their lives through sheer force of will. Chosen One or not, my dear, you can quite easily make nothing of your life.”
“And least the nothin’…nothing… will be my choice.”
“It will. But the opposite would be your choice, too. Why choose nothing, when you could just as easily choose to be something?”
Anna thought about that for a while. Still unconvinced, she said, “Hmm. I don’t really think I’m a Chosen One, Ms. Bolton. Not everyone who has powers is a Chosen One.”
“No? You think we just gather every magic-using child and bring them here?”
Anna frowned. “Then where’s my marker? In our ‘History of the Ones’ class, we learned that every Chosen One has a mark on their body that shows they’re special.”
“And what would you call the great, purple splodge on your back?”
“Hmm. Well, all Chosen Ones are supposed to have a prophesy. Where’s mine, huh?”
“That will come when you’re ready,” said Haelen.
Anna folded her arms defiantly. “Chosen Ones must always accept their burden reluctantly, at first.”
“Tell me, would you describe someone who runs away from school three times as being reluctant?”
“You’ve got an answer for everything… everything except this! Chosen Ones are supposed to have a mentor. One who they pretend that they dislike, but secretly have affection for.”
“Hello?” said Haelen, smiling and waving her hand.
And so, her sailing dreams not forgotten but at least buried for a while, Anna went back to school. To ease her into it, Mage Haelen even cast an illusion spell on the window in Anna’s dorm, so that when she looked out of it, she could see the sea.
She replaced her dreams of seafaring with her lessons. The school made her exercise her body to almost peak physical prowess. Almost being the key word for Anna, whose leg would always be just as injured, just as painful no matter what she did. Even the school’s healer couldn’t do anything.
Her instructors made her perfect her speech so that she no longer said things like nothin’ and somethin’. Alas, it was impossible to remove the village from her heart entirely, and Anna found in moments of great anger or delight, that she would lapse into her rustic talk.
She learned languages. Customs. She studied beasts, monsters, weapons, and she was taught in which order to use all the different knives, forks, and spoons on the table when attending fancy dinner parties.
Most importantly of all, as the years went by and Anna grew taller and older, she honed her powers. She learned to use them purposefully first. She learned their triggers. She learned how to strengthen them, how to use one power in a situation, a different power in another. The stronger her powers got the greedier she became for more, and soon Anna was known as the hardest working student in the school.
In the blink of time’s eye Anna was in her final year, with her tablet-smashing day fast approaching. Tablet-smashing was a day all Chosen One stud
ents looked forward to and feared in equal measures. They each would have to descend into the nearby Caves of Prophecy, and battle through monsters and perils to retrieve a stone tablet waiting for them.
On the tablet would be a prophecy just for them, a destined task that would shape their working lives as Chosen Ones. Then, having received their fated task and committed it to memory, they would smash the tablet on the ground, collect their belongings, and leave the school forever.
Anna was looking forward to putting her knowledge, her physique, and her powers to a real test, and to leaving the school and living her life. She studied with renewed drive, she trained with a focus that amazed everyone, even her own instructors.
But it was on a drizzly morning just eight weeks before her tablet-smashing day that Anna’s best school friend, Utta, was caught stealing mead from an instructor’s private stash. He was to be given twenty-two lashings in front of the school as punishment, one lashing for every jar of mead he stole.
Knowing how much the lashings hurt, and unable to watch her only friend get the same punishment, Anna used her powers. She imagined a white blanket with blue spots covering Instructor Bondyke’s mind. She wove into it memories of the puppy he’d loved as a child, magnifying its puppy-dog eyes. Then she let the blanket settle over his thoughts, smothering ideas of punishment and leaving him in a more forgiving mood.
Instructor Bondyke snapped his gaze on her. The blood drained from his face.
“Anna? You dare to use your powers on an instructor?”
The furor was something to behold, and the tale of the instructor’s anger that morning would become a school legend. Of all the school’s rules, the chief among them was that Chosen Ones would never use their powers – whatever form they took – on an instructor. They were just doing their job, after all. They had to be safe.
And so, Anna was expelled from the school, with Utta along with her. Not even Ms. Bolton would forgive Anna this time.
Just like that, her life had been upended. She thought back to her conversation with Mage Haelen five years earlier. She remembered watching the distance and seeing nothing in it.
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 86