Forest of Illusions (The Broken Prism)

by V. St. Clair

  After dinner that night, the three of them and Lorn met in the fourth-year common area on their floor, sitting around the empty fireplace and discussing what went right and wrong in their last arena challenge, as well as tactics for the future, now that they knew what sort of thing to expect.

  Lorn and Zane spent twenty minutes debating whether they should have been aiming to kill or stun in their last challenge, and after Hayden got tired of listening to them and Tess nearly fell asleep, he called for an end to the discussion and they had to agree to disagree for the time being.

  “Are we done here?” Lorn snapped in his usual surly tone.

  “Yeah, we might as well call it a night. We’ve got other things to do,” Hayden sighed and rubbed his eyes, thinking of the homework he still needed to do and wondering if he would manage to finish any of it.

  Lorn grabbed a cookie from a tray near the door and loped off to his room, while the other three made their way back downstairs and departed the castle, deciding to practice in one of the rear courtyards where there would be fewer spectators at this time of night. Master Asher caught them on their way outside and handed Hayden a jumble of necklaces that he produced from a pocket of his red robes.

  “What are these?” Hayden asked curiously, surprised to run into the Prism Master at this time of evening.

  “Magical dampers. They’ll weaken your spells so that you shouldn’t injure each other terribly while you’re practicing. Mages tend to use them when they’re working on new techniques.”

  “Then why in the world haven’t we been wearing them while you train me every-other day?” Hayden scowled at his mentor, who gave him a winning smile in response.

  “I’m wearing a Mastery Charm, which serves as a damper or an amplifier depending on my needs. I have been taking the edge off of some of my more dangerous spells for you.”

  Hayden winced at the thought of how badly he’d be hurting if Master Asher hadn’t been cutting him some slack all this time.

  “Well, thanks, but you gave us one too many anyway.” He handed the fourth back to the Master, who didn’t reach out to take it.

  “Oh, did I? Well, you might as well hang onto it for now.” He smiled again and walked off with a jovial wave at Tess and Zane.

  As soon as they were outside with the doors shut behind them Zane said, “You may have a wickedly powerful mentor teaching you magic, but I’m still not sure he’s right in the head.”

  Hayden chuckled and said, “You get used to it. Besides, I’ve long suspected that he acts that way on purpose just to throw people off; he can be stone-serious when he needs to be.”

  He handed each of them a magical dampening charm and they draped them around their necks. Hayden immediately felt as though a wet blanket had been dropped over him, like he was muffled and weaker.

  “Whoa, this is weird,” Zane made a face. “My Foci feel…heavy.”

  “It was nice of Master Asher to think to give these to us so we won’t have to worry about hurting each other as much,” Tess added, admiring the carved emblem on the end of the chain.

  “Don’t know why he insisted on giving us four of them though.” Hayden shrugged and tucked the spare necklace into his pocket. “Alright, were both of you able to get the more advanced materials you were hoping for?”

  Tess nodded and Zane smirked and said, “I found myself mysteriously cleared for level-six texts—well, some of them at least.” He grinned, obviously pleased with himself. “Looks like I was right about Reede clearing me for better texts behind my back. Good to know he’s fond of me.”

  “Okay, well I talked to Asher today in class and he gave me some advice for where to start, so—”

  “What are you three doing?” Lorn interrupted, and Hayden turned to find his teammate lurking nearby, gracing them with his characteristic scowl.

  “Nothing you care about, just an extra project we’re working on,” Zane returned tartly.

  Lorn looked even more suspicious and surly when he said, “If you’re doing extra arena practices without me then I’m going to clobber you.”

  “It’s not extra arena stuff—though I guess it could help out in there as a side benefit,” Hayden explained.

  “Then what are you doing and why don’t you want me to know about it?”

  Hayden sighed and said, “We’re just doing some combat practice, you know…in case we have to fight other mages at some point. You may not have noticed, but I didn’t do so well with that in the I.S.C. last year,” he added dryly.

  Lorn looked surprised by his honesty. “You’re practicing fighting? But you’d need at least level-five clearance to get any spell books that would help with that…level-six, maybe.”

  “Which we’ve got, thank you very much,” Zane retorted with savage pleasure. Lorn’s pudgy chin dropped in surprise.

  “Then I want in. If you all are going to be studying the important stuff, then you’re not leaving me behind to look like an idiot in our arenas.” He folded his arms across his chest, preparing himself for opposition.

  “Why would we want to include you?” Zane smirked. “I thought the Trouts were such an illustrious family that you couldn’t bear to even be seen with commoners like the rest of us.”

  Lorn made a face and said, “Shut it, Laraby, if you like your face the way it is. Otherwise I can have it rearranged for you.”

  Tess pursed her lips and said, “You seem awfully sure that you could take him in a fight.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Lorn shrugged. “But I know for a fact that my brother Oliver would jump at the chance to help me take care of all three of you.”

  Hayden suppressed a shudder at the thought of facing Oliver Trout in combat. As much as he hated the arrogant jerk, he had to concede after last year that he was an excellent fighter and quite powerful.

  “Okay, okay, no need for us to see who can threaten the other most effectively,” Hayden intervened. “If you want in, then fine, but I expect you to keep up and do the same amount of work that the rest of us are doing to prepare, or you’re out.”

  Lorn nodded, mollified, but Zane looked incredulous. “But he’s not cleared for the materials we are. How do you even know he’s allowed to practice with us?”

  Suddenly understanding, Hayden reached into his pocket and extracted the fourth dampening charm, tossing it to Lorn and motioning him to sit down in the grass with the rest of them.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Zane muttered. “How could Asher know that Lorn would be stalking us and demand to join up?”

  Hayden smirked and said, “I’ve stopped questioning how Asher knows half of what he does and just started accepting it.” He turned to Lorn. “Put that on; it’s a damper, so we don’t accidentally maim each other.”

  Lorn did as he was told without any sarcastic commentary, and even Zane settled down.

  “Alright then, I’ll teach you all the stances and tactics that Asher’s been showing me, and you guys will share any interesting spells you encounter that the rest of us can research within our own majors,” Hayden explained. “I think we should agree up front that we don’t hide information from each other. If one of us knows something useful, we tell the others and help each other figure it out. There’s no point in us being spiteful about this just because we don’t all like each other,” he avoided looking at Lorn.

  The others all agreed, watching Hayden expectantly.

  “Okay…well, here’s how you’re supposed to stand if you’re fighting against a prism or wand-user.” He stood up and angled himself so that he was turned sideways to them. “You present your enemy with the smallest amount of your body as possible, because prism and wand magic both have a fairly narrow field of focus; if your enemy’s aim isn’t very good then they’ll have a much harder time hitting you if you’re a small target.” He paused while the others took notes; Tess had to lend Lorn a piece of paper and a pencil.

  “If you’re fighting a powder-user or a conjurer, there’s no point in making yourself sma
ller: powders fan out so much that as long as they can hit the broad side of a barn they’ll still nail you with some of it, and conjury circles can be massive. Your best bet with both is to keep moving and never stand still long enough for your enemy to get a chance to aim properly. Asher always says you should pretend like you’re dancing on hot coals—always keep your feet moving.”

  “What about elixirs?” Tess asked, gesturing towards her belt full of them.

  “They’re somewhere in between, because elixirs are liquid so they have some splash range on them, but not a lot,” Hayden explained. “Asher says it’s best to try and move around a bit and also show a small target when fighting an elixir-user, a bit like doing a waltz…though when I told him I’ve never actually done the waltz before he just laughed and knocked me out with one of his spells,” he grumbled.

  “Any skilled mages we fight would know the same stances as we do, and they would be looking at ways around them,” Lorn pointed out.

  “True, so we’ll have to work on ways to get around other people’s tactics while still protecting ourselves.” Hayden nodded. “Since we’ve got a good spread of majors between the four of us we can pair off and practice with the spells we know.”

  “We might as well try that first to see where we’re at and who the best fighters are, so they can give pointers to the others.” Hayden was surprised to hear Lorn suggest it, especially because he sounded so reasonable and not hostile for a change.

  Since he couldn’t think of a reason why this was a bad idea, he shrugged and said, “Sure, we might as well. How about Tess and Zane, and me and Lorn partner up to start with?”

  The others agreed with varying levels of enthusiasm, and they stood up and spread out to begin.

  8

  Midnight Flight

  A week before their next scheduled arena challenge, the announcement came that the arenas would be cancelled indefinitely. Hayden wasn’t really surprised, as news had been filtering in through letters to students from their families about the war for weeks, and it wasn’t looking good. While no one could seem to agree on how many of the enemy’s forces were on shore—some said a mere handful while others claimed thousands—the rest of the news was identical: our fighters were going into the Forest of Illusions and not returning, supply lines had been intercepted or cut off (the details on this were still unclear), and communication from the fighters had virtually dried up.

  The mood in the castle became very grim, especially after the High Mayor sent a messenger to all of the Great Nine schools of magic to ask for volunteers to fight from anyone who had completed their sixth year of schooling. The Masters did their best to caution the mastery-level students from being hasty, but some of them left anyway, and the mood in the castle darkened further from the loss of normal occupants.

  Hayden skipped lunch to work on his homework from Abnormal Magic, because Master Laurren had given them a bear of an assignment, and since he planned on having a long combat-practice meeting tonight with his team, he didn’t want to count on having energy or time for homework afterwards.

  He was supposed to be writing an essay on why he thought large amounts of Farfelle—a red berry that grew in arid climates—were safe to consume, but why small amounts were lethal. Since no one had actually discovered the true answer yet, there was no text for him to consult, and he had just crossed out a sentence for the sixth time when he sighed in frustration and went to find Master Laurren to ask for help.

  Since lunch was nearly finished, he decided to check the Master’s office first, and took the downward stairs two at a time on the outside of the castle. His efforts were rewarded when he found Laurren in the classroom where he taught Abnormal Magic. The Master was wearing a circlet like Hayden’s and had a clear prism equipped, his face tilted upwards towards the light as he looked through it.

  The first words out of Hayden’s mouth weren’t the ones he’d planned.

  “You’re a prism-user?” he blurted out into the silence, and Laurren startled and turned to face him, removing the circlet from his head and placing it back into a drawer.

  “Hayden, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir, I just had a question about the homework. I was surprised to see you had a circlet though, since I’ve never seen you use prisms in class before, and usually only natural prism-users buy or wear one.”

  Master Laurren smirked humorlessly and said, “I was a natural prism-user; it was my major at Isenfall.”

  Stunned, and wondering how he didn’t know that before now, Hayden asked, “But then why don’t you wear the circlet all the time?”

  Laurren gave him a wry look and said, “Have you never wondered why I teach Abnormal Magic, of all things? Or why my eyes are such a peculiar shade of purple?”

  Taken aback by the turn of the conversation, Hayden said, “I had wondered about your eyes…but I just thought you came from a land where that was normal.” He shrugged. “And about you teaching this class, well…it’s a weird class, and you’re kind of a weird teacher, so it fits.”

  Upon reflection, he could have worded that much better. He was therefore surprised when Master Laurren let out a bark of genuine laughter and said, “Your candor is quite refreshing, Hayden, thank you. People will insist on skirting around their true thoughts for fear of being found rude or impolitic.”

  Slightly embarrassed, Hayden said, “I don’t always think things through before I say them out loud.”

  Master Laurren smirked and added, “That is not always a bad thing, in my experience. It makes you appear genuine.”

  A moment of silence passed before Hayden caved in and asked, “So why do you teach this class?”

  “It was never part of my original plan, I can assure you.” The Master sighed. “I was a prism-major at Isenfall, apprenticing under the Prism Master there during my mastery year. I was working on a particularly ambitious research project with compounded prisms when I thought I had a new alignment all worked out. I checked and double-checked my calculations to ensure they were correct, and then I gave it a try.”

  Hayden frowned and asked, “What happened?”

  “I got an enormous amount of magical feedback that I wasn’t expecting in the form of TMS, and it did this to my eyes.” He gestured to their color. “It also made me color-blind.”

  It took a moment for the enormity of that simple statement to penetrate Hayden’s brain. Then he felt the blood drain from his face and had to lean against a wall to keep from fainting at the horrible thought.

  “But a prism-user who can’t see color…” he trailed off in numb shock.

  Master Laurren gave him a sympathetic look and said, “No colors, no prisms. I haven’t been able to use one properly in years.” He sighed mournfully. “Since I knew that my math was correct, and that I shouldn’t have gotten that kind of TMS from the spell I was casting, I immediately set out to discover what went wrong, which led me to Abnormal Magic. Since Isenfall doesn’t bother teaching it, that led me here.”

  Hayden was still trying to recover from the hideous idea of never being able to look through a prism again, of never feeling the connection with the light and channeling magic through it. It would be worse than losing a limb.

  “Did you ever figure out what happened?”

  “Not yet, though I suspect it has something to do with Schisms. It’s very hard to confirm, as there aren’t generally Schisms kept open between our world and the parallel space of anti-magic.” He shrugged. “Don’t look so horrified,” he continued, seeing Hayden’s expression. “I can still use the other areas of magic without issue, so it isn’t all bad. I actually got much better with elixirs and powders after I lost prisms.”

  Hayden tried to school his face into something more neutral for the Master’s sake.

  “Why do prism-users always seem to have bad luck?” Hayden added with a rueful scowl. “It seems like every time we read about someone who went evil, or crazy, or got hit by weird magic, it’s a prism-user
, and then everyone in class stares at me like they’re wondering why I haven’t keeled over yet.”

  “That’s not entirely coincidental,” Master Laurren explained lightly. “Prism-users walk the narrow line between genius and insanity more closely than any of the other majors; therefore we are much more likely to topple over the line than the others.”

  Hayden frowned and said, “What do you mean? Are you saying I’m closer to being nuts than Zane?”

  Master Laurren chuckled lightly and said, “Almost certainly, yes. Natural prism-users almost always descend from a line with mental instability in it. It is that touch of instability that gives us the power to see magic in light, which a more normal mind lacks.”

  Hayden thought about that for a moment in alarm. Asher had told him once that he was probably conceived soon after his father began messing around with Dark Prisms, so he supposed it was no surprise that some of that instability passed on to Hayden. But as for the other prism-users he knew…

  “What about Master Asher though? He has a pretty normal family from what I’ve seen.”

  Master Laurren raised an eyebrow and said, “If you mean Torin, then yes. Have you never wondered about his mother?”

  Hayden frowned. He hadn’t ever heard Asher talk about her before, and had never thought to ask where she was if he and his father were at Mizzenwald all the time.

  “What happened to her?” he asked at last.

  “She tried to kill me when I was nine,” Asher’s voice from the doorway startled Hayden so badly that he jumped and almost shouted. The Prism Master was leaning against the doorframe; there was no telling how long he’d been standing there. “I’ve no idea where she’s at now, or if she even lives.”

  “Master Asher—I’m sorry, I was just—” Hayden stammered.

  “Normally I don’t really notice or care when students don’t show up to class, but as you’re the only one in my level-four session it’s kind of hard for me to ignore when you’re absent.”