18. Left for the Ants

The time before Brother Merrin’s morning lecture began was usually quiet as initiates found their seats or reviewed their notes. Today, a black spider scuttled out of one girl’s notebook when she opened it.

“Eek! Spider!” the girl shrieked, nearly overturning her desk as she fled.

“Never fear, I’ll get it,” Aaron volunteered. If someone wanted a spider gone, Aaron was the person for the job. He took off his shoe and raised it over the pest in question.

“You're doing it wrong,” Silane said, scooping the spider out of the way a moment before Aaron’s shoe landed. Silane put the wriggling spider into her mouth, recycling that small life to bolster her mana reservoir instead of pointlessly being mashed under a shoe.

Aaron stared.

“What?” Silane asked through a crunchy mouthful of exoskeleton.

“Nothing.” Looking disturbed, Aaron put his shoe back on and returned to his seat.

It would’ve been a normal morning, except that the notoriously punctual Brother Merrin was late—and he had never, in all his years of teaching them, been tardier than two minutes early to class before. Now over twenty minutes had passed. Silane floated halfway between meditation and open-eyed sleep, staring blankly at the page of illegible notes on her desk. Handwriting, like mana manipulation, was not a proficiency of hers.

A screech of furniture cut through her reverie. Aaron shut his notebook and pushed his chair back. “C’mon, let’s get out of here. It smells weird.”

“Huh?” Blinking rapidly to unblur her dry eyes, Silane tested the air. It felt thicker than usual, but not unpleasantly so. “I’m staying.”

“Such a stickler for the rules,” an unidentified blob of classmate said, shoving past Aaron to reach the door.

Silane smiled without teeth. If only it was nighttime. If only they two were alone in the dark. If only her pride outweighed her mission—but it didn’t, and it never would.

“Listen,” Silane said to Aaron, who was still waiting, “skipping class just once landed Ranha in detention every day last week. Do you want to copy lines all week with Merrin breathing down your neck? I don’t.”

Aaron made a frustrated noise and paced around the classroom. “Why do you hang out with that fourth-tier loser? She’s got no sense of respect for seniors, instructors, field exorcists, or even paladins—anyone at all, really. She’s done nothing but insult you since she arrived.”

The actual reasons weren’t anything Silane could admit, so she shrugged and returned to her notes.

“Suit yourself,” Aaron said in the background. “Hey, who wants to find out where Merrin keeps our grades?”

Aaron started exploring the classroom. He sat in Brother Merrin’s chair, enjoying the squeaky rotation mechanism. The hardwood desk echoed hollowly when he tapped on it. He rattled the desk drawers, but they were locked. After squeakily rocking for another minute, he got up to scribble on the chalkboard. Then, he wandered to the adjacent supply closet. The door creaked open.

“Gah!” Aaron jumped back. One classmate sucked in a breath. Another shrieked. A meaty stench wafted through the classroom.

Silane looked up.

Inside the closet was Brother Merrin, lying in a pool of his own guts and swarming with ants.

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Lunch was solemn. Silane and Aaron sat at their usual table, eating in silence. The bustle of the rest of the dining hall faded into the background, irrelevant in view of Brother Merrin’s death. While Aaron’s silence was probably out of respect, Silane’s was a side effect of her concern about the investigations sure to follow.

“Oy, friends! What’s up?” Ranha dragged a chair between Silane and Aaron, elbowing them aside to make space for her plate.

“Hi,” Silane said flatly.

“Not you again. Go away,” Aaron grumbled, also in no mood to talk.

“Heh. No. Hey Aaron, I heard that you looove spiders.” Ranha dropped a black spider into Aaron’s bowl. It flailed in his soup.

Aaron leapt to his feet, grabbed his chair, and slammed it into his bowl with a mighty crash. Soup splattered everywhere as the bowl and chair simultaneously shattered. A broken chair leg ricocheted past Silane’s head, missing her by mere inches. The table cracked down the middle and collapsed. In the middle of the wreckage, Aaron clutched the splintered back of his chair, breathing hard.

The spider, miraculously not dead, shook off the soup and scurried out of sight beneath the table.

“Wow,” Ranha said, picking potato chunks out of her hair. “Someone’s on edge.”

Aaron threw down the chair remnants and rounded on her. “If you knew the morning we’ve had—”

“Not here,” Silane said. People throughout the dining hall were staring. Aaron glanced up, noticed them for the first time, and winced.

“Not here,” he agreed in a small voice. He nudged the chair fragments into a pile with his foot.

After cleaning up, they left the dining hall and found a large tree to sit beneath for the rest of lunchtime. The stares and whispers fortunately did not follow them outdoors. Ranha munched on an apple, the only part of her meal that had survived Aaron’s attack. Silane gave Aaron half a loaf of her bread as reward for splashing soup on Ranha. She gnawed on the other half, barely tasting it.

“What was that all about?” Ranha said.

“It started in morning lecture…” Aaron started explaining the discovery of Brother Merrin’s body.

“Stop it,” Silane said. “Remember, Sir Raimond told us not to spread rumors. It could cause a panic.”

“Ranha sure doesn’t seem like she’s panicking,” Aaron pointed out.

Silane looked at Ranha. Indeed, she didn’t appear the slightest bit concerned about what an instructor’s untimely death would mean for their cover. In fact, Ranha looked very smug. She caught Silane’s eye and smirked.

“It must’ve been a demon attack,” Aaron continued. “That’s why the instructors are keeping it quiet. What if we’ve got a shapeshifter in our midst?”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Impossible. There hasn’t been a shapeshifter around Lumivale for over two hundred years. It was probably a bear,” Silane said.

Aaron shook his head. “I saw the body up close. There weren’t any bite or claw marks. His stomach was open like it burst from the inside, and his guts were everywhere. A bear attack doesn’t look like that.”

“Was the body shriveled or decayed?” Ranha said.

“No, not that I recall.”

“Well then, it couldn’t be a demon. They always feed on their victims. With your keen perception, you’d surely have noticed signs of feeding if any existed.” There was a disharmonious note to Ranha’s voice, a veiled amusement beneath the words. There was sympathy in the set of her mouth and mockery behind her eyes. Observant or not, Aaron would notice eventually.

“Maybe it was bandits,” Silane suggested, trying to settle the matter. “Humans slaughter each other all the time without eating the remains.”

Aaron looked at her askance. “Bandits, in the middle of campus? With security everywhere after what happened in Redhaven? No way. It had to be a demon. Not feeding only means it’s powerful enough to hunt for sport. Think about it: a Night Coalition infiltrator could have snuck in with the Redhaven refugees, pretending to be one of us. It could be anyone in our midst.”

Anyone indeed. Silane glared at Ranha, who still looked very smug. Ranha winked back and leaned in toward Aaron, well within his personal space.

“Who d’you think it could be, then? Are you the demon in our midst, Aaron?” Ranha said conspiratorially.

Silane abruptly stood up. “Goodness me, look at the time. I need to water my plants.” She scurried away before the conversation slipped too far out of control.

In the solitude of her dorm, Silane tended to the dense overgrowth of mint plants that had taken over her quarter of the shared space. Her roommates had quickly learned that, while Silane was mild in all other aspects of student life, she didn’t tolerate any damage to her painstakingly cultivated herb garden. Every stem was intact, every leaf unmarred. The methodical process of inspecting her plants calmed her nerves. She crushed the life from a couple of stray aphids and left it at that.

The cathedral bells summoned her out into the world again. By the time Silane arrived at the cathedral, the main hall was packed with initiates and staff. A few stragglers trickled in behind her. Confused whispers filled the air; most of the people here didn’t know why this assembly had been called. Silane kept her head down and shuffled over to the front of the hall, where her ninth-tier class was seated. Aaron nodded a wordless greeting and scooted over on his bench to make space.

The Lumivale council of elders was composed of three paladins and three light-specters. Silane only recognized Sir Raimond, the most junior among the council paladins. The others were white-haired and wrinkled in flesh, yet their bodies radiated life essence potent enough to sting Silane’s mortal eyes. Guardian blessings glowed on each elder paladin’s arm, territorial as any Mistforged’s Mark. Sir Raimond stepped forward and raised his right hand. A brilliant light shone forth, and the sunbeams from the stained-glass windows bent inward to halo him. The assembly quieted.

“Hail the Guiding Light,” Sir Raimond intoned. The murals in the gallery high over his head seemed to glimmer and shift under the blaze of his mana.

“Hail,” the audience echoed. Once the sound faded, Sir Raimond closed his fist. The artificial light extinguished.

“Brothers and sisters of the Order, I bring you solemn news. Tragedy has befallen Lumivale. Last night, Brother Merrin was murdered in his own classroom.”

Shocked murmurs fluttered around the assembly. Some had seen the smoke rising from the crematorium earlier that day, but only Silane’s class had borne witness to the process.

“Beware, one and all: the culprit is still at large. We suspect an elite demon—perhaps even a shapeshifter, the likes of which has not afflicted Lumivale since the era of the dread Ytth Korlich.” Sir Raimond lifted his hand to the side, indicating a mural near the very apex of the cathedral: a golden paladin battling a dark tentacled monstrosity. “Report any suspicious observations immediately. We cannot allow the demon to kill again.”

Classes for the remainder of the day were canceled, and all Lumivale residents were instructed to remain in their lodgings until the following morning. Silane wove through the tide of departing initiates. Aaron was at the edge of the main hall, staring up at the ancient murals. She tugged his sleeve to get his attention.

“Shapeshifter? You told Sir Raimond of your suspicions?” she said.

“It was the least I could do to help. Brother Merrin didn’t deserve that fate. Besides…” Aaron looked upward, at the mural of the paladin fighting Ytth Korlich. “The last man to defeat a shapeshifter became a legend. If we help capture this one, we’ll be considered heroes too.”

In the mural, the golden paladin was less than a third the size of his enemy’s abyssal shadow, yet the saber in his hand blazed brilliantly enough to split the night and scar the earth. Perhaps it was artistic exaggeration. Perhaps not. Silane thought of the razor-light of Sir Raimond’s life, the lightning strike of his battle magic. As initiates, she and Aaron didn’t have anywhere near that level of power—but in the human world, legends were founded on accomplishments, not power.

“The one who banished Ytth Korlich became a paladin young, didn’t he?” Silane mused. “We could also graduate early.”

Aaron nodded. “That too. And once that happens, we’ll be able to make a real difference in the world, instead of spending all our time on the same old drills.”

They returned to the student dorm in accordance with the campus lockdown. Silane went upstairs to verify that her roommates hadn’t disrupted her mint garden. Indeed they hadn’t; all three roommates were huddled together around one girl’s desk, searching through a demonology textbook for information on shapeshifters. Silane settled cross-legged on her bed behind the mint stalks, outwardly slipping into meditative stillness while she focused her senses on the subtle glow of cultivated plant life.

After a while, the roommates’ demon-hunting discussion grew too tedious to bear. Silane headed out.

“Where are you going? We’re supposed to stay indoors,” one roommate said.

“I’ll study in the commons,” Silane said, backtracking to grab a random notebook for authenticity. The roommate didn’t press further.

The common room was full of people. Silane changed track and went down to the student kitchens. Given that only a couple of hours had passed since lunch, no one was in the kitchen proper. She idly scanned the area, searching for a worthwhile diversion. The pantry door was ajar. Inside, Ranha was chasing rats. She looked up when Silane’s shadow fell across the doorway.

“Nice weather we’re having,” Silane said as she entered. She shut the door behind herself, plunging the windowless pantry into total darkness. The loss of visual input heightened the intangible glow of nearby life: their two possessed human bodies, one rat, and a handful of cockroaches. It was as close to solitude as they could get.

“I guess.” Ranha lifted up a crate. The rat bolted for a hole in the floorboards. It dodged Ranha’s wild grab and disappeared beneath the floor. She cursed, sticking her fingers into the hole.

“Why?” Silane asked.

“I’m soooo hungry.” Ranha pounded on the floor where the rat had disappeared. It didn’t come back.

“Not the rat.” Silane lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “Why Merrin?”

“He annoyed me. What? It’s not that deep.”

“And you deemed annoyance worth risking everything we’ve worked toward. Risking your cover and mine.” Frost crept across the floorboards at Silane’s feet. A cockroach spasmed and keeled over. “Do you care for your pride more than our mission?”

That cut through Ranha’s infuriating calm. Her aura flooded the pantry, thinner than Silane’s but no less sincere. The remaining cockroaches fled from the combined chill of Mistforged energies.

“I cared about our home that burned for your mistakes,” Ranha said softly. “I lost my best friends in the world that day. You must know the feeling, don’t you? I’ve seen Elrach, but where’s the other boy? I haven’t heard of him in ages. Gone, is he?”

A nameless guilt rose within Silane. “Gone, yes. I’ve sworn to repay the Order for all we’ve lost.”

“Repay? Ha! Even your own worthless life won’t be enough to repay all who were slain back then. How can you call this repayment? You’re living happily in this farce of a disguise, calling friends those who are by rights our enemies.”

Silane smiled coldly into the darkness. “It’s easy to blame me for the past, isn’t it? Easier than realizing that, even if I hadn’t trespassed, even if we hadn’t provoked the humans, they’d still be training to exterminate our kind like they’ve been doing for centuries. They were only waiting for an excuse to attack. True, I gave them the first reason. Now you’ve made Merrin into a second. What will it cost us this time?”

The air trembled between them, darkness thickening under their standoff. Pressure built within the confines of the pantry. At last, Ranha’s aura wavered and retreated.

“You’re too serious about everything. Relax,” Ranha said, voice airy again. “Merrin’s death was an opportunity. After nine years, we’re still not established in the Order. But if something big happened, like a murder, and we caught the perpetrator, we’d be promoted to paladin in no time.”

This train of thought was sensible, except for one small problem.

“How do you propose we catch the perpetrator? Were you planning to turn yourself in?” The alternative hung over Silane, unvoiced: were you planning to turn me in?

Ranha shrugged. “I’ll figure something out.”