9. An Unremarkable Student

Identity was an ambiguous thing. Some days, she was the worm on a hook, the fish frying on a grill. Some days, she was the grubby child who drowned for stealing a soldier’s lunch. Often, she was bottomless hunger and a rage deeper than the abyssal seas. For the past three days, however, she had become—

“Silane! List the demon classifications from weakest to strongest,” Brother Merrin called out. Silane leapt to her feet.

“Wisp, specter, solid, sun-resistant, reanimator, sentinel, supreme,” Silane listed. Three days of mimicking human behavior had served her well. Where her classmates’ uniforms were the tie and skirt, hers was the face and flesh of a mortal girl, ever the obedient student.

Mortals throughout the classroom stared at Silane. Brother Merrin’s expression went flat. Giggles trailed in from somewhere behind her. She turned a gracious smile full of dull squarish teeth upon the offenders.

“Is there a problem, my dear fellow humans?”

Brother Merrin cleared his throat. “Attention up front, please. As we discussed earlier, the Vixell ranking system was outdated even when I was an initiate. We no longer use the old terminology. For example, what you refer to as a ‘solid’ is known in modern terms as a monoform shapeshifter. Have a seat.”

“Thank you kindly, good sir.” Silane sat and imagined sinking her teeth into Brother Merrin’s flesh, ripping his meaty body to shreds as he howled about demons and ranking systems. He looked like he’d be a screamer. Old and slow-moving, he belonged to the scholarly branch of the Order. If Silane attacked, would he really pose a threat? Silane didn’t dare risk her cover to find out. The uncertainty grated.

“Can anyone summarize what we’ve covered this morning?” Brother Merrin asked.

Aaron stood and read from his notes. “Weakest of the demonic afflictions is the malignant death aura, from which the wisp arises in areas of high concentration. The hungry wisp exists only to feed. The vengeful wisp seeks specific victims’ pain. The malicious wisp…”

After Aaron’s tedious recitation, Brother Merrin continued. Silane stared blankly at the desk in front of her, pretending to write in her own notebook. The vaguely letter-shaped squiggles she produced were illegible even to her, but the content didn’t matter. The appearance of studiousness was sufficient for her disguise.

In their respective situations, Aaron should have been Silane’s natural nemesis. Among their cohort of thirty recruits, only they had been directly affected by a clash between the forces of mortal and shadow realms. However, comparing their performance as initiates of the Order, Silane was more like a small worm raging at the blistering sun. Thus, Silane was perplexed when, during lunch break, Aaron cornered her outside the dining hall.

“Where’d you learn what you said earlier? Reanimator, sentinel, supreme—I’ve never heard of those demon types before,” Aaron said.

“Old folktales. Forget it. I’m sure we’ll cover whatever we need in class.” Silane slipped away before any more invasive questions could be asked.

The rest of their cohort was in the lineup for whatever passed for mortal food. Silane ladled a portion of it onto her bowl because that was what everyone else did. There were no rigid seating arrangements for lunch; everyone distributed indoors or outdoors as they wished, so long as they were back in time for afternoon classes. Aaron went to the table packed with most of their cohort. Silane found a nice shady tree to sit beneath and stared at her meal. What the other initiates called “porridge” looked like lumpy beige mush to her human eyes, or lifeless translucent mush to her Mistforged senses. When poked with a spoon, it squished. When lifted out of the bowl, it still looked very dead.

No. She just couldn’t.

Like all previous meals over the last three days, most of the potato mush ended up back in the earth where it belonged. This time, one of the groundskeepers caught her dumping it into a flowerbed.

“It spilled,” Silane said tearfully.

Being small and pathetic had its advantages. Suspicion melting into pity, the groundskeeper poured his own meal into Silane’s bowl before she could refuse.

Silane dumped that into the flowerbed, too, as soon as the groundskeeper’s back was turned.

There were more classes in the afternoon: histories of Lumivale Academy, geography of the Oakland region, more basics on wisps. It was dull and irrelevant to Silane's purposes here. She zoned out, allowing her eyes to defocus and her face to slacken from the rigid smile she had so diligently maintained through the morning hours.

When she zoned back in, the other initiates were turning the pages in their textbooks. For some reason, the book in front of her was wobbling. She reached out to hold it steady, but her fingers wouldn't close around the pages. Her hand slipped, nails scraping across the table. The student beside her looked up. Silane tried to return a reassuring smile, but the world lurched when she moved her head.

Distantly, Brother Merrin's voice filtered through, expounding about some subtlety of wisp formation that presently evaded Silane's interest.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Are you okay?” a nosy student asked.

“Of course,” Silane gritted out. Her pulse pounded. Black spots surged across her vision.

“You don’t look okay.”

“I am perfectly well, thank you.” Silane squeezed out these words despite the lack of air in her lungs. The world tilted sideways, and the desk slammed into her face.

The nosy student might have said something else, but Silane couldn’t hear anything beyond the thundering in her ears. All she could see through fleshy eyes was throbbing blackness alternating with the blurry grain of textbook paper pressed against her cheek. It tasted like paper, leaving an unpleasant dry patch on her tongue. Trying to get up was like attempting to move a puppet without strings; nothing happened.

Hands shook her shoulder, but she couldn’t manage a response. Indistinct voices muttered beyond the pounding of her heartbeat. Arms lifted her up, and then she was pressed against the bright glow of human life, separated from delicious warmth only by a few meager layers of cloth. The bright human carried her body out of the classroom to an infirmary that smelled of bitter herbs and glowed with ambient energy.

Silane remained stuck for the better part of an hour, unable to move even a finger yet unwilling to abandon her disguise for certain death in the afternoon sunlight. With her Mistforged senses, she could track the movements of humans and other lifeforms in the immediate area, but the omnipresent glow of the sun soaked over everything, making it difficult to peer outward for too long. The heartbeat and breathing of her body were among the few factors she could affect, but increasing the pulse too much brought other humans rushing toward her to investigate.

One human whose life glowed dangerously bright propped up Silane’s head and spooned a sweet liquid into her mouth. Only then did she finally muster a muscle response: the twitch of an eyelid, the contraction of her stomach.

Broth spewed everywhere. Her body gagged and coughed reflexively, choking on the few drops of liquid that had leaked into her lungs. Remnants of the sweet broth sloshed around in her stomach and digestive tract. Just how much of that stuff had they poured inside her?

“She lives. It's a miracle,” a voice said dryly. An old woman dressed in doctor's garb set down a bowl on a side table.

“What happened?” Silane croaked.

“First, answer this. When was the last time you ate or drank?”

“...huh? Not even half a week yet. What’s that got to do with anything?”

The doctor explained. Silane listened, feeling more and more foolish as the doctor went on about such foreign terms as blood sugar and hydration.

This worthless Order education system! Despite three straight days talking about all sorts of random classifications for wisps and suchlike, the instructors hadn't covered anything actually useful—such as, for instance, how to keep a mortal body functional. Mistforged didn’t truly need to eat to survive; it was simply pleasurable and increased one’s overall power level, enabling the ambitious to grow stronger and more intelligent in direct proportion to the strength and intelligence of the prey consumed. By contrast, mortal life required consumption of foreign matter. Mortals needed to eat those lifeless foods and drink that tasteless clear water on a daily basis to preserve their structural integrity. Sometimes, they even needed it multiple times a day! How they lived when all their inputs were not-alive made no sense to Silane. Nevertheless, she smiled at the doctor and nodded in acceptance.

“I will eat more,” Silane recited.

“And drink.”

“Drink. Yes.”

The doctor made her consume another bowl of broth. It stayed down this time, which seemed to be the correct response. Silane was permitted to return to class for the evening exercises.

Later that night, after the sun had set and the mortals were asleep in their cozy little nests, Silane snuck out to hunt. She caught three cockroaches and a small rat, all of them alive and sodden with life essence. She ate their flesh and drank their life, using the energy to restore vigor to her possessed body from within.

The next morning, her weak mortal shell regurgitated a foul slurry of indigestible cockroach exoskeletons and rat bones while her roommate watched in horror.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.” Acid burned in Silane’s throat. Shameful tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. She wiped her mouth and forced a smile.

Eating became a necessary chore. Silane hunted every evening before curfew, catching live roaches and crickets to supplement the thoroughly cooked-dead slop that the dining halls served every mealtime. After acclimatizing for a little over a week, she didn’t even need to regurgitate their exoskeletons anymore. Her roommate looked disgusted whenever Silane brought a pocketful of live beetles or worms back to their shared quarters for storage, but no more fainting episodes occurred.

As a bonus, her roommate took to calling her “Bug-Eater.” Despite the odd reactions the nickname seemed to garner from the other initiates, it filled Silane with pride every time she heard it. Legend had it that the Stargazer Supreme, mightiest of all their kind, had toiled for over a century before gaining the title of Sun-Eater; for Silane to be known as Bug-Eater after only a fortnight of infiltrating human society spoke well to her progress in earning the humans’ respect.

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Every morning and evening, the initiates underwent a mandatory physical exercise session. The focus ranged from practical—chasing small animals such as rats or snakes out of the kitchens—to the pointless and absurd ball-throwing activities that the other initiates seemed to enjoy far more than hunting rodents.

At the end of Silane’s first week in residence, the initiates were instructed to run laps around the headquarters instead. Brother Leton called it a “running tour.” Most of the initiates called it boring and set off in the starting direction at a slow jog. Silane, eager to prove herself in this new test, took off at a sprint, leaving everyone else in the dust.

“So fast!” a girl exclaimed behind her.

Silane didn’t look back. She focused on footsteps, raising and lowering each leg, the rhythmic contraction and extension of muscle in time with the body’s heartbeat. After some minutes, her legs were burning, her lungs were heaving, and her whole possessed body was overall getting harder and harder to direct. She ran even as her legs protested, as a sharp pain stabbed in her side with every step; this body was under her command, not the other way around.

Reality begged to differ. Having run until the last of her body’s energy and oxygen was spent, Silane’s knees buckled. She crashed down in the mud, unable to convince those uncooperative legs to move again.

Half an hour later, Brother Leton and the rest of the joggers found her lying there. The initiates giggled. Brother Leton checked her pulse and sighed.

“Pace yourself next time,” he said, launching off on some inexplicable tangent about turtles and rabbits.

Silane smiled through the mud and nodded. “Yessir, thank you sir.”