Young Writers Society

When I woke up, I was in a portable prison cell. The only thing that was missing was bars on the windows, which didn’t matter because they were far too thin to escape through.

Across from me sat a pale woman with dark hair and pale blue robes. “Good. You’re awake. We’ll be arriving shortly,” she said in a clipped, formal tone.

“Arriving where?” If I was a prisoner, what did that make her? She could be another prisoner, picked up along the way, but I doubted that. More likely she was a an enforcer, one of the people involved in my capture.

“The Eternian Academy,” she said. “You’re Alsari the Stoneshaper, yes?”

“Why? Who are you?”

“It would be unfortunate if we recruited the wrong person,” the woman said. “My name is Eira. And I won’t answer any more of your questions, which I’m sure you have, unless you answer mine.”

“You’re right,” I admitted. “How did you know?”

“We monitor everything,” Eira said. “Nothing goes on in this city that we don’t know about.”

“So how do you know my name?” I asked. I was pretty sure I hadn’t said it on this world, but I was actually grateful for the woman’s presence. She helped take my mind off of the events that had caused me to come to Archora, even if her answers were vague and suspicious.

“We know everything,” she said, staring out the window. She was bored.

I dismissed Eira’s statement as absurdity, but the more I considered it, the more it bothered me. How did she know my name? “Who is we?”

“The Academy,” Eira said with a look akin to satisfaction.

“An Academy with files on everyone?”

“The Eternian Academy isn’t just any school,” she replied. “We train mages.” She paused importantly, but I waited for her to continue. “I know what you are, Stoneshaper. And I can assure you, you should be impressed.”

The carriage stopped with a thump. Eira tossed me a blindfold. “You’ll need to put that on,” she drawled. Of course. Couldn’t let the prisoner see where she was.

I smiled obligingly, and did as I was told. The feeling was something like nails on a chalkboard.

Eira held onto my shoulders, guiding me out of the carriage. Once my foot touched the ground, the blindfold hardly mattered. My magic came from the earth and stones. Since the road was paved with cobblestones, I could tell there were twenty soldiers fanned out in a semicircle around me. I could also feel that the second one to my left was tapping his foot, that the one directly in front of me had been wounded on his right hip, and there was a caterpillar making slow progress across the road one hundred feet away.

The Eternian Academy’s only safety precaution is a blindfold? They really have no idea who they’re dealing with, I thought. The anger that had seized me when I killed the thief was returning. It left a bitter taste in my mouth, but filled me with cold resolve.

The soldiers’ armor made them easy targets; all it took was a thought to send them flying through the air. I heard a few surprised cries as they were thrown back.

I reached up, ripping my blindfold off. I squinted at the sudden glare and dropped to my knees. I willed the cobblestones to become liquid, and plunged my hand into it. The stone coalesced into a sword in my hand, which I pulled from the ground.

A few of the soldiers were starting to rise to their feet, but I had a bigger problem. Eira was standing back at the carriage, electricity flickering along her body.

“Surrender, Stoneshaper. This is a fight you can’t win,” she said, but for the first time since meeting her, I had all of her attention. I noticed that her lips twisted into a slight smile, contradicting what she said.

I didn’t dignify that with a response.

“We’re not your enemies,” Eira said.

“You knocked me out, captured me, blindfolded me, and held me at crossbow point,” I snarled. “That qualifies you as my enemy.”

“Those were precautions. And not unfounded ones, it seems.”

“I’m leaving,” I said, bitterness touching my voice. I’d come to Archora to hide from everything, yet I was getting tangled up in things I didn’t want to be. “Get out of my way.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Eira.

The cobblestones melded into a spear at the same moment electricity launched itself from Eira’s fingers towards me. Lightning slammed into me, and sent me skidding back. I felt the force of the strike more than pain, like a punch. My spear was frozen less than an inch from Eira’s throat; it’s progress halted when I’d been hit.

Soldiers began to move closer, crossbows trained on me. I stayed frozen where I was, but willed the soldiers’ armor to tighten ever so slightly. Soon all twenty were writhing on the ground trying to get out of their suffocating armor. It wouldn’t kill them, I wouldn’t tighten it that much, but it was enough to stop them from getting in my way.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” Eira sighed. This wasn’t the response I’d expected. Maybe she didn’t care about what happened to the guards, maybe they were expendable to her, but she didn’t seem worried. She was resigned, and her disappointment seemed genuine. Was it possible that she was telling the truth when she said that she didn’t consider me her enemy?

Before I could continue to ponder this, the cobblestones beneath me dissolved, but this time I wasn’t the one liquefying it. Caught be surprise, I plummeted through the ground beneath me. I fell on a stone floor, which cushioned my fall. I was in a prison cell.