Heritage - Chapter 1.2

Here's the second part of chapter one. I hope the world Haraan lives in becomes a little clearer with this section. I will comment on the work of anyone who reads through this and leaves me a critique. That said, let's see what our mysterious loiterer wants with Haraan.

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Haraan's legs buckled as his shoulders took twin blows from above. Instead of letting him crumble, however, his assailant spun him so they met face to face. "You're alive."

"Jasti, as soon as my eyes stop rattling in my skull I will level you."

Jasti's hands remained on Haraan's shoulders as a way of saying "Try me" — Haraan was a full head shorter — but after a couple of seconds he was released. His expression fell so hard he could almost hear it.

"The appeal didn't go so smooth?" Jasti motioned to follow him down the hall to their locker.

"I mean, I wasn't expecting to get out of the composition." Haraan plucked at the cross-woven cord across the front of his shirt. "After the bell rang, I was only focused on apologizing to her in private, and then letting her know what's happened lately."

"Did you have that same dream you were telling me about?"

"Yeah." He had dreamed about that same dragon before — beside a maelstrom as large as his home, Talery Bay, outside a chasm that dove into Sosara's black bowels, or performing acrobatics in spurts above the very ocean.

On the advent of a story, Haraan bolstered his voice with as much indignity as his indoor voice allowed."So I go up to her and start my little speech. 'Mam Ghieri, look, I'm really sorry for today—' and she cuts me off right there.

'Do you see this face?' she asks me with the scariest monster glare I'd ever seen — and you know what my mom gets like. 'If this face isn't scaring you, maybe two hundred extra words will. Get out of my sight and go home, Haraan.'" Out of energy, he let his gaze fall away.

After enough time to let the gravity of Haraan's plight to sink in, all Jasti said was, "Harsh."

Haraan knew not to expect outrage at Mam Ghieri from his friend, for despite her gift for terrorizing her students, they averaged six out of seven on the Exam. No sane high schooler antagonized that advantage.

"Remember, though. 'An educated mind is stronger than the thickest armor.'"

Haraan asked, "Did you steal that from somewhere?"

Smirking, Jasti held up his book.

"Of course he'd say that. But say Saig there gets a ballista bolt hucked at his chest—"

Deflected to brighter topics, the conversation wound around corners like the halls of Altina Academy.

The building had seen better years. Autumn rainstorms pummeled Talery Bay with enough violence to make venturing out in the open a very risky thing to do — even if one had the astronomical fortune of collapsing with a recovery team in the area, the victim couldn't be rescued if he or she was too far from the nearest point of cover. Suicides rose during this time; their remains could be so crushed that a cobblestone street would leave an imprint in their flesh.

The city's cost-free solution to keeping down the homeless population, the storms also stressed the hundred-forty-five year-old Academy to great lengths. On the outside, it was a battered castle-looking thing that still managed a presentable facade. On the inside, it was a handyman's worst nightmare. Here and there, drips of water left trails down the walls and peeled the orange paint. A classroom (previously inspected, condemned, and isolated from the rest of the school) once imploded when a ceiling caved under the heavens' unrelenting pressure.

These windows will probably outlast this place, Haraan thought as he and Jasti walked through Vista Hall. To his left was an array of glass panes six inches thick, substituted for a crumbling wall some years back, giving the corridor its name. Because the Academy sat high on the North Arm, anyone could and did sit in a large, semi-circular viewing area in the middle of the hall to survey the rest of Talery Bay.

"Listen." Haraan had arrived at the locker he and Jasti shared and began turning the dial. "I've told you how these dreams of mine only started a month ago."

Jasti shoved some books into the locker, took others out. "Yeah?"

"Now they're talking to me with my own voice."

"And you think that means something?"

Haraan frowned at the textbook in his hand (The Corthian Annals — and yes, there was an overused joke to go with that). "I was told 'I want to be you again.'"

"Then it's obvious to me. You're winding up as a dragon, my friend."

"Brilliant! No oneirologist would've ever come up with that."

"No what?"

"It's from a book I found a week ago. Hang on, it's in this bag somewhere..." Haraan knocked other books to the side of his shoulder bag until he came up with a small blue leather-bound volume titled ONEIROLOGY in mystical, golden letters. He flipped through the pages. "The study of dreams. Lots of history about dreams, all of it uninteresting. A suggestion — here — to draw the subjects of recurring nightmares.

"And I've drawn the dancer so many times already. Here," shoving a sketchbook into Jasti's hands, "it's all my normal stuff at the beginning." It was mostly sketch work, teenagers done slap-dash and finely organic hanging off orthogonal rooftops and exposed piping. "And then he's all over the place — finished pieces, practically, he took up two whole pages here. It's the ocean and I'm using colors like orange and green and lavender, crazy colors you wouldn't expect to find under there. Drawing him's become an epidemic with me."

"How do you fit all that in your bag?" Jasti demanded.

"The dream book's a hundred pages of shbyk. Might as well go return it today, and get stuff on Brenner. Done?" Haraan shut the locker with enough force to attract gazes within a twenty-yard radius. "I'll go to bed early for once, eat breakfast, do handstands on fire — whatever stops these freaky dreams."

"Dreams?"

"Amina!" Haraan was almost relieved he could continue ranting to a growing audience. "Yeah, you've seen these drawings before, haven't you?"

"A couple of them." She took his sketchbook and flipped to the most recent page. "Haraan, this looks amazing. I think this is your best stuff yet."

"It's those dreams, I tell you, they won't stop."

Amina returned Haraan's sketchbook so her arms were free to hug Jasti's neck, who in turn kissed her forehead and murmured greetings decipherable only to those in a relationship. Haraan had come to indulge those two in moments like that and waited for them to separate before he asked, "So! Who's up for a trip to the Archive?"

"Why do you need to go there?"

Haraan told her.

"Ha ha! You should have taken Kamanese with me," she laughed. "I draw all the time in that class and still ace every quiz."

"Well, yeah, your family's from there."

Amina folded her arms with authority. "Call it extracurricular study. I don't know what you and Jasti are thinking, taking Scary Ghieri."

"We simply believe in the virtue of hard work."

"Henshbyk."

"It's true," Haraan insisted.

"Whatever." Amina hefted her bag, adjusted the strap so it ran snug across her torso. Despite being a little shorter than Haraan, her arms and legs were longer and more slender in proportion. In the right light, her hair turned a very subtle shade of blue. "I can go with you."

Jasti soon found himself walking in front of the other two. Being one of the tallest students at the Academy, his presence parted the hallway crowds in a manner almost holy. In no time, Haraan found himself at the school's main entrance.

Through the double set of glass doors, he could see lightning thrashing the sky. He passed through the first doors, Jasti and Amina following suit. Ahead, another group pulled the second doors open. A roar filled the antechamber, turning it into an echo chamber, as thousands of pounds of water smote the outer courtyard stones with unrelenting ferocity. Enclosed walkways around the courtyard ensured safe passage to Issica Heights Station, the main steamer stop servicing the Academy and its environs.

"Augh."

Haraan heard crinkling paper, a plastic click, the clinking of a belt buckle on a button. A second later, Jasti tapped his shoulder.

"Do you happen to have—"

"Fare?"

"Yeah."

"What happened to your pass?"

"Left it at home."

"Empty your pockets at night. Make it a habit." Haraan dug into his pocket and discovered a few coins. Pulling them out, he counted a grand total of nine pips. "All I have, sorry," he grimaced.

Amina cleared her throat, then grabbed her boyfriend's hand. A muffled jingle escaped from between their palms. Jasti removed his hand with the half-gambit necessary for student fare.

"You're buying me lunch tomorrow," Amina said.

In the diffused light, Jasti's face turned the slightest shade of red.

Compared with the Academy, Issica Heights appeared to be a bland, orthogonal building, almost flush with the ground it was built in, but the exterior remained free of graffiti, urine, or other unsavory episodes that plagued some of the other junction stations. That was especially the case with Thorn Impasse Station, where large posters discouraged commuters from any contact with the station's walls.

Haraan withdrew a brass cog the size of a peach pit from his pocket and shoved it into a slot adjacent to the entry gate. The machine behind the slot split Haraan's cog into seven pieces and fed them down different lanes, where each piece turned other cogs a certain number of teeth. Patterns matched, weights were verified, gears spun smoothly. The seven pieces reunited and reemerged on the other side of the turnstile, which signaled Haraan through by ringing a pleasant bell. This entire process occurred in less than one second. Amina followed up with her own pass, and Jasti brought up the rear, inserting two coins into the same slot.

An escalator brought them hissing down into Issica Heights Station proper. Several sets of parallel tracks ran the length of the arching tunnel, illuminated from above by electric chandeliers in the tiled ceiling. Substantial crowds of students packed the platforms below, dented steamers rumbled like black-mouthed beasts in and out of the station, and yet the cacophony kept itself just shy of excruciating thanks to absorbent foam panels hung from the ceiling with chains. Haraan would have much preferred leaping over the railing to the walkway below — striding had taught him to do that safely — but it wasn't worth provoking one of the many officials wandering the station into taking his monthly pass away. That was a shame — the tangle of pipes running along the walls became instant ladders and ledges for the adventurous, and the track gulfs were narrow enough to jump across. Not that he would ever consider such a reckless move, of course...

A reverie overtook him and he snapped out of it on the other side of the steamer doors. From a loudspeaker in the ceiling, a tinny voice asked all riders to sit down or hold on, and soon, Issica Heights Station passed by the windows with a whoosh and was gone.

"Over here." Amina smacked the seat across from her. When he complied, she continued, "I didn't know you could get to the Archive by taking Sapphire 1."

"You can't," Haraan replied, bamboozled.

"You almost did, just now. Jasti and I had to pull you back before the door closed on your leg."

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Words: 1922

Already I'm thinking of scrapping this. This is one of those things you write to throw away in lieu of another idea that hit you mid-way through. Haraan needs to be developed differently in this beginning. Still, I had a lot of fun characterizing Jasti and Amina here, and regret withholding Haraan's appearance from the reader. Can anyone suggest a few places I could sneak in details?

And apologies if Altina Academy wasn't clear -- I'm still trying to work out what it looks like on the inside. :S