Basking between a warm cover and soft bed, his head pressed into a feathery pillow, Tercius stretched in contentment after a full night of sleep. The night behind him passed without any dreams of the dead mage, and Tercius attributed that, with some levity, to the barrier that isolated the Pyramid from the outside world. Maybe ghosts can’t go through it? he thought with a small snicker.

The sheets were fresh, clean and oh so pleasant, and it got to the point where it was difficult to get up and leave the bed. The day behind him seemed so distant, as if a lifetime passed since he arrived at this place, and Tercius attributed most of this unusual feeling to his lodgings.

Going over the events of last night seemed like a nice way to extend the time in bed, so he dived right into it.

After their meal, Tercius and Penelope had a talk with the twins, Eunim and Euria, inquiring about their thoughts on roommates and broaching the idea of sharing a room. It turned out that the twins had never separated before, just as Tercius previously suspected, and had some apprehension about it. There was also a bit of resistance from Euria when Penelope mentioned Lomera as their third roommate, but that was quickly smoothed over by Tercius’s and Penelope’s words, convincing the girl to at least give Lomera an opportunity. After all, it was always easy to pack your things and leave.

While Euria and Penelope got along swimmingly, Eunim and Tercius were another story altogether. Eunim was polite with his words, but it was clear that the boy was irked in some way with Tercius. They did not end up agreeing on being roommates, just yet. The fault for that lay entirely with Tercius, as he decided to take a room for himself, if only for one night. The events of the previous few days loomed over his head, and he did not want to contend with another matter if he did not have to do it.

After Tercius’s hasty decision, Eunim seemed a bit offended, so Tercius did not place a lot of hope in the success of the roommate-ship.

Mistress Dea gave him a room and he retired early, leaving Penelope with her new roommates in the canteen.

The locks on the doors attracted his attention, when Mistress Dea showed him how they were used. Attuned to the Mana signature of those who use the room, the locking device was in the same shape as the amulet they received, and placed into an identical indentation into the door, on the inside of the room. The lock worked in conjunction with the amulet, and only when they were used together would the door open. Merely pressing your amulet to the door was enough for the amulet to take some Mana from you and open the lock. Only four signatures could be used on one door. Mistress Dea’s was the first and had the master position capable of override, while three more signatures to be added later. If someone ended up deciding to change rooms, Mistress Dea would have to come and take out the lock device, as once placed into the door, the devices were immovable to anyone but her.

Tercius left his backpack on the floor near the door, and made a brief inspection of the small room. One bunk bed and the other a regular one built in a rather narrow width, their frames made of wood. On the same wall where the door was, were three closets, and all of them occupied the whole height of the wall.

A very basic arrangement, but highly suitable for a dorm.

The dorm rooms for first years were at the ground floor, the second years took the one above, and so on. Only those in the final year were placed somewhere else.

After the inspection of his room, he went for a bath in the common bathroom.

A true, honest to Gods, bath. Not some kind of a shower where he had to spill water from buckets over himself, or a barrel into which he had to climb in. There was an area in the common bathroom that had four stone tubs, each separated with a thin wall and a door, giving privacy to those who use them. He requisitioned one for himself and Amber, filled it up with warm water and jumped in. The tubs were giant, so he made himself comfortable, and let the water come up to his nose before he closed off the tap. Thrice the water went cold, Tercius merely letting out the old through the drain and replacing it with a new, warm one. When water started swirling as it went down the drain, Amber would let herself be carried by the twisting current. Her excited meows were a balm to the weary Tercius.

After each time, when the water was completely drained, Amber would look at him with her soulful eyes as is saying, Can I go once more? Please?

He could not have denied her silent plea, even if he wanted to. Such was the power her small eyes held. Besides, she was not the only one who wanted to spend time in a warm bath.

At times Amber would use her newfound power over water to move herself about the tub. Her Mana capacity was very small, so this lasted only for a few minutes. When she came near being empty of Mana, she would stop using her skill, and make herself comfortable on his bent knee, that jutted out of water. His kneecap was like a small island with Amber being the only inhabitant. After the bath, Tercius wore a new set of clothes, while the used ones Tercius packed and took to where Mistress Dea showed them, to be washed and dried.

A paradise on this planet, that was what the Pyramid was, and Tercius did not even go out of the first building he saw the insides of.

"I guess I can’t spend a whole day under these heavenly sheets…" Tercius murmured in a voice that sounded like a purr. "No matter how much it appeals to me…"

Getting up with a jump, much to the protest of one small lioness, Tercius dressed himself and slapped his cheeks gently to shake off the chains of overwhelming comfort that called him back to bed.

There were a few things he wanted to find out, and Mistress Dea seemed like a fount of such information or, at least, she could point him in the right direction. The woman had a gruff manner, but Tercius figured that she had to be that way with the amount of kids that ran through this building. Tercius would never in a million years take her job, as he could only imagine what kind of horrors the woman had to go through on a daily basis.

With a small shudder he rid himself of those thoughts, and gently picked up Amber in his arms, as the small girl let out a small cry in protest. "I can’t just leave you here silly," he whispered to the tiny creature. Another thing to add to the list. Find something for Amber to stay in while I’m out and about, he thought. Maybe I should make a small cage out of stone, like before?

Heading down the hallway, Tercius saw a few of his new schoolmates. A few greeted him as he went by, and responded in kind. Mistress Dea office was in the great hall, right in the conjunction of the three wings, where everyone had to go before they could go to another floor or wing. One whole wall was made of glass and allowed the woman to see from where she was sitting anyone who entered the front door and any of the staircases that led to the upper floors.

Tercius knocked and only after she hailed him to enter did he go in. Without looking up from the book she was reading she asked, "Can I help you with a problem of some kind?"

"I was hoping you could answer a few of my questions, Mistress," he said.

The woman turned over a leaf and said with an even tone, "You can’t leave the building, and you absolutely can’t…"

Tercius listened as the woman went on to list a quite specific list of things he can’t do. "… I was not going to do any of those things, Mistress… Did someone really do that last one?"

For the first time since Tercius came into the room the woman lifted her gaze off the book and looked at him. "Why would I lie? The girl in question found out that her best friend kissed her boyfriend. As revenge, she encased her friends legs in ice, all the way to the knees, and then she pushed her. It was… horrid, so many broken bones… but luckily there was no… permanent damage,"

That was the second time that some Master of this Academy said the phrase ’there was no permanent damage’. There was a silence in the wake of Mistress Dea's words, as Tercius processed what he just heard. All of a sudden he vividly remembered some of the things that happened in his own high school, years ago, and a stone settled into the pit of his stomach. It just hit him that he was sharing a home with soon-to-be hormone-driven magically-enhanced teenagers.

Hells, on some of the upper floors, those teenagers were already there...

"How old were they when this happened?" he asked, while fearing the answer.

"Fourteen, maybe fifteen?"

Oh well, he had a few more years...

"Of course, there was this one time when a boy of twelve..."

Tercius ended up not even asking what came for, initially. After all of the stories he heard Tercius only had one question, "Mistress, are there any... private lodgings in the vicinity?"

It turned out that dormitory was a mandatory requirement, a place where all of the students were housed without regard for any kind of previous social structure. Here, everyone was equal.

***

The second day of their stay inside the dorm, Mistress Dea finally gathered all of the newly arrived first-years and told them some more ground rules. There was a lecture about properly addressing Masters and Mistresses, how to properly ask a question during a lecture, and so on.

Then came the lecture about visitors inside their rooms, about noise, about cleaning behind themselves specifically in the bathrooms, and so on. A few rules about by which time they would have to return back to the dorms, with no exceptions whatsoever.

"If you’re alive, you will be inside of this building by 8 PM. If you’re not alive… It can be forgiven, but only once," Mistress Dea said with the same stony face and flat tone his uncle had. Tercius chuckled, and a whole dining-room full of children turned his way. He did notice that Mistress Dea did not say a word at his outburst, even as he endured the stares.

After those lectures, for the first time since they came to the Pyramid, they were allowed to leave the dorms. A time limit for their first steps outside was placed at one hour, and Mistress Dea warned everyone to be back before the deadline.

Tercius inquired with Mistress Dea about one Master Zver, the mage whom Master Belior recommended for a visit. Master Zver’s workshop, they learned, was just down the street from their dorm so Tercius and Penelope ended up visiting the man that same day. At the wizened man’s advice, they made a few purchases from him. The kind and patient old mage even explained to them how to use these items, even though there were written instructions present with the item.

For 200 dweta Tercius purchased a pair of enchanted items, the first being a leather collar for Amber, that came in pair with a leather bracelet for himself. When he sent a bit of Mana into the bracelet, he got an idea of where Amber, or rather her collar, was.

From a brief talk with Master Zver, he learned a few things about enchanting. For example, an enchanted item could be made to take Mana from anyone who touched it, with no activation necessary. Others could be made to respond to only one Mana signature, and to no other. Some could be made with ’switches’ where a certain function laid dormant until the user manually activated it.

His uncle’s cloak, the older one, probably had a ’switch’ that Master Zver explained about, and Tercius suspected that the brooch, that his uncle sometimes kept fiddling with, was this ‘switch’.

The older man was in a very talkative mood, like most mages he met so far seemed to be, Tercius quickly noticed. Taking advantage of the older man’s desire to share the pride in his work, Tercius asked questions and many got an answer. Any spell could be turned into an enchantment, Master Zver assured Tercius, with a few modifications. One had to be intimately familiar with both the enchanting process and spell which you wanted to imbue into an object to make these modifications, and this was what limited the number of enchanters in the world. To study even one was a monumental task.

The older man was not in fact primarily an Enchanter, but rather a Beast Master who dabbled with enchantments to further his primary craft. Tercius was quite interested about that as well, and with a few nudges, he managed to find out some interesting things.

Beast Masters raised and domesticated animals by forming bonds, mostly using some kind of low-level mind magic. Few were willing to thread this path, Master Zver told them, even though the craft of Beast Masters was highly sought after. Almost every single animal part was on a list of some recipe, and the Beast Masters were usually the only ones who had rare or endangered species at their beck and call.

The casual ease with which Master Zver showed them some of the pickled parts of the animals he himself raised and then killed, turned Tercius’s stomach upside down. Probably because Tercius thought of Beast Master’s as some kind of solitary types who were friends with animals, rather than some kind of butchers for parts, that he now saw them as. Tercius was not repulsed with the fact that the man did what he did, oh no. It was the way the wizened Master presented his collection. Something about seeing the old mage fondly remembering a particular beast he raised from birth, talking about that same beast by name, all the while proudly holding a jar in his hand that contained a heart or some other organ that he personally harvested sent all kinds of alarms in Tercius’s mind. Penelope shared his apprehension, Tercius saw in her eyes, so as soon as they were able they made a hasty exit.

When they were leaving the workshop of the old mage, the stuffed animals adorning the space and walls gained a new light. Just when Tercius thought that the day could not get any more horror-movie-like, the old man ended up inviting Tercius and Penelope for a visit to his ’ranch’. Even though Tercius said that he would think about it, there was no way in all the Hells for him to go there.

Only when the workshop was out of view did they breathe easy, making a promise never to go back there.

***

Maybe it was because he was surrounded with eleven and twelve year-olds, that had different interests than his own, or maybe it was because of the vaguely familiar surroundings that reminded him of his old life so he slipped into a zone that was familiar to him, but his day was mostly spent in the libraries reading or playing with Amber. Very little interaction occurred with his fellow schoolmates.

Penelope, Lomera and the twins spent every free moment of the week together, occasionally calling for Tercius to join them. At times he would accept, but mostly he declined. Penelope was the one who wanted to include him the most, going out of her way to invite him at every turn, and he appreciated her effort. He truly did. But Tercius realised pretty quickly that he was a parent in their group. Most of the things they thought as fun and tried to do, led to Tercius trying to get them to drop it. They were annoyed with him, and he in turn with them. Once Tercius realised what he was doing he dropped it and slowly moved away, leaving kids to act their age. He was still on a friendly manner with everyone, but with an intentional gulf was placed between them and him.

He saw that Penelope and Euria made Lomera the little sister of the group, even though the little girl was the oldest of the three, which Tercius found incredibly amusing. Lomera was... afraid, in a way, of the attention she got from the two girls. She was used to taking care of herself, and her pushy roommates made her anxious. The first day Tercius saw Lomera in a new set of clothes and with a new haircut, he didn't recognize the small red-haired girl.

As the week went by, Mistress Dea allowed Tercius and his group of schoolmates more freedom, in small increments. Two more kids arrived on the 27th of the month, and Mistress Dea turned most of her focus on them, while informing Tercius and his group that she still had her eye on them. The new arrivals were brought in an even worse state than Lomera was when she came initially. The skin on their faces was so stretched that every single bone structure was clearly visible, while their clothes so thin and ragged that Tercius had to wonder how they even survived the storm that raged outside the Pyramid’s space.

Ever since he heard from Master Belior of the third option of payment, the one where someone could pay once they finished the Academy, Tercius wondered why street kids did not take this deal if only to get away from the cold and hunger. The answer he found after many hours of research, mostly from conversations with Mistress Dea and a few chatty friends of hers, proved itself complex with many layers. The rumors about this particular Academy, that most mages here seemed completely content to ignore completely, were the biggest impediment as Tercius saw it.

The mages cared not for the rumor mill that ground them in the outside world, was the picture Tercius saw that day. The Academy had enough applicants as things stood now, and their research required attention.

All was well in the world, from their point of view.

Another facet of the problem was how many students actually managed to get skills Mana Manipulation and Mana Metamorphosis. Only a third of those enrolled, or so claimed a statistic Tercius found in one book. Mana Manipulation was the easier one to gain as it could be gained with guided help from older mages. An experienced mage would grip the Mana of a student with his own metamorphic Mana and move it about, giving the student a feel for how it was done. The author claimed that most of the first year students managed to gain Mana Manipulation within six months to a year, while the rest got it within two. Only one or two out of a hundred failed to get it within that period.

Mana Metamorphosis was a skill you had to earn by yourself by using Mana Manipulation in some way. With acquisition of this skill the older mages could only provide verbal instructions while the student had to do the rest for him or herself. The skill Mana Metamorphosis was a very delicate application of Mana Manipulation, one that was very difficult to do before the skill itself was acquired. The difficulty of learning this skill was the main reason why only around a third of the first year students managed to get to third year.

People in the world outside did not know this particular information, but the failure rate itself was rather well known in some circles. Considering the attitude the Empire had towards the Pyramid, only those who were truly desperate would try and gamble to become mages there.

Most who tried over the years failed.

Then they were in debt with the Pyramid for those years they spent there, and had to pay it back, while the Empire’s local authorities had a semi hostile attitude towards them in the world outside, where the best case they could hope for was ostracization and the worst… Well, there are those who never paid back their debt. The Empire was the bigger beast, no matter how hard a rock Pyramid proved to be.

A much safer option, for those desperate, was to join the Army.

While Tercius spent his time between the pages of books, day by day, the new year came closer.