The ominous tolling of a bell woke me from my restless slumber. Sleep had made my muscles tight and I felt cramped in the enclosed space, but I threw myself from the rocky expanse of stone that passed for a sleeping pallet and clambered to my feet. Knowing in my heart that this day was unlike any of the others that had come before, I stretched until my muscles warmed and I felt limber again.

I stayed there with legs wide apart and fingers grasped around my toes, past the time the barracks had cleared out and the duty officer had begun making his rounds to hurry along any stragglers. Before he’d rounded the corner and started down the hallway that would lead, eventually to my room, I crept out into Sowillo’s morning rays with a wince and a scowl. Without rousing much suspicion, I managed to form up beside Rathlin and Rogue, who both grinned.

“Today of all days, and you’re late— again!” Rathlin hissed.

“Avoiding the morning muster again, Shiro?” Rogue whispered slyly.

I pulled the hood of my cloak over my face, partly to make conversation easier, but mostly out of necessity. By then I’d been weeks in the sun, but my fair skin refused to take on more than the slightest of tans.

“Got a feeling today is going to be rough,” I muttered by way of explanation.

“You might be right. Rumor is there’ll be an exam today that’ll decide whether we’re fit to be academs,” Rathlin said under his breath.

I cast a furtive glance at the silent, docile-looking academs lined up by classes in rows several deep. In the weeks since we’d joined the other academs-in-training, several classes had been cycled out to be replaced by fresh sets of trainees. The trainer-professors were a tightlipped bunch, so no one knew for sure where our senior classes had gone, but there was an implicit expectation that the vanished had become true academs.

“Where’d you hear that from?”

A growled warning from Rogue silenced us.

“Shhhhh! They’re coming,” came the hushed whisper from the class to the left of ours.

The Academy’s trainers had arrived on the field from parts unknown across the gray sector. I’d noticed their cloaks were more of an ashen color than the ones handed out to academs, and each was emblazoned with unique marks of rank— I’d yet to suss out their meaning.

Merlin rubbed the sleep from his eyes and grinned boldly at leftmost wing of new recruits. From the time I’d spent in his company and under his thumb up to that point, I’d come to expect the perverted gaze, but I’d yet to see him act on them. After a smattering of girls looked away uncomfortably, he set his hands on his hips and craned his neck to admire the overcast sky.

“Looks like you lot lucked out, you’ll have some shade today. With what the Academy cooked up for you, you’ll need it.” Merlin beamed, then startled at a shrill whistle. “Right then, we’ll start with a warm-up. Anyone who falls behind, might as well stay behind. Follow me!”

All six of us groaned. Merlin had different ideas about what constituted light exercise, and we’d all come to dread his expectations.

We fell in line behind Merlin as he jogged around the track. For the first few circuits I kept my pace light, and our pervy instructor called a short water break. Rogue, Rathlin and I circled up, laid out on the ground. Each of us joined hand-and-foot so we might better stretch ourselves out, and we set to it with grim purposefulness. From beside the track where he was bouncing from foot to foot, Merlin called an end to the short respite.

The second time we set out, it wasn’t at a light jog, but at almost a full-out sprint. Our line bowed outward and fragmented from the sudden increase in speed, and I fought to keep pace alongside Rogue. We flew by other classes that were grimly focused on the morning exercises— thankfully, the usual suspects were too preoccupied to hurl insults at us.

As the second weakest link in the class— just barely ahead Frank Stein— I fought to keep up with the rest of the group. I’d found it was easier to focus my attention on the heels of someone in front of me, so that’s what I did. I followed behind Rogue and focused on my form. I tried to keep my breathing steady, but it wasn’t long before it was punctuated by my signature pained rasps.

My vision grayed and my lungs burned. My steps began to waver as each became more difficult than the last— my legs cramped at inopportune moments, and it took all my concentration to remain on my feet. Pain shot up through my body every time I made contact with the ground. Whenever I felt like giving up, I felt an anger rise in me that brought me back to my senses.

Merlin broke into my thoughts when he hop-skipped-jumped to a stop. The six of us past him before raggedly drawing up beside him. For a time I battled the urge to spew my guts before my heart-rate settled and my breathing calmed.

As soon as I could, I laid myself down on the downtrodden grass on the inside of the track. I tuned out the wizened magus when he started to blather on about one of his half-baked magical theories.

“I’m sure the rumor-mill has already primed you for this… but I might as well tell tell it to you straight. For better or worse, today is the day you’ll enter Magisterium in truth. We’ll head to the proving grounds in a quarter hour. I’d advise that you use the time to prepare yourselves for what is to come, but that’s up to each of you to decide for yourselves. I’ve worked you hard for this, so do me proud. That’s all. Dismissed.”

I took the opportunity to study the rest of the class for their reaction to the news. Rathlin looked like he’d won first prize in a rumormonger tournament. Rogue merely shrugged. Rocket had begun to violently crack parts of his body— clear evidence that the news had caught him off guard. Nadia’s cool gaze was as impenetrable as ever, but Frank Stein was an open book— he sagged in relief and smiled lazily. I assumed he figured it’d be smooth sailing after he passed what had to be the Academy’s qualifying exam.

After I had finished scoping out the competition, my nerves overcame me. I put up a calm front that disguised my inner turmoil and focused on clearing my mind of unwanted distractions. No matter how fit we’d become over the past weeks, I doubted the Academy had some easily surmountable challenge in store for us.

When the time came, I hardly felt like I was ready. Merlin returned from a huddle with approximately a third of the trainer-professors and gestured, wordlessly, for us to follow. Like a dutiful servant that looks but does not see, I trailed behind the muscular mage. At some point Merlin flashed us an encouraging grin and allowed himself to be replaced by a bored-looking academ in glasses.

Along with the other classes, we’d been corralled inside an expansive domed chamber that, at first glance, seemed to have no end. The wide-open room bore a passing similarity to the enclosure where I’d taken my citizenship test. Besides the nagging feeling that it was of a kind with its cousin, however, I didn’t notice any obvious parallels between the room I found myself in and the one that’d won me first class citizenship in Magisterium.

All around me were pairs elaborate gray pillars in various states of disrepair. Each pair supported an archway, and beyond each archway rose a nebulous mist that hid their secrets from view. While my eyes proved to me of little use to me, I sensed the thick miasma of anima between the archways was forming the dense mist I saw.

A delicate cough was enough to silence close to a hundred nervous academs-in-training. “Welcome, fledgling academs, to the Chamber of Trials. Over the years, headmasters have added layers of complexity to the magics sustaining this chamber, but one thing has remained constant— the Chamber of Trials, like life and our passage through it, presents the illusion of choice,” Glasses said.

A smattering of nervous chuckles broke the near-reverent silence.

Rathlin nudged Rogue with his elbow. “This one isn’t much of a believe in free will, is he?”

Rogue shook her head. “Magisterium has never struck me as a place that holds that holds freedom of choice in high regard. It’s not surprising to see them instill a sense of unavoidable destiny in their citizens— especially those like us, outsiders-turned-citizens that have been given a path to power.”

Noting the officiant’s attention was focused in our direction, I shook my head and nodded in that direction. Rathlin and Rogue tried to look chastised, and Glasses attention roved onwards after only the slightest pause. They both failed to hide the relief at avoiding a public scolding.

I tuned Glasses out as he reiterated the broad strokes of our charge. Bored as he looked, the academ seemed more than happy to lord over his juniors for as long as he could. Rather than giving him the satisfaction, I let my eyes drift across the chamber.

“Emerge from one of these arches and you become an academ. Good luck, and may the gods be with you.”

That was it?

I’d hoped a detail might strike me and clarify my pick before we were set loose to choose, but it wasn’t meant to be. Glasses dropped his arm from above his head to below his waist, signaling the commencement of the trial.

Almost as one, the mass of would-be academs rushed the field. I held myself back and waited. More than half of those assembled chose an archway almost immediately, seemingly at random. Another third were torn between a few options, and a tenth were lapping the room in a bid to give each option due consideration. The remaining tenth of those participating in the trial were those like me. A few had hung back to observe, while others examined the archways themselves for clues.

Figuring that was as good a place as any to start, I walked to the nearest arch and studied the dense, shifting mists bookended by two dilapidated columns. I was struck by a sense of age; it seemed to be that the archways were as old, or older, than Magisterium itself. When I scratched at the old stone, half-expecting bits to flake off and get stuck under my fingernail, I was jolted by an electric pulse of anima that had me leaping back instinctively.

With some hesitancy, I approached once more. I confirmed what I’d suspected from the start: the archways were incredibly powerful magical tools that contained enormous amounts of anima. Hidden amongst the artful filigree, I saw more than one rune etched into the enduring stone. Unfortunately, none of my observations shed light on their function.

Nyx was unnervingly silent. Since whenever Merlin wasn’t around he had taken to insulting me or talking my ear off, he was being uncharacteristically silent. I was about to try my luck when I decided it was worth the begging and pleading.

“Thoughts?” I asked my shadow.

My shadow, which tended to move in ways that made onlookers look twice, didn’t even twitch. Briefly, I wondered whether the Chamber of Trials might have been suppressing the link between Nyx and myself— I shook off the sudden loneliness invoked by the absence of his reassurance presence.

I tuned my senses away from the mundane and towards the magical. Almost against my will I was pulled to the center of the room by an insistent tugging sensation. One of the archways was calling to me. At the very center in the eye of the storm of chaotically swirling anima sat the saddest looking archway of them all.

Whatever designs had graced its bulk had been washed away by the sands of time. Sagging between two squat columns was a too-wide arch. While I knew the stone was possessed of the same enduring quality as the other archways, the aged appearance might make the casual observer give it a wide birth.

Even though I knew the archway wasn’t going to crumble away or topple at the slightest touch, I was loathe to touch the thing. I couldn’t point to a reason why, but the arch made me feel… orange? It was the first time an aura had evoked a color from me, and I wasn’t sure how to react when I didn’t have anything to compare it to.

Rathlin stepped up beside me. “Seems like this is the original. The rest must have been patterned after it.”

I caught myself nodding. “Seems like.”

While Rathlin began his study of the rock formation, I forced myself to take a step forward. Closing my eyes, I thrust my arm into the dense mist that shifted almost imperceptibly at my approach. When I discovered nothing untoward was going to happen, I wiggled my fingers experimentally. After I’d gone a minute without feeling any ill effects from submerging my limb in the orange anima, I couldn’t think up any more reasons to delay— and plenty of reasons to move along.

“I’ll see you on the other side.”

My teeth clacked together. Too late, I recognized the cliche double entendre. Color rose in my cheeks, but I managed an embarrassed grin.

“You bet,” Rathlin said.

As much to escape the embarrassment as anything else, I stepped fully into the archway and allowed the mists to swallow me up. I felt like I was falling, falling endlessly through a sea of mist.

Then: a kaleidoscope of color flashed by me for an instant before I slammed— splash— into an infinite plane of colorless sludge. Any body of water big enough to swim in— or in my case, drown in— filled me with thoughtless fear, but I didn’t sink beneath the sludgy landscape like I thought I should have.

Desperately, I cast about myself with my arms and legs for something, anything… and found I was no more than ankle deep in sludge. My laughter, although heartfelt, was tinged with hysteria. I stood and shook like a dog; most of the sludge glopped off, and I suffered the rest.

In the vain hope that an exit would appear, I spun around. None of the sections of gray expanse stood out to me, but there was… something. A fleeting feeling played across my senses. I cocked my head and waited. I flicked a globule of gray muck off the back of my hand and blew gray-tinged snot from my nose. No divine inspiration struck me.

I felt I could’ve waited until the end of the world without finding an answer to my prayers, so I set out myself in search of answers. The muddy earth fought me every step of the way and quickly robbed me of momentum.

Aggravated, I tossed my hands up in the air. “What gives?!” My complaint traveled less than a few paces before they were consumed by the empty world.

“Echo!” I yelled with the intent of casting my voice to the far reaches of the gray world, but the sound was absorbed less than twenty paces from where I stood.

“That’s weird,” I said, my words sounding weirdly hollow.

I had somehow been transported to an alternate world. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks. Neither Sowillo nor Pleiades could be seen on the horizon. I broke out in a cold sweat. I cast about for a landmark, for anything that resembled my home world.

I shivered. “Nothing. There isn’t anything.”

“Where am I? What is this place?”

Not unsurprisingly, no one answered me, but my mind was supplied with a name: Absentia. What else could it have been besides the proper name of the world? That had to be it. I didn’t question the source of the knowledge.

“Absentia,” I tasted the word on my tongue, found it to be just as dull as the world it represented.

A ripple spread out from where I stood in the muck. I searched for threats and discovered something most frightening: the colorless landscape had begun to gnaw at my anima like a starving animal. My vital energy was being leeched away by the unforgiving world— and I was its newest resident.

I sloughed off every lack speck of goop clinging to my body. Besides the fact that I was up to my ankles in gray slop, I thought I’d gotten it all off. My body shook as I battered fear, relief, and revulsion.

That was when the puddle of sludge at my feet came alive. Two shapeless blobs of the stuff moved up my legs like giant caterpillars. Kicking and screaming, I ran, and ran, and ran. I ran without form or precision until my legs would carry me no farther and the colorless sludge held me fast.

It took me longer than I’d care to admit to bring myself back under control. In part I had Absentia to thank for my recovery. The gray world wasn’t a picky eater: anima was the crowd favorite, but it also consumed emotion, action, desire, even thought. How long I sat there like a stone without thought or care, I don’t know, but eventually I gathered my wits and sussed out a way to make myself more difficult to digest.

I condensed my aura into a hard shell around my body. Absentia hesitated like a hound when its prey had escaped from sight. The gray worms coiled around my legs stopped writhing, then stopped their upward ascent. The speed at which my anima was leeched away slowed, but didn’t stop altogether. Absentia continued to eat away at my life force, like a dog worrying at a bone.

The world boiled and bubbled, then out popped countless human-shaped blobs from the muck. In place of arms, the slimes sported gray tendrils that they held up before them as they searched their designated areas.

Nyx shook himself awake. “It’s not what it looks like. Absentia is affront to sentient life, but it is a single entity— albeit one that devours others to grow larger.”

He was right. Their movements, I found, were entirely uniform. They oozed across the landscape at the same speed, turned at the same points, and walked the same routes. All that set the slimes apart were their relative locations— and only then because I used myself as a focal point.

When I spoke, I remembered to be annoyed. “Gods, Nyx, it’s about time I heard from you!”

Nyx flipped me the bird. “You’ve got some nerve, kid, to think a supreme being such as myself would come running whenever you need me to explain the obvious.” My shadow yawned theatrically. “I rest my eyes for just a second and wake up to find you’ve gotten yourself into another mess.”

I held my breath as one of Absentia’s roving patrols neared me, began to move on, then stopped. The slime turned and extended its arms in my direction. The appendages split into dozens of tendrils that snaked through the air— and caught on my cloak. The feelers twitched and called the main body— I shrugged out of the mottled gray canvas and cast it off. The slime’s poured over it, absorbed it, and dissolved it to mush.

“That was quite the object lesson. I dare say you’ll be wanting me to help you avoid the same fate?” Nyx sniggered.

I smiled grimly. “Go on, laugh it up. In this vast, empty world, how long do you think it’ll take for you to find a vessel suitable to replace me?”

Nyx choked down his amusement. “You make a fair point. The situation requires that we stand a united front against this atrocity.”

While Nyx and I talked, Absentia reabsorbed its slimes. Bulbous sores ballooned out from the sludge until thirty foot high welts took their place. Waving tentacles in the hundreds, the thousands, poured out from the protrusions. The perpetually gray sky darkened to twilight and the crisscrossed mass of tentacles reminded me, to my chagrin, of home— of the Dark Forest’s canopy in winter.

I directed my stare at my shadow to avoid confronting the oncoming danger. “I’m glad we’re in agreement. Now, I’d really appreciate if you could give me pointers on how to best this thing and return to Magisterium in one piece.”

Shadow paused to consider, smiling and glancing past me at the unavoidable fate bearing down on us. “Setting aside the moral components, Absentia has made great strides towards advancing magecraft. This world was designed to awaken the sight— áse— within a mage. If I have the right of it, and I’m sure I do, Absentia was created for a particular purpose: to awaken latent mages to their potential. What might have taken years of rigorous training can be accomplished in a mere fraction of the time. Intense emotional responses combined with life-threatening situations enable an untrained mage to achieve áse.”

Fortunately— or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it— you have already begun the process of opening your third eye.Of course, you’ll need to experience quite a bit more pain and come quite a bit closer to death than you or I would like to for The Sight to fully manifest within you as the final of the seven senses. In the moments before your untimely demise, you should see the way out. This is the crucial part. The slightest hesitation or the smallest mistake will kill us both— I’ll guide you through the process so you don’t doom us both.”

“That’s it? I’ll know the way out when I see it? And you’ll hold my hand when things get tricky?”

My clipped summary made Nyx lose just enough of his grip that I could feel him radiating displeasure. “In essence, yes.”

“If you’d kept that short and sweet, I would’ve had more time to do something about this,” I waved my hand disconcertingly.

“If I’d done that, you wouldn’t have fulfilled the necessary prerequisites. This way we can be sure to generate the appropriate conditions for our return,” Nyx said reasonably.

“You could at least pretend not to enjoy tormenting me.”

A living cage of woven gray tendrils formed a perfect hemisphere above me. Light filtered through the ever-narrowing cracks in the weave, which drew tighter while I watched. Absentia loosed a sub-audible howl that shattered my aural field and rendered me senseless. I splashed into the muck, my muscles quivering, drool dribbling from the corner of my mouth.

The cage contracted, expanded, contracted, expanded— a heartbeat, or breathing… or both? Shortly thereafter, the cage tied itself off. For reasons known only to Absentia, an air pocket remained so I could breathe. The darkness was so complete that my unfailing night vision was unable to penetrate it.

Despite the all-consuming black, it was plain as day to me that the capsule was approximately two times my width and half again my height. We began to descend beneath the earth, towards the core. By my best guess, my dying body pumped out more than a thousand frantic heartbeats before our descent slowed.

I felt the air bubble pop and the earth tilt sideways; I slid into Absentia’s maw. Painful anticipation turned to dread as my life-force was absorbed. I lost feeling in my extremities first. My mind became a jumble of incoherent thoughts. Acid burned away my clothes and the sludge slithered across my skin, funneled into my eyes, mouth and nose.

My body went into convulsions and I choked as a titanic force split me open and tore me apart from the inside out. I felt my skin sizzle, it was the same sound water made when it boiled. My eyes bled and sharp tendrils forced their way up my nasal cavity in search of the brain.

Absentia’s howl shook me like a ragdoll. A thought burrowed its way into my eyes: where’s the harm in staying awhile?

Luckily I didn’t need my eyes to find what I needed. It took some doing, but I found it— a long, multicolored cord composed of intricately woven threads— attached to my spine at the base of my neck. My lifethread stretched behind me in a line, turned at a ninety degree angle, and climbed into the highest reaches of Absentia’s sky. I saw the luminescent sparkle fade, and I faded along with it.

Nyx’s voice filtered into the haze of my mind. “Your lifethread is tethered to your body, which, for now, lives and breathes on the mortal plane, in Magisterium. Now, before it’s too late! You must throw the entirety of your being into securing your homecoming, cry desperately for life from the very depths of your soul.”

And I did. The strangled cries of my soul conjured up waves of gold-green light that beat back the mass of gray sludge and cleansed my body of it. Denied its meal, went mad with hunger. Vibrant color returned to my lifethread, and I bent every fiber of my being towards following it home. I grabbed hold and pulled with all my might.