You can’t spend time worrying about Geist. Focus on the dorm. Besides, everything is probably fine. You’re probably just overreacting.

My dorm situation. My food situation. Those were more important. My stomach grumbled in agreement.

When did you eat last? The day before?

I wasn’t sure.

As I walked down the hallway, I looked at the placards next to each of the doors. Most of them were blank. In fact, all of them were blank except for the nameplate with my own name. I started to open the door when someone called out to me from my right.

“Hey! There you are.” It was Flin. He walked up, glanced at the door, and then back to me. “Nice.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“I mean the rooms are fine,” he said. “They’re basic, spartan even, but they fit the bill.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we're here to learn a trade, well, some of us are. I'm not. I'm training to be an adept so the vanisher class is less of a trade training program and more of an academic class.”

“So, you can do magick.”

“Yes. I have the requisite skills to be an adept. We’re fairly rare. Primarily possessing—”

“Primarily possessing?” I laughed. “Did you memorize the definition?”

Flin laughed. “Right. I'm sorry. I teach a class on the side.”

Is he a teaching assistant?

“What class?” I asked.

“Gateway theory.”

“Gateway theory,” I nodded. “Sure. Seems complicated.”

Flin raised his eyebrows. “You have no idea. Anyways, sorry for speaking to you like you were my student. What I meant to say was that adepts are just…”

He frowned and thought.

“What?” I nudged. “Adepts are just what?”

“Gimme a sec. I'm just trying to figure out how to put this for someone who hasn't grown up in the magick world. For someone starting from zero.”

I waited, thankful that he was going to explain to me like I was five. I was tired of listening to explanations that had prerequisites I didn’t possess.

“So, adepts…” He started again but then frowned. “Okay, let's start at a fuzzy version of the beginning. There are four types of magick, right? Bone, blood, life, death. At the very bottom of the totem pole you've got sticks. No magick. Above them you have casters. They’re good with a variety of magick. Some are a little stronger, some a little weaker, but, you know, just general type stuff. Most casters tend to use witchstones instead of magick. Above casters you have adepts. Adepts are people who have two magicks that they're strong in. These magicks tend to combine and make them ideal for learning battle magick.”

“Battle magick?”

“It's really complicated to describe but suffice it to say adepts are the ones casting spells at each other and dueling in your typical stick movies and tv shows.”

“Got it.”

“And wizards are above adepts. They’re super powerful in one style of magick while the other styles are still present, just at a lesser degree.”

“Oh okay,” I said. It made sense that way.

“So, you're an adept,” I said. “You're learning to duel other…” I frowned. “Other adepts?”

“It's a little more complicated than that,” Flin said. “Just like in the stick world, there’s an entire underbelly of magickal crime. Adepts are the ones who deal with criminals.”

I snapped my fingers. “You're a cop.”

Flin frowned at this. “No. I'm an adept.”

I rolled my eyes. “Come on. You're a cop. You make sure people don't break laws. You enforce laws.”

Flin started to argue this but then stopped. “Yeah, well I mean… Oh. Yeah, I guess I am a cop. Well, a cop in training at least.”

I nodded and sighed.

It’s just like you to make friends with a cop. That's all you need: a cop standing over you, watching your every move.

“I can show you around your room,” Flin offered in the silence that stretched out between us.

I raised a single eyebrow, reached my hand out to the doorknob twisted it, and opened it. I fixed him with a withering look and then glanced into the room.

“Do you really think I nee—” and that's when I realized the room wasn't set up like a normal stick room. The room was completely empty.

“Yeah,” Flin said, looking into the room as well. “Bristlebloom and the Austerium tend to use magickal rooms so if someone ever needs to shift departments, or dormitories, they can do so instantly without having to worry about moving furniture.”

Flin and I stepped into the room and he brought me over to the center. There, set flush into the floor, was a clear witchstone the size of a manhole. Carved into the surface of the witchstone was a circle divided into three equal parts. Within each of the little triangle pies of the circle were different symbols.

“What do the symbols mean?” I asked.

“They’re the symbols for life, death, and bone magick,” he answered.

“No blood?”

Flin gave me a grimace and shook his head no.

“Okay,” I said.

Flin cleared his throat and stepped onto the seal. He looked at me and I could hear the teacher voice slip back in. “This seal is powered outside of the room. It's not like a witchstone. It won’t hurt you. It won’t even affect you.”

“If it's powered from outside of the room, where does the power come from?”

Flin shrugged. “I haven't really ever considered that. My expertise is in gateways, not seals.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So, what you do is you stand on the seal, you close your eyes, and you imagine what you need.”

“And it can be anything?” I asked.

“No. It can't be living. It can't be organic. It has to be something inanimate.”

“What about food?” I asked.

“That's a different thing. We'll go over that in the second. Stand on the seal though.”

I stood on the seal and closed my eyes.

“Okay,” Flin said, “let me step out of the room so you don't injure me, and you can get started. All you have to do is close your eyes and imagine—whoa.”

I opened my eyes and saw the furniture from my apartment now in this room.

“That was fast,” Flin said. “How did you do that so quickly?”

I shrugged.

Flin frowned, staring at the furniture. “I would've had to think about each piece of furniture, but you did that so quickly that… How long have you had all this?”

I shrugged again. “Since I was a little kid.”

“Hmmm,” Flin said. “That must be the case. Most of us in the magick world don't keep furniture for very long. That must be why it was so easy for you to call this to mind; you have a unique relationship with these objects.”

“So,” I said. “Now that my room’s in order, food?”

“Yes,” he said. “Just follow me.”

I stepped off the seal and followed after him down the hallway.

“Do you have to do that with the furniture every time?” I asked. “Or will it stay there?”

“You essentially just transported all of that furniture from wherever it was to here. It will stay here until you move it again. Most of us, magickkind, would've created something out of scratch. We would've basically built a construct out of lume. You did quite the opposite by bringing real objects here.”

“So, is the furniture you make different? I mean you have to create your bed every time you want to go to sleep?”

“It's a little more intricate than that, but yes we create things with lume and just as easily wipe them away. The seal at the center of the room makes it simple to do. It absorbs the lume back within it and someone else can use it if they need to. The lume that is, not the bed.”

“Wow.”

At the end of the dormitory hallway, we faced multiple flights of stairs, and began to descend.

“So, what's with the nameplates next to the doors?” I asked.

“Oh. They’re just names.”

“All the ones I saw were blank though?”

“Yeah,” Flin said. “As a matter of privacy students can only see their own name.”

“There were two plates next to mine. My name was on one and the other was blank. Is someone else staying with me?”

I could tell by the sudden hitch in his shoulders that the answer was no and that something was wrong.

“No,” Flin said. “No, no one will be staying with you.”

“Does everyone else have a roommate?” I asked.

“I believe so.”

“Why don't I?”

Flin stopped walking. “The magick world is open to many things, but it still hasn't fully wrapped its head around integrating with sticks.”

I'd been segregated and hadn’t even realized it.

“So, magickkind is racist? Against sticks?”

“I don't know if racist is the correct word,” Flin said with a finger on his lip. “Magickist maybe? I'm not sure what the term would be. But yes, magickkind is definitely elitist.”

“Well, that's disappointing.”

“I agree,” Flin said.

Well… At least you won’t have to share your furniture with anyone.

He showed me down to the cafeteria and how to work the food cauldrons.

They worked in much the same way the seal in my room had.

The strange thing was that they looked nothing like what I expected a cauldron to look like. It was just a box with a seal in front of it. You put your hand on the seal, closed your eyes, and imagined what you wanted to eat. Then the food would appear.

We did this and took a seat.

As I ate, I peppered Flin with questions. “Are you eating food made out of lume and am I eating food that I've transported here?”

“No,” he answered. “You’re more or less broadcasting your thoughts to someone who makes the food and delivers it to the box.”

“But it's instantaneous,” I said.

“Yes, the workers who are making the food are working in a warded area of the Shadow Vaile.”

I frowned. “The what?”

“The Shadow Vaile.”

“And that is… what exactly?”

“a very deep and broad subject that I neither have the time nor expertise to delve into.”

We finished eating and Flin showed me to the library. He showed me where the books on vanishing were as well as where an entire cluster of Lumadex stations were.

“Have fun,” he said.

I nodded. “Why are you helping me? Why are you helping a stick?”

A stricken looked flickered across Flin’s face. He bit his lip as though he was trying to decide on something. Eventually, he shook his head. “That's another story for another time. Ask me again and I'll tell you. For now, just get caught up. You've got a lot to learn.”

If anyone else had told me I had a lot to learn, I would've taken it as a slight, but the way he said it was so genuine that I could only nod my head in agreement.

I truly did have a lot to learn. A metric ton.

I started out by searching random words and phrases I’d overheard that day, not really focusing on any one subject.

My mind kept drifting back to that store though. Not the store that had been destroyed, but the one on the same street that had pulled my attention while I was delivering Geist’s package. The one with the upside-down heart emblazoned on its hanging sign.

I tried to figure out how I was even supposed to find out anything about the store when I knew neither the store’s name nor its address.

Eventually I found a massive tome in the library on symbols and flipped through it page by page. After about thirty minutes and on the edge of giving up, I found the symbol that that I’d seen on the white sign hanging in front of the shop.

The shop’s name was Blackhart and my mouth fell open as I read the brief description of the shop:

For centuries, Blackhart has been the preeminent witchstone and arcana dealer in the magick world. It is said that this shop can only be held by a Covington.