through shilouette gate

From street level, the school appeared rather nondescript. There was a tall stone wall — perhaps twelve feet tall — with an additional green metalwork fence atop it. Although Demi could see a large egress quite a bit further up the street — likely the main entrance — Monday led her through a little side gate, which she unlocked with a key from her person.

Going through the little gate was like stepping through an enchanted portal into a strange, new world. Once one passed through the wall, there was a short flight of stairs down, because the school grounds were lower than the street, and gently sloped away, downhill, as one went deeper into them, deeper into the mystery of the campus.

And it was a mystery.

While the street on the other side of the wall was pleasantly landscaped, with flowers in beds and small, well groomed trees, it was still a street in Metropoly, a city street in a densely packed urban area where buildings reared high into the thin sky and walkways crissed and crossed far above. Buildings were piled on buildings here, as they were everywhere in the City. Asphodel was refreshing in its own way, but it was still the City. It was asphalt and concrete and brick and stone and steel and glass and iron.

In the City, the City seemed the whole of the world, as if nothing at all existed outside of it. All other places seemed to fall away into nonexistence. There was only the City. It was every where and every thing.

But the grounds of the School were something else.

When she passed through the gate, she knew.

Here, the City did not matter at all. On the grounds of the School, the School was the whole of the world, and even the City fell away, leaving nothing but trees, a smell of the forest, and a feeling that one had passed into a secret kingdom.

It was strange. Here, in the middle of the City, was a park so densely forested that it might have been called a wood. They had such a wooded park at Forest Home, along with a few managed timber areas and several preserves. One expected squirrels and deer to be about.

It was a good place.

She liked it instinctively.

There was a canopy of leaves overhead and a tangle of bumpy roots underfoot. Once a body passed through the gate, there wasn't a proper paved path any longer, likely because of all the gnarled roots. Instead of a sidewalk, there were dozens of stepping stones: some of them irregular slabs of natural rock, others more regular geometric tiles. The light came down dappled, and shed Dalmatian spots over the stone and the mossy ground. The trees were so thick around them that it was difficult to get an impression of where things were. There was the high stone wall behind them, and a gate at their backs. The future lay ahead of them, through the wood. The only option then, was to follow the path of stepping stones laid into the ground, like they were pearls or breadcrumbs.

It almost ought to be yellow brick, oughtn't it? Demi wondered to herself. It seemed she was always off to meet some wizard or another, so she was always on the lookout for the telltale sign of yellow bricks.

But these were not yellow bricks.

Instead, the natural stones were all different sorts of rock: granite, shale, limestone, basalt, flint, sandstone, marble, and some other kinds she did not immediately recognize. The tiles were similarly diverse in make and color and finish. Almost all of the stepping stones were carved with pictures: flowers and ferns and mushrooms, squirrels and rabbits and deer, nuts and leaves and pine cones. The tiles were painted and glazed with similar subjects: very sylvan, all of them.

But every once in a while, like a glimpse of the divine, one saw a fairy.

That wasn't to say one caught a glimpse of a real flesh and blood fairy, all spritely as it flitted between buttercups. That would have been a bit beyond the pale, even for this place, which seemed to be perched at the marches of the marchen.

Instead, there were wee clay people hidden among the roots of the trees like toadstools, small figures spun out of glass and left hanging like lights or chimes from the branches of trees, lithe little things shaped from metal and left to dance in the sunlight, or turn atop a weathervane.

The fairies weren't overwhelming in their presence. Certainly, the regular motifs of the forest were prevalent, but the fairies lingered everywhere, like hidden secrets, and were particularly apparent if one had a keen eye and the curiosity to look for them.

Demi was a born bird spotter and was insatiably curious. She was particularly curious about curious things, and so she spotted quite a lot of fairies in a very short amount of time.

But she found she did not really have much chance to look for them, because once they were through the gate, she discovered that she and Monday were no longer alone.

Demi was relieved to see that it was a small delegation that had come to meet them — although faintly, one could hear the sounds of a crowd. Demi hoped she was simply hearing the sounds of traffic on the other side of the wall. She wasn't quite ready to face the mass of her adoring public, if such they were.

“Aren't you supposed to be in class?” Monday asked the assembled girls mildly. “The final bell rang twenty minutes ago.”

Demi blanched and checked her watch. Monday was correct. They were certainly late for school, although the self-proclaimed equerry didn't seem particularly concerned about their tardiness.

“The free press is free to go wherever it likes!” declared one of the girls defiantly.

The girl who had spoken was wearing an enormous cable knit sweater over what one could only guess was her ordinary uniform. The sweater was cavernous, and hung like a tent, all the way down to her bruised knees. Since it was being worn over a jacket and skirt and who-knew-what-else, the sweater was weirdly rumpled and lumpy, and it bulged in places where it really ought not have bulged. Demi got the impression that there was more under that sweater than just a strange girl and her strange clothes, but she wasn't yet ready to guess what made the stranger lumps and bumps.

Behind the girl in the mysterious sweater was a tall, willowy girl with long, dark hair. Her hair had much more volume than her delicate self, and she seemed almost to hide inside it, peeking out like a shy little lamb.

But it was another person who spoke next, a delicately androgynous youth with wavy hair the color of tea with milk. Their uniform was very sweetly arranged, and absolutely becoming, and there was a large silk ribbon tied loosely in a bow that was clipped into the milky colored hair at the temple. This was a very pretty person, with a fresh face and very carefully done and yet understated makeup, which added to the person’s overall appeal of innocence and cuteness.

“We’ve been let out of guidance early,” milk tea said pleasantly. “All three classes of the juniors have been let out, and I think some of the underclassmen too. Everyone is excited to see Lady Serraffield in the flesh.”

Since St. Muirgein’s was a girl’s school, it might have been reasonable to assume that this mysterious youth was a girl, but Demi could not say for sure. Having heard milk tea speak, she was less sure that there was even a definite answer to the question at all. The one thing she could say for certain was that milk tea was really hopelessly, almost fiendishly adorable.

If that's a boy, then all the girls I have ever met are in trouble, she thought to herself.

Milk tea bowed slightly to Demi and introduced himself. “Good morning, Lady Serraffield. I’m Ichigo Omi,” he said, “Thirteen hundred and twenty seventh heir to the grand shrine of Izumo. My charm points are that I’m a miko as well as a priestess in training, so be sure to come to me if you need blessings or cleansings, all right? I also write for the literary magazine. You can say ‘he’ or ‘she.’ I don't mind either one. I’m a junior in the Star Class. I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Demi bowed reflexively in response. “Ah, the pleasure’s all mine, Omi-san.”

“Ichigo is fine,” said the very pretty boy with an idle wave.

“So the whole of the junior class has been let out early?” Monday asked, seeming faintly perturbed. “I’m glad I thought to come in through silhouette gate.”

Ichigo fluttered her hands. “Oh, it's a zoo at the main gate,” she agreed. “But I know Momon. That’s why I’m here and they're there.”

“And I’m here because I have a nose for news,” announced the sweater. “Nobody can keep me away from a good story. I’m attracted to a scoop like a magnet is attracted to another magnet.”

There was a girl wearing a lace headband standing near the girl in the sweater, and she planted both of her hands on her hips.

“We’re here because we followed Ichigo,” she said. “And you do know that magnets don't just attract each other, right? They also repel one another.”

“Of course I know that,” scoffed the sweater. “I repel boredom and boring things.”

The headband rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m not going to argue with that,” she said, then muttered. “But I don't think that's all you repel.”

The sweater ignored her and instead focused her attentions on Demi.

“I hope you're ready to confess all your deepest and darkest secrets,” she said, swaying back and forth, as if she were a snake intent on hypnotizing a hapless mouse. “We’re all ready to run a special edition: Lady Demeter Serraffield, Dark Queen of the Abyss.”

But Demi was not the sort of mouse who was easily hypnotized. She was the sort of mouse who rode motorcycles and fought off her enemies with a longsword.

She might have also (unfortunately) been the sort of mouse who breaks into other people’s houses and then wrecks them in the course of her own enjoyment.

“Ararara,” said Demi blankly. “No, I’m not really ready to do that. And I sincerely hope you don't call it that, whatever you write.”

“We’re not calling it that,” assured the headband, but the girl in the sweater continued to ignore her.

“I can make you talk,” the sweater said with an eerie giggle as she flailed her sleeves like ominous noodles. “I have ways of doing it. So it’d be better for you if you just answered my questions.”

The lamb girl had begun to back away slowly when the lumpy sweater noticed that she was attempting to escape.

“Get back here, minion, unless you want to be cursed for your next twenty lifetimes!” the sweater demanded, flailing her noodly sleeves in apparent threat.

The lamb girl bleated in distress and shrank back into the position she had occupied previously, behind the maniac in the lumpy sweater. She hid even deeper inside her hair.

The headband girl sighed, and slowly rolled up the paper she was carrying under her arm, and whacked the sweater girl on the head with it.

“Don’t call Mariah a minion,” she said with a sigh. “We’ve been over this, Mallory. She’s not your goon. She’s an editor at the newspaper, just like you are.”

“Ah yes, but I am the editor-in-chief!” the girl in the lumpy sweater — apparently Mallory — cried in triumph, and struck the pose of a confident dictator-for-life, one finger pointed straight up toward the blue heavens, as if the gods themselves had agreed to her dominion over lesser mortals. Her majesty was only slightly undermined by her spontaneous bouts of creepy giggling. “That makes me the supreme boss, and you the obedient minions,” she declared.

She hunched over and then giggled again, this time into her noodly sleeves.

I wonder who reads this newspaper, Demi mused idly. Vampires? Werewolves? Monday?

The girl in the headband rolled her eyes very expressively.

“Yes Mal, we’re all very impressed,” she said dryly. She looked apologetically at Demi. “My name’s Rosamund. I’m sorry about Mal. She gets this way when — “ she gave a halfhearted shrug, “Who am I kidding? She’s basically always like this. We’re the senior staff of the Muirgein Ze — “

“The Bloodhex Dispatch!” interrupted the sweater with passion. “It is called the Bloodhex Dispatch because we dispatch our enemies with blood hexes!”

Rosamund unrolled the paper and calmly held it in front of Mallory’s face as she spoke to Demi. “We’re the senior staff of the Muirgein Zephyr. We publish new issues every other week. I’m news, Mariah is features, and Mallory is inexplicably the editor-in-chief. In the interest of transparency, I feel like I ought to tell you that we’re also the senior staff of the literary magazine. Oh, and Mal does actually write the Bloodhex Dispatch. It's just a column in the newspaper. She may actually try to put ‘Lady Serraffield, Mistress of all Evils’ in there, so heads up.”

I can't wait to read that, Demi thought. I hope she captures my good side when she’s writing about my abyssal soul.

Besides Ichigo and the members of the newspaper staff, there was one other person waiting near the gate who had not yet spoken. She was a very short girl with a mass of pink hair done up in high, curly pigtails. There were mirrored, star shaped sunglasses perched in her head and she was wearing a large backpack that had been made in the shape of Popuppu, a popular golden retriever mascot character. The backpack was really almost comically oversized, like it was meant for rough, backcountry camping, or a military deployment, rather than an ordinary school day. The backpack was almost bigger than the girl.

She must be stronger than she looks to be able to keep from falling over with all that on her back, Demi thought.

“I’m Vivian,” she announced, “And this is Luna,” she said, motioning to the backpack she was wearing.

Well, that backpack is certainly big enough to have a name, Demi reflected.

“It's nice to meet you, Vivian,” Demi said warmly, then paused briefly and added, “And Luna. I really like Popuppu too,” she admitted. “He has a really cute butt, doesn't he?”

This was a popular observation about Popuppu, and a regular topic of discussion among his fans.

“Yes,” Vivian agreed very seriously. “His booty is really cutie.”

Demi managed to keep from bursting out laughing only with some difficulty, when she realized that Vivian had not meant it as a joke, but as a legitimate observation.

She managed to turn her strangled laugh into a clearing of her throat and said with gravity, “Wisely said.”

Monday clapped her hands lightly.

“I am sure Lady Serraffield is very happy to meet all of you,” said Monday diplomatically, “But right now, she does have an appointment to keep — “

“The press will not be denied!” cried Mallory, moving to stand directly in their lane of travel. “We’re here to ask the important questions that the public has a right to know,” she said as she leaned forward, staring at Demi through her hair in a very disconcerting way.

“Like, ‘do you have a dog?’” broke in Vivian. She also leaned forward, balling her hands into fists as she stared in a similarly disconcerting way. There was a gleam in her eye. She was apparently desperately ready to hear the answer to her question.

Demi, caught completely off guard by this most unexpected question, stammered, “Yes, I mean, no, I suppose not.” She blinked. “There are many dogs at Forest Home, and I am happy to count all of them as my dear friends, but I wasn't allowed to bring any with me, or I suppose, they convinced me that the dogs would be happier in the country than they would be in the City.”

“What?!” asked Vivian in astonishment, “Who told you that?” she demanded. “I bet that person has never talked to a dog before in their life. The very best place for a dog to be is with their person. It doesn't matter whether it's the City or not in the City. Pups belong with their people,” she said decisively.

“Well, I’m not sure dogs are allowed in the place where I’m living,” Demi said with an awkward smile.

She tried to imagine spaniels and terriers and collies scrambling over the towers of junk in the attic of the original chapterhouse. And she’d have to take them through the cathedral to walk them, since there was no way else to access the ground from the saint's walk short of installing a dog elevator consisting of a large picnic basket and a rope.

Vivian waved off her concern as if it didn't matter in the least.

“Dogs are allowed everywhere,” she announced. “Some places just don't know that dogs are allowed there yet.”

“That’s an interesting way of thinking about things,” Demi said diplomatically.

The gloomy, sinister newspaper girl broke in, apparently aggravated. “That isn't the question I was going to ask. The public doesn't care about whether or not she's got a dog.”

“Of course they do!” insisted Vivian. “Everybody loves dogs.”

“They don't,” insisted Mallory, stomping her foot. “Right now, I don't like dogs, because you keep talking about them!”

Vivian crossed her arms over her chest. “I would say that dogs don't like you back, but you know what? Dogs are better than that,” she said. “Dogs will like you even if you dislike them. That's how good dogs are.”

Monday breezed in between the two quarreling girls effortlessly.

“Mallory, I promise that Lady Serraffield will give you an exclusive interview for the school newspaper, all right?” she asked mildly. “And Vivian, Lady Serraffield has already told me how interested she is in sitting in on the next meeting of the ‘look at dogs’ club. Unfortunately, at the moment, she’s late to see the headmistress.”

Demi’s eyes widened as Monday helpfully booked up her schedule without so much as a reassuring glance. Both of the girls seemed satisfied by the promises, and unlikely to interdict their travel further.

“And Ichinichi just wanted to get a look at the princess, right?” asked Monday, turning to the priestess-in-training.

“Bingo!” Ichigo said with the flash of a smile. “I’ve collected enough material for a first meeting. I have so many ideas,” he said, his cheeks flushing rosily. “I can't even wait.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Monday said easily. “Just try not to get caught writing in Professor Fisk’s class again. You’ll have to do a Saturday detention for sure.”

“Yes ma’am,” Ichigo chorused obediently, folding her hands in front of herself.

Monday turned to Rosamund.

“Do you mind breaking the news to the girls at the main gate? Just give us about fifteen minutes to get safely to the Air Castle,” she said. “They’ll be disappointed they didn't get to see her arrive, but just remind them that they’ll have plenty of chances to see her this afternoon.”

“Will do,” said Rosamund with a salute. Then she waved at Demi. “We’ll be seeing you, Lady Serraffield.”

The lamb girl behind her nodded her head silently, but was clearly not yet ready to emerge from her hair.