Hugo took a seat near Oskar, towards the top of the room. He guessed there were about two hundred students here. They sat and chatted while they waited for class to start.

“It’s ok if you don’t want to talk about it, but I was wondering about your scar,” Oskar said.

Hugo reached up to touch the scar on his face. It went from in front of his ear to his neck. He said, “Yeah, I think about it sometimes too. Is it too long? They say girls like scars, but I think they like small scars, not big disfiguring scars.”

“You aren’t disfigured,” Oskar said and rolled his eyes.

“Sure, sure. I know you are right. But I haven’t had much luck with the ladies and I wanted to blame something else, alright?”

Oskar stopped himself from replying when he looked down. A short woman with brown hair walked to the center of the stage. The auditorium quickly quieted down as she approached the lectern.

“Welcome to the Blue Lion Academy. My name is Marta Edge. I expect you all to show proper respect and address me as Sage Marta. I will be your teacher for the next week before you are all soulburnt into your new domain. After you have your new magic, you will be taught by one of the specialist mages for that domain. Some of you will see me again since I teach a mana control class during the regular school year.

“I get the same few questions every year, so I figure I will answer them now. To answer your first question, no. You cannot get a better dorm room. I know what your next instinct is, and thank you for the money. You still can’t get a better dorm room.”

There was scattered laughter at the proclamation. Everyone gave a knowing smile, bribes and throwing around influence were the normal ways of getting things done. Especially for the general makeup of this academy. Because of the way shimmer mountain passes were handed out, two thirds of the students came from rich families. Of course they would want a better room than the cramped quarters they had all been assigned.

Marta didn’t laugh, she just continued, “The dean is on the city council, and unless your parents are on the city council too, there will be no preferential treatment. Many of you are used to being the big fish in a small pond. Welcome to the ocean, boys and girls. You are all little fish, don’t piss off the barracudas. Every single one of your teachers is a master of their craft, and they are all more important than you are. If you get one of them mad, you will be expelled, regardless of who your parents are. Give us your respect or you will live to regret it.

“On to more pleasant topics. The sports fanatics will be glad to hear we have our own azad court here, just past the solarium. Our two tournaments are always well attended. The cafeteria is out this door and to your left, near the academy walls. If you want to nourish your mind instead of your body, our library is on the opposite end of campus.

“Physical education will start tomorrow morning, bright and early at the 8th bell. You will report to Sage Hanna in the field directly in front of this building, wearing your running clothes. I am going to make this easy on you, attendance is a test. If you miss the physical education classes or my lectures in the afternoon, you will be expelled and your tuition will not be returned. Please be on time to both.”

...

As he usually did, Hugo woke with the sun. He stretched and smiled. That habit came from needing to get off to work early each morning. Based on the sun, Hugo guessed that it was half past the sixth bell right now. Normally he would be grabbing some hardtack and heading off to work. Today he just lay in bed, feeling luxurious.

A half hour later, he got dressed. He considered waking Oskar up for breakfast, but he wasn’t sure if his roommate would appreciate that or not. He decided to let him sleep. There was still an hour before they needed to be at athletics anyway. He might get up on his own shortly.

Hugo found his way to the cafeteria. It was a nice and airy building, with both indoor and outdoor seating. He was pleased to find that payment was as simple as showing his student badge and them writing the number down. He ate a scrumptious breakfast of oatmeal and sausages. He added a few fruits to be healthy. The cafeteria quickly filled up, but he didn’t see his roommate. Maybe he was on the other end of the cafeteria, it was plenty big enough for him to miss someone.

He decided to bring Oskar some breakfast just in case. He chose some granola and fruit, and added the cost to his tab. That way it could be a snack for later if his friend had already eaten.

The thought occurred to him that there were probably lots of easy ways for a student to run up their tab. If he bought lots of extra food, or bought things from the commissary, he might find himself adding an extra year of indentureship to his debt.

When he returned to his room, he found Oskar still sleeping. He woke his roommate and gave him breakfast. He also made a point of saying it was a one-time thing. Oskar offered to pay him back, but he wasn’t quite awake yet so Hugo didn’t count on it.

Then he changed into sports clothes. He had been issued shirts and shorts in the typical school blue and white, for the first class of the day. He put them on and frowned. He was going to be a little chilly in this light outfit. Maybe it would have been perfect in the middle of summer, but it was the tail end of winter right now. He wondered if he would need to buy a jacket.

“Are you ready yet?” Oskar said.

“Me? Aren’t you the one that slept in for an hour?” Hugo said.

“What are you talking about? I am dressed and ready to go, and I already ate. Let’s go,” Oskar said with a smile.

They walked out together and found the field where their class was supposed to meet. On their way, they saw several upperclassmen walking about in sport clothes as well. Apparently, athletics was a class you never really stopped taking.

The physical education instructor arrived right on time, just as the bells were ringing. The faculty certainly had a thing about punctuality. She was tall with short hair, and had a long brown robe with academy blue trim.

“Alright folks. I am going to call roll, speak up when you hear your name,” she said, not even introducing herself.

Hugo noticed he was able to tell his classmates apart by the way they answered their name. The ones that were used to public school were quick to shout ‘here’. But the ones that were used to a private tutor took a half second longer to answer. Hugo took special note of one of the latter students. She was a statuesque girl with long curly brown hair. Hugo made sure to remember the name ‘Lenna’ when she answered her name. He was instantly infatuated with her. She had a kind of effortless grace that made him think of a cat stalking its prey.

The teacher clapped her hands when the roll call was done and said, “Alright, only one missing. That is a good start to the class. Now that I have memorized all your names, I will give you mine. I am Sage Hanna, and I will be your athletics teacher for the next two years. You heard that right, two years. I will help you keep your bodies in fighting shape, and help you adjust to the many rank ups you will experience at the Academy.

“I am here to help you out, please remember that. I expect all of you to give it your best. I will notice if you don’t. You won’t be able to transfer to a different teacher, and this class is required for graduation. With that in mind, I would like you all to make a quick jog around the track. I will lead you for this first lap, stay with the pack.”

Hanna led them in a jog around the campus, following a paved track that made a large loop around the entire campus. The track was wide and had gentle curves as it passed around buildings, through grassy fields, and around small groves of trees.

Hugo had been doing a lot of running before this, training to be a shimmer corpsman. The jog didn’t seem all that tough to him, but several other classmates disagreed. They were gasping and wheezing by the time they finished the loop. He wondered how they had made the trip down shimmer mountain if they were this out of shape. Maybe they had gotten carried.

“Alright, we took that one slow, just so everyone could get used to the track. Now we are going to do another lap. I will start out in the back this time. Anyone who finishes the lap after me will have to take a remedial athletics class after dinner for a week. Go!”

The students startled at the unexpected start to the lap, but at least twenty of them were ready for this and took off as fast as they could. Hugo was among them. This kind of weeding out race was something he had already experienced, and he was expecting it. The lap around the campus was more than a mile long, but he immediately ran at his top speed.

He fully expected the instructor to start out slow and then pick up to unfair speeds halfway through. He wasn’t going to be caught by her mind games though. An extra class sounded like a terrible idea, so he was going to do his best to avoid it.

Of the twenty or so students that were at the front of the pack, many of them couldn’t keep up the fast pace. Particularly when they hit the three quarters mark, most dropped into an exhausted jog. Hugo was loving it though. He had run like this before, but never with the added stats of being soulmarked. It was almost fun.

Ten students finished the lap almost together. They had run hard the whole way. They looked back and didn’t see many of their classmates. There was a general sense of accomplishment among them. The rest of their classmates were still racing against the instructor, but they had won.

Hugo loved how quickly he recovered from the run, he was able to talk as classmates started filing in. The remaining runners out of the two hundred first years slowly started trickling in.

He turned towards the attractive girl from earlier and said, “How much do you want to bet that more than half of the other students don’t beat the teacher?”

She smiled and shook her head, “No bet. I saw her frown on the first lap, she wasn’t happy. I would be surprised if fifty classmates make the cut, let alone one hundred.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me, how did these people make it up and down the mountain? We all got soulmarked on the same trip, right? We were running pretty fast on the way down, how did those slowpokes not get eaten?” he said.

“Potions,” she said with a frown, “Plenty of them don’t do the training they should, and so they supplement with speed and stamina potions. Now that they are at the academy without their parents resources, their laziness is showing.”

“Huh, I had no idea.”

“It says something about your character that you didn’t know about the shortcuts.”

“Or just the size of my wallet.”

She laughed politely.

“I’m Hugo by the way,” he said with a smile.

“Lenna. Pleased to meet you.”

They were interrupted by the instructor, Hanna, arriving. She looked over the group that had already arrived. Lenna was right; there were only forty of the two hundred students that had been able to beat the instructor on her second lap around the campus.

“Pitiful, fewer and fewer every year,” Hanna mumbled to herself.

Shortly after, Oskar fell gasping to the grass in front of Hugo’s feet.

“And this eloquent fellow is my roommate, Oskar,” Hugo said to Lenna, “He is normally much more talkative.”

Oskar got enough breath to swear at Hugo, then he went back to gasping. It wasn’t long before he recovered and stood up. “That wasn’t fair. I was ahead of her at first. I was just trying to pace myself. Not like you lot that ran all out from the get go. How come you two didn’t collapse halfway through?”

“I have literally been training for years,” Hugo said with a shrug.

“What? How did you know mages needed to run a lot? No one told me,” Oskar said indignantly.

“No one told me either. I was actually training to be in the shimmer corps. I didn’t get in so I came here instead,” Hugo said.

“Being a mage was your back-up plan? You have your priorities mixed up, man,” Oskar laughed. He turned to Lenna and asked, “And what about you, are you a shimmer reject too?”

She laughed and said, “No no. I have always wanted to be a mage. My mother has the formation domain, and I wanted to be like her since I was little. She told me to stay fit.”

“My dad has the formation domain too. Maybe they know each other? His name is Mihai. We own a sewing machine factory in town,” Oskar asked.

“I doubt my mother would know him. We aren’t from here. My parents are still in my hometown, Paarl,” she said.

“That’s a whole other country. What are you doing all the way over here?”

Lenna shrugged, “It’s only two stops away, not that far. Still on the wheel.”

“Yeah, but why did they send you here?” Oskar said, bewildered.

“Politics. My parents are doing stuff that the local nox don’t like. They wouldn’t admit me to the Paarl academy so my family sent me here. Apparently this academy is better than Tallinn, at least for formation,” she said.

“My dad said the same thing, but I am trying to avoid formation myself. He wants to make me into a copy of himself, and I am not really into that. And since I can introduce myself now, my name is Oskar Simm. What’s your name?”

“Lenna.” She seemed like she was going to say more, but Hanna interrupted.

“Today is your first day,” Hanna yelled to the class, “So I will forgive some of you for walking. But this was the last time any of you walk when I said to run. I better not see you walking the campus loop again. Otherwise I will give the new healers a chance to practice their craft. Don’t test me.” That last part came out as a growl.

She led the class to the physical education building and waited until everyone filed in to continue, “This is the obstacle course. We will typically spend half of our daily lessons here. Today will be a little bit longer since it is still the first week of classes, but normal classes will only be two hours.”

Hugo stifled back a groan. It was just past the ninth bell, if this class was longer than normal, how long would they be here for?