Chapter IV

The next few days fell into a pattern. Every morning an obnoxious bleating noise would wake him up and not stop until he went down to the breakfast table. He’d sit there with his family as they ate in silence. Then he’d promptly go back to sleep until the evening. When he woke up, a cold lunch would be left at his door. If anything was edible for Mort, the monkey demanded it with hums and Kizu forfeited it immediately.

Dinners were easily the most difficult. Thankfully, they didn’t eat out again, but even still the sticks they used to eat drove him mad. He wanted to just spear the food through like a kabob. At one point, he followed through with the temptation and received an hour-long lecture about table manners, all the while Finn smirked through it.

After dinner every day, he spent his time reading. The house’s library proved to be extremely different from the crone’s. Not a single book was even remotely similar. Instead of water damaged pieces of five hundred year old papyrus listing off ingredients for a sleeping potion, half of which were from extinct animals, this library contained books about politics and how to influence others, all looking like they were printed yesterday. Most of them he found incredibly dull and repetitive. Without fail, the ‘make eye contact’ tip was used in every single book. But after abandoning those books out of sheer boredom, he found a small stache of adventure books. Finn’s name was stenciled in the front cover in a mark of ownership. Surprisingly, Kizu found them really fun. However, when he approached Finn about them, thinking of maybe connecting with his brother through them, he got incredibly red faced and stormed off. Kizu was quickly coming to question why he bothered. And a few hours later, all of Finn’s books disappeared from the shelves.

At nights, Kizu and Mort scavenged the mountainside for food. They found a small peach tree not too far away. Hardly Mort’s favorite meal, but far better than nothing.

They sat under the tree on their final night at the house. Mort wiped his tiny juice-covered hands in Kizu’s hair, then licked the rest off his palms.

“We should stock up on these. We don’t know what options the academy will have for you. Better if we have something to fall back on.”

Mort purred and climbed to the top of his head. They stared down at the town spread below them. Every imaginable color of light twinkled and moved down below. It looked alive. The house, removed from it all, felt sterile and unnaturally clean in comparison. He couldn’t wait to be gone.

The house felt like a completely foreign place to both him and Mort. He hoped he’d remember the island a bit better than this. Part of him regretted accepting his place in the dorms so quickly. The more he looked back, the more fond memories he remembered of his time with Anna there. But the other part of him reminded him that living there required sharing a living space with Finn. So the regret died almost as soon as it arrived.

That night he went to bed earlier than he would back in the basin, before even the sunrise. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to help too much. Still he felt zombified as he followed after his family. He dozed off in the carriage until his father gripped his shoulder and shook him awake.

“Quickly, or you’ll be late for the send-off. If you miss your room, there won’t be another one for another two days.”

“My room?” Kizu asked, still groggy.

“Yes, yes, now come along or be left behind.”

So Kizu did as bidden. They left behind the carriage and went into a large stone building. It looked like some ancient ruin renovated. Kizu noticed how strange it looked juxtaposed with all the town’s wooden buildings styled completely differently. The architecture of the thing seemed crooked in comparison to everything else. But nobody else seemed put off by it. They bustled in and out. The majority seemed to wear the nice clothing of the upper class, but he noted a few street rat kids harking newspapers and shining shoes. And he spotted at least one of them picking a well dressed man’s pocket.

He made certain not to lose sight of his family as they navigated through the throng. The passages inside the building were no less crowded and they interwoven like a labyrinth. Statues made of marble looked down at him in distaste. He noticed them shift on their pedestals as they frowned at him.

Finally they halted outside a door. His mother removed Finn’s overcoat and was tightening Finn’s tie. At that point Kizu came to the realization that while Finn wore a uniform. In contrast, he still wore a change of clothes the crone had weaved for him a year or so ago. Though, as he looked up and down Finn’s outfit, he decided he’d rather not bring it to anyone’s attention. He felt bad for the plants used to make it. Silk frills adorned each joint and the necktie poofed out from his chest. Not to mention the ruffles at the joints of the thing looked like saucers.

“Now Finn, make certain to guide Kizu to the testing facility once you arrive. They’ll take care of everything else from there. Do you understand?” his mother asked his brother.

Finn made noises of agreement and then the two of them were pushed forward into the room.

“Wait, you’re not coming along with us?” Kizu asked as the door began to close behind them.

“No, no. Have fun, stay safe.” His mother shooed them away.

“We will see you at the winter tournament,” his father said. “Make us proud!”

And just like that, the door slammed shut.

Kizu wheeled around on his heel and examined where they left him. It looked like a waiting room. A dozen other people roughly his age sat on couches and benches. With the exception of the youngest few, each of them wore a uniform like Finn’s. Though, thankfully, Kizu noted theirs lacked the frills. Without exception, every single one of them gawked at Kizu.

Finn, for his part, did his best to pretend to be unrelated and disassociate himself from Kizu the moment after they entered.

Doing his best to ignore the stares, Kizu walked to the other side of the room towards a girl his age on a couch. She looked frantically anywhere other than at him as he approached and flinched as he sat down next to her.

“My name’s Kaga Kizu, mind if I sit here?” he said, minding his manners the best he remembered how.

She looked horrified as she excused herself and scurried away to a chair in the furthest corner of the room from him.

“Welcoming,” he muttered to himself. Then he sighed and rested his head against the back of the sofa. Mort climbed out of his bag and curled up around the back of his neck. He stroked the monkey until they both ended up drifting off.

He awoke as students scurried out of the room. Nothing seemed different, but he followed them out anyways. Outside, students filled the passageways, emerging from dozens of other doors in the hall. And unsurprisingly, Finn was nowhere to be found.

“Testing facility,” Kizu said to Mort. “Just got to find where that is and everything will be sorted out in no time.”

Following the stream of people, he quickly was washed into the open air. The building he exited had the same stone architecture as the one he had entered, but as he looked around himself his eyes widened. In picture books he’d seen pictures of castles across the sea. Stone fortresses that kept out invading armies. Hon didn’t have anything like that. The castles he’d seen from his home country involved moats and high walls, but nothing like what he saw before him. But, as he craned his neck to see the entire courtyard, he saw the familiar patterns of his home as well. The entire square seemed to be a hodgepodge of different architecture styles. As if someone dumped different pieces of different nations into the same place.

Whether a result of his hair, his clothes, or the monkey perched on his head, people continued to give him quizzical looks as he passed through the courtyard. But no one appeared outright hostile like in the room that brought him here. He took comfort in that.

Students, like the buildings, seemed to be from all over. And not just in regard to nationalities, he saw one figure in a student uniform whose head was covered completely in quills like a porcupine. And another girl who seemed to float through the crowd, her feet dragging in the dirt behind her.

“Excuse me,” he said to a boy who looked to also be from Hon. “Can you point me in the direction of the testing facility?”

The older boy looked at his hair and scoffed. Then he pointed in a direction and walked away.

He asked three more students for directions. Each of them pointed in a wildly different direction.

Kizu was quickly coming to the realization the students of Wave Edge Academy might not have a reputation for friendliness.

The sun’s beams made the walk more work than it had any right to be as he went in the direction the boy had pointed him toward. No signs or notices informed him of any testing place as the students’ numbers thinned out. After about an hour of wandering, he asked another person. This time an elderly adult whom he assumed to be a faculty member. As he approached, he noticed the patterns across what would be flesh on a normal person. Instead his skin looked like the sanded down grains of wood he might see on a puppet. The man swept the cobblestones with a sparsely bristled broom and didn’t even look up as Kizu spoke to him.

“Oh, lost? You just need to pass under the statue of Harold and through the Root Corridors. Then up the western tower on the left hand side. It’s a simple enough path. If you reach the drowned men, you’ve gone too far. There should be signs for other first years once you get close.”

He thanked the wooden old man and turned around to follow the new directions.

The statue of Harold, it turned out, was only the massive foot of a statue. A tunnel descended under it and he watched as a younger student, not wearing any uniform, hopped down it. Kizu followed.

As he jumped down into the hole, the toe of the statue shifted. His feet hit the ground a moment later, the impact rattling through his bones.

The Root Corridors fascinated Kizu. He spotted dozens of different rare varieties of tree roots that he’d only ever seen sketches of. He longed to harvest them for his now nonexistent stock of brewing ingredients. Mentally, he took inventory on everything he noticed. Spotted oak roots weaved the dirt overhead alongside banyans and tamarinds. He stopped and stared at a birch root. At first glance, it looked natural and fine, but the longer he stared, the more he noticed the off-color.

“Out of all the roots to stop and stare at, why choose this one?” a jovial voice asked.

“Something is wrong with it.” Kizu glanced at the portly man then focused back to the root. “I think maybe it’s been poisoned. It looks unhealthy.”

“Pretty interesting deduction.” As he approached, Kizu noticed he reeked of a thousand different spices, all smothered by the scent of garlic. “Why jump to poison though? Perhaps it’s only been overwatered.”

“That’s not impossible, but the soil around it is dry. It looks more like the nutrients have been messed up somehow from the soil. It wouldn’t have grown so large if the soil was normally like that, so something must have changed recently.”

“Hm. Very interesting. And you’re a first year student?”

“Sort of,” he said. He saw no reason to keep his background a secret. “I’m sixteen but I was abducted when I was a child. I was recently rescued. And now my parents signed me up here.”

“Abducted? By whom, if you don’t mind my prying?”

“The crone.”

“A witch raised you?” He sounded delighted with curiosity. “I thought all they wanted with boys was to eat them? But that explains the green hair and familiar. You become more interesting by the moment. I look forward to seeing you in class.”

Kizu watched as the chubby man turned and began to walk down the path towards the statue foot. Then he stopped.

“Oh, and boy, you’re not too far off. The plant is haunted. Don’t be taking any slivers of it without supervision. Mishandling it often results in radical liquification.” And with that, he rounded a corner and disappeared.

Haunted. In one of the crone’s old manuscripts, he’d read of how a haunting might corrupt living creatures. But it spoke mostly of minor possession that sickened and caused irrational emotions in humans. It said nothing of plants. He wondered if the haunting of plants amplified the magic effects normally drawn out from them. He wished he had a way to test the theory.

Finally, he peeled himself away from staring at the plant and continued down the tunnel. A stone stairway led upward. An old wooden sign hung above. WE TE R TO E.

He followed it up but became increasingly uncertain of his path. The puppet man had told him he’d see other first years.

When he reached the top of the tower, his fears were put to rest. First years sat on the ground and an old man stood in the center of them with a clipboard in hand.

“Wait,” he said as a dawning realization hit him. “You’re the same man who gave me directions. How did you get here before me?”

The wooden man swung his head towards him. His empty mouth hung open as he spoke. “My name is James. I apologize, you must be mistaking me for one of my brothers. Please give me your given and family name and I will locate the appropriate test material for you.”

“Kaga Kizu.”

“Thank you, I ask for your patience as we wait for all first years to arrive.”

He took a seat on the ground. The girl next to him said something, and at first he thought she just spoke too quietly. But when he prompted her to ask again, he realized she spoke a language completely foreign to him. He made an apologetic gesture but she frowned and looked away, as if hurt. Then her ears flipped in on themselves, blocking any more attempts of communication.

He counted two score first-years in total. But he also knew more must have arrived in the last few days. And he was easily the oldest in the room. One or two others trickled in after he sat down, but then several minutes passed. He was beginning to wonder if maybe the test was some sort of arbitrary task like figuring out what they wanted.

Then a boy rushed inside, panting and looking around the room with eyes too big for a human skull. He wore no shirt, showing off a bare chest with gray scales that glistened with sweat.

“Harvey Hugo,” he hissed between gasps for breath. As he spoke, Kizu noted that his teeth were filed down to points.

“Very good, now that all of you are in attendance, please remain silent as you fill out the test in front of you.” The wooden man raised an arm stiffly, as if on strings, and papers and quills appeared in front of them.

Kizu picked up the first stack and leafed through it. It asked questions about political alliances and positions of the known world’s nations. Suddenly, he wished he had bothered to listen to his parents while they gossiped. He strained his memory to recall anything of their dinner conversations, but his mind came out blank.

He skimmed through each question, but didn’t have the slightest clue for anything asked.

Next, he picked up one labeled, Alchemy. It was filled with numbers and equations. Everything in it went far beyond his very basic arithmetic. Feeling grim, he set that one to the side as well.

The third stack was Brewing. His heart leapt, but he tempered his excitement. He still only knew very basic brewing techniques and recipes. However, once he started the test, he stifled a laugh as he answered the questions. It listed some of the easiest potions to create and asked if you stirred them clockwise or counterclockwise. Then it asked about those same potions' ingredients. Once, he caught an awkwardly phrased trick question which listed crickets instead of grasshoppers, but that was the only thing in the whole book to give him pause. He crossed it out and wrote beside it, grasshoppers. None of the potions even used ingredients from magical plants or animals. Everything listed was mundane things you’d find in any forest in the northern hemisphere. It barely even touched on herbology.

He had to look around himself to make certain this wasn’t a joke. But other students sweated over the questions, staring at them intently.

“Please refrain from looking at other test takers' pages,” James said without looking at him.

Kizu picked up the next stack. History. The crone had taught him well over a thousand years of history. And if it left out political history, then he knew a fair bit. But as he looked through it his confidence died. The questions listed events, some of which he was familiar with, and then left a space blank for the date. Kizu felt affronted. The idea of boiling down these historical behemoth movements to a single day. It felt idiotic. Why did it matter if the invasion of the aquatic unification occurred twenty years ago or two hundred years ago? It irritated him that these people put the entire test’s emphasis on a date.

As he flipped to the final pages, the questions allowed him to fill in information. There, he found something he could answer. “Why were the witches of the Hon Basin exiled and trapped within their jungle?” An easy question that he filled out in depth. The entire page he filled with his vast knowledge of the subject.

He reviewed his answer with pride, before moving on to the last stack of papers. Astronomy. He felt confident in his education of star constellations and their meanings, right up until he started reading it. Nothing was listed by the names he knew. He struggled through the test as he tried to associate the names of constellations on the test with what the names the crone had taught him..

Underneath the Astronomy stack, a paper asked the two questions- “What instrument do you play?” Followed by- “What do you evaluate your skill to be? Novice, Average, Expert, Professional.” Kizu played nothing. So he just left the questions blank, like so many others.

Only one other student looked finished before him. A girl with porcupine-like quills obscuring her face. She raised her hand in a tiny wave when she noticed him looking.

Kizu dozed off while waiting for everyone else to finish testing. Nobody questioned him. And he regained bleary consciousness as the last few tests were finishing up. His aching body told him he’d slept in that awkward sitting position longer than he’d intended.

As the rest of them all finished the tests, James approached and picked up the stacks of paper, bringing them to a table at the back of the tower. Then he brought out dozens of vials and passed them around.

“Please place this to your thumb, it will with-tract blood which we can use to identify your skill levels of different magics.”

Kizu stared at it, horrified. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. But as he frantically looked around, all the other first years did as James requested without hesitation.

“You can’t be serious,” Kizu said.

“Are you facing a difficulty, Kaga Kizu?” James asked.

“Yes. Difficulty understanding why you so blatantly are collecting our blood in preservative vials!”

“I apologize if this practice displeases you. It is designed to help place you in classes of your appropriate skill level.”

“Do you have any idea what you could do with this blood? Create cursed objects, summon us to you in a mere moment, completely take control of our limbs. Not to mention frame any one of us for any number of magical actions. Our blood is our magic.”

“Once again, I apologize if this action distresses you. I assure you that the blood will be properly disposed of after your evaluation.”

“Stop being so dramatic,” one girl said. “You’re acting like you’ve never done a blood withdrawal before. It’s silly.”

Kizu’s eyes widened. “You mean this is common practice?”

“Mr. Kaga, if you do not comply, we will be forced to take action to suspend you.”

Everyone else in the room looked either irritated, amused, or confused.

Slowly, he brought the vial to his thumb. It pricked him and a trickle of red blood settled in the bottom of the glass. Perfectly preserved blood. He took a moment to mark it with his quill’s ink before he handed it over to James.

“If it’s being properly disposed of, then you won’t mind if I watch it be destroyed, correct?”

“Your concern will be noted and your request sent to the headmaster’s queries.” James took each vial and set them on the back table.

“Professor Arclight will now see you down at the northern courtyard. She will be appraising you for your final evaluation. Combat.”