Act 1 - Arc 1 - Chapter 5

Foil awoke soon after in an infirmary bed. Soft cotton sheets wrapped his wounded body and two fluffy pillows supported his head. For all the Academy’s flaws they did not skimp on medical resources. Foil twitched, but the effort of moving any more was beyond him. It seemed that little time had passed and his injuries were still enervating. He also realized that he was seeing out of only his right eye; the left was swollen shut. He let his sight drift around the room. Ostensibly a small shared space for four or so patients at a time, Foil was the only current inhabitant. No, wait - he could see in his periphery someone was sitting in a chair directly next to his bed.

In bright contrast to the sterile white of the infirmary room, Cynthia’s bright orange hair lay tussled around her face and neck, obscuring her visage from Foil’s limited sight. But he could tell she was sleeping by the slump of her shoulders and soft breathing. The room was well lit and framed by several large windows facing the inner pavilion, and the setting sun sent yellow sunbeams across the undecorated walls. An errant sunbeam played across her curls, creating the illusion of movement. It looked almost as if an entire world of light lay living amongst the curves and bundles, and Foil watched the dancing glow for some time. Eventually, his breathing or some other imperceptible presence betrayed his conscious state, and Cynthia awoke to soft awareness.

Cynthia’s eyes fluttered briefly before she lifted her head to look at Foil. Seeing him alive and awake, she smiled. She said nothing, but Foil wasn’t in a place to respond in any case. He noticed her worried eyes and prepared for the news he knew she had come to deliver.

**

Foil was released from the infirmary a few days later. No permanent damage was done, but much of his body remained tender and frail. Cynthia had remained by his side for most of his stay, but she would often leave for short periods to study or train. His body’s condition was not conducive to athletics, so he was lucky that the final exams had finished weeks ago. Cynthia was somewhat more neurotic; while Foil had napped under trees in these remaining days, she was preparing for Assignment and, hopefully, her upcoming Keyseeker term. Given that one of the major components of the Expeditionary Exam dealt with Essence and its usage, she was at a debilitating disadvantage. Foil had spent every free moment he had with her over the last year attempting to find any niche she could fill that wouldn’t involve being infantry fodder in the army.

Foil had advocated for an administrative position in the Academy. If she could prove her intelligence and diligence (two traits she had in surplus), she could remain in near-permanent safety on the southwestern edge of the continent while Foil found a way back home. Cynthia had vehemently rejected this notion and it had remained an instant source of arguments from then onward. She was adamant in her conviction to join Foil on a Keyseeker Expedition and end the war herself. Foil hadn’t relented explicitly but in his thoughts he had accepted that he would need to take her along.

This resolution had kept him awake for many nights for months but no more so than during his time in the infirmary. Cynthia has confirmed his worst fears and Lance’s calamitous prediction: the Academy administration had had enough of Foil’s disturbances and were planning to make an example of him by Exiling him at Assignment. There was no official decree, no plans written down, but it had become an open secret among the elders and thus public knowledge among the juniors. Foil had not made friends before his Manifestation and certainly hadn’t after, but it seemed now that nearly everyone went out of their way to avoid being even in his general proximity.

Foil spent much of the time following his discharge from the infirmary in a blur. Asked later, he would remember little of the week leading up to Assignment as he drifted from class to class without a single word to his peers, teachers, or Cynthia. He would sleep, or attempt to sleep, under the same Tree of the Soul he often retreated under, but his dreams would be plagued by nightmares of abandonment and mutilated loved ones. Other students observing him, benignly or with malicious intent, noticed his fingernails chewed down the nubs and the skin around his fingers torn to bleeding. The bags under his eyes looked purple and swollen and the redness of his scleras implied that he was often crying outside of sight.

To Foil, this was a defining crisis. His decision would set the course of the rest of his life and bring with it lethal enemies and vital friends. He may not have known it at the time, but he became an agent of fate during the night before Assignment. In the moment, however, he would have said that he was acting only to save Cynthia from the evils of the world.

**

Assignment was a special ceremony that took place on the first day of Ellsmonth, the first month of the summer season. Foil didn’t remember much of his time before being dumped onto a conference table with Cynthia, surrounded by shocked elders in strange robes, but he felt like time passed faster in Serulea than in his home world. Every year was uniform, ten months of four weeks of five days. It drove Foil crazy sometimes; every day of celebration fell on the same weekday at the same time-

Foil blinked. Where was he? What time was it? He cast furtive glances around himself. He was alone, in an unlit wooden hallway brightened only by a single barred window near the ceiling that allowed in the amplified moonlight of the Academy. That’s right. Foil remembered now. This was his plan, the scheme that had allowed him to sleep unbothered for the first time in weeks. He was standing outside the Archivist’s Sequestery, the hidden and isolated administrative quarters of the head administrator of the Academy. Hidden until now, that is. Foil barely remembered stalking Academy officials until they had let its location slip. He had intended to bribe or coerce the location from someone less scrupulous than the officials, but he had become too much of a pariah for his inquiries to remain unreported.

Foil had not had the opportunity to scout the location of his heist until tonight. The office was closely and heavily guarded every day and every night except for this specific night. Each year, the Academy hosted a campus-wide celebration the night before Assignment. Attendance was mandatory, and students risked exile for disobedience. Luckily, Foil risked nothing at this stage by not attending, and was able to take advantage of the system that the elders had believed to be bound by honor or fear. Foil would have preferred to live his life with both intact, but he was desperate. Regardless, as Foil could not be trusted to spend his night at the celebratory dinner, he could not trust that there were not still dedicated guards preventing him from his task.

Where he stood, though, was quiet. He could hear the raucous sounds of merriment through the window, and he crept across the ancient planks to reach the view. He walked slowly, with intent, careful to never lift his feet more than a few inches from the floor at a time. He tested every piece of flooring for creaking and groaning. It made for slow progress, agonizingly slow at times, but ensured that Foil would not reveal himself to any keen ears. He reached the window without incident and gazed upwards into the central plaza. Many theorized that the Academy’s most valuable files and records would be kept in the Spire, or hidden magically among many of the strange and defunct buildings on the campus. The reality was far more mundane and, as a result, effective.

The Archivist’s Sequestery was a single hallway lined with black metal doors accessible only through a locked, unmarked door…in the administrative building that ringed the southern side of the central plaza. Whether its location in the basement of the most obvious department was an open secret to the elites Foil had been ostracized from he did not know. What Foil did know was that the Archivist’s assistant, a mousy boy named Edward who had been chosen for the Assignment years ago, kept his keys in the bottom right drawer of his oaken desk. A drawer whose key was left in its lock each night because not a single person in Edward’s life had done him wrong or deceived him. Foil would have been bitter if not for the benefits Edward’s naivety supplied.

It was unnervingly simple for Foil to sneak into the administrative building’s offices, claim Edward’s keys, and unlock the door to the basement. Was there even a grand conspiracy to hide the Sequestery? Perhaps the basement with its cool and dry interior was simply the best place to store fragile documents and the Archivist’s reclusiveness was nothing more than a personal quirk. If that was the case, would it not-

Foil shook his head a second time. His mind tended to wander when he was stressed, and on a night like tonight that meant he ventured down useless tangents far too often. He remained at the window for a moment, watching the dress shoes and high heels of fellow students and faculty traipse. As was normal for the nighttime, several massive pillars were ablaze to keep the night’s darkness at bay. Several reflective panels made of a strange twisting of metal and glass turned the flames back on themselves and through this the elders of the Academy created a nearly overwhelming overlap of spotlights and braziers. Nighttime at the Academy was oftentimes brighter than day but few complained about the effort the Academy took to protect itself. Between two of the pillars and weaving between the feet of passerby sauntered a small cat, a calico breed with orange and black splotches.

Foil turned away from the window and towards his objective. Though the doors in the basement were unmarked, he could differentiate their importance by their wear. Several doors were attached to the wall with hinges so colored with rust Foil doubted that they had been opened in his lifetime. Other doors had broken knobs or by contrast were kept visibly free from grime. Foil’s target was none of these extremes, and he paced farther into the underground hallway with soft steps and an intense gaze. Near the very end of the hallway was a door so like the dozen or so he had already passed that Foil nearly ignored it entirely. That alone was suspicious and despite his thoughts drifting when he paid attention to it, he turned his sight back to the door he had missed.

Indeed, the door was likely charmed. Something about its mundanity pushed Foil to move on. This clearly could not be the correct door; the correct door would be better secured, or clean, or protected. These intuitions were all true, to a degree, but on close inspection Foil could see in the filtered moonlight a complex mechanism inside the door’s lock unlike those he had seen before. There was almost certainly additional charms and Essence lingering to harm or trap burglars, but Foil had no experience in larceny regardless. He twirled the small keyring around his finger in satisfaction before flipping through the carefully ordered and labeled options. It was possible that Edward has mislabeled his keys on purpose, using a certain cypher that only he could interpret and would leave would-be thieves confused and impotent. Foil briefly considered this idea but discarded it; if Edward had the wherewithal to plan punishment for key thieves he wouldn’t have left them among his other valuables and effects.

Foil found the key he was looking for, a jagged silver key labeled “ARC OFF”. He inserted it into the strange mechanism in the handle, and turned. A moment of nothing, then a soft click. Foil released his breath; he hadn’t realized he was holding it. Perhaps his blase attitude concerning Edward was less genuine than he had believed. He placed a hand on the curved doorhandle and pushed inward. Without even the slightest sound, the door swung open on oiled hinges.

Foil had been expecting a room full of shelves. Or perhaps a room filled with cabinets and tables with sheafs of paper. Or some sort of apparatus to, as the name would suggest, archive things. Instead, the door opened into a claustrophobic space that contained nothing but a bizarre piece of furniture akin to a shrine. The walls were bare, a deep fuchsia made of velvet and the flooring abruptly transitioned from the dark wood of the hallway to a light stone tile. The room smelled strange; a combination of mint and ashes fought to dominate the space. The shrine, or at least what Foil interpreted as a shrine, took up about a fourth of the room. It was placed in the very center which allowed an observer to walk around it completely with just enough space to avoid touching either it or the surrounding wall. The shrine was a pyramidal series of steps made of a shiny, black stone that was glossier even than obsidian and covered with oblong wooden ornaments.

Foil was captivated, though more in incredulity than awe. This was what he had risked exile to find? He stepped inside the windowless room as the door deftly swung itself shut. As he neared the shrine, he realized that the small wooden ornaments that decorated the surfaces of the steps were actually tall painted pegs slotted into circular divots. The pegs varied in height, but were uniform in width and material. Each peg had a unique pattern of rings painted around their edges. Some of the pegs had multiple rings ranging along their length, and each ring seemed independently colored from its neighbors. Their arrangement and hierarchy itched in Foil's mind. He paused his patrol around the shrine. He quickly counted the pegs to estimate their total amount. The pegs numbered near 250, with more near along the bottom edges than at the top. Their meaning became clear. These pegs were indeed the Assignments for every graduating student in Foil’s cohort.

Though he suppressed the feeling of elation that arose, Foil was buoyed by his success. His tongue darted out to lick nervously at his dry lips. He began studying the pegs in earnest as he sought his own. Strangely, a peg’s position on the pyramid did not seem reflective of the related student’s position: the very top of the pyramid had six pegs placed in an uneven circle and the bottom ring had only near 80. The patterns, too, seemed arbitrary and without meaning. The top pegs all varied between one and four rings and contained no hints as to the meaning of the blues and reds and pinks and greens that decorated them. Slowly, Foil’s excitement gave way to apprehension and began to melt into panic. What would happen if he couldn’t find his peg? Would all of this be for nothing?

The pegs quickly began to blend together. Without some sort of guide, Foil was at a loss.

Even at my most desperate, he despaired, the risks I take lead to nothing.

He closed his eyes and attempted to steady his breathing. He considered switching pegs at random; that could disrupt the proceedings enough to delay Assignment and buy him time to think of another option. But he had no other options, no other schemes. He was here only out of abject desperation. Foil opened his eyes and tried to ignore the tightening of his chest and throat. He circled the shrine again, looking for anything unique. After his third and fourth circles he thought he had begun to see something of a pattern. The placement of the pegs did not matter in any absolute sense, but were instead grouped together with pegs of similar “quality”. Pegs with blue rings seemed to be near pegs with red rings, but pegs with both blue and red rings seemed to always surround a peg with green rings. Were these…teams? Was the Archivist sorting students by comparing them to their nearest peers?

If that was the case, then the student being Exiled should have no group. Foil rescanned the pyramid and on the second lowest step he finally spotted it: a lone peg at least twice the distance from any others were from each other. The peg had a singular painted ring that had appeared at first to be a dark blue but was at a closer glance black. The only peg with a black ring. Foil grasped the peg and popped it out of its divot. The stone was smooth and gave little resistance. Relief and apprehension battled within him. He now had to make a horribly immoral decision: who did he switch places with?

Whichever peg he switched places with would condemn the innocent victim to Exile. Foil would be, in effect, ruining any chance at a normal and prosperous life that the student would have otherwise had. Ideally, he could find the worst performer out of the cohort, who in all likelihood would have been Exiled if not for Foil’s bellicosity, and return them to their rightful place as the bottom performer. This was likely impossible. There were too many pegs in too arbitrary an order with too esoteric a labeling system. A pang of guilt and shame struck; the same guilt and shame that had haunted Foil since he learned about his impending Exile.

He had no one to blame but himself. Bitterness welled within him despite it all. Had his cohort been less afraid, had he spent even more time training and studying, had the Ells-damned Rift not ruined any chance he had at living a happy life…

Foil realized he was squeezing the peg with enough force to whiten his knuckles. He relaxed his grip and returned his attention to the pyramid. Choosing someone to switch with involved not only inflicting pain on another person but also taking whatever place they were intended to fulfill. He had, by his last estimates, risen to be one of the top students with the potential for leading his own team. If he switched with someone low ranking, he could be sent to die in a violent melee unbecoming of his capabilities. He would never get home. With that, he had another thought: which one of these pegs was Cynthia?

Her peg was far less difficult to find. Foil had known what to look for after seeing his own, but was unprepared for the emotions that would choke his breath and blind his eyes upon finding it. Cynthia’s peg was in a middle tier, amongst many others, and was utterly bare. Not a single ring of any color marked its edge. It was clear now that the rings represented each student’s Aspect; if a peg had a second ring, they also had a Manifest. Few Seruleans had Manifests (which is why those they did were considered “blessed”), but everyone, if they had a soul, had an Aspect. Rift Orphans were multiple times more likely to develop a Manifest, but it wasn’t rare for one to remain Mundane. If Cynthia’s only flaw was that she had no Manifest, she could have risen to a high-ranking administrative position on her own merits and Foil could have sought the way home while she stayed out of danger.

But it was not to be. Somehow, Cynthia had no Aspect. Cynthia had no soul. The elders were aghast and the more radical of their number discussed execution as a form of euthanasia. If Foil had experienced ostracization for being a Conduit, Cynthia was barred in a far more systemic nature from ever succeeding. She had friends (any of them) unlike Foil, but had Foil avoided this current debacle he could have been rich and powerful. Cynthia was destined for nothing more than a servant or hanger-on for someone more important in the military. That was why he had to succeed here. Only Foil’s ascension to dazzling heights could lift Cynthia out of the role others had decided for her. If he became an expedition leader, he could submit a formal promotion request for whatever job he could find that would keep her safe and hale…and dignified.

The two pegs, one in each hand, seemed to gleam slightly in the dim moonlight seeping in under the door. The room was strangely visible despite the gloom. If Foil was not the captain of a Keyseeker squad, he would not have the authority to take Cynthia anywhere. This meant that, in effect, if he chose to switch his Assignment with another student, he would need to swap a second with Cynthia in order to keep her close. Despite her efforts, she was all but guaranteed to place in the lowest tier and be sent to die in war she had no stake in. Though Foil was conflicted about switching his own peg with someone undeserving of the punishment, he had far fewer qualms about protecting Cynthia. He would swap her position with even Lance if he could.

There was little time left. The festivities would soon be over and with their end the Archivist’s guards would return to protect his records and Foil would be trapped. He quickly scanned the pyramid for other anomalies, anything to glean meaning from the myriad of shapes and groupings. He believed that his hypothesis about the rings marking Aspects and Manifests was correct and sought an ideal, small group of pegs with Aspects he knew did not match any of his worst detractors. In his rush, he did not consider why his peg had only a single black ring when he had both an Aspect and a Manifest. He would not realize his mistake until the consequences of his choice had spiraled far beyond out of control.

The door handle jiggled behind him. A primal fear overtook Foil and he nearly dropped his pegs in shock. There shouldn’t be anyone down so soon, and their presence likely meant a clairvoyance surrounding Foil’s mission. Foil’s hands began to shake uncontrollably as his eyes darted between the door and the pyramidal shrine. He still didn’t know who to switch with. Did he have time?

The handle turned fully and the door opened.

Foil dashed around the shrine and dropped to a soft crouch behind its obsidian steps. He was still holding his pegs, but in a rare stroke of fortune the unfilled divots were both on his far side. He had no choice; he would just have to switch with pegs in a random group and hope for the best. It certainly couldn’t be any worse than the current situation. He also had no time to deliberate further and turned his full attention to remaining undetected. There was a brief pause as the door finished swinging open before a single pair of footsteps entered. Foil was tempted to probe outwards with his Essence but the risk of being discovered by someone aware was terrifying.

The footsteps paused again, and then methodically began tracing Foil’s path clockwise around the pyramid. Foil’s entire body was shaking now and he had to bite the inside of his cheeks to prevent his teeth from chattering. He slid adroitly away from the footsteps, keeping the full size of the pyramid between them. As he reached the right side of the pyramid and the footsteps to the left, he made his choice under severe duress: from a small group of six pegs on the corner, he grabbed the peg in the center with a single white ring and the one nearest to it with two dark purple rings. He placed his peg in the center and Cynthia’s in the remaining divot. The footsteps were now approaching the back of the pyramid where the missing pegs would be discovered, but Foil had no time to slot in his replacements.

Instead, he placed the pegs on the ground as close to the corner nearest the footsteps as he dared. He scrambled to the door and placed a hand on the handle. Then he waited. A brief moment. Another. The next sound was that of two wooden pegs being kicked by his would-be captor. The footsteps stopped immediately, but their maker made no exclamation. Foil would not have heard one in any case, however, because as soon as the sound of the rolling wood filled the room, he wrenched open the door and sprinted out. He thanked Ells with every breath that that door’s hinges were silent and prayed on His every mercy that the soft click of its closure was not audible to the room’s inhabitant.

Down the hallway, out into the administrative office, a frantic detour to Edward’s desk to return his eyes, then through several dark twists and turns of the inner buildings of the Academy before bursting out into the northern plaza. It was some time before Foil even found the wherewithal to catch his breath. He crouched among the shadows of a small copse of fir trees near the entrance to the dormitories and heaved heavy breaths while he held himself. He nearly vomited with the intensity of the nausea that overcame him. Then, slowly, like the sun heating snow on a wintery day, Foil’s stress and panic grew into euphoria. He’d done it! He’d prevented his Exile!

Much had gone wrong. He was nearly caught and was not able even to replace the pegs he had taken. He could only hope that the intruder would believe the pegs to have fallen out of their divots naturally and place the wayward pegs in their new home. If he didn’t (and with this thought his euphoria was curbed dramatically), the Archivist might remember who had been originally placed in Exile and be aware that neither of the two misplaced pegs were correct. Worse, Foil hadn’t gotten to choose who he’d switched with. He hadn’t even seen the colors on the pegs, really, and only began to process their meaning while he waited. A white ring…Foil had not seen any other peg with that color. Were there any Aspects that had only one student associated with their power other than Foil?

Yes, there were. But it couldn’t be him, he had a Manifest. It couldn’t be him. But as he exhausted all other possibilities the color drained from his face. Eventually, as students began filtering towards the residential buildings from the central festival, Foil joined them and slipped into his dorm unnoticed. But he remained awake through the rising of the sun, glassy-eyed and hollow, grappling with the reality that he was an evil and horrible man.