126 - Punishment

The dean stared at the boy in front of him, the ringleader who had managed to escape unscathed thanks to sheer luck of his room being the last in the creature’s path of destruction. Though he’d wanted to ponder their punishment after a night’s rest, the guilt seemed to be eating at the boy, and he’d shown up at the dean’s office regardless of the late hour to confess his crime, not that they needed the confession anymore.
The others were in the infirmary, and the third-year boy stood in a defensive stance, squaring his shoulders and stating, “Yes. It was my idea.”
“I see.” The dean folded his hands. “Just to clarify, it was your idea to fake an exeat on the last day of school, under the guise of having fun with your friends, borrow a boat from Khor, and row yourselves to North Base to attempt a ritual on the island.” The dean’s voice was soft as he read off the transgressions, though the tension in the room notably increased. “Is that what you’re saying to me?”
The boy swallowed. “Yes.”
He hadn’t necessarily volunteered all of that. The dean had figured most of it out on his own.
“And this ritual was…demonic?”
The boy didn’t answer that, but the non-answer was answer enough. He was just too ashamed and scared to admit what he had done.
The dean regarded him carefully. “Do you understand how serious this is?”
The boy paled, but to his credit, he did not back down. “Yes, sir.”
Dean Octavius didn’t like to expel people, or even hand out demerits. Being an ascendant at the academy was already difficult enough, with all the tests the students had to undergo, and the board’s insistence on immediately removing anyone who didn’t qualify. There was no quota on adepts, but the school board insisted that, to maintain its reputation of excellence, they must keep to the rigorous trial process and expel those who did not pass, though they might have made perfectly average adepts with more time.
Fifteen demerits was an automatic expulsion. While an expulsion only meant that you could not graduate from this academy, most other reputable schools would not take someone who had been expelled. For students who did not have the right connections and who could not train any other way and get access to EPUQs, that was as good as a guaranteed core suppression. The dean would feel bad condemning almost anyone to that fate.
Some of what they had done, sneaking off campus onto the North Base, wasn’t anything that other students like Arielle and Selena hadn’t done. If it had ended there, he would have given the third-year four demerits, and the first-years one demerit each, and been done with it.
However, the foolish boy had actually tried to summon a demon, while the world was currently struggling with a series of demonic invasions. If he had succeeded, people would have gotten hurt. People would have died.
This was beyond an expulsion. This issue needed to be reported to the council.
Though the dean couldn’t help but blame himself a little here. After his talk with Vittoria, he’d initially wanted to institute a network of spells preventing access to the Island, but Pietro, whom he’d consulted on the matter, had been against it.
“More magic is not the answer,” he said. “Especially not powerful magic that close to the cave. This creature can feed off magic, and the more you cast, the better its understanding of our world becomes. This thing is an anomaly, but it is hungry, and it learns fast. To starve it, ensure that no live magic passes through there.”
So, the dean had had no choice but to reroute the leyline and the wastage pipes from North Base temporarily. He’d set up a perimeter far away from the island that would sense whenever someone was crossing it. The problem with that was that boats often crossed that perimeter, particularly those going and coming from one of the other Islands. Usually, when he sensed a breach, he would either send out one of his birds to survey the area or he would go himself.
But as it turned out, when this one happened, he’d been busy in Pietro’s lab working on the spell.
By the time he returned and had sent his bird to figure out what had happened, the boys were already gone.
It was the last day of school, and so he’d planned to bring it up during the final assembly the next morning. He certainly hadn’t thought they would have carried batteries there and cast the sort of powerful magic that would turn a creature like that, mostly starved at that point, into a menace drawn to campus.
On the bright side, he’d used this as an opportunity to kill the thing once and for all.
Pietro had been grumpy when he was summoned, but he had agreed to attempt the spell they had been working on, even if it wasn’t perfect. He’d also managed to secure the talisman from the head of their house, which would help them fight the abyss.
The only complication was that Pietro, afterward, wanted to interrogate Valeria about the making of the spell. Dean Octavius knew why. The Lis were possessive of their bloodline abyssal spells, and Pietro wanted to know how Valeria had been able to perform such a spell and create such a creature.
Dean Octavius had sought to table that conversation, reminding Pietro that Valeria wasn’t under any investigation and had done nothing legally wrong, though perhaps more than a bit careless on her part. She would be keeping her experiments to a dedicated lab from now on, but her research was still sensitive, so she might not want to discuss it at the moment.
Valeria had interrupted them and subsequently agreed to a conversation regardless, giving Pietro general answers about her research and how she had discovered the spell. She’d kept Arielle’s assistance a secret, although she did mention help from a collaborator who would rather remain private.
Pietro had accepted the explanation, although not happily.
Therefore, while things might not have been tied with a neat little bow, it was settled as cleanly as it could be.
Except now he had to decide everyone’s punishment.
“I’m curious,” he said to the boy. “Where did you even learn that ritual?”
“I…” he coughed. “I…”
“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “You’re already in enough trouble.”
The boy squeezed his eyes closed and said, “I can’t say. I don’t want to get anyone else in trouble.”
The dean shrugged. “Well, I suppose you can share that with truthseekers during your inquisition. Most importantly, you know that demonic rituals require sacrifice. What were you planning on using? One of your friends?”
“No!” he said with such vehemence that Dean Octavius couldn’t doubt the veracity of the word. “Not them, I swear. I was just going to sacrifice some of my lifespan.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to get super old anyway. Seems lame.”
The dean gave him a look that made the boy blush.
“I didn’t mean…” he stammered. “I mean, not you obviously…”
Octavius held up a hand to stop him in his tracks. Then he made him describe the exact ritual they had cast that had given the creature a path to follow them out to campus. It wasn’t one he’d heard of before, but it was one he was going to pay attention to now. Though it hadn’t summoned a demon, it had been enough to get the creature’s attention.
“I don’t have to tell you that that was incredibly foolish and dangerous of you,” he said. “This incident will be reported to the council, and you will all be called in for an official inquisition. That will also go on your record.”
The boy’s pallor worsened, and he swallowed.
“They will decide what happens to you. Regardless, your time at this institution has come to an end.”
“No,” the boy whispered, tears filling his eyes. “Please…”
The dean did feel some sympathy for him, but there was nothing he could do to help the boy. His actions had been too egregious. “The first years will also be investigated, and depending on the results of that, it will determine whether or not they continue. If they do continue, they will receive no less than five demerit points each. And if I discover later that you somehow coerced them into it, their demerits will be lifted, and there will be additional punishment for you.”
The boy’s lips trembled. He opened his mouth, his expression pleading, but he seemed to know that begging wouldn’t get him anywhere.
He bit his lip, choking back the plea and remained silent.
“We’re instituting a magical suspension as well,” Dean Octavius continued. “You will be unable to use your EPUQ over the break. Perhaps forever, depending on the council’s decision. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” he whispered, misery in every line of his face.
“Good.” Dean Octavius inclined his head towards the door. “Now go get some rest. It’s not going to be a fun holiday for you. I’m extremely disappointed in you, Robert. Words cannot describe the disrepute and calamity you have brought to his academy and to yourself. Yet, I still hope you have a chance to learn from this.”

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Robert drew in a shaky breath. “Yes, Dean Octavius.” The ringleader bowed and left, with his entire body sunken in and trembling.
As the boy left his office, the dean leaned back in his seat, tense and filled with mixed emotions. He went over it again, in his head, yet there was nothing he could have done differently during that conversation.
It was just a shame that it had to happen in the first place and they had to lose a talented student in such a way. The boy had not seemed like the bad sort, but he was clearly power-hungry enough to attempt such foolishness.
To think, they had almost made it a whole term without a major incident on campus.
He’d been looking forward to a relaxing vacation, with no students around to drive him mad. Just a few hours more and they would have made it. But that was the thing about running an academy filled with talented mages. No matter how clever you were or how careful, they found unique ways to defy security measures and get themselves into trouble.
The situation had worked out as well as it could in the end. It had even doubled as a tool he’d used to deal with the Selena problem.
When Pietro wanted him to help lure the creature, the Dean had recommended Selena instead, for her powerful magic, knowing that she needed this to restore her confidence, to enable her to move on from her obsession with Arielle.
What Selena wanted was very simple: to restore the status quo. She had not once ‘won’ against Arielle, and a part of her would never rest until she did.
It was why, even though he knew that Arielle had something to do with the creature’s defeat, and knew that she had somehow enabled Selena’s spell to pass through the abyssal cover and hit the creature even before Pietro’s spell successfully activated, he had allowed Selena to take credit she did not deserve. Pietro assumed that the talisman had weakened the creature’s cover to enable that to work, and Selena likely thought it was the intensity of her spell that did it. Letting her take the credit was a way of simultaneously soothing her and letting Arielle continue to hide.
So at least one good thing came out of this fiasco.
Dean Octavius planned to let her rest with her win for the night, but tomorrow, he would dole out her own punishment.
Punishing Selena was always complicated. He could give her a demerit, or some other kind of laborous, mind-numbing punishment, but that didn’t often work as well and she didn’t really care about that. Exposing her in front of the school would only rile her up again, especially since students didn’t often get punished for gossiping. Though this whole thing had been orchestrated by the rumors she’d spawned, there was not much else he could do to punish her, short of a long, drawn-out investigation that might ricochet and expose Arielle’s part in it too.
But there were ways to get to the girl. He knew the right buttons to push with her, after years of observation.
If it happened again, then they could escalate, as they could then establish a cruel pattern of behavior. But something told him that though she may not get her comeuppance by his hand, it might come regardless.
There was a knock on the door, and he opened it with a wave of his hand. Both Rava and Garrick walked in, and he managed to give them a comforting smile.
“Well, this has been an exciting conclusion to the semester, has it not?” he said.
“Yeah,” Rava said. “But there’s something else we have to report.”
“Arielle Blacksoil,” Garrick continued. “She somehow managed to break the lockdown spell while we were trying to resolve the situation. We don’t know how she did it. There was no spell break or patches noted anywhere in the logs or per our detectors.”
The dean sighed. Just when he had been winding down, believing the whole mess to be over.
“Perhaps she wasn’t in her room when lockdown happened,” he tried.
“There was no other place she could have been unless she was wandering around the hallways,” Rava said. “She wasn’t in any of the labs or classrooms. There was no movement on the compound to suggest that she’d snuck out before the incident.”
“I see.” Arielle Blacksoil, you are determined to make my life more complicated than it needs to be.
“I’ll speak to her,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for this. Most likely, she was in the hallways doing something or the other.”
Both Garrick and Rava looked doubtful, so he added, “Don’t worry, you two. Over the break, I will personally search for ways to improve our security so this doesn’t happen again.”

---

Arielle and Lyra returned to their rooms, guided there by Professor Flintwick, who looked more than a little irritated to be assigned the task.
Maus and the twins had caught up with them at some point to see if they were okay, but they didn’t have much time to chat before they were separated onto their floors.
When the girls got to their room and closed the door behind them, Lyra finally released a long, noisy breath.
“I know I probably shouldn’t ask,” she said slowly. “But it’s going to keep bothering me until I know.” She glanced back. “Where did you learn that spell you used to open the door?”
Arielle had already thought of a lie. “Elric.”
Lyra’s expression was vaguely disappointed. “You don’t have to tell me the truth, Arielle, but please don’t lie to me.”
Arielle stared at Lyra and immediately felt immense guilt. She didn’t want to lie to Lyra anymore. Lyra was her best friend and had already kept at least one of her secrets. There was no reason not to trust her with more.
“No one taught me the spell,” she admitted. “It’s just something I know how to do.”
“Let me guess, because of your special demon-acquired talents?” Lyra sounded amused when she said it, but Arielle didn’t get the joke.
“My…what?”
“Sorry.” Lyra looked chagrined. “Is that rude to say? It’s just that I don’t know what else to call it. Or would you rather I not mention it at all?”
Ari narrowed her eyes at Lyra and said, “Who told you that I had demon-acquired talents?”
“You did.”
“No, I did not.”
“Yes, you did.” She pointed at Arielle’s bed. “We had a conversation right there on the bed. You told me that…” Lyra paused, with a quizzical look, her mouth forming an ‘o’. The gape was breathless for several seconds, until she inhaled sharply. “Wait a second. What did you actually mean when you said that your problems were tangentially related to demons?”
“I meant that there are demons doing things in the magical world that affect me. For example, the ones that hurt Elric might come for me at some point.”
“Oh.” The word was long and dragged out, enough to fill several breaths. “Oh, I thought…” Lyra laughed, then put her hands on her forehead. “I really need to start asking clarifying questions when it comes to you.”
Arielle nodded. “You thought demons gave me my powers?”
“Yes,” she admitted, blushing. “But to be fair, I didn’t believe the rumors until you told me yourself. Or at least I thought that was what you were admitting to. I thought that was your big secret.”
“Rumors?” she blinked. “There are rumors about me having demon-acquired powers?”
“Yes,” Lyra said, appearing chagrined. “I don’t know how it started, but suddenly a bunch of people were talking about it and asking me about it too. I defended you, of course, and told them they had no idea what they were talking about.”
“Even though you also thought my powers were from demons?”
“Well, yeah.” She blushed. “I mean, I know you’re not a bad person, so I figured it was something that was done to you against your will, or maybe you were tricked. I wanted to figure out a way to help you, but I didn’t want other people to mock you or fear you when you’ve done nothing but be nice to everyone. Almost everyone.” She amended. “I also didn’t want your feelings to get hurt, so I never told you what they were saying.”
Arielle’s heart softened, a wide smile spreading across her lips.
So Lyra had defended her when she thought Arielle was working with demons. She should have reported her, because having a demon-possessed roommate was bad news for everyone.
But instead, she had lied to protect Arielle and even kept being her friend and making her tea.
“That’s why you wanted the tea leaves to be blessed.” Arielle suddenly realized. “And is that why everyone was looking at me strangely?”
“Yeah. That’s why they kept asking about the cave too. They thought that was where you met the demon.”
Arielle didn’t know what to say. It was a little offensive but also funny in that it was so far from the truth.
But mostly, she felt very warm and fuzzy inside because her friend had stood up for her rather than turning against her, even in a situation where she probably should have.
She moved toward Lyra and extended her hands. It felt stiff, because she was not used to this particular set of movements. She could count on one hand the number of times she had initiated a hug.
But she continued, feeling a little like a cricket as she wrapped her arms around Lyra and pulled her close.
Lyra chuckled and hugged her in return. Arielle patted her back, counting to five in her head before she allowed herself to let go.
“Well,” Lyra said, smiling. “That was the most fascinating hug I’ve ever received.”
“Thank you,” Ari responded. “For defending me.”
“You don’t have to thank me for that, Arielle. It’s what friends do. Plus it wasn’t just me. The twins were right there with me, and I’m pretty sure Maus almost fought Faulkey for you that one time.”
Arielle finally recalled the incident with Maus and Faulkey, putting the pieces together in her head. Of course. It was so obvious, if only she’d taken a second to think.
“Why do they all think I’m consorting with a demon?” she wondered aloud.
“It’s because you’re so very talented,” Lyra said. “It’s easy for people to think, yeah, she cannot be legitimately that skilled. There has to be a catch.” She shrugged. “Many people are jealous of you, and it’s easier to believe that you somehow cheated the system to get to where you are than it is to believe that you work hard.“
“Yeah.” Although hard work didn’t explain any of her talents, really. She’d meditated a lot, yes, but the fact that she could see the orbs made that easier.
“And if I’m being honest, there are a lot of things you can do that make no sense,” Lyra continued. “Like the rune you made for me. And the fact that you broke the door-locking spell and somehow activated it again.”
Arielle bit her lip, staring at Lyra. She quickly came to a decision.
“I’m not sure why I can do the things I can do either,” she admitted. “I don’t know why magic is easier for me, or why I can see the things I see. It’s been like that since I can remember.”
“Really?” Lyra asked. “You could use magic even when you were little?”
“No, not use it. But I could tell when it was being used.” She figured she could share at least that much. “I’ve always had an affinity for magic, since I was very young, even when I couldn’t use it.”
Lyra blinked, appearing stunned, but she accepted it with a nod.
“That makes sense,” she said. “Maybe you’re just blessed by a deity, or a primordial guardian.”
“Maybe.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lyra said. “All I know is that you’re great at magic, and you’re great as a person, and I’m so happy I met you, Ari. I’m happy you’re my best friend.”
Arielle beamed, and she made herself hug Lyra again for more than five seconds this time. She would miss her during the break, though they would meet to go dress shopping.
And before that, she would dedicate the next twelve days to finding a cure for Lyra’s curse.