The Awakening of Ren Crown (42 page)

I threw myself across the misty border and onto the grass of the ninth circle, landing poorly as I rolled and whacked a warning sign.

I scrambled behind the sign and waited for the troll to burst through the smoke.

Nothing emerged.

Clutching my chest, hoping that my racing heart wouldn't kill me first, I shakily edged around the sign. Obviously, I couldn't just enter the Midlands, throw up a field, and start painting. I laughed a little hysterically and walked warily along the barrier.

I stepped carefully through the barrier four hundred yards to the west of my previous position. An entirely new landscape of dense woodland immediately surrounded me.

Whether the troll was real outside these levels or an illusion that purely existed within didn't matter. Unlike the practice rooms which simulated reality, the Midlands made things real.

Four mages in battle cloaks appeared suddenly a few hundred yards away, their backs to me. They started creeping forward—away from me—spears in their hands. A monster with horns and a forked tail appeared suddenly behind the group, stalking steadily after them. I opened my mouth to yell out a warning, but the mages and monster blinked from existence like a channel that had been suddenly switched.

Monsters, trolls, and unidentifiable beasts appeared and disappeared at will. As I ran, ducked, and dodged different hairy pursuers, I passed a leopard-sized dragon, three large mechanical praying mantises, and a school of piranhas flying through the air before they too vanished.

The one simple line in the research book—that mages were hunted here—was unforgettable in the midst of the melee.

Finding a solid structure to inhabit that had four walls, locked windows, and impenetrable doors went on my checklist as a must.

As if on cue, a crumbling manor collapsed, then the bricks stacked themselves and smoothed into an obelisk.

Ok, finding a building that stayed
solid
was a must.

I looked up. Like the fish, other strange things flew through the skies. But it seemed far safer to be up in the canopy than down on the ground. I took a quick breath and climbed an oak with solid branches. A moment after gaining my position, there was a huge crack and the tree started to fall.

I hung on for dear life as the wind and leaves whipped across my cheeks, and the ground rushed up to meet my face.
Christian, I'm sorry
. I closed my eyes at the last second.

But the tree continued its plunge right into the ground without damage. I kept my grip tight as we whirled in the ensuing darkness. Moments later, the top of the tree lifted, pivoting us into place in an entirely different landscape.

Breathing hard, I clung to my large branch and let the tree take me on a roller coaster ride through the Midlands as it ported and pivoted through a hundred different spots.

The landscape shifts were unnerving at first, but they were so frequent that they quickly became normal. And they were...tiled. The tiles weren't the same size—one could be a few inches, another a hundred yards, but each tiled section of earth moved, collapsed, and reformed as a unit as if it was a piece on a game board.

The shifts themselves were not a problem once I became used to them. What I could never count on was what I would shift next to—like a yeti or chupacabra.

Two students died during my first two days of reconnaissance, their companions whisking them to medical. I stayed as far from anyone or anything as I could get, which usually meant perched up a tree. There was a vast ecosystem that lived in the canopies, though. Like firesnakes. And lizards and monkeys who moved like lightning and threw magic.

And some of the trees...had a sweet tooth for mages. Ensuing nightmares of barked tongues and grasping branches caused me to examine trees carefully. Christian's voice was always most upset and insane after a mage-eating tree episode. That feeling of being trapped was bad for both of us.

Guard Rock had emerged from under the bed and tucked himself into my bag after my first eventful day. As if he had read my need, he had been my constant companion in the Midlands ever since. He was quick with his pencil jab and proved to be a good listener, occasionally gesturing to me with a small rock hand.

I had never dodged and dived so much in my life—not even in Draeger's training or running drills with Christian. I had been accosted by no less than fifteen unknown-to-me species of animals and plants.

Since the territory was a hotbed of churning energy and magic activity, the levels sometimes attracted attention from those pursuing adventure. Students traveled in groups, though, since death here was off the Academy’s radar. Even some of the gutsier combat mages, who came here to train, did so in pairs, just in case.

Bar one.

My second afternoon was very pleasantly spent huddled in a non-mage-eating tree, watching Alexander Dare battle demented yetis and giant, animated rock beasts—quite unlike my loyal little Guard Rock. Dare wore a black, buckled cloak similar to ones I had seen other combat mages wear, but his...was magnificent. It moved like an extension of his magic, and it was like watching liquid metal.
He
moved like liquid metal. Mercury moving in glass.

It was hard not to watch him. More even than his astoundingly good looks, the way he held himself and moved drew my eye to him—and my pencil to paper.

Mages were either arrogant or desperate to come to the Midlands alone. After a few notable observations, I was pretty sure Dare's arrogance was earned from being a badass in everything he did. Sometimes a fellow mage in a black cloak would accompany him, but it was rare. The combat mages seemed to be tasked with patrolling the Midlands. That made things dicey for me sometimes in trying to stay unnoticed.

Because the landscape of the Midlands shifted so frequently and quickly—and I always shifted with the tree I was in—many times I just caught quick glimpses of Dare. But each time I saw him, I felt the pull. I wanted desperately to ask him about the night Christian died and about his missions with his uncle in the First Layer, but I couldn't afford the connection he would easily make.

I saw no one as frequently as I did Alexander Dare. It was almost like he was hunting me, instead of the thousands of predators surrounding us. By the third day, I had researched and erected a shield that would make me invisible to one specific person. An anti-ex enchantment, hilariously enough. I set it to respond to Dare, but he always seemed to find me anyway. The shield was taxing to maintain and made me collapse in exhaustion at the end of each reconnaissance mission, but visually, at least, it seemed to work.

But there was always something about the tense set of his shoulders that suggested he knew there was someone else nearby.

I was far from unhappy that he was frequently my unwitting companion, though. He had unknowingly saved me countless times due to his proximity and prowess.

Like the flotilla of rabid croc-geese that were waddling around on their webbed feet, sniffing out my tree with their snapping jaws, and propelling their knife-sharp feathers into the base. He moved faster than anyone I had ever seen—twirling, then knocking his staff into the ground. A quake shook the earth and the croc-geese were expelled in four directions, swept away with a multi-directional shift in the landscape. I cataloged his movements to memory so that I could draw and animate them later.

I also collected some
great
intel about how he looked without a cloak or shirt when he was hot and sweaty.
Great
intel.

Ensconced safely in the branches of another tree for the third day, I settled in for another bout of shirtless drooling while buildings formed and disappeared, and I drew and took notes. I wasn't furthering my needed goals fast enough, which made me tense and anxious, but reconnaissance had advantages.

The pleasant feeling of using my magic heavily—working my bones off with Draeger, Stevens, and Mbozi every day, with Will and Nephthys (and sometimes Mike) mentally at night, and being surrounded by chaos magic for much of the rest of the time—made my body happily lethargic. The tiring workouts produced a gratifying physical ache.

But there was an itchiness between my shoulder blades that wouldn't ease, no matter how I tried to shake it out.

I had started to register it as my magic further escaping the cuff, increasing my need to touch the tube of paint. Safely under the nearly completed vault wards, when Mbozi wasn't looking, I had started sneaking in moments of uncapping the tube and sniffing the comfort of the lavender paint.

The itching increased and I scratched the skin near my cuff.

I looked down to see Dare engaged in some very complicated martial arts forms. He obviously wasn't going to be finished anytime soon, so I was stuck. I always tried to keep quiet when he was around. If I alerted him to my presence audibly, I had a feeling that he could easily break through the shield enchantment hiding me from view. But the wind was currently howling through the trees, covering most sounds.

Normally, I would be nervous in the current scenery of dilapidation and devastation—I had firsthand knowledge that zombie-like beings hid out in these types of places in the Midlands—but I always felt safe when Dare was near.

Stupid, really, as he would likely just as soon destroy me due to my Raphael Verisetti connection. But my first encounter with Dare had been too intense to overcome. Seeing him utterly destroy everything that launched an attack here had only strengthened the feeling of protection I associated with him.

My shoulders itched.

I touched my latest ward device and the tube of paint. I could chance one test...I needed to see if it worked, and with the wind, Dare wouldn't be able to hear a thing, engaged as he was.

“
Do it, Ren,”
Christian said.

“
Let this go, Ren,”

I flipped out my notebook, balancing in the fork of the tree's branches, and started drawing a 3-D space, using what I had learned from all my previous attempts. I rotated the box in my mind, shading the areas underneath and behind the box's edges with my magic. I shaped it much like I would my cornerstone pyramid, only the focus was a flat holding space. I put forth the intention that it would be able to hold three small acorns.

Pressing the ward device box, a small field activated a foot around me in all directions. I breathed deeply, then carefully twisted the cap off the paint. Its seductive magic hit me instantly, settling the itch. Dare stopped his form dead and his staff came whipping out as he looked around. I froze and Guard Rock immediately pulled his pencil into attack-spear position. Dare crept carefully along the path, his eyes cataloging everything.

My focus was on Dare, but the peripheral feeling of a million eyes suddenly watching me took hold.

His gaze settled on my tree and his eyes started drifting upwards, his shoulders tightening more.

Panic hit me full force as his narrowing eyes focused on my invisible position. His hand started to lift upward and I could see violet magic gathering in his palm. My panic turned wild, and the path tile abruptly changed, throwing my tree into the middle of an urban wasteland, far away from Dare’s intense eyes.

Breathing harshly, I clung to my branch. Hopefully I was all the way on the other side of the tenth circle.

Guard Rock relaxed, sitting back down on the branch with his little rock legs hanging over the edge. Zombies liked the urban wastelands too, but Guard Rock had developed a good feel for them. If he was relaxed, I'd trust his senses.

I checked the encapsulation field, which was still up, then shakily tipped the tube. I would never try this again in Dare's vicinity.

The sudden feeling of a million eyes touched me again. There was an abrupt stillness to the already unnaturally still landscape.

I touched the edge of the tube's mouth, then touched the page and focused my mind, intent, and control on what I wanted as the paint absorbed. A box, with depth and dimension. A box that could hold the one pound weight that I visualized in my mind and felt in my palms.

The paint seeped and the edges of the box sharpened. Excitement lit, internally and seemingly from all around me as well. I stuck my now-clean finger on top of the box and willed it to rotate toward me as I pulled my finger down. The box followed my finger. Smiling, I nudged its top aside. The inside was just as I had imagined it. I plucked three acorns from my tree and placed the first on top of the paper. The acorn sank inside, as if a surface of dense liquid had suddenly given way.

A crow let loose a caw in the distance.

I smiled down to see the acorn resting inside the box. It lay flat in a seemingly two-dimensional space, that now contained a three dimensional object.

I dropped in the other two acorns as well. It required a few tries for everything to get sorted, but I could fold the paper and still retrieve the acorns intact and without negligible mass or weight loss. I'd have to test that scientifically later when I set up my lab.

I stepped carefully from the Midlands thirty minutes later and waited for a member of the Justice Squad to come.

No one came.

Smiling fiercely, I made my way to the library to meet Will and Nephthys. I hadn't fallen out of the tree, gotten eaten by a yeti, or received a citation, and I had used paint.

Suck it, Marsgrove.

~*~

I experimented with encapsulation field modifications and tested small drops of paint on projects, but by the time Monday arrived, I still hadn't figured out how to claim a building. My exhaustion was nearly overwhelming, and if I wasn't careful, a yeti was going to claim me as a meaty prize instead. I tightened up my mental pyramid construct to keep my magic alert, but it cost energy resources. Every time I used a drop of paint, I had to fight to retain magical control an hour later, making me work my pyramid cornerstones to their limits.

And campus events seemed to be growing crazier—as if part of the Midlands insanity was following me past the boundaries. A silly thought. They had specific enchantments in place to prevent such things. It had to be that I was just better able to identify the weird stuff popping up on campus everywhere.