My Soul Is a Prison for Forbidden Spells

Chapter 3 - The Surface

Chapter 3 · 1,193 words

The passages angled upward.

He could feel the gradient in his calves, the subtle shift in air pressure that came with ascending. The stone walls gave way to worked surfaces. Plaster over brick, then bare brick, then something smoother. The lighting changed too, in stages. First a faint grey that might have been phosphorescence in the stone itself. Then a dim amber glow from fixtures set into the walls at intervals. Magical, he thought, though he could not have said how he knew the word applied to this.

The sounds grew clearer as he climbed. Voices, overlapping. Footsteps on hard surfaces. The hum of something large and mechanical, or magical, operating at a distance. The infrastructure of a building. A large one.

He slowed. The passage he was following had narrowed again, branching into a maintenance corridor that ran parallel to something bigger. Through a thin wall, he could hear the main corridor beyond. Students, he thought, though the word arrived without context. Young voices. The particular cadence of people moving between classes.

He found a gap in the wall. A maintenance access panel, loose on one side. He pressed his eye to it.

The corridor beyond was wide enough for four people to walk abreast. The ceiling was high, arched, supported by columns that were carved with patterns he could not read but that felt deliberate. Magical lighting hung in globes from the ceiling. Warm, steady, casting no shadows. The floor was polished stone, different from the rough blocks of the sealing zone.

People moved through it. Young men and women in what he recognized, with a certainty he could not explain, as uniforms. The uniforms varied. Different colors, different cuts, different insignia. But they were uniforms nonetheless. Institutional clothing. The clothing of students.

A young man in a dark coat walked past the maintenance panel, talking to a woman beside him. His voice carried through the thin wall.

"—third week already. If you haven't got your Origin Spell under control by the end of the month, they'll cut you. No appeals."

The woman's response was sharp. "I know. The resonance patterns keep collapsing at the third stage. I can't—"

"Then you'd better figure it out. My cousin was in the last cohort. They don't extend the elimination for anyone."

They passed out of earshot.

He pressed his eye back to the gap and watched. More students. A faculty member in formal robes directing two younger students toward a side corridor. A group of young women comparing notes on a scroll, their voices low and urgent. The institutional rhythm of a school in session. Purposeful, hierarchical, organized.

And something else. A hierarchy he could read in the way people moved. The students in dark coats walked differently from the ones in lighter colors. The ones in lighter colors walked differently from a small group in muted grey who kept to the edges of the corridor, their heads down, their steps quick. No one looked at the grey-clad students. No one moved out of their way. They were invisible.

He watched for a long time. The information came in fragments. Overheard conversations, observed interactions, the way people responded to institutional signals he could read even if he could not remember learning them.

The elimination period. Thirty days. First-year students had to demonstrate stable control of a single Origin Spell or face expulsion. The pressure was everywhere. He could feel it in the urgency of the conversations, the way students clustered in practice groups, the tension in the shoulders of the ones in lighter uniforms.

The social hierarchy was clear. Combat-track students at the top. Dark coats, confident strides, the deference of others. Support tracks in the middle. And at the bottom, the sealing track. Grey uniforms, invisible movement, the particular anonymity of people whose work no one wanted to think about.

The sealing track. The word carried associations he could not trace to any specific memory but that felt true. Underground work, containment maintenance, proximity to things that could kill you if you made a mistake. Low status. Low scrutiny. Access to the sealing zone, the place where he had woken.

He withdrew from the gap and leaned back against the maintenance corridor's wall.

He tested the first option. He followed the draft toward what he guessed was the building's exit. The passages narrowed, then opened into a wider corridor. Detection wards hummed in the walls, their pulse growing stronger with each step. An unregistered presence walking through those wards would trigger every alarm in the system. He stopped and retreated.

Hiding in the sealing zone was the second option. The wards down there were active too. He could feel them operating on frequencies his perception could register. Hiding meant eventual discovery.

The sealing track offered a third path. The grey uniforms, the invisible students, the elimination period's registration chaos. The sealing track gave him access to the underground zone. The lowest status meant the least scrutiny.

He straightened his back. He smoothed the dust from his clothes. Whatever he was wearing was plain, functional, close to the grey uniforms he had observed. In the chaos of an elimination period, close enough would have to be enough.

He moved toward the main corridor. He would walk in like someone who belonged, even if he had to fabricate the belonging from nothing.

The registration area was easy to find. He followed the flow of students, the institutional gravity that pulled first-years toward the administrative center. The hall was crowded. Tables stacked with forms, aether-scanning equipment queued along one wall, staff members calling out track assignments over the noise.

The elimination period's first week. Chaos. Exactly as he had calculated.

He found the line for new registrations. It was long and disorganized. Students shuffling forward, documents being checked, signatures being collected. The staff were overworked, their attention divided between a dozen tasks at once. When he reached the front of the line, the registrar barely looked at him.

"Name?"

He opened his mouth. Nothing came. He had no name. The void where his identity should have been offered nothing.

The registrar looked up, impatient. "Name. For the form."

He thought of the grey uniforms. The invisible students. The track that no one looked at closely.

"Cyran," he said. The word came from somewhere below thought. A sound that felt right, that fit the shape of the person he was now, even if it was the person he had been. "Cyran Ashmark."

The registrar wrote it down without looking up. "Track?"

"Sealing."

A flicker of attention. The registrar's eyes came up for a fraction of a second, assessing. Then they dropped back to the form. Sealing track. The bottom. No one asked questions about the bottom.

"Third door on the left. They'll get you oriented."

He took the form. He walked through the third door on the left.

No one stopped him. No one looked twice. The institution swallowed him as easily as the darkness in the sealing zone had, and for the same reason. He was exactly where no one expected to see anything worth looking at.

He was in.