Chapter One: Scarify
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Chapter One: Scarify
It's only winter in the north.
One could say it to mean many things. That life is only hard in the north. That houses are still buried under ice and snow in the middle of spring. That growing used to hardship means being less used to comfort.
It's the third one, this time. The plush benches make even a rickety old train car an uninteresting ride. The meals are dainty and fine, meant for lips that never sullied themselves on dried meats. The air is perfumed with strange, exotic odors, supposedly to improve focus and heighten intellect.
The very air is plush. It feels like breathing thick fur. Not at all like the crisp, thin air of home.
Plush. Stifling. Hot. It's difficult to keep this half-crumpled letter free of sweat.
Welcome, Jackie Frost, to the Arkham Institute of Astral and Magical Discovery!
The letter is boisterous and arrogant. Do they hope to irritate people into joining?
As you well know, our world is one of unrivaled opportunity, where aspiring adventurers can find glory in the clash of kingdoms, where dragons gather hoards of unfathomable wealth, and where dungeon diver–
It crunches satisfyingly into a ball again. Meaningless though the gesture is.
Who cares about wizards, really? A third of everyone is born with some magical ability. Most never manage more than an inkling of what the Arkham Institute of Who Gives a Shit is promising.
Wizards make potions. Magic swords. They fight their enemies from as far back as possible, and act like they did as much as anyone else when they aren't even winded.
Someone born with the potential for magic doesn't have to be a wizard. They could be anything else. Destinies are suggestions, not absolutes.
The paper makes an unsatisfying crinkle as you smooth it out on the table again. Your name, age, species, personality, aptitudes, potentials...
Destinies are sometimes very insistent suggestions. With a hint of malice thrown in.
Wizards are assholes. Arrogant, pompous assholes. They would never lift a finger to put food on anyone's plate. They would never leave their plush towers without a slew of body guards to protect their sad, spongy frames.
They could never survive without anyone else, and here they were, in writing, making it sound like you couldn't survive without them.
Not that they'd say it out loud. All those deaths had just been accidents. Very tragic. How would–
A dainty knock on the train cabin's door puts that thought to rest. The voice behind it is just as dainty.
"Hello? Forgive me, I don't mean to intrude..."
The door starts to slide open. Slowly. A few inches give way, revealing a plain white robe with the intricate silver designs of an initiate diviner on the sternum and shoulders, partially hidden under a mess of mint green curls.
The elf on the other side must have felt like she really was intruding, because she peeks in shyly before committing any further.
Of course, she isn't intruding. These train cabins are meant to be shared. Her eyes go wide when your baritone voice says as much.
The letter crunches satisfyingly again as you crush it. For how little good that does.
Her eyes go wider at the sight of hands the size of dinner plates squashing paper into pulp.
They follow the damp little ball as it hits the wall, bounces out the window, and disappears to who knows where out in the hellish green sauna this place calls spring.
Her eyes go back to you, two perfectly round saucers on a rigid plane of a face, watching you lean back and settle in as best you're able on a bench that's starting to squelch under you.
Her mouth opens, to no avail. For a moment, you wonder if she got stuck that way, but then words come out after all.
"Never... I think I'll, uh... find another cabin. Sorry to disturb you."
The door slides shut just as slowly as it first opened. There's barely even a click as she closes it, and locks it with magic. Which she might have meant to be considerate.
Wizards. You're a wizard, Jackie Frost, you try to tell yourself.
It would take too much energy for it to not sound bitter. The noble daughter of a warrior line is a wizard, because the stars aligned to funnel a stream of hot piss from the very edge of the cosmos onto you.
Nobody back home would respect a noble who didn't earn her scars. But nobody would respect a noble who shirks her duty, either.
***
The train station bustles with countless tiny radiators who haven't figured out where they're going just yet.
People. They're actually all people, but a throng of hot bodies in hot weather may as well be a gathering of radiators. Standing head and shoulders higher than most makes them all seem tiny, as well.
You could stuff any one of them into your satchel, if you had a reason to. The satchel gifted to you by your father, packed with everything he'd thought a fresh wizard might need.
Namely, reagents the few traders wandering north ask for to bring back to the cities. Extracts of beasts common to the northern wastes, where nobody who isn't born into the cold would ever dare to set foot. Most were listed in a book once gifted to the clan by an indignant wizard, who hadn't felt the ingredients he'd sent a merchant to barter for were to his standards. A simple mirror rounds out the set, once blessed by your mother as part of a divination ritual, and decorated to remind you of home.
Plus a heaping sack of dried meats and fruits for the journey, and a full jug of berry liqueur.
Just a glance over all the luggage carts shows the truth. You're horribly under prepared for whatever it is that requires a personal library per person. Of math, apparently, and studies on the constellations, and on the particular aspects of the elements... the list goes on.
Perhaps the alcohol will be useful, after all.
Nevertheless, it's a sour mood that leaves a bitter taste. You're already loaded down with the guilt of everything your father's holdings could spare, only now to find it couldn't be enough.
But then... if you can succeed in spite of that, wouldn't it make for a good tale of its own? It might not be a useful tale to the people back home, but maybe beating the wizards at their own game would be good for a few laughs. At least until you finished wringing anything worthwhile out of it.
The flicker of hope doesn't last. Scars aren't just for show, and hunting stories aren't just for tell. The marks show you were there, and the tales are useful for the others to learn.
What could be learned here, at a wizard's academy, that might be useful to a tribe of so-called barbarians? Least of all to the brute meant to lead them?
Someone clears their throat, and somehow it can be heard clearly over the overstuffed train station. There's an ever so slight lull to the hubbub, but they pick back up again, and louder for it.
A tinny chime fills the air with an electric stillness, and it's a moment before you notice it wasn't something natural at play. The air is even stuffier, if that was possible, and it hesitates to leave your lips. One by one, mouths cease to flap soundlessly as each of the others picks up on it, too.
"Your attention, students. Your attention, please."
An aged, extremely bearded man was speaking from his own private podium on the far side of the station. His heather robe reaches from his shoulders to the floor in a pile, and there are so many glittering crystal baubles strung from its gold pauldrons and the sapphire blue sash from his shoulder to belt that, by all rights, the whole mess of it ought to have fallen off from its weight.
Of course. The stuffiest wizard of all still gets to talk.
He taps on the clear pane topping his podium, right in the center of its circular spell diagram. A ponking noise like the sound of a drum full of water gets the whole crowd's attention.
That seems to finally satisfy him. The old man clears his throat before continuing.
"Students. Today marks the first day of your illustrious future at the Arkham Institute of Astral and Magical Discovery. The best among you will become the greatest of wizards in the Dichin Kingdom. The rest will sadly have suffered completely avoidable deaths. Please try to learn from their examples."
The hushed pall over the gaggle of radiators feels less unnatural, now. The letter had said the same thing, but it's different when they send someone to come down and stop everything just to make sure you got it the first time.
It's enough to raise the spirit, if only a little. There may, actually, be something worthy of a warrior's time, here.
Whether that's true or not, the rest of the speech might as well be hot air in a cauldron already bubbling over with it. The elderly professor spends a full turn of an hourglass going on about the accomplishments of many famous past students, and how everyone here can aspire to such great heights, too.
By the time he's out of breath, everyone around you seems to have forgotten the dire warning he opened with. A certain mintette elf especially.
"I can hardly believe it. Here, at the Arkham Institute of Astral and Magical Discovery! Isn't it just exciting?"
She steps up into a cheerful twirl. It ends with her saucer eyes looking up at yours expectantly.
What can you say? You doubt it's that amazing. You're here, after all.
Her minute frown is on the polite side of perturbed. "Surely you must have a spectacular talent to be admitted here, of all places? They wouldn't let a... I mean..."
She looks you down and up. From your loose blond wave to your densely toned calves. The thick leather and furs in between make it too clear how hard she's searching for a kind way to put it.
The gathering had started to follow their pompous old grape a while ago, and it's no effort on your part to catch back up. The titter-patter of dainty little cloth shoes following after tell a different story.
Why is she spending her important time on you, anyway?
"The air smells of, ah... speech. Your perfume reminded me of the fields back home, is all. Forgive me."
That's not perfume. It's sweat.
You can see the revulsion creeping in at the edges of her polite smile.
A few strides later, she's just a distant memory.
***
The academy is an impressive sight, at least.
A black stone obelisk of a tower juts up from the dead center of a verdant glacial valley. Five smaller spires surround it at equidistant points, each braced by and connected to its three neighbors with suspended corridors. An open-top observatory of many rotating lenses forms the head, and the smooth, angular walls gradually break down into blocky classrooms that sprawl out further as they reach the base, eventually engulfing the smaller spires and seeping out into the surrounding land.
This is, primarily, a school for divination, and those lenses aren't meant to look skyward. Every one is aimed down at the classrooms during their slow and unceasing orbit around the tower's peak, sometimes overlapping another lens, sometimes changing course to point higher and outward for a half turn, before once again settling back down to gaze at the student body below.
Those classrooms, if seen from above, would form the wings, tail, and head of a bird if drawn from crude lines. The splayed tail would be dedicated to the study of evocation, and many brilliant blue spheres the size of comfortable homes shine like suns among its feathers, generating the elemental power that gives the whole academy heat, light, and running water.
The wings would be dedicated to transmutative and alchemical studies at their fringe, with the inner parts meant for lesser studies such as summoning, enchantment, and necromancy. The more developed arts would be in toward the body at the tower's base, for the practices of illusion, time magic, and the secret workings of the heavenly bodies. Individual classrooms float in the empty air between the ground floors and the spire peaks, some motionless and some orbiting, for seemingly no reason but to reduce how many walkways are needed to connect them.
The surrounding countryside is made up of farmland, a small town near the south foothills where the train lets off, and a mining village spread over the western mountain range. Much of the valley is undeveloped, with a broad, open field that may have once been a lake bed in its southeast end, and a long, dense forest following the eastern half of the valley up to a wide delta which by now is a fetid swampland.
Countless inns line the streets near the train station, their names an exercise in every imaginable pairing of animal and innuendo. The student body has lost all cohesion by now, filtering out into the town to spend their allowance on lodging, food, entertainment, and company.
All it takes is a glance to know they'll find plenty to spare. The town seems to have nothing but, in fact. Bars for the drunkards, song and dance for the merry, merchant stalls for the discerning, and all manner of less reputable things in between. Even in sight of the train station, there's an ongoing slave auction for chimeras, debtors who sold themselves to cover their families' dues, and prisoners bought from the gallows for any price better than death. Other stalls offered hard drugs chemical and magical alike, among which were proudly marketed love potions, which anywhere else would be deathly illegal.
"Isn't it incredible? No law save the crown's, all in the name of study."
Any more debauchery in this place, and you might have been too distracted to keep from coldcocking a suspiciously familiar mintette elf out of sheer surprise.
You're starting to wonder if this is why a full third of the student body dies before graduating.
She seems put off by the very idea. "O-oh. Well... surely not, when these grounds have the highest survival rates of any academy?"
For a place that claims to record the future of everyone in its walls, any accident seems like a lie by omission.
Her mouth is tightly pursed at the idea. She hums something that isn't a word in reply, and begins to walk down the street with her personal book cart in tow to meet the last waiting stage coach.
The station is mercifully silent with its second to last passenger gone. The train's wizard mechanic gives the grounds a look over, checks a bauble on his wrist, cocks an eyebrow at you, then shuts himself behind the exit hatch. A short wait later, and you can hear the arcane flame engines slowly building heat for the trip back.
Three months from now, another train will come through with another class of students. Then another, a few months later. And another.
A third of all people show some degree of magical aptitude. Only the best are invited to academies such as this one, with rare exceptions for those who show outstanding promise.
Or, it seems, exceptions for the daughter of a petty lord of an inhospitable fiefdom that was established as an experiment and virtually forgotten. Where a magical act, one which was later forbidden by royal decree, allowed people to adapt and eke a living from the frozen wastes, and to pass those changes down to their children.
If you'd been born to anyone else, you might be on sale with those unfortunates at the auction. But someone chose a different destiny for you.
A quick hoist brings the satchel of things comfortably back on your shoulders, then it's off to do what needs to be done. For your homeland, if nothing else.
~~~
View your character sheet here.
You are in the academy's entrance town. It's a little after morning now, and you're expected in the academy tomorrow morning to start your classes. Your classes were chosen for you already, based on what you would have picked if given the choice. They didn't bother asking you first.
You have 150gp in your bag, and everything described in the chapter is available to do. For the market, you can name virtually any non-unique magical or non-magical object and expect to find something like it at suspiciously affordable prices. If it would be worth more, it's probably fake but a passable imitation. Lodging for your first day is free but limited by availability, as long as you are a student of the academy.
If you want to buy a person, you'll find the characters who didn't win the creation vote hit their final bid at just under 150gp. You can choose to free them after buying them if you have morals, or you can buy them as a menial, companionship, test subject, or "comfort." Lewd scenes are fade-to-black unless it happens three times, at which point the thread will continue on NSFW.
Now, then...
[] What do?
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or well, who knows if she'll even get a chance to shed mortality and humanity as a side character.