YOUR CENTRE IS GONE

Marvel was standing on a hill.

Lush, rolling green surrounded him, every inch touched by the bright morning sun. On every side were trees, resplendent in autumn reds and golds. A brook trickled nearby—he could hear it, though he couldn't see it.

A breeze fluttered through his hair—longer than he usually kept it—whipping it into his face. He gazed down the hillside at the army encampment below. Dozens of dark-coloured tents, pinned between poles flying great, white banners.

He couldn't make out the coat of arms on the tents as they rippled in the wind. He didn't care to try. He knew the army was his, felt the power radiating from the camp below. Its invisible rays brushed past and against him.

Nothing compared to his power—nothing else came close. But the army contained a great power all the same. Full of soldiers collected from every corner of Orr, pledged to follow him.

It was an army greater than the Northern King's.

And it belonged to him.

A woman's voice called his name. He couldn't see who it was, but he knew exactly who the voice belonged to. He turned in her direction.

The woman walking toward him was beautiful and cruel, vicious and powerful. She had the golden blood of the Dragon's children. Even then, she was not nearly as powerful as he was. She was royalty, the woman he had married. She was supposed to belong to him. But she hated him.

For good reason, he was sure. Though he couldn't remember why.

He had hoped she wouldn't try to find him. He had known she would, but still he had hoped. Once he had admired how she defied all of his expectations.

Now, she only defied him.

"Call them off!" she commanded him. "Call them off right now! Before you destroy everything!"

She advanced on him, green eyes flashing with anger. Irritating.

Here she was again, like a fly buzzing around his head. With all her moralising and criticising. It was always about the people who had needed to die for him to gain the strength he required. As if sacrifices weren't necessary for power. As if the weak shouldn't be ground to dust beneath his boot if they would not become strong.

Each time she spoke on the subject, he felt her weakness. The strong never complained about what needed to be done. And that was all she did.

She had to go. Just like all the others who had defied him, one after another. Aisling. Baylin. Dallis. Caspian. Hendrix. Ulysses. Echo. Every single person he had once called friend. He had been required to silence each one. It was a pity she had to be silenced too.

"You cannot do this!" the Princess screamed. "I will not let you!"

He didn't need to speak. His shadows came to him, a swelling, flowing mass of athar. They agreed with his intentions. They wanted her destroyed, just as he did. They wanted to make it as though she had never been born at all. They wanted to feast.

"Go ahead then," he told them. "Feast."

She did not scream as they rushed at her. Instead, she drew out her sword, summoning around it the Dragon's Flame that was her birthright. Her armour glinted gold in the sunlight, impenetrable to all magic.

Even the Draconian Helm couldn't stop the shadows, but she stood her ground. He once admired that bravery, that strength.

Not anymore.

The shadows closed around her like a fist, unharmed by her fiery blade. Without even a scream, she was gone. Unmade. And then the shadows began to feast on the earth she had stood, the grass on the hill. It swallowed up everything she had ever touched. He stopped them before they could eat the army below.

Soon enough, the entire world would belong to him. Then he and his shadows could feast as they liked.

...

Marvel lurched awake, his heart slamming madly against his ribs.

Fear climbed his spine even as the dream burned itself into his memory. Those shadows again. Eating everything in their path, unmaking that woman.

And him—he'd wanted her unmade, wanted her gone. He'd indulged those horrifying shadows. He'd been a monster.

"Marvel?" came a muffled, familiar voice. "Marvel! You're awake! Finally!"

The voice stopped his fear cold. He turned his head toward it, afraid to face another nightmare.

But no, it was her.

Aisling threw herself from the stool at the end of his bed to his side. Her freckled face was bright with hope. "Marvel? Can you hear me? Can you talk? Are you—how do you feel?"

He could only stare at her. She didn't feel real.

After the golems, and the Grandmaster warlock, after watching everyone die, and those awful shadows, he couldn't be home safe with Aisling.

It felt impossible. This had to be a dream still.

"Marvel?" Her hands flew up to cup his cheeks. They were so warm. "What's wrong? Can you hear me?"

His armour was gone, he noted, and he was dressed in one of his loosest, most comfortable shirts.

He let his eyes travel the room as it slowly resolved around him. The low wooden ceilings and rough floors covered by threadbare carpet. The blazing fire in the hearth he'd constructed himself from bricks he'd stolen from an abandoned hut. The rough wooden table and chair where he studied at night, the lantern he used for light, the heavy metal trunk containing all the things he owned.

All the books he'd collected in the eight years since he'd come to the Academy, piled in every corner.

He was home.

But… how?

Maybe all that had happened before was a dream, a nightmare he had finally woken from.

Aisling's voice snapped his attention back to her concerned frown. "Master Baylin, I think something's still wrong."

"If there is, why question me about it?" was the crotchety reply from a person he couldn't see. "You're the one from the Healing Section. Shouldn't you know more about it than I? Do a detection spell and leave me in peace."

Marvel recognized the eternally cross tones of his employer, but surprise stopped him short.

Baylin was taking precious time from her studies to see him. That was the strangest event so far.

"I did think of that," Aisling snapped. "I can't detect anything wrong with him."

Her tone was more than disrespectful, considering the etiquette typically used to address a Higher Mage. But for some reason, Baylin never had a problem with Aisling speaking to her like that.

She didn't care much about Mage Etiquette, insisting that everyone referred to her as Baylin rather than Master. She was the only Higher Mage Marvel had ever seen who didn't wear sleeveless robes to show off the bronze marks of her status.

But that didn't explain why she let Aisling argue with her.

"Then nothing's wrong with him," Baylin said.

"Or maybe my spell isn't powerful enough," suggested Aisling. "Perhaps a more powerful mage could find something I can't?"

"You ceaselessly test my patience, girl." Baylin shimmered into view. She was nearly translucent. He knew if he tried to put a hand through her, his hand would meet neither flesh nor cloth.

What he was looking at was merely a projection of the part of Baylin's consciousness she could spare from her studies. The actual mage was probably somewhere deep within her private library.

Master Baylin, stepped into his line of sight. Short as she was, she looked nothing like the incredibly powerful magus who could rip a mind apart without as much effort as it took to breathe. She seemed ageless, neither young nor old. Once, out of curiosity, Marvel had peeked into one of her earliest treatises on alchemy and glimpsed the date it was published. She must have been at least half a millennium old.

Most mages who had reached Master level were at least that old. She had been within her first century still when she ascended to Master. That made her one of the most powerful mages of her generation. He couldn't imagine why she hadn't even attempted becoming a Grandmaster.

Draped in her bronze-colored Master's robes, she swept over to him, mouth twisted in her permanent scowl. "Well?"

He could hear Aisling trying to summon as much patience as she could. "Could you try a detection spell?"

"I don't need a detection spell to tell that nothing's wrong with him. Well, boy? Do you feel something is wrong with you?" She looked straight into his face with her shrewd, beady eyes. "Talk, before your girl here wastes all of her kathar doing any more detection spells."

"I'm—fine," he choked out. And he was. He wasn't dead, for one thing. "How did I get here?"

"You don't remember?" Aisling wore a fresh look of worry. "You came in through the portal—"

He whipped his head toward her. "So, you received my fire call?"

Her nose crinkled in puzzlement. "What fire call?"

Baylin shook her silver head. "I may be wrong. Clearly the boy has a head injury of some sort."

"I healed that," Aisling said. She didn't sound very certain though.

"As much as an Apprentice healer can heal anyone," Baylin remarked.

Aisling rounded on her, mouth open to probably defend herself. Marvel stopped her, catching her wrist. The sleeve of her tunic lowered, revealing the tally of bright, white marks denoting her rank over her arm. There weren't many of them, given she stayed away from killing golems.

Every time he saw them, he felt the familiar burn of envy mixed with admiration.

It took him a second to notice that she was staring down at where he touched her and blushing.

Marvel winced. He'd nearly forgotten the utter humiliation of what happened between them the night he left with the group. He let go of her wrist as quickly as possible, ignoring the exasperated look Baylin shot them both.

"N-nothing's wrong with me," he said. Apparently, the fire call hadn't worked. So much for his being able to do magic. "I dreamt while I was asleep. Must have been that. Uh, so, how did I get to the portal?"

"Well, we don't know," Aisling said, recovering herself. "All I know is that I went to the portal room to give Orson a sleepbane potion, and he was messing around with the portals—"

"Why would Orson mess around with portals?" he wondered. "He hates wasting his time."

Orson Baldrik never opened portals unless he was bribed for it or ordered by a mage. Why would he randomly open a portal? At the exact moment Aisling arrived at the Portcullis, no less. It didn't quite fit.

"I don't know." Aisling seemed as confused as he was. "But he did, and suddenly, you fell through. You were unconscious and pale as death. Your centre is… it's..."

He could hear what she couldn't bear to say. On any other day, losing his centre would be devastating, even if it hadn't been that useful in the first place. With his centre gone, there was no chance of him ever becoming a mage, or any kind of alchemist for that matter.

But he'd already know his centre was gone. He hadn't been able to find it back at the cage. Instead he'd discovered something else. Something new, and potentially, better.

Eyes softening, Aisling placed a sympathetic hand in his arm. "We thought you were dead, Marvel."

So, that part he hadn't dreamed up. He swallowed. If that was true, then everything else…

"She brought you to me." Baylin sounded more annoyed with the recounting than worried or perplexed. "I found you were… surprisingly fine without your centre, but it seemed you had been suffering from a magical attack by a Higher Alchemist—a warlock, most likely."

Marvel recalled the agony as the shadows slammed into him. He gulped hard. "And then, what?"

Baylin shrugged. "Despite my desire to discover what miracle helped you survive an attack that powerful, I handed you over to your friend here to heal other bodily injuries you sustained."

Aisling narrowed her eyes at Baylin. "More like I had to pry her away from you. She wanted to study you."

"You don't think it's curious that he suffered an attack that destroyed his magical centre and only sustained a light concussion and a few bruised ribs?"

"I don't care." Aisling moved her body between him and Baylin. "Shouldn't you have been worried your apprentice got hurt?"

"He's not my apprentice," Baylin said testily at the same time as Marvel corrected, "I'm not her apprentice."

"Whatever," Aisling spat. "The point is that he was hurt and you should have been concerned—"

"Who would that have helped? Besides, I'm sure Marvel is more curious about what happened to him than how you nursed him tenderly through his fever for the past four days." The last part was said mockingly.

Privately Marvel was inclined to agree with her.

"Wait, the past four days?" He sat up. "I've been unconscious for four days?"

"You were delirious," Aisling said. "Kept muttering about shadows and being hungry and Stompers."

Shit. Satis, please, let this not mean what I think it does. "And it broke earlier today?"

"Yesterday," she said. "I was so relieved you were fine, Marv." Her voice cracked. When he glanced at her, he discovered her eyes were wet.

Was I that bad? A part of him rejoiced that she cared so much. He'd been certain she would never speak to him again the last time they had seen each other. That was part of why he'd gone on the assignment. He thought he had nothing left to lose after what she'd told him that night.

"You kept calling these names," she went on. "Flynn, Pidge, Adia. Something about someone named Quinn—"

"Someone named Quinn?" he repeated slowly, dread clawing at his gut. "You know Quinn, Aisling."

"Are you sure he doesn't have a head wound?" Baylin drawled.

Aisling's eyes searched his face warily. "I don't think I've met a friend of yours named Quinn."

"He's not my friend!" Marvel clenched his jaw at the memory of Quinn unravelling into threads. "He's the best Adept here at the Academy! The youngest one to have attained such a level in two hundred years?"

Apprehension clouded over Aisling's face. Slowly, she said, "There isn't anyone here by that description, Marvel."

"But—" Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. "But Adia? Flynn? Pidge? Our friends? You started Novice class with them, remember? They were the slowest to ascend? You brought them to my birthday celebration last year!"

"I—I don't—"

"Flynn brought you flowers when you made Apprentice, and you make sustenance potions anytime Adia needs to go on an assignment." He grabbed her arm desperately. "You got Grimm Boll to modify Pidge's armour so her wings would fit!"

It was obvious how hard she was fighting to be calm. "Marvel—"

"Don't say you don't remember them!" He raked both hands through his hair. "Don't! They're your friends. They're our friends and they're—"

Dead.

Because they had been torn apart by golems. He'd seen Flynn's fucking body. All three of them had been killed—he'd watched it before he died himself. And taken to that cave. That warlock woman had set them on fire and—

And then the shadows had eaten the mountain, the fire. The bodies.

Motherfucking shit.

He turned to Baylin, realisation sinking like led in his stomach. "You don't remember them either, do you? You don't remember tutoring Quinn Killian yourself?"

Baylin tilted her head curiously. "But you seem to think I should. Interesting."

Interesting. That was all she had to say. Marvel buried his head in his hands. This couldn't be happening. It was already his fault all of the others had died. But for them to be forgotten? This was worse than death. This was like they had never even existed at all.

Just like what he had wanted to do to that Princess in his dream.

The shadows must have unmade his friends somehow. Quinn, too. Could it be all Marvel's fault?

No. He shook his head. I didn't ask for that. I just wanted to kill those golems. I didn't know this would happen.

Aisling's gentle hand laid on his shoulder. Carefully, she said, "Marvel, you've been through a lot in the past three days—"

"You don't remember anyone else?" He looked at her over his fingertips. "Trainee Johnston? Apprentice Calamity? Novice Wizen? Apprentice Young?"

"—your magical centre is gone," she said carefully. "It's possible all this could be one of the effects of that happening—"

Marvel tuned her out. She would be no help in this. Baylin was already looking at him as if he was a new experiment. It was up to him to fix this somehow. He owed it to the lost. Someone had to be able to fix this. Maybe if he sought out the Conclave of Grandmasters—

"What?" Aisling's shout tugged him back. He hadn't realised he'd spoken aloud. "You can't just ask for an audience with the Conclave over this! Are you insane?"

"That's not a wise course of action, boy," Baylin said. "Surely I've taught you better than that."

Marvel thought about his options. Baylin and Aisling would talk him out of it in time, if he let them. Barring that, they could restrain him. What he needed was the element of surprise.

"You're right," he said, forcing his body to appear relaxed. "You have taught me better."

Aisling relaxed too, her shoulders sagging a little. "Alright. Maybe we can do a deeper diagnostic spel—"

Marvel shot out of the bed and sprinted for the door. Aisling squawked as he rushed past her. He barely caught the handle before a massive wall of kathar—pure and blue—slammed into him. Pain burst through him on the impact and he was thrown backwards onto the floor. Spots danced before his eyes.

"Baylin!" Aisling snapped.

"Oh, hush, child," Baylin said. "Put him to sleep before he hurts himself."

No! Marvel began to pick himself from the floor. I have to get to a Grandmaster. I have to do something. I have to—

Aisling chanted something soft and melodic and his limbs grew heavier with each word that rolled off of her tongue.

No, he thought uselessly as his limbs flopped against the hard, wooden floor. No.

The last thing he heard before he passed out was, "Is this enough to warrant your fucking attention now, Baylin?"