Page 108 of Mud

Black dots spread in my vision until I couldn’t even see her anymore. Every ounce of energy in my body was already gone. I was empty.

My last thought before I felt rough wood against my cheek was that I was thankful, after all, because I’d prefer tonotfeel it when she sank her teeth in my neck.

Chapter 23

Rosabel La Rouge

2 years ago

Meet me when the world burns,said the text with a grinning devil emoji at the end, which could have been created with Taland’s face in mind. It was exactly him—minus the purple color and the horns.

I shook my head, looking up at the sky, at the sun that was getting ready to set. I had another few minutes before I had to go.

“I’m telling you, I’ll never recover from it,” Briar was saying, hands on her burning cheeks, eyes on the blanket we were all sitting on. It was a nice day out, though it was August, and the entire week had been hell but today the wind blew a little harder. Today the wind was cold, and we were thankful for it—especially after what had happened in class.

“Did you see his eyes? The way they went all white…” said Kayla, and she, too, was completely shaken. We all were, all seven of us sitting in the backyard of the school, drinking iced soda from the cafeteria, trying to come to terms with what we’d seen.

Which was basically one of our classmates, a Bluefire named Chris Carrol, beingpossessedby a different dimension. Technically speaking.

Our school had plenty of anchors for students to use, plenty of magical beasts to teach us with, as well as magical artifacts to allow us to better understand the lessons—like what we called aveler, which was basically a radar for magical energy. With it we learned the basics of searching for missing objects or people, or even of thoughts and memories in some instances, if the mage was strong enough to cast the spells properly. Bluefire magic worked the best with this as most had the gift of foresight, but every other school of magic could master it, too.

Through the veler, our professor said, we could find anything, even other worlds, other dimensions, other galaxies entirely, but that history had taught us that that was the surest way for a mage to go mad. To see beyond what we were made to see, things we could not understand, had dangerous, sometimes fatal consequences for the frail human mind, and that’s why now one needed a special permit to create a veler, and nobody other than the IDD and private investigation companies had it.

We were supposed to try to connect with it just to feel its magic, to think of something we lost or misplaced and never found again, to try to understand how the velersearchedfor it. Chris Carrol had been the fourth to try it, and whatever had been on his mind, whatever he’d lost or tried to search for, it had messed him up within seconds.

The veler was a circle slightly bigger than both my fists together, made of pure black obsidian that hardly evenreflected the light around itself.It looks like it can absorb your soul and imprison it forever,Kayla said when the professor revealed it to us in class. She was right—it did.

But never in a million years did any of us think it could do what it did to Chris. Within the second, he’d started shaking, couldn’t take his hands off the smooth surface of the veler, and his eyes had really turned in their sockets while foam came out his mouth. The image of him was imprinted in my mind so vividly still. The professor managed to pry him away and healers came to take him to the infirmary in no time, and all they told us was that he’d tried to access another dimension before they dismissed us for the rest of the day.

Another dimension.

Shivers washed down my back at the mere thought of it—whichother dimension? We had no clue if others existed, if there were other habitable planets out there, if aliens were real. The curiosity burned me as much as it scared me. Definitely something I’d think about for weeks to come.

“I heard his mother died when he was fourteen,” Briar said. “Maybe… maybe he…” She shook her head because she couldn’t finish her sentence.

Maybe he’d tried to find her wherever it was that we went after death.

Which left a bad taste in my mouth.

I’d lost both parents, but I hadn’t even thought to searchfor themwith the veler—I’d planned to search for a necklace I couldn’t find since I got here.

When people died, they died. There was no going back.

But I still understood the pain Chris must have gone through to make that call.

“Poor Chris,” said Kayla in a whisper, tears pooling in her eyes.

“But he will be okay, right?” Gina asked, so pale she resembled a ghost, and the white shirt of our uniforms wasn’t helping at all.

I probably looked even worse—and it wasn’t just because of Chris, either.

It was because tomorrow wasthatday of the month. The day in which I had to call Hill with my monthly report about Taland.

Goddess, I hated tomorrow with all my heart.

“Yes, he will. He’s in the infirmary, and they said he’d pull through in a matter of weeks,” Kayla said.

“Do you think they’ll let us visit?” I wondered, though we weren’t reallyfriendswith Chris, just like we weren’t close friends with the other students who weren’t in our chambers. Those determined your circle of friends in the Iridian School of Chromatic Magics.

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