“Eyes up,” Elbexas cautioned me.

  I blinked, pulled out of the mire of my thoughts by the words. The Magister hadn’t turned around, but somehow, he had apparently noted the distraction I had been lost in as we passed through the halls of the Entrarium.

  “There’s a few days until courses start,” he told me brusquely. “You can spend as much of that time as you want angsting. For now, eyes open, mind focused, got it?”

  I swallowed and gave him a brisk nod. Again, he didn’t turn around, but I somehow knew he saw it anyway. Watchful Magister, indeed.

  Moments later, the tight hallway around us suddenly opened up, revealing the grand entry hall from yesterday. Without pause, Elbexas started down the large staircase I had ascended with Charrin and the others yesterday, forcing me to keep up.

  I was so focused on staying by the Magister that I didn’t notice Fallon until I was halfway down the stairs.

  She was standing on the far end of the hallway, eye downcast, behind and to the left of the Lilting Magister, Bela. The head of the Crystalline Chorus.

  Well. There’s that question answered.

  We reached the bottom of the staircase, and Elbe led us around the large circle design that we had entered through the day before.

  “Bela!” he greeted the other Magister warmly, like he had run into an old friend at the mall. “How kind of you to wait for us!”

  “I heard you coming, and thought it easier to descend together,” she said simply, her voice as solemn as ever.

  “I prefer to take it as kindness, in any case,” he said, with what I recognized as purposefully infuriating good cheer. It was the same thing I had attempted with Almara, killing them with kindness. Elbexas was just much better at it. “And Miss Fallon! I see you’ve made your choice, too!”

  Fallon nodded, her eyes still downcast. “Ah, yes, Watchful Magister.”

  Elbexas paused, eyeing the girl with dissatisfaction. “Already with the formality?”

  “Pupil Fallon is behaving as I’d expect from any grade one student,” Bela said, somehow managing to be reproachful to Elbexas and encouraging to Fallon at the same time.

  “Oh yeah.” Elbexas gave me a look, his eyes dancing. “Now that you’re an official student, you’ll be titled as ‘Pupil Danielle’ in formal settings.”

  “Such as?” I asked. Unlike Fallon, I had no problem looking either of the Magisters in the eye, which Elbexas seemed pleased with.

  “Courses, trials, dispatches…” Elbexas paused to give Bela a look, then added, “and whenever the Chorus Magisters are around.”

  I felt my lips stretch a little, increasingly sure I had made the right choice.

  “If you’re done, Watchful Magister?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, refusing Bela the same formality he had just told me to observe. “Come Dani, into the circle.”

  The circle Elbexas led me into was farther back, putting the larger and more ornate circle I had come through yesterday between us and the grand staircase. Not only was it significantly smaller, it only had four flat crystal circles at equidistant points around it, as opposed to the larger circle’s six.

  “The big one leads out of the Grand Dungeon,” Elbexas explained helpfully. “This one will take us deeper, out of the Entrarium.”

  Right. Because Primevus existed inside of a giant dungeon. Which seemed… I don’t know, unsafe?

  Bela led Fallon into the circle with us, which was a tight fit, and then the four corners started to glow, seemingly without prompting. The light flared, and I felt the uncomfortable tumbling feeling of a fall–and then we were somewhere else.

  I had to take a second to rub my eyes and blink a few times before I could look around.

  To all appearances, we were in a field very similar to the one I had passed through up above. The plush grass was tamed and trimmed to ankle length, though, and the six large roads were replaced with dozens of smaller, winding cobblestone paths. But the warm breeze was the same, as was the bright blue sky overhead.

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  “How…?” I heard Fallon breathe, a barely audible sigh of a question.

  “This is the Domus Campus,” Bela explained. “The primary layer you’ll spend your time in during grade one and two. Course halls and dormitories are both housed here. The sky, breeze, and plants are all artificial products of the Grand Dungeon, but we find that they help to ensure the emotional stability of the student body.”

  “By which she means that in the early years, a bunch of students went crazy living underground full-time, and the old Magisters had to make some changes.”

  I snorted a laugh at Elbexas’s addendum, but neither Bela nor Fallon acknowledged him.

  “The Campus is split into four fields, one for each of the colleges,” Bela continued, as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “Each handles coursework and dorm life in their own way, with only sporadic crossover.”

  “There are also common areas,” Elbexas added, “for those students who actually want to socialize outside of their college.”

  Bela’s look showed what she thought of that idea, but I could’ve sworn, while she was distracted, that I caught the most fleeting glimpse of a smile on Fallon’s respectfully downturned face.

  “It’s time we went our separate ways,” Bela said. “We’ll need to get you settled in the Chorus dormitories before afternoon meal.”

  Elbexas rolled his eyes, but gestured me in one direction, opposite of where the other two were going.

  I swallowed, my throat tight, and waffled for a moment, before blurting, “Good luck Fallon!”

  Bela and Fallon both froze, seeming equally surprised, though likely for different reasons. Finally, for the first time that morning, Fallon looked up, and her bright blue eyes met mine for a lingering moment. She flashed me a smile I felt from my head down to the soles of my feet, but it was gone in an instant, and then she was looking at the ground again. “Best of luck in your studies, Pupil Danielle.”

  Yeah. Okay. She was filling a role, I got that now. She was behaving the way Chorus students were apparently supposed to.

  But… I don't know. It was good to see that the real Fal, the one I had spent three days with, wasn’t just a product of my imagination. She was still in there, even if there was more to her than I knew.

  “Pupil Danielle, Watchful Magister.” Bela nodded a pair of farewells to us, then led Fallon away. I thought she seemed a little rushed–didn’t want me corrupting her human, did she?

  Elbexas gave me a thoughtful look, but didn’t otherwise comment. “Well then,” he said, “let’s go.”

  #

  As we walked through the Domus Campus, I had to admit that I was stunned by just how… college-y it all felt. I mean, it was nothing like Coastside, or most of the other state schools I had idealistically gone to tour. There were no roads, or giant stuffed parking lots, or ugly glass and metal class halls.

  It felt like one of those old schools, an Ivy League or Oxford or something, one of those colleges that dated back to colonial times, all grass and stone and open and natural, the kind of colleges you saw in movies.

  Elbexas occasionally pointed out landmarks as we passed them. The drill field, where both the Vigilant House and the Iron Curriculum did athletic training. The Tacticos, an open-air, columned hall where tactics and strategy were taught. One path led down to Glitterdust Lake, one of the more frequented common areas on the Campus, while another curled into the Silent Grove, a dense stand of trees that was supposed to be one of the quiet and private parts of the grounds.

  In the distance, over the sparse treetops, I could make out two much more clearly magical buildings. Elbexas explained the first, a crooked, spiraling tower that looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa as designed by someone on hallucinogens, was the Libratorium, the center of the Arcane Conspectus campus, while the second, visible as a wide, fanning arch of crystals, was Quartz Cry Temple, the primary chapel of the Crystalline Chorus.

  “And finally, we have your new home.”

  I wasn’t sure if the Vigilant House field was the most out of the way of the four colleges, or if Elbexas had taken me the scenic route, but it took us over twenty minutes before he led us through a wrought iron gate and into the House campus.

  It… wasn’t what I expected. Dense trees and stone walls penned in a bustling little area of buildings. Two large paths, marked with black gravel, formed the primary avenues, splitting the neighborhood into four blocks, each comprising a wide assortment of structures. The two blocks closest to us looked residential, wood and stone constructions that looked like multi-family boarding houses or duplexes by way of the Shire, but down the road, I could make out larger and more ornate buildings.

  “Dorms up front, class halls in the back,” Elbexas explained. “The dorm houses sleep between six and twenty–unfortunately, as a grade one, you get to stay in one of the more packed ones. But that’s fine. You’ll make friends.” He continued walking as he spoke, navigating the blocks of houses. “Students are responsible for keeping their dorms clean and feeding themselves. Fresh supplies are brought up biweekly from Vestige for both purposes. Burn through your food too fast, and you’ll have some hungry days ahead of you.”

  Elbexas kept talking, but I found it harder and harder to pay attention to him. Our presence was starting to draw attention from the many students lounging around the little dorm neighborhood, and I was stunned by the sheer variety of them.

  So far I had mostly seen ellids similar to Elbexas, favoring pale hair and skin ranging from tawny bronze to golden brown, with only a few exceptions. Among the rest of the student body, though, that coloring seemed to be massively outnumbered by a bewildering variety of others.

  Some had pale olive skin, with bright blonde hair. Others favored an ivory white tone with deep blue hair, like a winter’s night. Some were dark brown, with fiery red hair, while a few shared Aoss’s slate gray coloration, often complemented by shocks of spiky green and purple hair. I even saw one boy who shared Eni’s dark skin and forest green color combination, sitting next to a girl whose skin was as sky blue as her hair.

  Plainly, there were as many ethnicities of ellid as there were of humans, and Primevus seemed to be a boiling pot of all of them.

  Elbexas stopped suddenly, waving at the house we had come to halt in front of.

  “Here we are,” he told me. “Welcome home.”