Preapproved Fate - Chapter 4 (Patreon)

I don’t remember teleporting.  Only the sensation of time passing, and of something I could not see.  My eyes worked, but they wouldn’t focus; there wasn’t black, there was something deeper and darker and much, much, much more scary.

In the background behind the curtain of reality, past the laws of our universe, outside of time and space and the other tiny trappings we pretended governed everything, there was something hungry and curious and other emotions that had no words that mattered.  And it didn’t bother to hide.  It waited only as a courtesy, or something similar to it.  The real was a snack to it, or a toy, or a houseplant, or a child, or some other unnamable thing.

I screamed for a very long time, but my voice gave out and my body crumbled and my mind went with it.

And then, one or two eons later, we arrived where we were going, and I forgot every part of that, except the howling poems that I had inscribed with blood on my body, written in letters that meant nothing, and already fading away with the other unreal memories.

“Oof.”  I said.

“Everyone experiences discomfort the first time they move between realms.”  The wizard informed me, not unkindly.  “Please check to make sure you have your things.”  I did, and it all seemed to be there.  Backpack, yes, suitcase, yes.  The wooden box Horn had given me still making the backpack bulge with a rectangular protrusion.

My clothes were still on, gloves still in place, piercings still… Okay, I took the moment to raise a hand and check my ears, just in case.  Something about the teleport had left me with chills, and double checking that my piercings were still in was a comforting reassurance.

“I’m good.”  I told the wizard.  He gave me an appraising look, before nodding.  “Very well.  As you are here on scholarship, your orientation group will be assembling in this pavilion over the next candlemark.  Please do not stray, and do not leave your belongings.  This is a temporary space, and anything here may be lost.”  The wizard gave me the closest thing to useful information I’d gotten so far.  “I must continue to retrieve new students.  Please save your questions for your guide.”

Yeah, fair enough.  I was going to thank the guy, maybe even ask if I should tip him or something before I both remembered that I had no actual cash on me, and that he’d teleported me out of a moment with my non-boyfriend.  So he got no thanks.

Weirdly, he just walked off instead of teleporting, rounding a corner of white bricks and vanishing out of sight, leaving me all alone as I guess the first arrival.  And then, freed from the need to pretend I knew how to do social interactions, and no longer shaking from the teleportation, I looked around.

The pavilion was all white brick, a stone that sparkled with a kind of glittering shimmer as I looked over it.  Unlike most brickwork I’m used to, every brick looks like a square, and not a rectangle.  Slightly offset in rows, but also patterned in a way that feels uncannily like all the little mistakes are artificial.  I’ve never seen architecture be in the uncanny valley before.

It’s when my eyes sweep up from the ground that it starts to get weird.  There’s a few planter boxes in a sort of ring around the middle of the pavilion, with trees growing out of them that are an almost identical shade of white to the brick.  Then I realize the planters aren’t full of dirt, they’re just more bricks.  And the bricks around the trees, in their neat little configuration that would be perfect for sitting and reading on during a nice summer day, are all just cubic extensions of the bricks of the ground.

The pavilion is surrounded by arches, also made of identical cubic white bricks, beyond which there is a somewhat shaded hallway.  I see a few doors, a few more arches that look less… glittery and artificial, I guess… and absolutely no people.

All told, the place looks like if you gave a construction crew a stack of just exactly the same block, and told them to make a college quad.  It’s even got the badly thought out lines of pathing that my alma matter did; where if there ever were a group of people hanging out on the edges of the planter boxes, using the flat surfaces for their obvious purpose of being sat on, then the collective extension of their limbs and backpacks cut roughly a third of the path off for everyone walking by.

I don’t really know how long I’m going to be here, but my legs feel like jelly, and distracting myself with thoughts of how familiar this looks isn’t going to work forever.  I claim one of the benches, pulling my suitcase close against my legs.

A deep breath does very little to stabilize my riot of emotions.  I’m here.  I’ve been teleported.  Somewhere, probably a thousand miles away, I’ve left my shitty life behind.  I’ve left Horn behind.  I’m free from everything, including the things I maybe wanted to be entangled with, but never said anything to.

The air tastes different.  People don’t get just how important the taste of the air is, sometimes.  It informs your brain at every second of the day what kind of place you’re in.  The air here tastes lightly of cinnamon, and heavily like sandy hot stone.  It is kind of aird, I realize now, and while the warmth of the sun feels nice, the lack of humidity is doing a good job of making me wonder if my guess of ‘the tropics’ was off by just a little bit.  It’s hard to tell what time of day it is, though, with the white stone glimmering the way it is.

I look up.  And my eyes widen.

First of all, there’s more of these strange off-white trees, with their stilled branches and dun leaves unmoving even in the light breeze.  They grow out of the sides of the brick walls that rise up around the pavilion, looking more like exploding roots that are holding the whole construction together with their sheer might.  Ten, maybe twenty of them that I can see, as the brickwork rises up thirty feet overhead, making me feel like I’m back in Seattle looking up at the spires rising around me and making me feel trapped down at street level.  A tiny ant against the construction of giants.

But however high the walls, however strange the magical trees growing at ninety degree angles out of solid stone, nothing prepared me for the sky.

The sky over head, seen unobstructed through the place where a building would have a roof but the pavilion simply has open air, is unfamiliar to me.  I’ve been to places before, especially Colorado, where the sky felt like it was too close.  Where it felt like I was being watched, crushed, every time I looked up.  Now, I look up, and I feel something in that same category.

The sky is a lovely clear purple, with wisps of red clouds moving across it.  But not the purple of sunset, oh no.  I can tell damn well that the sky is meant to be this color.  The clouds aren’t blocking anything, they’re just the thin streamers of vapor you see on a clear summer day.  And right now, what they’re failing to block is the view of two distant suns, beaming down warmth and light onto the world.  Two suns, that light up a magnificent band of orange and gold and brown, out beyond the color of the sky, like a painter just decided the view needed a little more.  Like Bob fucking Ross was looking at this alien sky and said “We’re just gonna add some happy little rings here, make it a little more like the view from the surface of Saturn.  Yeah, just like that.  That’s a nice look.”

Thanks Ross.  I love it.  I’m also back to screaming on the inside.  I might be making a noise on the outside too, I don’t know.  I’m busy staring at the alien sky.

Under the sky, under the twin suns and rings of ice and rock, under the purple atmosphere and red clouds and hell only knows what else, underneath all of that, I can see more terrestrial things too.

The peaks of buildings, tall spires and towers, what look like castle walls made of grey stone.  They must either be on a risen hill in the distance, to be visible from where I’m standing at the bottom of this sunken courtyard, or they’re so large they loom a thousand feet tall.  I’m an english major, which means I basically only passed my math requirements on a fluke of fate, so I can’t exactly do the trig in my head to tell you how tall those things are.

But I can tell you they’re so tall, I feel tiny all over again.

Where in the hell have I been brought to?

Oh god, I wasn’t on Earth anymore.  I wasn’t just somewhere unfamiliar, I was somewhere so far from home, I would literally never get back if I tried to make it on my own.  The feeling of isolation threatened to overwhelm me, for a moment.

Then I remembered that ‘back home’ was where I got a bill every month for student loans that I could barely afford to pay the interest on, and I started to intellectually rationalize being fine with being on… another planet?   Another world, at least, probably.  I hadn’t really asked a lot of questions about the teleporting; so far neither of the wizards I’d encountered had been amicable to a lot of chatting.

The pavilion is quiet for another five minutes or five hours or however long I just stare up at the sky.  I’m looking at an actual orbital ring, catching sunlight, from the surface.  This is the kind of thing that my limited physics knowledge informs me probably shouldn’t work.  But then, I know planets in my home system, a sentence I never thought I’d have to say for real, had rings.  What keeps them up there?

I pull out my phone, make the decision to put it into low power mode, and take a picture of the sky.

And then let my mind go wild again.  Holy fuck, what are the tides on this world like?  This place must be the least stable environment in existence.  Do they even have seasons here?  Earth’s axial tilt is kind of a big deal for that, right?

My train of half-remembered college classes snaps in half as there’s a rush of air and a popping sound like glass breaking and then melting, and a wizard appears in the middle of the brick ground of the pavilion with two other people in tow.  He speaks a few words to them, muffled by the scarf wrapped around his face, and then walks off the same way my own ride went.

The two new kids make eye contact with me, before they start talking to each other, pointing around at things at random.  Suddenly, being here first feels like I’m on top of the world.  Yes, kiddos, there are trees growing out of the walls. Get used to it, it’s wizard world.  I’m an old hand at this by now.

Also, Christ, they’re actually kids.  Like, fifteen, tops.  No wonder they don’t want to come talk to me, I’m ancient by their standards, probably.  They’re also wearing Nikes, so like… I guess this place recruits a lot from my world?  Wait, hang on.  They have sneakers, and also robes.  Are those actually just oversized bathrobes?  Fuck, Horn was right, that does look super silly.  I’m glad I listened to him.  Again.

There’s another noise that sounds like someone doing rude things to space, and another wizard brings in a new person.  Then another, at roughly the same time, before both wizards walk off.  A few minutes later, while the new ones are getting their bearings, my original ride reappears with a trio of dark skinned young girls in rainbow quilted shawls that I am instantly jealous of.

The other kids start mingling.  No one approaches me, though, sitting on the outside of the courtyard under my own personal tree.  I’m still the oldest one here.  Everyone else is just kids, teenagers.  But that’s fine, I’m kinda okay just being alone right now, and everyone else is way too high energy for me.  I’m still processing the purple sky, honestly.

A few more teleports later, and the courtyard is starting to fill up.  There’s only one guy who looks like he’s even close to his mid twenties.  He makes eye contact with me at one point after his arrival, and for a brief moment I’m worried he’s going to come talk to me, but then he’s back to looking around like he’s lost, and making friends with the teenagers.  The uncharitable part of my brain sees an eye roll as he looks away, but that might just be because I’m used to derision from strangers.  I choose to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I have no interest in looking lost.  I’m just gonna sit here, and wait for our guide to arrive, because I actually listened to my wizard.  Maybe the others didn’t get the message.  Or ignored it, because they’d just been teleported to wizard college.

Actually, I keep mentally calling this place wizard college, but… I’m still the oldest person here.  The kids they’re bringing in are all pretty young; half of them look like they haven’t finished high school.  It’s making me uncomfortable, in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

The feeling is still there when the first wizard-esque person actually walks in, instead of just teleporting.  A woman in a dark flowing robe that makes it look good on her curvy hourglass body.  That’s not a bathrobe, for sure, that’s a robe for someone who can throw fireballs.  It ripples with her legs as she walks, moving like she’s wading through water without slowing or getting in the way.  I add a thing to the list of clothing I am jealous of.  And bodies I am jealous of.  If she had hair, I’d be jealous of that too, but she’s got bald head ringed in small tattoos that make her look like she’s ready to attack and dethrone god if that’s an option around here.

She clears her throat, directly into the mind of everyone in the courtyard, and everyone who is apparently blind or something turns their attention toward her.

“Good greeting.”  She says, folding her hands in front of her body.  “I am here to give you a light tour of your initiation area of the Magistarium, and settle you into your rooms before your true education can begin.”  She looks over all of us, pausing briefly to raise an eyebrow at me, still sitting on my bench close by where she’s stopped.  “My name is Magdera of Alento.  You may refer to me as Magdera, or by my proper Magisterium title of Middle Witch.  I will open the ground for questions at the final point during our brief tour, but many of your inquiries will be met by your shapers over the next span of days.”  She drops her arms to her sides, and turns to begin walking toward the archways on what I’ve started thinking of as the ‘exit side’ of the pavilion.  “Follow me, bring your things.  This space is temporary, and we shall not dawdle.”

In my heart, I feel like I made a slight miscalculation pushing that two hundred pound weight limit.  Maybe rounding out the extra ounces with cans of Red Bull was a bad idea, and I should have just had a lighter load to lug around.

Too late now.  Too late for regrets of any kind.  I’m here, I’ve got a direct task to fill, and I’m going to be a fucking wizard.

I follow after the pack, beginning the process of eroding away my suitcase’s wheels on the brick ground.  And I do it while smiling the whole time.