“Holy shit,” Rafe exhaled, his words sounding strangled. “The founders of Twyst Academy actually met up in the Mage Trials, including Bartholomew Twyst?”
The air snapped tight, and the painting on the wall vanished, replaced by a doorway that opened onto a sun-drenched town square. Before I could take another breath, we were yanked into the Mage Trials.
5
We collapsed in the middle of a town square. It wasn’t a square I recognized, which was both good and bad.
The process of the Mage Trials, for all its internal crazy, was pretty straightforward. You entered the Trials realm with your team of four or five student mages. Each team was made up of at least one girl, but given the imbalance of students at Twyst, the rest of the team was usually guys. Once you arrived in the Trials, you almost invariably landed in a town square, whether in the meanest village or a bustling city. This particular square was somewhere in between the two. It was a town, not a fortified city, and the square was quiet—the shops shuttered, no carts gathered together, no one at the well at the center of the cobblestoned space. We were alone, in other words, which made the second part of our entry into the Trials a little problematic. Typically, there was a herald that appeared almost immediately to tell us what our challenge was supposed to be for this level of the Trials, or where we had to go to receive the challenge. But this square appeared to be deserted. In fact…
I looked around, frowning. The entire town seemed to be deserted.
“This seems odd,” I said, and Luke rumbled his agreement beside me.
“Definitely screwed up, especially this late in the competition. We shouldn’t be searching for direction at this point. But there’s no smell,” he said. “We gotta be in the Mage Trials.”
I nodded. The realm of the Mage Trials had another few anomalies from the real world. There was no sense of taste in anything you consumed, and no sense of smell. Sight and hearing existed, but the sense of touch was a little trickier. You felt the cut or crunch of weapons if you were struck, but your wounds didn’t last beyond depleting your strength level while you were in the Trials. So as senses went, touch was kind of a wash.
The guys were silent for another few seconds, peering around. But nature wasn’t the only one who abhorred a vacuum, and I pressed on. “If there’s no herald, where do we go? What do we do?”
Rafe fielded this one. “We strike out. There are two reasons why there may not be anyone inhabiting this town. The first is that it’s merely a starting point and we have to choose where to go from here. That choice will eventually affect our outcome in ways that are difficult to predict—difficult, but not impossible.”
“Uh-huh,” I said drily. Rafe would never be happy in a situation he couldn’t fully predict. “And what’s the second option?”
Rafe grimaced. “The second option is that the herald, the townspeople, or anyone else who was supposed to be here to help us have been harmed in some way. They’ve been killed or removed and the game hasn’t adapted yet to replace them.”
We let those words settle over us for a moment, feeling the possibility of them.
Connor blew out a long breath. “Man,” he mattered. “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“But what does that mean?” I asked. “If these people, characters, whatever they are…if they were harmed or removed, who did that? Why?”
Marcus answered. “The most likely reason is to screw up our chances in the game. To keep us from facing the ultimate challenge of level four.”
I considered that. The Mage Trials was made up of four levels with the fourth, our current level, being the hardest. Each level offered challenges to ensure that the mages who passed through them were up to the task of becoming a super powerful wizard of awesome after leaving Twyst. If any of the academy students who passed through the Trials were unable to complete one of the levels, and they never reached level four, they would be sent off to other schools, not graduating from the academy. If they made it to level four and survived until the end of the Trials, they would graduate from Twyst Academy and enter wizardom at a fairly high level—but not the highest. That honor went to students who not only survived but defeated the final challenge. Those students would graduate with honors, get a power boost, and become wizards most high. Not surprisingly, my team, the Mage Runners, was in it to win it. But if we didn’t even get the chance…
“This can’t be right,” I muttered.
“Well, think about it,” Marcus returned, his light blue eyes squinting against the bright sunlight. “We just discovered that some of the founding fathers of Twyst Academy apparently showing up in the realm of the Mage Trials before the Trials or the academy supposedly existed. There’s all sorts of ‘this ain’t right’ happening with that.”
He had a point. “Well, maybe it was like a retrospective painting,” I offered. “Honoring the men who started the academy by showing the magical realm they created as well, even if they didn’t create it until, like, after.”
“Yeah—except we don’t have any clear sense about when the Mage Trials was put together, exactly,” Marcus said. “It’s been around as long as the academy has. It just never occurred to me that it might have existed first.”
No one had anything to say to that. With no herald showing up to help guide us, we headed out.
The moment we stepped out of the town square, something shifted forcefully in the air. Sound crashed down around us—distant, but definitely there—the cries of people and the roar of something unearthly. Given that we were in the Mage Trials, unearthly was sort of the name of the game, but the rest of it was a little unnerving.
“What the—” Luke began, but Connor had already launched forward.
“Go, go!”
We raced forward, moving instinctively into the diamond formation that made up our usual battle stance. Connor to the front, Rafe to the rear, and Luke and Marcus on either side of me. In this formation, we could capitalize on the strength of the guys while keeping me in the center to either augment their abilities or take their energy to feed my own.
I hadn’t tried that last bit so much, but I could feel the desire to do so beginning to surge up within me. I needed to take charge, to fight with every ounce of my energy and the energy of the guys as well. It confused and scared me more than a little bit, wanting to take control like this, but it wasn’t something I planned to put to the test today. I couldn’t afford to screw up, not with the Mage Trials’ outcome in the balance.
Despite the growing noise, the curious emptiness of the town continued as we raced by abandoned shops and empty carts. Had everyone decided to join the fight outside the city walls, or had there ever been any people here to begin with? The place felt so empty, up to and including the town gates, which, unlike in any other town we’d visited in the Trials, were completely devoid of guards standing at the ready. What was going on here?
“These are our teams—Twyst students,” Connor yelled as we cleared the gates to the town. And he was right. Locked in battle outside the gates were not only the academy teams, but an entire contingent of red-armored soldiers.
“The Red Team,” growled Luke as we pulled up short. “We’ve got the Spell Seers, Dream Spinners, and Scorpions in the center of this mess. They look like they’ve been ambushed and have been fighting for a while, and they’re outnumbered five to one. This isn’t going well.”