Page 42 of The Teras Trials

Drike isn’t my problem. Not really. This place is. The state of the world is.

What is there to do? I have two nights at best, if we’re to believe the dean, before the next trial. Another day of rest. Another day to vomit out our fear and depression, and rise to the next awful thing they throw at us. God, they could spring the trial on us tonight, if they wanted. But I have to believe they won’t. I have to take these two nights and use them, if I’m going to survive. For Thaddeus. For my mother. For the emptiness that is my father.

There is no other safety than London. There is no other future for me than here.

The resolve is nice, and it grounds me. My mind goes to Thaddeus’ letter, sitting neatly beneath the boards of my room.

1. Python. Gun’s useless. Dead: 32

2. Use for trials 2, 4. Library in centre. Massive willow. Courtyard. Meléti helps for a price. Dead: 1

3. Plant from 2 is a toxin. Be careful to

I crave an essay from my brother. From any graduate. I want to know what they went through. But all I do now is recall the second and third lines.

I don’t know how many have died in our trial, but I can’t afford to care. Number two. Library. Meléti helps for a price. And only one died.

If God can’t reveal the truth of these trials, perhaps Thaddeus can. If my brother stumbled across something in the library, then I will take it.

Briefly, I consider going back to the rooms and rallying the motley lot of us together. I want their company, because we’re already bound by the horror of what happened this morning. But no one is giving as much as I am. They are all, already, so determined to be alone, and I’m simply too exhausted to worry about charisma. I could crawl back to them and sleep, or bicker through the night, watching the rain, wondering if all of us are going to die.

And I couldn’t stand that. I’d go insane. If I can return to them with even the tiniest bit of insight, it will be enough.

Massive willow. Courtyard. The University is labyrinthine and strange. I recall I haven’t seen a single student beyond the cohort desperate for a place. No first years, no seconds, no thirds. I decide I don’t want to encounter anyone anyway. Not Blood Hunters, certainly, but neither students. There seems something about their status, now: a dark and unsettling certainty of what they’ve done to secure their place.

I decide right then and there that if I am to die, it’ll be once the Jones family were secured in London. Preferably much later.

Without a map, I am left to either scale the buildings for the vantage of height, which seems a sure-fire way to snap my neck—to end up sprawled and gasping in the grass, limbs at odd angles, face caved in, no, don’t think about him—or to wonder through the halls. It doesn’t sound good, but I hate impotence more. So with a final drag on my cigarette, I stub it out beneath my feet, and turn to my right, facing further into the bowels of this place.

The University, as I’ve said before, is maze-like. But I am not sure this does it justice. It is disorienting, and if I believed more wholly in magic, I would assume it was a spell of haziness that falls over me whenever I walk its halls. I think neither God nor Satan has a hand in this, but some bastard novice architect; none of its design makes any sense.

I orient myself before I walk away. The main hall, where I first entered the University, I believe is the original mass of stone. Then there are the towers and rooms for accommodation, which are scattered and disconnected buildings to the west of the hall. The chapel sits down a covered outdoor corridor. If I were to go left from where I’m standing, I would return to the great hall, where we eat. To the right, then, will take me further into the University proper.

I walk from the chapel down a stone corridor that then splits to my left and right around an enclosed colonnaded garden. The rain patters down mercilessly on sad looking shrubs and something that might have once been a tree; it is a gloomy garden. No flowers. No colour. Exits trail off from this garden to the left, right, and straight ahead. I choose the one that is brightest—only the straight path has torches burning, and besides, this path will take me deeper. As I walk it, the chill sets in, and even out of the rain I shiver as wind barrels down this corridor. Then I am well and truly in the bowels of this place. Darkness swarms like a plague.

Still, there is no one, but that doesn’t change the shiver that splits down my back. The instincts in me that flare wild around teras suddenly spark to life. I flatten myself against the wall, my heart hammering for no reason.

You’re paranoid. Anxious. Cut the crap and focus, you fucking cur.

I can’t tell if that’s my own self hatred speaking, or Thaddeus’, but it does the job. I centre myself, breathe. Peeling myself from the freezing wall, I walk forward with my body tense and my hand securely on the gun. The next corner I turn startles me with sudden brightness. Countless candles dribble wax onto the stone floor. The walls are bright; torches burn in sconces, their flames fluttering with the wind but, spiritedly, never go out. The light is so overwhelming after long stretches of darkness, there might as well be a thousand lamps burning in front of me. I feel exposed, but I push forward anyway. It is so cold I expect the wall to open up into another garden, but instead there is only a large room to the left, and another stretch of corridor heading straight. I peek carefully around the bend, bracing myself for people, conjuring an explanation for my presence here if I am asked. But there’s no one.

There are, though, a dozen coloured lamps in glows of amber and blue and red, coalescing on the walls with bright hues, split and cut like the scales of a snake. Great tomes sit open and unattended.

Unexpectedly, I laugh.

This is a honey-pot for a scholar. A beautiful room, rain outside, leather-bound ancient books sitting unattended, waiting to be consumed. It almost feels like the devil knows me, and I am frozen with fear and excitement and a lack of understanding at what I’m seeing.

Until the pages move. I see them turn one by one to the next page, a seamless movement, without flesh to do it. Strings, something in my head tells me. This is an automaton display, meant to. . . to entice students. . .

I sound weak even to myself. And then, brief as anything, as bright and illuminated as lightning, I see—a woman. She sits around the tomes. She is studying. There is no grand or awful devil pulling strings, just a student; in uniform, scanning pages. She glances up at me, and I know her gaze is dazzling even when she is washed out and faded like a ghost.

I blink. She is gone.

My hands shake with the absolute fear of a man who has simply dealt with too much in one day. I feel my legs buckle. I want to scream, if just to ease the sheer insanity of this place, but I stop myself. Or rather, I don’t think my body has the energy for it. Slumped against the cold stone of the wall, I let it seep into my skin, wait until my cheeks are burning.

The library. Get to the library. Meléti will help for a price.

It is the only mantra that will get me to move. I forget what I saw, or try to, because I have no space in my head to rationalise one more impossible thing tonight. I pick myself up, I square my shoulders, I walk past the strange alcove without another glance to my left.

---