The Schism (The Broken Prism Book 4) (12 page)

“I know, and it’s fine.” She smiled at him. “I’ll be busy too this year, but we’ll make time for each other when we can and manage it.”

Hayden nodded gratefully, relieved that she understood. He kept thinking that school should get easier every year and less time consuming, but the opposite kept proving true.

Well, at least I don’t have to prepare for arena challenges this year—or worse, the Inter-School Championship.

His goal was to make it through the entire first term without encountering one monster or engaging in any epic battles to the death. He reflected that it was a bit sad that this goal seemed like a stretch for him.

Conner must have read the look on his face because he said, “Hey, at least you’re popular this year.”

Bonk chose that particular moment to choke on a fragment of turnip he hadn’t chewed properly, and after pounding the dragonling on the back, the offending morsel flew into Hayden’s half-empty glass of milk, splashing his brand new shirt as it sank to the bottom.

“Yeah,” he rolled his eyes, “it’s pretty glamorous being me.”

7

The Schism

Hayden stayed up half the night doing homework, and after a nightmarish three page essay comparing the likelihood of splintering for laurel and elm wands, he only had the energy to study half of his prism alignments before collapsing into bed and falling asleep.

As a result, he spent the following morning reviewing his prism notes over breakfast, because he had to report to Asher’s office for research in the evening and had no idea how long he would insist on keeping him there before letting him finish his homework.

Trying to eat cereal with sliced strawberries was difficult with the eyepiece of his circlet pulled over his right eye, face tilted towards the window to catch the light. He kept missing his mouth with the spoon, and Bonk swooped in and stole slices of strawberry from the bowl every time he thought he could get away with it.

“You’ve been looking for that same spell for the last ten minutes,” Zane interrupted him at last, after Hayden finally succeeded in locating it and attempted to commit the array to memory. “How hard could it be to find? It’s your major, after all.”

Hayden frowned.

“It’s got thirteen different color bands, two of them inverted, and it looks a lot like the array for Haste if you’re not being careful. Add that to the fact that it’s bordered by about a thousand other arrays in the violet prism that keep catching my eye—some of them even sharing color bands—and it’s a lot to keep track of.”

“Yuck, sounds terrible,” Tamon summarized succinctly, scanning his own notes for one of his classes. Hayden felt better knowing that he wasn’t the only one who was overwhelmed at the very beginning of the year.

“It’s actually really interesting, and normally I wouldn’t have much trouble if we were only doing one or two big alignments every few days, but seventeen at a time is a bit much.”

Felix and Bonk began fighting over the last piece of toast on the table, drawing all attention to themselves. Bonk flapped his wings impressively, but Felix made a weird hissing noise and his fur stood up on end, and Bonk scampered backwards to hide behind Hayden’s arm.

Hayden’s friends laughed when he said, “Are you kidding me, Bonk? You’re a dragon for crying out loud, and you’re going to let a fox intimidate you?”

“Go easy on him,” Zane grinned. “Felix can be very scary when he wants to be.”

“Bonk has been battling monsters and fighting in wars for over half a century,” he said without taking his eyes off his familiar. Bonk gave him a sour look, turned around, and stuck his bottom up at Hayden.

“You get weirder by the day,” he sighed, standing up. “I’m going to Abnormal Magic. I know you don’t like the basement much, so you can go play at Torin’s until lunch if you want.”

Bonk took flight without hesitation, and Hayden walked to class alone, mentally preparing himself for another long day.

By the time lessons ended for the afternoon, Hayden was exhausted. It took every ounce of effort he possessed not to fall asleep in his soup bowl at dinner, though he did accidentally knock over his glass of tea, soaking the recently-acquired bandages that covered his right forearm.

“Whoa, who did you lose a fight against?” Zane greeted him when Hayden finally looked up from his food and blinked his eyes a few times, feeling slightly more alert after his meal.

“Asher,” he yawned, wincing because it hurt his jaw to open it that wide. Now that he gave it proper attention, most of his body ached in some way at the moment. “He isn’t taking it so easy on me anymore during our combat lessons.”

“That’s the understatement of the year,” Zane whistled. “It looks like he’s been bludgeoning you with heavy objects for the last hour.”

“That’s about what it feels like,” Hayden concurred. “It’ll be good in the long run, because I doubt there’s anyone better for me to train with and I certainly want to be as good as possible—but it would be nice if I could go a single day without getting beaten up by someone.”

“As long as he doesn’t accidentally kill you during practice,” Tess sighed, removing a bottle of murky brown liquid from her belt. “Here, drink this. It should take away some of the pain and give you a little more energy—but I warn you, it tastes terrible.”

Hayden gulped it down without caring that it tasted like shoe leather, and felt the effects immediately.

“Wow, thanks. That
is
better.” He began to have hope for making it through the next few hours without passing out.

When he’d eaten all he could stomach, he forced himself to get up and walk back down the corridor to Master Asher’s office, which had been rebuilt since he’d last seen it. There weren’t nearly as many stacks of paper lying around on the floor as in previous years, the benefit of having the place blown up recently.

Asher was no longer wearing his Mastery robes, standing over the large desk he’d made of four tables pushed together, a ruler in one hand and a pencil in the other as he drew something Hayden couldn’t see onto an unusually large sheet of paper. He looked up when Hayden entered the room and said, “Come on in, I was just finishing up.”

He tucked the pencil behind one ear and rubbed his eyes, cursing when he smeared streaks of black from the pencil onto his face. After looking around the office for a towel and failing to find one, he used the bottom of his shirt to wipe the smudges off.

Hayden moved around the side of the table and looked down at what his mentor had been working on while the latter cleaned up. The large drawing that Asher had been adding to was over a meter-long, almost entirely covered in the most intricate sketches of prisms and alignments he had ever seen. Just looking at all the colors, orientations, and formulas made his eyes water, and he blinked a few times to clear his head.

“Whoa, how long have you been working on
that
project?” he asked in amazement, wondering how long it had taken to create that monstrosity of a document.

“On and off over the last ten years, and that’s just one of four sheets like it,” Asher replied, though there was something wooden about his tone, as though he didn’t really want to discuss it.

He carefully rolled up his work, along with a few other smaller sheets of calculations, and tucked them neatly into a wooden tube that was made to hold documents, storing it securely on a nearby shelf. Hayden had never really seen him treat paperwork so carefully; usually it was heaped around the room in disarray, where it was inevitably lost forever.

“Wow, a ten year project…it must be something huge,” Hayden continued in admiration. “Just at a glance, it looked like you had about fifteen compounded spells in a row on there…even one that looked like it might take three prisms to pull off, which I didn’t even know was possible….”

“It isn’t, which is part of the problem.” There was still something off about Asher’s tone, but Hayden was too curious to really think about it just yet. “If you attempt to compound through three prisms at once your brain will explode—quite literally. I’ve been trying to find a way around that particular alignment for years for that very reason.”

Hayden made a face at the thought of his brain exploding inside his skull and said, “Ick, thanks for the heads up about triple-compounds. But even if you figure out how to finish off your spell properly, could it ever really be used in the mainstream, even amongst natural prism-users? If it involves that many different alignments, all executed in a certain small amount of time, no one is going to be able to remember all that…plus, even if they did, it wouldn’t be a fast cast at all. And would a single prism even be able to take all of those alignments without being entirely consumed?”

He just realized that while he was rattling off questions, Master Asher had become uncharacteristically motionless and silent. His mentor’s dark mood finally registered with him, and he opened his mouth in surprise and said, “Sorry to question your work, I—”

“Believe me, I’ve considered every one of your questions and a thousand more,” he answered in a measured tone, exhaling and relaxing slightly upon seeing Hayden’s expression. “Luckily, it was never my intention to make this a mainstream spell…and as I have yet to complete it, I have no idea if a single prism could withstand the force of it. I’m not even sure it will work, but it’s been sort of a pet project of mine for a decade now, so I work on it when I have the time.”

Wondering if he was pushing his luck, Hayden hesitantly asked, “What is it?”

Asher frowned and began rummaging through a stack of papers beside the table while he answered.

“It’s intended to reverse the effects of magical distortion on the mind.”

He didn’t explain any further; he didn’t need to. Hayden immediately knew why he started on that research a decade ago, and why he might be sensitive about not having completed it sooner.

He was trying to save my father before it was too late.

Feeling awkward, Hayden said, “That’s a heck of a goal. You’d probably win a hundred Medals of Heroism if you could find a way to reverse distortion…it would open up a lot more magic that’s currently forbidden because of the risks. Then again, a hundred Medals of Heroism would be really hard to wear all at once…you’d have to make an entire suit of them or something.”

Asher gave him a half-smile.

“I’d insist on a statue right in front of the Crystal Tower, so Calahan and all the other members of the Council could admire my visage from their headquarters every time they looked outside. But anyway, enough of that. First things first, you can plan on meeting with me like this twice a week. Take Gerin and Vadin off so you don’t go insane, and the other two evenings you’ll be on schism duty.”

“Schism duty?” Hayden looked up from his hastily scribbled notes in surprise. “I thought you weren’t planning on chucking me into that thing.”

“I’m not,” Asher answered smoothly. “But it shouldn’t come as a real shock that we have people on patrol at all times around the perimeter of it. We’ve laid down a huge number of protective spells around it to try and discourage anything from crossing through—and for the most part that works—but the schism keeps adapting over time, so invariably something will cross over and signal that we need to put down more magic around the opening. As we can hardly teach with monsters roaming around the grounds eating first-years, we station pairs of mastery-students on shifts at the entrance to subdue whatever may come through.”

Hayden supposed that made sense. He had been wondering what was being done to secure the grounds while classes went on, but hadn’t really imagined being a part of it until now. He reflected that that was pretty dumb of him, since he always got roped into things with a high chance of fatality.

“Okay, so we work in pairs and just…kill whatever comes through the schism opening?”

“Pretty much,” Asher agreed cheerfully. “If it looks like something the two of you don’t think you can handle, you’ll have the means to summon help, and whoever amongst us Masters is available will show up to assist.”

“Glad to know you all aren’t just leaving us to the tender mercies of the schism monsters,” Hayden said with perfect sincerity, since it was the kind of thing the Masters might casually do.

“Of course not. If you get eaten that’s a terrible return on all the time and materials we’ve invested into your education.” He waved a hand to say,
Perish the thought!

“Now, onto our current project,” Asher switched subjects abruptly, spreading out the papers he had been riffling through earlier. “I had a hard time deciding which of my numerous assignments to have you assist on, and the one I picked is fairly ambitious, but I think once you get up to speed you might be particularly useful during the trial phases.”

With a strange mixture of nerves and excitement Hayden asked, “What is it?”

“I’ve been attempting to turn carbon-containing rocks into diamond—coal and the like,” Asher explained. “High-level prism prices have been increasing steadily over the last decade as diamond and crystal become scarcer throughout the Nine Lands. Sure, we’ve still got plenty of it lying around in the mines of Sudir and Osglen, but one day even those will run dry. If we could convert any rock with a decent amount of carbon in it to diamond then we wouldn’t have to worry about supply problems.”

“Wow, that
does
sound ambitious,” Hayden said with raised eyebrows. “Turning one material into another isn’t impossible, but finding a way to make the diamond stable enough to actually be cut and used as a functioning prism might well be.”

“Hence our work here. I’ve had some preliminary success with these four alignments,” he pointed to them briefly, “but these two cause the new diamond to be extremely brittle. The other two alignments have worked better thus far, but casting them has the unfortunate side effect of consuming the entire prism I used to perform the magic—and since it’s pointless to waste an entire prism to create a prism, we’re back to square one.”

He pushed the papers towards Hayden’s end of the table.

“Have a seat and read through all my notes. When you get up to speed you can ask questions and we’ll figure out the next step from there.”

A little surprised at how abruptly he was being thrown into things, Hayden nodded and sat in the most comfortable chair he could find with the stack of papers in his lap and his own notepad beside him to write down ideas and questions as he read.