This can’t be good.
As soon as Saybil read the note pinned to the bulletin board outside his classroom, he broke out in a cold sweat.
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Student Summons
Saybil
Mouse House, Year Three
Proceed to the headmaster’s office directly after class
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The spring of Saybil’s third year at the Academy had come, and he was on the cusp of advancing to his fourth. Getting slapped with a summons to the headmaster’s office during this delicate period could only mean bad news. A ring of students began to form around the note and its subject. They cast glances Saybil’s way from a safe distance, whispering among themselves.
─Wait, who’s Saybil again? He really a third-year?
─You know, that forgettable guy who sticks to the back row. He’s so deadpan, makes you wonder if the muscles in his face are just flat-out dead.
─What do you think he did to earn a summons from the headmaster?
─He’s got literally the worst grades in our year. Maybe they’re gonna kick him out?
They weren’t mincing words. But Saybil was getting minced. To be fair, he was pretty forgettable, and he did have the worst grades in his year. He couldn’t deny the part about his facial expressions, either. Even in that moment, he looked sleepy at best, with a permanent air of unaffected apathy.
─The headmaster’s, like, crazy scary, don’t you think? And the direct descendent of some super famous witch, I hear.
─Well, I heard the headmaster got all these beastfallen and locked them up in an underground prison, then exsanguinated them.
─Beastfallen?
─You know, those part-human, part-beast monsters. Haven’t you seen the ones we’ve got here?
The whispered gossip showed no signs of abating. Every word drove another anxious knife into Saybil’s heart.
The headmaster was a busy person. The students only rarely caught a glimpse of their principal, with whom almost none of them had ever spoken. Saybil, for one, had never even seen the elusive head of the Academy. Apparently it was customary for the headmaster to briefly greet new students at the yearly matriculation ceremony, but Saybil hadn’t enrolled until a little after the start of term. The receptionist had been sitting there in front of him when he came to, and the next day she had been the one to introduce him to his classmates as a “transfer student.”
Not sure if showing up a week after school starts really counts as transferring, but…
In any event, Saybil had never met the headmaster. And he never would have guessed the principal of his own school would be the subject of such exclusively negative gossip.
There’s got to be at least one positive rumor going around, right?
He pricked up his ears to catch his classmates’ conversations.
─D’you think the headmaster really poisoned the last king? You know, the one who backed the anti-witch faction?
─I mean, that’s what the professor said, right? That the headmaster took on a whole country alone─at sixteen, no less!
Nope. This is only making things worse.
Saybil prepared himself to accept his fate. As he pursed his lips and turned on his heel, the ring of students surrounding him and the bulletin board parted down the middle to give him a wide berth.
Gahhh… “This can’t be good.”
That said.
Saybil couldn’t very well ignore a direct summons, so he begrudgingly trudged down the hallway leading to the headmaster’s office.
The Royal Academy of Magic of the Kingdom of Wenias had only been established four years prior. As the course of study took five years to complete, no one had yet graduated. If the headmaster did expel Saybil, he’d earn the dubious honor of being the first student in the Academy’s short history to fail out of the school. And expulsion would, of course, mean he could forget about ever becoming a mage. Not only that, all of his knowledge of magic would be sealed away─he wouldn’t even retain the memory of getting kicked out! Of this, at least, he was certain, since the woman who’d helped him enroll that first day had told him as much.
The prospect terrified Saybil to his core. He could hardly remember anything from before he’d awoken there, so sealing away his memories of the Academy would leave him completely and utterly empty.
I can’t let myself get kicked out. Anything but that.
Saybil wished he could entreat the headmaster to let him stay with a teary performance, but alas, his frozen facial muscles would not play along. He tried to practice contorting his stubborn face into a sad frown in a mirror in the hallway, but he only wound up looking like a corpse just after rigor mortis had set in. Not that he really expected his muscles to suddenly spring into action after three years of total inertia.
It’s not like I don’t feel anything, though─
For whatever reason, Saybil had resisted all powerful emotions, instinctively suppressing any feelings that threatened to express themselves externally or have any physical effect.
The young mage-in-training stepped out of the dark corridor and found himself before a pair of stout, perfectly smooth ebony doors: the entrance to the headmaster’s office. Devoid of any adornment or even handles to open them from the outside, the doors could have easily been mistaken for a section of wall. Like silent sentinels, their cold, intimidating presence warned away any who approached. Saybil was overwhelmed by their imposing power─
“These blasted doors! Why have they no handle? I was told this was the way to the headmaster’s office, but was it a lie? Have I been duped yet again?”
─or at least he would have been, if not for the presence of an earlier arrival: a young girl─most likely around Saybil’s age, if not younger─was pacing furiously back and forth before the doors, muttering to herself and shaking her fist at them, which shattered the office’s gravitas like a bull in a potions shop.
“Oi! Come out here at once, Albus!” she raged, calling the headmaster by name. “Cower in there if it please thee, but thou shall not escape me today of all days!”
Pretty bold to call out the headmaster without so much as an honorific, even for an angsty teen.
It wasn’t his problem, but Saybil still felt a chill of fear race down his back all the same.
“I know very well thou art in there! Oiii!” the girl railed, then began mumbling to herself. “Can she perhaps not hear me? In which case I would be making a complete fool of myself, would I not? That won’t do… No, not at all… If it came to it, ’twould be much preferable to be ignored…”
“Excuse me.”
At Saybil’s voice, the girl froze. Looking terribly displeased, she turned around and blinked eyes so big they seemed in danger of popping out of her head entirely. Her long, honey-blonde locks─so long as to trail down to her heels─looked as if they might melt at first touch, and leave a sweet taste on the tongue. Vivid purple ribbons were woven through her braided hair, tied off with exquisite spheres of glass. Pale scarlet flowers bloomed softly within the translucent orbs, marred by neither scratch nor bubble. Even a master artisan would struggle to craft such perfect baubles. And even Saybil, with his amnesic, piecemeal understanding of the world, could guess that to enclose the flowers so delicately within would require skill of the highest order.