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At first, I’m not sure what I’m seeing. It looks as if a girl is suspended in the air above, her long vibrant red hair hanging far below. The peaks of her high, pointed ears are just visible. The train of the emerald green and gold brocade velvet gown she wears tumbles a good fifteen feet below, the delicate silken fabric putting every dress in the room to shame.
I blink as my brain tries to process why a Fae girl would be preserved above this place like some sort of prize. A living art sculpture on full display.
“Who is she?” Evelyn asks. For once, she doesn’t know something.
The professor’s face turns grim, and he takes off his hat. “No, they wouldn’t teach this story in your history books, would they?” His dark eyes turn watery, and he makes the mark of Titania, a touch to his heart and then a touch between his eyes. “She was the Summer King’s only daughter and heir. But when she fell in love with a member of the Unseelie, the king killed his only child, Titania’s favorite, to prevent her wondrous magic from falling into the Unseelie’s hands.”
“Why is she displayed?” Mack asks quietly.
Crenshaw twists his hands together. “A reminder of the new edict: No Seelie or Unseelie may fall in love or ever marry.”
After that, he makes another mark and refuses to say more. As the group wanders to other oddities, I have the sudden, overwhelming feeling that if I don’t get out of this room, I’ll suffocate.
When the professor beckons us to a red door with strange markings covering the surface, I tear my gaze from the dead princess and run to join the others.
“The forbidden Vault of the Darken. These weapons were used by the fallen king during the war, and their warped magic is partially responsible for the fallout that tore our worlds apart.”
Silence descends, heavy and ominous. His eyes narrow. “Before we enter, you should know, the weapons on the other side are outlawed weapons forged from dark, forbidden soul-magic. Touch anything, and I do mean anything, on the forbidden side, and you will be immediately expelled.”
He gestures and Magus appears, his hooves clopping loudly against the wood as he nears. “Only Magus can access this room. Anyone else, even with the keys, and the unlaggin that guards it will bash in your skull.”
“What’s an unlaggin?” I whisper to Mack.
She grins darkly. “A type of orc with one eye.”
Lovely. A cyclops orc. Fae monsters can’t just be regular ones, after all.
Everyone moves aside to let the centaur access the lock. I watch him fiddle with a key ring. The door pops open with a creak. As I pass, he nods kindly at me.
“Not going inside, Magus?” I ask.
His ears twitch. “If you knew what lurked inside, you wouldn’t either.”
A burst of magic comes from the next room, but it’s laced with something different than the usual lilies and copper smell.
Something closer to dust, blood, and decay.
An ominous sensation permeates the room, a dark, musty chamber that must be huge by the way our footsteps echo. Here, there’s no glorious chandelier, only small torches hanging from stone columns, making it hard to determine the exact size of the vault.
As we trickle into the room, I can’t shake the image of the dead princess. I must have read about her somewhere.
Could she have been the one who fought the prince in the Nocturus?
But, as I follow my classmates, my thoughts quickly shift to the row after row of deadly instruments displayed in the middle of the chamber.
Longbows with strange markings similar to the door. Ornate leather quivers brimming with arrows made of bone and iron heads. Iron axes that give off dark, curling shadows. Iron forged swords and daggers still smeared with old, black blood and gore, huge magical stones embedded inside their fancy guards.
Crenshaw explains that these are class six through ten weapons. Below our very feet, in a vault guarded by six beasts, are the few class eleven and twelve weapons confiscated during the war. ce a smile. “It was pretty awesome.”
“Awesome?” Mack scoffs. “They haven’t had anyone actually obtain the venom in over a decade.”
“Girls,” Professor Lambert calls, his stern voice echoing inside the high ceiling of the lecture hall. “I expect total silence during Miss Skywell’s demonstration.”
We all nod, and thank God, the attention of the room quickly shifts back to Eclipsa. Soulmancy is an ancient art, and once forbidden. The little I do know about it so far is fascinating. The Evermore, the elite and powerful Fae from the most prominent families, use soulmancy exclusively to live forever.
“As you may know,” Eclipsa says, her voice carrying from her spot on the stage. “Soulmancy can be very dangerous when done wrong. But when done right . . . it’s an absolute miracle to watch. Notice that when the spell is complete, the new body transforms to look like the old one. That doesn’t always happen, and it requires total focus, but that is the goal. To restore the Evermore to their former self completely.”
Apparently, Eclipsa has already declared her specialty in soulmancy, even though the Evermore students don’t have to declare until the beginning of the third year.
