Julius stepped forward toward the small house, entering the front garden.
As soon as Julius's foot passed the open fence, leading onto the neat path of square cut tiles of concrete, he immediately felt all the hairs on his body stand up.
He could feel the subtle distortion in the air, like the feeling of static charge surrounding the perimeter around the house.
He continued along this trail of concrete squares, recognising the familiar carvings etched into random spaces around the garden as he passed.
One was scratched into a concrete tile, an engraved letter of some long-forgotten language.
Another was carved into the wood behind the white picket gateway, just underneath the metal latch.
There were many that Julius reminisced carving, only a few weeks ago, when he hastily had to set up the house to move into.
When he agreed to attend the academy, he knew it would mean leaving behind his old home, an obvious hindrance to Julius.
His eyes tracked a brown plant pot, placed beside the rough stone doorstep, another carving scratched into the dried mud-coloured surface of the plant pot.
Julius raised his foot, lowering it onto the stone of the front doorstep, then stepping up as he reached for the door handle of the dark coloured door.
WIthout reaching for any key, let alone intromitting one into the lock, the door made a mechanical click as soon as Julius's hand grazed the curved glossy silver handle.
Julius pulled down and pushed the door open, stepping into a cramped room with light-grey carpet flooring the same colour as wolf fur and plain grey walls the same shade as a pebble.
Ahead of him, sat a white door with two engraved spaces at the top.
Where two rectangularly shaped dents sat, the same shape as wooden planks, for design.
Julius stood on the left side of this room, just past the front door, the white door opposite him in the small room.
The room was big enough to fit two pigs next to each other, side by side.
Beside the white door sat an empty shoe rack, housing two white shelves, placed against the wall.
On Julius's right side was another grey wall, with a slight opening on the far-right side of the wall, allowing a set of wide grey carpet stairs to bend in a sharp left around the grey wall and out of view.
From these stairs, Julius heard a loud and gruff voice call out.
"Boy? Is that you?" The voice was old, worn with time, heavy with a northern accent from someone who had been living in the mountains.
This voice recognised Julius's following silence, acknowledging it as his confirmation, like a mother cat recognising their kitten's scent.
The loud sound of thudding followed soon after, each thud growing continuously heavier, until a big burly figure revealed themselves from the opening at the grey stairs.
He was tall, with a barrel chest that stretched the soft navy-blue quarter zip jumper he wore.
He wore this peculiar hat on their head; it was the fur skin of a grizzly bears head.
The hat still retained the creature's features, the brown ears still stuck out over this man's head, and the bears lifeless black nose still draped over his forehead like a hood.
Though weirdest of all about the hat, was how it sat around the man's black-bearded face like a mask.
The teeth seemed to frame around this man's face, like the teeth of a bear trap clipping around a person's face to outline it.
It was as if he was literally wearing the bear's face, as a mask, the bear's glossy and preserved eyes shining lifelessly at Julius.
"Right, you were off wandering again..." The man tutted with a tired sigh as he looked at his leather wristwatch.
"God knows you've always been like this, even the police couldn't keep an eye on you since you were a youngling." The man chuckled and it felt like the air was struggling to coexist within the vibrations coming from the man's booming voice.
Julius remained where he was, silently watching this man from across the small room, still standing by the door.
His eyes were closed into observant slits, like a snake poised to strike.
In truth, the man across from Julius was his Uncle Halberd, yet somehow that warmth of familiarity was never enough to thaw the ice trapped over Julius's cold expression.
The air around Julius seemed to thicken, growing denser with something that made lesser men tense with fear, as this penetrating gaze focused onto his Uncle.
Though this unwavering intensity never affected Halberd once, he only ever simply acknowledged it as "just how Julius is".
"So how was your first day at the academy? Did you make any friends? That young lady said it was a good place for you." Halberd asked innocently, patting his big chest with a palm the size of a gorilla as he cleared his throat whilst talking.
Julius remained silent for a long while, imperceptibly letting out a ghost of a sigh.
That young lady.
Not just any young lady.
"A sun deity, hellbent on forcing me into the system of this forgotten civilisation. Though still a system, nonetheless" Julius internally brooded, barely stopping himself from scoffing.
He remembered that day, it was almost a month and a half ago.
...
At the time, Julius lived in the forest, inside some old cabin buried deep within the heart of some plain Rocky Mountains.
Julius arrived home, standing in the hallway with spruce wooden floorboards, looking through the open door leading to the living room.
He saw a woman with red flowing hair and orange subtly glowing irises standing in a tidy room, the walls were made from a polished stack of dark brown logs that resembled the same colour as a cigarillo.
The woman was dressed in a black skirt, leggings and a sophisticated grey dress jacket with white stripes.
The jacket was buttoned closed, just enough, to reveal the hint of defined collar bone under the jacket.
Julius's expression turned sour immediately, his jaw clenching with barley contained restraint.
"How did she get past the enchantments?" Julius flared internally, already reaching toward his cloak for a familiar star-shaped token.
Julius recognised this woman from somewhere, he just couldn't put his finger on it.
Then his hand paused.
His gaze strolled across the room, and toward the massive man stepping into the living room from the kitchen.
Julius turned his gaze aside and looked at Halberd, his large frame drowning out the red-head woman's in comparison.
Between his tree trunk arms, he held a small plate of fine China, with a pink floral pattern splayed over the plate.
The same pattern, also on the side of the tiny teacup, as the cup continued balancing perfectly in the purposeful crater engraved into the plate.
Julius's hand reluctantly lowered, from where it reached toward the insides of his cloak.
"Aye, speak of the devil." Halberd chuckled heartily, stepping forward to set the plate before the seated red woman on a rounded brown coffee table.
The plate landed with a soft clink, as Halberd set it down beside a piece of brown parchment.
Then settling down to sit on a sofa, with a brown fur rug splayed over the comfy furniture.
"Right, Miss..." Halberd's voice trailed off, gesturing for the woman to fill in the empty blank.
"Lugh. Miss Lugh." She answered politely in a regal tone, her hands folded neatly in her lap, as she purposefully maintained a straight posture with a respectable demeanour.
"Miss Lugh, here, was just telling me about a proposition she has for you." Halberd continued, reaching out a flat palm to gesture toward the red head across from himself.
Julius was silent.
His gaze fixed heavily upon the woman, with vigilance beyond his years.
"What sort of proposition?" Julius asked firmly behind his gaze of steel.
Miss Lugh flashed a mockingly delicate smile, her eyes flashing like burning rims of flame, purposefully turning her gaze toward Halberd.
She wanted the explanation to come from Halberd.
She thought the more it sounded like Halberd's idea, the more inclined Julius would be to listen.
Halberd detected this gesture, though not the intention behind it, innocently turning toward Julius to speak whilst slowly waving his hands as he spoke.
"Well, you see, ever since...-" Halberd paused.
The room felt colder.
The cold silently fractured something in Julius, in an imperceivable way.
Halberd carefully reselected his choice of words.
"You've been disappearing your whole life as a youngling lad, I always tried to keep you in but somehow you found a way to escape from every set of four walls I put you in." Halberd explained with an uneasy expression for once.
"Like it was magic..." Halberd breathed quietly, slowly grasping at the nothingness in his hands, as he closed his fists.
"The only time I know you're home is when I can hear you in your room scribbling away, studying things I can't even get the foggiest grasp of." Halberd continued, his voice incredibly soft even with his thick accent.
"I know you're gifted son." Halberd added.
"I know things haven't been easy since-" Halberd paused again.
A silence.
Miss Lugh's eyes imperceptibly narrowed at these pauses, as if sniffing for breadcrumbs of what Halberd kept referring to.
"Miss Lugh here knows a place for people like that, I think it would be good for you. You could make some friends, meet people like you." Halberd explained, his voice carrying this soft grace of something suspiciously close to hope.
He paused, reaching toward the coffee table, plucking the brown parchment from the table and offering it to Julius.
Julius's gaze had been locked carefully onto Miss Lugh the entire time.
His gaze finally flicked away, to where Halberd held the paper in front of him.
Julius quickly absorbed the contents.
It was a pamphlet of sorts, containing information on a school.
The advertisement was simple, written in some digital font like it had been printed out.
Though as soon as Julius's eyes landed on the page, Miss Lugh's lips curved with a knowing smirk.
The seemingly printed words began to blur, each letter on the parchment literally rising from the lines on the page and drifting around.
The words started to shuffle around, whilst simultaneously transforming into illustrious handwriting.
"Place of study for the academically gifted" shifted into "Place of learning for the magically gifted."
"Top ten computer science department in the state" transformed into "The most advanced institution of magical research and development in the realms."
Lastly, at the top of the page.
"Academy for honourable business" now blurred into
"Academy for half-bloods."
Julius's eyes widened with recognition, suddenly it all made sense.
He recognised where he had seen those eyes before, those fiery impossible eyes.
He remembered many a time when someone with those same eyes, but a different appearance, had bumped into him and tried to start conversation.
He thought of one time when he passed through Nioavolier, a man with thin black hair had stumbled into him.
Julius would never have remembered such a meaningless incident, though that person's eyes had revitalised this dead memory.
Those fiery-singed eyes, like rings of barley-there flame.
He remembered another situation, when he was called out by a food vendor, the vendor behind the stall had the same eyes he was looking at now.
Though as Julius looked at this paper, he could also remember a time when a person of those eyes had given him this paper before.
The food vendor.
He had seen the pamphlet hanging from the top of the wooden food stall.
His chin shot up from the paper, his gaze narrowing intently on Miss Lugh, his gaze threatening to crush her.
Now, he had finally remembered where he had first seen these eyes.
The coliseum.
"Has this been her plan this entire time?" Julius wandered in instant thought.
"Miss Lugh must be an alias." Julius theorised in continuous burst of rapidly growing thought.
"Is she part of a group?" He wondered again, his internal monologue like a raging sea threatening to drown him.
Then Julius thought back to how Falson had saved him from his first encounter with 'Miss Lugh', back at the coliseum.
He remembered how Falson explained what a shade was, and how only sun deities had the knowledge to perfect such a technique.
"A shade? So that's how she's appeared as a different person every time, she's been changing her appearance!" Julius realised in a streak of blazing white thought.
Then the ghost of the afterthought settled over him.
This woman, a sun god, had violated his home.
She had spent years trying to slowly nudge Julius in the direction she wanted.
When that failed, she audaciously slithered into his home and used his own Uncle against him.
If this had been just a year earlier, Julius would've had her head.
Much had happened since that time, Julius was much different compared to the past him at the coliseum.
The past him that lunged his sword without needing a reason.
Though even then, Julius couldn't help the bubbling rage inside his gut.
His Uncle, who had never been exposed to this secret world the same way Julius had so long ago now, was unaware of the plots being strung over his own head.
His own Uncle.
How dare she!
Julius's gaze impossibly narrowed further onto 'Miss Lugh'.
The intensity of his sight, threatening to consume her.
His leg twitched sharply forward, intent on landing the first strike.
Until he saw his Uncle's eyes.
They were innocent, gleaming with a faint light.
Right.
Halberd was still waiting for an answer, the one Julius forgot to give.
Julius remained in place, his expression dimming slightly.
"Why don't you try it for one day? Just one, if you don't like it then you can give it up. How does that sound, Lad?" His Uncle suggested in a soft tone, still heavy with his gruff voice.
Julius paused.
His silence an unnatural fog, settling calmly over the room.
His expression was calm, with the softness of white silk.
Finally, he breathed a small whisper.
'Miss Lugh' smiled deeply within her heart as she heard the words.
"Just one day."
...
"You want me to make you tea, Lad?" Halberd leaned in slightly, speaking with mild concern, noticing how Julius seemed to be lost in a world of thought.
Julius blinked slowly, his eyes remaining shut for a lingering moment, as he finished recollecting his thoughts.
His eyes slowly slid open, in an inhuman manner, like how a snake's eyelids stretched along.
He briefly reminisced the old cabin, processing the present reality of the grey walled hallway.
Julius's now open eyes revealed a gentle shimmer, a gentle tantalising light naturally frosting from his gaze.
Julius refused with cold silence, though it now seemed softer somehow.
Then he stepped forward, passing Halberd, to climb the grey carpet steps.
Though before he disappeared upstairs, Halberd heard a faint whisper barely graze his ear.
"I made a friend."
end of chapter 11