The first night in Eterna, I dreamed I was a tree.
Not one of those elegant, tragic birches from the pass, but a gnarled thing, root-bound and throttled by centuries of bad weather.
In the dream, I clawed my way up through layers of moldering city and stone, reaching for a sun I hadn't seen in five hundred years.
My arms grew too long, then brittle, then snapped off one by one as the wind howled with the sound of the old world dying.
"ah…"
When I woke, my whole body ached as if I'd actually spent the night hollowing through basalt and grief.
I rolled over, the thin mattress of the wayhouse bed.
As I squinted at the hairline of dawn bleeding through the window. I knew It was the only thing that moved in the room.
For the first time since the pass, Corwin slept so deeply he didn't even snore.
…
…
…
Not long after we crossed into the Academy District at a checkpoint manned by two guards in highly polished chestplates.
One of them took a long look at Corwin, then a longer one at the crate. He cocked his head, like he was waiting for an excuse to be difficult, but then another guard—a woman, older, with a scar the width of two fingers across her cheek—waved us through with the barest flick of a wrist.
Corwin let out a breath so slow it might have lasted the entire pass. I pretended not to notice.
We parked the cart where they told us, in a sunken courtyard ringed by marble walls twice the height of our house.
I half expected an escort of stony-faced porters to appear and relieve us of our pitiful luggage, but nobody bothered.
"God damn…"
Over head the great doors of the Academy nearly six stories tall, arched like the ribcage of a sleeping dragon.
It stood open and unguarded, as if the place itself was too grand to admit the possibility of theft or trespass.
Corwin didn't even try to hide his anxiety he set the crate down with both hands, then shot me a look like maybe I'd grown an extra head since breakfast.
I shrugged, because there was nothing to say, and nothing in my arsenal of explanations that would make sense to a man who'd never felt power like this crawling under his skin.
We followed the mage and her retinue through the administrative wing, past a succession of marble corridors, until the walls narrowed and the light turned a little cold.
A reception desk bisected the far end, massive and seamless, carved from a single block of volcanic stone.
Behind it, a senior functionary in mage robes sat rigidly upright, fingers twitching at the edges of an enormous ledger.
"Sensitive Material Intake, here," she said, not looking up.
She had the frazzled, look of someone days deep into an all-nighter and running purely on principled terror.
Corwin cleared his throat, the polite version of a plea for help.
"Special delivery for the Research Dean. From the Bourne main estate. It's, ah, urgent."
She slid a beige tag across the counter and pointed to the left.
"Security intake, down the hall. They'll process you and the cargo for final sign-off. Don't touch anything."
She eyed the crate with the suspicion of a bomb-defusal technician whose hands were tied behind her back.
We went where she pointed without a single word.
I caught glimpses inside the other offices and labs lined with glass tanks as students in colored robes clustered around spitting mana-torches while a sharp-faced man in a monocle was dictating to a floating pen.
There was so much magical energy it was hard to breathe at first, I mean it was like stepping into a public pool and realizing the water was twice as dense as your body.
At the end of the hall, two more guards flanked a door wrapped in ribbon-like spells.
The left one held his hand up and barked, "Halt!" without looking up from his clipboard.
The other, a bored woman with a face like a snubbed cigarette, waggled two fingers at us.
"Step inside. Place the package on the marked glyph."
Inside, the first thing that greeted us was a security archway so elaborate it looked like someone had tried to reconstruct the gates of paradise from memory, then given up and just overcompensated with crystal and gold wire.
The whole thing hummed flickering with layered enchantments, warning labels, and a dozen of runes that promised severe consequences for smuggling in 'improper magical signature.'
Corwin went first. The archway flickered a gentle green, then a soothing blue, and he passed through with nothing more than a soft chime and a sigh of relief. He turned, expectant, to watch me follow.
I carried the crate forward, heart banging in my ribs, and the moment I stepped under the archway, all hell broke loose.
The arch didn't flicker, it detonated.
A shrieking banshee wail went off overhead, cycling from blue to red to screaming, strobe-light crimson.
Runic panels on the arch screamed "ANOMALY DETECTED" in three languages.
My world narrowed to the overload of light and sound, and then was filled with the sudden arrival of eight, maybe ten security mages in matching robes, each armed with a different flavor of overkill.
"Drop the crate!" the head mage shouted.
I did, and it landed on the glyph as instructed.
Two mages fell on it, scanning with technology that spat sparks and spat out needle-sharp readings onto little screens.
"Crystals, unshielded, high-grade—interfering with arch's baseline. Might be a resonance spike."
Corwin's face had lost all its blood. "It's the cargo," he stammered.
"The Bourne estate assured us it was stable."
The head mage didn't look convinced. She studied me with clinical curiosity, then gestured at her underlings.
"Bag and seal it. You—" she jabbed a finger at me—"step through again. Slowly."
"Damn… so much for protocols,"
There was no point arguing. I forced myself to breathe slow, shutting down every stray thread of power leaking out of me, thinking of it as a wound I could cauterize.
My shoes made almost no sound on the tile. I took a step, then another.
CLICK…
The archway flickered, but the alarm didn't scream this time.
Instead, it let out a low anxious bell.
The light toggled between yellow and magenta and the mages exchanged glances, with the head mage's eyebrow twitched upward.
"Looks clear," said one of the lackeys. "Residuals, but within operational margin."
"Probably a calibration issue from the St. Germain delegation's jump this morning," offered another.
"They rattled the entire east wing when they came through at dawn."
The woman stared at me a moment longer.
She saw a skinny, pale kid with half-mended sleeves and underfed wrists, a nobody from a minor branch barely worth remembering.
Her eyes said: If you're hiding something, you don't even know what it is.
She snapped a finger. "Log it as artifact malfunction. Containment on the cargo, and let them through."
We had almost made it through the inner set of doors and with the crate's seals freshly banded with sigils Corwin's face started to flush with relief, when a second set of footsteps closed in behind us.
A woman in what I assumed was a senior administrator's uniform—black, severe, with the sort of pinched silver at the collar that said _I will ruin your day if you make me_—strode toward us, trailed by a trio of not-quite-invisible aides.
She never even glanced at my father, just spoke past him in a voice sharp enough to shave marble.
"Your delivery has been flagged for Tier-2 review. The Head Director will see you in her office. Now."
She made a tiny, elegant hand motion and two of the aides peeled off, one taking the crate, the other falling in behind us.
The main woman—she had no name tag or badge, but her presence was as official as a royal decree—led us up a stair that seemed to sprout from the floor whenever she approached it.
Corwin started to protest that the package was scheduled for immediate transfer to Lab Six, but her smile was so thin it looked like a paper cut.
"Our current policy is that all flagged abnormalities require personal disposition by the Director," she said. "Please follow me."
We followed.