Chapter 6: Twelve Years Old, Actually

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story about a boy who hears a prophecy and nods solemnly, close this book now. Dear Reader, Arthur Specter had read that exact scene in four hundred different novels, and every single time, the kid was an idiot for not asking the obvious follow-up question first.

The campus kept moving around them like nothing world-ending had just been said. Cadets sparring somewhere off to the left, that laughing sound still coming from the tree that shouldn’t have anything in it. Voss hadn’t moved. He was watching Arthur the way you’d watch a pot you weren’t sure was about to boil.

"Okay," Arthur said. "Before we go any further... you do know how this sounds, right?"

Voss blinked. "How what sounds?"

"This." Arthur gestured at him, at the campus, at the whole production. "Orphan-coded kid, secretly special, shows up out of nowhere, mysterious headmaster takes a personal interest, drops a prophecy about him destroying everything. You didn’t come up with this. You stole it. There’s a whole movie about a wizard boy with a lightning scar that did this exact plot forty years ago."

"I didn’t—"

"I can draw one on, if it helps." Arthur tapped his own forehead. "Right here. Jagged. I’ve got a marker in my bag. Really sell the whole bit for you."

Voss stared at him for a long moment, and something in his charming, camera-ready expression cracked. Not into anger. Into something closer to genuine surprise. Somewhere behind him, a cadet went sailing sideways out of a training circle and landed in the grass laughing, and Voss didn’t even glance back at the noise. His whole attention stayed on Arthur.

"I wasn’t trying to do anything," he said. "I was trying to warn you."

"Sure you were." Arthur crossed his arms. "Here’s the part you’re skipping. You’re not just warning me. You’re recruiting me. Feeding me. Probably about to offer me extra credit for existing, my house as well, make me feel golden before you stab me in the back. That’s not a warning, that’s a leash with a bow on it... so that later, when your bigger plan needs a very specific, very dangerous twelve-year-old, I’m already sitting right here, trained and grateful."

Every gift wears a leash out of sight...

the softest hand can still hold the knife.

"You are," Voss said slowly, "an extremely untrusting child."

"I’m an extremely ordinary child. But you’re not that special either. You can’t even come up with an original plan." Arthur didn’t slow down. He’d started walking again without deciding to, gravel crunching under his sneakers, putting just enough motion into it that he didn’t have to hold Voss’s eyes the whole time. "You know what a school does with a student who might end up ’standing over the whole world’? It doesn’t befriend him. It builds a code black. A kill switch. Something quiet, something fast, something that activates the second I look like I’m drifting the wrong way. That’s not paranoia, that’s just good management. I’d do the same thing if I ran this place."

Voss opened his mouth. Closed it. For once, nothing smooth came out to fill the gap. Just a beat of silence long enough that a bird somewhere finished an entire sentence of its own before he answered.

"That’s not what this place is," he said, which Arthur noticed, and filed, was not actually a no.

He decided not to push it. Not yet. Some plot holes were worth letting breathe.

Voss recovered fast. Professionals always did. He reset into something warmer, gentler, the kind of voice built for assemblies. "What we’re building here is community. Belonging. Cadets who’d lay down everything for each other, because—"

"Nope." Arthur held up a hand. "Stop. You’re doing the sleepy voice. The unity-and-friendship speech. I’ve read that Chapter too, and it’s always the boring one right before the plot actually starts."

Voss didn’t answer that either. Arthur didn’t notice he hadn’t. Not yet, not with what happened next.

Something moved past them, out across the training field. A flash of white, low to the ground, then suddenly not low to the ground at all. Wind came off it in one hard gust, carrying the smell of cut grass and something warmer underneath, like static right before lightning.

Arthur stopped walking entirely.

A kid maybe a year older than him stood near the fence with both hands buried in a mane that shouldn’t have existed, attached to a horse that shouldn’t have existed either, except this one had wings currently stretching out to their full, ridiculous, sun-catching span.

"Is that," Arthur said, very carefully, "a pegasus."

"That’s a Bond," Voss started. "A Gift, earned through—"

"Stop trying to put me back to sleep and tell me about the freaking pegasus."

Voss actually laughed at that. A real one, short and surprised out of him.

"It’s a Gift called Dragon," he said. "Save up enough Coins, redeem it, and you’re taken to meet the—"

"Wait, taken where?"

"...the Earth Dragon. She keeps every creature in this—"

"There’s a dragon dragon? An actual—"

"If you let me finish a sentence." Voss held up a hand, fighting a smile now. "She keeps every creature in this world on something like a leash, ironically enough. She gives you an egg. The egg hatches into a bonded pet. What it turns into depends entirely on—"

"On the person, yeah, obviously, that’s how every pet-egg system in every story ever works—"

"...on the person," Voss finished anyway, mostly to himself.

Arthur turned on him, and every trace of the last ten minutes, the suspicion, the leash theory, the very reasonable point about kill switches, evaporated off his face like it had never been there.

"This should’ve been the first thing you told me," Arthur said. "On the tour. Before the training yards. Before the houses. Before any of it. I’m twelve. Of course I want to see a dragon and get my own magical pet, what is wrong with you. Does it evolve?"

Voss nodded, visibly unsure what had just happened to the conversation.

Arthur was already bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, all traces of Iron-tier cynicism gone, replaced by something that looked, for the first time since he’d died, exactly like a regular twelve-year-old.

"Code black be damned," he said. "I’m a hundred percent in. Where do I get my freaking quest?"

Suspicion melts for a shinier prize...

even old souls have young, hungry eyes.

TO BE CONTINUED...