Chapter 01. The Letter

A ball rolled into my room while I was practising my glyphs.

It was red-leathered, scuffed at the seams, and it came through the gap under the sliding door, wobbling across the stone floor until it stopped a few feet from my desk. I put my pen down and looked at it, and I could hear children’s voices outside in the corridor, whispering to each other.

“Go get it.”

“You go get it.”

“I’m not going in there, the Axiom’s in there.”

I tried to place them. The first voice belonged to an older boy, probably around twelve or thirteen, who had a habit of swallowing the ends of his words.

The second was a younger girl who spoke quickly and nervously, like she was always halfway to bolting. There was a third one also, quieter than the other two, who hadn’t said anything at all but whose breathing I could hear through the thin wood of the door.

They’d been coming here often these past few days.

“Is he busy?”

“He’s always busy.”

“Mother said we’re not supposed to be here.”

“I know what she said!”

I stood up from my desk and crossed the room with the intention to open the door and give them the ball, perhaps even get to talk to them, but when I got halfway there, I heard them run, bare feet slapping against the stone and the sound got smaller and smaller until the corridor was silent and empty again.

I stood there for a moment with my hand half-raised, then I picked up the ball, slid the door open just wide enough to fit my arm through, placed it down carefully on the other side where they’d see it, then slid the door shut again to go back to my desk.

Those were my siblings. Probably.

I couldn’t be completely sure, because I’d never spoken to any of them and had only ever seen them from a distance, small figures playing in the south courtyard three floors below my window. But Nana Serre had once told me I had siblings, and she’d told me their names, then described each of them well enough that I could match her descriptions to voices if I concentrated.

The older boy was probably Rowan, who was now thirteen and left-handed. The nervous girl was Calla, who was nine and allegedly looked like our mother. The quiet one could have been Dorin, or maybe not. I wasn’t sure exactly how old Dorin was. Nana had said he was born the same year I mastered pyromancy, so probably five years old now.

Nana Serre had told me a great many things she was never supposed to. She was old, mostly deaf in her left ear, and had served House Aridis since before my father was born. But somewhere along the way, despite the elders’ orders, she had decided to tell me who my family was.

She told me I had a mother who lived in the east wing, named Meredys, and that my birth had been celebrated for a full year with feasts of all sorts and formal letters to the branch families. I even learned that my father had wept openly in front of the council when the elders confirmed what I was, which apparently was something my father simply did not do.

She was the first person to tell me I was the Axiom, a heaven sent once-in-a-thousand-years singularity, the pride and treasure of House Aridis, and that this was why I lived apart from the others, why my meals were prepared separately according to a plan I had no say in, and why I had my own wing, my own instructors, my own schedule and had never once set foot outside the estate walls.

Ah, and she also brought me books.

These were not the theory texts and dry tactical commentaries on my assigned reading list, but real ones with stories in them. Adventures about heroes who crossed oceans, fought terrible things, fell in love, lost people and kept going anyway.

She slipped them into my room during her evening rounds, one at a time, tucked inside her apron where the instructors wouldn’t see.

Only through those books did I learn what a marketplace looked like, I could imagine things like forests, oceans, and snow, and rain that came sideways, and what thunder sounded like when you were standing under an open sky with nothing between you and it.

I learned all of this from pages, because pages were all I had, and every night after lights out I read under my blanket with my knees pulled up and the book propped against my chest, and every morning I slid it back under the mattress before the bell rang.

They fired Nana Serre when I was eleven.

Someone found one of the books during a routine inspection of my quarters, and that was that. They didn’t tell me she was leaving. She was just gone one morning, replaced by a woman who never laughed with me, and the books were gone too, pulled from under my mattress while I was in a training session with Instructor Bellos.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

I missed her, and I missed the books more than I missed her, and I felt guilty about that for a long time, but it was the truth.

My name is Howl. Howl Aridis, firstborn son of my father, though the order of my birth stopped mattering the day the elders saw my birthmark and decided what I was going to be.

Because of that, I never left the estate in the sixteen years of my existence. I’d never chosen what to eat, never had a conversation with anyone who wasn’t an instructor, a servant or an old woman who got fired for being kind to me.

But today, for the first time in a long time, I was happy.

On my desk, half-buried under the sheet of glyphs I’d been copying when the ball rolled in, there was a letter. The paper was heavier than anything I’d held that wasn’t a book, cream-coloured, sealed with dark iron-coloured wax and stamped with the crest of Sartheon Academy.