The Great

We landed at the center of campus with a soft thud. The well trimmed bright green grass radiated soft green light while the main campus building stood tall and sound. Its design was similar to the palace of the Emperor as its red clay walls were embroidered with patterns consisting of beautiful flowers. It had a triangular roof with overhangs that were also painted with spectacular patterns of roses and gold. The black pillars of the building were large and sturdy, and the stairs of the entrance were made of gold-fletched, black marble.

Me and Geon started to walk towards the building when three men walked out of its doors. Standing there were Professor Vylen and two men that I had never seen before. “Oh, that’s the headmaster,” Geon whispered next to me and I visibly shrank.

So I messed up that badly…..

Professor Vylen looked like he was urging the two men to go away but they both kept walking towards us while ignoring him. They reached us and me and Geon both gave them a bow. “Mr.Leventen I ask that you bring Ms.Fairheart and Ms.Maple right away. I ask you to stay as well.” I looked at Geon who didn’t look back.

“Sir, if everyone is coming then is—”

“Yes Mr.Novak will be here as well,” Geon clenched his fists and grit his teeth.

“Who’s that?” He looked at me with a tired face.

“It’s Ren. Novak is the house name of the Emperor’s beloved brother in law. Ren’s mother, or the emperor’s sister, was married off while her brother became the emperor. So Ren is technically the Emperor's nephew.” My face slumped and my body fell even lower.

“So that’s how he had so much leverage on Lila….”. Geon’s face told me that he hated the situation as much as I did. There was no way the school was going to let anything happen to the precious nephew of the emperor. Even if we got off without a trace we would still be subject to harm by the royal family. But the most realistic option was that we would be declared guilty on the spot. I had thrown the first attack after all….By law I was technically the instigator. “Come with us, and I ask you to refrain from saying anything until we get there Mr.Maver. Your odds are already not in your favor.” The headmaster spoke with a melancholy voice.

He was an elderly man with little hair and a plump belly. He wore a gray robe with a simple white hem and baggy gray pants as well. His face showed that he had great wisdom behind his eyes, and I could feel that he had great authority and power. The other man was taller and thinner than the headmaster and he had a full head of brown hair as well as a pair of round glasses. He seemed to be younger than the headmaster, but still seemed to be in his thirties. He wore the same clothes as the headmaster and seemed to accompany him everywhere he went. I followed them and the teachers led us to a small one room box-home that was sitting outside the acceptance hall. “This is where we will hear what you have to say. Stay put, your hearing will be in a day's time.” The headmaster spoke shortly and they were all on their way.

Geon sat down on the floor and sighed. I sat along the wall with my knees up to my chests. I buried my face in my knees and let out a large sigh. Geon looked up at me with a tired look. “You had to go and punch him man?Honestly, I don’t blame you. But what was that? You were all golden and stuff.” Geon didn’t sound condescending or rude, but he sounded tired. “I didn’t even know you could do that—whatever you did back there. I don’t know who Amie is, I don’t know anything about what sets you off. We told you to be careful and I feel like if you had told us about these things we could at least find some better ways to keep you out of trouble. For fucks sake man I–”

“I don’t need to hear this right now, just fuck off for a little bit!”, I shouted for the first time in a while. My voice had come out a lot louder than I had meant it to. Geon looked surprised for a second but regained his composure. “Listen I can’t really…uh…fuck off to anywhere, this place is really small, but listen, I get it. I would’ve killed him if he pulled me away too. It’s just that you seem to not trust us. You don’t tell us anything.”

I kept staring at the ground, “Listen…..There’s a lot of stuff that I can’t tell you guys. It’s not that I don’t trust you, it's just that…….you wouldn’t ever understand.”

He looked at me with a sad stare. He took out a small, pink pearl and levitated it in the air. He spun it around his fingers and made it dance along his hand—like a beautiful ballet performer flowing across their stage. He stared at it absentmindedly.

“This was a gift from my mother. It’s nothing special really, but it was the only thing that my mother could afford to get me. It’s fake by the way–I think it’s made of iron,” He kept controlling the pearl as we talked. “She thought that I needed to learn how to use my skills and she also thought this would help stop me from getting bored. I used it to practice when I was younger and I would do this all day and night. My mother worked as a slave to my father. She was a prostitute that lived in Bondas. Apparently my father liked her skill–the ability to summon metal–and bought her to be his personal woman. He wanted to mesh different abilities together until he got a super baby–which turned out to be me.” I looked at him and saw no signs of any change in his expression.

“He didn’t love her and he made her live in this shack near the creek behind his home. She got to go up to his house when he needed her but she was usually just in that shack.” He talked with cold blank eyes and an even colder voice.

“But one day she had me. I turned out to be the perfect super baby, and after that, he couldn’t care less about what happened to my mom or my siblings. He just cared about whether I lived or died. He did give mom more resources to keep me alive and continued to use her for his own. I had seven more siblings, all of them died of starvation.” I looked at Geon with a half horrified and sympathetic look, but he didn’t take his eyes off the ball.

“It was a pretty big shit show until he finally died. I don’t know how he died exactly but I know he was killed by another butcher. It was something about that guy and my father going gunning for the same person, but I don’t really care about the details. He was gone and I left….Because my mother didn’t make it after me,”

“I ran off to some village in the woods. I was eight when they took me in. I was just some kid from the city who was on the run but those people taught me how to stay out of trouble. I left though….and I found out that I had inherited my father’s money.” I opened my mouth for the first time in a while.

“What did your father do for a living exactly? What’s a butcher?” Geon didn’t change his gaze and kept talking.

“They take out a target in exchange for a large sum of money. The nobles usually can’t and don’t bother to get their hands dirty and the politicians of this world—the ones that have all the ideas and the minds to support a government—have no physical power. These politicians advise the nobles on government affairs, but they have always wanted power for themselves. The major nobles have none of these advisors, but the minor nobles do. These minor nobles who run the smaller provinces of the major regions are strong but weaker than the major nobles. They’re also power hungry idiots. It’s possible to take them out, but they are still nobles. Killing them is near impossible unless you have the proper butcher.”

“So the politicians make all the decisions for the minor nobles and hire butchers to take out other nobles. It’s a clean way to get rid of a person you don’t like and save yourself some trouble. So in other words, good butchers make unfathomable amounts of money right?” Based on Geon’s nod I could tell what I had said was correct.

I inherited all of my father’s money. “I never used it. I got into Feltz academy by trying out for their combat team. I got free classes and a scholarship there too. Then I got into Eden and the rest is history.”

I looked at Geon and he finally put the ball in his pocket. “Now the reason why I just dumped my life story on you is that now, I’ve got nothing more to say. You can trust me right? So please, Evay, try to trust me. Try to trust us.”

I looked at him with sad eyes and turned my head. I could hear Geon lean his head back on the wall and sighed a little bit. I wanted to tell him….I wanted to tell them everything. About my family, my past, why I was here….

But I didn’t know the answers to some of these questions myself. And the others….I couldn’t tell them. I looked at Geon, whose blank expression left a sad ache in my chest. He closed his eyes and looked like he was ready to fall asleep.

I felt my heart tug and I tried my best to speak. “Amie……Amie was a..a friend. She was….nice and smart and pretty.” Geon slowly sat upright and looked at me.

“We were childhood friends I guess you could say. I don’t like to think about…..her. I like to think I had no friends at all. I—I really don’t want to think about what happened to them….I try to block them, forget them,” Geon looked at me and sat back on the wall. He had an empathetic look on his face.

“We were kids at the time, and I couldn’t do anything about it. They carried her away and………”

The screaming, the begging, the screaming…The crying…

I shook my head and steeled my nerves as I snapped back to reality. I took a deep breath and calmed myself down.

“She—she….killed herself…” Geon looked at me and he looked back down at his lap.

“Geon I’m sorry, I really am. But I try to keep these things out of here. It’s never good to let these secrets out,” He looked at me with a sad gaze, “I hope you understand why I’m like this. But I’ll try to be more me in the future.” With that I turned my body again and layed on the floor.

Unlike everything else I had kept or told them this wasn’t a lie.

I hadn’t thought about Amie, or all of the others in a long time. It made me feel worse.

A lot worse.