Chương 1: 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. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

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.

By order of the Rector and the Governing Council, the candidate Howl Aridis is formally invited to present himself for the entrance examination of Sartheon Academy, to be held on the first day of the Turning Season. Sartheon. Every great house in the kingdom dreamed of having a child accepted there. It was the oldest academy in the known world, and the most storied, and the hardest to enter.

The mages who graduated from Sartheon went on to do things that ended up in the kind of books Nana Serre used to smuggle into my room. They explored uncharted spirit wilds and mapped ley lines across entire continents, duelled ancient things that didn't have names and came back alive to talk about it.

Every hero I'd ever read about, every adventurer who made me press my face into the pages and wish I could crawl through the paper and stand where they stood, had walked through Sartheon's gates at some point in their story. And now they were inviting me to walk through those gates too. They'd even written my actual name on the paper, sealed it and sent it, and it was the kindest thing anyone had done for me since Nana Serre tucked a book inside her apron and pretended she hadn't.

For the first time in sixteen years, I was going to leave this house. I was going to see a real marketplace with real bread, meet other people my age, and if I could figure out how it worked, I was going to talk to one of them. Maybe I'd see a forest, or the ocean, or one of those mountain cities I read about… Hah, maybe I'd do something worth putting in a book.

I folded the letter and held it against my chest, sitting there at my desk in my room in my wing of the estate that I had never once been allowed to leave, and I was happy. It was a strange feeling, but I wanted it to last. Suddenly, a knock at my door. Three sharp raps, evenly spaced, the way the household staff were trained to knock.

"Yes?"

"Young Lord, your presence is requested before the Council of Elders. At your earliest convenience." At your earliest convenience meant now. Everything in this house meant now when the elders were involved. I looked down at the letter on my desk and felt my throat tighten. I had it for less than an hour and hadn't told anyone about it, but of course I hadn't needed to. It would have passed through the elders' hands long before it reached mine.

They'd probably read it, discussed it, and formed an opinion about it while I was still practising my glyphs and daydreaming about marketplaces.

"You may enter." I heard the servant's footsteps retreat from the door, and then more footsteps approaching, heavier and more numerous, and before I could stand properly, the door slid open and four attendants filed in. They bowed when they entered, then they set to work without looking at me or speaking to me or acknowledging in any way that I was a person standing in front of them and not a piece of furniture that needed arranging.

Two of them went to the wardrobe and pulled out a set of formal robes I'd worn maybe twice in my life, deep Aridis black with silver thread along the collar and cuffs. The third laid out a basin of water and a cloth on the side table. The fourth stood by the door with her hands folded. I raised my arms when they needed me to raise my arms, turned when they needed me to. One of them combed my hair back and tied it with a silver clasp, and her fingers were careful, never once touching my skin longer than they had to.

Another adjusted the fall of the robe across my shoulders, tugging the fabric straight, smoothing creases I couldn't see. They worked quickly and in silence, and when they were done, they bowed again, all four at once, and filed back out through the door in the same order they'd come in. The whole thing took about five minutes, and none of them had met my eyes. So I now stood there in my formal robes and looked at myself in the mirror they'd uncovered on the far wall.

"... Huh." The escort was waiting outside my door. Eight of them, four on each side, household guards in full Aridis colours with their hands on their sword pommels. That was more guards than I'd ever seen assigned to anything inside the estate walls. I stepped out into the corridor and they fell into formation around me without a word, and we walked. The Council chamber was not far from my wing. It had never been far.

I'd lived my entire life a few corridors and one staircase away from the room where every decision about me had been made. People came out to watch us pass. Servants paused in doorways with their trays held against their chests. A pair of groundskeepers stood aside in the corridor and pressed their backs to the wall as the escort went by.

We crossed through the eastern pavilion, where a group of branch family members had been sitting around a low table with tea, and they all stood up when they saw me, and one of them said something I couldn't quite hear, and another one hushed her. I kept my eyes forward. I'd learned that from Instructor Maren, years ago. When you don't know what expression to wear, don't let them see your face. Look ahead. Walk like you know where you're going, even if someone else is leading you there.

But I still caught pieces of it. Murmurs that floated up from behind cupped hands and half-turned shoulders as I passed. We stopped at a set of heavy double doors, dark wood banded with iron, carved with the Aridis crest. The guards split formation, four to each side, and the lead escort stepped forward and knocked twice.

"The Young Lord Howl Aridis, Axiom of House Aridis, requests an audience with the Council of Elders." There was a pause at first. Then a voice came from inside.

"Granted. Let him enter."