Chương 146: Chapter 143. New Job

One week later, Adom was sitting where the professors sat. It was strange in a way he hadn't braced for. He'd done a great many unlikely things in two lifetimes, and very little still managed to catch him off guard, but sitting up here on the raised dais at the front of the great hall, in one of the high-backed chairs reserved for staff, looking out over the assembled rows of students from the wrong side of the room entirely — that did it. Because the people on either side of him were his teachers.

Crowley sat at his left. There was grey in the man's beard now that hadn't been there when Adom was twelve and being told, in that parade-ground voice, to show the class proper form. The scar was the same, the posture was the same, and the man still managed to make a chair look like something he was guarding rather than sitting in. Further down sat Miss Thornheart, the infirmary nurse, exactly as severe and steel-haired as the day she'd checked him for possession after he'd woken up shouting that he was back.

Biscuit lay at her feet, gone grey around the muzzle now, the old Sunhound's nose twitching in his sleep. The dog had sensed something off about Adom that first day, all those years ago, and Adom had spent a long time wondering what. He'd finally just asked, once he was a druid and could. The answer had been disappointingly ordinary: blood from the hit Damus had landed, mixed with a few drops of a potion he'd spilled on his robes that same morning during alchemy.

The two together had thrown off a faint, particular scent, and Biscuit, being a Sunhound, had caught it and decided it warranted watching. Nothing more sinister than chemistry, and Adom had been almost let down. Biscuit cracked one eye open, found him on the dais, and gave a slow, unbothered thump of his tail against the floor before going back to sleep. And then a handful of faces he didn't know at all.

New hires, brought in over the last few years, younger than the rest, talking quietly among themselves and stealing the occasional glance at him. At the front, below the dais, Headmaster Merris stood facing the students, waiting for the hall to settle before he gave the welcome speech. That was the strangest part, in its quiet way.

The welcome speech was an old tradition, the sort of thing that had quietly died out at some point during Adom's own years as a student, when nobody could quite remember why they'd ever bothered. It had come back after his team had won the Krozball championship — the first cup Xerkes had taken in years — and the school, flush with a pride it hadn't felt in a long while, had gone looking through its own attic for the ceremonies it had let lapse. The speech had been one of them.

So in a sense, Adom was the reason he now had to sit through it. He didn't mind, though. Looking back, those had been good years. Maybe the best he'd had, in either life: the championship, the friends, the long stretch of relative calm afterward when, for once, nothing was trying to kill him or end the world on a schedule. Sadly, it hadn't lasted.

He'd spent only two more years at Xerkes as a student before they'd fast-tracked him through the rest when he stopped holding back, finishing years early to begin the Magus path that had put him in this chair. A short, bright, ordinary stretch of life. He'd take more of those, if the world ever let him. Headmaster Merris suddenly cleared his throat, and the hall went quiet.

"Yes! Hello! Wonderful, wonderful — there you all are." He beamed up at the rows of students, having to tilt his head well back to take them in, his feet not quite reaching the floor of the speaking platform someone had built him years ago specifically so he could be seen over the lectern.

"Now. A welcome. I'm meant to give a welcome, and I will, I promise, only first I want to say, isn't it remarkable? Truly. Look at all of you. Hundreds of minds in one room, every one of them about to learn how to do something that, four ages ago, would have had you burned as a god or a menace, possibly both, the records are unclear—" He caught himself, then lifted a finger.

"—but that's a tangent. Forgive me. I have a great many of those. You'll get used to it, or you won't, and either way the years will go by faster than you think." He let that sit a half-second, something fond and faintly sad passing over the unruly grey of his face, then it was gone.

"You're at Xerkes. I have been here longer than I will admit to in front of this many witnesses, and I still wake some mornings and cannot quite believe my luck. There is nowhere on the continent — I will fight the deans of three rival academies on this point, and have — where you will be made to work so hard, frightened so thoroughly in your first year, and changed so completely by your last. It is a privilege, though it will not always feel like one.

Both of those things are true at once, and learning to hold two true things at once is, as it happens, most of what an education is for." He clasped his small hands behind his back and began to pace. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"To our new students, welcome! Be lost. It's allowed. Everyone up here was lost once, including the ones who'll tell you they weren't. And to our returning students, the older years—" His eyes lifted, moving along the upper rows.

"You set the weather in this place. You do. The first-years are watching you to learn what's normal, what's permitted, what kind of person one becomes here. So be the example you'd have wanted, when you were small, new and afraid. Kindness costs you nothing and they remember it for life. I would know. I remember every kindness anyone ever did me in this hall, and I am very old, and my memory is otherwise a disgrace."

A ripple of laughter went through the students, and it was somewhere in that ripple that Adom, scanning the rows out of idle habit, found Eren, who was already looking at him. Last-year student now, near the front where the senior years sat, sitting up straight, and looking directly at the dais. Adom kept his face still. He was a professor now, so technically, this boy's superior. He looked back out over the hall at large, the very picture of staff-appropriate attention, and did not engage until Eren made a face.

It was a deeply stupid face — eyes crossed, cheeks puffed, the whole arrangement held with total commitment — and it was so completely unlike Eren, who in all the years Adom had known him had been the stoic one, second only to Damus, that it caught Adom entirely flat-footed. A laugh came up his throat before he'd decided anything about it and he turned it into a cough as his shoulders moved once. The two professors nearest him on the dais looked over.

Crowley, at his left, did not turn his head, but one eyebrow rose a precise quarter-inch, which from Crowley was the equivalent of a hand on the shoulder and a quiet get hold of yourself. Adom got hold of himself. He breathed, smoothed his expression, and pointedly stopped looking anywhere near the senior rows. He'd deal with Eren later. He was proud of him, was the thing; not that he'd ever load the boy down with saying it too often. Eren was in his final year now, and he'd done well. Better than well, actually.

He'd come into the academy a charity case, a sponsored slum kid half the noble students wouldn't sit near, and he'd turned himself into a genuinely formidable mage through nothing but work. He was famous in his own right these days, too: the Archmage's apprentice, personally taken on by Gaius himself, which was the kind of distinction that opened every door in Arkhos. What almost no one knew — what stayed locked among Merris, Gaius, and a very short list of others — was the reason for it.

Eren was a second-circle mage. It was the sort of fact that did not stay a private blessing for long. A talent like that grew into its power or it grew into a problem, and there wasn't usually much middle ground; the world had a poor track record with young people who were strong before they were steady. Which was exactly why Adom had wanted him taught properly, watched properly, kept close by people who'd pour the right things into him while there was still time to shape where all that power pointed.

He risked one last glance at the senior rows. Eren had stopped making the face. He just grinned, and faced front. When his speech was done, Merris turned the floor over to the staff, and one by one the professors stood to introduce themselves. It was a simple thing. Each rose, gave their name, their faculty, the years they taught, perhaps a line about what to expect. Crowley: second and third-year battle magic, delivered in four words that somehow still made several students sit up straighter.

Thornheart: infirmary, with a flat reminder that she'd see most of them at least once and would prefer it be the once. The new ones, names and posts, polite ripples of welcome. Then it came round to Adom. He stood.

"Hello all, my name is Adom Sylla." He'd meant to go on, but he didn't get the chance. Murmurs started before he'd drawn breath for the second sentence, ran along the rows like a fuse, and by the time it reached the back of the hall it wasn't a murmur at all. Somewhere a first-year said that's him loudly enough to carry, and got I know hissed back from three directions.

The noise built and kept building, and Adom stood there at the lectern with his name and absolutely nothing else delivered, watching the room he was meant to command come apart at the seams over the simple fact of his existence. He wanted to say it was odd and exaggerated, but honestly… he didn't mind, hah. Merris let it run for a moment, enjoying it a little, then raised one small hand, but the hall did not quiet.

He raised the other one, and this time something in the air pressed gently down on the noise, the sound thinning out the way it does underwater, until the students remembered themselves and went still in embarrassed ones and twos.

"Yes, yes," Merris said, beaming.

"I understand. Believe me, I understand the excitement around the Ghost of Xerkes—""Ghost of Arkhos," Adom murmured, not quite under his breath.

"—the Ghost of Xerkes," Merris continued serenely. He had been doing this for years now. The headmaster had confessed to Adom once, that he'd spent years quietly avoiding the headmasters of the rival academies at the inter-school functions, on account of how badly and how often Xerkes used to lose at Krozball, and that ever since the championship, he attended every single one, at length, and made a point of being seen. The Ghost was, in this sense, partly Merris's property now. Reputational spoils.

"But this morning," Merris went on, to the students, "the Ghost is simply another member of staff, and would I think rather like to finish his sentence. Professor Sylla. Please." The permission, absurdly, settled something. Adom inclined his head.

"Adom Sylla," he said again, into a hall that was now hanging on it.

"I'll be the titular professor of the Faculty of Runicology, here at Xerkes. I'll also be teaching the seventh-years." That was all, and for some reason, the hall applauded. They had not done that for the others, so he had no idea what they were applauding. There were even whistles now, a few sharp ones from the senior rows that he chose not to trace to their source. He lifted a hand, gave a small wave, said "thank you" once more to no one in particular, and sat down somewhat faster than he'd stood up.

His ears, he was aware, had gone slightly red. This was going to be quite the experience, he supposed.