Chapter 1 #3
He forgot me as soon as he found something better.
I glance at the dark-haired instructor at the Foros table, thankfully looking down at his cups. Someone good looking like him could think he’s better than me, I guess, except that I don’t think I would have a chance with him. Would going to the beach meadow with him feel like plain bread?
He looks up at me, and I stare at the sky, wondering what insanity has come to my mind. Fine, Marcus has been gone for a year, and that’s a long time, but imagining lying down with an instructor, even a young and good-looking one, isn’t going to help me now.
I tell myself I’ll have plenty of opportunities to find interesting men in the academy, but all it does is make me even more anxious to pass the Trial.
Auranius takes off from the hill, his large shadow covering the grounds and the academy as he flies over us towards the ocean. At least he reminds me that I want to fly even more than I want to fuck. And still, I want both.
I want everything: the glory, the excitement, the fulfillment. I want to feel air beneath me as I float over our kingdom, like I’ve seen sentinels doing so many times before. Every time, my heart caught in a hiccup, my chest tight, that yearning deep like a knife lodged in my sternum.
My eyes focus on the table with the hourglasses, when a shadow covers us. My gaze lifts, expecting to see Auranius returning, but it’s a cloud. Gray and heavy, but lonely. More clouds are forming over the sea, clouds that will become liquid and fall before sunset.
Every evening in the summer, a thunderstorm hits us, usually at around five in the afternoon, and today it won’t be different. But the Trial should be done by then. Hopefully.
More candidates go up and down the towers, while I try to conjure the most unsexy image I can, just to banish any bizarre thoughts about the instructor.
Fish innards. Rotten fish innards. And yet they remind me of Marcus.
Bleh. I focus on the trials instead, even if my anxiety mounts every time a new candidate steps forward.
Meanwhile, clouds and more clouds cast shadows over us, and I can no longer see the time on the sundial, even if I’m sure three was a long time ago.
Thunder roars in the distance. Shit. What if they postpone the Trial because of the rain?
What if they cancel it? Electricity feels heavy in the stuffy afternoon air, and my heart beats, beats, beats.
Would the clouds listen to me if I told them to wait?
My life’s suspended here, hoping for a chance.
More thunder roars, and my body feels stiff and cold, anxiety like a second layer of skin. An instructor steps out of the signing table and walks towards us. Please, please, please, don’t tell us the rest of the Trial is canceled today. Please. It’s my last chance.
“Three batch. Come forward.” His voice is solemn and low.
Forward?
I get up in a fraction of a second, and stand before him, as five other people do the same. We’re a small group, like some kind of leftovers.
He lines us up far from the remaining two o’clock batch—and I’m the first. Relief washes over my body right as another thunderclap splits the sky. We don’t have an hour before the rain.
The instructor walks to the back of the line and calls the girl standing there. It’s when I realize that, in reality, I’m not the first, but the last.
My mind is a blur as more and more clouds cover us, as one by one, the candidates take their turns. I can’t make the rain wait, can’t make everyone go faster, and yet for some reason, my body thinks that by getting stiff and bouncing around my feet, it can wield time and weather.
A thick drop of water hits my face, and I hear, “Next!”
The young man in front of me heads to the sandglass table, and my heartbeat echoes through my veins, as if it had climbed to my neck, behind my ear: thump, thump, thump.
Mayara, you trained for this. You’re ready. This is my wise voice, but it told me the same thing last year, and I don’t trust it anymore.
But you weren’t ready like you are now, it says, all calm and confident, as if it believed the nonsense it was saying.
Yes, but I didn’t predict any rain, I reply.
“Next!”
It’s me. It’s me, and I run to the hourglass table.
The instructor stares at a paper, barely raising his eyes. “May Foros bless you.”
I force a smile, then put my hand in the opening.
Time is limited, but I can feel the differences between the wooden frames, even if they are minimal.
Larger frames mean more sand, more time.
My fingers brush past several smaller ones, searching, until they close around the largest one I can find, and I pull it out.
My heart freezes. It can’t be.
While the wooden frame is indeed huge, inside, the glass vial is impossibly small, a tiny channel for a trickle of sand. Twenty seconds at most, but my bet is on fifteen.
I’ve watched this Trial many times, and one thing I know: climbing up and down the tower in thirty seconds is extremely hard.
In fifteen, it’s impossible.