Chapter 11 Caelum Twelve Years Old #3
“Did my father also inform you that this arrangement is meant to be secret?” he asked, tossing his head to get a hank of platinum blond hair out of his eyes.
At Pants’s stupid frown, Caelum scoffed.
“That means, you do anything to blow my cover… like beat up your supposed friend… or do anything but show me the utmost fucking respect as befits the noble heir to the Bones fortune… I can assure you, my father won’t give two shits if I discipline you accordingly.
Or if you fall out of a fucking window of the castle, for that matter. ”
Scar looked distinctly pale now.
Voltaire looked mostly angry, but Caelum could see him thinking.
Keep rubbing those two brain cells together, you unmagicked worm, he thought coldly.
Now that he’d cowed them, Caelum decided he’d offer a carrot.
“Right,” he said. He placed his hands on his thighs and pushed himself to his feet. “I fancy a wander. I think it’s time to start letting everyone know I’ve arrived.”
There was a silence while his words sank in.
Then Voltaire actually smirked.
Caelum assessed him again.
Okay, he could work with that.
If he gave Voltaire and Pants a free hand, both on the train and once they’d reached the school, most of his classmates would hate his guts before he’d even stepped foot at Briarwood.
That should be enough to keep his father happy, and maybe enough to get him to back off a little.
It might also keep Voltaire, Maskey, and Pants from turning those fists on him.
Caelum walked to the compartment door and shoved it open.
He didn’t bother to look back to see if the oafs were following him. He knew they would. For the same reason, he simply entered the corridor and––
––got shoved, hard, from behind.
He hadn’t felt the thick hand of Voltaire until he was already flying forward.
His head slammed into the window of the train. Pain, and panic, took over before Caelum could control how his magic reacted to that information.
He phased, without consciously triggering it at all––
He blinked his eyes, breathing hard, hands pressed against a walled surface that felt like smooth glass tiles. He fought to think, then to look around, to make sense of where he was, of the bodies moving through the shadowy spaces around him.
Like a cornered animal, he didn’t move.
He stood there, panting, his mind and eyes blurred.
Until, all at once, his eyes snapped back into focus.
Eye of Ra. Where was he? He certainly wasn’t on the train.
He was outside, though not completely in the sunlight.
It looked and felt like he stood in a train station entrance, a small one, anyway, nowhere near as large as the one he’d stood in with his father less than a half-hour ago.
Above him, a round symbol in red and blue was made out of ceramic tiles, dirtied by smoke and dust.
His heart thumped loudly in his chest but he daren’t move from the wall.
He was still trying to decide if he should phase back through the wall, even with all of these Magicals walking to and fro, when another realization came to him.
These people had no magic.
He could scarcely see auras around any of them.
The thought made him light-headed, even before he fully comprehended what it meant. Then it clicked, and his anxiety grew into something closer to terror.
Overworld.
Gods and dragons… his father would absolutely murder him.
He’d lock him in the dungeon until after the snows melted, if not until he reached nineteen.
Had he really phased into the dark kingdom of Overworld?
Why would his magic bring him here, of all places?
Usually a logic of some kind guided his phasing, some rhyme or reason to where he ended up, particularly when he did it on accident.
He was still panting, fighting that feeling he might pass out––
He felt eyes looking at him.
Someone was staring.
Someone finally noticed him standing against the wall.
He turned his head before he could think about disappearing, before he could even pull the spell out of his mind, or remember the exact mudras that went with it, and then he froze.
It was a girl. Just a small girl, younger than him.
Black, curly, wild hair, shockingly large green eyes, a half-open, surprised mouth. She wore a fluffy pink jumper with lime-green, stretchy trousers with little lines on them. A backpack hung low on her back, covered in purple and blue dragons and unicorns.
She definitely looked younger than he was, but not by much.
She stared at him.
He stared back.
The mere fact of their locked gazes was strange enough, startling enough, Caelum missed everything else about her for a full two breaths.
Then it hit him, what he was actually seeing.
Magic swirled around her.
Not a small amount of magic: a volcanic, unruly, startling, chaotic, dizzying amount of magic.
It sparked and flashed in a thick aura caged behind black, spiderweb lines, a meshed web of ironlike spells that held her in, possibly to keep her from exploding outwards.
The colorful, wild, storm-like magic slammed and rushed and twisted against the restraint like a wild beast locked in a too-small pen.
Something drew his eyes upwards then, and he gaped openly.
A sharp, white and blue sun exploded into his view.
It burned brightly, several feet above her head, feeding that caged magic with all of its power and wrath, sparking brighter the longer he stared.
It was beautiful.
Gods of the Underworld, he’d never seen anything, anywhere, on anyone, as beautiful and fierce as that rotating, burning, pulsing little light.
He didn’t understand why, but it made him want to cry.