Regaining consciousness was not something like a sudden shock, but a slow, unwilling wave breaking upon the deserted shore. The first thing Leo knew was the smell, not the sterile, antiseptic smell of a hospital, but a compound odor of dried herbs, ozone and something old, something like sun-baked stone and an old parchment, and so forth. The second one was the light. It was an airy flickering light which was throbbing softly in the eyelids of his closed eyes in cerulean and silver.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on a low cot, and in a blanket of impossibly soft, grey wool. It was a circular room with smooth pale-colored walls which had a certain glow of their own. But it was the atmosphere in which he breathed that took away the breath. Dozen of burning runes, all symbols, intricate and three-dimensional, multiplied slowly around his cot in a sphere. They flicked a gentle, all-rhythmic light on, and as they swiveled gave varying patterns on the walls and the floor. There were some the cool blue of a dark glacier, and some the warm gold of sunshine, and some there was glowing with a worrying, faint criminal. He was having the peculiar, uncomfortable sensation that they were reading him.
The alienation was cool and deep. This wasn't his world. A familiar infirmary and its clean lines and fluorescent lights were a distant thing in the past. In this case, even healing was esoteric, alien. He was an impostor, a banal cog, pushed into the mystical machine in which he belonged.
"Vital signs have stabilized. Essence leakage contained. The runic lattice is running well enough nomenally.
The voice of the Warden was a kind of cold like shiver in his brain. It was called... critical, perceptive, as though he were examining something that was a malfunctioning piece of machinery.
Where are we? Leo wondered, the cry that is screaming in the silence of my skull.
"The Aethelgard Infirmary. Main medical school of the Mage Academy. The runic array is a Diagnostic and Containment Field of Class-III. Your signature of the essence was swinging here and there on arrival, which caused our quarantine measures to work automatically.
Quarantine? Panic, a shiver, javelined into him. Are they going to dissect me?
"Unlikely. Their practices imply conservation and analysis, rather than dissection. You are a novelty."
Another instant he had to think about the horror of being a novelty, the runes which hung round him were flickering and fading into the wall until the room was no more than a room, though a room with magical lights round it and a circular form. The door, which was a smooth piece of wall which he had not even caught sight of, slid open a few minutes later with a whisper of stone on stone.
A man stood there. He was tall and thin, and wore plain, dark grey robes, his hair a shock of unruly white, which stood in a great contrast to a face which looked too young to have it. His eyes were piercing, stormy grey, and they went glaring over the room and came to rest on Leo with an intensity that was disturbing. At his shoulder flew a little crystal-like slate, which was covered with moving writing.
"You're awake. Good, man, good, his voice was dry and not warm. He didn't introduce himself. He had moved into the room, and the slate was floating along submissively beside him. "I am Professor Riven. I supervise abnormal admissions. What is your spatial coherence?"
Leo only gawked, with his mouth open. "My… what?"
The eyes of Riven were narrowed. He lightly touched his fingers, and the crystalline slate has moved nearer to Leo. The effects of an unauthorized portal transit include disorientation. To a coming one, in particular, one who, as it were, had arrived. Your name."
It wasn't a question. It was a demand.
"Leo," he managed to croak. "Leo Aris."
Riven passed his fingers in the air, and writing ran over the slate. He frowned. The system is recording your voice input, but it is failing to match your file. He looked at the slate, then at Leo, and his eyes stayed on the shining brand that was imprinted on the palm of Leo, who lay on the blanket. "Show me your Codex."
"My… what?"
"The System Interface. The expression of your relationship. Summon it."
Leo had no idea how to do that. He looked down and saw his own hands helpless. The Warden did not scruple, however.
Obedience to the command of authority.
The world before the eyes of Leo broke. Or rather, it was overlaid. The Codex--so it was its name--grew out in his vision, much more elaborate and vivid than in his bedroom. It was no more a pale mist, but a solid, complex fabric of light. His name, LEO ARIS, was rising in gleaming glyphs on the top. The four stats mentioned by the Warden days ago were next below it, now marked plainly, MIND, WILL, ESSENCE, BODY. They also had poor values with most having a low of just a meager 4 or 5. Other sections included SKILLS, which was empty except the one, greyed out glyph of the Lumen Spell and stage, UNBOUND INITIATE.
Professor Riven had his own slate to study and the scowl on his face deepened to a frown. "This is… irregular." He tapped the slate sharply. Your name is in the Academy Registry. It recognizes the Warden-summons. But your file student file... it is a ghost. It's blank." His angry eyes pierced Leo as he looked up. "No bloodline listed. No affinity assessment. No pre-enrollment testing. Not even a place of birth outside of Mortal Realm. The system is like it knows you exist but it does not know about what you are.
The turn of the blank file came out like a physical blow. He could not fit here even here, in this place of magic and wonder. He was a glitch. A fault in their ideal, mystic system. The sense of being a pretender added to it, hardening into a more sinister state.
Riven leaned in, his voice lowered to the whisper of a word that was no more than a hiss to Leo, a foreshadowing that wasn't even sharp enough to pass as such, but which made Leo shiver again. A Warden can not be here... no more. They were decommissioned. Scrapped. How did you come by one?"
And before Leo was able to lie, Riven drew himself erect, his face flinty with professionalism again. "No matter. The Registrar will have a fit." He made another gesture, and the slate came flying by, bursting through the open doorway. "Get up. Your physical form is intact. Orientation is in twenty minutes. Try not to cause a scene."
And with that he walked off, the stone door closing down after him, and Leo was left alone, in the throbbing light of the infirmary.
He shook his legs down at the edge of the cot and the feet came in contact with the cold smooth rock. He felt heavy in his body because of the mere impossibility of his situation. He was in a magic academy. His file was blank. A professor heard about the Warden and apparently believed that it was a relic which belonged to a scrap heap.
He glanced down on his branded palm, and about the foreign room. This was his first actual encounter with the environment of the Academy, and one of cold analysis and puzzling mystery. They were not greeted, but evaluated. It was not warm, it was just hierarchical. He was at the very bottom of it.
When he stood there full of a great feeling of solitude his own Codex, which had passively hung there, twinkled. The interface was glowing with a steady, yellow light that shivered like a broken neon lamp. The glyphs became indistinct, disorganized and in a moment of dread it seemed that the whole system was going to degenerate right out of sight.
Then another window had forced its way to the fore of the UI. It was not like the others, darker, having a border of jagged and obsidian glyphs. There was one piece of writing in the middle of the window, in full-blooded, rude type, as though it were meant to cut his eyes.
It was a voice. but it was not cold and regal about the Warden. It was yet another thing, more deeply touching, more sonorous, a noise of shifting tectonic plates and the moaning of a star that was dying. It was the voice of the System himself.
"WE ARE UNFINISHED."
The words were displayed in his eyes with a shocking, absolute truth. The window then disappeared and his Codex fell to the usual stable presentation as though nothing had occurred.
Leo was paralyzed and his blood was ice-cold. The melodramatic suspense was a hole that was opening under his feet. The Warden was another thing--another being, a parasite, a pilot. But this, this was the structure of this world outlawing him, or maybe, realizing something in its own make up which was amiss. The fact that struck him was a crushing one; he was not simply different with the other students whom he had not properly encountered yet. He was a nonconformity to the reality of the Academy itself.
It was an internal and immediate conflict. The system of Academy did not know what to do with him. Professor Riven had his suspicions. There were two options, a desperate dilemma: he can keep this anomaly, this incompleteness of his status, and attempt to fit in, to pretend his way out of whatever follows. Or he might tell it, make his submission to a system that viewed him as a ghost in the machine, and a professor who viewed his supreme secret as a scrap of forbidden stuff.
He glanced at the door, and then down at the brand on his palm, an emblem of a fate which he had never desired. Hiding it was a risk. It was a higher one to report it.
With a trembling breath, Leo Aris, the Unbound Initiate whose file was blank, and whose Codex had not been filled in, approached the door. Surviving at least meant keeping silent. He would hide. He had to. Since the voice of the Codex had not spoken like a malfunction. It had sounded like a promise... and he was appalled at what it was going to complete.