The dining hall was not what Hermes had expected.
It was vast and vaulted, lit by hanging lanterns that cast everything in amber, with long wooden tables running the length of the room and the general atmosphere of a medieval tavern that had somehow been made respectable. Less Hogwarts Great Hall, more a very large inn that took itself seriously.
Professor Abano deposited him at the entrance with the efficiency of someone releasing a fish back into water and disappeared into the crowd without a word.
Hermes stood there for a moment.
Right then.
He followed the loose current of students toward a long booth at the far end where kitchen staff moved with practiced speed, loading trays without ceremony or eye contact. He joined the queue, shuffled forward, and when his turn came the woman behind the counter looked him over with the particular haughtiness of someone who had decided not to like him before he'd opened his mouth.
She loaded his tray without a word. A plate of cooked fish. Sliced bread. A bowl of something that might be soup. An empty mug. She slid it across the counter and was already looking past him.
Hermes accepted the tray and found an empty table near the wall.
He was, he realised, extremely hungry.
A jug of water sat on the table. He poured himself a mug and started with the fish.
No seasoning. No sauce. No garnish.
But the flesh was sweet and succulent in a way that caught him completely off guard.
He tried the bread next. It was aggressively hard. Structurally speaking it was less food and more a weapon that had lost its ambition. He stared at it for a moment, then looked at the soup, then dipped the bread into the soup and tried it again.
Much better.
Presumably that was the intended method. I refuse to believe anyone eats this voluntarily otherwise.
The soup itself was just salty. Not unpleasant. Not interesting. It reminded him of the exquisite 'British' cuisine. He ate it anyway because he was hungry and hunger, it turned out, was a remarkably effective seasoning.
His thoughts drifted. He called up his status again, letting the runes settle in front of him while he ate.
—
Name: Hermes
True Name: —
Rank: Aspirant
Soul Core: Dormant
Memories: —
Echoes: —
Attributes: [Oculus Sapientiae], [Ars Scriptoria], [Ars Homuncularis]
Attributes Description:
Oculus Sapientiae — You have eyes. They work better than most. Do try not to stare.
Ars Scriptoria — You have been given a pen. What you write with it is your problem.
Ars Homuncularis — You may now play god with your little creations. This will end well.
Aspect: [Novice Alchemist]
Aspect Description:
[A Novice Alchemist believes he can improve upon creation itself. He is wrong. He has always been wrong. Every alchemist before him was wrong. This one will be no different.]
—
His eyes lingered on the Aspect.
Novice Alchemist.
One might say that the end goal of all alchemists was to refine the Philosopher's Stone. But that was a shallow reading. The Stone was never really about endless gold or even immortality, as appealing as both sounded. Those were the dreams of lesser men who had missed the point entirely.
The true meaning of alchemy was transformation.
Transform ignorance into wisdom. The fragmented self into a unified whole. Body and spirit. Matter and consciousness. The mortal into something perfected and complete.
The Philosopher's Stone was never a literal object. It was a symbol — the symbolic representation of a being that had undergone total and absolute transformation. A being that had refined itself so completely it had transcended the limitations of what it once was.
Hermes's goal was to become the Philosopher's Stone.
Not to create it. To become it.
And his Aspect, cryptic and insulting as its description was, provided him exactly that path.
The Nightmare Spell says every alchemist before me was wrong, we'll see about that.
He finished the last of the bread.
Three days until the attack. I should learn everything I can in that time.
He was also, he noticed, extremely sleepy.
After the last plates were cleared, the older students rose without announcement.
Everyone else followed, the way people follow when the alternative is being conspicuously wrong. Hermes stood and joined the nearest row, slotting himself into the quiet procession as it wound through corridor after corridor, staircase after staircase, the castle revealing itself in fragments of torchlight and cold stone.
Dorms, he realised, as the first door opened and the oldest students began filing in one by one.
The group thinned with each door. Oldest first, then the next, then the next, each cohort peeling away with quiet efficiency. He hadn't seen his own reflection yet but he could feel it — he was shorter than he remembered being. Not dramatically so, but enough.
He was a child now. Wonderful.
He tracked the remaining students by height, searching for the ones closest to his own, and eventually there was only a cluster left who looked roughly his age, taller but not by much, filing toward a door near the end of the corridor. He drifted to the back of their row and joined without a word.
The students nearest him exchanged looks. Confused. Mildly annoyed.
What are you looking at? I'm simply doing as the Romans do.
He kept his expression neutral.
One by one they filed through. An older student stood at the door — a prefect, or whatever the local equivalent was — admitting them in an orderly single file. The looks from his neighbours grew more pointed as the line shortened. He ignored them with the serenity of someone committed to a decision they were no longer willing to revisit.
His turn came.
He stepped forward with what he hoped was the facade of confidence.
"Halt."
He halted. Like a good boy.
The prefect looked at him with the particular expression of someone who had expected the evening to be simple.
"What are you doing here? This isn't your designated group. Return to your assigned dormitory."
"I forgot," Hermes said.
The prefect blinked.
"…What?"
"I forgot my designated group." He felt his ears go red. The warmth spread upward across his face with the slow inevitability of a tide. "And my room."
The needles started in his scalp first, then his back. The specific, crawling discomfort of having said something embarrassing in front of strangers and being unable to take it back.
The prefect stared at him for a long moment.
"Follow me," he said finally.
They walked in silence through a different sequence of corridors, narrower and dimmer than the ones before, until the prefect stopped before a door and produced a key.
"Everyone is already asleep," he said quietly. "Don't make noise."
The lock turned. The door opened onto darkness.
"Thanks," Hermes murmured, and slipped inside.
The door closed behind him. The key turned. Footsteps retreated down the corridor and then there was only silence.
His eyes adjusted slowly.
Rows of beds. Every one of them occupied, blankets rising and falling in the quiet rhythm of sleep.
Every one except one.
The bare wooden slats of an empty bunk stared back at him. No mattress. His pillow and blanket were there, folded with an almost deliberate neatness that made it worse somehow.
Oh.
The feeling arrived before the thought did. A cold, specific recognition. He had been here before — not this room, not this castle — but this exact arrangement. The bare bunk. The particular silence of people pretending not to be awake. It had happened to him once, years ago, in a boarding school his parents had sent him to. He had said nothing then. Told no one. Simply concluded that nothing would come of it and endured.
He shut the memory down before it could fully surface.
A scenario constructed from my own regrets.
That confirmed something. Did the Spell choose this deliberately? To drag up old wounds and see what he did with them? If so it should have tried harder — this was one of the tamer things that had happened to him in that place. But an opportunity was an opportunity regardless of where it came from.
Last time I said nothing. Perhaps that is what I am meant to correct.
He was still thinking when he heard it.
The soft sound of blankets shifting. Once. Then again. Then all around him, a quiet rustling spreading through the dark like something waking up.