Ennette sat on the ground with eyes wide and mouth open.
“What in the—!” some old man in a red robe standing nearby started to spit and sputter as the young man on the floor laughed heartily.
Ennette was not a stranger to colorful dreams—literally or figuratively. It wasn’t at all uncommon for her to dream of the things she read or the people that she liked, nor was it altogether uncommon that she had a certain amount of autonomy and awareness. Sights, sounds, even smells—she’d experienced it all at one point or another.
But this was… more. It was everything, all at once.
This was far more than she anticipated.
As the young man in front of her went between trying to look like he was trying to take things seriously to clearly thinking this was all a great joke, Ennette resisted the temptation to laugh right along with him. Given the absurdity of her current situation, any person in their right mind would come to the same conclusion that she did at that moment:
Even if the setting was so realistic, she was still in a dream.
And as it was a dream, Ennette logically deduced that once she had a better grasp of her situation, she then would be able to assert her will over it and gain some semblance of control over the situation—but where, exactly, was she supposed to start?
She looked up from where she was seated on the floor and into the handsome face of the young laughing man her mind had conjured for her. Her eyes lingered on a jawline she’d only seen in cologne ads, then drifted up to his eyes. As if sensing her interest, his gaze met hers as he quelled his laughter into a bemused smirk. She was sure she’d never seen such eyes before, be it on a model or a movie star.
Dark irises reflected his poorly contained mirth and the flickering lights from the braziers in the room as his smirk turned into a Cheshire-cat grin.
Flustered by the brazenness of her dream self’s perusal of a stranger's face, Ennette stood up and began to look around the room, turning in an attempt to distract herself from the literal dream man kneeling at her feet and hide her intense embarrassment.
Wherever she was resembled someplace out of one of her ancient history books, with tall columns and large stone bricks—but when she peered closer, everything seemed oddly pointed, from the mosaics on the wall to the decor to the details in the high ceiling that gave the strange impression they were in some kind of highly ornate cavern. Things that looked like incense burners, chests, and braziers made of glass, clay, or various kinds of metals took on shapes akin to stalagmites, while carved ceiling features and glass lamps hanging down made her think of colorful stalactites. The lamps cast patterns of stars as what looked like blue fire flickered within them.
Nor were the columns what she thought they were at first glance, as a green light emitted from the diamond patterns etched deep into the pillars. The strange way the light danced off the many facets of the architecture gave the whole room an eerie feeling.
It wasn’t just her, the young man, and the old man in the red robe, either. Many people off to the side were watching as her eyes and mind were working in tandem to find something for her to ground herself with. Most of them looked to be the same age and were hooting and hollering, laughing as they looked at her and whispered among themselves. They all looked clean and well dressed enough that she felt it was safe to assume that they were neither slaves nor servants, but the older people in the room were wearing much more ornate things.
None of their clothing looked normal, but if she had to place it, it felt vaguely historical European yet strangely modern—almost futuristic—with patterns, fabrics, and features that did not match the immediate design, just like the rest of the room.
And then there was the magic circle she was standing on.
An odd sense of discordance struck her as she tried to make sense of everything that she was seeing. Was she in danger? Was she about to be sacrificed to some demonic god because she watched too many horror movies?
As the shock of the overwhelming transition began to wane, she reminded herself once again that this was all just a dream, and everything was fine.
If she was about to be sacrificed, then at least this very long and bizarre dream she was taking part in would be over.
Ennette took a deep breath and turned about in the center of the circle.
“You there! Who are you? What—What—you!” The man in the red robe was still entirely lost as to what he just witnessed.
His robe—which she initially thought was red—was actually a complex geometric pattern of reds and yellows outlined by what looked like some kind of black, brown, or deep blue thread. Around his neck was a heavy, thick collar of similarly colored beads of glass, gems, or metal. Ennette was no expert on telling the difference between the materials, but she was almost certain gold was involved. There was something very stately about his appearance, with his slicked-back hair graying at the sides and a pointed goatee—but the expression on his face was anything but. He looked as lost as Ennette felt and didn’t quite seem to know if he should be blaming her for whatever was happening or the young man on the floor, who was rubbing his chin with a delighted smile as he looked over the circle himself.
Dark-eyed with sandy blonde hair, the younger dream man wore a different style of clothing than the older one next to him. He, too, was well dressed and put together, with his hair tied back in a short ponytail. The patterns of his teal, gold, and deep green fabrics emphasized points and angles but also had swirls and embroidery of ivy and horses. Belts of colorful fabric were tied around his waist, and he wore tall boots over well-fitted, deep blue pants.
He stood up in a graceful, cat-like motion and inspected her. He was quite tall, and loomed over her as he looked her over.
He has nice cheekbones, too, Ennette thought, feeling her face heat up. Luckily he stepped away and went back to examining his circle.
Kneeling, he touched the circle’s edge with an expression that was something between great curiosity and irritation.
Did the spell… fail? Ennette wondered, twisting around.
Given that this was all just an extension of her dream of meeting with the Starlight Secretary, Ennette felt safe in assuming that she was in a world that was, at the very least, loosely based on The Lady of the Golden Star. While she obviously couldn’t tell what the circle was for, she remembered enough to understand that, based on the positioning, the handsome young man she’d first seen should have been the spell's caster.
The person at fault being identified, Ennette flicked her hair over her shoulder and crossed her arms.
“W-Who are you?” Ennette demanded to know of the young man with far more courage than she felt.
As if there were someone else that it made sense to ask that of, he pointed at himself and said, “Me?”
“Isn’t this your stupid circle?” she asked. “Who else am I supposed to ask?”
“Fascinating,” he said.
“What is?”
“You.”
“Why?” she asked, frowning.
“What are you doing here?” he asked back, puzzled.
“Didn’t you bring me here?”
“I mean, apparently,” he said. “But my spell wasn’t supposed to work.”
Ennette tilted her head, but as she was about to ask him what that was supposed to mean, she noticed that the older man had turned the same color as his robes.
“Maziar…” the older man growled. Ennette blinked at the name, then paled. That was a name she knew, but certainly not the one that she expected to hear. Wasn’t this dream supposed to have come from the fact she was thinking of Laria when she fell asleep? If she was going to meet any characters from the book, shouldn’t Laria have been the first character she met? Well, outside of the Starlight Secretary, of course—but why the villain of all people! And why was he handsome? Of all people, why did her mind make a villain attractive?
“What do you mean, ‘the spell wasn’t supposed to work?’” the older man asked.
The young man shrugged. “It’s not like I used complicated language,” Maziar told him.
“You—You—! What have you done!”
“Does it matter if I say I didn’t summon a girl on purpose?”
“This is preposterous!” the old man, whose name was actually Zerathon Mortia, exclaimed, throwing his arms up in the air for lack of a better way to illustrate just how frustrated he was with the young man.
Zerathon didn’t want to hate his job, but every day for the past two years, he had been thinking of walking right out the front door of the Tower and never looking back. At first, he’d pitied the poor young Maziar, who’d shown up on the Tower’s doorstep looking like a drowned kitten. He was dreadfully ill and incredibly weak. Any mana in him seemed to have been depleted, just teetering on the edge of keeping the boy alive.
He remembered hearing the rumors about the powerful Kreeth boy, but meeting him in person revealed him to be nothing more than a cripple. Pitying him, the council gave him the right to stay indefinitely, so long as his mother—the only person thought to be capable of doing the necessary research needed to get him back on his feet—was the Grand Wizard.
Only after that, when Maziar’s health improved, did they realize what a complete and miserable mistake they had made. Everyone paid the price, and now his mischievous behavior had gotten some poor nobody involved in the endless stream of chaos that seemed to follow in his wake.
Squeezing the bridge of his nose in an attempt to mitigate his growing headache, Zerathon groaned.
“You had an assignment to complete—are you admitting that you intended to fail on purpose?” He asked. “Are you truly set on making a mockery of the Grand Wizard and this institution?”
Wincing, Maziar said, “Did you need to bring her up? Can’t I just make a mockery of myself, or do all my choices have to implicate someone else?”
“Either way, your choices have consequences!”
“Professor, I’m telling you—it wasn’t supposed to work!” Maziar insisted, hands on his hips. “How could there be a consequence from a spell that doesn’t work?”
“Messing with any magic circle can have any number of unknown consequences!” Zerathon sighed. “And look, now you’ve summoned a… girl. A perfectly normal young lady who was probably minding her own business until you got it in that empty head of yours to fail on purpose!”
“When I say it wasn’t supposed to work, I mean that it wasn’t supposed to work at all,” Maziar pouted, and Zerathon wondered what Yulda would have done if he slapped her son silly.
He couldn’t imagine how she hadn’t made that part of his daily schedule yet. What the boy really needed was discipline, not magic instruction.
“I-I’m sorry to interrupt, but…institution? Is this… a Tower?” the red-haired girl that Maziar had torn from her proper place asked, miming the shape of a tower with her hands. “Are you all… students? Teachers?”
Tilting his head, Zerathon looked the girl over. Other than her appearance as a human, everything else about her was slightly odd. Her clothing was strange—especially for a woman, with oddly light, tight, cloth-like pants and a loose shirt with a funny-looking cat face on it that showed her midriff. She wasn’t wearing anything on her feet. Her accent, too, was particularly odd. He’d had many students throughout his tenure, and he wasn’t quite sure he’d heard the like.
Is she from across the sea, perhaps? He wondered, though that didn’t quite make enough sense, either. It wasn’t like he’d never met people from the other side of Gaiuel.
But if she were from another plane, how would she know who they were?
“You,” he started, looking straight at the girl. “Who are you?”
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