After breakfast, all the seniors are piling into the arched room deep in the basement, and unlike them, I will only be watching.
The hexagonal room is all wood, ceilings and walls and floors, and it’s far too dim with only lanterns bolted to the walls.
It was built to be the examination room, with stone statues of the gods lining the walls, because prints are the essence of the gods—and so it’s all very religious in here.
My mouth purses as I snag in the slow-moving line of students parting off to their designated seats.
I avoid the stares of the statues—those sorts of pale eyes that follow me around a room.
It’s the Dagda that ices me inside out.
His statue is tallest, looming across the room, reaching up to the curve of the ceiling. His sculpted form is human-like, bulked with more muscles than possible, a neck thicker than my thigh, but in one strong grip, he wields a hammer coiled with tree roots, and in the other, a harp that drips with crimson blood.
Like the blood, his eyes are painted red.
Those eyes follow me to the seat with my name card.
Prickles rinse over my body, head to toe.
I arch my neck back and look up at the ceiling.
Beams disturb the detail of the painting, but by the gold, the helmet, the scarabs, and the sun in the centre, I know it is a depiction of Heka, the essence of magic, of life, the mother and the father, the beginning and the end.
Heka is not a god in the sense of the Dagda. Heka is not a form, not a soul or a spirit, not a conscious deity, not a he nor a she.
Heka is all.
Oliver drops down beside me with a drawn-out breath of reluctance, a sigh so gentle and civilised that it lowers my gaze from the ceiling.
He wears the fatigue of the semester, head-to-toe. His shirt is creased around the buttons and collar, his hair tousled andslightly frizzed. Dark circles dim his eyes, and his posture on the wooden pew is too sagged.
Forearms braced on his thighs, he drops his head—and looks half-asleep by the time Master Wealdwine starts calling out names.
The podium in the middle is poorly lit, but the alphabetical order of the seating means that I’m close enough that I can watch without straining my eyes and giving myself a headache.
First called up, Dragana and Zef drag themselves to the podium. Reluctance weighs down their shoes like bricks underwater.
All the reluctance in the world won’t get them out of this.
Breakfast sits heavy in my gut.
Zef and Dragana stand opposite each other on the podium, facing off with chewed mouths and flickering gazes.
Their nerves eat away at them as, slowly, loudly, Master Wealdwine pushes a trolley to the centre of the stage.
The clatter of the wheels over wooden boards rattles metal tools on the surface of the trolley, and it’s a jangling sound I feel in my bones.
Oliver curses under his breath.
The string of words sounds like a hiss before he draws back to sit upright, and he turns a scathing glare on the trolley.
Must be having migraines again.
Pushing himself too far.
Good.
Hope he pushes himself all the way into a coma.
