Chapter 559: Outed

Arc felt it would take a little longer to settle things after the distraction Owyn just created, so she sent him off the ship to wait while she worked through exactly what was going on with Snow and the quadruplets.

By the end of it, she managed to extract their promise that they would stop harassing Snow, provided their mutual teacher didn’t find out about the two ratkin’s attempt to sneakily acquire metal for the ship, and provided they pay back Snow in full.

Afterwards, she found Owyn sitting at the edge of the dock, staring out over the lake towards the inner edge of the Veil. Sitting next to him, she waited for him to say something, but when he continued to stare out, she finally asked, "What’s really going on, Owyn? Does this have something to do with what my father said?"

"Yeah," he replied, and took a deep breath. "Coming through the Veil... did something to me. The, um... your mothers? Back at the hospital, they said I’d have to pick between losing all my magic or becoming... something else."

"Something else?" Arc asked.

"I didn’t quite understand. I just know I’ve got a couple of weeks to decide between the two."

"That’s... How can that be?"

After letting out another sigh, Owyn tried to explain in depth. Arc struggled just as much as he did to understand the concepts that had been thrown at him. She felt guilty for not realizing what was happening to him, but the last few days had been hectic, so the best she could do was promise, "Whatever happens, I’ll go with you when you see my parents, if only to make sure you get answers. They shouldn’t be keeping secrets like this."

"I appreciate that... and you," Owyn said, with a smile so sincere it left a slight blush on Arc’s cheeks as she looked away, before her eyes widened and she let out an excited sound. "Look!"

The formation of dragons, a wing of five, passed in an arc well before the edge of the Veil as they flew, light glinting off their well-tended scales and the healthy membranes of their wings.

"Dragon Knights?" Owyn asked.

"Yes! Looks like a training flight for young dragons. Look, they’ve got two desert spiketails; the brownish ones. I think that the yellow one is a venomous acrod, and the green one is a common forest dragon. Ah, leaftail." She pointed at the leading dragon. "That one at the head of the formation is a mistwing. See the segments on the wings? They’re also aquatic. Most of the dragons used by the Knights are red Heavenflames, and they don’t get along with others."

"Dragon’s aren’t all that common on the outside," Owyn said. "Except on Diurnus, from what I hear."

"That’s a shame," Arc said, covering her eyes as the flight grew distant. She realized Owyn was looking at her funny and blurted, "What?"

"You were smiling," he said, pushing himself to a stand.

Arc immediately looked away, crossing her arms, "I just really like dragons..."

"I believe you," he said casually. "Maybe this weekend you’ll get a dragon of your own?"

Arc snorted. "I doubt it’s that fast. No one knows how a dragon picks their rider."

"Well, maybe we’ll find out together," Arc felt her heart flutter a little at the words as he put his hands in his pocket and turned, walking back up the gangway.

Her mind filled with ideas about what it would be like to have a dragonflight team like Johan and Aiden, though of course Owyn would need quite a large dragon, maybe even a matriarch, just to get into the air.

Again, she found herself smiling. The weekend couldn’t come fast enough...

*

The next day, however, Arc discovered just how stressful the rest of her week was going to be.

She noticed first that when she went to breakfast, many other students were whispering and looking in her direction. Most of them were first years, but a few second and third years were in on it as well. Even some of the Disciplinary Committee students cast baleful glances her way, and it wasn’t until she ran into Veng during class that she found out why.

"Some of the Disciplinary Committee members thought that the contract was up, and because no one got a name, they started talking..." And by talking, Arc learned that she was being slandered as forcing other students into the contract using her family’s influence. The ink for such contracts, which used crushed mana stone, was apparently expensive, which made her look like some out-of-touch rich kid throwing around resources without a care.

They assumed she was the one who broached her own identity, despite the fact that she’d been very publicly, highly indisposed at the time. The more Veng told her, the more Arc got the sense that the truth of her alibi didn’t matter one whit. She was being looked at as the "bad egg" of the House of Stars.

"Fuck, and you’re sure there’s nothing to implicate anyone? What if the person who burned the contract is the same person who tried to kill me?" Arc scratched under her horn, not hearing a single word the Professor was saying.

"The only thing I can really think of is that the contract was somehow rigged from the start, or someone got a more advanced student to break it. The only people who knew about it were the Disciplinary Committee."

"So what’s the school going to do about it?" Owyn asked from the other side of Arc, his tone aggressive but clearly aimed more at Veng.

"About the broken contract? Nothing," Veng met Owyn’s glare with one of his own. "They’re considering it a student matter gone wrong." He looked back at Arc. "But when it comes to what nearly happened, I’m pretty sure I saw a squad of Knights this morning at that room where you almost..."

"Died," Arc finished.

"Yeah."

"Well, it’s a good thing my "useless" magic came through for once..."

Veng gave Arc a sympathetic look. "I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up without access to your own magic... Are you sure you didn’t have it sooner? Your father had his mavenry active, even if he didn’t recognise it at the time. It allowed him to grow his power by eating mana crystals."

"First off, I would know if I had it. And second, why are you talking about my Father? How do you even know that?"

"I read his biography. It’s required for second-year specials."

"For what? History?" Arc scoffed.

"Ethics," Veng replied.

"What, to teach everyone how to be a good little member of society?"

"Not exactly," Veng sounded uncomfortable, and Arc remembered he was one of those who quasi-worshipped her Father. "I guess you could ask Professor Char. She wrote it."

Too uncomfortable to continue the subject, Arc changed it. "Speaking of... what happened. I didn’t see you before then. What happened to you after the attack?"

Veng winced. "After I defeated Rivna, ah, ’Ripper,’ I reported the fight to the Coterie... It’s a council of Vampires separate from the other demons. They did not like hearing what he was doing, or the fact that I beat him, but with the city as it was... They decided to be lenient and turned him over to the city for holding. Provided he cooperates with the Knights, they might let him out in ten or so years if he behaves."

"Ten years?" Owyn said.

"To an adult demon, it’s a light but not completely dismissible loss of time. Since there was no way to confirm whether he actually killed anyone in the Underground..." Veng trailed off, sounding a bit bitter. "Compared to when we lived in Hell, the Coterie considers his punishment to be quite civil."

Arc shuddered. If this was how demons treated each other for attempted murder, what else did they view as ’civil’? The Coterie sounded like a bunch of political wanks, not that Arc would say that to Veng’s face.

The rest of Veng’s "week off" had been lost to his helping with the recovery efforts after the incursion, a "community service" his parents insisted on to keep him busy and make it clear the Coterie was cooperating with the city.

In the end, Arc didn’t manage to catch Professor Char that day, or the next, since she started getting approached by students she didn’t know, and worse, students she recognized as wanting nothing to do with her until her identity got revealed. While some came by because they were curious about the rumored attempted murder on campus, some used the chance to take subtle or not-so-subtle digs at her or her family, and Arc very quickly settled into the habit of taking her meals to her room or Owyn’s, hoping their interest would blow over at some point.

The one bright point of this was that she sort of figured out why she couldn’t get a read on Owyn’s roommate, who seemed to be the one person that wasn’t her friend who didn’t care who she was. The angel was the most guarded and standoffish person she’d ever met, and in private, she relayed this to Owyn as they experimented with what she could read through the omnipresent threads.

It turned out that shielding emotions from Arc’s ability to interpret was rather easy if one knew that was what they were doing. She could still "see" Owyn’s threads, even with her eyes closed, but she couldn’t read them as long as he made a conscious effort to veil his thoughts.

Even though Rikael didn’t seem to care what Owyn and Arc were up to, he had an oddly helpful idea when Arc described how painful everything had felt at first. His only response, after sipping coffee, was "Existence is pain."

That led Arc through the question of what pain was for, and when she worked through that, she found that she could almost refine her sense of specific people amidst the threads when she opened herself to the pain that underpinned those senses of connection. This discovery happened so fast and felt so familiar that Arc found herself suspicious. Veng’s question kept echoing in her head, bringing her mind to the uncomfortable place where darkness and fire waited.

Are you sure you didn’t have it sooner?