The absolute silence of the pitch-black dormitory was not merely broken; it was thoroughly shredded by a sound that pierced right to the bone. It was a soft, elastic giggle that seemed to originate from no specific corner, echoing directly against the inside of their skulls.
BAAAA!!!
Silarias and Nyx bolted upright almost simultaneously, the mattress rebounding under their sudden weight. Nyx instantly seized Silarias by the wrist, her fingers tightening so hard her nails bit deep into his skin.
“Nyyyx!!? .. I’m so exhausted I’m starting to hear things,” Silarias whispered frantically, blinking heavily as he tried to pierce the surrounding gloom.
“Like some kind of goat—” Nyx cut in sharply, her voice barely more than a hoarse rasp.
“Oh, so you hear it too…” Silarias muttered.
CRACK!
The foot of the mattress abruptly sank. A glowing hoofprint of pure, pulsating white-blue light burned into the fabric of the blanket. Then another. And another. The unseen entity trotted across the bed, heading straight toward them as though crossing an invisible bridge laid across their legs.
Silarias and Nyx froze mid-breath. Right there, in the middle of their bed, the creature manifested out of thin air. It was an ethereal, translucent goat glowing with an ethereal luminescence, boasting twin spiral horns and eyes that shone like a pair of miniature, brilliant white stars.
The creature stared back at them, uttered a brief, mocking bleat, and turned on its heel. It casually strolled straight through the solid oak door. On the other side of the wood, its upper body leaned back through the panel. The goat executed an absurdly theatrical bow, tilted its head ninety degrees, and made an unmistakable motion with its hoof, beckoning them to follow.
Silarias and Nyx exchanged a baffled glance in the dim light.
“Woken up by a magical ghost goat that walks through doors,” Nyx said deadpan. “Of course. Why wouldn’t we be.”
“No questions. Just put your clothes on,” Silarias grumbled, shoving his legs into his trousers.
Nyx reached toward the bedside table, where the Ice Anting rested, shimmering like a stray, frost-bitten gemstone. She raised her thumb and middle finger and snapped sharply.
CLICK.
The gem liquefied against the stone surface, transforming into a flowing stream of silver-blue ice magic that wrapped around her ring finger in a fraction of a second, settling into an intricate, frozen band that glowed cold against her pale skin.
Silarias watched her out of the corner of his eye. “Oh… so that’s how we’re doing this? Watch and learn.”
He struck a dramatic pose, chest puffed out, fists clenched, staring with fierce intensity toward the far side of the room where his heavy metal gauntlets and massive golden staff rested against the wall. He raised his arms, waiting to summon his gear in the exact same stylish fashion.
For a full second, absolutely nothing happened.
Nyx raised an eyebrow. “Sil… nothing’s happening.”
“Just hold on, the magic needs a second to—”
WOOSH!
Both ironclad gauntlets launched off the floor like stones fired from a catapult, hurtling straight across the room.
CLACK!
Silarias took both gauntlets straight to the face, his head snapping back violently against the stone wall. Before he could even clutch his nose or utter a curse, the heavy golden staff shot straight into the air, executed a graceful pirouette, and drove its blunt stone pommel relentlessly right between his legs.
THUMP!
Silarias doubled over instantly, his eyes bulging so wide they nearly popped from their sockets. He collapsed like a sack of grain, falling to his knees on the freezing floor, wheezing desperately for air with a high-pitched, pathetic squeak.
Nyx flopped backward onto the bed, clutching her stomach as she burst into uncontrollable, ruthless laughter. “HAHAHAHA! So legendary, Sil! So smooth!” she wheezed, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I’m… dying…” Silarias squeaked from the floor, curling into a tight fetal position.
Why must every attempt at grandeur end in agonizing physical trauma?
Silarias asked himself, his entire lower body throbbing with white-hot pain.
A deep, snuivend ademgeluid bij de deur onderbrak de chaos. Silarias and Nyx looked up at the same time. The glowing goat had poked its head back through the wood. The creature regarded the crippled Silarias with a deeply questioning, almost pitying expression, shook its head in slow disappointment, and pointed its hoof toward the hallway once more.
“He’s literally calling you an utter disappointment without saying a single word,” Nyx wheezed.
Silarias grit his teeth, swore under his breath, and dragged himself up. The moment he extended his forearms, the gauntlets unlatched automatically. With a series of crisp mechanical and magical clicks, they clamped tightly around his hands and forearms, the plates conforming seamlessly to his muscle. He balled his fist, and a magnetic shockwave yanked the massive staff firmly into the housing of his right gauntlet, a golden aura pulsing along the metal.
“Come on, Sil, let’s see what this beast wants,” Nyx said, wrapping her shadows around herself while struggling to suppress her chuckles.
They bolted out of the dormitory and into the dark corridors. The luminous goat galloped a few paces ahead of them. They followed it up a wide flight of stairs, but halfway up, the creature halted on a semi-circular spiral staircase.
Without warning, the entire stone staircase groaned. The massive underlying mechanism rumbled as the stairs began to tilt sideways, detaching from the wall and rotating away toward an unknown, pitch-black section of the facility.
Silarias and Nyx skidded to a halt at the edge of the drop.
“Not this again…” Silarias groaned, watching the rotating steps drift further out of reach. “I despise the architecture in this place. Seriously, who designed this?!”
“Jump on three!” Nyx shouted. “One… two… three!”
They both leapt, but severely misjudged the speed of the spinning mechanism. Silarias’s foot slipped off the edge of the stone step. “SHIT!” he yelled, flailing his arms wildly. Nyx grabbed him by the collar, using her momentum to drag them both backward. They hit the stone landing hard on their backs, right where they had started.
“Alright, attempt two, use magic to launch!” Nyx panted as the stairs rotated past them once more.
Timing it right this time, they dug in and kicked off hard, landing with a solid thud on the turning steps. The staircase carried them upward to a higher platform where the goat waited patiently. The moment their feet touched the stone, the creature hopped backward twice, effortlessly leaping onto a second, vertically rotating mechanism that climbed even higher.
The goat paused, turned its head, and cast a daring, expectant look back at them.
Silarias’s eyes widened. “Nyx, hold on a second… that pattern…”
“…Yeah, Sil, the damn thing is testing us,” Nyx interrupted, calculating the angle of the platform and the rhythm of the gears. “It wants to see if we can copy its exact path.”
“Two steps left, light launch, time the rotating gear,” Silarias said. “Let's go.”
Executing the sequence in perfect unison, they cleared the gap precisely on the mechanism’s rhythm, landing cleanly beside the spirit goat on the top floor.
The environment here was entirely alien compared to the rest of the academy. They stood inside a colossal, circular library. Towering dark-oak bookshelves stretched nearly twenty meters high, packed with thousands of ancient scrolls and leather-bound tomes. In the center of the stone floor lay a large, square tile casting a faint, purplish radiance.
The goat emitted a loud, unnervingly human laugh—a high-pitched
“Maaaa-haha!”
—and jumped with all four hooves onto the center of the square tile.
CLANG!
With a violent jolt, the entire square platform began to plunge downward like a massive elevator. The bookshelves vanished upward in a blur as they descended into a deep, rocky shaft.
The lift kept dropping, plunging deeper and deeper into the bowels of the academy. The air grew damp, heavy, and thick with the stench of sulfur and wet stone.
Far below, they passed a massive opening in the rock face: the entrance to a dark, abandoned mining tunnel. The lift didn't stop, hurtling further into the abyss. As they sped past the jagged walls, Silarias caught sight of a triangular sign mounted to the rock, painted with bold lettering: CARBON DISULFIDE MINE. Just beneath it hung a second triangular warning sign displaying a grotesque face wearing a heavy gas mask.
FLASH! FLASH!
Arcing electricity crackled along the lift shaft walls, blinding blue flashes illuminating the descent in jagged bursts.
HISS!
Deep within the shaft, a pipe ruptured. A thick, pitch-black cloud of chemical gas erupted directly across the elevator’s path.
“Emergency protocol! Eyes shut, hold your—” Silarias yelled, but it was already too late.
They plunged headlong at full speed right through the dense, toxic black-and-green plume.
The chemical fumes instantly scorched their airways. The volatile sulfur compounds combined with the carbon disulfide hit their central nervous systems, causing their brains to short-circuit completely.
“BWAHAHAHA!” Silarias collapsed to his knees on the platform floor, his eyes watering uncontrollably from the harsh fumes. “DISULFIDE! MINE DIS DIS! HAAAAAHAHA! I CAN’T BREATHE, NYX! LOOK AT THAT GUY ON THE SIGN, HE CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!”
Nyx clutched her throat, but instead of coughing, her body began to shake with uncontrollable sob-laughter. The gas completely derailed her emotional filters, tears carving clean trails through the grime on her cheeks as a chaotic storm of laughter and weeping tore from her chest.
“Sil! Sil, I love you, so much , I swear…” Nyx wailed, flinging her arms wildly around Silarias’s neck. “We were just trying to sleep and now we’re getting poisoned in a damn dis-dis mine! Why does this always happen to us?!”
“Hahaha! Nyx, let go of me, I can’t breathe!” Silarias wheezed, rolling across the floor. “My lungs are on fire, but it’s too hilarious! DIS DIS MINE!”
At the edge of the lift, the spirit goat stood with its hooves planted on the rim. The creature was completely caught up in the chemically induced breakdown sweeping the platform. Throwing its head back, the goat joined in, wailing and bleating at the top of its lungs.
“MÄÄÄÄÄ-HAHAHA-HUHUHU!” the goat bawled, giant luminous spirit-tears splashing off its horns. The creature was losing its mind right along with the chaotic duo, stomping its hooves as if the sky were falling.
It was an utterly unhinged symphony: Silarias’s hysterical wheezing, Nyx’s emotional weeping as she held him in a vice grip, and the goat’s echoing bleats, all compressed inside a plunging lift shaft filled with crackling blue lightning.
THUD.
The elevator slammed to a brutal halt at the bottom.
The violent impact blew away the heavy chemical cloud, allowing fresh, oxygen-rich air from the lower cavern to sweep across the platform, shattering the gas-induced high in an instant.
Silarias immediately doubled over.
“UGH… DISGUSTING!”
Dropping to his hands and knees, Silarias retched, coughing up a bitter wad of chemical bile onto the stone. He coughed so violently his entire chest heaved, shaking his head frantically to clear the black spots swimming in his vision.
Nyx sat beside him, face buried in her hands, shaking her head just as violently to clear the emotional haze. She coughed dryly a few times, wiped the sweat, tears, and snot from her face with the back of her sleeve, and took a deep, clear breath.
She looked up slowly at the goat, which had already clambered back to its feet, calmly shaking out its glowing fur as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
Nyx let out a raspy, bitter chuckle. “So much for the question… of why we needed masks.”
Silarias groaned from the floor, wiped his mouth with his gauntlet, and held up a weak hand. Nyx grabbed it, dug her heels in, and hauled him up with a sharp tug, brushing the fine dust and soot off his shoulders.
“You still alive, idiot?” she asked with a faint, weary smirk.
“Barely…” Silarias coughed, straightening his back. “I think.”
As they looked around, the oppressive darkness of the shaft gave way to an extraordinary, bright radiance.
They were no longer in a stone shaft, a tunnel, or a mine. They stood in the center of a colossal, lush, and seemingly endless forest… hidden deep within the sprawling walls of the complex itself.
Silarias peered upward at the ‘ceiling,’ where an impossibly vast, enchanted sky seemed to stretch out, before turning to Nyx with absolute bewilderment written across his face. “Wait… just how ridiculously huge is this university?!”
“I… I thought it was just a couple of buildings,” Nyx stammered, shading her eyes against the sunlight.
Before them lay vast, rolling fields of green grass, dotted with massive, ancient oak trees whose lowest branches were as thick as houses. To their right, a gentle slope led down toward a crystal-clear body of water where luminous, cyan-blue fish darted at incredible speeds.
Near the water’s edge, perched on the absolute brink of a steep cliff overlooking the shimmering lake, stood the glowing spirit goat.
The creature cast one final glance back at Silarias and Nyx, its starry eyes gleaming brightly in the twilight of the forest. Taking a single step backward, it balanced right on the edge of the precipice… and waited in absolute silence.