That night, Simon slept on a top bunk further back in the room instead of the bottom bunk he’d originally planned. They weren’t any warmer in that drafty stone room, but he understood why they were in higher demand now. They were more defensible.

Despite that advantage, though, he still got very little sleep. It wasn’t winter’s chill, or his thin blanket that kept him up, either.

His fight, brief as it was, had left him paranoid enough that he woke up almost anytime someone snored too loud near him or got up to use the bathroom. While he didn’t expect his wanna-be bully to try anything again any time soon, he was certain he’d painted a target on his back with at least a few others.

None of those feelings went away in the morning. Instead, when his internal clock finally said it was almost time, and he could see the thinnest light painting the sky through a high window, he roused himself before the sun could finish rising, dressed in the dark, grabbed his little slate, and quietly paced out of the slumbering hall before the horn blew.

As he walked through the darkened room, one of the other boys who was sleeping near the door surprised him by saying, “First, you want to show everyone how tough you are, and now you want to be first, huh? I don’t see this whole magic thing working out for you.”

Simon wanted to ask what the boy meant by that. It was obviously a threat, but was it a threat coming from him or from the adults? Would the teacher, or even perhaps the Magi, hammer him down if he stood out too far?

“Listen, you can be first if you want,” Simon answered with a shrug. “I don’t care if I’m tenth or even fiftieth. I just don’t want to run up those stairs again.”

That drew some drowsy snickers out of some of the other boys, but no one tried to argue with him or stop him, so he kept going. Unfortunately, when he reached the door and tried to open it, he found it locked from the outside. That made him shake his head and his own stupidity. He should have realized it wouldn’t be that easy. Running is the whole point, he chided himself.

The dull sound of the door rattling against the frame provoked a second wave of laughter. They’d been expecting that. “Not so smart now, are you,” the first boy said, a little louder this time.

Simon endured their quiet derision and took a silent step back from the door while he waited. Whether he was waiting for the door to open or for someone to jump him, he couldn’t say precisely. Fortunately, the former happened before the latter. A few moments before the horn rumbled through the dark to let everyone know a new day had arrived, there was the sound of the bar being removed. As that happened, the boys in the nearest bunk started to get up, and before the door had even opened, they were crowding close to Simon.

When the door opened, it was like a wave, and despite what he’d said before, he was running just like the rest of them. He charged ahead with the other leaders of the pack in a desperate race that left the door to the girls’ sleeping hall before they’d even emerged. They were halfway across the plaza before that ugly horn even started spewing its dull, brassy notes throughout the Plaza of Lesser Miracles.

At first, he was running just to keep from being trampled by the boys behind him, but soon enough, as the crowd thinned out and there were only half a dozen people anywhere near him, he started to get into it. This wasn’t quite play, but it was still more fun than swimming through the awful mix of hot and cold water that he had to do every morning at Hepollyon, so he ignored the way his breath steamed in the cold air as he pushed himself harder.

As they crossed the courtyard, a wave of black-robed boys finally met and overtook them. Though they’d been in here longer and were no doubt in better shape, some of them were running fast enough that he was fairly certain they were using magic to make the dash that much faster. The idea of spending even a week of your life to run a bit faster struck him as pointless, but then he had no idea what the rewards and punishments were.

They probably don’t even have to bear the costs themselves, he told himself as an afterthought as he kept charging forward. This was something he’d considered before, but learning magic in any sort of organized, academic way would require the students to be able to shift the costs of spellcasting onto someone else, lest they all graduate as old men. That was certainly a big part of what was going on in the heart of the pyramid, and though he was sure it involved blood magic or worse, he still wanted to know what it was.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Simon enjoyed the competitiveness of running across the plaza, but that enjoyment stopped the moment he got to the stairs. After that, he took back everything mean he’d told himself about Hepollyon; the water was only miserable for a minute or two, but the stairs were miserable all the way up.

Still, he didn’t want to outright give up now, and he charged on as the half a dozen around him dwindled to only three. He didn’t even know that one of them was the boy that had given him the hard time until one of them gasped. “I thought you weren’t going to run!”

“And I thought I was going to be allowed to walk!” Simon yelled back, his voice full of mirth. “How could I have been so stupid, right?”

The other boy laughed at that. Simon didn’t come in first place, but he was close. He was in the top five, and that was enough for him. He had no wish to climb any higher than that. Still, he was rewarded with a double portion of fried eggs wrapped in a gooey cheese-filled wrap that was as messy as it was delicious.

Simon moved to sit down on the edge of the pyramid where he had yesterday, but when he recalled the threat he’d made the night before, he opted to sit a little further back, against one of the pillars at the entrance. His spot still afforded him a beautiful view of Zurari and the God-King’s pyramid, as well as the rest of the acolytes and initiates that were running up it.

Though Simon had intended to sit alone and make sure no one tried to jump him, he was very quickly joined by others. First, it was the guy who’d called him out on the stairs, and after that, a few other hangers-on made their presence known. Simon’s new rival, or whatever he was, introduced himself as Aljeem while they ate, and he seemed friendly enough. Truthfully, it seemed sincere enough that Simon didn’t even think it was an act.

“You ran like the wind!” he said with a smile between loud bites of breakfast. “Truthfully, I didn’t think I’d be able to beat you at the end there.”

“In a few weeks, you won’t,” Simon agreed. They both laughed at that.

“It’s true,” Aljeem admitted. “I’ve been doing this for months now, and practice does help, but with any luck, I’ll be gone before your legs get strong enough to pass me.”

The two of them ate and talked, and Simon found out that he was one of the most senior boys in his class, which meant that he’d soon don the black robes and disappear into the heart of the pyramid. That would probably put a damper on making friends with the kid, but Simon tried anyway.

After all, in a month or two, I’ll be heading that way myself, he thought as they chatted.

Some of the boys were still definitely sour toward him, but a few of the most senior seemed to take a liking to him, and that helped to deflect a lot of hate he’d expected. Just after the prayer to the God-King that seemed to be a part of every lesson, Simon caught the boy he’d put down glaring at him. He never got his name, but that look made it clear that Simon had made an enemy for life and probably a few bonus enemies just for good measure.

Simon ignored all of that. No one did anything untoward in the presence of the teacher. They didn’t dare because it was impossible to say what would set her off. She might overlook one or two troublemakers only to thrash the third hard enough to make them beg for mercy. It was capricious, and Simon spent the day keeping his hands busy and his mouth closed.

One of the girls had forgotten her slate in her bunk, so the teacher had made her spend the rest of the day running up and down the steps as punishment. Simon would have preferred the lash to that and made a note never to make that same mistake.

Still, aside from those activities, the day was remarkably boring. He practiced another five letters until he wanted to kill himself and listened to half a dozen lectures that seemed to all have the same moral: unswerving loyalty to the God-King. It was stultifying. It was like someone took all of the Greek Fables that every child had drilled into their head from an early age and rewrote them so that the moral was ‘the President is always right!’

Can’t reach the sour grapes? It’s because you didn’t believe in the God-King. Hare lost a race with the tortoise? It was cursed with slowness for its impious behavior toward the God-King.

It was all so transparent to Simon. He’d often thought of the Oracle’s compound as a cult, and on some level, it probably was, but it was nothing like this. There was no brainwashing, just entreaties to see the world differently. This was the opposite. There was only one way to see the world, and that was with the God-King at the center of it. Their teacher was quick to badmouth other peoples and other cultures whenever they came up in one of her lessons. The pale-skinned savages of the south were often portrayed as villains in the fables she told; sometimes, they were even in league with the goblins and other monstrous races.

She wasn’t too kind to the Murani that dwelled beyond the city, either. She called the horse clans backward savages and, at one point, declared that “One does not need horse archers or cavalry charges in an age of magic. All anyone needs is faith in our lord’s power.”

While Simon doubted that most of the citizens of the city, let alone the country, would agree with that, they had no way of knowing that they were being ruled by a sinister priesthood. Simon spent much of the afternoon trying to figure out how he might get that word out, but without the advent of the printing press, he really had no idea.

When class ended, he walked down the pyramid with his new friend, but Simon had no greater understanding of magic than he’d started with and no real idea of how he was going to put a crack in this country’s warlike ways before they got around to attacking Blackwater and Ionia again.