Rising Shards

Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Heyo,” Dr. Diast said. “Hey, come with me for a bit.”

Did she find out I was in trouble with Soleri? Or worse, about my fight with Oka and Kalei? Diast had me follow her to a study room because her office was in her words, “frankly an embarrassing disaster.”

“And speaking of disasters,” Diast said. “So here’s the deal. Usually when we do Jump Fifteens each new Cani goes into their room by themselves.”

I could maybe swing this to get out of going to the others, then?

“This isn’t anything you did!” Diast said. “I can see that worried/guilty look on your face Zeta.”

“A wise woman once said, ‘Zeta worries more than she exciteds.’” I said.

“Who said that, Stella?” Diast asked.

“Why would Stella say that?” I asked. “I mean, she would, but she’d say it with like good grammar unlike Kalei. Is Stella calling you about me regularly?”

“Yes,” Diast said. “Well, sometimes. I’d prefer if she called more, but—"

“Why would you prefer that?” I asked. “Is it something I did? Am I doing something wrong?”

“No, not that!” Diast said. For some reason her face got red from that. “I just told you you didn't do anything. Did you have a bunch of sugar or something?

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine, let’s just get to it already. So one Jump Fifteen at a time usually, right? It seems a certain faculty member at Wildfire Hearts screwed it up, and yours wasn’t the only one, Zeta.”

“So what does that mean?” I asked. “Are we screwed on the Benta?”

“Far from it, you have the best advisor in the school,” Diast said. “Since this henceforth unnamed Wildfire Hearts faculty member boned up the process so bad on multiple groups, it looks like we’re going to have to stagger our Jump Fifteens. And Zeta, since you were first, you’re going to have to come with to all the others, and we’re going to have to do them once at a time.”

“Is it just gonna be me and the, er, main Jump Fifteener in there each time?” I asked.

“No, I was thinking of starting with you helping Oka and Kalei knock both theirs out in the same session tomorrow. For the others, I was gonna draw straws or something,”

Suddenly my mouth got dry.

“I figured them first cuz you know them the most,” Diast said. “That won’t be a problem, right?”

I had a chance to say it was a problem and avoid this whole thing by using the Soleri paper as an excuse to not confront my current roommate situation. So naturally I immediately said, “Nah.”

“Perfect!” Diast said. “Alright, I should get going, I really should clean my office a bit…”

I stayed in the study room for a while after Diast left, trying to get any progress on my paper and to spend as much time as possible away from my room. By the end of about five hours of work, I had accomplished approximately three words. And I was counting my full name I wrote at the top of the otherwise blank page.

I wandered around the school for a while. It kinda hit me how few people I’d really gotten to know at Rising Shards despite the amount of time I’d been there. I didn’t really know where I was going. I kept walking until I reached a hallway with angled reflective black material surrounding me. I looked at my reflection.

I just looked tired.

Then I looked around at the strange hallway I’d found myself in, which looked like a weird art exhibit. I desperately hoped I hadn’t wandered into another art exhibit made by Principal Penteldtam.

“Wait, where am I?” I said.

“Too stupid to even know where you are?” Ovie asked. “While also being awkward enough to talk to yourself out loud?”

While I didn’t know a lot of the people at the school, I unfortunately knew Ovie all too well.

“And I have some bad news about this place,” Ovie said. “These aren’t funhouse mirrors; you really are that ugly.”

I looked to which side of the hallway Ovie was on and turned and walked the other way as fast as I could. I didn’t have the energy to engage her. Knowing her, she probably found out I had a fight with Kalei and Oka and would dig real deep on that one.

“Hey,” Ovie said as I reached the end of the hallway, where there was a door built with the weird reflective material as the walls. “You can’t go that way.”

Out of pure spite, I kept my shoulder turned icily towards Ovie and opened the door, shutting it behind me. I held the door for a bit to make sure Ovie wouldn’t follow me, then turned around.

“Whoa,” I said.

This room looked like the hallway; lots of angled parts on the walls. But it had a darker blue hue, and there were lights of all colors glistening around, as there were tons of bloodsabers propped up on the walls, hanging on their sides, and some hanging from the ceiling. They looked so beautiful; all of them had energy running through the veins in their blades despite not having anyone to draw blood from. It was like an aquarium of bloodsabers, and I slowly walked through, half out of wonderment and half out of trying to not walk right into the point of a sword. I found a bench that was against a wall and had no bloodsabers that could fall on me near it, so I sat down. Staring at the glistening colors, the energy from the bloodcoursing through the veins of the bloodsabers, all of the lights sparkling around me, it all helped calm me down.

“You know, first years really aren’t supposed to be here,” Someone in the room said.

I didn’t realize anyone else was in the room and jumped up and yelled, my back and hands against the wall as I saw a stringy haired Cani boy in the Falling Shards uniform working on a bloodsaber.

“Oh,” I said, catching my breath. “I uh…am sorry?”

“It’s fine,” he said. “This isn’t usually on the tour, and first years don’t come down here much anyways, so I don’t expect you to know what this place is, let alone that it's off limits.”

“…OK…” I said, still wide eyed and catching my breath from that jolt. “I’ll go then, sorry again.”

“I don’t care that much, the teacher’s not here,” he said. “Sorry I made you jump; you look like you could have used the breather.”

“It’s alright, I probably deserved it,” I said.

I walked over to his desk, which was around a bend in the room. The layout was strange, the walls were almost the shape of a banana with the way the room curved.

“I’m Zeta, by the way,” I said, extending my hand.

“Arctus,” the boy said. It took him a second to notice I had my hand out, but he did shake it, so he was a trustable.

Arctus had the bloodsaber he was working on clamped at two points. He had a funny looking brush that he rubbed on a huge fang that was wedged into a wax or plastic block before he swiped it over the blade.

“Why did you deserve it?” He asked, not looking up from his sword.

“I…” I started. Did I want to tell this random person anything? Could it hurt? “…got into a fight with my best friends. And I think it was all my fault.”

The boy continued to brush the bloodsaber. I kind of expected him to give some wise advice or something, but he kept working on the bloodsaber.

“Sorry, my focus is a bit…” he said, making a delicate brush on his bloodsaber. “On this bloodsaber. I’m about to take a trip, actually. So I want to be caught up on all my class work before then.”

“So you fix the bloodsabers that get busted up?” I asked.

“Uh huh,” he said. “It’s apparently one of the lesser liked student jobs for the second years. But I think it’s relaxing.”

“Do you have anything like a metaphor for fixing bloodsabers that would match up for patching a friendship?”

“Hmm,” Arctus said. “That’s a tough one off the top of my head. I’d probably give better advice if I knew more about this fight, maybe?”

“Well,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

Arctus continued to brush the bloodsaber. “I’m just touching this up now, I won’t space out if you have to tell it.”

“Alright,” I said. “I had a girlfriend, but she sucked, right? And…it took a while to get away from her, but I did. But I kept some keepsakes like pictures and stuff. And…a present I got for her that she burned.”

“Wow, she sounds lovely,” Arctus said. “I hope she isn’t who you had a fight with, because my advice would be that you were probably in the right with whatever happened.”

“No, I haven’t talked to her in…a long time,” I said. “But because I kept all that stuff of hers in a box, I hurt my friends, and one blew up at me when she found it all. And then the other, someone who has been…a lot to me…that friend, she just got quiet and left. And that almost hurt more. Because that friend has really been there for me, and…I just feel so stupid for hurting both of them.”

“Well, unless you actually physically beat them with the box of memories to hurt them, I’d say you have a pretty good shot of making up with them.” Arctus said.

“You think?” I said. “And I didn’t beat them with the thing, no.”

Arctus sighed. “I got in real trouble once a few years ago. And I dragged some friends down with me.”

“Did you beat them up with a box filled with bad memories?” I asked.

“No, but I did get us all in trouble with the law,” Arctus said.

“Wow, seriously?” I asked.

“Seriously,” Arctus said. “It wasn’t here though, it was, well, a long way’s away. And my friends were pretty mad because this law trouble pretty much ended our normal way of life.”

“Whoa,” I said.

“Yep,” Arctus said, scratching his head. “Ah, great, got some of this repair goop stuck in my…can you had me a napkin from that pile there?”

I gave Arctus one of the napkins, and he wiped the goop from his hair.

“If you were like two seconds late there, I would have had to cut a whole chunk out of my hair.”

“That happened to me when I was younger,” I said. “Well, not me, a friend. We had this glop toy thing and put it into a bowl, and I found out if you shake your hair against it, it made this cool pattern. Well, cool to me when I was six years old. So my friend tried it, but the glop like fused to her hair. She was scream-crying when they had to cut the huge part of her hair out.”

“Did you make up with that friend?” Arctus asked.

I had to think about it for a second.

“I did, actually,” I said.

“Then I’d say your chances are pretty good with your best friends.” Arctus said.

“Wait, you didn’t say what happened with your friends!” I said.

“Oh, right,” Arctus said. “Well, we got a van, went on a real long road trip, and worked everything out. I’m actually dating one of them now, so I’d say me and her in particular patched things up really well.”

“I’ll say,” I said.

“Somehow, we ended up here, and this normal way of life is much better. So trust me, as someone who has made their friends plenty mad from stupid mistakes, you can get through it with them. Except for probably that first girlfriend you had, she sounds really bad.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She was.”

It was weird to hear someone I just met immediately agree that Jeans was bad to me. In a way, it validated that pain I went through a bit more, silencing the little demons in my mind that still told me all of it was my fault.

“I’m wrapping up here though, so you’ll probably want to get out unless you want to be stuck here until this room’s unlocked tomorrow,” Arctus said. “And the girl from Rising Shards they have on bloodsaber duty is not very charming, to say the least.”

“Alright, thanks for listening to me vent,” I said.

“Anytime, it was nice meeting you,” Arctus said. “I hope you and your friends make up soon.”

“Thanks, Arctus,” I said. “Have fun on your trip!”

“Oh, I will,” Arctus said. His eyes had a bit of steel to them when he said that.

As I figured out how to navigate back out of the bloodsaber repair room, Arctus called out to me.

“Oh, wait! Got one!”

“Got one what?” I asked.

“Fixing metaphor. How’s this: sometimes the veins inside bloodsabers get damaged,” Arctus said. “And sometimes they just take time to heal, and all you have to do is wait it out and they heal on their own. Sometimes you have to do some work fixing them yourself. But usually, it’s a mix of both. Like friend fights. It could use some work, but, pretty good, maybe?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “Don’t get in trouble with the law while you’re gone!”

“Thanks, Zeta,” Arctus said. “I’ll do my best.”

I left the room then and was back in the weird hallway. Luckily, Ovie wasn’t there. I had to figure out my way back to Rising Shards, as I had somehow wandered into one of the connecting buildings between Rising and Falling Shards. Talking to Arctus had ignited a fire in me. Somehow, I’d make things right with Kalei and Oka.