Sylvie Asleton and the Coven of Glass by James T. Callum

Author:James T. Callum [Callum, James T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Latest
Publisher: James T. Callum
Published: 2019-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

Professor Vacili had been right about pain being a teacher.

Professor Rocamai - better known as Professor Pain - was a cruel taskmaster. Remedial Defense was as rough as Sylvie could have expected and yet she found a great thirst for more. There was a thrill to it she couldn’t quite explain.

The evening was coming on in full. Stars poked out of the velvet sky. A chill descended on the grounds and still they practiced in the Yard, Professor Rocamai’s classroom. It was a large spacious room, by far the largest of all the classes. A veritable warehouse with fieldstone floors and several pits, or Yards as Rocamai had called them.

By her own admittance, Professor Rocamai wasn’t particularly inventive with names. There was some small amount of confusion over the various Yards inside the Yard, and which they were meant to go to.

Thankfully the Yards were color coded.

Each of the pits was filled with soft, supernaturally springy grass that was dyed every color imaginable according to its name. The Azure Yard was deep blue grass, Ruby Yard was red and so on. The ceiling faded away to the open sky through some sort of magic Sylvie didn’t understand, but it let in the cool night air and afforded a gorgeous view of the heavens.

It was Rocamai’s belief that every Magi needed to have a strong body as well as a strong mind, or the both would fail. She drilled them in the basics of grapples and holds until their noses were running and they were both sweating and freezing.

By the end, Sylvie couldn’t feel her legs, much less stand without shaking and wheezing. And she wasn’t the only one.

Sylvie had always assumed she was a decent fighter. Scrappy would be the word she would use to describe herself. Maybe she didn’t know actual martial arts, but she knew street fighting pretty well.

Professor Rocamai was quick to disabuse her of that notion.

“Who here thinks they know how to defend themselves?” she asked.

Clustered in the Central Yard, a thirty foot square of sunken verdant grass nobody seemed willing to be the first to raise a hand.

Screw it, she thought, I’ve gotten myself out of a few tight spots. I probably know how to fight better than most of these people.

Sylvie raised her hand.

Rocamai immediately nodded at her and motioned her closer. She stepped away from the group of clustered classmates. She felt Pyx pat her on the back reassuringly.

“Hit me.”

“Excuse me?” said Sylvie, taken aback.

“Hit me,” repeated Rocamai.

Professor Rocamai was a large woman. She cleared six foot easily, and was obviously of Amazonian descent.

She was beautiful in that deadly sort of way. She gave Sylvie a feeling of arrested violence, waiting to be unleashed. All tight, coiled muscle held in check by an iron discipline. Rocamai had short sandy-brown hair that was layered and swept to the side. She looked more at home in a suit of armor than the black robes she wore, belted and strapped in places to keep it from flapping about.

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