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Hizashi picked his way over the path that wound through the old battlefields on the outskirts of the city. Uneven stones were scattered over the ground, huge rough-hewn boulders with only the faintest touch of carving work in them.
The fields here were thick with old magic, vines and mosses growing over the arcana lines that had once animated the colossal stone golems and a heavy electric-buzz presence suffusing the air. Every breath had an undertone of power, tasting of ozone and greenery. Occasionally, when Hizashi passed too close, a years-old sigil would gutter to life and stone would shift, grinding against itself as a golem the size of a building attempted to put itself back together.
None of them ever got very far.
Finally, Hizashi found a relatively flat boulder without too much magic soaked into it and carefully settled down. He began to hum, idly starting a small braid in his hair. As his humming grew more insistent, the runes tattooed around his throat started to glow and active magic seeped into his voice.
Hizashi had still been quite young during the war. Only a child, really, watching from the safe houses in the city as the colossal stonework statues carved into the walls stood up and stepped in front of the charge. Even at the time, though, he could feel the raw power in them. He was one of the few.
Even now, only two decades later, everyone seemed to have forgotten. Forgotten when the walls themselves had stood to fight.
Hizashi remembered the sounds of grinding, splintering stone that sounded through the night for weeks on end. He remembered waking in the morning to the taste of ash and heady rot on his tongue and knowing that one of the attacking monsters, twisted chimeras of wild magic and ill intent, had fallen. The city had been desperately hopeful on those days, despite the constant sounds of war and the drain of even the half-trained sorcerers going off to join the colossuses in combat.
Even at eleven years old, Hizashi had known that he was only spared conscription because he had no training yet, and couldn’t control his own magic. With the tendency of his power to resonate and reverberate in solid objects, he would have done more harm than good on the battlefield.
After almost three months of constant war, it was over. The last of the monstrous chimeras died with a howl on its tongue and a shockwave of raw fury that had woken Hizashi in the middle of the night, startling him out of his blankets.
He had been one of the first to know the war was over. His mother hadn’t believed him when he’d tried to tell her, and then the colossuses had begun to return, slogging back towards the city pitted with scars and cracked limbs and whole missing pieces. The sorcerers who had joined the battle returned with terror and nightmares buried deep in their bones, lingering behind their eyes and twisting their magic into barbs of pain.
Everyone had lost something in the war, even if they themselves never saw the battlefield. For Hizashi, it had been his best friend, a boy not much older than him with just enough training to control his magic.
Most people ignored the old battlegrounds. Hizashi had heard them refer to it before as the stony hills, the forsaken field, even the bone cliffs. Anything to avoid directly referring to the horrors that had occurred there. As far as Hizashi knew, no one but veterans of the war ever visited the battlefield.
Well, no one but him.
Hizashi’s magic was carried on the wind as his hum became a true song. Not a ballad of honor or mourning, but something much simpler and sweeter. A lullaby.
It was one that Hizashi’s mother had sung to him when he struggled to sleep, and he had sung it to the younger children in the safe houses when the chimera attacks shook the walls and their screams split the night. He knew the words by heart, and could probably sing it in his sleep.
Over the years, Hizashi had visited the old battlefield many times. For a while, he was going once a week. He’d found that the magic that lingered in the stones of fallen colossuses preferred certain types of music. Like how singing in a small room would make your voice reverberate if you hit the right note, if he sang the right type of song on the long-abandoned battlefield, the wind would practically burst with his power, carrying the notes far beyond where even Hizashi could have sent them.
And hence, the lullaby.
He didn’t know where Oboro’s bones were buried under the rough ground and shattered pieces of colossus. They had never recovered his body, even after the war. So, he chose a new perch every time he came, and he sang the lullaby that he had learned alongside Oboro and hoped that some days, Oboro’s bones could hear him sing to them.
The lullaby trailed off into a high, clear note that Hizashi held as long as he could. When his breath finally failed him, silence settled over the battlefield like it could only in the echoing absence of all-encompassing sound.
“I’ve been issued a challenge,” Hizashi told the fallen stones of the colossuses, “by my students.”
The blades of grass that poked up from the churned earth beneath his feet shivered in the wind, and distantly, Hizashi heard leaves begin to rustle again and wind hum through the channels it had worn in the vast canyons of fallen stone.
“I told them about the statues in the city. How cunning and swift they are, when called to life. They said it was impossible. That all animated creatures are stupid and slow, but make up for it with their strength.” Hizashi let out a little huff of laughter, tracing the broken sigil on the edge of the stone he was sitting on. “I know they’re wrong,” he asserted, “of course I do. Even the colossuses were fast and clever. I never saw them close up, but I know they had to be, if even a quarter of the stories I’ve heard are anywhere close to true.”
Distantly, huge stone monuments groaned and the wood of newgrown trees creaked in the wind. It sounded like an agreement, and so Hizashi continued.
“They told me that, if the statues were so clever, then one of the smaller ones could pass for a human if they tried very hard. I think that’s silly,” Hizashi asserted, and for the moment ignored the aggravated rustle of leaves. “A statue can’t pass for a human just by trying very hard. They would need someone to guide them, teach them, and supply necessities like clothing and money. Even magic.”
Hizashi bit his lip, pausing to tilt his head back and stare up at the darkening sky.
“I think it’s worthwhile,” he said slowly, and felt the wind dance on his skin. “A challenge for me, but also something to show my students what can be done. To make them expand their worldview. If a statue can be a human, what else is possible? If we can teach a stone to speak for themself, what else can we do?”
The wind picked up, swirling in a spiral around Hizashi so tight and swift that he had to squint against the force, clinging to the stone beneath him as the wind shrieked around him.
As soon as it had appeared, the dervish faded to nothing.
Hizashi found that the stone beneath him was warm, and long abandoned arcana lines lit up abruptly, shining with golden magic from somewhere deep inside. He sprang to his feet, backpedaling away from the stone as it began to shake. All around him, stones of every size and shape started to vibrate, shuddering and jumping, the plants that had climbed them over the decades sloughing off as more arcana lines erupted with internal light.
Broken and chipped sigils flared with power, and it spread like lightning. Shaking and sparking and jumping to the next mound of broken stone.
It stretched away from him like the sunrise on the horizon, racing across the entire battlefield until every stone and leaf was glowing with burning golden light.
Between one blink and the next, the light winked out. All the arcana lines went dead, the stones settled back into their place, and it was as if nothing had happened at all.
Except for the stone he’d been sitting on. The broken sigil that Hizashi had been sitting beside was glowing faintly with clear gold light, and if he strained his ears he could hear, very faintly even in the dead silence, the familiar notes of his mother’s lullaby.
Hizashi cautiously approached the stone, scanning his surrounding for anyone else who might have done something to influence the stone field. He was the only one there.
The lullaby was his, but the magic in the sigil was clearly something other. Not the bright canary-yellow light of Hizashi’s own magic, but something deeper and fuller, a proper full-chested gold, closer to the golden lightning that powered the colossuses.
When Hizashi was only a few steps from the stone, the light and music both disappeared, reappearing several meters down the path from him, humming out of a round stone with a cracked sigil half buried in the earth.
Hizashi followed.
The light and music wound out of the battlefield and led down to the city streets, where there were sigils aplenty for the light to jump to. It seemed like nobody else could see the light, and even after he got deep into the crowd, the lullaby was always just faintly audible. Just enough for him to make it out over the hubbub and rush.
After chasing the light halfway across the city, Hizashi stopped and stared up at the walls of the Royal Academy.
A sigil high on the wall was glowing with golden light, as though it was mocking him, and the lullaby trickled down to him over the sound of students wandering through the corridors and chatting with each other.
Hizashi tentatively took a step back, away from the sigil. It faded as he got farther away, but returned to glowing strong when he got close again. The nearest staircase was on the other side of this building, and Hizashi really didn’t want to know what would happen if he got far enough away for the sigil to fade entirely.
With a deep breath to brace himself and an instinctive furtive glance around, Hizashi reached for a protruding brick on the wall.
He was two stories up before someone noticed him, and three before someone came to investigate. The glowing sigil had jumped twice in that time, and Hizashi had been forced to dip into his knowledge of fortifying and energizing magic to keep climbing. This sort of thing had been a lot easier when he was a kid.
“Yamada!”
Hizashi glanced at the ground below him and found Yagi standing there, staring up at him with wide eyes.
“Young Yamada, what are you doing?”
“Quest of Arcanum!” Hizashi shouted back down at him, “Very important! Nothing to worry about!”
Which was an excuse that might have worked if Quests of Arcanum were still a thing, and hadn’t been phased out of practice a century ago.
“Get down from there before you fall and break your neck!” Yagi fretted, clearly distressed. “You’re supposed to be a good influence!”
Hizashi cursed under his breath as the glowing sigil jumped away again. “Sorry, can’t hear you, Yagi, we’ll have to talk later!”
“Young Yamada!”
Hizashi slowly climbed up another story, gaze pinned on the sigil to avoid looking down as the ground got farther and farther away. Just in case, he started mentally reciting any possible spells that might help break his fall, starting with a simple feather falling spell and moving all the way down to brief – but incredibly potent – physical defense spells.
Fortunately, before he needed to use any of them, he made it up the seventh floor and onto the roof.
Hizashi hauled himself over the edge with a wheeze, taking a moment to sprawl on his back and catch his breath on the gently sloped academy roof.
The glowing sigil was still waiting patiently for him when he finally got up to follow it, and it jumped up once more. Hizashi followed it all the way to the ridge of the roof.
“If you led me up here just to take me down the other side,” he wheezed as he tried to hold onto the smooth shingles, “I’m going to be super upset.”
The sigil jumped away, moving a distance of less than a meter, almost like it was scolding him, and Hizashi reluctantly followed. It bounced back and forth along the ridge of the roof until it reached the far end, where a gargoyle crouched on the edge, peering over the entrance of the academy main building.
“How come I’ve never seen this guy before?” Hizashi asked, hauling himself half upright to squint at the gargoyle.
As far as gargoyles went, this one looked relatively human at first glance. It had no wings or horns or tusks, no strange inhuman features. The teeth under its snarling lip were somewhat flat and blocky, but that was more a side effect of the medium than anything else. On second glance, though, it was clear that the gargoyle had significantly inhuman proportions. Its arms and legs were too long, even as it was folded on the roof in a spindly crouch. The shape of its face was too sharp and angular, almost like it was made of only a few flat planes connected by sharp angles. It also had claws on its hands and feet, hooked razor-edged things that had been carved in perfect detail into the gray marble.
The most interesting part of the gargoyle was that, despite the fact that it was clearly supposed to be looking down at the academy entrance, it had a thick blindfold sculpted around its eyes, looped several times around its head with the ends long and trailing as though caught in high wind.
Hizashi’s lullaby drifted quietly around the gargoyle, emanating from the sigil carved into its blindfold, exactly over where its right eye should be. The sigil was pulsing slightly, golden light thrumming with more power than Hizashi had felt the entire time he was chasing it.
He squinted, tilting his head and trying to read the sigil under the light. It looked like an awakening sigil, the sort of thing that one would see at the base of the statue guardians who watched over the cities or like the giant sigils on the core of the colossuses. At the center of the sigil, as the focus for the whole magical array, was the single character ‘shō’. Erase.
Without allowing himself a moment to second-guess, Hizashi took a deep breath and leaned forward. The arcanascript tattoos on his neck slowly flooded with brilliant canary-yellow light that contrasted sharply against the rich golden magic on the sigil. With magic infusing every syllable and breath, Hizashi whispered, “Erase”.
A change spilled over the gargoyle.
Stone became cloth and skin and hair. The monotonous gray material split apart into pale skin and impossibly dark hair, and the blindfold sprung to life, turning pure metallic silver as the loops spiraled forever in on themselves and the ends whipped in a nonexistent wind. The sigil was the only spot of color on the statue, a burnished gold that seemed to have set itself into the blindfold like embroidery or an embossing.
The gargoyle rocked back on its heels, unfolding gracefully from its hunched crouch.
Oh no.
Hizashi was so startled he almost fell off the roof, catching himself at the last minute as the gargoyle lifted its head as though looking around despite the silver loops of cloth over its eyes.
Oh no. He’s hot.
Now that it was alive, the gargoyle’s angular face gave it strong, sharp features, and the way it held itself had all the grace and assurance of a predatory cat, with strength and deadly skill clear in every line of its body.
“Who are you?” the gargoyle demanded, and its voice sounded like distant stones shifting in the old battlefield, low and rough and barely disguising immense power.
“Uh, I, uhhh…” Hizashi blinked dumbly the gargoyle, scrambling to get his thoughts back in order and his tongue untied.
“Surely you can’t have been the one who woke me,” the gargoyle said, turning away to look for someone else standing on this forsaken rooftop.
“Hey!” Hizashi protested, “I am, too!”
“Hm,” the gargoyle grunted, turning to peer down at the entrance to the school. “well, then, who are you?”
Ready this time, Hizashi bowed as well as he could while balancing on the roof and offered, “I’m Yamada Hizashi, I teach arcanascript at the academy!”
“A teacher?” The gargoyle’s ear – long and pointed, almost batlike, though emerging from the same spot on its head as a human’s would – flicked back at him. It did not return his bow. “Why have you awakened me?”
Hizashi hesitated for a second. Why had he awakened this gargoyle? One of the ancient protectors of the city, likely sculpted for the sole purpose of protecting the academy itself. And Hizashi had dragged it into wakefulness, just, what, on a whim? A silly dare?
Well, no, it was obvious why he’d done it. He had already shared his reasoning with the old battleground. To prove to his students that anything that can be imagined can be done. To remind them that they shouldn’t underestimate themselves. If a statue can be human, what else is possible?
“To remind my students of their potential,” Hizashi found himself answering, and the gargoyle paused.
For the first time since awakening, it turned to look at him. Not just glance his way or flick a judgmental look over him, but to actually look. The blindfold whirled and spun around its head, but Hizashi could feel its eyes on him anyway, piercing and sharp.
“That… is an acceptable answer,” the gargoyle decided. “You’re a peculiar person, Yamada Hizashi, arcanascript teacher of the Yuuei Academy of the Arcane.”
“One of the most peculiar I know,” Hizashi agreed with a broad grin.
The gargoyle tilted its head, and then a slow grin spread over its face. The smile made the hair on the back of Hizashi’s neck stand up; somehow, it didn’t actually crease the gargoyle’s face at all. Like instead of pulling its lips back, the gargoyle just… ceased having lips. Not to mention, with its too-flat teeth and the whirling blindfold over its eyes, the gargoyle just looked all sorts of wrong.
“I am Shō, balancer of logic and passion. Tell me your plan, Yamada Hizashi, arcanascript teacher of the Yuuei Academy of the Arcane, and we will prove exactly how much potential your students have.”
The golden sigil stamped on the gargoyle’s blindfold pulsed with power, the faintest notes of Hizashi’s lullaby trickled through the air, and Hizashi knew that, if nothing else, the guardian spirits who lingered in the old battlefield were on his side.
First, he would need to get down from the rooftop, preferably with Shō as well. Then… well, then the true fun would begin.
Hizashi was going to teach a gargoyle to be human.