Eike stared.
The Grey College was no stranger to odd and odder sights; she had started to think herself a bit jaded, a bit matured to the sense of overwhelming wonder that cut the tendons in your jaw. She had seen, well, she hadn't quite seen it all, but she wasn't even thirteen yet and she had watched a trading company run, traveled to a dwarf Karak, and become a wizard like her hopefully-maybe-soon master and all around awesomest person in the world, Mathilda.
All of the other apprentices were properly jealous when she told stories.
(And her chainmail slip lived under her bed and her hatchet behind her books. Shallya taught that a staff at most should be needed, and she looked forward with secret glee every time she was praised in her classes to the day that Mathilde smiled at her and handed her one of her own. But the dwarves taught that tools were best, because they could be used for other things than just defending yourself, and so she hoped that shallaya wouldn't mind her having an axe for firewood on her journey. As for the armor, well, she listened to her lessons. Trying to protect herself with magic as she was seemed far more dangerous than dwarf wrought chainmail.)
All of this passed through her head as wind through a tree as she starred out at what she knew to be illusions. But such illusions!
A forest stretched away from her, pine and spruce in towering clumps, snow covered. In the far distance ahead, aurora played in the sky, in tints of green and red. The stars were out- it was night, obviously- and the silver moon shone full, no trace of it's mouldered cousin. Wolves and giant, shaggy deer slipped in and out off the branches just in the edge of sight, and a glimpse of a single red eye(?) deeper in added the sense of menace that all imperial citizens knew the woods to hold.
It must have been one of the more Ulrican of the instructors, which in the Grey College narrowed it down significantly. Magister Klaus, most likely... And he'd been teaching them the basics of holding two incompatible truths in your head at the same time (the basis for all illusions, he said) just earlier this week!
A light flickered on in her head. A test! But an unplanned one, and one that she could just turn and walk back down the corridor away from, so...
She took a deep breath. The illusion was gorgeous, and a part of the world she had never dreamed of before. But she knew that illusions couldn't change the physical forms underneath, and she knew she had been just about to walk into one of the open lounge rooms, so if she could just remember the layout of the furniture...
She gasped as she stepped forwards into the snow, the crisp cold biting through her slippers. Almost, she closed her eyes, but no- she forced them open at the last moment, instead making herself to overlay the memory of the room onto the trees and drifts about her, like she had been taught. Fumbling forwards, she crept under dark branches and pushed through snow banks, trying her best not to flinch as the wolves circles closer, silently appearing and disappearing. Only once did she freeze, shivering, as the glowing red eye moved deeper in the forest, searching for her... Eventually it moved on, and she scuttled forwards to where she knew the door to the other corridor must be.
It was a blank cliff, looming suddenly out of the gloam. But she smiled, for this was nothing new to her, and reached for where she knew the doorknob must be, opening it and passing through.
"Oh ho ho ho! A neophyte appears! And quite a clever one too! Not a misstep in the room, but not so arrogant as to ignore dangers even if they are probably illusions! Good work!" Magister Klaus boomed out from where he sat in a chair, in an alcove that Eike was sure hadn't been there last time. He wore a hood of scarlet and white fur over his dark grey robes, with a great white beard even a dwarf might envy, and a gigantic bag of boxes perched next to him.
"And for being good, a gift! That is, if you can open it!"
The smiling instructor tossed her one of the boxes and waved her on. Grinning, Eike skipped along, tearing off the cheap paper and twine wrapping it. A plain wooden box with no openings greeted her, nothing but a few odd seams... A puzzle box! Now she understood what he meant about opening it.
She couldn't wait to show her friends.
Hochland