The sun over Asandra was hot, beating down on the clusters of students making their way through the school grounds. Cheerful conversation drifted in and out of Blaze’s ears as he reclined in the grass underneath a luscious willow tree, its full branches dripping down towards him as he relaxed and read a book.
He looked up from his book, absentmindedly searching the courtyard for who-knows-what. Approaching from inside the school was an unfamiliar first year in emerald green robes. Clutched in her arms were several books, and he could begin to make out the concern on her face as she got closer and closer.
The courtyard had largely emptied, so Blaze shut his book and propped his head upon his elbows to watch as the girl rushed by, muttering softly to herself.
“Hey! You, are you okay?” he called as she neared the willow tree, not exactly sincere but just wanting to make sure he wasn’t dealing with a crazy person. She looked up, her silver eyes locking onto him.
“I have to go, I shall be too late!” she said hurriedly, pushing back the sleeve of her robe to check the time on a gold watch. She turned, scurrying off the designated path, past Blaze, and around the back of the willow tree. He waited a few moments to see if she was going to reappear from the other side of the tree, but there was no sign of her.
Growing a bit worried, Blaze set his book to the side and crept around the side of the tree, his hands brushing its soft and luxurious wood. The girl had vanished into thin air.
Now, normally this wouldn’t be much of an issue. He was a wizard, they had ways of getting around that were undetectable to others. However, at the base of the tree, just at the spot where the girl would have vanished from was quite a sizable hole.
Oh boy, he thought, eyeing the hole. Every thought in his brain was telling him to walk back around to the other side of the tree and continue reading. But that girl had definitely fallen down that hole. Would it really make him a bad person if he just let it happen? She was just a first year, it’s not like anyone would miss her anyway.
But as much as he hated being dragged into other people’s messes, he knew that he couldn’t just let this go. Sighing a little bit more dramatically than this situation warranted, Blaze knelt in front of the hole and peered inside, trying to discern how far down it might go, and to where.
“Uh… hello?” he called uncertainly, his voice echoing back to him. He frowned, leaning farther into the hole, just trying to get a glimpse of the ground. After a few minutes passed, there was still no response. Relief was just starting to trickle into his mind as he began to think that the girl really hadn’t tumbled down whatever animal’s home this was when a flash of silver caught his attention. Silver, like the first year’s eyes.
He gasped, and leaned even closer to the hole, suddenly losing grip on the grass and lurching forward. Blaze grabbed at the sides of the ground, tearing out fistfuls of weeds as he toppled head over heels into the same fate that had befallen the girl.
The hole beneath the willow tree, wherever it had come from, was beginning to become a bit boring. Blaze had started yelling at the top of his lungs as soon as he’d started falling downwards, trying to catch himself using stray roots and magic. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the best under pressure, or, you know, whilst hurtling towards his death down some sort of sinkhole.
After a few minutes had passed and Blaze realized that he had not hit the ground and broken all his bones yet, he stopped yelling, and stopped grabbing at the edges of the increasingly wide hole, and stilled, wind rushing past his face in the darkness.
And he thought, this is a rather deep hole.
Not that he was unappreciative of the extra time he had been given before his death, in fact, he had formulated quite an extensive list of last wishes at this point; he just wished that he had a piece of paper or something of the like to write it all down on.
Something flickered at the edge of his vision and he whipped his head around. Pockets of light began to appear on the sides of the shaft, burning candles stuffed into cutouts illuminating the hole. It was more of a tunnel, really. A very steep tunnel.
Accompanying the candles were a variety of seemingly random household objects, books and grandfather clocks and tea sets, all stashed away on shelves underneath a lovely willow tree.
He was so distracted by the sheer oddity of it all that he didn’t realize he had stopped falling until he hit the ground with a surprisingly soft thump.
At this point, it had already registered in Blaze’s mind that there was some sort of magic at work here, Myth illusion magic or something similar. He briefly wondered if he had stumbled into a strange, far-off alternate world from where there was no magic and he was poor and lived with his terrible parents--- but, no, that would be ridiculous.
It appeared that he had landed in an ordinary hallway, doors lining either side which were all locked when he tried them. Frustrated, he kicked one of the doors like he expected that not to hurt, and clutched his foot in agony when it did.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a streak of pink hair and immediately turned towards it, all pain forgotten.
“Hello?” he called, starting down the hall. There was no response. He began to jog, coming to a stop at the end of the corridor. There was still no sign of the girl.
He only stopped when he almost crashed into a little glass table, looking very out of place in the middle of the hallway. On the table was a tiny golden key resting in a dish. Blaze was thoroughly baffled by the presence of such a small key, as the locks on the doors were much too large for it to unlock, until he caught sight of a door, maybe a foot tall, set into the wall behind the table.
Reluctantly picking up the key, he strode over to the door and knelt down, turning the key in the lock. The door popped open, revealing a tiny tunnel leading who knows where.
“Are you kidding me? This is my only way out?”
He turned back to the table, noticing a small bottle that had definitely not been there before. It was filled with a clear liquid, and there was a note attached to the neck of the bottle by a string. It read “drink me.”
“I have literally nothing better to do,” he said, uncapping the bottle and draining it in one swig.
He started to regret that way of thinking a moment later when he began to tingle all over, and so he went back to planning his will. The hallucinations began when the room around him suddenly grew taller and taller, and then it stopped. He glanced around, and everything seemed just the way it had been a moment ago, only bigger. Possibly it was him who had grown smaller, and everything else had just stayed the same, but he kind of liked to think that the world revolved around him and not the other way round.
As he looked around, he noticed that the small door was now just a regular-sized door, and he gave himself a congratulatory pat on the back because, wow, he was actually a genius.
It turned out that Blaze was not really a genius, because the door was still locked and the key was still on the table where he had left it when he found the bottle, which must have been some sort of potion.
“Oooh, nice.” His words were laced with sarcasm.
He approached the table again, his short, stumpy legs taking an obnoxiously long time to reach the base. Once he got there, instead of having to try to climb up the table as he had planned, he just had to take a look at the conveniently placed mini-size table underneath the first table. This made everything quite a bit easier.
Blaze climbed on the table and looked up. Unfortunately, he was still too short to reach anywhere near the bigger table.
He sat down on the table with his legs crossed and frowned. On the table, which he hadn’t noticed before, was a plate with a small cake with the words “eat me” written on in icing.
“Seriously, who keeps leaving these around?” he asked no one in particular, taking a bite of the cake without thinking. This time the room began to shrink, and shrink, until Blaze was much larger than he had originally started. “Oh, come on!” He grabbed the key off the table and flung it at the mouse-sized door, drank some more of the potion and stormed out the door.
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