I don't know if I've said it before, but Luca is about eighteen. Marelda is just a little younger, turning eighteen the next spring.

PetVet1023: Yeah, Luca's a lot smarter than he acts, and what most people give him credit for. He's just not interested in what most of the teachers are teaching. And thank you so much for the compliment! I was always annoyed by stories with poor grammar, so I didn't want to do something that annoyed me when other people do it. That, and I'm making writing into my career, so I kind of need to be good at it. That's why most of my time (spare or otherwise) goes into writing and improving I listened to the song! It was really pretty. As for recommendations, have you ever heard of Lindsey Stirling? She's my favorite musician. She's a dancing violinist, so not only are her songs amazing, she's got so many cool music videos. My two favorites of her songs are Something Wild and Song of the Caged Bird. I'd give them a listen!

TheFallenHero: To be honest...I haven't gotten that far. Selen hasn't even visited Johnny's grave at the point I'm at. And I can't do much until after that. The problem is, I haven't even really touched the Elemental Spiral in a month. Between layout week in journalism, and having two writing portfolios to put together, coupled with my own lack of desire to actually get something written...I've gotten next to nothing done. But Luca probably will be the one to explain this all to Selene, but it won't be after until she's almost figured it out herself. Luca's information is missing a few keys, but Selene will only find those missing keys, so once they come together, it'll all make sense and have information to prove it to everyone. It'll be something, that's for sure. As for Copprus, we'll definitely see more of it. Heck, she'll even have to use it against a Chimera at some point. (I will not say more, and will leave you to your own speculation. ;)

Chapter 6

Marelda's POV

"What about the other princess? The younger one, Princess Aulelia? Why do you think you might be her son?" I asked.

He sighed, his hand reaching up and fiddling with his one earring. I don't even think it was a conscious movement—he tended to rub the green jewel when he was thinking.

He took a breath, "Towards the beginning of the school year, I was in Schuyler's off…"

"Professor Schuyler."

"Yeah yeah, anyway, I was in his office, and I spotted something. I'm pretty sure it was a match to this." He tugs on his earring. "I've worn this for longer than I can remember. It's always been there. I've always assumed that it belonged to my mother, seeing as it's a woman's earring. So when I saw the match in Schuyler's office, I became curious. So I did some research into Schuyler's background. He's taught at the academy for around thirteen years. Before that by about four years, he was a royal advisor, did you know that?"

I shook my head, "I wouldn't have guessed that."

"It took long hours of looking through records to find that out. The academy library and archives are the only library in the country, probably in the continent, at least as complete as the royal archives. It's the backups, in case the files at the palace get damaged or destroyed. Next to no one knows that. I had to, ah, take some liberties to get access to these files, though."

"Seriously? You mean you broke in?" I sighed, "How did you not get caught? They would've known if you unlocked it with magic."

"Naw, picked the lock. No magical trace, no damage done. So many people at this place forget that there are ways to do things without magic, and don't make spells against things like lock-picking." He shrugged, "Now, moving on from the how, to the what. Schuyler was also a good friend of the younger princess, since the two had pretty much grown up together. When she vanished, he quit his job in order to search for her, because no one was really allowed to go off and search for Princess Aulelia. They said the royal guard was looking for her, but I don't really think they were. Unlike Princess Aurora's disappearance, I don't think it was of her own free will. I think that the old king sent her away." Luca wouldn't look me in the eye, instead choosing to look up at the canopy of the trees, his hands supporting his weight behind him.

"Sent her away? Why? And why would he lie and say she disappeared, then? Particularly after how devastated the country and the prince were when the older sister disappeared." I felt like I was missing something, a detail that would make things click into place.

"I think she was pregnant."

My eyes widened and I could almost hear the click. "The child had no father in the book, did they?"

He shook his head, "Nope. I think, in order to prevent it from becoming a complete scandal, the king hid her away in secret, claiming she, too, had vanished. An easy scapegoat, huh, to blame it on the influence of the absent older sister? I think Schuyler found out and went with her."

"Then what happened, when the baby was born?" This plot was thickening. Our history may have been written wrong. Honestly, once he—we, because at this point I'm not going to let him do it by himself—get this figured out, with proof, I hope he takes to to someone who can fix the history and get the word out. People deserve to know. But that's only if he says yes.

"The death date of Princess Aulelia and the birthdate of the child were the same day." He said softly. Meaning the mother died in childbirth. It wasn't as common as it had been a few generations ago, but it still happened.

I put my hand on his knee, "Hey, cheer up. Whether it was you or not, it's not the child's fault. There are many reasons. Besides, if it is you, you're still here, so someone cared enough to take care of you in her stead."

"Ha!" Luca sounded cynical and bitter, in a way I hadn't imagined he could sound, "Because locking a kid in a room for ten years, never making contact, and then teleporting them and a magical letter to a boarding school is most definitely caring."

I stared at him, completely taken aback, "Luca, you've said something about your past…you never talk about it." While the actual meaning was dreadful, I felt honoured and humbled that he was trusting me with such information.

"Yeah, it's kind of stupid." He still wasn't making eye contact with me.

"No it's not. I think it's serious and it clearly bothers you. I think you both need and want to talk about it, even if you won't admit it." I looked at him, completely serious in my tone and expression, "So talk. I've already promised not to tell anyone, so you might as well. I mean, it's only fair, seeing as you've made me tell you a good deal about my own past." I had even told him about Parker and his death, even if I didn't go into detail. He's the only one outside of the village, with the exception of Sir Vargas and Elma, with her brother.

He looked over at me, head tilted. He sighed, "You're right. It's only fair I actually give a little, after taking so much, isn't it?"

He decided to lay back onto the grass and look up at the sky. I shrugged, and fell back onto the grass. Our heads were about a foot and a half apart, our feet pointing opposite directions. The wind makes the canopy of tree leaves above our head move in a calming rhythm. I've often heard people say the the waves of the ocean are calming. I've been to the ocean a few times, and the waves aren't all that relaxing. I've always found the wind in the trees to be the most soothing sound in the world.

Luca inhaled before beginning, "I don't have any memories before the age of about four or five. My earliest memories are of a room, exactly 300 yards by 250 yards. I measured once. It's got two rooms attached to it, a bathroom and an office-type room—both together would've been about the size of a single dorm room at the academy. The main room had a twin sized bed, a dresser, a nightstand, a small table, a couch, a few overstuffed chairs, and two large bookshelves. The office had a large desk and an entire wall taken up by another bookshelf. All three bookshelves were filled with books. They all had notes written in them, or comments. There were a lot of magic and history, but there were several novels that were completely fictional. There were also several that were written in a different language, one I didn't recognise."

I saw that he smiled slightly when he talked about those books. "How'd you know how to read? Or speak?"

"For the first couple years, I taught myself using some of the books. There were a few magical ones that could speak—well, more accurately, read themselves aloud. They were no good for conversation like some of the books here. I used them to learn, though. I read every book in those rooms, save for the foreign ones. Now that I think about it, they were in English." He chuckled, "I kind of wish I could go back and read them."

"What makes you think they were in English?" I asked.

"Selene." Ah. Of course. He snorted, "She decided about two months ago that since classes bored me, I needed something new to learn and set me to working on English assignments, making me learn it. You can apparently buy all sorts of things to practice over in Terra. She's also been teaching it to Prince Elias. He learns it willingly, though, being the scholar he is."

"Ha. This Selene seems smart. Idle hands are Evil's hands, after all." I tease.

"Yup." He laughs, "It's not bad, and it's something new to do. I recognised some of the characters, which I why I thought think, at this point, that they were English."

"Huh. Interesting. Did you ever leave that room?"

"Yeah. Tried that. There was no way to do so. Trust me when I say I tried. There was no way out, not by normal means."

"Then how did you live, survive?"

"Magic, I suppose. Three times a day, food appeared on the table in the room. Always at the same time. There was a single clock attached to one of the walls. At nine o'clock in the evening, exactly, the lights would shut off. They wouldn't turn on again until seven the next morning. At some point I learned how to use magic to make floating balls of light from one of the books, like the ones all around the academy, only temporary. Eventually, I learned that if I put a note on the plates before they disappeared, within the next day or so something else would appear. Most of the small things I asked for, like paper and writing utensils, sketch paper, more books, I got. Things like requests to see the outside world...well, those went unanswered. So everything I knew was from the books. At some point—I was probably about eight—I decided to try and draw the things in the books. I started by copying pictures that were there, then moved on to drawing things that were described, particularly things from the novels. Eventually I started drawing things I wanted to see one day. I had read about the outside, the sky, the cloud, the sun, the stars and moon. It kept me busy.

"Eventually I got around to practicing the magic explained in the books. Soon after I began, this appeared." He pulled his wand from his pocket. It wasn't one of the cheap, generic wands, not at all. It was one of the fancy, hand-crafted wands. Luca's was the emerald green, the same color as his earring. It was carved to look like vines wrapping around each other, creating a twisting effect. It was a pretty wand, much more so than mine. Mine was merely a normal dark brown wand. The only abnormality on it was the coppery ring embedded into it, that connected my sword, Copperus, to the physical realm. It was stored in a little pocket dimension, and anything stored in a pocket dimension needed a connection to the physical realm, hence the ring.

"It looks like a very expensive wand, a one of a kind." I comment.

"When I first got it, it had the same aura as the magic books that were in the room."

My eyes widened at that, "They belonged to the same person, then?"

"Yeah. I think so." He laughed, "And when I was about fifteen, so around three years ago, one of the acceptance letters appeared into the room. It went and explained to me that I was going to leave and go to a school to learn magic. It was a chance to get out of the room, and I took it. I was teleported to the academy. Thank goodness it was a weekend right before school started, so no one was really there. I probably looked like an idiot, gawking at everything. I was introduced to the headmaster, given a dorm room to myself. I hate to say it, but I actually cried a few times, like when I saw the sunset and rise, saw the stars and moon. And the library...not to mention when I found the archives a few weeks later...it was amazing compared to the room. This kind of freedom was new. Then classes started. They were fun for a couple of weeks, until I realized that I wasn't learning anything new. And being stuck in a classroom for that long, bored out of my mind? Heck no. I started skipping, finding more interesting things to do."

"Huh. So there was a better reason for your constant skipping than I originally thought." I laughed a bit, "You're not such a vagrant after all."

He looked over at me, mock hurt on his face, "You're so mean to me, bella."

In an uncharacteristic move, I poked his forehead, "But you'll live, now won't you?"

He smirked, "I'm not so sure, you might need to kiss it better." He puckered his lips and closed his eyes.

I smirked, slipping a knife from my belt and pressed the flat of the blade against his mouth. His eyes snapped open and he looked extremely confused. I wiped the blade on the grass and stuck it back in my belt, "Careful when kissing knives, kid. You might cut yourself." I couldn't look him in the eye and had to bite my lip to keep from outright laughing. Couldn't keep my shoulders from shaking, however.

Then I sat up, alarmed. "Crap! What time is it?" The sky had turned an orange color. "We've got to hurry or we'll miss curfew!" I scrambled up, "I guess I'll see you later. Bye!"

I sprinted as fast as I could towards the girls dorm, barely making it and getting a small scolding from the dorm mother. After a series of apologetic words, she let me go and told me to make sure I got something from the kitchens to eat, since I missed dinner. "You're a warrior in training, after all, so you've got to keep your strength up." she told me.

Luca's POV

I didn't even get to return the "Bye." before she was gone. Dang that girl was fast. She almost completely lost me, earlier. I had to use a spell to track her.

But if anything, I felt a lot lighter now.

I hadn't had time to tell her everything, but the amount that I did tell her was more than I've ever told anyone, ever. It was as if every word had been a weight that I had shed as it left my lips. It was a nice feeling. For the first time, I felt as if I could trust someone completely. I mean, I trusted Selene, but not enough to tell her everything.

I took a deep breath and pushed myself up. I was about to stand when something started to glow, catching my eye. There was a matching glow on my cloak and a burst of light. It faded and I clearly saw what had been on the ground. It was a school emblem.

More specifically, Marelda's.

I smacked my forehead and fell back into a laying position.

Crap.

Marelda owns several tanto, a type of knife. They can be used for all sorts of things, from prying things open to throwing.