The first few years here weren't that bad. My daily routine consisted of basic sword training with Nocte in the morning, followed shortly by magic lessons with Cinder. I enjoyed training with Nocte. He explained in detail the forms of different styles used in fighting with a sword, demonstrated them for me, and then helped me practice until I could get them right. The sparring sessions were a different story. Nocte has a tendency to take any sort of fight quite seriously, which I learned very quickly. With his quick reflexes and swift powerful strikes, it was difficult for me to even land one blow on him. To be fair, he's got years of experience and I'm just a beginner. Eventually I became skilled enough to keep up with Nocte for a few minutes. That's the amount of time it takes for me to get too exhausted to effectively block or evade any of his attacks. I'm sure he holds back a lot though. I've seen one of his spars with Cinder and the only thing I can say is that I do not want to be caught in between those two in a fight. One strange thing I noticed in that spar was that Nocte and Cinder were wielding these weird looking swords. When I asked Nocte about it, he told me the swords were called "keyblades", and that he would get in trouble if he told me anything else. I guess that's another thing I'll never know more about, since nobody other than Nocte seems to tell me anything.
Lessons with Cinder weren't as fun. Her efforts to teach me involved only telling me the name of the spell I was supposed to learn for the day and a brief description of what it did. It was up to me to attempt casting it. The situation was not helped by the fact that my control was really bad. Once, when I asked for a little more help, she told me that helping me would make me dependent on her, and that if I couldn't do it on my own, then I should just stop trying. I tried to get help from Nocte, but he told me that he wasn't good enough at magic to teach me. Cinder seemed kind of cold and detached when dealing with me. Nocte told me later that he and Cinder were getting ready for their Mark of Mastery exam that was coming up. I guess she was just busy preparing for the exam and didn't want to waste too much time trying to teach me. I didn't hold it against her anyway. I'm not one for holding grudges.
In the afternoon, I would go to the library to read up on different topics. It was a little interesting to learn about the history and culture of many places in the world. It wasn't as if I had anything better to do, anyway. Master Verum doesn't let me leave the castle grounds. I asked why, but all he told me that it was for my own safety. He seems to have a lot of things that he doesn't tell me, and it gets on my nerves sometimes.
I think everything started to go wrong after the Mark of Mastery exam. I don't know what actually happened in it, since I wasn't allowed to watch. All I do know is that both of them passed. However, immediately after the exam Cinder seemed to be very angry about something. Nocte was unusually quiet as well. A few days later, Cinder announced that she was leaving the Land of Departure to seek out her own path in life. I was shocked at the announcement. One of the few people I knew here was leaving, possibly forever. All I could manage then was a short "goodbye". Nocte still wouldn't say anything, and Master Verum just wished her the best of luck. I haven't seen her since.
A couple of years after Cinder's departure, Nocte left to investigate something weird going on in a place he said was called Vale. It's been six months since he left and there hasn't been any word from him. Master Verum told not to worry and impressed the importance of me remaining in the castle. Waiting around is not something I'm fond of doing, hence my decision to try and leave.
My first attempt to leave went rather poorly. I had packed some supplies for the journey, along with my trusty sword for protection. The sword was one of the only things that was found with me when I first came to the Land of Departure. It's something that has a connection to my past, so it's one of my most prized possessions. The sheath that it was in is pretty important too, though it's kind of heavy. Justified, when I found out that it could turn into a shield. Very handy to have, but I haven't practiced with it much. I prefer to dodge attacks rather than block with a shield. I still brought it along, since I still needed it to carry my sword. Anyway, there I was at the front door. I had left a note for him explaining where I was going, and was all set to leave. I opened the door, took one step outside, and was smacked in the face by a huge glowing orb. Turns out Master Verum has some sort of security spell guarding the grounds that seems to also be a deterrent against me leaving. He showed up about ten seconds later and scolded me for trying to leave. I ended up having to scrub the floors of the hallways as punishment. All of the hallways. Needless to say, I was extremely exhausted after that.
I realized that if I was going to escape, it was going to have to be in some way that Master Verum would never see coming. I went looking around the castle looking for anything that would help. Fortunately, I didn't get lost again. Even more fortunate was the storage closet I found on the fifth floor. There was tons of stuff in there, and it was really dusty. I looked through the various things in there: rusted helmets, ropes, sheets, an inflatable raft, and much more. The search was going poorly until I came across something interesting: a parachute. It wasn't a typical parachute either; it had a bunch of additional stuff on it that I only recognized from a book I had read once in the library. This led to the crazy idea that, thinking back on it, was actually less likely to succeed and more likely to kill me. Still, I was slowly going insane from the anxiety and frustration of being stuck in the castle, and it seemed like my only chance, so I took it. On a night when I was sure that Master Verum was sound asleep, I jammed his bedroom door and put a chair under the doorknob for good measure. I managed to do this without waking him up somehow. Then, I went up to the roof of one of the towers of the castle with all my stuff. It was the highest point of the castle, and I thought it was the best place to launch myself from. I took a deep breath to calm myself, checked the straps on my pack, and leapt off the roof.
This leads me to my current situation: me plunging towards the ground at an incredibly swift rate. Without any delay, I pulled the handle to deploy the chute. Nothing happened. Turns out there was a reason the parachute was in that storage closet: it wasn't working properly. Master Verum probably had put it there intending to dispose of it at some point but forgot to actually do it. What this meant was that I was falling to my certain death. All I could do at this point was let out a long continuous scream as I plunged towards the ground. Right before impact, I closed my eyes so that I wouldn't have to witness my own grisly demise.
"Thoom."