Two
hundred thousand pairs of eyes watched as the three of us walked on
stage. "And now," said the Headmaster as he gestured to us, "your
Faustus Academy of Deep Arcana graduating class of 2016!" The crowd
erupted in a chorus of cheers, applause, shouts, roars, stomps and
colorful, miniature explosions launched into the sky. Morris led us on
stage, visibly shaking, his hands drifting up to rub the purple bruise
the rope gave him when he tried to hang himself just a couple hours ago.
Ahh, immortality must be a bitch, I thought. Nancy, followed behind
him, a length of fabric torn from her sleeve tied over her eyes, or,
more precisely, where her eyes used to be two hours ago before she dug
them out. I brought up the rear, eyes straight ahead, wondering how I'd
gotten here, my robes tight around me and the twenty-pound explosive
vest I wore under it.
You see, it takes a special breed of asshole to apply to the Faustus
Academy of Deep Arcana. You want to learn how to brew love potions or
cast stunning spells? Go to the Merlin University or Boarboil College.
At the Faustus Academy, there are no team sports, no academic clubs, no
group projects. You're not here to learn cheap tricks or manipulate
magic. You're here to dominate magic, to bend it to your will and claim
it for your own. And yes, everyone knows that no one person has ever
been able to control magic, and yet that doesn't stop Faustus Academy
from filling a class year after year.
"And now," the Headmaster said, "I'd like to present this year's
valedictorian, Morris Fortuna, with the honor of being the first to
conduct his graduation ritual."
He mixed the contents of several containers together into a cauldron
and snapped his fingers, instantly boiling the contents into a paste. He
stripped to his waist and I saw scars carved throughout his chest, his
abdomen, his back. Ritual scars, the kind that bleed and bleed and
bleed. He smeared the paste onto his face, turning it a deep shade of
red. With the rest of the paste, he painted a 20 foot wide circle on the
stage. Morris grabbed another container and scattered a white powder
into the center of the circle. Around the edges, he placed 4 heads, one
in each of the cardinal directions. I recognized one of them as
Margaret's and another as Johnny's. He must've been keeping them frozen
since neither looked as far decomposed as they should have after we
split their bodies up just before Christmas break, Sophomore year. In
fact I was going to use some of Margaret's bones in my own graduation
ritual.
Morris knelt before the circle and started chanting. Chanting was
probably the one thing all graduation rituals had in common. The other
thing was that they would all end in our deaths, just like last year's
graduating class, and the year before that, and the year before that,
all the way back to the founding of the school.
After of couple of minutes, the sky darkened and red lightning
flashed across the sky. The ground shook and a giant pit opened in the
center of the circle. The heads started chanting as well. All of the
scars on Morris' body glowed red, the same red as the light now emitting
from the pit. Flames and screams burst from deep within the hole.
I yawned. It was all standard ritual stuff. I really expected more
from our valedictorian. To have made a deal with a pit demon, well that
was just cliche. Then I saw a head. A human head with slicked-back,
black hair. It rose from the pit to reveal a man of average height,
dressed in a slick, black, three-piece suit. A perfectly average man, if
you could ignore the red, whip-thin tail and the fact that he was
floating a foot over the pit. He stepped forward to the edge of the
circle as if walking on an invisible floor. He extended his hand only
pull it back as if it had just been shocked. Quickly, he regained his
composure and took in his surroundings before focusing his attention on
Morris.
The man, who was definitely not a man, spread his arms and smiled,
displaying a sharp set of fangs. "Well, Morris, it appears we've finally
reached the end of our contract," he said.
Morris stood up and bowed his head. "Yes, Leviathan, this is the
end." He stepped forward and descended into the flames. Leviathan
laughed and followed him down, the portal closing behind him.
"Holy shit," I said to myself. Morris had made a pact with Leviathan,
one of Lucifer's personal guards during the Fall. Not only that, but
he'd managed to summon the devil to Earth while keeping him restrained
in such a tiny cage. Very impressive.
And that's really the whole point of these graduation rituals, to
show-off for one last time. To tread where those who call themselves
great fear to go. To show the world what magic is truly capable of. And
I'm sure it provides a boost to enrollment when someone summons a devil
from Lucifer's inner circle, as well.
Nancy went next. On a hunch, I closed my eyes, assuming whatever it
was she made a deal with was something that you didn't want to lay eyes
upon. I could here her moving around, chanting words I didn't
understand, beautiful words that the world had forgotten long ago. It
was a good thirty minutes before I felt a warmth shine on my body, on my
soul. I felt something I hadn't felt in the longest time - joy, bliss,
contentment, forgiveness. A voice spoke back from above, a voice so deep
and rich and pure, I could feel tears starting to stream down my face -
and blood trickle from my ears. There was a loud boom and I was thrown
back several feet.
I opened my eyes to see a crater where Nancy was standing, it's edges
marked with runes and symbols I'd never seen before. Based on the lack
of blood or body chunks, I assume whatever it was either took Nancy or
else had disintegrated her to dust. I looked around the crowd to see
that some people were not as smart and didn't close their eyes before
hand. It took a good while to bandage everyone up and get them to a
hospital. Through their constant babbling, I made out the words
"beautiful," "wings," and "tentacles."
But that's why we do it, the graduation rituals. 4 years of study at
Faustus Academy of Deep Arcana comes at a price, usually your soul,
sometimes even someone else's. As I said, only a special breed of
asshole applies to Faustus Academy. An asshole that knows, from the
moment they apply, that no one has made it past graduation day and yet
believes, truly believes that they are better than the hundreds and
hundreds of wizards who came before them, that they, somehow, will
finally be the one to conquer magic. And then comes 4 years of study, 4
years of doing horrible, terrible, unspeakable things to make it to
graduation day. Things that would eventually drive any one of us insane
when the guilt finally catches up. Every graduate knows this. People who
have done the things we've done can't exist alongside proper society.
And so the graduation ceremony exists so we may demonstrate our
abilities before sacrificing our lives.
I made my way to an unharmed section of the stage with my materials.
First, the metal stage was unsuitable for my ritual. I tapped my foot
twice and snapped my fingers once, turning a large section around me
into rocky terrain, sort of like what one would expect on the side of a
mountain. I grabbed some bones and powdered blood from my materials and
began throwing them around randomly, some over here, a bit more over
there, a little less on the other side. The ambiance set, I waved my
hand in the air and a huge, metal cage covered in paper talismans fell,
enclosing the area and myself. After all, if this worked, the world was
about to see something that hadn't walked the Earth since the time of
King Arthur himself.
Then came the shoveling. It was the one part of the ritual I was not
looking forward to, well, except for the dying part. Mostly because it
gave me time to think. Especially about why I was so pissed about dying.
It wasn't that I didn't expect it or even that I didn't deserve it.
The pit finally finished, I levitated myself out. I grabbed a
5-gallon bucket of blood and poured it down the hole. I walked to the
far side of the cage and surveyed my work. Rocky terrain, bones and
blood, a hole. Well, it wasn't quite the Cave of Caerbannog but it was
close enough.
I didn't think it would work, but an hour later, I saw something
move, hop out of the pit. I saw two, tiny red eyes in the darkness. From
outside the cage, I could hear the crowd "ooh" and "ahh" and, of
course, more than a couple people yelled, "it is the rabbit!"
Deep down, that's probably the biggest issue I had with the
graduation ritual - that I was going to be killed by a joke. The killer
rabbit of Caerbannog! Come on, how could anyone believe it was real. But
there it was, almost at the very back of the book of restricted
rituals. The lucky thing was that since this wasn't the real cave and
I'd be summoning it, the rabbit would go back down the hole after
killing me. The downside was that, as I said, I'd be killed by a rabbit.
Seeing the crowd of people, the rabbit lunged at them first, but
collided with the enchanted bars of the cage. Obviously it would be a
real dick move if I just let it go after the spectators. The rabbit
fixed its beady eyes on me as I grabbed the detonator from my pocket.
The rabbit lunged cautiously, as if uncertain about what I held in my
hand.
There's no holy hand grenades in today's modern era. Trust me, I
looked. I settled instead for 20lbs of C4 and as many ball bearings and
nails as the vest could hold, and the whole contraption doused with holy
water and blessed by the only priest I could find who believed that
this was for a school project. "One! Two! Five!" I said with a smile as I
released the detonator and triggering the dead man's switch.
After writing the reality fiction piece the last time, I promised my next writing exercise would go back to fantasy, and when I saw this writing prompt -
There's a school that kills all of its students at the end of their senior year. Everyone knows this, but you're the only one who has a problem with it - I knew almost immediately what I wanted to write about - A Magic School Graduation. After all, Harry Potter has been a big part of my life since probably about the 6th grade and more recently, I've probably read and re-read Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" series about 2 or 3 times now. It took me a while to write this one (I think a whole week actually) mostly due to the fun I had in writing it. The original plan for the story was much longer and included a magic duel between the protagonist and a famous duelist in their world ("The valedictorian didn't fight him, not because we wanted to embarrass him, but because I was probably the sanest one and least likely to kill him" - That was going to be a line from that deleted section). I cut it out because I only wanted to use it to show just the type of wizards this school turned out when they trained here, but I think the summoning of demons and unknown creatures did a good enough job. I also originally planned for roughly 7 of them to graduate and I would run through all of their graduation day rituals but that was making the story extremely long for too little of a payoff besides to show-off whatever imaginative events I could come up with. My one hope is that you laughed at the end because I did when I tried to think of the most ridiculous thing someone could be killed by, but, for me anyway, comedy is hard to write so I'm not sure it came off that way. Mostly, I'm hoping you got a good visual experience into a fantastical world.
