6. Ella

Chapter 6

Ella

Ella awoke the next morning to two emails from Headmistress Dyer waiting in her inbox.

The first contained the password to the main database, the subject line I heard you . The second was a mass email to the whole student faculty, the subject reading MANDATORY staff meeting first period in the teacher’s lounge.

When she read the capitalization on the word mandatory, she knew this meeting would be about her.

Ella kept herself contained in the corner of the room as faculty members began spilling into the teacher’s lounge, populating the blue couches, breezing right past her due to her hood being pulled all the way over her head, concealing her blonde hair. She watched Oliviana and Daniel amble over to the windowsill and not even bat an eye in her direction, the hood protecting her from attracting unwanted attention. The only person in the room not fooled by her cover was Kellen—the moment he stepped over the threshold, his eyes pasted to her in a way that led her to believe he’d found her through her scent amidst the sea of bodies. The only thing she didn’t understand was why he seemed to be searching for it, since no other Varmin with similarly heightened senses of smell appeared to be looking to flush her out.

She’d woken up that morning with a new outlook on her current circumstance. She’d worked so hard to create this illusion of resilience, to try to stand up to the Primordials, all while conflating danger with fear. When things turned physical, she allowed her fear to prevent her from upholding that mask. Last night, when she asserted herself with Headmistress Dyer, no fear in the underbelly of her actions, she seemed to have acquired real results. She decided to try something new, to truly meet their opposition with her own unique rendition, to stop trying to fit herself neatly inside the box they wanted to shove her into and instead try to authentically embody what the Primordials claimed strength was to them. If what they valued most in Cavale was one’s capability to put themselves first above all else, then why shouldn’t she adopt the same mindset?

Beneath the protection of her jacket, she found the confidence to meet Kellen’s stare head-on, her defiant smile lost in the shadow of her hood. Ella sensed he could still see it inspite of the obscurity, his top lip curling up in a snarl.

If I disgust you so much, then look away, she taunted him with a cock of her head.

The way his lashes fluttered and his head jerked back made her wonder if he’d actually heard her. He sniffed the air, his posture adjusting against the window before she heard his voice fill her ears and mind.

I count the moments until I can memorize what you look like expelling your last breath, Ms. Rose. I may cum to that image for the rest of my life.

Ella yanked her hood down, wanting her expression of horror and fury to be unavoidable. Kellen offered her in return two soft dimples celebrating their victory in the center of his cheeks, having provoked Ella to expose herself to the room. Oliviana lunged off the couch she’d been occupying and made a beeline for Ella, the earth-bender’s red hair a blur of cherry stained tendrils sullying the ether.

Vines sprouted from the floorboards with Oliviana’s impending arrival, diving towards Ella and coiling around her throat. The boughs shunted her so hard into the wall that Ella heard something crack, though she wasn’t sure at first if it was her back that cracked or the wall behind her.

“Is that the best you can do?” Ella laughed, though her skull and spine throbbed from the collision. “I’m getting really tired of being thrown into walls. Come up with something original for a change.”

“You want my worst, little earthborn? You’ve got it,” Oliviana threatened with a smile outlined by malice.

“Let her go, Ms. Bryan,” Headmistress Dyer ordered when she stepped into the room.

The vines slipped off Ella’s neck, dropping her to the ground. Oliviana’s nostrils flared at Ella before she stomped back to the windowsill, dodging the hands Daniel extended for her and choosing instead to seek comfort in Kellen, leaning her head on his shoulder. Kellen didn’t so much as twitch in acknowledgement of her presence—his eyes remained pinned on Ella, his absorption completely consumed by her.

“What a wonderful introduction that was into what this meeting is about,” Headmistress Dyer quipped on her quest to the front of the room, stepping behind the podium that faced the entire faculty. “Ms. Rose, why don’t you come join me up here?”

Oh, fuck.

Ella pulled herself upright, lifting her chin as she strolled to the front of the room to stand at Headmistress Dyer’s side. Sixty-three pairs of eyes stalked after her, their hatred humidifying the air. Once Ella flanked her, Headmistress Dyer addressed the room.

“It’s been brought to my attention that there have been numerous attacks made against Ms. Rose since the school year commenced, both verbal and physical, resulting in several broken limbs and a near-death experience of almost drowning. That ends today. I understand you may have certain opinions about Ms. Rose being hired, but those opinions should be directed at me, not her. You may share your concerns with me, but you will no longer be allowed to take your frustrations out on Ms. Rose. I’ve spoken with the Cavalian Gods’ envoy, and they’ve decided that anyone who lays a hand on Ms. Rose that she didn’t want there will be sentenced to three days in Terminus. If you continue to harass Ms. Rose, more severe punishment will be deemed appropriate, such as a permanent stay in Terminus.” Headmistress Dyer’s eyes swept over the room to locate Oliviana. “Ms. Bryan, you will be spending three days in Terminus for strangling Ms. Rose, effective immediately.”

Holy shit, Ella almost gasped aloud.

That certainly fragmented the room into a frenzy. As a figure cloaked from head to toe in silver, titanium armor came marching into the lounge, Oliviana rose to her feet, screeching at the top of her lungs.

“This is bullshit!” she screamed, just as the envoy reached her and seized her arm, yanking her towards the door. “You’re punishing me in defense of a human? This goes against everything the Gods stand for!” Her eyes found Ella’s, and right before she was ripped from the room, she roared, “Mark my words, I will skin you alive with my bare hands, earthborn!”

Daniel Madix began shouting nonsense, his voice drowned out by the multitude of faculty making their displeasure known, both verbally and with unbecoming hand gestures. The only person in the room who sat there in a chilling silence, no emotion readable on his face, was Kellen.

You know what this means, Ms. Rose? he asked her, his voice inundating her ears above all the shouting.

What? she asked back through whatever connection he had with her mind, her eyes locked with his.

They’ll hate you more now than they did before. She’s turned the act of slaughtering you into a game, a challenge of discretion. She’s done you no favors here, earthborn. Ella’s stomach churned.

She couldn’t decipher if he meant that to be a warning or a threat.

“You will do well to remember that Ms. Rose, as a human, would not have been permitted to enter our lands had the Gods not sanctioned it themselves,” Headmistress Dyer continued, speaking over the upheaval. “ They want her here. So she will stay. Now, I’d like to give the floor to Ms. Rose so she can explain to you what she needs from all of you to be able to do her job.” Headmistress Dyer stepped to the side, turning to Ella and gesticulating to the podium.

Don’t let them see you sweat, she thought to herself. From the corner of her eye, she watched Kellen’s lips twitch in acknowledgement of what he heard in her thoughts. She took Headmistress Dyer’s place at the podium.

“Hello, everyone,” she greeted the room, keeping her voice steady despite her nerves and the myriad of deadly glowers being shot at her. She flattened her hands on the podium so no one could see them tremble. “I’d like to take this time to clarify what a school counselor actually is. I’m here to provide academic, career, and social-emotional support to all students. I’m not trying to poison the minds of the youth against you or debunk any of the traditions in Cavale. I’m here to be a force of good for the students and ensure that nothing like what happened to Tifani Robinson happens again. While I work to adjust how I approach this job based on the customs of Cavale, I’d like to be extended the same courtesy. That means, if a student wishes to speak with me, please don’t make it impossible for them to do so. Please don’t position them against me or tell them they can’t trust me. If I ask to do a classroom observation of a student, please don’t shut me out of your classroom. If I ask for a student’s grades, please don’t blow me off. I’m not here to make your lives harder. I’m actually here to make your lives easier, should you allow me the chance to do so. You don’t have to like me, but I implore you to accept that I’m not going anywhere. All I ask is that you respect my place here, so we can find a way to work with one another to help our students and coexist until the end of the school year.”

Kellen was right.

All she felt staring back at her was the intensification of their hatred for her, not the reduction of it.

“Thank you, Ms. Rose.” Headmistress Dyer nodded, her signal for Ella to step away from the podium. “Meeting adjourned.” Before anyone moved, she added, “I hope to see all of you still here by our next staff meeting. I’ll be fucking furious if I have to call in more substitutes for anyone being sentenced to Terminus.” With that final threat looming in the air, she strutted out of the teacher’s lounge.

The minute Headmistress Dyer’s tightly wound ringlets disappeared behind the door, Daniel stormed across the room, plumages of rage simmering in his wake, and raised his hand like he was about to smack Ella down. Ella stumbled back, but before his fist made contact with her face, Kellen hurtled in front of her and grabbed Daniel’s wrist, wrenching his arm down in a sliding arch to push him away.

“What the fuck, Kell?” Daniel growled, clasping his now dislocated shoulder.

“Did you not hear Dyer?” Kellen snapped. “One wrong move against her, and you’ll be tossed into Terminus.”

“She’s a fucking nark! She got Oliviana banished!”

“Doesn’t fucking matter. She’s not worth marring your personal record too.”

Daniel yanked his fingers through the blonde wisps of hair dripping over his forehead, shoving them off his face. His eyes swung to Ella, his nose wrinkling with disgust before he retreated from the room.

Ella turned to Kellen, bringing her intertwined fingers to her chest. “Thank—”

“Don’t think I did that for you, earthborn,” he hissed, her hands lowering to her sides. “I did that to save my colleague from making a rash decision that could cost him his career. I don’t give a flying fuck what happens to you. I would gladly step aside and watch any other instructor damn themselves to Terminus for killing you. Just not one of my people.”

Kellen expected to garner a much more enraged, or even hurt, response from her. Ella only granted him a blink of her eyes and a tiny smirk, wanting to elicit the reaction from him he’d been trying to provoke in her.

“What’s wrong with your face?” he snapped, fidgeting like the sight of her smile made him uncomfortable in his skin.

“It’s a smile. Ever heard of one?”

“Stop that. It’s weird. What about what I just said is smile worthy?”

“You’re not as scary as you think you are,” she answered, holding back a laugh at how a blush blitzed his cheeks up to his ears, his confusion over her strange attitude almost tangible in the ether.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he sneered at her, her grin growing wider.

“What’s my problem? You are,” she answered, her smile falling away. She inclined closer and declared, her voice whetted by a coldness she’d never heard herself produce before, “You’re standing in my way.”

She stepped around Kellen and headed for the door, his eyes sketching lines down her back.

“Pretending you’re one of us now?” he shouted at her, her feet coming to a halt at the threshold. She spun around to look at him. “It won’t work. Your words may sound like they belong to a Primordial, but they reek of human desperation. You don’t fit in here, Rose, and you never will.”

“What makes you think I want to fit in, Kilic?” She tossed her ponytail over her shoulder, then blew him a kiss with her middle finger.

Mid-afternoon, just as Ella retrieved a salad from her newly-minted enchanted fridge and sat down to eat her lunch, her amulet glowed purple, her presence requested in the Varmin quarter.

Please be anyone but Kilic, she prayed to the Gods, then rose from her desk and grabbed her coat.

The yellow and crimson leaves dotting the curvilinear trees overhead descended upon her into the unseen cushion of air. As the petals fell, they rested as one mosaic tile after another along the dirt path she followed. Within the Varmin sector, the grounds were split between the student housing and the hundreds of large steel domes dedicated to each of the different beings the Varmin could shift into. The interior of the domes consisted of large, vacant space for the Varmin to practice shifting and/or flying, the size of the dome contingent on the magnitude of the species. Ella pulled open the door to one of the more miniature domes, belonging to the serpent-shifters.

Inside, she encountered a class in session, a throng of freshman practicing shifting between their serpent forms and their human skin.

Waiting by the entrance stood a dazzling female, with long, cascading violet-shaded hair and bright, lavender hued eyes to match. Ella found her appearance inviting despite her strong bone structure and the upturned shape of her eyes, the serration making it understandable for anyone to find the Varmin female intimidating, should they only glance fleetingly at her and not look close enough to detect her softness. Her head turned to the door when Ella’s presence made the metal squeak.

A luminous smile spread across the bottom half of her face in greeting, the first smile Ella had been granted since arriving in Cavale.

“We haven’t had a chance to meet!” the woman greeted. “I’m Josefyn Yilanci, lead serpent-shifter instructor.”

“I’m Ella.” When Josefyn extended her hand to Ella, a sob chafed the walls of Ella’s throat. It had been weeks since she’d been offered any form of civility that she didn’t remember how much kindness feels like a hug when you’ve been denied comfort for so long. “You called me down?”

“I did! I’m concerned about a student and I wonder if you might be able to help.” Josefyn swung her focus back to the shifting Varmin, calling out to one of the males, “Jasper! You need to bring your hands together when you stretch your arms over your head.” She emulated the movement for him, stacking one hand over the other in a graceful arch above her skull. “Make sure you engage your core and don’t let your back stiffen. If you shift without assembling into the proper form, you could break your spine.” Josefyn sighed, swiveling back to Ella. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be sorry.” She really called me for help. Ella forced her lips not to slide into a smile, settling into counselor mode. “Who’s the student?”

“Jamila Finley. She’s a sophomore.”

“Tell me what’s been going on with her.”

“Jamie is a serpent-shifter, but she also possesses Cerebri abilities. She can sense emotions in others. She’s always been an incredibly sweet, empathetic kid. Always attending to the needs of others, always top of her class. But since returning to Delmarth this year, she’s been acting different. Colder. More closed off. Less caring and attentive. She’s not performing well in her classes. She’s withdrawn significantly from her peers.”

“Do you have any idea if anything changed for her over the summer? Anything about her family?”

“As far as I know, she comes from a loving home, which is more rare than you’d think in Cavale. Possibly something happened over the summer, but do you think that could cause such a drastic change in personality? At her age?”

“It’s absolutely possible, depending on the severity of the incident. It could also indicate something deeper, something more emotional happening under the surface.” Ella twisted her arms across her chest. “How does she present when you speak to her? Is she maintaining her hygiene? Does she seem more tired than usual?”

“She’s well-kept. Always clean. I don’t know if I’d say she seems more tired. Just less present.”

“When you speak to her, do you get the sense that she seems, for lack of a better word, emotionless?”

“Yes!” Josefyn replied emphatically. “Yes, exactly. What do you think is going on?”

“I’ll have to meet her before I can know for sure, but there are some possibilities for what you’re describing.” Ella hunkered down on one of the benches lining the wall of the dome. “Vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue. Vicarious trauma is usually an occupational challenge for people who work in fields where they’re required to listen to other people’s hardships and trauma on a daily basis. Not learning to properly separate their experiences from your own can lead to an emotional and physical exhaustion. It sounds like Jamie may be experiencing a version of this. Maybe it’s not that her personality has changed, but that she’s emotionally drained and detaching herself from feeling in general. Or it’s none of that, and something changed for her over the summer that she’s struggling to cope with.”

Josefyn’s lavender eyes studied Ella prudently, like she was trying to cleave a hole through Ella’s being and steal a peek at her soul. “Don’t take this as rude, but what would you be able to do for Jamie?”

“Be someone she can open up to about whatever is troubling her. If she’s experiencing compassion fatigue, I can work with her to develop skills to teach her to separate her own emotions from others. If there’s something else she’s struggling with, we can adapt our goals to whatever will help her come back to herself, or help her figure out who she wants to be, if she’s experiencing some semblance of an identity crisis, which is common at her age.” Ella rested the back of her head on the wall. “Do you think she’d be open to speaking to me?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she isn’t. You should hear what the instructors say about you.”

“Trust me, I’ve heard plenty to last a lifetime. And I can work with hesitant. All I’ve been given at Delmarth is hesitant, and I’ve managed so far.” Josefyn’s full lips carved a serpentine smile. “What period do you see her?”

“Ninth period. End of the day.”

“Okay. On Monday, I’m going to stop by and do a classroom observation of her. I’d like to see the behavior you’re describing and get a sense of the gravity, as well as see how she interacts with her peers. Then, I’ll introduce myself to her. For the next week or so, I’ll attend each of your classes and make my face one she recognizes. Once she’s used to me, I’ll pull her aside and tell her we spoke, then offer to begin counseling with her. I’ll leave it to her if she wants to meet with me or not.”

“I run the class with Austin Armstrong, another serpent-shifter instructor. He won’t be pleased if you join our class.”

“I could give two fucks what he thinks,” Ella burst out. “I won’t be there with the intention to piss him off with my existence. I’ll be there to watch over a student in need, and if he has a problem with that, he can go cry about it somewhere else.” Josefyn’s grin stretched up to her ears.

“I knew I was going to like you,” she declared.

“You did?” Ella spluttered. “Why?”

“I tend to gravitate towards misfits, and I think it’s fair to declare you the most supreme oddity in Cavale.”

Ella choked on a laugh. “I think that’s fair to say.”

“Not to mention, you’ve been quite literally torn and ripped apart, if what Headmistress Dyer said this morning is true. You’re still here, fighting to do your job, fighting to help these kids. That makes you the only person in this school worth my time or compassion.” Ella’s eyes burned at the corners.

“You have no idea how much I needed to hear that,” Ella whispered tearfully. “Thank you, Josefyn.”

“Please, call me Jo.” Josefyn chewed on her nail bud, then said, “Tonight me and a Cerebri instructor named Akio were planning on heading off campus to grab some drinks. You should come.”

“Really?” Ella’s heart nudged against her ribcage from how it swelled with hope. Tiny prickles of doubt blemished the surface of that hope, though, blazing holes in the configuration. Why is she being so nice to me?

Did Josefyn have an angle? Was this a trap where Ella would be inevitably humiliated, or a ploy to get her off campus, away from the Cavalian Gods’ envoy, so the Primordials could finish her off without a watchful eye stalking their every move?

“Would Akio mind if I tagged along?” she asked, some of her qualms leaking into her tone of voice.

“Doesn’t matter if he minds or not. I want you there.” Ella smiled for possibly the first time since she’d been in Cavale.

She wanted so badly to not be alone at Delmarth anymore that she chose to abandon her worries about Josefyn’s sincerity for a later date, possibly an unwise decision, but one she felt was integral to her sanity.

“I’d love to come,” she answered with a simper, receiving a wide grin from Josefyn in return.

“Amazing! What dormitory are you in?”

“Hall three. Room one-D.”

“I’ll collect you around seven. Dress nice.” Josefyn swung her violet hair over her shoulder, then darted back to the shifting Varmin, shouting out commands for the students to follow.

Ella exited the dome, covered her mouth with her hand, and squealed into her fingers. Maybe this was the speck of light at the end of a vast, dark tunnel, planning to mature into a powerful luster that could swallow the darkness whole. A newfound determination settled in her bones, a promise that she’d not only survive the next nine months, but claim some enjoyment for herself in the crevices.