Aoss turned out to be another ellid woman, which really shouldn’t have been a surprise. She was taller than Enila, but shared her graceful build, all long limbs filled out with curves just rounded enough that I had to focus on Fallon to keep myself from drooling. If I had thought the others were sharp-featured, Aoss had cheeks like razor blades, her large eyes canted exotically.

  Most noticeable was her coloring, which was distinct from the others I had met so far. Her skin was a shade slate gray that seemed matte in the afternoon sunlight. Her hair, on the other hand, was a deep shade of purple so glossy it made Charrin’s armor look dull by comparison, and her eyes were a startling, almost swirling, combination of black and purple.

  The woman made a gesture, and an archway of stone and crystal, glowing with a mixture of purple and blue light, simply opened in one of the cliff sides, directly opposite the more roughly-shaped entrance to the dungeon we had just left.

  “Uhm,” I said, unable to otherwise express my alarm.

  “What?”

  Fallon swallowed audibly before she managed to ask, for both of us, “Is that another dungeon entrance?”

  “Hmm?” Aoss looked from the archway to use and back. “In a way, I guess you could say so.”

  Eni approached the arch of crystal-studded stone with the wide eyes and amazed expression of someone meeting a celebrity in real life. “Wait–is this a portal? A managed dungeon? I’ve never seen one in real life!”

  Char shook their head at their friend’s reaction, and gave us a small nod. “It’s okay,” they tried to reassure us. “It’s not like a normal dungeon.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Aoss said primly. “Think of it like a tiny little dungeon, without crystals, or monsters, or multiple floors.”

  I knew that, whoever Deep Delver Aoss was, she was someone important. The reactions of our rescuers, and of the official they had argued with, had made that clear. Still, my mouth didn’t register that knowledge as it automatically shot off, “So nothing like a dungeon, basically?”

  Aoss gave me a flat look that I was inordinately pleased to learn came as naturally to ellids as humans. “It’s close enough, I suppose, until you have a few years to learn eldritch foundational warp theory. Suffice it to say that the archway will bring you to a small box, about ten meters across. On the other end of that box is an identical archway, which will take you to Primevus.”

  Char gave a low whistle, while Eni bubbled enthusiastically, “Seriously? That’s like a 1:100 compression ratio!”

  “It’s not compression,” Aoss clarified. She held up a hand before Eni could ask any more questions. “Enough. Make it to grade four, and I’ll approve you for some private study with me, okay? For now, we need to get going.”

  “Why the rush?” I asked.

  That question earned a haughty look from Aoss and an alarmed one from Eni and Char. Gellert just looked amused, if I was any judge of things.

  “Firstly, because my time is precious,” Aoss told me. “I get one day off from the castrum each cycle, and I’m spending part of it running errands. Secondly, if you need another reason, it’s because Elsenis Ful is waiting on your arrival, and his time is an order of magnitude more precious than mine. Now. Let’s go.”

  I waffled in place a little, and Fallon saved me from asking the last question on my mind. “It’s not going to make us hurl again, is it?”

  “Facet’s gleam, no, it will not!’

  “C’mon,” Eni urged us. “It’ll be okay, I promise. And look at it like this–you’re getting the chance to do something even I haven’t before!”

  “Novelty has lost its appeal,” I told Eni with fervent honesty. If I was going to go to school, fine, but let’s just get to it. After the past few days, a few months of tedium and routine sounded heavenly.

  Oh, who was I kidding? I’d be crawling up the walls inside of a week. But that week, at least, would be amazing.

  I felt a feather-light touch, and I looked down, surprised to see Fallon’s hand against mine. I grinned at her, remembering the feeling of her curled up against me the night before, and I entwined my fingers in hers, and then we stepped through the portal together.

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  I braced myself for another surge of nausea, but Aoss was right. There was little more than a small tug of disorientation, then we were through.

  As promised, there was little more than a simple, square room on the other side, perhaps thirty feet to a side. It was made of a weird, crystal-flecked marble of some kind, polished to an almost reflective shine.

  Eni was suddenly behind us, pushing us forward with a hand on each of our shoulders. “Keep it moving, there’s a queue,” she reminded us. I found myself pleased that she didn’t comment on our held hands.

  We followed her directions, across the room and through another archway set into the wall directly across from us. Then, as promised, we were somewhere else.

  The farside of Aoss’s portal, or dungeon, or whatever it was, let out in the middle of a grassy field, the kind I’d expect to see in middle America. The grass around us was long and plush, brushing against my thighs and Fallon’s waist. A gentle, warm breeze swam through the grass, creating those intricate patterns you see in especially overgrown plains when the weather is just right. Overhead, the sky was an azure dome, uninterrupted by clouds and stretching to eternity in every direction.

  There was only one landmark in view, not far in front of us. It was a circle of polished white marble, not so different from that inside of Aoss’s portal, its boundaries defined by six massive spires, perfect hexagonal obelisks of glassy crystal jutting straight towards the heavens. While clearly artificial by nature, I took it for a monument of some kind–though I couldn’t help but notice that not a speck of dirt marred the perfectly even surface of the circle.

  Eni and Aoss emerged from the portal just in time to hear Fallon ask me, “Where’s the school?”

  “Through there,” Aoss said, flipping a hand towards the stone circle.

  I blinked.

  I looked at Fallon.

  I looked at the defined borders of the stones. Six roads, winding through the wind-blown plains, met around the circumference of the circle, each ending between two spires.

  I looked at Aoss, and saw Char and Gellert emerge from the portal behind her.

  “What?”

  Aoss arched a delicate eyebrow, and turned towards the ellids who had rescued us. “Did you not tell them?”

  “There… wasn’t exactly time,” Char claimed, looking mildly embarrassed.

  Aoss rolled her eyes, the expression decidedly odd on her classically arch face. “I had expected these three to tell you–Primevus Academy is located inside of a dungeon. The largest dungeon ever seen, in fact. The Grand Dungeon.”

  #

  By that point, even I had begun to grow tired of my constant objections, and I let Eni and Fallon chide me into the center of the standing stones without too much argument. If anything, this crossover was even more gentle than the previous ones. One second we were standing in the middle of the broad, open plains, and the next, we were in a building made of the increasingly familiar crystal-flecked marble.

  We appeared in what seemed to be a grand entry hall of some kind, albeit one without a door. Straight ahead was a broad, shining staircase that led to a second level, while large, closed doors stood in the middle of the walls to either side of us.

  The six of us had appeared in the center of a ring set into the floor, a scale version of the monument we had stepped into, with circles of crystal set into the floor at equidistant points, reflections of where the six crystalline spires had been outside. Behind us, opposite the grand staircase, where an exit should’ve been, was a similar circle, although this one only had four crystals surrounding it, each glowing in one of four colors–crimson, indigo, violet, and cerulean, the same colors as the identity crystals we had found in the crystal altar days before.

  “The Entrarium,” Char explained, gesturing to the building around us. “The topmost floor of Primevus. Among other things, this is where new students complete their orientation, before being chosen for admittance into one of the colleges.”

  “The Magisters are waiting in the Small Hall,” Aoss instructed the others. “Do you know it?”

  Charrin nodded. “We can take them from here.” They hesitated, as if unsure, but hastily added, “And, Grand Delver… Thank you, very much. This could’ve been a lot more trying if you hadn’t been there.”

  “No thanks is needed for a duty discharged,” Aoss replied with a weary smile, repeating the same dismissal Char had used every time I had thanked them. The woman’s gaze shifted to the two of us, and her mouth twitched in what might’ve been the barest hint of a smile. “And you two… good luck. I hope to see you both down at Castrum Terminus one day.”

  Deep Delver Aoss gave us all a final nod, and then she was gone.

  Immediately, Char staggered in place, enough so that Gellert had to step in to catch them.

  “Well that was breaking terrifying,” the knight said.

  I grinned a little at the use of ‘breaking.’ The way they said it made clear that it was a swear, and given the crystal-centric nature of Elida’s culture, I could guess at its origins easily enough.

  Enila was still staring at the where the woman had been before she vanished. “I like her,” she decided.

  “Good for you. If I see another Deep Delver before level twenty, it’ll be too soon.”

  “Is a Deep Delver like a more senior Delver or something?” I asked. I had noticed that both the official outside of the dungeon and Aoss had called Char and the others “Delvers,” which I assumed made Aoss some sort of leader figure.

  Char ran a hand over their face and stood up straight again, pausing to give Gellert a nod that said a lot for such a small movement. I felt Fallon’s hand tighten in mine. She had noticed it too.

  “Deep Delvers are… complicated. And we don’t have time to talk about it right now.”

  “I’d say not,” a prim voice observed from atop the grand staircase. “Nor for your theatrics, Delver Charrin.”