Excerpt from the lost memoirs of Anaya

  I was a foolish girl worrying about foolish things....days at the Academy are remembered with fondness now.

  I told myself I don't like that pce—and I didn't in the beginning—but it ended up growing its vines around my heart.

  There are days I feel as if nothing is beneath my skin except the Void. No flesh, no bones, no heart, no guts, just cold oblivion. Perhaps I feel sorry for myself, and rightfully so. In the end, it doesn't matter what is or is not inside my heart, nor what I feel. The Crucible of Blood melted the core of my being until...until whatever I am now, remained. Cold iron, steel, and amarium are my closest kin now.

  Are these words cast upon the Void?

  The Wastes were cruelly named, there is life here. More hidden perhaps; underground life of shadows yes, but life nonetheless.

  My first year was rgely uneventful. It began with all of the students swearing an oath to Lodestar and The Breaker Academy. Exams of cerebral and mostly physical nature marked its ending.

  The average year at the Academy started in the eighth month of Citar. From there it continued the next year until rock rain(around the middle of the fifth month - Sardon when our csses stopped). After this, all of us students needed to work together, to compare notes and consolidate knowledge gathered over the academic year while csses were held. These preparations sted from the second half of Sardon until the middle of the next month- Lapul. Exams sted from the second half of Lapul until the end of Taz(the seventh month). The next academic year would then start again anew in Citar.

  I don't know why I bothered keeping the calendar and noting which month or year it is. Void's breath, I could've invented my own. Perhaps I needed a sense of normalcy, at least a thread of it. While I ck the proclivity to indulge it, my sense(if I can call it that) of retrospection increased greatly ever since I started writing all this.

  The clouded corridors of memories are made of bzing embers, they burn me, they burn, and yet I walk them and feed on the torment of my bereavement. I will feast on it forever. I will.......

  I broke my old quill pen. It took me days to compose myself and continue writing this. I must be cold. I will be colder than a long-forgotten grave.

  Despite portraying itself as a confident, untouchable institution with a heart of rock, the Academy was in fact desperate. The ''gift'' of the goddess was fickle, growing thin over centuries, and the pce wanted its students to succeed. Many failed exams were transferred to the next year, and if less than half of the exams are passed; only then the student is expelled.

  It was a practical system based on the needs of humanity; the needs of my beloved Lodestar.

  To me, physical trials were obviously inconsequential although my grades were never allowed to reveal this. The Academy rated us with marks from one to five. One was called ''insufficient,'' and it means you failed. Two was ''sufficient'' and represented the most barely passable grade. Three meant ''good,'' four was ''very good.'' Lastly, five meant ''excellent'' and it was, of course, the best grade one could covetise. I was mostly ''very good'' with few ''excellent'' marks sneaked here and there when it came to wrestling, spear and discus throw, lifting partly loaded carts, weightlifting stones, long jump, running, and many other such corporeal demands I considered nonsense at the time. It is a rating system I'm using to rate the combat readiness of many in my ever-expanding army. At first, I taught few how to properly hold steel and fight—ter they taught future teachers. This way my knowledge spread like wildfire.

  Perhaps the strangest, most useless physical effort of all that I can remember was familiar vaulting where we would bance on one leg or arm, stand upright, throw ourselves off the saddle or assume ridiculous body poses on four or six-legged galloping beasts...Theia's tits...despite my many decades, I may not look like a grandmother but I certainly reminisce and write as one.

  There were days, mentally and physically draining at the time but now they feel to have been fulfilling in the end. Older students had an internal joke, we would say: ''this pce is called The Breaker Academy because it was meant to break us.'' Memory is a strange thing. I wonder...how much can I trust it now. One often only focuses on the best and worst moments in life.

  At the time I did not understand why, but during my studies, the blight of insomnia decided to ease its steel cws upon my mind and there were a few nights per week half spent in oblivion. This ended up working to my advantage since the Academy's library was accessible for studying at night in the weeks prior and during exams(besides staying open all the time throughout the st two days of each week). Once I pretended to fall asleep there which earned me a scalding or two. It was necessary to kill any potential for awkward gnces or questions that I couldn't answer at the time, even to myself. I honestly believed the Academy taught us much useless knowledge, in any case, sleepless nights were utilized to their full extent, therefore, making me an excellent student in all matters schorly.

  Goddess...it all feels so trivial now. I should be careful not to damage the parchment, my resources are ever so sparse.

  A part of me wished to feel guilty about my unfair blessings however ''one must use the tools presented or they may rust away;'' or some such, I'm unsure about how the saying went, my...father...told that to me so long ago...The ''might'' in me never felt wrong, this was and is a part of me, a part of who I am. If one was born with strong arms or powerful legs would he or she feel guilty about their very limbs? That is how I saw it then and that is how I see it even now.

  I missed the simplest comforts of home(to this very day there are moments I still do). During those first months at the Academy, at night I missed my bed so much, but most of all I missed my parents. Mother's hug, listening to my father's carving and smoothening of crystals, creating exquisite wonders...Sol's light. I'd gdly cut my hand off for that hug or those sounds of home. Things I've always thought were granted to me by life as if by some divine right, things that were never given a second thought now dominate the primeval stem of my mind.

  Long ago I pondered how perhaps truly Blessed were those untouched by the curse of the goddess. Throughout the years of my studies, I kept a certain bitterness in me fostered by the idea of how I did not choose the ''gift,'' nor to tread that Genesis path in life.

  I did not like the Academy and even in my ter years of study I continued to resent the pce, nevertheless, some of the sweetest moments of my life arose there, within its honeycombed heart, before the camitous fate befell on all my kind.

  End of excerpt