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it
wasn’t.
    She smiled kindly. She was very pretty. “No, this is
advanced alchemy for C-Five students only. This is Room F3. You want Room 3F,”
she whispered. “Come on; I’ll take you there.” She gathered her stuff into her
bag.
    “Don’t you have to listen to this?”
    She rolled her eyes. “This is review from last year.
Professor Mali does review every year on the first day of class.”
    I followed her out into the hall and shut the door
quietly behind me. “Thank you for showing me the way.”
    “No problem.” She slung her blue bag over her
shoulder and held out her hand for me to shake. “I’m Heather Anne. You can call
me Heather or Anne, just don’t call me Annie. I am C-Five Spirit.”
    “So you mastered the other four elements?”
    “Yep.”
    “I’m Devon Sanders. C-One Water, I guess.”
    She laughed. “You guess? Water was my first element,
too. Just in case you don’t know, all C-Five students are on the spirit
element. We have our own dorm floor, we get to choose our roommates, our
classes are apart from yours, and we are all required to be assistants for our
mentors.”
    Since there were other students in the hallways, I
knew we weren’t all on the same class schedule. We went up several floors and
down many hallways until I was thoroughly lost. There were random windows into
classrooms, the floor, or the ceiling. If that wasn’t weird enough, I also saw
doors with no knobs, stairways that led to the ceiling, paintings of empty
walls or hallways, and the floor was dangerously slanted in some areas. When we
finally reached the classroom, we stopped.
    “I suggest you explore the school until you get
familiar with it, but don’t do it alone.”
    Yeah, like I’m going anywhere alone in this death
trap. “Thank you again for helping me find this place,” I said.
    Instead of walking away, she opened the door, grabbed
my arm and pulled me close to her. “Good morning, Professor Langril,” she said
brightly. “Devon is in your class this year, but please don’t count him late
because he was helping me run some errands.”
    “That isn’t a problem, Heather. You know you can
borrow my students at any time.”
    She smiled and turned so only I can see her. “Be
careful. He’s insane,” she whispered, then left before I could say a word.
    “Devon Sanders, correct?” he asked kindly.
    I nodded and set my bag in the nearest seat to the
door. I was instantly on alert when I saw that there were only five other
students in class. Had the rest been flunked? Or maybe they got lost… In
those halls of horror, I doubted any student who got lost would ever be seen
again.
    “I heard you were able to fight off a tiger shifter
this morning.”
    At least he didn’t assume it was with magic.
    “That must have taken some strong magic. You should
be the first to give this a go,” he said enthusiastically.
    I sighed. The man was the last person I expected to
be a lunatic. He had medium brown hair cut short in a decent style with dark
blue eyes. From the ease with which he looked me in the eye, I knew he wasn’t
any kind of shifter. “I’m really not very good,” I said. The fewer
demonstrations I had to give of my lacking magical talents, the better off I
was.
    “That’s okay! A trained fish could do this. Come on
now!”
    The room was slightly smaller than the previous two.
The back half of the room sloped downwards towards the middle. There were five
two-person desks. The teacher stood at the front of the room before a long
table that was piled high with odd ingredients, vials, tweezers, candles, and
oddities. Instead of big windows providing light, there were torches floating
randomly around the room… just floating.
    A large, cast iron cauldron, about five gallons, sat
on the floor beside a door… which was in the floor. “Everyone already put their
ingredients in. The only way to be sure if it worked, since I didn’t see what
they put in, is to light it.”
    “Why can’t you