My phone had a crack running corner to corner, so my channel stats looked like they'd been through a war.
Eleven subscribers. Three of them were my mom.
She'd made a second account to like my videos twice, then a third because she forgot the password to the second. I respected the hustle. My latest guide was called "Healer Rotations Nobody Asked For, Part 4." It had nine views. Two were mine, checking whether the audio worked.
The 11:40 out of Boise smelled like wet coats and someone's gas-station burrito. I had my store lanyard still on, the green one with my name in block letters, because I'd been too tired to take it off after an eight-hour shift stocking cereal. My earbuds were in. Nothing was playing. They were a do-not-talk sign.
The bus was full. Thirty-some people, a long day's worth of strangers.
Two rows up, a big guy with a perfect fade had a ring light clipped to the seat in front of him. He was talking to a phone on a little stand.
"Grind culture isn't a trend, guys. It's a decision." He flexed without seeming to notice he was doing it. "You either earn your spot or you watch someone else take it."
His chat must have loved that. I'd have loved it too, if I were a protein powder.
Across from him, a woman in black jeans and a black button-up sat sideways with her back against the window. Bleached hair growing out dark at the roots. A toothpick in the corner of her mouth. She wasn't on her phone. She was watching the bus like a bartender at closing time, sorting people into tippers and trouble.
Her eyes went over the streamer, held a second, and moved on. I liked her for that.
At the next stop an old woman got on with two plaid bags and a cane. She tried to lift the first bag into the rack. She got it to her shoulder and stalled there, wobbling.
Nobody moved. The streamer adjusted his light.
I pulled out an earbud and stood up.
"Here. I've got it."
"Oh, you're a sweetheart." She let me take the bag. It weighed about as much as a car battery. "My grandson says I pack like I'm moving."
"Are you moving?"
"To my sister's. For a week."
I got both bags into the rack and wedged them with her cane. When I turned around, a guy in a camo jacket had taken my seat. He was already asleep, or committed to looking it.
Fine. That was how it went. You do the thing, somebody else gets the chair.
The old woman pressed a tin of mints into my hand. Peppermint, the round kind, rattling. "For your trouble."
"No trouble." I took one anyway, because you don't refuse a grandmother's mint. Then I went and stood by the back door, holding the bar, watching dark fields go by.
The lights went white.
Not bright. White, the color of a blank page, all at once, with no source. The engine noise stopped. My ears popped. Somebody started to scream and the scream cut off halfway, like a skipped track.
Then the floor wasn't there.
I landed on stone, on my hands and knees, with the mint tin still in my fist.
Cold came up through my jeans. Somewhere close, a man was retching. Someone else kept saying "What, what, what" in a rising voice. Torches burned in iron rings along a curved wall, and the smoke went straight up into a low vault.
A crypt. I knew the word because I'd built dungeons in three different games. I had never wanted to be in one.
At the center of the floor, a stub of grey stone pushed up through the flagstones, about waist high. It was rough, like a broken tooth. Every one of us had landed in a ring around it, facing in.
Thirty-one of us. One way out, a stair on the far side. Six people in long grey robes standing along the wall with their hands folded. One man in a dark-blue coat with silver buttons and white gloves. And in front of them all, an old man with a chain of office over his robe and a face like a polite eviction notice.
"Welcome," the old man said.
I understood him. That bothered me more than the crypt. His mouth was making shapes that weren't English, and my brain was getting English anyway. Apparently the trip came with subtitles.
The streamer had found his feet first. Of course he had. He stood up, brushed off his knees and smiled at the old man like they were about to do a collab.
"Hey. Cameron Carver. Is this a show? Because the production value is insane."
"I am Deix Graulei, Provost of Keimore Academy." The old man inclined his head, exactly enough. "The crown has called you, and the academy will make you useful."
"Useful," said the bartender, around her toothpick. It wasn't a question. It sounded like she was reading a bill.
"Can we go home?" A woman near the stair was crying quietly. "I have a dog. I have work at six."
The Provost's face did something kind and practiced. "All will be explained above. Please. The hall is waiting."
That was a no. I'd heard that answer from enough managers to know.
My heart was going hard. My hands had started to shake, so I put them in my hoodie pocket and held the mint tin. The old woman from the bus was next to me, leaning on nothing, because her cane was in a rack on a bus that no longer existed.
I gave her my arm.
"You again," she said.
"Me again."
"Do you know what's happening?"
"No, ma'am. But I'm pretty sure there's a tutorial."
We took the stair slowly. The woman with the toothpick came up behind us and matched our pace without making a thing of it.
"You know her?" she asked me.
"Since the last stop."
"Huh." The toothpick moved to the other side of her mouth. "Most guys on that bus would've let her carry it."
"Most guys on that bus were filming."
"One guy was filming." She looked up the stair at Cameron's back. "The rest were just watching him do it."
Then she went past us, two steps at a time, and didn't look back.
The hall above was the size of an airplane hangar, built by people who thought ceilings should make you feel small.
Long tables ran its length. Hundreds of people sat at them in grey coats with high collars. Every one of them turned to look at us. They were all grown. Plenty were older than me, with beards, scars and the bored faces of people who'd seen this before.
At the head of the hall, on a low stone dais, sat another stub of the same grey rock. This one had been cut smooth and square, a block you could lay your hands on.
Behind the dais stood the tallest wall I had ever seen indoors. It was one slab of dark stone, polished, and names moved on it in pale light. Hundreds of them, in columns, rising and sinking like bubbles.
The man in the blue coat took a seat beside the dais. A crown envoy, someone whispered. He peeled off one white glove and laid it on his knee, finger by finger, like he had all night.
"You will be measured," the Provost said, to us and to the hall. "Lay your hands on the stone. It reads what you are. Your chit will tell you, and the wall will tell everyone."
A robed staffer came down our line with a tray of brass tags on fine chains. Chits, he called them. He hung one around each neck without asking. Mine settled against my breastbone, cold and blank.
A loud guy with a frat haircut flicked his with a fingernail. "Bro, it's a dog tag. They gave us dog tags."
"It's a loot table," said a thin, careful man with glasses, very quietly. He was turning his over to look at the back. "The rock rolls, the tag tells you what you got."
"Then I'm rolling legendary." Cameron cracked his neck. "Watch."
The bartender took the toothpick out of her mouth. "Chief, you don't know what the dice are."
"I know what I am."
She put the toothpick back. She didn't argue. She just looked at him a second longer than he liked, and I saw him notice.
Cameron went first. Nobody had decided that. He just walked up.
He put both palms flat on the stone, and the stone lit from inside, a deep gold. Words rose in the air above it, big enough for the back rows.
PARAGON.
The hall stood up. I mean the whole hall, benches scraping, people shouting and banging the tables. Cameron turned around with his hands still glowing and did a slow, humble little nod, the one he must have practiced for brand deals.
"Rare class," someone near me said. "There hasn't been a Paragon in this intake in years."
The envoy put his glove back on. That seemed to be applause, for him.
They went faster after that. The bartender stepped up and the stone threw blue-white light. STORMCALLER. A good roar. She didn't smile at it. She took her hands back and looked down the hall the way you'd check a bar for its back door.
"Carly Paxton," the staffer read off a slate.
The dog-tag guy got LANCER and pumped his fist. Scott Duffy. The loot-table guy got SPELLWRIGHT and wrote something in a little notebook before he even stepped down. Jared Abbott. A young woman with a ponytail got PATHFINDER and looked straight at Cameron to see if he'd noticed. Tess Ingram.
He hadn't. He was taking a selfie with a staff member who didn't know what a selfie was.
The old woman from the bus got MENDER. The hall gave her the polite clap people give a speech at a wedding.
"A support class," a student said behind me. "Rental."
I didn't know what that meant yet. I didn't like how he said it.
They called me last. I'd been slow to step up, watching everyone else, learning the rules. That's what I always told myself it was.
"Ian Griffin."
The stone was so cold it hurt, a cold that went straight past the skin and into the bones of my hands. Something underneath it seemed to lean toward me, the way a dog sniffs a stranger. Then it let go.
Warm brass against my chest. A single clear chime, like a spoon on a glass.
I looked down. Words were rising on the face of the chit, small and neat, as if someone were writing them from the inside.
```status CHEER MAGE | Ian Griffin Cheers: Hold! | Steady Threshold: unread ```
I didn't know what a Threshold was. Apparently the chit didn't know mine either.
Above the stone, for the whole hall to read, the same two words went up in plain yellow light.
CHEER MAGE.
For a second nobody made a sound. Two hundred people reading.
Then someone in the back laughed. One short bark, surprised out of him. Somebody else caught it. Then it went down the tables like a wave at a ballgame, row after row. Soon the whole hangar was laughing, and I was standing up there with my hands on a rock.
Scott Duffy's voice cut over the top. "Bro. He's literally the cheerleader."
That got the biggest laugh of the night.
My face went hot from the collar up. I could feel the heat in my ears. My whole body wanted to step off the dais and go stand behind a pillar, and I made it stay where it was.
There was a joke in my mouth. Something about pom-poms being a late unlock. I didn't say it. When a room's laughing at you, a joke just tells them you heard.
Cameron jogged up beside me and threw an arm around my shoulders. He smelled like expensive deodorant. He spoke a little too loudly, toward the hall, from the habit of a man who always assumed he was on camera.
"Hey. Every team needs a hype guy."
People cheered him for that. For being nice to me.
"Thanks," I said.
"Love that for you, man. Genuinely." He squeezed once and let go. "Anyway."
The Provost raised a hand, and the hall quieted enough to hear him. "The dungeon under this hall goes down in floors. The intake will run its first floor as one team, under a captain. The crown's choice is Mr. Carver."
Of course it was.
"Captain's first call, then." Cameron grinned at the hall, then down at me. "Hype guy runs with us tomorrow. Floor one. Let's see what a cheer does."
"You serious?" Scott said. "He's dead weight, bro."
"Everybody gets one shot. That's leadership." Cameron winked at nobody. "Right?"
A staffer read rooms off a slate as we came down. The summoned all went to something called the Gilt Wing, crown-paid. Mine was up three flights. The staffer said my name without looking up, the first person all night who hadn't looked at me first.
I liked him a lot.
The laughter thinned out into talk. The students started drifting toward the big wall, so I followed them. I wanted to know what I was.
A tall woman in a grey coat stood near the front of the crowd, arms crossed, chewing something. She looked about thirty and very done with all of us.
"What is it?" I asked her. "The wall."
"The Tally." She didn't look at me. "Kills, weighted by floor. Deepest floor you've reached. That's your score. Score sets your rank, a letter. S at the top, F at the bottom."
"Kills only?"
"Kills and floors. Solo numbers. Nobody records who carried your bags."
"What about healing? Buffs?" She didn't know the word, so I tried again. "Helping."
"Helping doesn't kill anything." She finally looked at me, at the chit on my chest, and her mouth twitched. "You're the cheer one."
"I'm the cheer one."
"Huh." She went back to chewing. "Well. Somebody's got to be last."
"Is there a prize?"
"There's a bench."
"Wait. How is anyone ranked yet? Nobody's killed anything."
"The stone guesses, first night. Your class, and whatever else it felt in your hands." She shrugged. "The floors fix it. Mostly they fix it downward."
New names were coming in at the bottom of a column labeled FIRST YEAR. They flared bright as they arrived, then slid up or down to wherever they belonged. Cameron's name went in like a firework and shot straight to the top line. Paragon, rank S. People clapped again, smaller this time, the clap of people who'd already decided.
The rest slotted in under him. Carly a good way up. Scott, Jared, Tess, all in the upper rows on the promise of their classes. The old woman's name, Mender, landed down near the bottom and stopped.
Then mine.
It flared in exactly as bright as Cameron's had. Same pale light, same clean letters. For a second it hung there in the middle of the column like it had a chance.
Then it sank. Past the Menders. Past a row of names with LAMPWRIGHT after them, whatever lamps had to do with fighting. Past everyone.
Along the base of the wall ran a long wooden bench, worn pale by years of people sitting on it. A dozen students sat there in grey coats gone shiny at the elbows. They had been laughing with the rest of the hall. One of them, a skinny guy with a lamp clipped to his belt, was still grinning when he looked up at my name.
Then he looked at me. The grin went away. He gave me a small nod, like we'd been introduced.
I looked back up at the wall.
The bottom line of the first-year column, under two hundred and eleven names, in the same light as everyone's:
212. Ian Griffin | Cheer Mage | F
