Dave shook uncontrollably as his body went into shock.

  He was nestled in a deep wing-back antique velvet loveseat staring at a roaring fire, sitting in an office that looked like it had come right out of a Charles Dickens novel. There was a huge grandfather clock and leafy parlor palms. Everything was paneled in mahogany and he was drinking tea.

  Or he was supposed to be drinking it. Instead he was just holding the hot mug in his trembling hand letting it slowly grow cold.

  He thought maybe he should feel something but he didn’t. He just held Charis’s hand as firmly as he could and would not let go. She sat quietly next to him with a blanket around her shoulders, peaceful and very, very pale with a glassy look of relief in her eyes.

  The window flashed with silent white lightning. To the human eye, it looked like they were sitting in a huge stone tower in the middle of a silent electrical storm that surrounded them on every side. White and black lightning leapt continually from one area of the pitch black clouds to the other. But that wasn’t what was really out there.

  It was really, really cold. Like impossibly cold. Outside the cozy office the hallways of this weird tower were frozen. There was literally icicles hanging from the ceiling. Somehow they were keeping the office room temperature, but Dave suspected there was more to that than one little parlor fireplace.

  “Well,” said a pale older man with crooked teeth, pockmarked skin, and his black wavy hair and goatee carefully trimmed. He wore a long robe which looked like it was the result of a breeding experiment between a cloak and a business suit. He flipped some pages in a black leather folder. “It looks like the police are willing to pass you off to the Space Force. Excellent news. That makes you U.S.F. property more or less.”

  “Property?” Dave repeated it dully, barely able to understand James Castle’s words.

  “Yes. You are currently under arrest; which is fine. That means you’re staying with us. At least for a little while, until Mars stops looking for you, at any rate. They can’t find you here don’t worry; in Nythe you are totally invisible to them.”

  Dave kept looking at the window. He couldn’t resist; there was something very, very wrong about the silent glittering cloudscape. “We’re not in space, are we.”

  “No. We are not in what you would call ‘space.’”

  “But we came here in a UFO.”

  “Yes.” Castle slapped the folder shut with a gesture of finality, and returned to his heavy mahogany desk. “You came here in a UFO. Do not try to attempt to learn where you are. You may ask the staff, and we will try to explain; but there is no way for you to return to Earth without being taken there by a Nythian.”

  “Nythian. That’s you?”

  “All of us,” Charis told him with a grin. “We’re all Nythian Graduates.”

  The others were there too. Lord Madrik lounged in a wingback chair, still wearing his spotless white leisure suit. Somehow it hadn’t picked up even a speck of moon dust. He toyed with his ray bans. Scott, Dusty, Miradon, and even Inu sat in various places around the room watching him and none of them looked happy.

  Scott had a cold compress on his forehead; he’d managed to acquire a black eye and an egg-sized bump on his forehead. No snide comments now issued from the beat-up group. They were too exhausted. The only exception was a little moaning comment from Dusty: “That was the worst rescue I’ve ever had.”

  James Castle was evidently the President, or the Principle, or basically the leader of the Academy of Nythe. He wasn’t the owner… he was kind of like the manager, he’d explained.

  Apparently, the school for teaching superpowers was owned and had been founded by a man named Lawrence Richelou… who was really good friends with the Space Force. The explanation had been too brief to make much sense.

  “So… does the Academy belong to Space Force?” Dave asked, still staring at the window. The silent white lightning never stopped. It just flickered on and on like a bad movie set.

  “No.” Castle sat at his desk with a creak of the old leather chair and rummaged through his papers. “The Academy of Nythe is a private school. Owned by its founder, and operated by a privately funded School Board. The governments of the world have no true jurisdiction over Nythe… although we work closely with them and always have.”

  “You work with the governments?”

  “We do. We are the premier experts on all things alien. Rune, the Enshi, all of it. We know more about the invaders than anyone alive.”

  Dave looked long and hard at the three Enshi who stood near the fireplace, and Madrik in his chair. Four of them… all of them aliens for sure. Lord Madrik grinned at him, his fangs far too white in that ebony face.

  Real aliens… Dave had always wondered if some of the aliens had survived. Now he knew.

  Lord Madrik suddenly spoke. “You know, I feel quite responsible for all this. Poor David is really quite lost.” Madrik leapt lightly out of his chair and paced to the fireplace, leaning against the mantle. “It was lost artifacts which started all this mess. I’m afraid I wasn’t paying attention or I might have kept the amulet out of Jim Cragley’s hands in the first place. Lost in the paperwork as they say. I’m really dreadful with paperwork.” He shook his head with faux regret and studied his fingernails.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Dave narrowed his eyes at them, but he spoke to Castle. “So… is there any chance you might have a spot for a Linguistics Major?”

  “Very possibly,” Castle seemed interested. “I was thinking you could work with our Museum staff for now. We could use a good translator. How proficient are you at the Enshi language?”

  Dave looked from Castle to the aliens and back. “Um… you have aliens. Can’t they translate stuff for you?”

  “Some can yes,” Castle said boredly, “but like everyone, they aren’t all professional scholars. Nor do all of them speak the more archaic forms of their own language. And the few ‘aliens’ that we do have working for us — most of whom are in this room — are frankly too busy to bother. We have better things for them to do. Now how are you at Enshiran Long Form?”

  “Not bad. James Cragley was better, but I can work it out. I’m best with the written form.”

  “Excellent. It sounds like you might be of some assistance to us. You’ll have to gain Top Secret clearance of course… I’m assuming you can pass a background check?”

  “Until recently I never shot anyone. Not that I … um… shot anyone recently...”

  Charis squeezed his hand to shut him up.

  “I’m sure you will pass.” Castle smiled faintly, but it wasn’t a terribly encouraging expression on that craggy face. His black eyes were too piercing, like they could see through everything.

  “So what about the amulet?” Charis asked. “Any information on it so far?”

  “Well at least I can shed some light on that subject, anyway,” Castle announced, raising his voice as he read the reports. “The amulet, as you surmised Charis, is a blank. A placeholder. The real Artifact is an Elogic one; that is, a construct made purely of energy which entered into Mister Tolin when he began to wear the amulet regularly,” he nodded toward Dave. “What you have picked up inadvertently, Mister Tolin, is nothing short of a Mantle of Thrones,” He flipped a page, scanned it, and looked significantly at Dave over the top.

  Scott whistled low, impressed.

  “Wow,” Dusty added, amazed.

  “That’s bad?” Dave’s voice sounded completely wiped out, even to him. His head started to nod. Any minute and he was just going to fall asleep whether he wanted to or not.

  “What it means is this: since your odyllic essence—that is, your natural spiritual power—is quite average for a human, you can never fully ‘turn on’ this mantle or it will fry you like a bug. You must continually keep it running at a low level of power, or however that works; I am sure you will figure out how to regulate it.”

  “Right. Bottled god-power. Not meant for mortal hands, or something like that. Gotcha.” He put his hand over a huge yawn.

  “It also means,” Castle flipped the folder shut and leaned forward, giving David that no-nonsense dogged stare of exasperation, “that we cannot get the Mantle off of you without killing you, since you have to be able to turn it all the way ON in order to reject it.”

  “And turning it on would fry me like a bug. Check.” Dave didn’t seem that impressed. Really, he was getting used to bad news.

  “Which means, in short, that you are now a walking Mantle of Thrones, which is an elogic draw powerful enough to have every demonic bounty-hunter from here to Markathan after you like a wasp after a bit of candy melting in the sun.”

  Scott and Miradon glanced at each other.

  “So I’m demon bait until I die.” Yeah. That figured. Dave sighed. “My room mate is going to love this.”

  Everyone looked grim and no one spoke.

  “Your room mate, Mister Tolin, will not be informed. You should not leave Nythe or contact anyone on Earth, not until we study your situation more closely,” James said with a sigh, tossing the folder back onto the coffee table with a leather slap. He leaned back into the desk chair, massaging the bridge of his nose as if Dave had given him a headache.

  “What about the charges?” Charis asked Castle. “Have they been dealt with?”

  “We may be able to convince the police that they are chasing someone who isn’t really David Tolin, but we will need some time.”

  “Hey, did you find out how the bastards found us in Hong Kong?” Scott finally raised enough energy to ask.

  “I believe so,” Castle answered, sounding weary as usual. “It seems that Mister Tolin had a pistol which he handled regularly. The mazik used that to trace his whereabouts while the five of you were lounging about, quite unprotected,” he shot a glare toward Miradon.

  Miradon blushed and whistled, pretending to be fascinated by the ceiling.

  “Hey, we were tired,” Scott moaned. “We can’t be expected to do everything perfectly. We’re only a second-year Team after all.”

  “That is exactly what separates the C-teams from the A-teams,” Castle ground out, glaring at Scott.

  Scott sighed.

  “Okay, normal person question…” Dave interrupted. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did they use my gun to find us in frikkin’ China? I lost that thing in San Francisco. I’m sure it didn’t know where we were going.”

  “Think of it like radar. Spiritual radar. They used the gun to send out a resonance, and they received an answer. The echo told them which direction you were, and how far away. They merely followed it. Kind of like playing ‘Marco Polo’. And they can move very quickly.”

  “Yah. Demonic Voodoo. Got it.” Dave sighed. There was no point in fighting fate. He just had to make the best of a mad reality.

  Suddenly the heavy metallic door burst open. A very short rather overweight little man, less than four feet tall, with curly brown hair and a bulbous red nose puffed and huffed, stamping on the entry mat to warm his feet. Thick layers of frost fell from the edges of his boots.

  He looked like a very small monk straight out of the middle ages. He pulled off his thick gloves, his face red from the freezing temperatures outside. It was astonishing how cold this lightning-streaked land of nothingness was. But then again, if they were somewhere in outer space it would make sense.

  “Castle,” he declared in a very proper old-time British accent even more correct and old-fashioned than Castle’s. “Now what did you call me away from my classes for? I have a lecture in half of an hour and I haven’t graded…”

  James Castle gestured to Dave, who sat slouched in despair staring into the fire.

  “Oh. Aha.” The little man adjusted round, wire-framed glasses and stared hard at the man. “Well! My heavens. A Normal, in Nythe? Why is he here?”

  “It is more productive, Muggleston, to ask why you are here,” Castle said loftily, taking one last look at the reports in the black folder. “David Tolin is a young man who finds himself in a difficult situation. He’s acquired a very powerful Mantle; to be specific, a Mantle of Thrones. Until we know what to do with him, we need to house him in a safe place here at the Academy. Can you see to it?”

  “Me!?” Muggleston blew up his cheeks in indignation. “Can’t you find a steward to do it? I tell you my classes…”

  “This is extremely important,” Castle leveled a piercing black-eyed glare at the little man. “I do not trust him to just anyone. Consider it a favor if you will. He must be quartered in the most secure location. I give you permission to house him in the Staff Accommodations upstairs.”

  “Why… the Staff…” the little dwarf blustered, astonished. “Well!” He straightened, gaining as much height as he could. “Very well then. Come along, Mister Tolin.”

  They all turned to Dave. He was sound asleep, leaning against Charis and they were both snoring.

  “Well…!” Muggleston huffed.

  Scott laughed.

  . ?? ? . ? ? ? . ? ? ?.

  End