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The third chapter is here. In this chapter David's latest lesson involves him taking a field trip into the Spirit World. What will David experience in such an emotional, illogical world? As always, Chronicles of Darkness is a very horror and gore orientated IP. So if that's not your thing it's best not to read this.

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David hissed in pain as Colin softly dabbed an antiseptic soaked gauze on a series of large slashes across David’s face and neck.

“I barely touched you,” growled Colin in the First Tongue.

The First Tongue was the growling, savage language of the Uratha. All Uratha gain a basic understanding of it after their First Change. But David found that he struggled slightly with it. So much so that it annoyed his teachers to the point that they refused to speak anything but in the First Tongue and expected the same from David. Whenever he spoke in English, they’d punish him with a claw to the face. Which Colin was helping treat as the pair sat on David’s bed.

"Why won't it heal?" David asked Colin, in English.

Colin slapped him up the back of the head.

“What was that for?!” asked David, rubbing the back of his head.

“I already got in trouble for clueing you in on the obstacle course. I’m not gonna get in trouble again for this,” answered Colin before slapping the back of David’s head again for speaking English a second time. Despite not being an Uratha, he was fluent in the First Tongue from being taught it by his family as a child. Though the redhead had a very noticeable, thick accent when he spoke in it. Like he would have difficulty saying some words and choke on them.

David went to retort but flinched when Colin raised his hand again. He took a moment to find the right words.

“Why no heal?” he asked in broken First Tongue.

“‘Why won’t it heal?’,” Colin said, correcting David’s First Tongue before answering, “There’s three main reasons why an Uratha won’t heal. One, it was caused by silver, which this wasn’t. Two, it was caused in a ritualistic way, which, again, this wasn’t.”

“Then finally. Three," Colin said as he dropped the gauze in a plastic bag he was using as a bin that was full of bloodied gauze. “is that you’re actively suppressing your ability to heal.”

“Why block?” asked David, “How?”

“Why block it?” asked Colin, both asking himself and correcting David’s First Tongue. “My best guess is that you instinctively recognise that it was caused by you disobeying an Elder and won’t let yourself heal.”

He leaned in close to David’s neck. Uncomfortably close, and David shuffled away on the bed.

“Though judging by where they got you on your neck,” said Colin, moving back in to look closely despite David moving away, “I’d say you have been healing, just a bit slower. You would’ve bled out otherwise.”

He lightly touched just below where the slashes ended on David’s neck who flinched away, “You also don’t seem to be scarring either, and it isn’t bleeding anymore. So it’s just healing slowly. You’ll probably be fully healed tomorrow evening or the morning after.”

“Stop block?” asked David

“You want to know how to get rid of the mental block keeping you from healing?” asked Colin.

David nodded and flinched slightly as the motion aggravated the slash going down his neck.

Colin rubbed his chin in thought, “You got swiped because you kept speaking English, which you keep doing because you’ve been struggling with the First Tongue. But you should have an innate understanding of it since you’ve had your First Change. So I guess there might be a block keeping you from speaking it. Especially since you can understand me and the Elders just fine.”

He was right realised David. When his teachers first started speaking it to him he felt that he should be able to understand, but for some reason just couldn’t. Now he could, but struggled to speak it.

Colin looked David up and down with an intense gaze that made him feel strange. He hugged himself and avoided making eye contact with the redhead.

“Have you been shifting forms outside of your lessons?” asked Colin.

David shook his head. Why would he? it was pure torture to change forms. So he only ever changed during his lessons when explicitly told to do so.

Colin let out a long ‘Ahhh’ of realisation and then nodded.

“I see now,” he said, still nodding. “You’ve been avoiding shifting and so you’ve been staying in Hishu most of the time. Your human form.”

“Why shift not…” David started to say before he growled, and with a hard stomp of his foot switched to English. "Why would staying human keep me from speaking the First Tongue?”

Colin’s hand twitched, like he was about to smack David but held himself.

“Uratha are hybrids of Flesh and Spirit.” said Colin holding a hand up and then the other as he spoke. He brought them together as he said, “These halves must be kept in Harmony with each other.”

“Okay?” asked David, confused on where Colin was going.

“I suspect your insistence on always staying in Hishu is tying you too closely to the Flesh,” said Colin. “You need to shift more often. Not just when the Elders tell you to. Because not only are you tying yourself too closely to the Flesh and disregarding the Spirit, but Hishu simply can’t speak in the First Tongue properly.”

“How come?” asked David. “You seem to speak it just fine.”

“I really don’t,” said Colin. “My accent is too thick at times and I can’t pronounce certain words properly at all. You and others can only understand it from the context of the rest of what I say.”

He thought to himself for a moment. “Think of it like this, there are certain human languages you simply can’t speak properly if you don’t have a uvula. I can only speak it as well as I do because I’ve spoken it my entire life. If anything, the First Tongue is my first language. Not English. But until I have the First Change, I’ll never be able to speak it as fluently as an Uratha.”

“If my human form can’t speak it properly, what forms do?” asked David.

“Dalu, Gauru, and Urshal can speak it fluently without any problem. Urhan can speak it too, but it can only get a few short sentences out.” said Colin.

“What ones were those again?” asked David.

Colin put his face into his hands and groaned. “Oh for… Dalu is the wolf-man form, Gauru is the true hybrid form and war form, and Urshal is the hellhound form.”

“And Urhan is the regular wolf form?” asked David.

Colin nodded and said, “You should shift to Urshal to practice the First Tongue. Dalu is a bit too close to Hishu, your human form, and I’d rather not risk getting torn limb from limb by you shifting into Gauru.”

“Why would I attack you?” asked David.

“Because you only shift to Gauru if you plan to kill everything around you and, if you don’t, you risk falling into Kuruth. The Death Rage. Where you’d attack everything that isn’t your Uratha packmates which neither I or the Elders are. That’s what you were in at the Asylum.” explained Colin.

David’s stomach dropped when he was reminded of his slaughter at the asylum. The Bone Shadow Elders had since made him watch the entirety of it after he had broken the Iron Master Elder’s tablet that showed him the start of it.

“You said only packmates are safe from it,” said David and Colin nodded in affirmation. “But the three at the end of the video. One of those was the Lucas dude you told me about, right? I attacked them. They were supposed to be safe.”

“Yeah, Lucas was one of them. The one that stuck you with the needle,” Colin said with a nod and David stiffened when the needle was mentioned. “And that’s cause they weren’t your pack yet. They won’t be until you meet them proper after you’ve been initiated into the Bone Shadows.”

“Now,” Colin said with a snap of his fingers. “Stop stalling and shift to Urshal.”

David reluctantly stood up from the bed and walked into the middle of the room. His Urshal form was fairly large so he needed the space. He stood there for several moments with nothing happening, his hands trembling.

“Do I have to?” he asked with a shaking voice. “It hurts.”

“If you never shift, it won’t get any easier,” said Colin.

David whined in response but still didn’t shift forms.

Colin saw his reluctance to shift and said, “They haven’t taught it to you yet, but there is a way to shift forms instantly. It won’t make the pain any better but you’ll get it all at once instead of having it drawn out from shifting normally.”

“How do I do that?” asked David.

“By spending Essence. That’s what you actually paid the blood and violence spirit the other day.” explained Colin. He tilted his head, “Though they probably haven’t taught you about it because they don’t think you’re ready for it yet.”

“How do I use essence?” asked David.

“Essence is the energy that permeates the Hisil, the Spirit World. It’s what spirits are made of and what they need to sustain and strengthen themselves. It’s created by acts in the Mundane world that resonate in the Hisil,” explained Colin.

“I’ve never been into the Hisil, as it’s too dangerous for a Wolf-Blood like me. But I’m told it’s an illogical place. The polar opposite of the Mundane. So when dealing with anything concerning it, you can’t expect it to behave logically. Emotion is logic to the Spirit, and logic is illogical. You’re Uratha now, so you’re half spirit. So do something that FEELS right. Don’t think too much about it. Follow your instincts.”

David thought on it. If Essence is what he paid the blood and violence spirit then how could he use it on himself? He shook his head. No, Colin said not to think too much about it. To follow his instincts. He knelt down onto his knees and closed his eyes. He remembered back to the spirit he dealt with in the obstacle course. He ignored what he thought and focused on what he felt during it. He remembered fear, so much fear. Fear and revulsion. But also a strange hunger when he first opened the door to the spirit’s room and smelt the blood.

Without thinking, he brought a finger up to the open slashes on his face. He traced along them, getting blood on his finger, then immediately brought it to his mouth and licked it.

Why the hell did he do that? David thought to himself before his mind whited out with an explosion of the worst possible pain he had ever felt. He tried to scream but his entire body stiffened and all that came out was a strangled gasp. He slumped backwards onto the ground and blacked out.

He came to with a deep, growling groan. He ached all over and he wasn’t sure how long he was unconscious for. He tried to stand up, but arms and legs collapsed under him the moment he put any weight on them.

“Take it easy,” Colin said softly, who was sitting down next to David on the floor. “Take your time.”

David rolled his head over on the ground to look at Colin. He looked small, smaller than normal. He had to tilt his head to see him clearly because of a large black mass blocking some of his sight. He looked down at it and realised it was a large, blocky snout.

He brought a hand up to feel it but what came into sight was a large mitt of a paw. With long fingers that could grasp and hold things but had no fine motor skills. It came down with a heavy slap on his snout. He groaned again.

“How do you feel?” asked Colin.

“I feel like shit,” groaned David. He had a constant ever-present ache all over his body.

Colin punched David in the shoulder for swearing but it felt to him like a light slap and he gave a small huff in response.

David tried to stand up again and pushed himself up onto all fours with shaky limbs. The tattered remains of his clothes that were destroyed as he shifted forms fell off him and onto the ground. His arms, or front legs, he wasn’t sure if they were one or the other as they had aspects of both, were much longer than his back legs which made his slouch all the more prominent. He was also much larger too, the size of a bull. Which made his room, being just a small office that served as his bedroom as he was being taught, seem overly small. He stood above Colin who only reached David’s triceps. But David’s head hung down below his shoulders and was head level with the redhead. His head hanging so low didn’t help his slouch.

He panted to catch his breath before asking in a deep, gravelly voice, “You sure this is supposed to help me speak in the First Tongue?”

Colin shrugged, “Since you’ve been speaking it fluently since shifting to Urshal. Yeah, I am.”

David tilted his head and muttered random words under his breath. Colin was right and he was saying them in the First Tongue instinctively. He tried to say some things in English but he couldn’t get them out. With them coming out as coughing barks that somewhat sounded like English but was still incomprehensible.

“Why can’t I speak English?” he asked, glaring at Colin. Suspecting the redhead tricked him in some way.

“Cause Urshal can only speak in the First Tongue,” Colin said with a smirk.

David growled at Colin who batted him on the nose and said, “Settle down, Cujo.”

David snorted and sniffled from the hit to the sensitive appendage and asked, “Now what?”

Colin shrugged and walked back to David’s bed to sit down on. “Just chat I suppose.”

“About what?” David asked as walked over. He tried to climb on to his bed but it creaked loudly in protest and he worried about breaking it. So he laid on the ground next to it, but not before walking in a circle a few times first.

“Anything that comes to mind. Get you used to speaking First Tongue.” answered Colin. He searched around David’s bed before he found what he was looking for underneath it. A large sketchbook.

“We can talk about your paintings,” offered Colin and opened the book. “Get you used to not just speaking in the First Tongue but expressing yourself in it. Describe what you were feeling when- Oh!”

Colin’s eyes widened as he saw the first painting in David’s book. A dark watercolour painting of the blood and violence spirit from the obstacle course. Its thin, flayed form was hunched over shin-deep in a pool of blood. It held the serial killer's blood covered journal in its hands and its featureless face was torn open, and its long, thin tongue was slathering over the journal.

“I’ve never seen a spirit before. In person at least. My family always sheltered me from them,” Colin said softly. He looked up from the book to David. “Is this what it looked like?”

David nodded, “It was…”

He trailed off with a shudder and stared off into space as he remembered the encounter before finally saying, “Disturbing.”

They spent the next few hours talking about his paintings and the spirits they represented. He made up for lost time since he last had access to painting supplies and painted mainly what spirits he remembered seeing while committed to asylums or living on the streets. Spirits of death, self-harm, alcoholism, gluttony. While talking to Colin about his paintings, he failed to notice the slashes on his face had healed fully by the time he went to bed for the night.

***

The next day’s lesson had been taken away from the warehouse he had spent the last couple weeks by Howls-For-Lost-Skies to a small decrepit office building. Its windows were boarded up, and the front doors chained.

“Today you were supposed to learn how to use Essence to shift forms instantly,” she said in the First Tongue. “But Colin seems to have taken the liberty to teach it to you himself.”

“He’s not-,” David started to say in English before flinching and quickly switching to First Tongue. “He’s not going to get in trouble again, is he?”

Howls-For-Lost-Skies lowered her hand, having decided not to strike David for speaking English and said with a shake of her head, “Not this time, no. Especially since he seems to have been on the right track as to why you were struggling. You ARE too tethered to the Flesh at the moment. A trip into the Hisil will be a fast and effective way to solve that.”

“But Colin said it was too dangerous to go there,” said David.

“Too dangerous for him,” Howls-For-Lost-Skies pointed out. “Mind you, it’s a dangerous plane even for Uratha. But we have this area of the Hisil under pretty firm control. So even a powerful spirit wouldn’t be stupid enough to try anything.”

“How do I even enter the Spirit World?” asked David. He pointed at the rundown building with a thumb. “I wouldn’t describe an office as a very spiritual place.”

His teacher scoffed and walked past David to the abandoned building’s front doors, saying, “You have too narrow a spiritual worldview. It’s unbecoming of an Ithaeur.”

She tapped the padlock holding the chains on the door together, muttered something, and the padlock unlocked itself and fell to the ground along with the chains. She opened the doors and walked inside.

David stood outside for several moments and jumped when Howls-For-Lost-Skies yelled from inside, “PUP! Get in here before I drag you in by my claws!”

David scampered inside after the Elder and immediately went into a sneezing fit as he entered from the suffocating amount of dust in the air. When it subsided he took in the office interior. It was even worse than the exterior. Most of the tiles of the suspended ceiling were on the floor and smashed, paint was peeling off the walls in large leaves, and the cubicles had the large scraps of their vinyl covering hanging off exposing the particle board beneath. Something about the office felt wrong. It resonated with an oppressive atmosphere. Made him feel like he carried the backbreaking weight of unreasonable expectations on his shoulders. Draining away the vibrancy of his passions. It made him slouch even more than he already did.

“What happened here?” asked David, kicking a chunk of ceiling tile.

“Abandoned since the Eighties,” answered the Elder. “The company that operated from it exploited its workers. Forced them to work constant unpaid overtime with no sick days or vacations. They punched in, worked to the bone, punched out, returned home and immediately went to bed, and repeated that again and again and again. Day in, day out. Until one day, after the last employee punched in for the morning, they all disappeared without a trace.”

David looked at the row after row of cubicles and asked, “How can that many people just disappear?”

“Sometimes,” said Howls-For-Lost-Skies, who stood tall and was seemingly unaffected by the office’s oppressive atmosphere as she looked over the dilapidated office space. “When a place has such a concentration of intense human emotion, it generates so much essence that it pierces the Gauntlet separating the Mundane from the Hisil and creates a passageway called a Locus. Where one can travel from the Mundane into the Hisil, and vice versa.”

She turned to David. “Today’s lesson will have you find this location’s Locus, figure out how to use it, navigate the Hisil, and return.”

“That sounds too easy,” said David sceptically. “There’s no way that there isn’t a catch here.”

Howls-For-Lost-Skies nodded, “The Hisil is not something that can be properly described. It has to be experienced to have a chance of being understood. It’s a world of emotion and concepts where logic is such a foreign concept that it shatters the mind of the Sleepers.”

“Who?” asked David, confused by the unknown term.

“Sorry,” said Howls-For-Lost-Skies, “I’ve been spending too much time with the Mages as the Council’s liaison. Picked up some of their terms. The Herd. Regular Humans.”

David nodded, “Oh, ok.”

“Uhhh,” David said as he looked around the office space. “How do I find it? I don’t see any portals or anything.”

Howls-For-Lost-Skies shook her head and sighed in disappointment. “Again, you have too narrow of a spiritual worldview. I, and Colin, gave you everything you need to find and use it.”

David leant against a cubicle and thought on it. Colin and Howls-For-Lost-Skies gave him everything he needed. Colin never told him anything about how to use a Locus. Only about Essence, so a Locus must be used by using Essence. He also told him to do what felt right when it concerned spirits.

He focused on the oppressive atmosphere. It felt too real for it to be a trick of the mind. He followed it, feeling for where felt the strongest on his mind. Until he came upon a wall with a small, blocky analog clock with a slit on top of it. Next to it was a shelf with small slits containing cards with grids printed on them. He grabbed one and saw a series of small numbered stamps in the grids and a handwritten name on the top.

He pointed at the clock with the card and asked his teacher, “What is this thing?”

“A punch clock,” she answered.

“A punch clock?” David asked rhetorically. “So that’s where the term comes from.”

He looked at the punch clock. It practically vibrated with a feeling of promised misery and depression. He could almost hear the constant clacking of keyboards and ringing of phones. He tilted his head, and leant in closer. No, he actually could hear keyboards and phones from it. This was the Locus. It had to be.

But how does he use it?

He looked at the card in his hand and at the name at the top of it.

“Do you have a knife?” he asked his teacher.

She didn’t reply and simply watched David. She wasn’t going to help him any further.

He walked over to a cubicle and foraged around the inside of it until he found something he could use. A pair of scissors. With the tip of the scissor’s blades he sliced the tip of his thumb and wiped it across the name on the card, covering it with a streak of blood.

He returned to the punch clock and said with a dry mouth, “Well. Moment of truth.”

He slid the card into the slot on top of the punch clock.

David’s stomach immediately flipped and twisted. He dropped to his knees, clutching his stomach. He grimaced but couldn’t hold it and leant forward to retch, throwing up his breakfast.

He kept retching, his stomach twisting in on itself until it could no longer force anything else up. He spat, trying to get the horrible acidic taste of bile out of his mouth and wiped his mouth.

“Don’t worry,” said Howls-For-Lost-Skies. “Almost everyone throws up the first time.”

“Did you?” asked David.

“No,” she answered curtly.

David stood up and found that he was in a completely different space. Line after line of pristine cubicles spread in front of him. Far more than were in the office space he was in before. They were also much smaller than the original cubicles, with all their openings blocked by sliding doors of iron bars. In the far distance, was a spotlight that methodically combed along each individual cubicle. From each cubicle came the sound of clicking keyboards and the occasional ring of a phone.

“What the hell is this?” asked David, slipping into English from shock of what he saw.

“The Hisil is an emotional reflection of the Mundane. This,” his teacher said with a wave of her hand, “is how the employees saw their job. A prison.”

She turned to David, it was then he noticed a glowing silver crescent on her face, framing her left eye and a series of similar glowing runes along her arms. She said in a serious tone, “The Hisil always comes as a shock to pups, so I’m going to look over that slip into English so long as you don’t do it again.”

David nodded and turned to the punch clock to leave the Hisil but found it gone. Instead he saw not the wall and shelf of cards, but another cubicle. It was empty, but the sound of clicking keyboards still came out of it.

“You didn’t think it would be that easy did you?” said his teacher with a smirk. “Prisons aren’t known for being easy to escape.”

David closed his eyes and growled. There’s the catch.

He looked around, but saw nothing but cubicles. If the workers saw it as a prison, then he needed to see it as one too in order to find his way out. Where would the keys to a prison be?

He looked towards the spotlight. The prison warden.

He watched the spotlight combed through the cubicles. He was trying to escape a prison, so being caught in that light wouldn’t end well, but if the warden’s office was anywhere, it’d be there.

The light moved in a sweeping pattern, so it was just a matter of silently moving through the places it had combed through already.

He took off his shoes and left them behind. He sneaked better without them. With the weight on the balls of his feet, he moved silently forward. While he moved between the cubicles, avoiding the gaze of the spotlight, he whispered to his teacher, “That crescent on your face. Is it something to do with our Auspices? Because we’re both Ithaeur.”

“Yes,” she whispered in return. She then gestured at the glowing runes on her arms, “Our Auspices and Shadow Gifts are visible in the Hisil.”

“I don’t see my auspice anywhere,” whispered David looking himself over but saw no glowing rune.

“That’s because it’s on your face like mine is,” whispered his teacher, pointing to David’s forehead.

He held his hand to face and saw a faint silver light on his fingers from something on his forehead. He was curious to see what it looked like, but he couldn’t see anything he could use as a mirror in the sea of cubicles he was sneaking through.

As the pair moved through the cubicles he paused when he noticed the sounds of keyboards was louder in one of the nearby cubicles than all the other empty ones they had passed.

He broke off his path to investigate. He found, in the overly cramped cubicle, a hunched figure of a man typing away dressed in casual office wear. His skin was sunken and sallow, with large dark bags under his eyes, and thick unkempt stubble.

David tilted his head and pressed up against the iron bars blocking the cubicle’s entrance. Something was different about the man. Out of all the spirits he’d seen in his life, the man didn’t resemble them at all. He looked far too mundane.

“Is this one of the workers?” asked David. “Is he a ghost?”

Howls-For-Lost-Skies shook her head, “This isn’t the plane where you find ghosts. That’s the Twilight, but sometimes a ghost can accidentally cross over into the Hisil like regular humans do. And become trapped but it wouldn’t survive very long. Not all spirits look strange and terrifying like the ones you often saw in asylums. This is a spirit of misery and drudgery.”

She jerked her head towards the spotlight, “Get back on track and find the Locus, pup.”

David looked at the trapped spirit. He rapped on the bars to try and get its attention but the spirit still tapped away. He couldn’t just leave them there.

“Pup…” Howls-For-Lost-Skies growled in a sharp warning.

David still didn’t leave. He didn’t want to raise his voice and attract the attention of the spotlight, which was moving away from them. He remembered back during his stints in asylums, the only way he could get some of the more delusional patients to speak to him was to play along.

“What are you still doing here? It’s time to punch out,” David said in English.

The tapping stopped. The man pulled away and looked around in confusion and his eyes looked right at David but also through him.

“It’s time to go home,” David said softly. “Go home and get some rest"

The spirit turned away from David and started tapping away again at the keyboard and ignored all other attempts from David to get its attention. Dejected, he turned to his teacher and closed his eyes and braced for the punishment for disobeying her, and also speaking English.

“Hurry up and find the Locus, David,” she said.

David quickly nodded and walked away, not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Reaching the spotlight was easy enough and they encountered no other trapped spirits on their way there. He found himself in front of a large, imposing wooden door. It emanated malice, and demanded order and compliance from the pair. The door to the warden’s office.

David tried to open the door but it didn’t open. The door knob didn’t even rattle slightly like it would if it was locked. It was as if it wasn’t really a door, just an idea of a door.

He was stumped. He needed to get inside but it wouldn’t open normally, and he also suspected that trying to break it down wouldn’t work. It was a door in the Spirit World. He couldn’t expect it to behave like it would in the Mundane.

He remembered what Colin told him when he told David his name. About it being more polite to ask for him by name.

He rubbed his chin in thought. More polite.

He raised a hand and gently knocked on the door. He waited for a moment and the door opened inwards with a low, ominous creak.

He entered the warden’s office and what he saw disturbed him. He guessed that the warden's office would reflect how the employee’s and boss saw it, but he didn’t expect this. Where the boss’s desk and chair should have been was a garishly opulent throne, and facing the throne, instead of a regular chair was an electric chair.

“Clearly the employees were never called in here for a good reason,” David said to himself and Howls-For-Lost-Skies grunted in agreement.

David sighed in relief when he saw behind the throne the punch clock and the shelf of cards. He quickly walked over and saw sticking out of the punch clock the same card David had used to enter the Spirit World. He pulled it out and noticed though that the blood he smeared over the name was gone. He realised something.

“Shit,” he muttered as he remembered that he left the scissors back in the Mundane.

His teacher cleared her throat and David turned to see her holding a knife by its blade and offered its handle to David. He took and muttered a sheepish thanks. He guessed that since he was at the end of the lesson that his teacher was going to help him now, and also served as a non-verbal chastisement for not being prepared. He should ask for a small knife after he got back to the warehouse.

He cut his thumb with the knife, gave it back to his teacher, and reapplied the blood to the card. He slotted the card into the punch clock and immediately dropped to the ground again clutching his stomach.

He doubled over to throw up but he had already thrown up all he could earlier, so he spent several minutes dry heaving and groaning as his stomach flipped and twisted in on itself trying to force out nothing.

He looked up from the ground and saw he was back in the dilapidated office building in front of the punch clock like he had never left. The only clue that they had left was Howls-For-Lost-Skies being nowhere to be found.

He blinked and saw her suddenly standing in front of him, the glowing runes on her body gone, and waiting for him to stand up.

“That didn’t seem too dangerous,” David said as he stood up, brushing the dust from himself.

His teacher crossed her arms and David braced himself for the coming lecture.

“That's because I told you that we have this area of the Hisil locked down, and you WERE __in real danger. If that spotlight hit you it would’ve trapped you in a cubicle, and if I wasn’t there that spirit of misery and drudgery would’ve done the same. I know you were only trying to help it but that was a very stupid and dangerous thing to do.”

“But Colin told me to do what felt right when it came to spirits,” mumbled David, avoiding his teacher’s judging gaze.

“Colin knows a lot about the Hisil, more than most wolf-bloods. But he doesn’t understand it. He only can by entering it and spending time there. But it’s too dangerous for a wolf-blood and his bloodline is far too valuable to risk taking there even with an escort. He’s certainly able to make well-informed decisions with what he knows. He wouldn’t have been able to teach you how to use Essence otherwise. But his knowledge is limited,” said Howls-For-Lost-Skies before her face softened and noted. “You two have grown pretty close lately.”

“He’s helped me a lot with lessons,” stammered David. His stomach fluttered, which he attributed to still feeling queasy from stepping between the different realms.

He risked looking up to his teacher and saw her looking at him with a raised eyebrow. He quickly averted his gaze again.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” his teacher said in English, making David look up at her in surprise. “You have a big day tomorrow.”