The passage was small and unlit, about twenty feet in length with walls only six feet apart. In a way, it reminded Rowan more of an alleyway than a hallway. At the end, a small wooden door was firmly shut, with only the faintest glimmer of light emerging from the other side.

Cautiously, Rowan crept towards the door, keeping his stance low and his ear trained for any sounds of Morgana’s return. No sounds emerged from beyond the door, and Rowan reached it without issue, but he did not open it right away. Instead, he waited, the minutes passing by slowly as he crouched low in front of the door, making sure that Morgana had not heard him following her and now lay in wait for him just through the wooden portal.

In the hallway he had just come from, no one stirred, the guards busy at their posts and the teachers not caring to patrol such a distant and forlorn section of the castle. Whatever the reason, Rowan was happy to wait, allowing the minutes to pass by one after the other.

In this manner, five minutes soon elapsed. Satisfied that Morgana was not waiting on the other side of the door to ambush him, Rowan tested the handle. The door remained shut.

Locked. Rowan frowned, but did not despair. A locked door was no impediment to him, so long as it was a real lock and not a magical one. Reaching into his shirt, he brought out a small packet, unrolling it to reveal a series of twisted metal implements that, to the observational eye, appeared rather similar to the utensils from the dining hall.

Although Rowan had been forced to leave his lockpicks back in Taureen along with everything else he had owned—as pitifully small a list that had been—he had learned long ago the value of a good set of lockpicks.

Unfortunately, knowing no one at Faebrook, he had been unable to procure an actual set for fear of being turned in, and so he had resorted to making his own. The forks and knives used in the cafeteria had naturally been what he had turned his eye to, and the result lay before him.

Although they would win no prizes for elegance, the picks in his hand were functional, and that was all Rowan needed right now.

Sliding two picks into the lock, Rowan’s trained ear listened for the sound of tumblers being displaced. With a slight click, the first caught on his pick. Holding it in place, he continued, methodically raising the tumblers until, with another soft click, the door swung slightly open.

Like lightning, Rowan reached for the handle, preventing it from opening any further. The door did not appear new, and he was not about to risk all his work so far on the chance that the Faebrook maintenance staff had properly oiled it in the last century.

A quick peek through the small crack between door and doorframe revealed no one waiting in the passage beyond. Carefully, Rowan opened the door just enough to allow him to pass and slipped inside, sliding the door closed behind him. The entire operation was completed without a sound, and Rowan immediately moved to the shadows, taking stock of the new hall he found himself in.

Unlike the previous, this hall was lit, though interestingly not by the normal crystal braziers that illuminated the halls of Faebrook. What greeted him here was the flickering torch light of a proper torch, burning gently in its sconce about halfway up the hall.

Longer than the other hall in length, Rowan estimated that it would take him roughly fifty paces to reach the door at the far end, another portal of wood with metal bands stretched over it. With only one torch for the entire hallway, shadows abounded, and Rowan slipped into them with ease, his footsteps soft as he padded towards the only possible place that his quarry could have disappeared into.

The stones of the wall were rough, grating against the skin on Rowan’s hand as he crept forward with one hand on the wall and the other in front of him. In a dark spot where the torchlight did not reach, however, the stone suddenly became strangely smooth to the touch, and Rowan’s hand glided along for a few moments before the rough sensation returned.

Puzzled, Rowan filed the information away, but paid it no heed for the moment. Back in Taureen, the thieves had a saying: ‘Only break one law at a time’. The rationale behind it was pretty simple; if you had stolen jewels on you, don’t get into anything that would draw the guards attention. Rowan had learned this lesson the hard way, and also discovered it applied to other activities, such as indulging his curiosity.

With his current quarry being a girl who had already shown both the ability and the inclination to utterly destroy him, there was no benefit to be gained in splitting his attention and getting caught by her. Doing his best to forget the scene of a large rock slamming into his skull, Rowan arrived at the door.

This time, there was no need to wait before entering. If Morgana had not hidden behind the first door, there was no reason for her to do so behind the second, and every moment he delayed was another opportunity for her to finish up whatever it was she was doing. Not wanting her to open the door with him crouched outside, Rowan tested the handle. Locked again.

Could this girl get any more paranoid? Rowan wondered, his makeshift lock picks appearing in his hands once more. Twenty seconds later the door unlocked with a soft click. This time, Rowan’s hand was already on the handle, and the door did not swing open at all.

Controlling his breathing, Rowan slid the door open a crack, just enough to see what lay beyond.

“Haa… haa…” The sounds of heavy breathing were the first thing Rowan noticed, emanating from the girl in the centre of the room. Torches on the walls flickered with fire, tiny wisps of smoke curling up into the air and causing the torchlight to flicker hazily as it illuminated the scene.

Hands on her knees, Morgana rested, her panting filling the circular stone room. In front of her was a training dummy, its joints reinforced with metal, and bearing numerous shallow cuts that were slowly healing, the wood regrowing at an incredible speed.

Magic formations in the dummy? Rowan ignored it. There would be time to make sense of what he was seeing later. For now, he just had to watch.

Back in the room, Morgana stood up. Raising her left hand, Rowan could just make out a black stick clutched in her grasp. As he watched, she stepped forward, the stick blurring as it struck the dummy’s face, a cracking sound ringing through the room.

Like lightning, Morgana moved backwards, the sound from her previous strike still audible as she thrust her right arm forward, her hand glowing a verdant green as plants sped from her fingertips and lashed at the dummy, cutting deeply into the wooden frame.

Circling, Morgana continued to strike at the dummy, never resting for even a moment as she ducked and weaved around the wooden construct. After a full minute of this, she collapsed, her breathing hard as she took a break from her assault.

In front of her, the dummy had already begun to heal, the scars and cuts from her plants and the black baton slowly filling in with wood as the magic within took effect. For a moment, Morgana just sat there, but with a groan she reached over and grabbed a book that Rowan had not noticed before. Flipping it open, she began to read, her breathing still harsh as she recovered from the exertion.

Eyes moving away from Morgana, Rowan took in the rest of the room. Apart from the torches on the walls, the room was remarkably sparse. A desk sat at one end, burdened with books. Though he could not make out the titles from his current position, Rowan recognized some of them as being textbooks from the library, having looked at a few of them on recommendation of Kanna.

Beside the desk and books, the rest of the room was empty save for Morgana and her training dummy. A remarkably unremarkable room that was only notable for its current resident and how out of the way it was.

Movement from the corner of his eye brought Rowan’s attention back to Morgana, who had squared up against the dummy again. A moment later the sound of her attacks filled the room once more.

In this manner, Morgana continued, alternating between attack and study as she trained in solitude.

For his part, Rowan sat and observed, doing his best to figure out why she was here. Although training was an everyday thing at the academy, it was usually done during normal hours and in the specially set up rooms for practicing and studying. Not after curfew behind two locked doors in a forgotten wing of the castle.

It was not as if she was unable to train elsewhere either. Rowan had seen Morgana training at both the training field and the gym before, and she was a frequent visitor to the library as well, although she never remained to study as he did. So why was she holed up in here after midnight?

The question burned in his mind, but Rowan had no clue how to go about discovering the answer. After all, it was not as if he could just go up to her and say: “Hey, Morgana. I saw you heading out for a late night practice session and tailed you secretly before watching you like a creepy stalker for twenty minutes.”

Rowan shook his head. Yeah, no. There was no way he could say that. She would tear him apart, and unlike the training dummy, he did not have any magic to stitch himself back together once she was done with him.

Figuring that he had seen enough, Rowan decided that it was about time to head out. Even if he was pretty safe in the darkened passage, there was no guarantee that Morgana wouldn’t grow paranoid and decide to check to make sure she was truly alone. After all, this was the girl that had hidden herself behind two locked doors just to train. There was no telling what went through her mind.

Withdrawing from the door, Rowan slid it closed, holding the handle so as to not allow the latch to brush over the door frame. Gently, he shut it, intending for it to close as silently as it had opened. That was not the case. With a sound that, to Rowan’s ears seemed almost ear-splittingly loud, a chime rang out through the air, similar to the ones shopkeeps employed.

In reality, the sound was faint, just barely loud enough to echo through the hallway, which explained why he had not heard it when Morgana had shut the door in the first place. Magic in the handle perhaps, which would explain why it had not been triggered when he had picked the lock to open it.

Regardless of the reason for the chime, the sound it made was still more than loud enough to alert the fae girl to his presence, and Rowan heard her jump to her feet in the room beyond, doubtless coming to see who dared to spy on her.

Fuck. Rowan glanced down the hallway. What had once seemed like a rather short hall now seemed to stretch out into infinity, the door at the other end impossibly distant. Morgana’s footsteps on the other side of the door he was standing beside were not close, but it would not take her long to reach it, and there was no way he would be able to reach the end of the hallway in that time.

Flattening himself to the wall, Rowan did his best to meld into the shadows, his hands pressed hard against the rough stone as he sought to meld with it, wishing he had a full body version of the spell Fiin had used to reach into the wall back in the Thimp dungeon.

Unfortunately, he had no such thing, and the footsteps were growing closer. Moving slightly to the side, Rowan sought a darker patch of shadow, hoping that she would assume that whoever or whatever it was that had triggered the door spell had already made their escape. Or perhaps even better that she had been hearing things and no such perpetrator existed.

Fanciful delusions aside, Rowan felt his hand suddenly slip, the stone turning smooth beneath his palm all of a sudden. A moment later, he felt the rest of himself slip sideways as well, the wall spinning as it sucked him inside, spilling him into darkness as he fell forward and the wall shut closed behind him.

Outside in the hallway, a click sounded as the door opened, revealing Morgana’s wrathful face to the world. Brushing a strand of stray hair out of her face, she raised her hand, casting a spell that illuminated the entire hallway in harsh light. Nothing was revealed, and she frowned, her gaze falling upon the door at the end of the hallway. After a moment she turned, heading back inside as the door shut behind her, another soft chime ringing through the now empty hallway.