That evening, when they were finally allowed to leave, Simon followed the rest of the students to the pair of dorms where the neophytes slept. The black-robbed students had not reemerged from wherever they had disappeared to that morning inside the pyramid, which made the river of children flowing down the pyramid and into the dining hall near the foot of it a sea of brown and tan with only a speck of gray where a slave or a minder supervised the organized chaos.

The children were not as boisterous as he would have expected, but then they were not entirely muted either. They were rather serious for kids, but there was still shoving, teasing, and snickering whenever they thought they were far enough away from an authority figure to avoid a scolding. Simon did his best to blend in, but mostly, he was surveying the little city within a city that surrounded the giant step pyramid and trying to square a few circles.

Where had the black-robed students gone? Why did this feel like religious daycare instead of the dog-eat-dog existence that the first minder had practically promised him? It didn’t make any sense to Simon, but for now, he didn’t make waves or ask any questions that might strike his fellow initiates as odd. He just did whatever they did and kept his eyes open.

Dinner was waiting for them, and despite how chaotic everything was, it was his first real socialization since he’d gone down what was becoming this very strange rabbit hole. Unlike breakfast, every child got to eat, but the best foods were in short supply. Children were jostling for position at every stage of the process with little wooden bowls.

Simon struggled with them, but only because it would have been strange not to. He didn’t care at all whether he got a honeyed pastry sweetened with dates or that his bowl was more chickpeas and root vegetables than it was meat. He was happy to eat and learn.

"Must we truly labor over the same letters over and over again?" one complained. “We learned these already only weeks ago!”

"This endless cycle of initiation wearies the spirit." Another piped up, wrinkling his nose, "Couscous yet again? When will we earn the right to wear the black robes?"

These quiet grumbles and hopeful pleas were interspersed with hurried mouthfuls of food and a constant barrage of questions. Many were directed at Simon, the newcomer. But he remained elusive in his responses. Instead, he found it much more interesting to listen to other people than to repeat his own fictional and ever-shifting backstory again.

“Is it true that the children in black never come back?” Simon asked one of his more persistent questioners, repeating part of a rumor he’d heard mentioned only a few minutes before. “Some of them just disappear, right?”

“No way,” the slightly older boy laughed. “They just have longer days than us. They come out every night. They even bring out the ones that died.”

“Students die?” Simon asked. This time, his surprise wasn’t feigned. Intellectually, he kind of expected it, but the reality still stunned him.

“Learning magic is hard,” the other boy said with a shrug. He acted like he didn’t care, but Simon could see fear and sadness flicker quickly across his face. “Some people just aren’t cut out for it. Not like me! I—”

“Don’t listen to him,” another dark-haired girl said. “The acolytes hardly ever die. He’s just trying to scare you. There’s no real danger to being an initiate or an acolyte.”

“How do you know?” Simon asked.

“Because I’ve been here for weeks, and I’ve only seen one body,” she said confidently. The first boy countered that he’d been here for a whole month and he’d seen at least two. Apparently, when someone died, they placed the body in state on a bier in the courtyard before burning it. Simon quickly did the math and decided that probably meant something like 25 kids were dying every year in whatever they were doing down there.

Depending on exactly how big the class size was, and it was probably in the hundreds, given how quickly children were recruited and flowed through the initiate stage, that could be something like a 10% mortality rate. While the idea of killing one in ten kids was rough, the fact was that acolytes probably persisted in this program for years, so it might well be twenty or thirty percent.

A chill went through Simon as he looked around the room and tried to imagine a third of all of these kids were just gone. Some of them had a special talent that he didn’t yet fully understand, and many of them had no doubt led lives hard enough that a few were monsters in the making. Still, the idea that one day, a couple of years from now, a huge proportion of them would just be dead hurt him enough that he kind of wanted to shut this whole shit show down tonight with the most powerful souls he had instead of infiltrating and learning from it.

The truth was probably worse than that, though. Magi weren’t exactly common. There were hundreds, or maybe thousands, but certainly not tens of thousands in the city. If they artificially extended their life, then only a few would die every year from violence or mishap, so it wasn’t like a lot of kids from here would ever reach that point.

Simon’s gaze drifted as he tried to do the math, but when some tough kid jostled him, it slipped away, and he was glad to let it. His mind hadn’t been going anywhere healthy. This whole place was a filter, a very dangerous one, at that.

As strange and tumultuous as dinner had been after the dark robbed acolytes started to appear in the dining hall from their mysterious absence, the younger brown robbed students quickly began to vacate the large room through another door. It wasn’t hard to see why, by some unspoken rule, they were clearly a caste above the younger initiates, and anyone that found themselves too slow to vacate their spot had their bowl knocked aside or worse. Though they didn’t quite beat the younger students, the abuse became more physical than verbal at some point.

I can see that the Magi are really trying to raise some fine, upstanding bullies here, Simon thought to himself as he abandoned his long, empty bowl and moved to join the rest of his classmates.

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Even that casual cruelty wasn’t what he noticed most, though. That was just how many of them there were. There had been dozens and dozens of brown-robed children in Simon's group, but there were hundreds of black-robed students pouring in, and it was evident that as large as the dining hall was, not all of them would even be able to fit in at once.

So that’s it, he thought. This is just training wheels for true torment, just like writing and art are training wheels for true magic. Simon wasn’t so sure that teaching all of these kids powerful magic and poor impulse was a good combination, but if it was a recipe for a real bloodbath, then why were there so many children? Wouldn’t they have been an endangered species?

It was hard to say, but as he passed outside with one tide of children, he saw nothing worse than bruises on the other group. Whatever violence they were engaged in, it was non-lethal. While some of them looked malnourished, none were exceptionally well-muscled, so there wasn’t any sort of martial drilling going on in the depths of the pyramid.

Still, as Simon walked toward the place he’d be sleeping for the foreseeable future, he wondered what it was they did down there all day. They were up at dawn, just like him, and then they weren’t let back out until after dark. They were practically denied the sun.

You’ll find out, Simon reminded himself. When the time comes, you won't have a choice.

That night, when Simon went to go look for a bed, he found another surprise. While the black-robed children had graduated to full-time bullies, many of the brown-robed kids were already bullies in training. The boys and girls separated when they reached the place where they slept. Both groups were chaperoned by gray-robed minders until they went into austere halls with bunk beds for close to a hundred people, which was far more than they needed. He found that the hard way when he asked someone which bed in the long bunk house was free.

“New kids sleep on the floor!” the dark-eyed kid said with a laugh.

For a moment, Simon chose to believe he was joking, but as the beds started to be claimed, one at a time, starting with those that were closest to the door, it seemed more and more likely that he wasn’t. Top bunks were more in demand, so Simon decided to take one of the unclaimed bottom bunks midway down the hall, but the boy he’d asked about a bed only a moment before stepped forward and repeated himself. “New kids are on the floor, just like last night, and every night until another new kid comes to replace you.” As the young man spoke, he pointed to one of the back corners of the long room. “The longer you’re here, the closer you can sleep to the door. Those are the rules.”

Everything is a pecking order, huh? He thought with a sigh. This was enough to make him wish he’d just gone with tagging the walls of the city with magic words and letting them tear themselves apart.

“The rules, huh?” Simon smiled coldly. “Whose rules? The minders? The teachers.”

“Who cares who made the rule,” the bully yelled, trying and failing to push Simon as he twisted his chest and stepped back half a step to avoid the other boy’s touch. “Everyone else did it, so you gotta do it too.”

“I slept on a floor last night because a Magi told me to,” Simon shot back, “But that floor had a fire, so unless you’re ready to cast a—

“New kids don’t deserve fire!” someone shouted from the growing crowd.

“Warmth is for those who’ve been here the longest!” another echoed.

Simon ignored those outbursts, and the smug look that the other boy gave him at that show of support, and continued. “So, unless you’re ready to show off your magic for all of us, I don’t think I have to listen to what you have to say.”

The boy’s face reddened with embarrassment as much as anger, and there was a collective gasp from the nearby boys as a wide ring began to form around the two of them. Simon really didn’t want to fight a kid, even if he was a kid himself, but the last thing he wanted to do was show weakness. He’d only been here a day, and he could already see what a bad idea that would be.

Still, he waited for the other kid to throw the first punch and the second since the first was so half-hearted. “You’d really rather fight me than let me sleep in a bed no one is using?” Simon asked after he slipped the second punch and pushed the kid back, almost off of his feet.

“You’re the one that’s making this harder than this has to be,” the boy said as one of his friends moved to join him, turning the thing into a two-on-one affair. “You’re going to end up in that corner one way or another!”

Simon had just enough time to wonder if these two were some of the most senior students or the most junior before they rushed him together. That was a question worth answering, but it would have to wait.

While he didn’t want to hurt anyone, watching two boys team up against him like this made him feel slightly less bad about it. This time, he wasn’t quite so passive. He didn’t try to dodge again, which was what they were expecting. Instead, he moved forward close enough that the second boy’s fist didn’t have a chance to get any force behind it. He took that feeble punch in the chest as he delivered one to the other boy’s stomach. His blow was hard enough to double the other boy over.

Then Simon took a step back and let the first asshole come at him again before Simon pushed him over his friend, forcing them both to fall to the ground in a tangle of limbs. He might not be any stronger than these other boys, but he had lifetimes of fighting that they didn’t, and he felt certain he could take any group of two or three in the whole room, save for perhaps the biggest and oldest, who seemed content to watch.

As Simon moved to the two kids on the ground, no one interfered. That surprised him. He’d expected to have to make at least one or two more examples, but this seemed to be all there was that qualified for entertainment in the room, and no one wanted to miss a thing, which left Simon in the awkward position of how to finish this. He was unwilling to beat these two bloody, but it was clear that he couldn’t leave things unfinished, either.

So, he decided to try threatening before brutal. As the second kid was getting up, Simon pushed him out of the way and advanced on his friend like he was going to deliver a bicycle kick to the ribs. He stopped at the last second, but the way that his would-be bully balled up to protect himself against a blow that never landed still provoked gales of laughter.

While everyone was being so loud, Simon crouched down and spoke only loud enough that the boy on the ground could hear him. “If you tried that shit on my street, I wouldn’t stop beating you until you’d never walk again, do you hear me?” Simon snarled. “Good thing for you, we aren’t on my street, and I promised the Magi I’d try to be on my best behavior.”

“Y-you did?” the boy asked, trying and failing to meet Simon’s gaze without flinching.

“I did,” Simon agreed, “But you cross me again, and I’ll push you all the way down the stairs of the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles. I swear on the God-King I will. I’ll do it, and I’ll tell everyone it was an accident.”

That left the other boy pale, and when Simon offered him his hand to help him to his feet, he didn’t even register it at first.