When Simon woke up, almost pain-free and lying in a lumpy bed, he felt a surge of disappointment. Back to the cabin after all of that, he sighed internally as he opened his eyes. What a waste.

He’d expected a gang initiation with some secret society mumbo jumbo, not a murder. He supposed that meant that he’d done something to reveal himself, cutting his quest to learn more about magic short. Now, he expected to see the same thing he always did after he was returned to life, the rough timbered ceiling of his cabin by the dim light that managed to leak in through the closed shutters, but he was disappointed there, too.

He wasn’t in the cabin. He was lying in a dark room with a stone ceiling. Simon blinked as his brain froze, trying to square this circle. Wait, did I die or not? He balked. If I was alive, then I should be in a lot of pain, I—

“Healing magic,” he whispered to himself as he struggled to rise. His limbs were heavy and weak, and now that he was focusing, he could tell there were a few lingering aches that whoever had treated him had missed.

Almost as soon as Simon started to sit up, he was pushed back down by a gray-robed woman who leaned forward from the shadows. “Easy there, Nijam,” she said soothingly, forcing him to lie where he was. “If it was just healing magic, you’d have been up days ago, but this will take longer, I’m afraid.”

“Longer?” he asked, trying not to let his skepticism leak out. “What happened?”

“Exactly what the Magi told you would happen,” she said seriously as she lay a cool cloth on his forehead. “You died for your God-King, and in his kind, beneficent wisdom, he raised you up, and you live again.”

Simon didn’t believe that for a second, but after thinking about it for a moment, he said, “Praise be... I-I’m so glad he found me worthy.” As he spoke, though, he noticed he was wearing the black robes of an acolyte now.

“Only those who are restored to life by his grace are fit to learn true knowledge,” she answered reverently.

The two of them prayed together then for a time before she left him to recover. The whole time, though, Simon’s mind was racing.

What a mindfuck! His brain screamed as he examined the strange symbols that had been drawn on his body with flaking red paint now that she was gone. At first glance, they looked like words of power, but they were just nonsense words, and as he found no pair of matching symbols on him as he went, he felt sure they were just another layer of stage dressing in all of this.

He knew that some religions crossed the border into cult territory, but to beat children into unconsciousness, then heal them and tell them they died? That was crazy. No, what’s crazy is that they make you believe their God-King is where all this power comes from, and it’s not! Simon’s mind shouted, refusing to let the topic go, even as he lay there in the dark.

While he didn’t think that magic was a natural force, it was certainly a universal one. It might even be reliable enough to be considered a scientific force. If he had a few lifetimes and a laboratory, he could probably figure out the variables involved in some of the words. He could write equations that explained how pronunciation affected the power of a word of fire, and he could accurately measure the difference in life force costs between a lesser word of force and a word of force.

While Simon wasn’t close to understanding any of those things with any sort of precision at the moment, he believed that they were understandable in the same way that the more he understood anatomy, the better he could heal someone and the more vividly he imagined a spell, the better it would turn out.

While he was certain someone had created this framework of words and spells, he was sure it wasn’t this God-King. What need would a city or a nation have for war if they could simply rewrite reality? No, this is the work of Helades at best or the demons at worst, he decided as he lay there, reiterating the opinion he’d decided on long ago. While it was entirely possible there was some third answer to the question, he was sure the Murani one wasn’t it.

Well, he was mostly sure. If he finally infiltrated the Magi and found exactly the sort of equations that he was hoping to discover one day, then he supposed he’d be willing to eat some crow. That wasn’t very likely, though.

Later that day, or night, or whenever it was, the woman returned by candlelight and gave him some water. He asked for some food, as he expected any child his age would, but she insisted that he had to fast. “Being reborn is hard on the body,” she insisted. “Once you have rested, we will feed your mind and your soul, but your body must adjust.”

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The way that she persisted in going on with this lie angered him, and Simon had to look away often as he composed himself. No wonder Ajeem could barely meet my gaze, Simon swore to himself. The poor kid thought he was a zombie.

Looking back on the way some of the kids in black had acted, though, it suddenly made more sense. For every loud, obnoxious bully, there was a quiet kid coming to grips with all of this. Simon had assumed that what he was seeing was sadness because someone they knew had died, but that probably didn’t upset them half as much as finding out they had died.

“If the God King can restore me to life, then why does he let any of his acolytes die?” Simon asked his minder later that evening when she brought him a scroll to practice his reading on. “Surely they—”

“It is not your place, nor is it anyone else's, to question his will or the word of his Magi,” she corrected him sharply before softening slightly. “Nijam, you have to understand that what happens here can be very dangerous, and those students that you see taken lifeless from this pyramid fell short in some way. So, our ruler decided not to raise them up a second time. You don’t have to worry, though. As long as you are devout and focused, he will protect you.”

“Is that what those amulets are for, then?” Simon asked, pointing to the small amulet the minder wore around her neck. It wasn’t as large as the strange lotus-shaped amulets that made the Magi explode, but it was the first time he’d gotten to ask one of the minders about it, so he decided to go for it.

“In a way, yes,” she agreed as her hand went to her throat. “One day, if you are worthy, you will have the very same honor.” The woman seemed conflicted about that and left Simon soon after that, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint what her turbulent emotions were supposed to mean.

Was it shame because she wasn’t a full Magi or guilt for lying to him? Were the minders simply the lowest rank of Magi, or were they the highest rank of slave? He didn’t know. No one bothered to explain any of these things to him.

Over the next few days, all he did was grow hungrier and read the same few scrolls over and over again. Though he pretended to have trouble sounding out the words and acted like it took him two days to discover what it was he was reading, he knew in seconds. It was the same religious propaganda he’d read aloud with all of the other initiates every few days for months now. That was tedious, but it was expected. It was also one of the only things to do in this dark room.

While his minder had confirmed that this was the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles, besides the black featureless walls, her occasional presence, and the occasional echo of disturbing sounds from somewhere else, he had no real information about that. Simon spent those days with regret. It wasn't regret that he’d done this, but regret that he hadn’t brought the entire house of cards down already. The place was a madhouse. It was a factory of abuse and psychological manipulation that produced zealots.

It’s so strange, he thought to himself as he meditated and tried to make everything he knew align in some way that would make it make sense. It’s like the Murani are two entirely different cultures. There are the clans on the plains that seem more likely to fight each other than anyone else, and then there's the God-King’s cult in here, training the next generation of monsters. How does that happen?

While Simon understood that the mages could probably destroy the tribes or at least crush them enough to bring them to heel, he also saw why they wouldn’t want to. It was those endless minor wars that powered the slave trade of the region, and blood magic was thirsty business.

While Simon didn’t have a clock or a calendar in here, based on the way his hunger rose to a fever pitch and then slowly fell away, he was pretty sure he was in his dark cell for three or four days before they finally released him. Then, weak from hunger, which he was assured was really enervation related to his resurrection, he was finally escorted from the pyramid through a complicated maze of tunnels that he was going to have a hard time learning despite how carefully he’d paid attention to each twist and turn.

The place was very confusing, and that was almost certainly on purpose. Still, as he walked out, he did catch glimpses through different doorways. He saw a lecture hall, some practice rooms, some locked doors that might have been prisons or storerooms, and a library. It was that last one he was most interested in, but he didn’t expect they’d let him wander around that any time soon.

Instead, he was brought outside just as the sun was rising, blinding him. Simon was sure that was planned, too. The whole thing just dripped with symbolism. Still, the effect was somewhat wasted on him because the flash of light let him see the river of darkness flowing up the pyramid into the tunnel they’d exited for a moment.

They want absolute obedience before they give you cosmic power, he thought to himself as he walked down the pyramid with shaky legs. All of the other kids would be charging up the pyramid right now to make sure they were fed, but he couldn’t see them. Instead, he was being escorted down the second set of stairs on the far side. He hadn’t been over here before, but he was sure there was a reason for that, too.

“Where are we going?” he asked when they were halfway down.

“To get you fed first, then you’ll have some private lessons before you rejoin the rest of the acolytes,” she explained. “You might have thought that the black robes were only a single stepping stone, but there are many steps between the world of an initiate and the Magi. This is but the first step into the darkness, and it is only through that darkness that you will one day understand the light.”

The woman’s words were cliché, but they made a strange sort of sense to Simon, and he didn’t complain. Still, his patience was wearing pretty thin. It had been months since he’d started down this road, and he had nothing to show for it. Only the glimpse of that large room packed with books and scrolls was enough to make him wait a little longer. A little time in a place like that was worth almost any amount of suffering. So, for now, he let himself be led down the stairs to whatever awaited him next.