The Fae World: Kalinia (Post-Apoc): Jackson: The Thieves’ School
Jackson stepped through the wards. He’d known where the school was for a while, but he wasn’t sure that he wanted to be a thief, because it had been the job that had taken both his parents away from him. By choosing to remain thieves, rather than raise their three children, they’d caused damage that could never be repaired, and he was glad they’d have been moved onto other jobs, so he wouldn’t have to deal with them. As far as he was concerned the only parent he wanted was the woman who had raised him, his aunt, his father’s sister, who had also once been a thief. She, however, had decided to walk away when she became a mother, accidentally, and then took on the unwanted children of her brother’s lover. Other children in his position had ended up in orphanages with no idea why they were abandoned, which was something he sometimes thought might be better.
In that situation, though, Jackson would have had no idea why he could feel the magic of the school and wouldn’t have be able to make his decision. Normally people suited to being thieves found the school accidentally, before finding themselves being convinced that being able to travel to another world, where there was magic, was worth signing away their lives. Those who didn’t had their memory of the school removed, for the protection of the thieves. He shook his head. Fortunately they hadn’t removed his aunt’s memories, because she had too many of them for it to work, and that meant she’d been able to tell them stories of her time at the school.
Those stories had been why Jackson had, in the end, decided he wanted to be a thief. It wasn’t because he believed that both the worlds should have magic, but because he wanted to travel to the other world, to learn about magic, to make friends with people who were like him. He didn’t doubt that some of them had grown up in an orphanage and would have finally found out why they were abandoned, while others would have been brought up by a mother, or an aunt, or an uncle, who told them stories about the thieves, and then there were the few who would have found the school because they could use magic but no one in their family had known before. None of them were lucky, even though they might think they were, yet they would be a part of something that was much bigger than anyone really understood.
Some of the stories Jackson’s aunt had told him had made him wonder why the thieves really existed. They said it was so they could make magic a reality for everyone who could use it, rather than it only being taught to the Magicians on the other world, but there was something about that explanation that didn’t make sense. Apparently the school had been opened by a twin who was left behind when his brother was chosen to be a Magician, once he had found his way onto the other world, which made Jackson think the whole thing had been started by jealousy and continued because of that same emotion. Yet he was certain a lot of the thieves didn’t agree with the system - they just didn’t know how to change things.
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.