The first day on the job descended upon Lux with the relentless grey of a typical Victorian morning. She was to serve a dual role: both the homeroom teacher for Class 1-B and the grade's mathematics instructor. A mundane, albeit necessary, step in her new, bewildering existence.
Clad in a crisp white cotton blouse, its fabric cool against her skin, tucked into an autumn-brown maxi skirt whose hem and seams were embroidered with delicate, almost imperceptible gold threading, she cut an elegant if unassuming figure. Her hair, now a cool, aristocratic grey subtly laced with ash-brown undertones at the roots, was braided into a regal crown, a stark, deliberate contrast to the wilder hues it once held. A pair of thin-rimmed glasses, perched delicately on her nose, framed her face, lending her the look of a quiet, perhaps slightly severe, scholar. It was a disguise of normalcy, carefully constructed.
The school itself was... eclectic, a labyrinthine edifice of stone and dark wood, smelling faintly of chalk and ambition. It offered not only the expected traditional subjects—language, mathematics, biology—but also, jarringly, combat training, weaponry, and even the arcane arts, though the latter was heavily scrutinized by the pervasive Bureau of Magical Affairs. Lux harbored no grand ambitions for this posting. She simply intended to do the work she was paid for, a simple transaction of labor for livelihood.
"Good morning, Class," she began, her tone even, modulated, but not unfriendly. It was the tone of someone accustomed to command, yet choosing restraint. "My name is Esh Lux. I'll be your homeroom teacher and your mathematics instructor for the coming year. Let's do our best to get through this year… together." Her voice carried a faint, almost imperceptible accent, a whisper of old worlds.
The students of Class 1-B were not the gilded noble scions of the elite—this was the second-tier class, a breeding ground for a different kind of ambition. They were the children of wealthy merchants, sharp-witted commoners who'd clawed their way to privilege, or the progeny of minor officials. They lacked the political weight and inherited arrogance for Class 1-A, but their eyes, Lux noted, still burned with a raw, unrefined hunger for advancement. Lux, who had never been particularly good with human names or faces, found herself instinctively identifying students by their unique spiritual scent and resonant aura rather than their fleeting physical appearance—unless, of course, she had taken the time, out of necessity or curiosity, to name and memorize them.
Once the terse introductions were over, she had them elect a class representative, a tedious but necessary formality. The role fell to a fiery girl with an unruly mane of red hair that seemed to defy gravity and eyes that sparked with unspent, extroverted energy. Lux could feel the sheer force of her personality radiating off her in overwhelming waves. "How… utterly draining," she thought grimly, a flicker of her old, solitary nature resurfacing, as she turned to the blackboard, the chalk cool and brittle in her fingers.
The topic of the day: Equations and Inequality. A lesson, ironically, that mirrored the very social structure they inhabited. Surprisingly, the lesson went smoothly. The class, while not exactly cheerful, was oddly, unnervingly well-behaved. Too calm for their age, she thought with mild suspicion, a flicker of her instincts honed in far more dangerous environments. They're too young to be drinking… right? She allowed herself a fleeting, wry chuckle, a quiet indulgence in the absurdity of her new reality.
"Your assignments are due first thing tomorrow morning," she stated, her voice cutting through the scribbling of quills, effectively closing the lesson.
After dismissing Class 1-B, watching their contained energy spill out into the hallway, she proceeded directly to Class 1-A—and immediately felt the palpable shift in atmosphere. If Class 1-B was filled with quiet, hungry ambition, Class 1-A reeked of overt, suffocating entitlement. Subtlety, she realized, had no place here; court politics, whispered conspiracies, and veiled threats played out openly between students like a meticulously staged drama. At the gilded center of it all sat their class representative: the Second Prince himself, his bored arrogance radiating like a low-grade fever. Enough said.
He was surrounded by a meticulously curated entourage—
A haughty elf from the Light Elven state, with hair like spun silver thread and eyes that dismissed the world,
A fork-tongued diplomat's son from the Beastkin Confederation, his smile too wide, his gaze too knowing,
Others too: sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, and far too clever for their years, each a miniature reflection of the power they would one day inherit.
Class went by without overt incident, a delicate dance of veiled challenges and feigned respect, though Lux could feel the tension simmering beneath every polished answer, every carefully modulated gesture. It was a battlefield cloaked in etiquette.
By the time she finished writing her reports, her hand cramped from the unfamiliar penmanship, and reviewing the myriad of student performances, the clock in the staff room chimed nearly seven in the evening. The sun had long since dipped below the city's omnipresent, fog-draped skyline, a faint orange glow giving way to the deeper indigo of twilight. One by one, the gaslamps hissed to life along the cobbled streets outside, casting their amber glow through the encroaching, damp mist, painting long, dancing shadows.
The walk home blurred past in a haze of pure exhaustion, the rhythmic clang of her boots on the pavement a dull echo in her weary mind. Her thoughts drifted, a patchwork of equations, political machinations, and the lingering hum of distant magic she no longer overtly wielded. Her body moved on autopilot, guided by muscle memory honed over centuries—until she collided with something solid, something unexpectedly yielding yet unyielding.
Jolted, her senses snapped awake, a jolt of primal alarm shooting through her. She looked up, pushing her glasses higher on her nose, the mist-veiled gaslight struggling to pierce the gloom—
—and froze.
A corpse.
Or rather, something that had once, long ago, been human. Its skin was colorless, stretched taut and thin like ancient parchment over prominent bones, an almost translucent veil. Its eyes were not just blank, but lifeless pits, devoid of light, reflecting nothing. Yet, despite its grotesque stillness, it *moved*. A jerky, unnatural shuffle, the kind of movement no living thing could make without screaming in agony.
One massive, grey-tinged hand, with fingernails long and brittle like shattered porcelain, reached slowly, inexorably, toward her—
And she stood, half-asleep moments before, now frozen in a strange tableau of exhaustion and dawning horror, too dazed, too shocked by the sheer wrongness of it, to even scream.