Editing Eldramin (section)

== Chapter 3 ==
''Fannara''

I followed Arienna into her room–''our'' room, and stared. The far wall was one giant window, looking out over a forest full of lakes and rivers, stretching out to brush the mountains. The mountain range stretched on for miles all around, their white peaks bleeding into the bluish grays of the mountains.

Arienna tossed my bag onto a loft bed pushed against a wall near the window. I looked at the room itself for the first time and was slightly surprised by the simplicity of it. It was a large room but was smaller than most rooms in the Academy in Lathinya.

Two doors on the left wall led to a closet and a shared bathroom. The wall to the right of the bathroom door had a small couch pushed against it, sitting on a fuzzy rug. The window met with the right wall against which my loft bed stood, a desk under the white frame. Arienna's bed, desk, and shelf sat near the corner where the wall with the main door and the wall with the closet and bathroom door collided.

Her area was covered in pillows and blankets of various shades of orange, making it look like someone had set it on fire. Pictures and string lights hung on the wall over her bed and desk, a stark contrast to my side. The bleached white of my mattress matched the blank walls over my bed. The area looked cold and nearly dead. The dull greens and browns of my carpet bag were the only color.

Arienna studied my corner, a frown on her face. "Is it safe to assume that those bags don't contain bedding?" I nodded. I was used to the pre-furnished apartments at the Academy, I did not know that bedding wouldn't be provided. Arienna furrowed her brows once more. "Mel, you and Mara are going shopping, right?"

Melody stuck her head in the bathroom door. "Yeah, need me to pick something up?"

"You bet. I'm all out of milk and Fannara here needs some bedding.”

Mara stuck her head into our room too, pushing Melody out of her way. “What color? Green, maybe? Like a very dark, foresty green, ooh, and those string lights that look like leaves would look so cool, and-”

“-Mara, let her speak.” Melody laughed at Alamara’s enthusiasm.

I felt a genuine smile trying to ease its way onto my face. For once, I didn’t fight it. “That would be great. I’m not very good at interior design, so I’ll let you handle that if you want.” Mara’s face lit up with a huge smile.

“You would let me? Really?” She started bouncing when I nodded, clearly forming a plan for how to fill up the barren space that was my area. A small chuckle escaped me, the first genuine laugh in...I don’t know how many years.

"Well then, I guess we'll be heading off." Melody smiled at me, "I'd offer to bring you along, but you probably want to rest after traveling. We should go out some other time before school starts, get you accustomed to Elquar and everything."

Melody turned, closing the door after Mara bounced out of the way, leaving me and Arienna to unpack the few belongings that had been stuffed into my bags. We worked in silence, Arienna occasionally sighing and glancing at me. She seemed to be trying to come up with something to talk about, the slightly uncomfortable silence making her squirm.

"So," I started, keeping my eyes on the shirt in my hands, "I believe there was a certain person you were going to tell me about?" At the time, I couldn't remember Moren's name. It wasn't the best conversation starter, but my mind had gone blank.

Arienna drew in a long breath. "I really hope Ana was wrong about him being in our group, cause he has to be the most pigheaded person I've ever met." She glanced at me as if asking for permission to rant. I nodded my head slightly. Clearly, Arienna wasn't able to rant around Mara and needed to release.

“Ugh, things are just confusing and complicated and I can’t stand him anymore, I just-” She made a strangled screaming noise. “So we grew up together, right? His parents are in government, my dad was, a happy little bubble of children. Well, something happened to a mutual friend of ours years and years ago and he totally shut me out. I didn’t see him again until last year.” She glared at the bag next to her crossed legs. 

“When I saw him again last year, I was really excited, but also, meeting with old friends is always awkward. Now, he ''refused'' to acknowledge my existence for the first weeks, but my stupid brain figured that maybe he was nice again or something dumb like that. ''So'', second semester, we have a class together. And I’m like, great, now we can catch up.” A wry chuckle interrupted her story. 

“Let me tell you, that was the worst mistake all year. Moren Keleth is just so...''irritating''. He was rude every time I tried to talk to him, telling me there were plenty of other people to annoy on campus, literally, he said that. So you know what I did the next day? I ignored him, pretended he wasn’t there. And we haven’t acknowledged each other’s existence since.”

I stared at her, trying to put the story together. “So I take it you don’t like him anymore?”

She snorted. “I don’t think it’s possible to like Moren after you get to know him.”

“He sounds awful.” I pushed myself off the floor, grabbing a stack of clothes and stuffing them into a drawer.

Arienna squished my bags into smaller shapes and shoved them into the closet. “He is. Let’s hope he isn’t in our group.” As I was about to respond, something out the window caught my eye. Some kinds of birds seemed to be fighting in the distance.

“What kind of bird is that?” I pointed at the airborne creatures out the window.

Ari ran over to the window. “Oh, stink.” She put her palms flat on the window, pulling them apart and making the image zoom in like a magnifying glass had been placed in front of it. The enlarged view of the fight revealed not birds, but ''dragons''. I gasped at the enormity of the winged reptiles. One was a matte black color, the scales seeming to drink in all the surrounding sunlight. The second one was a vibrant red, glimmering like a ruby. They had to be hundreds of miles away.

As we watched, the black dragon dug its claws into the red one’s right shoulder, tearing off the scales. The red one seemed to shrink as it fell from the sky. The black flew away, victorious.

I turned to Arienna. “Was that a ''dragon battle''?” She was frowning at the open sky the red dragon had fallen from.

“That was a Shifter battle.”

“What’s a Shifter?” The name sounded familiar.

She sighed, her shoulders drooping. “Shape Shifter. They have three forms, fully human, fully animal, and a strange in-between. They,” she paused. “''Some'' of them have been doing ‘raiding parties’.”

“What do they steal?”

“People.”

I stared at Arienna as she fidgeted with the hem of her tank top. “They kidnap people? Why?” She shrugged.

“No one knows. Some people are returned, but they are different somehow.” She looked out the window as if she could will the fallen Shifter into the air again. “The leader of the dragons, the Deraal, is behind all of this, at least that’s what I think. Deraal Jana was appointed as leader fifteen years ago, and the second year into her leading them, something went wrong.

“Other races of Shifters went missing. No one has seen a bird Shifter in a decade. There have been occasional sightings, of course, but they have been strange, not like the Shifters used to be. The centaurs reached out to the Paladine government, my father, specifically, because he was a Shifter diplomat. They were seeking asylum. They were denied. We don’t know what happened to them, if they were slaughtered by Jana or if she had a crueler fate for them, we don’t know.

“Now we are on the brink of war. Every year more and more Eldran citizens go missing, and lately, they haven’t been returned.” She leaned against the window, a faraway look in her eyes.

“Why haven’t I heard about this?”

She scoffed. “The most advanced country in the known universe doesn’t want to promote they are on the brink of war. Many cultures see peace as the foremost achievement anyone could accomplish. Our government doesn’t want bad publicity.”

I thought about this for a bit, and with a gasp, remembered where I had heard the term “Shifter” before. ''Via''.

“Are you ok?” Arienna turned to me, looking rather concerned. I furrowed my brows.

“I’m fine, but I think I’ve met a bird Shifter before. She was an eagle Shifter, at least she looked like an eagle, maybe it was a different kind of bird.”

Ari straightened, now eyeing me with suspicion. “What color was her hair?”

I stared at her, very confused. “It was a light blonde, almost white.” I paused once more. “Are ''you'' ok?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s just that…” She stopped again, leaving me exceedingly confused. She took another deep breath. “Well, like I said before, whenever people have said they’ve seen bird Shifters it’s been weird. They have all had black hair. And the next logical thing to think is, ‘oh, maybe only the crows have been seen’ or something along those lines,” I nodded, that was exactly what I had been thinking. “But here’s the thing, their wing shapes are wrong. They ''should'' be other colors, but they aren’t. They all have black feathers, and they shouldn’t. So the fact that you have not only seen but ''met'' a normally colored Shifter is great news.”

I thought about how I had met Via. It was one of those wrong place, wrong time instances. I had been teleported to a different planet, somehow, and she was there. Her tiny frame somehow supported giant wings, nearly three times my height. Yet, she had run so quickly, shifting between her fully bird form and half form with ease.

“I think she told me she had left her homeworld looking for someone. Do you think this Jana person could have taken someone she knew?”

Arienna thought about it for a minute. “I doubt that would be who she’s looking for, I’ve never heard of Jana sending people off-world.” She looked like she was about to say something else, but stopped. She shook her head slightly, as if to clear it, and pushed wispy strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail away from her face. “I’m so sorry, this is your first day here and all I’ve told you about are the problems. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

The rather abrupt change in conversion puzzled me slightly, but it was understandable. "No, no, I'm fine. Thank you for telling me though. I would rather know the ugly truth than live here in comfortable cluelessness." The old Alithosi proverb came out automatically, the saying had been drilled into me for years, being the first response when a student asked why they should study.

Ari shrugged, "I'm glad I could help."

☙❦❧

The rest of the afternoon was quiet. I had just finished unpacking when Mara and Melody returned, Melody, seeming tired from shopping and Mara practically bouncing as she clutched her excessive amount of shopping bags. Mara threw her numerous bags on her bed and ran into our room, grabbing Arienna by the arm.

“Ariiiiiiiiiiiii, you and Fannara have to go shopping with me tomorowwwwwwwwwwww.” She drew out each word as if it were burdensome to speak.

Ari merely raised an eyebrow, not even trying to free her arm. “And why should we?”

Alamara dramatically took a deep breath before releasing a torrent of words. “Mel said she doesn’t wanna go with me and I need to buy more clothes and Fannara should get more clothes and you are the best at that kind of thing. W and we could get ice puffssssssssssssssssssss!.” She once again whined out the last word, pleading with her friend. Arienna turned to me, the eyebrow still raised.

I shrugged. “As long as it doesn’t last all day.” Mara squealed, squeezing Ari into a hug that made her eyes bulge.

☙❦❧

The trip did take all day, but the ice puffs made it all worth it. I didn’t even know how to describe what I thought when I tried it, aside from heavenly. However, the situation I found myself in was not anywhere close to the level of pure joy the food had induced. I had found out while shopping that an annual ball was held for the beginning of school; that was why Mara insisted on shopping.

Partway through our shopping spree, Mara had to “go check on Mel”. I returned to a fully decorated dorm and two rather sweaty suitemates.

The casual comfort of shorts and t-shirts was a luxury I had never imagined, and being in a skirt again was something I had hoped could have been left with my Alithosi clothes in the back of our now crowded closet, but alas, the ball was set.

It hadn’t seemed all bad at first. The building it was held in was ridiculous though, five stories of just the ballroom, complete with mini waterfalls, forests of glass, and, I kid you not, spiral ''escalators''. They looked like glass, but considering all the advanced, magical technology, I knew that they could be something else.Made entirely of glass, of course, at least, what looked like glass.

I sighed as I looked over the gilded room from the third-floor balcony. "This place is ridiculous."

"Tell me about it." A voice from behind scoffed. Startled, I turned and nearly had to catch myself on the railing. A boy about my age was standing behind me, his dark blue eyes resting in what seemed to be a permanent glare. Tufts of reddish-brown hair fell over his light-skinned fac{color} face haphazardly. I was certain I had seen him before as the strange feeling of de ja vú returned once more, accompanied by a strong wave of dizziness. ''What is the deal with this place?''

"You're not from here, are you?" I nearly jumped as he walked over to the rail, clearly keeping his distance, and seemingly annoyed at ''my'' discomfort.

Trying to pull my thoughts together, I shook my head. "I transferred." That wasn't necessarily the whole truth, but I was rather preoccupied and didn't feel like explaining being from Alithos to someone who seemed so...''stuck up''.

"Well then," I internally groaned as he kept talking. I couldn't even tell ''why'' he was talking to me. He clearly didn't enjoy it. "You probably shouldn't get too comfortable. I can guarantee that this school is much more challenging than wherever you came from." He glanced over at me, doing his best to look down when we were practically the same height. "If you don't believe me, wait a month. All the exchange students will be sent back where they belong."

"Excuse you?" I glared back at him now, trying to keep myself from punching something, preferably him, as my face warmed. "Why would the exchange students leave when ''you'' are still here?"

He rolled his eyes. "Their primitive teaching can't prepare them for our university. They don't stand a chance." That's when it clicked. The eyes were the first clue, the hair the second. He looked like a darker shade of his mother. The rude attitude was the real giveaway. Arienna had been right; Moren Keleth ''was'' irritating.

I looked at him, completely unimpressed. "Our 'primitive teaching' is what ''your'' country is sending people to learn. It would seem you weren't smart enough to be picked to go, or maybe they didn't want you to start a war." I shrugged. "You would have fit in well with the jerks at the Lathinyan academy. Shame that you're still here."

It was his turn to get upset this time, but before he could start, Arienna came over, standing next to me and glaring darkly at Moren.

"Not to stoop to your level or anything, but do you ''always'' have to be this rude?" He glared right back at her as she took my arm and led me away.

"You were right, no one in their right mind would like him."

She nearly growled. "One of these days he's going to get what's coming to him and I fully intend to see it."