Page 1 of Green-Eyed Monster
Chapter 1
*Hyrak*
“I better not ever need to use this in my real life,” Sidney said with a groan, bent over her accounting books on the other side of the stone picnic table with a pained expression. We’d been studying for an upcoming test in the campus quad for the last hour, and I was pretty over it, myself.
I shut my textbook with a groan and cracked my neck, squinting in the hot afternoon sun. “Why’d you sign up for a business degree if you don’t actually want to use it?” I asked her. While accounting wasn’t my favorite, I knew I’d need it eventually. Hopefully.
“Why’d you sign up for a business degree,” she mimicked me in a mocking tone, not even bothering to raise her eyes from her textbook. “Some of us don’t have the cool magic like you orcs, Hyrak.”
Her ire was fake, so I ignored it. “Girl, you’re crazy,” I replied, mustering all the masculine sass I could. She was so fun to provoke, sometimes. “Don’t have ‘the cool magic’? You canfly. Do you have any idea how many people would give their left arm to be able to shapeshift into a bird and fly?” I couldn’t imagine a magical ability cooler than that.
“Giving their left arm would be a massive detriment to their ability to fly. Do not recommend,” she muttered distractedly, flipping the pale strands of hair out of her face that had worked their way free of her braid. This girl messed with her hair as much as any bird preened. She was incredibly attractive, but her personality was a little too...feralfor my tastes.
“None of that explains why you want a business degree,” I said.
I didn’t know Sidney super well, but she seemed like good people. We shared a few classes, and she’d never once stared at or otherwise commented on the newly developing vitiligo that contrasted boldly against my darker green skin. She was also one of the few people I could count on to not be intimidated by my stature, which I appreciated. Even though I wasn’t a full-blooded orc, as a male with orcish ancestry, I still towered over almost everyone I met. It was nice to have a study buddy who I could count on to be chill about me being who I was, even if she was cranky as hell about everything else.
“Flying isn’t gonna land me a job, boyo,” she said, chewing on her pen. “It’s not like the old days when magpie-shifters were scouts or spies. You’re an elementalist, right? You could get a job in a factory, heating or cooling things or whatever it is you do. Or the food shipping industry. I have to find a regular nine-to-five like any other plebeian.”
I rolled my eyes at her rant. “Lots of people don’t want a career dictated by their genetic predisposition—”
A percussive boom shattered the campus stillness. Screams erupted from every side, and Sidney disappeared, collapsing into her clothes as she shifted into her much smaller avian form. She was instantly airborne, shooting up into the closest tree in a flash of black and white feathers.
I followed her lead, jumping to my feet and scanning the grounds. A handful of people came running around a building at the edge of the campus clearing. I was half a second from bolting and running with the group, but Sidney burst from the tree above and took off like a rocket past the group,in the wrong direction.
“Sidney!” I shouted at her rapidly dwindling form. “That is thewrongdirection! When people are runningfromsomething, you gowiththem!” I took off after her.
Sidney was a tough cookie, and something about the way she conducted herself told me that if I came across her in a dark alley, she could drop me like a sack of rocks. But her spunky, snarky attitude reminded me too much of a pale version of my little sister for me to leave her to her own devices. Not only that, but her tiny little bird form would be extra vulnerable to whatever was continuing to make that deafening crashing sound.
I dodged around a steadily growing stream of terrified people, trying and failing to keep an eye on the bird above me. I rounded the building to find the back half of it demolished and clouds of dust obscuring much of the scene. Walls and pillars made of stone continued to crumble and fall, and large portions of the roof fell and crashed to the ground, shaking the earth each time a new section dropped.
In the midst of all the destruction, a giant stone statue stood, pivoting this way and that, somehowmovingas if it were trying to walk and unsure where to go. Every time it turned, it crashed into something else, further damaging the architecture.
“You have to turn it off! Power it down!” shrieked a gangly, panicked man who I recognized as a teacher’s assistant from one of my labs as he cowered behind a pillar.
“I. Am.TRYING!” yelled a tiny, dark-haired elf. She was so small that no one would have judged me for assuming she was a child at first glance. She stood stock-still among the wreckage of the building, never flinching as massive chunks of stone and marble crashed to the ground around her. Giant plumes of rock dust hung in the air, making the copious amounts of jewelry she wore glitter oddly in the shafts of light that passed through.
She glared daggers at the moving statue, her face more ferocious than anything that size had a right to be. Two more people—an older woman, who was the professor of artifice, and a man I knew to be the head of the department—rushed in from a rapidly crumbling corridor.
“What is—” The terrified looking dean was cut off when the statue tried to smash him with a massive fist. “Why is the sentry active?” he yelled, his face a mask of terror.
“I just wanted to see if Elara could access the heartstone!” yelled the gangly assistant. “I didn’t think it would activate!” He ducked and squealed when a massive stone foot came too close. “I never would have asked her to try if I’d known this would happen!”
Why were all these people still in this space with it? Why wasIstill here? I hadn’t found Sidney yet, but I could grab the little elf and maybe the skinny assistant and leg it out to a safer distance. The dean and the professor were on the other side of the collapsing room, so they were on their own. My mental planning was cut short when the elf spoke again, her voice sounding strangely dissonant.
“I pushed too much power into the stone,” she said. The resonance of her voice made the hair raise on my neck, and I shivered.
Maybe I wasn’t gonna snatch that elf to safety…
I shook it off, realizing she was still talking and I’d missed some of what she’d said. “—tripped the trigger, but there were already instructions within the stone, and I don’t know how to—” The statue struggled and pivoted again, looking as though it was trying to swing an arm but was being held in place by some unknown force.
Just as it moved again, this time aiming for the aging professor who was crossing the room to join the elf, a blur of feathers streaked in front of the statue’s face. A raucous cry rang out from Sidney as she flew loops around the statue’s head, dodging stone arms as it flailed and swung about.
“This is awesome!” she yelled in a reedy approximation of her human voice. “This is the best day of my…” Her words were drowned out in the chaos, but it looked like she was succeeding at distracting the statue. The female professor joined ranks with the little elf, both of them standing as still as statues themselves, identical expressions of determination mirrored on their faces.
Finally, the dean saw me standing at a distance like a slack jawed fool. “Evacuate the grounds,” he said loudly, addressing me and a few others I’d just noticed gathered behind me. “Vacate the premises and tell everyone you see to leave. We’ve got this under control, but the building is no longer sound.”
I realized he was right. The statue had quickly become nothing more than that, a statue, and Sidney was still flapping around wildly, doing barrel rolls and crowing with excitement. I couldn’t help but chuckle in relief, finally able to let myself bail out of one of the weirdest situations I had ever witnessed. My chuckle turned into a coughing fit from all the dust in the air, so I turned and headed away from the destroyed building. As I made my way around the gathering crowd, I caught a flash of pale green darting around one of the crumbling stone walls.
