The schoolhouse smelled of chalk dust and old wood on the mornings Master Hobbes taught geography, a smell Arthur had come to associate specifically with the particular restless energy of a room full of children forced to sit still for a subject that felt, to most of them, entirely disconnected from anything that mattered in their actual lives.
Master Hobbes was an older man, thin in the way that some old men were thin, more from a lifetime of nervous energy than from any lack of eating, and he had a habit of tapping his pointer stick against the large hanging map at the front of the room with a rhythm that Arthur suspected he wasn't even aware of, the particular unconscious tic of someone who had given this exact lesson so many times that his body performed parts of it without requiring his mind's full participation.
HOB: Now then. Who can tell me the seven provinces of Maeris?
A scattering of hands went up, the particular enthusiasm children reserved for questions with clean memorized answers, and Master Hobbes pointed his stick at a girl in the front row.
HOB: Go on, then.
GIRL: Astoria, Castelgard, Corvane, Drennick, Lassiter, Valdrun, and Eskandar.
HOB: Very good. And which one are we sitting in right now?
The room answered this one together, the particular unified drone of children reciting something so obvious it barely required thought.
ROOM: Astoria!
HOB: Correct. The Sworn Kingdom of Astoria, westernmost of all the provinces, where the sun sets last across the whole of Maeris.
He tapped the map, tracing the pointer along the western edge of the western continent, and Arthur watched the movement with the particular fascination he brought to anything involving the wider shape of the world beyond the village, the same fascination that had kept him wide awake during his father's bedtime stories about roads he'd never walked.
HOB: Now. Castelgard, the Walled March, guards our eastern border here. Corvane, the Free Holds, sit along the southern coast, more villages loosely bound together than a proper kingdom. Drennick, the Iron Reach, is where most of the metalwork and mining comes from, harsh country, harsh people, though I'll deny saying that if any of you repeat it to a Drennick trader.
A few children laughed at that, the particular easy laughter of a classroom enjoying a teacher's small joke.
HOB: The Merchant Republic of Lassiter straddles both continents, here and here, controlling most of the trade across the Sea of Serenity. And the Sunward Realm of Eskandar sits warm and golden in the south, or so I'm told. Never been myself.
He moved his pointer east, across the wide blue expanse marking the Sea of Serenity, toward the far edge of the map, and something in his voice shifted slightly as he did, the particular careful neutrality adults sometimes adopted when discussing something they didn't want to frighten children with directly but couldn't avoid mentioning either.
HOB: And here, at the very eastern edge of the world, sits Valdrun. Once called the Old Dominion. The oldest seat of power in all of Maeris, they say, before it fell to ruin some two centuries back.
A girl near the back raised her hand.
GIRL: Why did it fall, Master Hobbes?
HOB: That's a longer story than we have time for today.
GIRL: But why?
Master Hobbes set his pointer down against the chalk ledge, the particular pause of someone deciding how much truth a room full of small children could reasonably hold.
HOB: The stories say a great darkness took root there. That the man who ruled Valdrun back then was corrupted by something old and terrible, something that should have stayed buried, and that he became something else entirely. Something the old stories call the Ruined God now, though whether he's a god or a king or something in between, nobody living can rightly say.
The room had gone quiet in the particular way rooms of children went quiet when a story tipped from history into something closer to a fireside tale, the kind that made the hair on your arms stand up even in broad daylight.
HOB: Valdrun's been barren ever since. No one goes there. No one who's gone there has ever come back to tell what they found.
He straightened, the particular brisk shift of a teacher steering the lesson back toward safer ground before it went somewhere he'd regret.
HOB: But that's quite enough of that for one morning. Let's return to-
ART: I'll defeat him.
The words were out of Arthur's mouth before he had fully decided to say them, the particular impulsive honesty of a seven year old whose conviction had outpaced his sense of when convictions were appropriate to announce.
He was standing, he realized, a beat too late to sit back down without drawing more attention than he already had. The whole room had turned to look at him, the particular weight of two dozen sets of eyes landing on him all at once.
HOB: I beg your pardon?
ART: The Ruined God. Whoever he is. I'll defeat him someday.
He said it with complete sincerity, the same plain conviction he'd carried into his father's bedroom months before, and for one suspended second the classroom held its silence, the particular pause before a room decided how to react to something unexpected. Then someone laughed.
It started with one boy near the window, a short bark of surprised amusement, and it spread the way laughter did among children, catching quickly, gathering momentum, until most of the room was laughing outright, not cruelly exactly, just the easy delighted laughter of children who found the sheer scale of the claim absurd coming from someone their own size.
FEL: You? You can't even make a spark. What are you going to do, throw dirt at him?
Felix's voice carried clearly over the others, the particular confident volume of a boy who never had to worry about being heard, and the laughter redoubled at that, several kids repeating some version of throw dirt at him between fresh peals of giggling. Arthur felt his face go hot.
He sat back down slowly, the particular deflation of a declaration that had sounded enormous in his own head and had landed, out loud, as something considerably smaller and more ridiculous than he'd intended. Master Hobbes rapped his pointer against the desk, the sharp sound cutting through the laughter with practiced efficiency.
HOB: That's enough, all of you. Settle down.
The laughter subsided reluctantly, dissolving into scattered snickers and the particular residual grins children took a while to fully abandon, and Master Hobbes looked at Arthur for a moment with an expression that wasn't quite laughing and wasn't quite serious either, something harder to categorize.
HOB: Ambition's no laughing matter, whatever else it is. Sit down, lad. We'll see what becomes of it.
It wasn't quite a defense. It wasn't quite dismissal either. Arthur took what comfort he could from the ambiguity and stared very hard at his own desk, willing his face to cool. Beside him, Elsie leaned over slightly, her voice low enough that only he could hear it.
ELS: I don't think it's funny.
ART: Thanks.
ELS: I think it's a bit much. But not funny.
He almost smiled at that, the particular honest bluntness that was entirely Elsie, offering comfort and mild teasing in the same breath without seeming to notice any contradiction between them.
Master Hobbes continued the lesson, moving on to something about trade routes and river crossings, and the room settled back into its ordinary rhythm, the moment already fading into the background noise of an otherwise unremarkable morning. Arthur did not look up again for the rest of the lesson.
But somewhere underneath the heat still lingering in his face, something else sat quietly, stubborn and unbothered by the laughter, the same something that had spoken before he'd had the chance to stop it. He had meant it. He wasn't yet sure what that meant for him. But he had meant it, every word, and no amount of laughing was going to talk him out of having meant it.