Dean Valcanica's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Dean Valcanica had won her son back, but she did not know him. She stood in her office at the Antihero Academy, holding a boy's letter she could not read. Sixteen years she fought to reach Landon. Now he sat across the desk from her, and she had nothing to say that fit the person he had become. The letter was his father's. Landon carried it from the reader world, folded soft at the creases. She had recognized the handwriting at once. She could not read the words. They were written in the reader tongue, a language she never learned. The one thing left of the man she loved, and she was locked out of it. "Read it to me," she said. Landon did not move. "You don't get to do that." His jaw set the way his father's used to. "You sent me away. I grew up on comic books and a coach who shoved me through a portal. You don't know one real thing about me." That was true, and it landed hard. She thought of the son she imagined for sixteen years. That boy was not this boy. This boy learned to fight in a gym she would never see. This boy buried parents who were not her. A knock cut the room. The door opened without waiting. Spare Imamu leaned in the frame, arms crossed, the Frexya stone at his throat catching the light. He was a student here, second-born of a dead king, and he despised Landon for one reason only. "The dean's son," Imamu said. "Handed everything. Even her." He nodded at Valcanica. "You never had to earn a thing." Landon stood fast. Valcanica raised one hand and Imamu stopped. But the words did their work. Landon's face closed. He turned to leave. "Wait." Valcanica opened a drawer. She lifted out the Volcanic Stone Golem Pup and set it on the desk. Its stone body cracked with ember-red seams. It padded toward Landon and pressed its head to his hand. "It came from the cave where I was born," she said. "In Firestone. It is half of what you are. The half no letter can teach you." Landon stared at the pup. His hand closed slow around its warm stone snout. For the first time he did not pull away. "I can't read that letter," Valcanica said. "I don't know your world. But I want to. Teach me. Start with one word." Landon looked at the paper, then at her. He sat back down. He set the letter flat between them and pointed at the top line. "Dear son," he read. Valcanica repeated it, wrong, and he corrected her. They went word by word. Imamu watched from the door, then left without a sound. By the time the pup fell asleep on the desk, Valcanica knew the first line by heart. She had found the way in. It ran through her son's voice, and it would cost her every wall she had left.