Phaedra was thin but not frail. Presence very much slender, yet resilient. Bearing the weight of her torment without surrendering, her spirit, akin to wilting flowers in a vase, held both beauty and sorrow in delicate balance. She sat moonstruck at the rail of a bridge overseeing a riverbank. Behind her roseate eyes veiled by her silken, platinum-blonde bangs, her repressed memories resurface, besieged by guilt over the great tragedy engulfing the Luminae Academy of Mystical Arts. 

An inquisitive sable darted around the area, climbing up the young girl’s shoulders, foraging through her kinky tresses draping her backside. It ran her pockets for a few nuts. Phaedra paid it no mind. Head tilted, the small creature observed the mourning sorceress and her radiant, almost aubergine complexion bathing in the moonlight. It could tell something was wrong but quickly fled at the arrival of a rumbling carriage. 

The doors of a patchy wooden crate masquerading as a luxury coach swung open, ushering a vacuuming vortex, snatching Phaedras's gray sarong with such authority it whipped her around like a roll of paper towels. Wide-eyed and flustered, she caught no glimpse of the inside before it swallowed her whole. The rhythmic clops of horses casually strolling away with her appeared to be in no rush once the doors closed. In total darkness, she felt wedged between a stiff old couch and a rickety chair.

"Hello, odd maiden! Don't mind my get up. Doing a bit of research." A faint amber spark developed, revealing her captors. A jovial wooly-mustached jester passed her a small, blank sheet of parchment and a huge woman whose rotund figure greatly strained the seams of her colorful attire. “Hello, Lovely.” Her overly caked cheeks already left residue on Phaedra's clothes and the liter of perfume she doused herself with did little to alter the fact that the carriage smelled like a hotbox of sweat. “Trust us, we’re not kidnapping you,” they said in unison. It was hard for Phaedra to lower her guard completely, but her gut surmised there was perhaps some method to their lunacy. 

The paper forcefully planted in her hand burned with an ongoing script of orange text, spelling out the message, “The Kaiage of Knowledge.”

The strange woman introducing herself as “Alegora'' placed her forearm and hand of many rolls on Phaedra's left knee, meeting Phaedra’s upturned eyes with a concerned heterochromatic gaze. Finally getting to the meat and potatoes, Alegora revealed “We know the attack of the Karnagebeast wasn't a natural occurrence. We have reason to believe many of your classmates are still alive and not only is High Chancellor Seldora complicit, we suspect she is a doppelganger.”

Nothing exemplified Phaedra's fear over the subject more than her deafening silence. 

Once again confronted by not-so-distant traumas far from being healed, the young woman’s quixotic quest she steadily ran from presented itself to her in yet another way.

Her eyes shut. Reliving phantasmagoric nightmares, the dawn's sky resplendent with hues of pink, and orange whimpered out as tenebrous clouds ran roughshod over any ray of hope the new day provided. To the untrained eye, a storm brewed. Phaedra lamented the times itself as came lighting, thunderous roars existing only as the product of unchecked imagination followed. On this Lundros morning, she awoke from one nightmare into another. A tangle of Wyrms, exterior like oiled scale mail interwoven in a sinister dance, descended upon the enchanted spires of The Luminae Academy of Mystical Arts, unfurling their twisted serpentine forms in an act of indiscriminate terror. They sodomized the school’s mullioned windows, razing the corridors, invasively rattling the entire dorm with a faint hum like the presence of an unseen stampede. Low-humming until it wasn't, with a deafening crash, the sound overtook Phaedra’s capacity to think let alone speak. The entire wall on which her door was hinged ripped away with the raiding serpent leaving behind a jagged maw of destruction–

“Or so, that's the theory, Ha-Ha-Hahaha!” Alegora's boisterous laugh rocking the carriage to the point where it startled the lugging horses brought Phaedra back to reality.

Eyes wide, dumped on her ass in the middle of a cobblestone pathway, Phaedra realized she was no longer in the carriage but set right in the middle of the path leading to the cursed academy she had been running from. The horse carriage that transported her trotting in the opposite way left her a parting message.  

“Keep that card close. You'll know where to find us as well as the others there, beloved.

Their message was pretty blunt. Go to school. It was something Phaedra already knew she had to do in order to save her classmates but now, knowing she perhaps wasn't carrying the weight alone, the task felt less daunting.