As the students started to move out in groups, he stood in the hallway out of the theater and started to think about his next move when Miss Julia came around the corner towards him. She approached him as if she knew what he felt and what he was going through and said, “Hello, Ethan.”
She grabbed his arm and walked with him. “Care to join me in the archery grounds?”
Ethan followed his favorite teacher to the middle of the school, where a stairway led to the roof. As they ascended, pictures of various animals, mythical and magical beings which inhabited Agartha adorned the walls of the stairwell, ones that Ethan knew now by heart. Here was a rabbit, and a deer, next there was a mighty griffin, and next to it, there was the ethereal looking merman. The pictures were so lifelike, that when he first came here, he almost fell to his death as he bounded a corner and was met by the fearsome head of a red dragon.
Dragons were believed to have disappeared along with the yellows and blues, a strange coincidence t nobody could explain. One day they were seen all over the place. The next, the magical beings just seemed to have ceased to exist, coincidentally at the same time, the nations mentioned above disappeared.
Finally, Miss Julia approached the gate of the archery ground on the roof of the middle building of the school, placed the strange glass amulet she always wore on her chest to the gates, and they swung open.
One of the reasons Ethan cherished the archery classes so much was that he could only enter the grounds for practice in the presence of Miss Julia or one of her two assistants, making it always a much sought-after activity for him and for a lot of the other students as well.
They entered the archery practice grounds, which had three meters tall walls all around the perimeter of the oval space. Along one corner were the regular bullseye targets, ones the stopped using more than four years ago.
He was here for the other unique feature of the archery grounds of Nafoura, the almost real animals and creatures that could be made to appear when Miss Julia activated the moving target system.
He grabbed one of the bows hanging on the sides of the entrance and a quiver full of the blunt-headed arrows next to it, got down to a crouch, and waited. Miss Julia approached a pillar near the entrance and placed her amulet again on its face, then the open-roofed space darkened, and the plain wooden floor looked like it sprouted thousands of plants, trees, and tall grass blades. Hanging above the roof now, was the scoreboard, made up of burning fiery letters to show the score of each participant.
Ethan drew the first arrow and knocked it to the bow and waited for the usual white orb to dance into existence somewhere ahead of him. As it did, he fired his first arrow, hitting it smack in the middle, but instead of disintegrating like it did when he first moved from the stationary targets to this moving target system, it started to change color and transform.
The orb would eventually change to another color, then the likeness of an animal or a magical creature would appear from it, yellow meant game animals, as it usually would change into a rabbit, deer, or something like that and would race across the grounds. If the shooter was fast enough, they could get the points of hitting it and move to the next color.
Blue was for animals with thicker hides or natural armor, and these took several shots to count as a hit. Next came the purple, which was usually one of the smaller magical creatures, and these required the special red-tipped arrows to hit. Usually, each quiver had a couple, but they were fast, elusive creatures, and even a master archer could barely hit a single one in each practice if it was at all possible.
Next was the green, which was the grander of magical creatures, like dragons, and griffins, nobody in Ethan’s e memory ever managed to count a single hit to those creatures, not even the best archer in the school, Miss Julia herself.
Then you had the indigo ones, which, even though they were really rare to encounter in practice, were more than just elusive, they could disappear from the field if you missed them in a shot, but they carried almost the highest number of points in the game.
Last were the reds, who either were dangerous predators or armored men, and you had to kill them fast or they would bound towards you, erasing all your points and kicking you out of the game if they touched you.
Ethan began with a red, who he got in seconds without any hesitation, next came a purple, which he managed to hit, to the cheers of Miss Julia. And this was how Ethan passed the day. Soon after, other students joined him, and even Miss Julia took a bow to compete with them.
Ethan had favorite classes such as hand to hand combat and trekking, but nothing came close to archery, he even had his lunch on the archery grounds.
Life in Agartha
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This story from The Chronicles of Agartha: Book 1 – The Green Boy, which you can read HERE.