Note: gendered pronouns are used to refer to Limstella here because the interview is from an outsider’s perspective, and Limstella makes no effort to influence the way others perceive them
There was little left that could surprise you. You had been with the monastery for a few decades by now, had seen a couple of generations pass through the academy’s halls, and called meticulousness and predictability your greatest virtues. Every day, you took your lunch by the third chime of the noon bell, and returned to your office before the echo of the next hour was carried away on the breeze. Your to-do’s grew and shrunk from day to day, but always in a balanced fashion, and your colleagues knew with certainty what you would be doing and where you would be at any given hour. Today, however, you returned to find your door ajar and stood puzzling over it until the peal of the hour’s bell was long gone. You knew you had locked it, because you always did.
“Your next interview was waiting outside, so I let her in. I hope you don’t mind!” a young professor called to you from down the hall. The fact of the matter was that you did mind, but you gave her a practiced smile and a wave and pushed the door the rest of the way open.
“My, you are punctual,” you said to the back of the delicate figure that had already settled into the chair across from your desk. On any other day, the unreturned greeting might have bothered you, but instead you used its mercy to recompose yourself from your colleague’s transgression. The door clicked shut and the old wood beneath the rug creaked with the steps that carried you to your desk, from which you would reclaim your routine with the preliminary assessment you always made of the prospective students who visited your office.
A porcelain doll came to mind first. From the unblinking gold eyes, to the fair, unmarred skin, to the new satin of old-fashioned attire and the full head of dark hair that bore not a strand out of place, you thought that this student could have very well been a life-sized version of the expensive toys your daughters had played with in their youth. Abruptly, you cleared your throat and began sifting through the packets on your desk to stop yourself from staring.
“Limstella… is it?” You found the name quickly enough, and tidied the rest of the pages into a neat stack with a few thumps against the desk.
“Yes,” spoke the doll, and startled you with the realization that you had assumed her voice would be gentler. You cleared your throat again.
“No last name… no homeland… no age…” You read off the rows of empty lines. “This application is incomplete.”
“Is it?” She seemed disinterested. With a sigh, you took your seat. The application had come this far.
“Well, we’ll fill that in now, I suppose. Family name?” The silence stretched on, causing you to glance back up with the question poised on your tongue for repetition.
“None,” came the answer at last. By now, you had seen students from a variety of backgrounds, with a variety of names, or lack thereof. It wasn’t unusual for the commoners to be without any family connections at all, but you couldn’t help but think that this one appeared too refined to be without a house. Nevertheless, you left the line blank.
You glanced up again to meet those unblinking eyes that stared back at you with finality. You left that question blank as well.
“Listen.” You leaned forward with your elbows on the desk, fingers lacing together to beg for more. “You wouldn’t be the first young noble to come to this academy in a ploy to gain independence from their family, but we still need these answers. The information will remain confidential, I assure you.”
Silence. You could feel yourself growing frustrated, but not at her. No. Your eyes dropped instead to the offending blanks and you scribbled in a few words to scratch the itch that had started up in your fingertips.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“No.” No elaboration. Creaking wood consumed the place where silence tried to slip in again as you leaned back in your chair with a sigh.
“My master said my body would be destroyed and it was not.”
You folded your arms across your chest and scrutinized your interviewee’s face for a trace of a smile, the sign of a joke, the crack in a mask of sanity, but could find no flaw in her ivory-sculpted features. Your toe tapped impatiently before you caught and stopped it.
“Please explain what you mean.”
“My master imbued me with a power he said would be too great for my body to contain, and I would be destroyed. Yet I was not.” The incisive stare turned vacant, looking through you to some faraway past. “I want to know why.”
It was an answer, at least, strange though it was, and you wrote it down in your desperation to get anywhere with the interview.
“I… see.” You didn’t expect elaboration and indeed she offered none. “Then what are your greatest strengths?”
You thought for a moment that she seemed to be considering this one, but soon a bird landed on the windowsill behind you and with its singing, drew Limstella’s attention away. She reached out her right hand for it, and you followed the slender, grasping fingers to the sparrow over your shoulder. Its song pitched higher suddenly with a note of panic, then choked into a sputtered staccato as its tiny body began to seize. You watched in horror as it tried to spread its wings to fly, only to collapse into a heap of feathers, buffeting by the autumn wind lending only the illusion of life. The silence that descended over it felt like a death shroud. You looked back to Limstella for an explanation, and she presented you instead with a marble-sized glowing orb.
“Extracting quintessence,” she said, and you couldn’t tell whether it was her nonchalance or the abrupt death of an unsuspecting songbird that sent your skin crawling down your back. You cleared your throat for the third time and wrote down “faith spells.”
“And your weaknesses?” The world had long lost its ability to surprise you and you had grown rather adept at controlling your voice by now, but you could still feel the way it tried to tremor in the back of your throat. Your eyes planted themselves to the application to hold your composure.
“Perfection, by definition, would mean there are no such things.”
You could think of a few though. “Perfect” she certainly was not, and you spent a couple of moments describing the lack of cooperation, secrecy, and disorientation that had colored the interview thus far. Then after thinking about it, you added that she could learn to emote better, too.
“Last question, then.” And it arrived none too soon. “If a story were to be written about your life, what role would you play?”
“I am a puppet,” came yet another of Limstella’s cryptic answers, and with it, the feeling that she didn’t quite understand the rhetorical nature of the question. That was the end of it though, and believing that you wouldn’t get any more out of her, you started to write it down.
“... but my strings have been cut.”
Your eyes darted back up and you thought for a moment that a shadow of sorrow flitted across those unchanging features. Then the room brightened again as the cloud that had drifted across the sun sped past on the wind.
“Well…” You gathered up the application - half of which was merely blank space - as you composed your words. “An academy specializes in guiding students onto a new path. If you truly wish to learn about yourself, then there is no better place for it.”
You stood to signal the end of the interview but Limstella continued to gaze distantly out the window as if lost in thought. Again, you thought of your daughters’ delicate dolls, which had been collecting dust in storage for at least a decade now with no one to play with them. Then the chair scraped softly against the wood and you put on your practiced smile to see Limstella out the door.
The half-hour bell had only just begun to chime by the time you returned to your desk, and you sat down in your chair to reread the interview as you always did. But whether it was because of the corpse of the bird that still fluttered on the windowsill, or the empty chair across from you, suddenly your routine no longer interested you.
