The starlight staircase ended in a corridor of chalkboard walls.
Equations crawled across them like ants, leaving trails that stank of ozone. Dylan's boots sank into powdered lime with every step, erasing footprints almost as soon as they appeared. Behind him the rest of the class filed down in uneasy silence, thirty-eight living IOUs and one professor that had never bothered to show its face.
A single door waited ahead, oak tagged with a brass plaque:
Theory of Want – Section 013.
Underneath someone had scratched smaller letters:
Pay attention or pay principal.
Dylan pushed. The door didn't budge. Instead the plaque flipped, revealing a coin slot shaped like an open mouth.
Insert desire.
Exact change only.
He felt the Well's mark pulse beneath his skin, a golden ratio still warm from the pipe. The mark carried weight, the way a loan carries teeth. He pressed two fingers to the slot. A thread of mana—thin, sour—leaked out and tasted the mark, then withdrew. The lock clicked. The door swung inward, exhaling dust and the smell of old examinations.
Inside was a lecture hall sunk three steps below floor level. Rows of desks formed a semicircle around a pit where a single black chair waited under a spotlight. No windows. No ceiling fixtures. Just chalkboards that stretched into darkness and a silence thick enough to choke on.
Students filed in, choosing seats by instinct or fear. Dylan took the aisle chair nearest the pit—close enough to look convenient, far enough to run. The moment the last backside touched wood the door slammed shut. Plates of iron slid across it, sealing with a sound like a bank vault giving up.
A figure stepped from nowhere into the spotlight.
Not a person—an absence wearing a silhouette. Where features should have been, the air bent, refracting hunger. When it spoke the voice arrived inside his skull, bypassing ears entirely.
"Welcome to Theory of Want. I am called the Bursar. I collect on debts the Well purchased yesterday. Attendance is mandatory. Survival is optional."
The chalkboards flared white. Questions appeared, one per board, letters sharp as warrants.
1. State the market value of your last kindness.
2. Compound the interest on your greatest regret.
3. If I foreclose on your future, how much collateral remains?
"Answer in any medium," the Bursar continued. "Ink, blood, lightning, song—so long as the balance clears. You have until the spotlight dims. Begin."
The light began to shrink, a slow iris closing on the chair. Desks rattled as students scrambled for chalk, knives, flint, sanity. Someone started weeping; the sound was immediately itemised and deducted from their word count.
Dylan exhaled. He had no chalk, no blade, no voice worth selling. What he owned was recoil and a fork that still tasted of dragon bronze. He flipped the weapon, pressed the tines to the desktop, and let Arc-Siphon drink the ambient fear. Sparks skittered across wood, carving cranberry lines that spelled his answers in negative space—answers made of interest, not principal.
1. Kindness: one copper badge—filed, fractured, forfeited.
2. Regret: thunderstorm memory—already repossessed, still accruing.
3. Remaining collateral: one favour, unvalued, unspent.
The spotlight paused, iris wavering. Then it expanded, brightening, as if surprised to find solvency in such a broke soul. The Bursar tilted its absent face.
"Student Thirteen balances. For now." Chalkboards wiped themselves clean. "Lesson one complete. Lesson two begins when the interest shifts—approximately sixty heartbeats from now. Suggest you use them to breathe."
The spotlight winked out. Darkness swallowed the pit, swallowed the chairs, swallowed every gasp. In the black the Bursar's last sentence hung like a price tag:
"Class dismissed… until the balance calls again."
A door appeared where no door had been—plain wood, no lock. Dylan pushed through first, boots crunching on calculations that had fallen to the floor like dead moths. Behind him students followed, quieter than shadows, each carrying a new weight where their wallets used to be.
He didn't look back. Looking back was interest, and interest was compound. Instead he counted heartbeats—sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight—while the corridor ahead stretched on, tuition rates scribbled on every wall in ink that never quite dried.
Fifty-seven.
Fifty-six.
He walked faster.
The Bursar walked inside his pulse.
Interest had begun.