The Last Days of Lorien Read Online Free PDF

academy who interested me at all were the Garde kids, who were just coming into their powers and gave the school what little sense of life it had. On Lorien, Garde children are raised by their grandparents until their eleventh year, when they’re sent away to a place like the LDA to train with their assigned Mentor Cêpan. There are training academies for them all over Lorien, but LDA is considered one of the best—the Garde who wind up here are the ones who are expected to have some serious power going on.
    Some of these kids racing the halls of the LDA had only started to manifest the very beginnings of their gifts, while others were already onto their second and third Legacies, but almost all of them were lit up, charged by the excitement of coming into their powers, not to mention living away from home for the first time. They had their whole future to look forward to.
    Pretty much the only exciting thing that happened in my entire first week was that one of the youngest Garde, a dark-haired, mischievous-looking kid named Samil, almost destroyed the whole school. That was actually kind of fun—I guess Samil’d been showing off his emerging pyrokinetic Legacy to some older kids in an empty classroom, when things had started to get out of control. Before long, the fire was raging. The halls of the school filled with smoke as sirens blared and Cêpan raced to evacuate the students and staff while the older, more experienced Garde headed toward the fire in an attempt to contain it.
    The rest of us were gathered on the lawn, waiting for it all to get sorted out and, for a few minutes at least, as black smoke curled from the building into the sky, it looked like maybe my stay at the Lorien Defense Academy would be a short one.
    “So if this place burns to the ground they’ll send me home, right?” I asked Rapp.
    “Don’t sound too disappointed, or anything,” he said disdainfully. When I didn’t reply, he just snorted. “Dude. You think this doesn’t happen all the time? The walls here are fireproof. Not to mention everything-else-proof. This school’s built to withstand just about anything. It’s what’s inside that room that you should be worried about. Like the poor kid who just found out being able to generate giant fireballs might not be as cool as it sounds.”
    I felt instantly guilty that I hadn’t even considered that. Every year on Lorien there were stories about young Garde perishing in grisly accidents, killed by powers that they didn’t know how to control or, in some cases, didn’t yet know they even had . There had been the girl with the ability to manipulate temperature who’d accidentally frozen herself to death in the bathtub, and a boy with sonic flight who’d overshot Lorien’s gravitational pull and found himself caught in the unbreathable atmosphere many miles above the ground. It was the purpose of Mentor Cêpans to prevent such incidents. But accidents still happened.
    “Sorry,” I mumbled to Rapp. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
    He shrugged, and his expression softened. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”
    I glanced over at Vatan, the Cêpan of the kid who’d started the fire. His face was pale and anguished, and I knew that if anything had happened to his charge, he’d never be able to forgive himself. But a few minutes later, a tiny figure crept from the smoke and flame. It was Samil, completely unscathed. He had an expression on his face that was equal parts shame, terror and exhilarated pride.
    Everyone whooped with joy and relief, and, in the first show of real emotion that I’d seen since I’d gotten to the academy, Vatan ran across the field and wrapped Samil in a huge hug. The boy’s skin—just as fireproof as the walls of the school, it turned out—was still burning with heat. Vatan didn’t let go even as it charred the fabric of his blue tunic.
    I was relieved too. I mean, of course I was relieved. I didn’t want anyone to die, much