Preview: The College of Locks and Keys

An early glimpse of the story I'm working on. Names aren't set yet. I'm having a ball with the concept (indulging myself with a bit of just about everything I love in this one), and I hope you will too!

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Nathan

“Pick a card, any card,” Miranda says, grinning and fanning out our full deck of homemade flashcards in front of me.

She’s used that same line so many times that I’m starting to wonder if she’s woven some subtle magic through it, just a little something to make the cards more tempting, to make this all feel like a game instead of a grueling cram session.

We’re sitting in the grass of the northern quad at the Western College of Locks and Keys, testing the limits of a limitless pot of coffee and waiting for the bells in the tower above to call us to class.

I pull a card and read it. “Recollection.”

“No problem.” Miranda cracks her knuckles and puts her coffee-warmed hands on either side of my face. “What do you want to remember?”

“Uh….” Thinking of something you’ve forgotten is exactly as frustrating as it sounds. I shrug. “I don’t know. Just show me home again.”

“You already remember what your home looks like,” she says.

“Yeah, but you help me remember better.”

“Fine,” Miranda sighs and leans in close, so that I can feel her breath on my ear as she whispers. “I’m taking you back to your old bedroom. To the bed you used to sleep in. What does it look like?”

I close my eyes, aware for a moment of nothing but the faint sun on my eyelids and the warmth of her hands, and then do my best to picture that room.

“Well, it’s a twin,” I say.

“You’ve snuggled this blanket for hundreds of nights,” Miranda casts the spell on me with her voice, and I can feel the thick orange knit of that blanket pressing down on me. “There’s a desk nearby, where your projects take shape, and a window. You know your future is outside that window somewhere, but when you gaze out looking for it, the view is always much the same.”

Magic seeps directly into my skull from Miranda’s hands, searing hot as always, yet somehow comforting, like tea with honey. It coats the blurry broad strokes of my memory, and suddenly the details come into sharper focus than my own eyes can manage in the present. I can see an unfinished self-portrait propped up on the desk, and the mirror I was using to make it. I get up from the bed, put my hands on the chipped paint of the window frame, and look down at the street a story down. I can even smell the taco stand on the corner, and feel the threadbare carpet under my toes.

The blanket is still wrapped around my shoulders and hooded up over my head, even though I didn’t decide to bring it with me. Its weight and warmth mix together with the feeling of Miranda’s hands on me, the scent of wool blends with her rosemary perfume, and I don’t mind.

I breathe it in, this room, this moment. I savor what it was like to have college as a bright light in my future, where I was sure to work hard and learn lots and win at everything. Miranda allows me about ten seconds before she pulls her hands away, and drops me back into the quad, where college is my present, the work is real, and so are the chances of failure.

“How was that?” Miranda asks, even though she knows.

“Vivid as always,” I confirm.

She picks up the deck of flashcards and holds it out for me to take my turn.

I glance up at the clocktower, briefly hoping that it will save me, before I remember that today only gets harder from here.

“I should probably stop,” I say. “I don’t want to run dry before the presentation.”

“That’s physically impossible,” said Miranda, playfully tapping my crotch with her elbow.

The enchanted chastity cage that keeps me from draining myself physically dry clinks metallically in agreement with her.

“Tell that to my magic,” I say. “One minute it’s flowing like a river. Well, a healthy brook, at least. And then it peters out to a trickle, even though I haven’t cum.”

“Magic is abundant in the places where people connect,” Miranda recites one of the intro class principles of social magic. “What matters is being primed to hold it.”

“Yeah, I understand the theory,” I say. “And yet.”

“You don’t run dry, Nate, you just get stuck in your head,” says Miranda. “That’s what you really need to work on. Come on.”

I shuffle the cards, fan them out, and wait for her to select the next form of my mediocrity.

“Uplift,” she reads.

“All right, give me a second.” I stretch my neck to one side, then the other, and breathe in and out in the crisp, sharp way that sometimes helps me focus.

I tuck my hands under Miranda’s, and search for the thread of magic that connects us.

There’s always a thread, no matter who you’re doing magic with. It might be a strand of spiderweb, made of nothing but the faint recognition that exists between any two sentient minds, or it might be a thick steel chain, formed from years of love. Or hate. Any strong emotion, really. Those threads are the essential conductor for every type of energy that can make up part of a relationship. And that energy is the source for every kind of magic the College of Locks and Keys teaches.

Miranda and I have been best friends for years, and the thread between us is a sturdy rope of many strands, the kind you’d trust your life to in the rigging of a ship.

“So, uh, the force binding you to the ground is losing its grip,” I form an image of the desired effect, and try to feed it down that rope toward her, with words to nudge it along. “Mass doesn’t matter. Weight doesn’t exist. There’s a rising wave of joy as you realize that you and the ground are just two objects that, you know, happen to be touching. And with, um, the slightest nudge, you can drift apart.”

I push up on her palms, and for a split second, I can feel her whole body rise just high enough for the blades of grass under her to unbend.

Then I start thinking about how bad it’s going to hurt her tailbone if I drop her from any higher than this, and she winces as her weight thumps back down.

“You make this so much harder on yourself than you have to,” she sighs.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I mutter, pulling my hands back and casually crushing them with each other, trying to squeeze the anxiety out through my fingertips.

“All right, how about, use that thing between your legs?” Miranda suggests, knocking unabashedly on the front plate of her own chastity belt, through her jeans. “There’s no point in keeping it locked up if you’re not going to let it work for you.”

“Social magic doesn’t have to be horny,” I grumble.

“No, it’s just a lot easier that way.” Miranda rolls her eyes at me. “So, you know, feel free to ignore the entire undergrad program, the core technique that gives our whole path its name, and possibly the most abundantly potent source of energy in the world, and instead do a grad-level presentation on the subtle strength of companionship. If that’s what you want. But if you’re having trouble, I suggest trying something more at your level.”

“In other words, objectify you,” I spell it out.

“Lust for me,” Miranda rephrases, exasperated. “You think I wasn’t thinking about pinning you down to that old twin bed of yours and testing out the springs?”

I bury a hot, blushing smile in my hands. Yeah, that seems like the way Miranda would make a Recollection spell work.

“I couldn’t tell,” I say, mostly honestly.

“Yeah, well, subtlety takes practice.” Miranda shrugs. “Would it make you feel better if I showed you the graphic version? So, you’re not the only one going there?”

“No, it’s fine.”

I grab Miranda’s hands again, and pretend to be someone else performing this spell. Someone who’s good at this kind of thing.

“I want you off the ground, now. I want you shove you up against a wall that doesn’t exist.”

I keep the words going, not letting myself think about how weird it is for them to be coming out of my mouth.

“Mass doesn’t matter. Strength doesn’t matter. I don’t give a fuck whether my body can lift yours. I can pin you to whatever point in space I choose, with nothing but how much I want to.”

“Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.” Miranda rises off the grass, still sitting, and I stumble while trying to stand up fast enough to keep holding her hands.

Her legs fall out of their sitting position, and she’s still low enough that her feet drag on the ground.

“Higher,” I order, in that strange imitation of a better wizard’s voice. “I want those legs dangling, helpless, ready to be pulled apart.”

Miranda rises a few more inches, high enough that the toes of her shoes just barely skim the grass, without finding any purchase on the ground.

“Mmmm,” she sighs, tossing her head so that her thick curls catch the breeze, running her hands over the most sensitive available stretches of her own dark skin, along her neck and the inner sides of her muscular, athletic arms. I know that, if Miranda wanted to, she could probably break this spell just by punching my lights right the fuck out, no magic required, but when she leans into it like this, gracefully stretching her limbs out to explore the empty space and her completely unobstructed range of movement, she looks downright delicate.

“Higher?” she asks, with that softer, huskier tone she takes on when she’s riding someone else’s magic.

“I don’t know if I can go higher,” I say, taking her powerful legs in my hands and wrapping them around my waist, so that our cages bump against each other.

Mine is getting tight. I can’t lie, this is working for me.

“Try,” Miranda whispers.

“Why would I want you higher?” I ask. “You’re already at the perfect height for me to imagine slipping right into you.” I raise my hands from her legs to her ass to hold us closer together. “You know, if there weren’t two layers of denim and enchanted steel in the way. Raising you any further means I have to rethink the whole fantasy holding you up.”

Miranda rolls her eyes. “Don’t be so literal.”

“I’m not good at non-literal,” I say.

“That’s what practice is for,” Miranda insists. “Getting better at things. Just feel the magic. Feel the hum, the flow, the pressure.” She reaches down between us to grab my cage. I can feel her warmth through the bars. “Think about what you want it to do with it, and push.”

I try. I think about the tightness of the cage, and about moving Miranda upwards, and try to force a nonsensical connection between the two.

She bobs up and down a couple inches in the air.

“Is that all you’ve got?” she teases. “Come on. We didn’t apply to the College of Locks and Keys because we thought it would be easy!”

“I actually did,” I remind her.

“Well, you’ve had plenty of time to realize you were wrong by now!” she says. “And you haven’t quit.”

“I haven’t quit,” I acknowledge.

“So fucking lift me!”

“Fine!”

I thrust upward against her, imagining that it’s into her, and pushing all the hunger in my body into that thought.

There’s a little more power in that hunger than I thought.

An explosive burst of energy launches Miranda twenty feet upward and away from me, and before I can think that I should probably try to hang onto the spell, it’s gone, and she’s on her way back down.

“Fuck!” I shout, and take off running to follow her arc across the law.

Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, what do I do? A better wizard would have the levitate spell back in place by now. Or they’d give Miranda wings, or bend reality around her to let her roll down a gentle incline instead of smacking into flat ground.

But all of those things are domination magic. Practically every spell worth doing seems to be domination magic.

Have I mentioned that I’m fucking weak at domination magic?

And I don’t have time to get better at it right now.

I catch up with Miranda’s trajectory, throw myself flat on my back in front of her, and try the one useful thing I’m good at.

I offer myself up, body and heart. I leave every door open, shove everything I have to the surface, and beg for something to be a part of.

“Miri! Turn me into a-”

Miranda points down at me as she falls. Before I can finish my suggestion, my mouth is gone, and I'm a mattress. It's a strange sensation, being wide and flat and featureless. My whole body feels like a giant ear full of cotton.

But it works. Miranda lands square in the middle of me and bounces off onto the grass, unhurt.

Not only unhurt, but laughing like a maniac.

“That’s more like it! Nice distance,” she tells me, while I shrink back down to my normal size and shape. “Why did you let go?”

“I was startled,” I say, picking my clothes up off the ground.

My cage is enchanted to stay with me through just about any magical misadventure, but everything else popped off one end or the other when I became a limbless, six foot wide torso.

“Startled?”

“More like scared shitless,” I admit. “I thought I was going to break your neck. I almost did.”

“Only because you got ‘startled,’” Miranda points out.

“Still, it happened.” I brush leftover bits of stuffing out of my navel and yank my t-shirt down over my head.

Being naked isn’t particularly taboo or unusual on the WCLK campus, but it still feels weird to have so much of my skin touching the breeze. Every part of me where muscles ought to be is just out there on display for anyone who walks by.

“What the fuck am I going to do if I get assigned something dangerous at the presentation today?” I say, stepping into my jeans and fastening them over the chains of my cage.

“There you are in your head again,” said Miranda.

“Yeah, I’m in my head!” I snap. “I’m practicing magic on other people, and if I make a mistake, I could hurt them. What am I supposed to do, just not think about it?”

“Hey, hey, breathe.” Miranda gets up and puts a hand on my shoulder, and I know there’s magic in her voice now. It wraps around the knots in my stomach and my neck, and forces them to soften. I resent how good it feels. “This is what this place is for. To give us a chance to get the hang of it with help nearby. Seriously, what are you so worried about?”

I do breathe, and try to find where to even start.

“If I drop the ball in there, I’ll be dropping Ruby,” I say.

“Hmm, yes, much more important than dropping me,” Miranda muses, tapping her lips with mock seriousness. “I see the problem.”

“You know that’s not it,” I say. “But at least with you, I know what you can take. I know how you feel about risk. I know that even if something goes wrong, you’ll understand it was an accident.”

“So, we know each other, is what you saying,” says Miranda. “You know, it is possible to get to know new people, just like it’s possible to get good at new skills?”

“Don’t start.” I sit back down in the grass so that I can rest my head in my hands.

“I’m just saying, if you’d spent a little time with her outside of class when you got paired up for the project, like I suggested at the time, like Professor Chicory suggested at the time, you wouldn’t be practically strangers now. And maybe doing magic together would be more comfortable for both of you.”

“She’s not just a stranger,” I struggle for words. “She’s… Ruby.”

“Oh, believe me, I know it,” says Miranda.

“How would you even go on living with yourself if you disappointed her?”

“She’s a sweetheart,” Miranda says, matter-of-factly. “And very cute. And an outrageously powerful submission wizard.”

“Don’t remind me,” I say.

It’s no secret that whoever gets to practice their magic on Ruby in class is whoever the teacher feels most sorry for. The magic Ruby can add to someone else’s spell, when she’s on the receiving end, makes my contribution to Miranda’s mattress trick look like a halfhearted pat on the back.

If I can’t cast a spell with her as my partner, I can’t cast it. Which is going to make it all the more humiliating if I whiff this.

Ruby’s also an absolute master of the few submission spells we’ve learned so far. Sharing her thoughts. Making herself almost irresistible to give gifts to. I’m good at those things too, far better than I am at anything in the domination category, but she breaks the curve.

And yes, I know that affects the way I see her. The way I feel about her. The way everyone feels about her. But I’ve never once seen her use her power to hurt anyone. Her spells don’t leave you with that cloying aftertaste of having been used, like they do when someone pushes too hard, or weaves lies into the casting. They finish clean and sweet.

“What I’m saying is, don’t underestimate her,” says Miranda. “Being able to open up like that is not the skill of a fragile person. She can probably take a whole lot more than you think. Of course, you’d know that with a lot more certainty if you’d just talk to her….”

The bell chimes in the tower, announcing the end of my window for taking that advice.