Derin Edala

4.09: Return

Some food, a good night’s sleep in a familiar bed, and a couple of hours in a workshop brewing potions put me in a much better frame of mind, with some much needed perspective. Plenty of kids had parents a lot less supportive than mine, and did just fine. I wouldn’t need to see Mum for another six months or so, so for now, I could just concentrate on the actual important things, like schoolwork and Max’s magical theories, and prophesied threat of very probable death as a sacrifice, whic...

4.08: Scars

I spoke to my parents again before heading back to school, because I felt like I kind of had to, but the conversation was stiff and awkward. I hadn’t explained the nature of my fight with them to Chelsea and Melissa; I didn’t want Melissa’s gentle reassurance of Chelsea’s ‘totally joking but not joking if you want me to be serious, just say the word’ offers to beat them up or something. I just wanted to digest things myself for a bit.

It wasn’t until I was back in Instrukt...

4.07: Betrayal

I didn’t get four steps out of Instruktanto Cooper’s van before Mum pulled me into a suffocating hug. When I was sure the lack of oxygen would kill me, she pushed me back to arms’ length and looked me up and down.

“Aww, you still haven’t changed a bit,” she said affectionately. “Except for needing a haircut.”

That… hurt, actually. I’d been careful to shave the patchy beginnings of my beard and it was good that she hadn’t noticed anything in that sort of depar...

The Apple Seller and the Eye -- bonus snippet

It was a good day in the marketplace.

Travelling merchants had come into town, some with more money than sense, which made it hard to stay rich in a town with people like George. George cracked his knuckles and headed into the bustle. He had a rule at work: visitors first. He didn’t pick from the locals if there were obvious visitors in easy range. Stealing from people you saw regularly was bad business – sooner or later, you’d get caught. George had no intention of languishing in...

4.06: Influx

“Remind me,” Magistus said, wrapping his coat tighter around his shoulders, “why are we out here, again?”

“Because there are four different memory potions I want to make that have ‘fresh snow gathered under a full moon’ as an ingredient and I refuse to pay for something so easy to get myself, just on principle.” I settled our buckets down and handed him a little shovel.

“Right, but why am I here, specifically?”

“Because you agreed to use your mighty mus...

4.05: A New Theory

“You seem perfectly fine,” Malas said once he’d scanned us. “Your parasympathetic systems are quite active, if that’s informative.”

“Is that bad?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s just the system of responses that calms you down. It’s a normal response to all kinds of things. Being fatigued, or hungry, or well fed, or sedated, or just in a very relaxing situation. What happened, to bring you two in here?”

We both shrugged. We’d decided not to explain Max...

4.04: OHSW exists for a reason

“Can spells be destroyed?” I asked Max while he painted runes up and down my arms. For the first time, he wasn’t painting the complicated, circular designs that we’d been taught at Skolala Refujeyo, but the spiderweb designs that we’d found on the skeleton under the lake. (With Saina not around to return Duniyasar to, Kylie was still the owner, and apparently she’d been letting him in to study the tapestries; he was pretty sure he had some idea of how magic flowed through them, no...

4.03: Perspective

“Today, we’ll be looking at memory potions,” Instruktanto Costa announced, adjusting her glasses and sweeping her raptor-like gaze over the class. “It’s that time of year where a lot of people start testing up or graduating, so if you’re going to be putting your health on the line and using magic to help you study, you should at least know how to do it safely. I’ve sent you all an information sheet, so give it a look and answer the basic questions on the worksheet.”

I gl...

4.02: Critical Updates

“Out at Duniyasar, when your spell warned Max about breaking the world, it gave us all some advice. It told me that if I was stuck, I should rely on what had gotten me out of the Pit twice before.”

Kylie did some quick math in her head. “You hadn’t started pit comps then, so…?”

“So it probably meant my Initiation and the Labyrinth of Dreams thing, yeah.”

“And what got you out?”

“My sense of direction. In the Initiation, I was in a forest and kept ...

Excerpts from Thaddeus Shuttlecock’s highly controversial “Disrespectful Rhymes For Rebellious Children, Fourth Edition” -- bonus snippet

Nine Inquisition

Nine Inquisition engaged in debate,

One’s declared a heretic and now there are eight.

Eight Inquisition musing about heaven,

One decides to check it out and now there are seven.

Seven Inquisition fighting with sticks,

One’s hit a bit too hard and now there are six.

Six Inquisition happy and alive,

One makes trouble and now there are five.

Five Inquisition at a witch’s door,

One takes a risk and...

4.01: Back to Business

I guess I figured, after the whole death at Duniyasar thing, that things would move along fairly quickly. But they didn’t. I explained everything to Casey, and they nodded and took notes and said they’d contact me when they had something to report, and left. I tried to get in contact with Saina, but it seemed like she was taking a bit of a break from school, presumably at the insistence of her mother. I didn’t know if she’d be coming back. Nobody had gossipped about the whole thing at...

3.38: Laying Plans

I’d never been in this part of the school before, but the map showed my where to go. I hadn’t even bothered to clean up before leaving, but the few students I passed didn’t spare me a second glance. Sometimes people had weird classes or hobbies; if that left some random acolyte covered in sand and sweat, how was that any of their business?

I let my thoughts run away with me as I walked. There wasn’t any immediate danger, Max was probably worried about nothing, but I let myself b...

3.37: Home

“Lydia!” Kylie knelt next to her mentor, fingers searching her neck for a pulse. “Guys, she – ”

“She tried to kill you,” Max said. His tone was clipped and neutral. “There is no point in trying to revive her. She paid a debt, and you won’t be able to let her body renege it now.”

“W-what? No, she… why would she kill me?”

“Your spell,” I said, but Kylie had clearly already figured it out, her fingers brushing the mark on her cheek. “She gave you...

3.36: Confrontation

Max was loitering in the hall, and looked startled to see us emerge. “I wasn’t standing guard or anything, I just – what’s going on?”

I didn’t slow down to answer. “We have to get to Duniyasar. Kylie’s in trouble. Come on!”

“What happened?” Max asked, following me and Saina down the hall.

“It’s not the Heiress of Duniyasar. It’s the Airess, A-I-R. A woman of the air and of Duniyasar.” I tapped my cheek, where Kylie’s mage mark, displaying here...

The Orphanage and the Eye -- bonus snippet

“Uncle?”

Ekon set down his hoe and wiped one sleeve across his brow before glancing down at his niece. Her cheeks were just a little hollow, eyes just a little shaded, clothing slightly more tattered than would’ve been acceptable only five or six years ago. All the children’s clothes were, these days. He made a mental note to see if Abebi, whose lack of legs would render her slow or unable to do most of the outdoor chores even after the amputation wounds had healed completely, w...

3.35: Mystery Gained, Mystery solved

I got dressed. Went to bed. Drew the bedcurtains tight, turned my tablet’s light on full, and inspected the scar. There they were; a lattice of stretch marks that I’d seen on nobody else but Chelsea, and that certainly shouldn’t be present on something healed by Malas.

Here was the thing. I had used my healing potion down in the labyrinth of dreams, where I’d gotten this scar. But this scar had come from the tooth castle, right? And that had been hours after I’d used the potio...

3.34: And Now For A Pirate Adventure

The excitement of being able to text my friends was somewhat undercut by the fact that, apart from me telling them where in the world I was (a conversation briefly interrupted by them asking where Duniyasar was, and me having to go and find Max to learn that we were apparently in Pakistan), we didn’t actually have all that much to discuss. We’d seen each other less than twelve hours ago.

The sudden evacuation had caused remarkably little disturbance in the school. Some homework dead...

3.33: Where We Are

“Well, this will either be great or terrible,” Max said, leaning against a bed force field and folding his arms expectantly. “Where are we?”

“It’s quite simple, when you think about it,” I said. “I guess it just requires a situation that most people don’t encounter very often. After all, most people keep their familiars within their range all the time, right? I don’t know what our range is, exactly, except that it’s bigger than the distance between our most distant...

3.32: When Worlds Collide

My encounter with Susan at the motel had left me worried that people were going to kick up a big stink about me being in town and call my parents. That didn’t happen. I steered clear of Chelsea and Melissa’s families, and the few who happened to recognise me in town just assumed that everything was fine. Most people, to my surprise, didn’t recognise me at all.

“You look different,” Chelsea shrugged when I mentioned this.

“How can I look different? I was here a few mont...

3.31: Reunion

There was one complication I hadn’t considered when trying to get a room at the motel, and it wasn’t until Susan, the motel manager, was staring me down over stubbornly folded arms that I realised that I was an idiot.

“Kayden, I’m not renting a room to an unaccompanied minor,” she said sternly.

“C’mon, you know I won’t break anything.”

“That’s not the point! Where are you parents?”

I bit my lip.

“Really? Your school just dumped you here ...

The Artisan and the Eye -- Bonus Snippet

“Sir?”

John kept his eyes on the pot until it was complete. Only then did he carefully lean back from the potter’s wheel and look up at his apprentice. The boy… what was his name? Benjamin? B-something… shuffled nervously. He didn’t way anything else.

“Yes?” John prompted.

B-something swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously in his lean neck. Puberty had stretched him up but not filled him out yet, and everything about him seemed lumpy and pointy. “T...

3.30: System Failure

Saina looked me up and down and opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.

“I’m fine,” I said, “and I don’t want to talk about it.” It had been a couple of days since the pit comp, and there were a lot of thing I didn’t want to talk about.

“Okay,” she said. “Want to practice that wood softening potion again? I’m sure we’ll get the simmer right eventually.”

“Heck yes.”

So we grabbed a workshop and started measuring ingredients. It was a ...

3.29: Old Scars

Malas was unsurprised to see me and didn’t ask for an explanation. Alania must have told him I was coming. I let him touch me and braced myself against the sickening wave of displaced magic.

“Are you alright?” he asked, while I gritted my teeth and waited for the magic to settle down.

“Fine,” I said. “I just can’t seem to get used to that, no matter how often you do it.”

“My apologies. There’s nothing immediately alarming about your biology. I’d advise ...

3.28: Confession

“What do you mean, the real reason?” I asked. “You kept us out of it because you were trying to protect us, right?”

“I thought so, at the time,” he sighed. “I didn’t lie to you, not deliberately, I just… lied to myself. Look, can we not talk about this in a random tunnel?”

So we went to our room. Max sat on his bed and rubbed the mage mark on his arm uncomfortably while I paced. I wasn’t sure why he was bringing any of this up now, but at least he’d stopped...

3.27: Pit Comp

By the time my first pit comp rolled around, magical assassin-incriminating evidence STILL hadn’t magically fallen into our laps, but for once I was too excited about something else to care. Specifically, the competition.

The team we were up against, Zephyr, were as new to this as we were, which was good in that they didn’t have any more experience, but bad in that we knew nothing about them, except that their team name was stupid. (We were the Pheonixes, which… shut up, okay? I d...

When I Was Your Age -- bonus snippet

Malas Aksoy had been the kuracar long enough to know that the week before classes started was always the busiest week of his semester. It was a week where the new initiates, fresh in a new location and full of excitement and apprehension, crammed in as many stupid injuries as they could before their schedules became weighed down with the tedious business of education.

It was never the legacy mages, who’d had the fear of embarrassing their families driven into them and spent their firs...

3.26: A Friendly Chat

Over the next week or so, no convenient leads dropped right into our laps. I was getting really sick of trying to solve mysteries on basically no information. Maybe this was why most people went to teachers or the police or whatever, instead of trying to do this kind of thing themselves, but all the mysteries I was currently dealing with were either ‘you don’t want the school staff to know you’re making trouble’ mysteries or ‘Saina doesn’t want her family to know about this’ mys...

3.25: A Breath of Fresh Air

We didn’t actually go and get an animal to turn into a familiar for a random experiment with no professional input or oversight, of course. That would be wildly irresponsible.

We made a fetish.

“I should warn you,” Max said as he guided my hand through scrawling the symbols on a piece of paper, “that this is in fact the world’s worst fetish. As in, it’s taking far more power to actually make than it can hold for you. If this works at all, I expect it to just catch fire...

3.24: Chain of Inheritance

“Okay,” Max said, pacing across our room two days later. “Do we know if this full moon was the correct full moon? Is there any way to tell when the timeline for the prophecy has passed?”

Kylie shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of. It’s never been a problem before; normally, the Eye – the Destiny – only predicts a short time ahead. But I don’t know what to do with these prophecies made in highly magical environments. Making the prophecy more powerful has just made i...

3.23: Numb Scars

“Scars can be painful, or scars can be numb,” the spellthing informed me, staring into me with those creepily symmetrical eyes. “Yours would have been more useful if they were painful.”

I sighed, already fed up with this. “You left me plenty of painful scars, I think. Enough that I’m still dreaming about you, apparently.” The only dream with the spellthing that I remembered was that one last semester where I’d woken up in the middle of it, but this scene had the feeling ...