“They can get out without you, you know,” my reflection said.
“What?”
“The others. You looked worried. I know you’ve given up on escape, but you don’t need to worry about them. They’ll do just fine without you.”
“I haven’t given up. I’m resting.”
“Uh-huh.”
We sat in silence for a bit. But silence was worse, so eventually I said, “You could help, you know.”
“I did. I moved them on for you. I can’t help you leave because ...
2021-01-30 12:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostWe rested until Kylie felt up to casting again. Now that we were together our only time limit was our food and water supply, so an extra thirty minutes of sitting around wasn’t going to hurt anything. Things were a lot easier, walking together; we knew everyone was safe, we knew which way we were headed and where we needed to go, and we knew that everything we saw was real.
Unfortunately, this meant that the when the hallway changed from smooth grey stone to some white, bumpy material...
2021-01-23 12:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostWe wandered through corridors long enough to get our bearings before once again turning inward, heading for the centre of the labyrinth. When we crossed the next strong current, thick with spells, Max stopped. “Kylie, it’s safe to stop channelling here, if you want.”
She did so, and immediately slumped against his shoulder. That seemed as good a sign as any that it was time to rest.
“Wouldn’t places like this with more spells be more dangerous?” I asked as Max, who had...
2021-01-16 11:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostWe stepped off the last stone, safely onto the shore of the lake, and Max looked at me with something like awe in his expression. “How?” he asked. “How did you know the pattern? Where did you see it?”
“A magician never reveals his secrets,” I said with a wink. This probably wasn’t the best time to admit that I’d chosen stones completely at random, not while we were still trapped down here and I might have to deceive him again. This was a labyrinth of dreams. What mattere...
2021-01-09 11:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostI called for Kylie for a bit, although I knew it was useless, before making my way down the valley. Last time I’d climbed out, and had a conversation with the spellthing made of prophecies, and used an illusion of my old tracker to get out, but I didn’t waste time entertaining the illusion that I was just going to be able to repeat myself. That had been a challenge designed for a less experienced Kayden. There as no guarantee that there even was a way out, this time – this wasn’t how ...
2021-01-02 11:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostI explained mirror runes to Kylie. She nodded, unsurprised.
“Turn off your light,” she said, turning off her own. I obliged.
The cave around us wasn’t perfectly dark. With our tablets out, our eyes quickly adjusted to a light that was faint, but perfectly adequate for making things out. Some patches seemed slightly brighter than others but the patches of brightness kept changing, like extremely subtle television static. I looked at Kylie, and she looked… odd. Flat. Like th...
2020-12-26 12:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post“It’s a runic inscription,” I explained, starting to pace. “The whole school! Or the initiate area, at least, but we have to assume the rest of the school, too, right? We’ve still got weird teleporting corridors and stuff here, and that has to be the reason. Little pockets of ichor buried in mage bodies, tracing out huge runic patterns day after day. The thing about runes is, the bugger they are, the wider they are, the less potent the casting, but for thousands of people churning t...
2020-12-19 12:29:59 +0000 UTC View PostThe only class we had on the day of the party was runecrafting, in the afternoon. Five of the most advanced students were absent. Four of them were probably at whatever celebrations Magistus and Magista were having that we had mercifully been able to skip out on, and the fifth was Max. Maybe he’d decided to go to his girlfriend’s party after all? It seemed out of character to use it as an excuse to skip class if he wasn’t going.
The class was rather more relaxed than usual, missin...
2020-12-12 12:29:59 +0000 UTC View PostMy ankle didn’t even need treatment, which meant I ended up seeing Malas for absolutely no reason. Stupid ankle.
The time for the party neared, my next healing potion came out better, and one morning at breakfast, Kylie started asking Max quiet questions about how to make a fetish.
“I’ve been learning to channel the spell consciously a lot better, and while it doesn’t do anything when nobody’s in danger, it can still feel like a bit much, sometimes,” she confe...
2020-12-05 11:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostMae leaned back against the tree trunk and looked up into the drizzling sky. “When I walked into the Pit, I found myself in… I don’t know if you’d call it a forest. A wooded area, certainly. I wandered a bit until I heard the sounds of laughter and music, and followed them to a big clearing were some people were having some kind of bonfire party.
“I say people, but they weren’t. They were… I guess wooden puppets is the best term? Or mannequins? Anyway, they were obviously ...
2020-11-28 06:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostVery little input was required from me for the party, which was good, because I hadn’t been sleeping well.
At first I blamed being hot and itchy a lot of the time, which was unsurprising on testosterone. (When did I get the beard, huh? And easier muscle building? Why couldn’t it all be beard and muscles?) But when I awoke after yet another dream I couldn’t remember, with a thundering heart and only three hours of sleep, I decided that enough was enough. I wasn’t going to let mys...
2020-11-21 06:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostTrying not to look nervous, I sat on the rapidly cleared chair in Instruktanto Miratova’s papery chaos of an office while she switched on her incongruous little electric kettle.
“Tea?” she asked. “Hot chocolate?”
“Didn’t Clara poison you using hot chocolate and nearly kill you?”
“If I let a near death experience put me off things, I’d have few pleasures left in life,” Alania said, setting out cups. “But I’m sure you didn’t come to talk to me about...
2020-11-14 04:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post“I’d be liable to be offended, if I were real,” the spellthing told me, sipping its tea. “I left you such useful gifts, and you’re just ignoring them. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to exist coherently enough to give them to you in the first place? We don’t have the advantage of individuality that you do.”
“Yeah, well, I’mreal. And you’re just a dream.” I glanced down at my own cup of tea on the table in front of me, hot and smelling del...
2020-11-07 03:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post“The twins’ birthday is coming up in a month,” Kylie remarked offhand one morning, looking up from her history of prophecy book, as I finished my yoga exercises.
“That’s nice,” I said, pinching at my bicep. I’d heard it was a lot easier to put on muscle when you had testosterone; maybe I should get back into weights? “Guess I should go shopping for – oh, god.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Magista can’t organise a party, can she? I’m guessing it’s not done to o...
2020-10-31 03:39:38 +0000 UTC View PostIt took Saina and me three more tries to get the healing potion right. We took it to Instruktanto Costa to assess (we weren’t stupid enough to test it ourselves), and she congratulated us on having created a mostly passable healing potion.
“It probably wouldn’t heal neatly, but it’ll work,” she said. “If you work hard, you could have a successful career in potions ahead of you.” She looked at me as she said the last part. It was meant as a compliment and I tried to take it...
2020-10-24 07:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostOur first attempt at a healing potion was an unmitigated disaster. This was probably largely because it was a complicated potion and, like cooking, potioncraft required a lot of practice to develop a sort of sense for getting it right. But it probably didn’t help that Saina retaliated against a joke about her spell by constantly distracting me with illusory butterflies.
“Done!” I announced, brushing my hand through some butterflies on the glass bottle to disrupt them. “Does this...
2020-10-17 07:04:11 +0000 UTC View PostThe book I’d borrowed turned out to be about the evolution of butterflies. The parts of it I could understand weren’t remotely interesting. It had some nice pictures, though. I tried to absorb some of it, if only to give me material to sass Saina with, given her spell.
Max had started working in Alania’s lab and was barely around. It was a few days before I was able to explain Talbot’s theory about Cheryl and ask his opinion. He just nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he s...
2020-10-10 03:46:15 +0000 UTC View Post“Now that you all have some base knowledge of the holding rune,” Instruktanto Animus announced as he strode across the front of the classroom, “we can start practicing the structure, the language, of runecrafting. There are several basic structures for a runic circle, and by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each structure we can – ”
I really needed to be paying attention in this class. But y eyes kept skimming over the English translation scrolling across my table...
2020-10-03 00:29:59 +0000 UTC View PostFifteen minutes later, Max returned to the dorm, looking shaky. “She’s going to be fine,” he said, sinking into a chair in the shared part of our room while I put the kettle on.
“What happened?” Kylie asked.
“Not much. We got her to Malas and then he took over. She’ll need Malas’ help with her skin but the spell’s stable now, so… congratulations to her, I guess?”
“Not sure if we should congratulate her,” I said. “I think she was kind of hoping it...
2020-09-26 09:56:10 +0000 UTC View Post“So there’s good news and bad news,” Kylie told me the next morning as we sat down to lunch.
“Why is that always the way of things?”
“Our coven – ”
“Coven?!”
“I’m not going to keep calling it our ‘witch group’, it’s too clumsy.”
“Yeah, but… I mean, you know what people think when they hear the word ‘coven’.”
“I know what people think when they hear the word ‘witch’, too.”
“… Point. You were saying?...
2020-09-19 05:50:41 +0000 UTC View PostChelsea & Liss,
This place is amazing.
I told you about the Pit, right? A big spell trap where they make illusions for the Initiations? Well, they can also make illusions for other things, and there’s a whole array of sports that Kylie calls ‘scifi holodeck nonsense’ that can be played in there. One-on-one magic duels, races through labyrinths full of puzzles and riddles; we watched some people play Capture the Flag the other day...
2020-09-12 07:03:04 +0000 UTC View Post“I’m surprised there isn’t some kind of magic potion for this,” I remarked to David, my new gender transition specialist, as he watched me carefully draw a testosterone shot into the needle.
“Oh, there have been several in the past, but we’re fortunate enough to live in an age where hormones can be safely mass produced,” he shrugged. “And if you’re choosing between a magical solution and a mundane one and the magic doesn’t have any major advantages…”
“The...
2020-09-05 08:19:54 +0000 UTC View PostI was still reeling over how easy it had been to get testosterone a full week later when Magista, triumphant over being accepted into the Amazons, took me to a pit comp. We didn’t go alone; both Magistus and Kylie also decided to come, and Magistus took a tall, weedy guy I didn’t know called Trevor, and we got ourselves an okay spot about midway down the rings of stone seats surrounding the Pit. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to try to find out if Trevor was a friend or a partner...
2020-08-29 07:52:40 +0000 UTC View PostMy potion book contained a full page and a half of biohazard warnings about potions containing human blood. Wear protection when handling other peoples’ blood, beware the dangers of open wounds, et cetera. I’d had enough accidents to know how to handle blood. Alone in the little workshop I’d booked, I pricked my finger and carefully added three drops of blood to a vial of blue liquid. The drops spread out, turning the liquid transparent which, according to the potion book, was ...
2020-08-22 07:21:38 +0000 UTC View Post“The map is wrong,” Max declared, apropos of nothing, as we headed to breakfast that morning.
“Um,” I said, “what?”
“The school map! I’ve been cross-referencing the actual data from people walking around with the distances and directions on the map. The distances the map gives on the corridors are almost always a little bit wrong, up to ten per cent too short or long. And if there’s a pattern, it’s one that’s too complicated for me to find with any amount of ...
2020-08-15 13:16:34 +0000 UTC View PostThe next morning, I woke up in a cold sweat, heart thundering in my ears.
I lay still and silent for a bit, waiting to see if I’d shouted or screamed or anything and awoken the others… but no. It was five in the morning on the Dorm Australia Personal Clock, and the other two were still asleep.
I didn’t remember the nightmare. I never did. But it wasn’t hard to figure out what it was about – this was the third time I’d woken up like this in the past week and a half. Sin...
2020-08-08 09:31:19 +0000 UTC View PostMy success with the Illuminus potion put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. Of course I’d known, intellectually, that’d be doing some magic at mage school, but not being able to cast the spell in my heart had left me feeling… well. It wasn’t the first time I’d just accepted being left out of things. A cursed kid in the comm – the nemagisto world had to avoid a lot of activities, too.
But I could still do magic!
I was still in a good mood when I received a messa...
2020-08-01 09:01:19 +0000 UTC View PostKylie froze, but I’d already shut the door behind her. Magista swept her more fully into the room, saying, “You’re fifteen! We thought we’d celebrate.”
“I never told any of you when my birthday was…”
“Of course you did! You mentioned it a few months ago. Magistus, the candles?”
The cake that Magista had made was understated, but beautiful, with pink icing covered in elaborate red scrollwork. The fifteen candles were quickly lit and we sang the birthday so...
2020-07-25 06:51:30 +0000 UTC View PostSo the thing about fire is this: it’s bad.
As soon as the flames erupted, I grabbed the fire blanket from the kitchen wall and tossed it over the dish, but that did nothing for the globs of flaming batter now scattered about the walls, floor, and benches. Magista swore and started stomping them out.
“That all of them?” I asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. You hurt?”
“No,” I said, rubbing at a painful burn on my wrist. “You?”
“Not significantly....
2020-07-18 10:27:28 +0000 UTC View Post
It was seven in the morning, Grenwich Mean Time, and I was sitting on my bed, pen poised over a blank piece of paper.
The bed was new. It was a lot like my old bed, but the décor in the main school area was more uniform, and the furniture nicer. The desk behind my bed was bigger, the chair comfier, and the room sported a coffee machine, despite only having three beds in it. Dorm Australia had decided not to break up.
My fresh tattoo still ached under its dressing. I...
2020-07-11 13:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post