Derin Edala

2.29: Contract

“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.”

2.28: The Castle

We 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; ...

2.27: Dangerous Information

We 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 channel...

2.26: Drowning Responsibility

We 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 ...

2.25: The Garden of the Dead

I 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 ...

2.24: Into the Labyrinth

I 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 tha...

2.23: Walking the Path

“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 ...

2.22: Secrets, Spells and Sigils

The 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...

2.21: Friendly Conversation

My 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 ...

2.20: Effigy

Mae 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 lau...

2.19: Searching for a Gift

Very 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...

2.18: Poison Control

Trying 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 ...

2.17: Distraction

“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 yo...

2.16: Party Planning

“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 l...

2.15: Rite of Passage

It 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.

2.14: Long Games

Our 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 prob...

2.13: Duty of Care

The 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 Sa...

2.12: Loose Ends

“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 str...

2.11: Debt and Balance

Fifteen 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 g...

2.10: The Lepidopteran

“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 ‘...

2.09: Social Studies

Chelsea & 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, ...