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 anothe...
2022-01-22 06:29:59 +0000 UTC View PostI 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 jokin...
2022-01-15 06:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostI 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. ...
2022-01-08 05:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostIt 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 ...
2022-01-01 10:45:05 +0000 UTC View Post“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 eas...
2022-01-01 05:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post“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...
2021-12-25 03:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post“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 no...
2021-12-18 00:42:41 +0000 UTC View Post“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...
2021-12-11 03:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post“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…?”<...
2021-12-04 03:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostNine 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...
2021-12-01 06:25:33 +0000 UTC View PostI 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 Sai...
2021-11-27 03:29:59 +0000 UTC View PostI’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 s...
2021-11-20 02:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post“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...
2021-11-13 01:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostMax 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 m...
2021-11-06 07:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post“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 clothe...
2021-11-01 09:46:13 +0000 UTC View PostI 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 th...
2021-10-30 07:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostThe 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 di...
2021-10-23 06:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post“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 of...
2021-10-16 06:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostMy 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 everythi...
2021-10-09 06:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostThere 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...
2021-10-02 07:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post“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 promp...
2021-10-01 07:00:45 +0000 UTC View PostSaina 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. “Wan...
2021-09-25 07:29:59 +0000 UTC View PostMalas 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....
2021-09-18 07:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post“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?...
2021-09-11 06:30:00 +0000 UTC View PostBy 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...
2021-09-04 12:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostMalas 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 th...
2021-09-01 08:02:03 +0000 UTC View PostOver 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 ...
2021-08-28 12:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostWe 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...
2021-08-21 12:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post“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, ...
2021-08-14 12:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post“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 ...
2021-08-07 12:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post