The tablet in my hands was gone. The birdsong and breeze of the forest was replaced by disparate voices echoing in a large stone chamber. I looked up.
Initiates – or acolytes now, I supposed – were scattered about the room in small groups, congratulating each other or waiti...
2020-07-04 13:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“Chosen by whom?” I asked.
The spellthing burst out laughing. “That’s the question that nobody asks, isn’t it? Everybody’s always so excited to be part of some grand plan, or annoyed to be part of some grand plan, or apprehensive about being part of some Grand Plan,...
2020-06-27 13:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The path before me was an ancient creek bed, long dried up and reclaimed by foliage. It was wide and flat, the biggest impediments being stones and occasional shrubs. The shrubs were vaguely familiar in that they had a lot of the characteristics I associated with native Australian pl...
2020-06-20 13:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, I partially read the orientation materials. I got about one paragraph into the scholarship contract before calling Casey and letting them explain it.
Everything was basically what I expected. I had a scholarship that covered tuition, food and lodging, a small suppl...
2020-06-13 13:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Things calmed down quickly. Maybe I was imagining things, but the press as a whole seemed to want to move on from having gotten things so wrong for so long. Some groups did a couple of quick ‘this poor child, look at all of this witch discrimination’ pieces and moved on to more i...
2020-06-06 13:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
We all stared in silence for a little while while everyone, individually, grappled with what Malas’ statement meant.
Then Casey spoke. “H… how long…?”
“I’d estimate that that curse has been dormant for Kayden’s whole life; I don’t think it’s ever activ...
2020-05-30 13:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Given that Doctor Marley was definitely on my side, I was pretty surprised that he was the second person that Mr Spline called.
“What is your relationship to the defendant?”
“I’ve been Kayden’s GP for about fourteen years.”
“Since he was diagnosed with...
2020-05-23 12:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I’d been in a courthouse before. Not for legal reasons; it was just a convenient place for Chelsea’s tracker. My first time, I’d been terrified that the blessed flooring and silver door latches would burn my cursed flesh, but I’d stopped expecting that years ago. Still, as I ...
2020-05-16 12:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Wearing pants again felt weird.
“How can this bother you?” Kylie asked, not looking up from her tablet. “You wore pants for fourteen years. You’ve been in robes for, what, three months?”
“They just do. Were jeans always this scratchy? Ugh, and I have to...
2020-05-09 11:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post
The next day, I got a message from Magista that just said “Aftermath”, with a link to a nine hour long audio file. I opened it up.
“Okay, where should I put it?” Magista asked, her voice a little muffled through the tablet.
“In here, I don’t think it matters,...
2020-05-02 11:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post
“Kayden,” Magista said, “nobody’s trying to kill Instruktanto Miratova. I know it’s hard to accept, but sometimes spells – ”
“The Guardian Ring was found in the wreckage of Miratova’s lab explosion. The… the details are complicated, but the situation suggest...
2020-04-25 11:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post
The day of the party arrived.
Max had, after much internal drama, decided on a favourite sash, and had updated his outfit appropriately. Kylie and I were simply wearing the robes we’d bought for the previous party. I was a lot more comfortable in mine, being used to mage robe...
2020-04-18 11:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“So what happened to your tablet, exactly?” Instruktato Cooper asked.
“I, uh, dropped it in the water,” I said. “And now I can’t find it.”
“Water? There aren’t too many bodies of water in the general access corridors.” He tapped at his own tablet. “I...
2020-04-11 11:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“What now?” Simon asked.
“How should I know? You attacked me, you lunatic; you figure it out.” Oh man, I was bleeding everywhere.
“Hey, I didn’t start this. You robbed me; I was defending my property. And you clearly know something about this place, so spill....
2020-04-04 09:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“Uh. Kayden?”
I got up, tried to stop crying, and failed. Oh man, this was embarrassing. I didn’t cry. I definitely didn’t cry in front of other people. And I didn’t dare contemplate crying in front of other boys. If this had been at my old school, my social life woul...
2020-03-28 09:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Malas didn’t even look up from his paperwork when we burst into the ward.
“She’s in the third bed,” he said in a bored voice, indicating the row of beds behind hospital curtains. “Don’t touch her, don’t touch the machines, and if there’s a sudden change in room ...
2020-03-21 09:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“Today,” the Fiore announced as he swept into the classroom, cat in arms, “we are looking at our last category of spells, which also happens to be the most dangerous, nebulous, and difficult to define category: contract spells. Who would like to define contract spells for me? Y...
2020-03-13 16:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The next day, the glow of the rose had faded, leaving a stick with thick, transparent petals, a dead and obviously manufactured thing. I tossed it out and gritted my teeth through meditation with Max. He seemed pretty sure this would help me, and I didn’t want to ditch him after he...
2020-03-06 16:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I had been sitting still for about twenty billion years, and my nose was getting itchier by the second.
Fuck it. I scratched it.
“You’re supposed to stay still,” Max said.
“My nose was itchy.”
“Acknowledge the itch. Allow it to permea...
2020-02-28 16:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post
“So what’s the emergency, witchnitiate?” Mae took a long drag on her cigarette.
“I need to plan the most romantic date ever for my boyfriend for this Friday, and I thought you might have some out-of-the-box ideas,” I explained.
“Why did you think we would – ...
2020-02-21 16:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
After dealing with the complicated matter of exactly how large and exorbitant the box of chocolates I was sending to Magistus should be, I got to the rather less important matter of investigating my friend’s role in the possible attempted-murderer-framing plot. I needed to be sure ...
2020-02-14 16:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Instruktanto Miratova dropped several small, shiny stones into her mortar and began to grind them to dust. “The key to understanding a prophecy,” she said, “is understanding that human beings are not real.”
Kylie, sitting cross-legged on the classroom floor, looked up f...
2020-02-07 16:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“Today, we will be learning about evocation spells.”
This was it; the one single lesson in this school that was actually important to me. So it sucked that I was learning it from someone who might be a murderer, and sitting in front of someone who might be his accomplice, a...
2020-01-31 16:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post
The note that Magistus had slipped under my door on the day of our date just read “Kayden – Alta Foresto.” I plugged that into the map and found myself wandering through a large, verdant forest.
The trees were high and luxurious, leaving the ground under my feet quite dar...
2020-01-24 16:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“So what are we doing, exactly?” I asked Instruktanto Cooper as we drove through some random small town in New Zealand.
“We are meeting Cheryl Castor.” Cooper was back in his suit, and he looked weirdly uncomfortable in it. This guy could look professional in purple Hul...
2020-01-17 16:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post
I shouldn’t be thinking like this. Max was my friend. How bad a friend was I, to be so suspicious of him?
Unless he wasn’t my friend. In which case, how much of a sucker was I, to be so trusting of him?
This was stupid. I’d never had to deal with this kind of thing ...
2020-01-11 05:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
So the story, as I knew it, went like this:
A few months ago, Max, Kylie and I had arrived at Skolala Refujeyo. Max had been immediately fascinated by Kylie’s curse, which wasn’t too weird; people liked to stare and gossip about curses, that was just a fact of life. We’d ...
2020-01-04 05:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“Hey, Max. What are the principal differences between a relative position translocation spell and a fixed position translocation spell?”
“The answer’s in the name, Kayden.”
“Okay, but – ”
“I’m not doing your homework for you, Kayden.”
“...
2019-12-28 05:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“Okay. Here we are.”
It had been almost a week since the awkward encounter at the gym. Instruktanto Miratova had bundled Kylie and I into a rickety-looking car, drove in silence for about ten minutes, and stopped in the middle of a broad field of grass. Aside from the road ...
2019-12-21 05:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Naturally, I couldn’t concentrate at all in the Fiore’s next lesson. Fortunately it was just about translocation spells (spells dealing with space, like teleportation, or enchanted bags that were bigger on the inside, that kind of thing), which I didn’t need to know about. All ...
2019-12-14 05:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post