GPCiMW Chapter 14 (Patreon)

I cradled Daphne gently against my chest, her head resting on my shoulder and my arm looped possessively over her chest. There was a bowl of ice cream balanced on her lap and I slowly picked away at the massive scoops of frozen, sugary goodness, slipping a bit at a time to my first witch between every few bites.

I hadn’t said anything, and I wasn’t really sure I planned to, but in a sense this treat was meant as an apology. Loath as I was to admit it, I’d been the one at fault. Daphne had only done her best to act in my best interest and it had been my responsibility to check what she was telling me and consider the potential consequences. Daphne was my witch. As any wizarding court would rule, I was ultimately responsible for her actions

I listened in silence as Daphne told me about futures that could have been. From the sound of it, Christopher Warner was truly a wizard deserving the nickname I’d given him. Christopher Warner was an idiot.The more I heard, the more Daphne’s words made sense. Yes, this was a wizard destined to always die. Someone as pigheaded, poorly educated, and generally set in his way as he was simply couldn’t survive in a culture so very different from the one he was raised in.

The boy––it didn’t feel right to call him a wizard––was some sort of religious fundamentalist. Despite all the materials he’d been provided, despite being told exactly what happened to wizards that didn’t bind a coven, he’d decided that he was right and we were all wrong. Even if he’d been given another week with Grace he would have refused to bind her on principle until it literally killed him. Apparently he thought this entire thing was some kind of test from the devil trying to lead him to sin.

Apparently my interference actually bought Christopher an entire twenty-four hours. Daphne wasn’t certain what exactly had ultimately killed Christopher, though she promised that she’d try to look into it with her gift, but if I hadn’t gotten to Grace when I did he would have apparently died a little bit before lunch during the second day of classes.

According to Daphne, the idiot had signed up for beginner’s fencing––one of the few sports that wizards tended to engage in rather than training witches to compete for them, though as far as I understood it was very different from the mundane sport of the same name. During their very first class, the shielding bracelet students used for sparring would have immediately overdrawn his mana, failed, and then the student he was paired with stabbed him straight through the neck with his sword.

I was pretty sure that wasn’t what had happened here––beginner’s fencing was scheduled for Tuesday morning––but I assumed it was something comparable. Many magic items and exercises that were perfectly safe for someone with even just a single witch in their coven could be deadly for someone with just a wizard’s mana.

Eventually Daphne fell silent. We sat together for several long minutes, my finger tracing patterns on Daphne’s collarbone as I considered what she’d told me. Eventually, I scraped up the last of the ice cream from the bowl and offered it to Daphne, who gingerly accepted the treat and then painstakingly licked every drop off the spoon.

I sighed heavily and dropped the spoon into the bowl with a loud clatter. “In the future, wizarding deaths are something I need to be warned about.” I deliberately ended there instead of making it an order. As long as nothing ultimately came of what happened, this could be the end of things. If not…well, I hoped to never have to cross that bridge.

Daphne bobbed her head. “Okay,” she whispered quietly. “I’m sorry. It…I didn’t think it was a big deal. I’ll do better.”

“Good.” I kissed the top of Daphne’s head. “You’ve been a wonderful witch so far, keep at it and we’ll be just fine.” Then I nudged her off my lap and stood up. “Now, I hope you enjoyed your ice cream, but break time is over. Grace! Uniforms! It's getting late and you two are falling behind schedule.”

Ten minutes later, Grace and Daphne were both dressed up and situated on their treadmills. Once I was certain they were good to go, I moved over to the other side of the training room and retrieved one of the two spell aids I’d received in class from where I’d left it the night before.

The carved wooden rod was exactly thirteen inches long and had about the same diameter as my thumb. This one was carved from a very dark wood, probably not mahogany––the color was wrong––but that was about the extent of my tree knowledge.

The surface of the wood was very smooth, but not slick, and there was a very obvious set of grooves in the wood where you were meant to hold it. The entire length of the rod was covered in incredibly intricate carvings, hundreds of individual symbols each no bigger than my pinky nail running in neat spirals from end to end.

Just holding it, the spell aid felt like an ordinary stick. It wasn’t particularly heavy, didn’t radiate a magical aura of any kind, and if I didn’t know better I would have thought it the work of some bored teenager with steady hands and a pen knife.

However, the moment I ran so much as a drop of mana through the wood, I could feel my magic responding. It was honestly rather disconcerting and several of my classmates had dropped their spell aids when the prof––Chuck, he wanted us to call him Chuck––had been walking us through the process for the first time.

Turning the rod slowly in my hands, I carefully lined my fingers up with the correct grooves, ensuring that each of my fingers wrapped neatly around a single line of runes and that my fingertips were positioned on just the right symbol. The final grip was slightly awkward––I had particularly long fingers and the aid was designed to work for any wizard––but I could deal with some minor discomfort.

Taking a deep breath, I thought back to Chuck’s lesson. Inhale. Focus. Exhale. Gather mana. Inhale. Protection, sturdiness, safety. Exhale. Mana flowed slowly down my arm and gathered in my hand and fingers, making my skin tingle slightly. Inhale. My favorite blanket wrapped around me in a tight cocoon to ward off the darkness; the high stone walls of a castle; a brightly-costumed man kneeling behind his shield.

Exhale. I carefully directed mana through the tips of my fingers into the rod, the carved runes beginning to light up a faint reddish glow darker than the wood around it. Inhale. I pictured Chuck standing at the center of the field with his own spell aid extended before him and a pale-pink shield the size of a manhole cover floating in front of him.

I exhaled one last time and jabbed the rod forward, pouring the last of the mana I’d gathered into the wood. The tip of the rod flashed with a blindingly bright light and my heart fell as every drop of mana I’d fed into the wood vanished in an instant.

“Damn it!” I swore loudly. And I’d thought I had it that time too!

Blinking spots out of my eyes, I hurriedly examined the rod for damage, then sighed in relief when I found it looking just as pristine as before. Okay, just a setback, not a disaster. This was fine. Everything was fine.

I carefully set the rod back down in its box, then sat down on the floor with a deep sigh. Okay. Where did I go wrong? Think, Severin.

After a moment, I very deliberately turned my body ninety degrees so that I could no longer see Daphne and Grace running in my peripheral vision. Okay. Now then. Where did I go wrong and what could I do differently next time? I had six days to figure out both the shield and the magic missile, and it was starting to look like I’d be needing a lot more time than I’d initially expected.

After my success a few days ago, I’d started to doubt the validity of just how hard it was to learn a spell. Now though, I was starting to understand just how much dad’s memories had carried me in that instance. Even with a spell aid––a tool specifically designed to make learning a specific spell super easy––this was freaking hard!

Focus. I had two hours before I needed to go to bed and I was going to make every single minute count.

The next morning, I woke up in a good mood despite my failures the night before. For one, I was woken by Daphne’s wonderful tongue––always a good way to start the day. More importantly, today I would have my first day of The Mind and You, the class I was most excited to take this year. I really hoped it wouldn’t be as much of a disappointment as runes had turned out to be.

In my excitement I decided to forgo most of my usual morning activities and instead rushed down to breakfast with Daphne in tow. After having barely eaten dinner the night before and then spending two hours burning through my mana, I was absolutely famished––though not to the point of sampling the disgusting goo Aglakok provided as witch-food.

I made it to the great hall considerably earlier than I ever had before and was slightly surprised to see the usually packed room nearly devoid of students. Instead, there were a lot more of the beastkin and lilin servants than I was used to seeing, hundreds of them swarming through the hall setting tables and bringing in food through camouflage servants’ doors.

I wasn’t the first student to make it to breakfast, there were about a dozen others I could see scattered throughout the hall, and I could see a trio of professors sitting together at the long table at the back of the hall. Most professors tended to eat in their rooms outside of special occasions, but there was always at least one in the hall during meals, and usually a few more than that.

Despite the bustle, I had no trouble finding a free, fully prepared table and getting some food from the rapidly filling serving platters at the buffet. Servants swiftly moved out of my way with the ease of long practice, bowing as I passed and then returning to their work.

Seeing that not everything was put out yet, I waved down one of the servants––a young-looking lilin carrying a big stack of clean plates––and asked her to bring me some faerie tea when she had a chance. Usually I preferred to start my morning with something hot, but I’d found that nothing woke me up quite like the invigorating iced drink. Perhaps when the weather turned colder I would go back to drinking hot tea in the morning, but for now I was enjoying having access to a beverage impossible to find in the mundane world.

The lilin listened to my order, bowed deeply, and hurried away. Barely a minute later a beastkin with chestnut-brown fur set a full pitcher down on the table beside me. Aglakok certainly had some very well trained fuckmeat on staff. Hopefully they put just as much work into training the ones they distributed to students as they did the ones they kept for themselves.

As I ate, the hall slowly emptied of servants until only a few dozen remained hovering around the buffet and taking away used dishes. At the same time, students started to flood in, the somber mood from last night’s announcement completely gone.

Around eight-thirty, I decided to get going. The classroom for The Mind and You wasn’t far from the great hall, but it was starting to get both noisy and crowded and I didn’t really feel like sharing a table with anyone right now. I had barely stood up when a group of four third-years swooped in to replace me.

As I’d expected, it didn’t take long to get to the classroom. It was a large, airy room on the second floor of the academy’s main building, one wall completely covered by floor-to-ceiling windows that opened onto the academy’s sprawling gardens. In the distance you could just barely make out some of the vast herb fields that surrounded the Aglakok on all sides.

On one side of the room there was a large blackboard surrounded by a half-circle of thirteen desks. The opposite wall was barely visible behind a wall of mattresses, beanbags, overstuffed armchairs, and what certainly looked like two sensory deprivation tanks. The rest of the room was wide open, with plenty of room for two-dozen or more people to spread out.

I had just stepped into the classroom when I was greeted by a soft, eerily melodious voice from almost directly behind me. “Good morning, honored student.”

I whirled around to find a very tall, willowy woman with angular features and luminescent blue eyes standing just out of sight beside the doorway, a sharp smile filled with pointed teeth on her face. I took a step back and nearly lashed out at her with the only real spell I knew, only stopped by the Aglakok collar around her slender neck.

A sidhe, I realized quickly, and a pretty old one at that. No other breed of fuckmeat looked quite so uncanny, one of several traits that made them rather unpopular as coven material despite their species’ range of useful natural abilities.

Her smile didn’t so much as twitch at my reaction. Instead, she continued as though I hadn’t nearly jumped out of my skin, “Welcome to The Mind and You, presented by my great master. Fuckmeat and witches are not permitted in the classroom without prior approval. Please deposit your attending witch in one of the provided containers and find a seat.”

Then she fell silent, her body as still as a statue. I nodded slowly and looked away. As she’d said, there were about two-dozen crates lined up in a neat row along the wall, each one just barely big enough to fit a witch.

I gestured to the crate furthest from the door. “Daphne,” I ordered.

I didn’t need to say anything else. Daphne stepped into the crate, then knelt down and carefully compacted herself into the tiny space. The moment her head was inside the box, the lid slammed shut and a bolt slid into place, sealing the container. I turned the key waiting for me in the lock, then pulled it out and slipped it into one of the inner pockets of my school robe.

Suddenly I felt a little bit bad about coming to class nearly twenty minutes before I needed to. That just meant that Daphne was going to be spending an extra twenty minutes squeezed into a painfully cramped metal box. Maybe later in the year I could bring Grace or one of my future coven members with me on Thursdays instead.

Well, whatever. Nothing to be done about it now. My eyes flicked back towards the sidhe, who was still standing in her spot by the door, and a cold shiver ran down my spine. Ugh. I had wanted to eventually add one to my coven, but maybe not. They were very useful fuckmeat, but maybe I could do without. Or perhaps they weren’t all so damn creepy. She looked like fucking slenderman without the suit, all boney arms and legs with barely any fat at all and completely emotionless features.

I didn’t always agree with the way wizards treated the fuckmeat races, but looking at that creepy smile I was glad that the initiatives to allow free-range fuckmeat communities had died out in the early seven-hundreds. Sure the idea of hunting down wild beastkin and nymphs sounded fun, but the idea of something like her jumping out at me in a dark forest sounded like nightmare fuel.

Over the next twenty minutes I was joined by seven more wizards, each of whom fell prey to the freaky sidhe’s jumpscare. One of them––a second year with red hair nearly the same shade as Grace’s––actually did attack her in his shock. He whirled around, a knife made from crackling black lightning appearing in his hand, and tried to stab her in the chest. The sidhe brushed him aside with a careless motion so fast I could barely track it, the knife vanishing in a puff of snowflakes, then politely chided him for ‘acting out during class’, her expression never changing.

Bleugh. Maybe a sidhe was not right for me. That sidhe certainly wasn’t.

A minute before nine, our Professor swept into the room followed by a second, utterly identical sidhe to the one that had greeted us as we came in. Wait no, not a second sidhe, but rather the same sidhe twice. The one trailing behind the professor stepped into the original sidhe and vanished, the greeter instantly falling into step behind him instead.

Very cool, but nope, nope, nope.

Professor Alexander Alexandrovich Alexandrov was an older wizard, his salt-and-pepper beard and the lines on his face showing his age even while the rest of his hair remained jet black. A pair of glasses poked out from the pocket of his shirt and his dark eyes flickered like candle flames in the morning sunlight pouring in through the windows.

He silently made his way up to the front of the room, then turned to face the eight of us, his hands folded behind his back and the creepy sidhe at his shoulder. “Good morning, students,” he began. He had a thick accent, but his words were still perfectly understandable. “I am glad to see that I have been given a…punctual class this year. I understand that it is still early in the morning for many of you, but I will not tolerate tardiness, nor other forms of disrespect in my classroom. Is that understood?”

He waited until we’d all nodded or otherwise acknowledged his words, then continued. “Good. I am Professor Alexandrov, but you may just call me Professor Alex if you’d like. My sidhe, Shella––” I almost jumped as she suddenly reappeared in my vision, having somehow lost track of her entirely in the time since the Professor had started speaking. “––shall serve as my teaching assistant. Unless I ask for questions, do not interrupt me while class is in session. Either Shella or I will be available from four to five every Monday and Wednesday in this room to answer any additional questions you may have.

“Now, let us dive right in. A single school year is far too little time to even begin delving into the complexities of the mind, but alas, that is all the time I am given to educate you. We shall make the most of that time.”

Professor Alex swept his hand through the air beside him and a complex diagram began to appear on the board behind him. “First we shall begin by discussing the nature of the mind and its connection to the soul and body. Copies of my presentation will be available after class, but I still encourage you all to take notes. This will be on the test.”