“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. B...
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 t...
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 seem...
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 ston...
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. T...
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 tha...
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...
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...
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 consc...
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 bonfi...
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 ano...
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 experien...
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, ...
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...
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 coul...
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...
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...
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 c...
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 s...
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 ...
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 pla...
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 s...
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 mi...
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 careful...
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 litt...
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...
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 –...
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...
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....
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 coff...
2020-07-11 13:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post