4.77: Power And Portals

Kylie recovered quickly. It seemed like her spell was perfectly content once I was back in range, and she just needed a bit of rest. I… wasn’t so lucky.

Since getting back on campus, I’d been experiencing random bouts of nausea and tingling. They felt like familiarity spell problems, except that they were very, very mild; for the first couple of days I thought they might be my imagination, but after a week with no change, I reported the symptoms to Malas, who put me through just about every non-magical scan and assessment he could think of and turned up nothing. The bouts never seemed to happen when I was with Malas. I pointed this out and he shrugged it off as a coincidence, but he kept me close by a lot more after I mentioned it.

Working for Malas was still mostly cleaning stuff. Occasionally, he’d show me a basic medical skill like hooking up some piece of equipment or reading some kind of scan, but it was msotly cleaning, cataloguing and fetching. According to his other apprentices, this was normal for the first couple of months. After that, he’d have me start learning about the body, but apprentices weren’t allowed to do any actual medicine until they had an appropriate understanding of what they were doing, which seemed reasonable.

The coven (minus Cheryl, who was off with her master somewhere) got together on Intitiation day to support Alan. (Both Helen and Jamil had decided to leave the school, although they’d remained supportive of Refujeyo in the handful of interviews I was able to get copies of.) When he came out of the Pit coughing violently and with tears streaming down his face but very much alive, we all went to lunch together to celebrate. It was on the way to the mess hall that I discovered the root of my new nausea problem.

We took a route I didn’t usually take, and I felt the disconcerting tingle and mild sickness just before we turned down one final hall leading to the mess hall itself. I shook the feeling off as we entered the room (the bouts never lasted long), then absent-mindedly turned the wrong direction and nearly bumped into someone because I was on autopilot and had forgotten that we hadn’t come in through my usualy entrance.

“So, Alan,” Hua said as she piled vegetables onto her plate, “how does it feel to be an official mage student?”

He shrugged. “The same as before, but probably with some new nightmares?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “The nightmares fade.”

“Like hell they do!” Talbot exclaimed. “Mine are fresh as ever.”

“Maybe you’re just strange,” Hua said.

“I’m on Talbot’s side,” I said. “I met a monster thing in my initiation and my last dream about it was… a couple of months ago, I think?” I was a bit too distracted to fully invest in the conversation.  There was something familiar, something important, about the specific door we’d come in through. What as it?

“What about you, Kylie?” Talbot asked. “Still get Inititaion nightmares?”

“Not to bring the mood down, but I get nightmares about so many other events that it’s hard to be sure,” she said.

It was the door that the janitors used! That’s what was so familiar about it! We’d come in through the entrance that we’d seen the janitors use, the one we’d followed one through and totally failed to find their kitchen. We’d conclude that we couldn’t follow them because there’d been a portal that…

That…

Hmm.

“I think I dropped something in the tunnels,” I told the others. “I’ll be right back.”

I backtracked, following the route we’d followed that janitor that one time. The route we’d just takesn. And I paid attention to my body. I followed a straight hall, turned a corner, and… there. A faint tingle, a little nausea. Barely enough to notice, if I hadn’t been feeling it regularly for almost two weeks. I shook, it off, turned around, and walked back – there, again, at the same point in the corridor.

After the thing for Alan, I spent some timed just wandering around the school and taking note. The reason the bouts had never had the good fortune to hit while I was with Malas was that they only happened in the corridors. They happened as I turned certain, specific corners. Entered certain rooms. Left the school.

“It’s the portals!” I announced triumphantly to Malas as I reported for training that afternoon.

“What is?”

“The tingling and nausea! It happens when I go through the school’s portals. It’s not a new symptom; I’m just carrying so much of the Destiny that I’m sensitive enough to feel the portals now.”

“Ah.” Malas looked thoughtful. “That’s… probably not good, but we don’t have the context to be sure.”

“It’s definitely annoying,” I said. “You would not believe how many portals are in this place. Well, you probably know all of them. But most people wouldn’t believe it.”

“Hmm. Well, let me know if it gets worse. If just moving around the school becomes a health risk for you, that’s a serious problem.”

“I don’t think it will,” I said. “I mean, how much magic can one human body hold, anyway?”

“Interesting question, but if you’d asked me a year ago I would have estimated a lot less than you already are holding. We simply do not know how this link will progress.”

“And the possibility of breaking it is long gone, because it’d kill Kylie.”

“Indeed.” He glanced at my arm. My healer’s robes were short-sleeved, baring the familiarity runes, and the lines cut through them, the attempt to cancel them made right after getting out of the Labyrinth. I knew what he was thinking. Something else about our link had prevented it from being cancelled, something else made me ‘sticky’ to Kylie’s magic as her familiar, and we had no idea what it was. It might simply be that I was a human, the natural home of magic. Or it might be something else, something that could change. The link might break, suddenly, and we’d never know why.

Malas cleared his throat awkwardly. “The best we can do at this stage is keep monitoring it. Let me show you how to make a hospital bed.”

After a couple of hours of mundane cleaning stuff, Malas let me go, and I headed for agreabla insulo, the little island with the cottage and Mae and Terry’s garden. The schoo, itself, the physical place, had been bothering me since getting back. The feeling took me by surprise; I hadn’t felt confined or unmoored in the confusing, endless tunnels of the school for a long time, not since I’d been an initiate. But lately…

It wasn’t just that walking the tunnels made me feel very faintly ill as I passed through the portals, although that didn’t help. It was the bond with Kylie. It wasn’t her fault; it wasn’t anyone’s fault. (Well, it was my fault, really. The familiarity bond had been my idea.) But her nearly dying after only four days apart had really brought home how confining the bond was; it made us reluctant to go out of range of each other at all. Which meant that we were both spending most of our time in the school’s tunnels, where we were definitely withing range. All of the outside locations except for Duniyasar (which neither of us were keen on going to if e didn’t have to, given how much tragedy had happened there) were out of range of the school, meaning that to stay in range, we either had to stay underground, or go outside together.

I liked spending time with Kylie. But only being allowed outside with your roommate got to be a bit much. We were both desperate for any outside time alone, so we took small risks. Usually one of us would disappear out of range for about ten minutes. Never longer than half an hour. It was an overreaction; we’d been separate for four days without problems over the holidays. But better safe than sorry.

The sky outside was filled with grey, heavy clouds, threatening rain. Whis was just, just fantastic. Another source of stress outside was really helpful.

“Kayden! Long time, no see.”

I looked up. Terry was approaching. She seemed to be Maeless today.

“Hi,” I said. “How’s the garden going?”

“I’m about ready to give up on it. Brown?” She asked, indicating my robes.

“Oh! Yeah. I’m Malas’ apprentice now.”

“Oh, nice! Congratulations!”

I shrugged. “It’s alright. How’ve you been?”

“Y’know, the usual. Trying to convince Mae to test up a year so that we can maybe get out of school sometime this century.”

“Oh, you’re trying to arrange stuff to you can leave school together?”

“Of course. We’ve got a joint funeral and wake planned, it’s gonna be amazing. Oh, on that note, Josh has a birthday party coming up. He wants you to come.”

It took me a moment to remember who Josh was. That socially aggressive boy from Terry’s friend’s wake; the one Mae called ‘Jaybaby’. He seemed nice enough, but I was pretty sure that Mae and Terry had only invited me to the funeral because I wasn’t straight. Or maybe because I was trans; they might kno that, if they’d ever bothered to google me. Either way, that was hardly a basis for getting into a social circle, so…

But that’s what I’d thought about the coven, wasn’t it? I hadn’t seen the point of Kylie getting together a group just because we were all witches. And look how wrong I’d been about that.

Besides, Josh seemed nice enough, What was I going to do, refuse to hang out with him because he was gay? That was even more stupid.

“Sure,” I said. “Send me the time and I’ll check my schedule. Malas has me pretty busy but I’m sure I can make the time.”

“Fantastic! I’ll let you know.”

I’d been outside for about a minute, but already I was worried about Kylie, so I said my goodbyes and went back in. I went to the gym instead. Normally, if I felt trapped or upset about something, I’d go to the rock climbing cliff, but that was out of Kylie’s range, too, and worse than the island because on the rock climbing cliff I’d definitely lose track of time. So instead, I just lifted weights until I couldn’t lift my arms all the way up any more.

It didn’t make me feel any better.

But it would be fine. There was no reason for Kylie and I to need to be separate, so everything would all be fine. We even had a plan to keep her fine! The prophecy that the Destiny had given in the Labyrinth of Dreams, the one I’d recently remembered, warned that the spell was too much for her, and that she’d need to ‘borrow another’s throne’. And also break a tooth.

If only we had absolutely any idea what that meant.