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We’re not meant to all survive, anyway. The school has to be fed somehow.
one whole wall of the room is open to the scenic view of a mystical void of darkness, so delightfully like living in a spaceship aimed directly into a black hole,
Some sorcerers get an affinity for weather magic, or transformation spells, or fantastic combat magics like dear Orion. I got an affinity for mass destruction.
And no one is going to help you build mana to summon a personal demon army, so let’s be real, it takes malia.
the power’s got to come from somewhere, and if you haven’t gathered it yourself, then it’s probably coming from something living, because it’s easier to get power out of something that’s already alive and moving around.
mana—or life force or arcane energy or pixie dust or whatever you want to call it; mana’s just the current trend—from
eighteen years ago—which I’m sure was not coincidentally near when Orion was conceived—only a dozen students came out, and they were all gone dark. They’d banded into a pack and taken out all the rest of the seniors in their year for a massive dose of power.
great-grandmother took one look at me and fell down in a visionary fit and said I was a burdened soul and would bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world if I wasn’t stopped.
My great-grandmother was just the first in a long line of people who meet me, smile, and then stop smiling, before I’ve even said a word.
horrible it is to be constantly surrounded by people who believe in absolutely everything, from leprechauns to sweat lodges to Christmas carols, but who won’t believe that you can do actual magic.
affinity is laying waste to multitudes, so I haven’t had much opportunity to try the experience,” I said.
Whenever I let my temper get away from me like that, I always feel rotten afterwards. It’s rubbing my own face in how easy everything would be if I just gave in.
don’t think anyone ever gets used to it, but only the most sensitive flowers still burst into tears over losses by the time they’re staring graduation in the face.
You have to ration sympathy and grief in here the way you ration your school supplies, unless you’re a heroic enclaver with a vat of mana.
only all the kids from Mumbai didn’t treat me like a leper because they’ve heard whispers about my great-grandmother’s prophecy.
For the last three years, I’ve had to think and plan and strategize how I’m going to survive every single meal in here, and I’m so tired of it, and I’m tired of all of them, hating me
It’s so hard, it’s so hard in here all the time,
We’re all in this shitty place together, but they’re going to get out. They’re loaded up with powerful artifacts and the best spells, guarding each other’s backs and pumping each other full of power; they’re going to survive unless they get unlucky.
won’t be okay, and Mum won’t be okay if I stay with her, because the mals are going to keep coming for me, and people don’t like me enough to help me even if I scream.
I’d shown them I was reliable, that I’d share what good luck came my way with people who had thrown me a crumb, and now they were showing me they’d recognized it, and that they were willing to throw me more of those crumbs.
instead he’d actually been making an effort to hang around with me, and if he wasn’t waiting for me to turn maleficer anymore, that meant that what he wanted was—to hang out with somebody who wouldn’t genuflect to him.
my mom also told me to be polite to rejects, because it’s stupid to close doors, and suspicious of people who are too nice, because they want more from you than they’re letting on. And she was right.
The only realistic goal for a single wizard is to distract it. That’s all Dad did. He grabbed the tentacle and pulled it away from Mum, back into the mass of the maw-mouth. He had time to turn around and tell her he loved her and loved me, the baby they’d only just realized was on the way, and then the maw-mouth got through his shield and swallowed him up.
It’s just making the choice to put yourself right, whatever that means for you. On the handful of occasions when I asked her whether I really was a monster, what was wrong with me, she told me there was nothing wrong with me that wasn’t wrong with me, and made me do the meditation until I felt right again.
anything. She says it’s too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it’s okay because they’re still good people overall, inside their own heads.
he didn’t know Mum well enough to understand that the one thing she’ll never go for is the lesser evil. So instead she took her greater evil back home and raised me and loved me and protected me with all her might, and now here I am, ready to begin my destined career any day I like.
My teeth were already clenched with fury by then, with a new addition of lurking anxiety: was I starting to feel evil? Yes, now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet. That would be so stupid it seemed almost likely.
Spellbooks wander off the shelves even in enclaves if you don’t have a really good catalog and a powerful librarian keeping track of them.
The rotten thing about having Mum as a mum is, I know how to stop being angry. I’ve been taught any number of ways to manage anger, and they really work. What she’s never been able to teach me is how to want to manage it. So I go on seething and raging and knowing the whole time that it’s my own fault, because I do know how to stop.
I love having existential crises at bedtime, it’s so restful. I lay awake for at least an hour after the final bell, staring furiously at the blue flicker of the gaslight by the door.
And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.
And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.
I wanted to pretend that all of that was fair and okay, like Orion bleating how we’ve got the same chances. But I can’t pretend that, because I didn’t grow up in that lie, so I don’t actually want in. I don’t want that safety and comfort and luxury at the cost of other kids dying in here.
people in here find out I destroyed a maw-mouth, some of them are going to look up that same journal article I read on the subject and understand what I am, what I can do. I could
Wizards don’t have faith in magic. We believe in magic, the way mundanes believe in cars. No one has deep discussions around a bonfire about whether a car is real or not, unless they’ve taken more drugs than usual, which is, not coincidentally, the condition of most mundanes who do encounter mals.
told her even more grudgingly that I’d just sat in the trees with the bird until it died, and then buried it. I hated having to tell her, I hated how happy it made me seeing her face glow. It felt like giving in, and I hated giving in more than anything.
If Orion was a person, he didn’t owe it to her to keep wearing that convenient little buzzer on his wrist, just in case she or any of her actual friends needed help, for nothing in return. If he was a person, he had as much right as she did to be scared and selfish, and she was supposed to pay back everything he gave her. She wasn’t interested in that deal, was she? She wasn’t going to come running if he needed help. She’d be running the other way.
If anyone tries to organize anything especially alarming, like a gang of maleficers, and other kids find out about it but don’t have the firepower to stop it on their own, they can call a tribunal,
It’s only worth calling a tribunal if you can reasonably expect that everyone else in the school is going to instantly agree that there’s a very clear, very imminent threat to their lives from the person you’re accusing.
We all have to gamble with our lives in here, we don’t get a choice about that; the trick is figuring out when it’s worth taking a bet.
“You just—you know, you get used to things. And you don’t think about whether they’re good. Or even okay.” She swallowed. “You don’t want to think about it. And nobody else seems to, either. “And there’s nothing you can see to do about it.” She looked at me, her whole soft face and clear eyes unhappy. I shrugged a little. “Because there’s not meant to be anything you can do about it.”
“And I wasn’t wrong! I wasn’t dating him.” “Yeah, that’s fair,” Aadhya said. “Only a boy would date somebody for two weeks and not mention it to them.”
All that mana just flowing at your fingertips, so much you couldn’t see the end of it. I hadn’t been able to feel the work behind it. It had felt as free as air. I’d had it for only a few hours and I already missed it.
