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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. It’s all my mum’s fault, of course, just like my stupid name. She’s one of those flowers and beads and crystals sorts, dancing to the Goddess under the moon. Everyone’s a lovely person and anyone who does anything wrong is misunderstood or unhappy.
Dad died here, during graduation, getting Mum out. We call it graduation because that’s what the Americans call it, and they’ve been carrying the lion’s share of the cost of the school for the last seventy years or so. Those who pay the piper call the tune, et cetera. But it’s hardly a celebratory occasion or anything. It’s just the moment when the seniors all get dumped into the graduation hall, far below at the very bottom of the school, and try to fight their way out through all the hungry maleficaria lying in wait. About half the senior class—that is, half of the ones who’ve managed to
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If it weren’t for Mum, I wouldn’t have been welcome in my own home.
Hope in your heart doesn’t count.
My anger’s a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning and stays a long time.
The one and only way to stop a maw-mouth is to give it indigestion. If you rush into the maw-mouth on your own, with a powerful enough shield, then you have a chance to get inside before it can start eating you. In theory, if you manage to reach the core, you can burst it apart from there. But mostly people don’t get that far; there’re only three known cases where that’s ever been done, and by a circle of wizards. 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
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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.
And yes, fine, but I think after a certain number of evil choices, it’s reasonable shorthand to decide that someone’s an evil person who oughtn’t have the chance to make any more choices. And the more power someone has, the less slack they ought to be given.
Yes, now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet.
Lol
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. Every five minutes or so I told myself to unclench my hands and go to sleep, with no effect.
And if you’re a mal, and therefore only exist because of magic in the first place, you effectively have to persuade a mundane that you exist and function in the world, contrary to all their expectations, before you can eat them.
“My mom told me that all boys are carrying a secret pet mal around in their underwear, and if you get alone with them they let it out,” Aadhya said. We both shrieked with laughter, and she laughed, too. “I know, right? But she did it on purpose, she told me to pretend that was true, the whole time I was in here, because it would be true, if I let a boy get me pregnant.”
Then he said flatly, without looking me in the face, “I’m trying not to get kicked out of your life,” and I got it, embarrassingly belated. I had Aadhya and Liu, now, and not just him. It was like all that mana at my hands, something so vital you could get used to it so fast you’d almost forget what life had been like without it—until it went away again. But he didn’t. He didn’t have anybody else; he’d never had anybody, the same way I’d never had anybody, but now he’d had me, and he wanted to lose that about as much as I wanted to trade him and Aadhya and Liu for an enclave seat in New York.
My darling girl, I love you, have courage, my mother wrote, and keep far away from Orion Lake.
