Chapter Text
Major Arcana: The Chariot
You know there are strange creatures that reside in the nearby woods, but you’ve only seen a few. During a patrol of the roof with your Rival, a giant snow owl swooped down through the clouds and dropped the carcass of a mauled stag in your path. The head of the dead creature had too many eyes and tangled antlers. The owl departed, leaving the corpse behind, its blood pooling, and running off the building. How do you remove the carcass from the roof? Why does it seem like your Rival expected this?
Lucian is in the library, studying for his Advanced Potions final. In two days, he’ll be tasked with using the same six ingredients to make a variety of draughts, poultices, and distillations. He’ll receive the list of potions when his exam begins. The ingredients, he knows now: copper shavings, mothers’ tears, aloe, cordyceps, rat claws, and ladybug wings. Due to the ethical implications surrounding mothers’ tears, many of his fellow students are boycotting the final. It’s fast becoming a whole thing. He, admittedly, cannot conceive of his own mother crying, thus has a poor understanding of the heartbreaking gravity of the situations during which this ingredient is collected. He is, however, certain the test will go ahead as planned and he needs to be ready.
Four hours ago, Lucian awkwardly jammed himself into the farthest, darkest corner of the map room and he’s been sitting on the floor since. His ankles hurt. His knees hurt. One muscle deep in his right lower back keeps falling asleep. Still, neat piles of white note cards radiate outward from him, each stack representing a combination of ingredients and the potion they make.
First, he sorted them by purpose.
Then by principal ingredient.
Now he’s rearranging them by method of preparation.
It’s a challenge, but Lucian enjoys a challenge. Well, he enjoys this kind of challenge: academic puzzles. Categorizing stuff. He does not enjoy challenges like “continuing to self-reflect and internally process the events of Convergence.”
What was that?
Where did they go?
Was it real?
Despite the magical community’s mastery of manipulating the fundamental threads of the universe, metaphysically, “what happens when you die” is woefully understudied.
Oh shit, Lucian realizes suddenly, Alexis went there. Alexis died and went there.
When Lucian was nine and his friend-and-occasional-babysitter was twelve, Alexis fell and broke her wrist. The two of them had been exploring a neighboring house’s unfinished, second-story addition so, in an attempt to avoid punishment, the children performed complex, cooperative healing magic to mend the injury themselves. It did not go well. Four days later, when Alexis came over to babysit, Lucian said her arm looked like “something out of Night of the Living Dead. ” Later that evening, Alexis checked into St. Joan’s with sepsis and a week after that, when she finally came home, she told Lucian something wild: she died and saw God. Well, not died, she’d been in a coma. And not God, capital ‘G’ but… someone. Something? On a mountain top, and they had a conversation she couldn’t remember.
He’s considering texting Alexis, asking her what the sun looked like on that mountain top, when his phone buzzes. It’s JT. Lately, it’s always JT - which is… nice. Her messages arrive in brisk succession, tiny banners lighting up his screen. She writes (and texts) exactly like she speaks and he finds it charming.
Hey, just opened the winter break chore assignments
Help me out here
What’s “Arcane On-Call, see Dr. Elvas”
It’s the whole break and it’s just us?
Ngl I’m happy not to portal garbage
Or melt icicles haha
Well, DID you see Dr Elvas?
Lucian asks.
Nope, not at all!
says JT.
>:(
replies Lucian.
<3
says JT.
Magical problem-solving
he says.
That’s how Elvas described it. They think you and I are good at it and they want us to be available in case someone needs help levitating a bookshelf or gets themselves accidentally trapped in a cursed dimension. We’ll have school-issued phones, people can call us.
And... what if the cursed dimension doesn’t have reception?
Dunno. I guess that’s more of a Dr. Elvas-level problem?
I can work with that
Hey where are you??
You wanna get food
Lucian eyes his note card stacks.
I dunno, I’m in the library
he types.
I really need to study
Cmonnnnnnnnnnn
I bet you’ve been there all morning
Oh god is it that mothers tears final? It's gonna get canceled. Anyway YOU KNOW ALL THERE IS TO KNOW
As if on cue, Lewis rises into the room through the floor, glowing faintly, with a purposeful scowl on his face. The old ghost has been observing the sorting, re-sorting, re-sorting process on and off since Lucian first plunked down earlier. Lewis firmly crosses his arms, bends at his incorporeal waist, and whispers something in Lucian’s ear. Lucian sighs.
Okay, fine
Lewis says if I don’t take a break he’s gonna hide all my flashcards
Haha fuck yeah
TELL HIM THANK YOU
THAT’S a good friend right there
“I am a good friend,” Lewis says to himself thoughtfully as he melts back into the floor, ruffling Lucian’s potion piles as he disappears.
***
“I get it now,” sighs JT as she removes the cap to a black dry-erase marker. The dining hall is nearly empty, the day's pre-dinner lull. People will really start pouring in about an hour.
“Get what?” asks Lucian, unusually chipper. He takes a large bite of a blueberry muffin.
“Arcane On-Call. Elvas got tired of dealing with everyone’s bullshit. Now that’s our job.”
“Our job is everyone’s bullshit?”
“Yes! I mean–”
She gestures to the enormous white board in front of her, picks a blank spot, and scrawls INFINITE SELF-REPLICATING CROISSANTS in accusatory all-caps. Lucian suppresses a snicker and shakes his head sagely.
“Infinite is a stretch,” he says, “those kids weren’t that good at spellcasting. An hour or two, max, if left unchecked. The croissants wouldn’t have even come up to our ankles.”
This break, Lucian has learned many things. Primarily, that he, apparently, enjoys responding to his classmates’ strange emergencies. With JT. That part is probably important. He thinks the two of them make a good team, kind of like Mulder and Scully in The X-Files. Like, the episode where the agents go on COPS to track a werewolf in LA.
JT is loath to admit it, but she’s enjoying herself, too. It’s novel having a reason to see Lucian every day, and something about becoming a trusted community figure is scratching an itch she didn’t know she had. Apparently, JT’s always wanted a framework around which she can conceptualize socializing. Also, people keep referring to her and Lucian as a couple. She corrected the first few but Lucian never did and after a while, she started to let it slide, too.
And everyone else staying at Brackroot? Turns out students are far more likely to ask for help from other students. Dr. Elvas found the accidents, injuries, and assorted winter break problems tedious before, and those were just the dorks willing to tell on themselves to their headmaster. Originally, Dr. Elvas asked JT and Lucian to keep a log of their Arcane On-Call incidents. Within three days, JT’s paper list got too long, so she transferred its contents to a giant whiteboard she found in an empty classroom. Across the top, in beautiful, illuminated-style Medieval lettering, she inscribed:
THE BRACKROOT WINTER BREAK ARCANE ON-CALL BLOTTER
Then she wheeled the whole thing into the dining hall and parked it next to the fireplace. Her intention was to keep everything anonymous. For dignity. Her fellow students did not agree with this plan.
For the last four weeks, Brackroot’s remaining denizens have been joyously ‘claiming’ their exploits by autographing the board, signing their names beside their shenanigans. Some even chose to self-report scandalous incidents JT originally omitted in the name of privacy.
FOURSOME RUINED BY PANIC (DESTINY) is the latest. It is signed: Shae, Carissa, Len, and Jay!!!! HELL YEAH!!!!
Destiny, the magical world’s DMT, has featured heavily in the students’ lives this break. Its appearance at Convergence was, apparently, just the beginning. Now it seems like everyone has either tried it or had to contact Arcane On-Call because they discovered a fellow student having a Bad Time on it. There’s even a catch-all category on the board called PANIC ON DESTINY. Beneath the title, there are 37 tallies. The LIFE-CHANGING REVELATIONS ON DESTINY heading has 30 tallies, some of which are from the same trips as the ones in the PANIC category.
JT is proud of the Blotter. It’s been weird. Sometimes it was hard work. But look at everything she and Lucian have accomplished!
There’s their very first emergency as Arcane On-Call,
CHARMED SHEARS RUIN DOG HAIRCUT
followed by, predictably,
CHARMED SHEARS RUIN HUMAN HAIRCUT.
At this point, JT remembers thinking that helping people with their magic-related issues might not be so bad. Less than six hours later, however, she was proven wrong when she and Lucian responded to
PIZZA-HEATING SPELL CREATES SMALL SUN
which, in about thirty minutes, led to its companion incident
SMALL SUN CREATES SMALL BLACK HOLE.
Still, there were plenty of easy calls:
POTIONS LAB 3 VERY PINK FOR 48 HOURS,
as well as
PORTAL TOO SMALL/COUCH STUCK,
and
VENGEFUL CHRISTMAS GHOST,
and
SWALLOWED AN EGG WHOLE WHILE TRANSFORMED INTO SNAKE.
Then there was last week’s ongoing issue:
RUNAWAY SLIME,
which ended up causing a
CRYSTAL BALL EXPLOSION
in the Elementals’ common room.
Near the bottom of the board lives what Lucian considers their most X-Files -inspired mystery,
LAPTOP LOST TO CREATURE SCIENCE’S RESIDENT CUTTLEFISH.
What began as a tech theft issue concluded in the revelation that Brackroot is, apparently, home to a jealous cephalopod smart enough to wield magic and create very small portals. Lucian convinced the cuttlefish to apologize, but JT still finds the wider implications of the whole situation vaguely upsetting. A fellow Third Year - the erstwhile laptop’s owner - will be publishing a paper about the incident, funded entirely by the magical division of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
JT replaces the cap of her marker and returns it to the white board. The magical community can be so awkward about money but she has half a mind to ask Dr. Elvas for an hourly wage next year. Or maybe a daily rate? Payment per emergency? Maybe she could frame it like an existential trauma stipend.
Her mind is still stuck on fractal croissants, swelling and peeling off of one another like hideous, pastry succulents. Puffy, fresh-baked millipedes crawl across a dorm room floor via sheer gumption and segmented, magical multiplication. Like the first Fourth of July snake she ever witnessed. She panicked because it was far too long for such a tiny tablet set aflame.
Where does it come from? What if it doesn’t stop? her child-self cried.
Where did all those croissants come from? She’s trying to draft the spellwork in her head, imagining the threads of reality surrounding her as potential croissants - proto-croissants, so to speak - when the Arcane On-Call phones ring again.
JT groans audibly.
Lucian picks up.
“Uh huh,” he says, “how big?”
JT massages her temples.
“Just to be clear,” she says quietly, “I need a smoke break before whatever this is.”
Lucian nods reassuringly before tapping the screen of his phone.
“Okay,” he says to the caller, “I just put you on speaker so you can tell both of us.”
“Uh, it’s the size of a car,” says the voice on the other end of the line.
“Like, a big car,” says a second voice, “one of those SUVs with a third-row seat.”
“Alright,” JT cuts in, “have either of you consumed mind-altering substances today?”
JT learned (the hard way) these are good facts to establish at the beginning of a call.
“No!” says the first voice.
“Yes!” says the second voice, before devolving into giggles. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m Remi. That’s Lorne. But it was flying around up there well before we started smoking, I promise.”
“Yeah, we’re watching it right now,” says Lorne.
“Hold up,” JT cuts in again, “what is it ?”
“It’s a white owl,” says Lucian softly.
“A huge white owl,” corrects Lorne.
“We were walking down to the lake and we saw this giant fucking owl fly out of the forest,” adds Remi. “It’s been doing loops over the castle for, like, half an hour now.”
JT’s dark eyes narrow.
“And you just decided to call us?”
“I mean, it wasn’t freaky until about five minutes ago,” insists Lorne. “It was kind of majestic, in a fucked up way. But this last loop, when it flew back toward the forest? I think it went hunting, because now it’s carrying something .”
“Something big,” adds Remi. “That’s, like… suspicious, right? What if it’s a person?”
JT switches her eyes into light mode specifically so she can more obviously roll them.
Be nice, Lucian mouths silently.
“We’ll take a look around the roof,” he reassures Remi and Lorne. “Arcane On-Call’s got your back.”
JT’s already fished her pack of clove cigarettes out of her bag. She holds them in her fist, waving them in the air as she points upward.
“C’mon, Mulder,” she shouts, marching out of the dining hall, “we got a big owl.”
Lucian raises an eyebrow. He didn’t tell her, did he? He can’t remember. Did he tell her? About the X-Files thing?
***
Shit, that’s bigger than an SUV, JT thinks. That’s the size of a school bus.
She’s still clutching her pack of cloves, officially distracted from her nicotine fix. The sun is setting and the snowy owl is departing, its talons covered in gore, its enormous wings cutting through the sky. It’s returning to the forest. Permanently? Or will it loop back?
For some reason, JT thinks the creature is done here.
The owl’s last pass was close. Very close. The combination of large, moving, and in the sky awakens a primal fear in the human psyche. TOO BIG, screamed JT’s adrenaline. Then the owl cut low, growing larger and larger, before pulling up at the last second, buzzing the tallest spire of the roof like a hot shot fighter pilot and dropping… this, practically at her feet.
JT and Lucian assess the bloody, hulking mass. Fur. Broken bones. Antlers. It’s still breathing, air wheezing from gashes in its side. Its many eyes are focused intently on JT.
“Thus is the cycle of life,” mutters JT as she slides a black cigarette out of its pack.
Years before Brackroot, JT worked for a shop whose employee parking was located on the rooftop of the garage across the street. One day, she pulled into a space just in time to witness a hawk absolutely decimate a pigeon, snatching the rounder, slower bird directly out of the air as it attempted to flee. The predator slammed its meal into the concrete to break its neck, then proudly flew its lifeless body to the top of the flood light in front of JT’s car. Curiosity got the best of her. She peeked up through her windshield to find the hawk staring back, viscera trailing from its beak. Downy feathers speckled with blood began to coat the hood of her vehicle, and JT thought,
thus is the cycle of life.
***
Speaking softly seems… right. Respectful, like the proper thing for a human to do at the altar of a dead forest god.
“Why’s it like that?” asks JT quietly. “Are all magical deer like that?”
She means its eyes: many. Too many. And she means its antlers, a gnarled, asymmetrical nest of bone atop its head.
Lucian is trying to remember - this creature has a name.
Shit, what is it?
Once a year when Lucian was a child, usually at the height of the summer, his parents would announce their family was “heading to the cabin” to “go camping” for a week. This was, as Lucian came to learn, an extremely loose application of these phrases, since his family’s “cabin” was, in fact, a trapezoidal, three-story architectural marvel perched, illegally, on a bluff in the heart of Olympic National Park. As for “camping,” well, that was just his mother’s term for “where we’re going, there are more trees than people.”
And young Lucian loved every single minute.
The scenery was awe-inspiring in the way only a National Park can be. The house was hidden from the prying eyes of the US government by complex magic, quiet and calm and full of light, even on overcast days. There was a tiny, picturesque lake, trails to explore, plenty of time to read, and sometimes his Aunt Celine (and whoever she happened to be dating at the time) came along too.
Aunt Celine excelled at curling up next to the fire pit and telling unsettling tales about the forest. Were they real, the entities she described? Fantastic creatures, older than humanity from beyond our world? What did she really know about their desires, their habits, their rituals? Lucian was never sure. She spoke with such confidence, and with a glass of red wine and her iridescent scales catching the firelight just so, Celine cultivated an air of supernatural authority.
If dragons were real, why not a pale, faceless humanoid who mimics the sound of a crying baby to lure you to your death? Why not a cosmic fungal superconsciousness, sleeping beneath the earth? And why not a many-eyed deer, its antlers tangled and chaotic, who visits when death has been, is, or will be near?
The Observer.
That’s what Celine called it.
Its existence came up only once. Lucian was maybe seven or eight. The moon was full, the fire was roaring, and his parents were unusually relaxed. Celine brought her girlfriend that summer, a kind woman whose name he’s since forgotten, who taught him how to fish and wore her hair in a sculptural bun composed of hundreds of tiny braids.
He was making s’mores while his mother gossiped about an acquaintance of hers, sick in the hospital and hallucinating. Cecelia called his visions “visitations.” The man kept ranting about a “staring deer,” calling the creature “the king of death.”
Lucian remembers his aunt gasping, holding her hands over her mouth with excitement. He remembers Celine taking a big gulp of wine. And he remembers how she explained it: neither king nor queen, a shard from another place.
She said The Observer is considered an evil omen but that it is, truly, neutral. She said its eyes see death , calling it simply curious about a process it will never experience. Because that was the other thing Celine said about it - the many-eyed Observer is eternal.
“It's a mistake to assign human motivations to it,” she explained, emphatically leaning closer to the fire, “because humans have these overwhelming, conflicting feelings about death. Personally, I think we could learn a lot from The Observer. Embrace death as the uncomplicated inevitability of being alive. After all, in the end, death is the one thing we all share in common.”
The creature on the roof is bleeding to death.
Lucian can’t make it make sense.
Maybe this isn’t The Observer, he thinks. Maybe this is a real animal Celine based her story on, because after a few glasses of wine, it was funny to make a too-serious kid ponder his mortality on a moonlit night in the woods.
JT is smoking and circling the creature cautiously. The deer’s eyes follow her and Lucian notices, with a shiver, that the smaller ones roll backward when JT crosses behind its body. It’s watching her through itself. Ugh. Fucking creepy.
That owl did a number on this thing. Its throat is a mess of meat, Wesley’s injury a thousand times over. The weight of its tangled antler crown tugs on its head, and every time it shifts its gaze, it loses more blood from the gashes on its mangled neck. Lucian listens to it wheeze wetly, its blood pooling. If that puddle gets any bigger, it'll start to run off the roof, following the same path as melting ice and snow.
Icicles. That was another crew’s responsibility this year, he realizes. They did a much better job, Lucian notes, glancing at the eaves of the tower - no icicles and no injuries.
***
It takes JT and Lucian exactly thirty minutes to leave the carcass, change their clothes, and visit the library to ask Lewis about “butcher spells.”
“He totally thinks we killed someone,” JT says as she and Lucian portal back to the roof. At their backs, in the stone entrance hall to the library, torches flicker in the rush of air. They’re atmospheric aesthetic spells - the library hasn’t had real fire anywhere near their books since the founding of Brackroot. “I can’t believe there wasn’t anything. Not even history. Everyone needs to chop shit up! Didn’t ancient witches have steak?”
“It’s an academic library,” says Lucian. “Anyway, that’s what the internet is for.”
“Oh yeah, we’re on a list now.” JT shakes her head. “Or you are, we used your phone.”
“I was probably already on a list,” shrugs Lucian.
JT stretches her wrists, then her fingers, practicing the motions a very sketchy website assured her will weave magic that cleaves muscle from bone.
“Let’s get to it, then.”
For a moment, Lucian says nothing. He frowns.
“We can’t.”
Lucian is standing on an empty roof, next to a puddle of blood and nothing else .
“The owl must have come back for its dinner,” JT says, brow furrowed, her hands on her hips.
“No,” Lucian says seriously, “The Observer has gone.”
He points to the far end of the puddle - bloody hoof tracks casually meander to the edge of the roof.
“That’s it, I quit, I am done with Arcane On-Call,” JT declares, only half-kidding, as she tentatively follows the prints. The individual tracks are bigger than her hands. She peeks over the roof’s edge. It’s just like last year, she realizes, but she’s not saving anyone.
“There won't be anything down there,” Lucian tells her.
“Oh, there’s something ,” says JT. She levitates herself and turns in the air, pushing backward off the gutter and descending slightly until she’s hovering in front of the castle itself. Facing Lucian and the castle’s facade, she beckons for her partner to join her, lights up the flashlight on her phone, and points the beam at the wall.
“Well, shit,” says Lucian.
It’s an extremely unsettling flouting of physics. At the edge of the roof, The Observer’s prints turn ninety degrees and continue, vertically, down the stone face of the castle, hundreds of feet, all the way to the ground.
JT and Lucian descend side-by-side, following the trail. In some places, the blood is so fresh the prints drip like they were applied with a wet sponge, suggesting the creature was still actively bleeding as it strolled casually down the side of Brackroot Academy. Illuminating the wall as they go, the investigators float past three levels of dorm windows and the stained glass of a staircase. They pass the Spires’ common room, packed with people. The house is hosting its annual Magic Grilled Cheese Championship tonight and somehow, somehow , not a single contestant, judge, or audience member noticed a thousand pounds of bleeding, many-eyed meat wandering by. Lucian and JT pass more stained glass windows - the main stairwell - where groups linger, chatting. They pass three floors of classrooms. The first, dark. The second, dark. The last glows faintly from a large saltwater fish tank, home of Brackroot’s sentient cuttlefish.
Did they recognize one another, Lucian wonders, a couple of fellow magical beings? Did the cuttlefish say hello as The Observer walked by?
At last, JT and Lucian reach the sidewalk, landing softly in front of the spot where the prints meet the castle’s landscaping and The Observer began to follow the standard rules of physics once more.
“And there they go,” says Lucian, pointing to a much subtler set of tracks that cross the sidewalk onto the snow-covered lawn.
“Back to the forest, I guess,” JT says. “Back home.”
She shakes her head in disbelief, removes another slim black cigarette from her pack, and lights it. Lucian lights one of his own. They smoke quietly, gazing past the path’s lanterns to the edge of the tree line. JT frowns.
“Was that, like, a very scaled-up version of a cat bringing you a mouse?”
“Sort of,” Lucian nods. “If your cat could bring you an unkillable entity curious to perceive humans’ death and death-adjacent experiences.”
“Wait," JT balks, "because I died?”
“Technically,” says Lucian, “you died, you came back, and then both of us kinda died again. I imagine that’s interesting, even for a cosmic being.”
JT takes a long drag and shakes her head.
“Okay, note that I am gonna to ask you to explain all that to me later,” she says, “but right now, I would like to go inside, eat a grilled cheese, and turn off these fucking phones.”
