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“Come with me,” a tiefling with a bass guitar on her back says on your first day at Aguefort, and grabs you by the collar. She smiles—wild and wide—over her shoulder and you don’t think you’ve ever seen something so magnificent, so free.
Your body decides to go willingly (is it willingly if she’s already hauling you along with more strength than anyone her size should have?) before your mind does. You’ve made worse decisions before. Sort of. Maybe. Only when Aelwyn was involved.
She pulls you into a poorly lit classroom packed with students. All desks are occupied, the L-shaped couch wedged into the corner is packed, and the long countertop by the windows is practically overflowing with bodies. Kids litter the floor, too, and you can’t imagine finding anywhere at all to sit until the tiefling leads you to a spot on the carpet in the back corner where she sinks to the floor and leans her bass up against the wall. You do your best to shove your giant crystal orb behind you, but it just sits uncomfortably against your back.
A teacher you aren’t yet familiar with (you’ve only met Augefort and Goldenhoard, to be fair) does not seem to be bothered by your untimely entrance. His gravelly voice soldiers on.
“Why are we—?” you whisper, but the tiefling holds a finger to her lips, still smiling, eyes twinkling with mighty hellfire and all the mischief in the world. Who are you? would’ve been your next question.
“Listen,” she tells you. “You’ll like it.”
You try, you really do.
You fumble for your bag, for your crystal, tapping until recording voice memo blinks across the dim screen.
And then you look at her, the tiefling. The girl with shaggy bangs, pointy ears quite like yours, and ivory horns that fade to black as they disappear into chestnut hair.
You’ve never seen a tiefling up close before. You’ve seen some older tiefling kids, the local ones who love leather, bikes, and dance, around town on occasion, but never up close. And you’ve seen them in pictures, sure; you’ve seen things your parents would scoff at: blue skin, indigo horns, pink skin, yellow eyes, red skin, black eyes, hell—hooves. You’ve seen a lot on your crystal, on that private browsing tab you swipe away each night before bed so that there’s no chance anyone can track your search history. You just like to know that there’s more to the world than elven high society and the grandiosity your family is so known for.
This tiefling, however, the one whose name you don’t even know, looks surprisingly normal. If you were anyone else you might be disappointed, but you aren’t. You’re Adaine Abernant, and this tiefling is anything but disappointing.
You like that she doesn’t look like the ones you’ve seen on your crystal. You like that her skin’s almost ruddy, her hair’s brown, that she doesn’t have hooves (not that hooves are a dealbreaker—they aren’t, you’d like to make that clear, but you like having your expectations shattered in a good way).
It’s nice, how normal she looks, because you kind of think it’s an affront to infernal culture. It’s a rebellion, almost, and a genetic one at that. Take a devil-spawn and strip them of their color, that manifestation of hellfire, and what’re you left with?
Someone who could pass for elven if it weren’t for the horns. She’s just a girl, and she doesn’t wear her horns with shame. As far as you can tell she just wears them, almost like nothing, like it’s cool that they’re there but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they weren’t.
You’ve never been a whiz at reading people, but you’re starting to think this girl likes her horns. If she didn’t, you think, you’d be able to tell. She doesn’t seem the type to be able to hide big emotions; her heart is on her sleeve whether she wants it to be or not, and it seems like on some level she’s okay with that, too.
“…and the barbarian rage doesn’t come from nowhere,” the teacher is saying, “it comes from a place you may not be ready to face yet.”
You shove your hand into your bag and fish out a paper and a pen.
Why am I here? you write, and pass it to the tiefling.
She hands it back a minute later.
Her handwriting is choppy and beautiful, a perfect balance between chicken scratch and big loopy cursive.
You seemed tense, the paper says. Thought you could use a class like this.
It occurs to you then that you don’t even know what class you’re in.
But she gets it. Of course she does. She takes the paper back, hunches over, and scrawls an addition to her note.
Barbarian Theory 101: an Introduction to Rage and Release. Good class, it reads. Hard to get into. I snuck us in with my street cred.
Right.
Yes.
That makes sense, you think, on some level you aren’t even sure you’re attuned to.
You’ve got the lecture recording on your crystal, you can return to it later. Something you never thought you’d tell yourself—you always pay attention, you always take diligent notes. You're always prepared for the next class.
But you’ve also never had a pretty tiefling drag you into a lecture. You’ve never been this distracted at school before. You’ve never not taken notes. You’ve never—it doesn’t matter.
I’m Adaine, you write before passing the note back.
It’s when a slow grin spreads across her lips that you decide not paying attention for the first time in your life is absolutely worth it.
Fig, you read when she passes it back to you. Fig Faeth. Future rock star. Keep this, it might be worth something someday.
Fig, you think. Fig Faeth. You like how her name sounds bouncing around your head.
It occurs to you that you haven’t gone this long without dwelling on your anxiety in years.
You don’t think Fig is inherently magic—you clocked the guitar, you’ve guessed she’s a bard—but you swear she carries some sort of sedative in her aura. How else could you be so calm being in a class you aren’t signed up for with a girl you’ve only just exchanged names with?
Surprising how okay you are with all of this, this unpredictability and these last-minute changes.
It’s only when you get home that afternoon that you truly stop to consider. It’s when you play back the recording from Barbarian Theory 101 that you begin to understand.
“…comes from a place you may not be ready to face yet. There will always be a million and one things that have the potential to trigger the rage.”
You think of your father, callous and cold.
“There will always be factors which you cannot control, that you wish would become malleable so that you might mold them to shield you.”
You think of your mother, passive and distant.
“The rage isn’t about forcing those things to your will. The rage is about embracing what pisses you the fuck off, right? The rage is about allowing that animal instinct to envelop your body to the point where in fight or flight there is no option. There is only the fight. And the rage, the fight, doesn’t always mean you need to resort to physical violence.”
You think of Aelwyn, your bitch of a sister, who you would love to smack just once right across the face.
But you also think the barbarian teacher is right.
“It’s not about wanting to beat the shit out of somebody,” he says, “it’s about what’s getting you to the point of wanting to beat the shit out of them. ‘Cause, sure, you can kick somebody’s ass, lay ‘em flat, whatever, but will that really satisfy you?”
No, you think, it won’t. It really won’t, because no matter what you throw at Aelwyn she’ll still be there the next morning at full capacity and unbothered by your hatred for her. She’ll still just be Aelwyn, infuriating and beautiful. And a little bit batshit crazy, maybe.
“The first time you feel the rage,” the barbarian teacher says, “it envelops you. The goal, what I’m trying to help you kids understand, is that the second, third, fourth, whatever time you feel the rage—right? Those times, it doesn’t have to swallow you. If you learn to embrace the rage, to take it for what it is, and not for what it wants you to become, you can focus it on your true enemies instead of just on who you last got mad at.”
Shit, you think.
“If you focus on the last person to piss you off, you won’t get anywhere. Ever. If you allow the rage in, that’s fine. But if you teach yourself to block the rage from taking over your rational brain, that’s the sweet spot. That’ll give you the strength to face the real problems you’re up against instead of just the surface ones. Think about that. Think about it.”
You’re thinking about it.
You’re hooked.
The barbarian teacher is right again.
You can get mad at Aelwyn all you want, you can hold an angry fire for your parents as long as you please, but it won’t do anything other than piss you off time and time again. Getting pissed isn’t dealing with anything. Getting pissed is surface level. Getting mad is a temporary solution to a lifelong problem.
Processing will help. Utilizing the knowledge and logic from said processing could potentially be a brilliant solution. Rationing and controlling the rage your family kindles within you could help you process it all in the long run. And the long run is what it’s all about—family is forever, whether you like it or not, and any solution at all is better than bickering with Aelwyn across the breakfast table, better than waiting for your parents to notice that you’re not a failure but a person. Anything is better than what you have.
Learning to embrace and understand your rage, instead of internalizing it and allowing it to fuel your panic attacks, would be worlds better than what you’ve got going on now.
The tiefling was right, too, you think when the recording of the lecture comes to an end, you really could use a class like that. And yeah, you did like it.
And, shit, you might like her, too. On more than one level. You could really use someone like Fig Faeth in your life; someone who so shamelessly throws it all out there to the point of dragging strangers to lectures that have nothing to do with their course of study but have everything to do with what they actually need to hear. And she could tell you needed a class like that from spotting you across the entry hall on the first day of school; she didn't just spot you, she saw you, and that's more than you can say your family has ever done.
Your crystal pings and pulses with light, and an unabashed grin works its way across your entire face—ear to ear, reaches your eyes, tightens the muscles in your cheeks—as you read the text:
Hey, it’s Fig. Don’t ask me how I got your number. Goldenrod clocked me missing from my afternoon bard class. Got double detention. Barbarian Theory is right after lunch tomorrow. Want to go again?
Yeah, you think. Absolutely fuck yeah, you do.
For two reasons: one—you want to learn more about embracing the rage in a productive way, and two—you want to see Fig again, so bad.
You look at your planner with all your wizard classes blocked out from hour to hour.
You grab a pen and draw a mighty line through everything from noon to four pm. You catch yourself smiling, maybe a little too happily, but you don’t care.
Below the line you write Fig in your loopy script, click the pen shut, close your planner, and for the first time in ages embrace the pure excitement coursing through your veins without worrying that someone's waiting to quash it before your very eyes.