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By his bedside was a stormy place to be. Qifrey lifted the warm teacup to his lips, toes flush and wriggling against the soft rug. His professor, with an amused grin, followed suit, wistfully gazing to the ceiling.
“Qifrey,” he starts, in a tone not all that far off from the beginning scenes of Qifreys nightmares. “You still haven’t told me. Will you take the 5th exam?”
Through liquid, he grumbles, a gentle fizz of hot bubbles burbling to his nose. He sets down the cup, gazing, as the tea stretched and sloped into the form of a sleeping lizard. He poked his pinky nail in, gnawing the inside of his lip. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Unsatisfied, his professor lies back, silver-blue mane of ribbony hair falling around his face and shoulders. Qifrey glimpses a loss of composure, where his strong and kind professors face lapses into a tired, oh so very tired expression, and his stomach grows quiet.
“I see. Take your time, boy,” he pauses warily, words struggling to find form on his teacup mouth. He never finds them, it seems, instead sucking a long puff of tobbaco off a long pipe, and, his student, placing the cleaned off cup onto the small table beside the bed, follows outside of the bedroom, the Artengärde’s jade and brown gaze watching him trot outside, out to the street, where he gallops to the bridge, where the spells and seals stop, and the wall of water rushing and swirling before his eyes.
The rumble, he thinks, sounds an awful lot like a nightmare. He pokes his fingers in, shivering while the cool seawater trickles down his arm, finding its way to swirl around his pale flesh, before it remembers that it was bewitched, and it jumps off of him, falling to the stone ground with a pathetic dribble.
Past his finger, he looks into the blurry sea, gazing down, into the abyss, where he remembers hearing of ecosystems and animals who survived off eating the carcasses fallen to the seafloor. He thinks that he wouldn’t mind to visit one day. Maybe it would be a home, where he could build walls of ribcages, and fill it up with all his friends and loved ones, and hold them prisoner, down in the deep black depths.
His eyes snap back up. He sees a small whale floating to the surface. He assumes it forgot to take a breath.
“Take me with you.”
Olruggio scoffed, smoothing the patchy beard that hugged his mouth with his fingers. It was a habit, Qifrey identified, remembering earlier that day, when he was deciding between a poultry soup and a vegetable one, stroking his chin as if it was a magic lamp, one where an ancient and foreign witch would leap out of, and make the decision for him.
He scoffed, but he hadn’t said no. Rather, he cast his ocean-depth eyes upwards.
And he proceeded to give a very Olruggio answer. “You won’t have enough time to pack. Or collect the right clothes. It’s not like…” He meets Qifrey squarely again, hand dropping to his side and curling to a fist. “It’s not like running through a window-way and looking for baddies in the dead of night. It’s boring. Journeyman work. Resumé building. In the cold, wet, sad autumn north. Blah!” Without adding on, he simply shook his head.
He wasn’t peturbed. “You have extra clothes, I can borrow them. Delay your trip by a day, and you can go with a friend.” Guilt bit at his belly.
Of course Olruggio considered it for a moment, the devil he was. “Qifrey, I would– It would be nice to bring along a companion. But I’m dead serious. You will hate being up north.”
“I just want to come along.”
“It’s cold.”
“I know.”
“And wet. And I don’t have that much extra clothes.”
“If I come along, I can get Beldaruit to pay the expenses for your trip. I’ll reimburse you for the clothes. And,” he swallows, fighting himself. “You’ll have a friend. Being alone in the Sanctum is hell. Being alone in the north alone sounds like it might be worse.”
The silence, compounded by the quietness of Olruggio’s dorm unit, with only the bickering squabble of excited graduates next door, threatened to swallow them both, to leave Qifrey drowned, floating upright.
“…If you can get the Sage to pay for both of us. I can’t stop you.”
“Thank you, Olly.”
It is cold.
It’s wettish. It’s more cold than wet, Qifrey thinks.
There’s snow under his feet, thick rabbit-hide moccasins kissing and crunching the crystal ice. And despite that, he feels warm. And more than that, Qifrey can breathe.
The mountain air, he thinks while raising his nose to the sunset painted clouds, is fresher than what he breathed in the prairie and foothills. It’s cleaner, seemingly in abundance, only providing to the swaths of animals lurking in the snowcapped forest, and the handful or so of people huddled in their log cabins.
And, he was beckoned inside, Olruggio’s volcanic grin eclipsing his furrowed brow.
“Get in here. You look like a tourist.”
Qifrey bounds inside, rubbing his moccasin boots off on the rug, returning the smirk. “I am, in fact, a tourist, Olly. You don’t need to be so embarassed.”
The small cabin that had been rented to Olruggio had been clearly made for one. The doubled amount of luggage, as well as the swath of paper and tree rings and pens strewn on the floor, and the extra logs ready to embrace the fire, had lead to a snug situation.
Olruggio returned to his work, where Qifrey placed a log on the stove, boiling a kettle of water. It was louder here. Fire crackled, sung, squealed, hiccuped; danced in its hearth, twisting in tango with itself atop charred spruce logs. The wind, howling and cantering through the mountain crevice cradling the village, was its own song. Qifrey found his cheeks strained, not against cold whips of weather, rather, the smile pleasantly laid across his icy face.
When the kettle wails, he pours two mugs of tea, and sits next to his friend on a pillow adjacent. Olruggio hums in gratitude.
His wrist cocked, pen searing soft wood into spells, twisting it into magic. His hand curled around the small and beautiful runes, encasing it in a bubble to breathe life into it. And, as it did, the ink lines began to shimmer, shining into an incredible light.
“What does it do?” Qifrey inquires in a childlike hush.
“Show me your boots,” Olruggio demands kindly. Qifrey kicks out his feet, and as Olruggio casts the face of the wood towards the leather, the trace clumps of icy snow began to crumble away, dripping off the fur onto the floor.
“Incredible,” he murmurs.”
The glow of the spell begins to fade, and Olruggio tosses it into the flames. Before Qifrey can chatsize him, he raises a finger to his mouth. “I can make more. I will make more.”
Qifrey’s pink lips shiver under his cold touch, and he pulls it away. He understands why he began to grow out that puny beard before this trip.
“I’m thinking it will be good for avalanche rescues, y’know,” he gazes at the fire, leaning on the cushion of the chair pulled behind him. “If I can find a way to make it activate at will, then rescuers can destroy the snow, and search for survivors.”
“Incredible,” he repeats.
Olruggio’s smile remains. The fire crackles as it ravenously eats the spell, burping and coughing up fairy like ashes that twirl out of the heath. Qifrey watches him silently.
“Why did you come here?”
“It looks good on a resumé.” He gets punched.
“Why did you come here?”
He ponders it, soaking up his question like a sponge, stroking his chin. Qifrey drinks his tea, snow and ice staring at his friend.
“Helping the people that nobody will help…” He glances at the floor. “I think it’s important. When nobody else will come to your aid, the most important people are the ones who do. The ones who will go out of their way, just to help you. Even though you know that it’s hard, and that there’s easier options, and there’s better options. It’s important to the greater witch society, right?”
Something eats at his stomach.
“…You put a lot of thought into this.”
“Not– No, not really. I think that’s just obvious. And it’s really not that big a deal, I’m used to the cold, right? Thanks for coming along with me anyways.”
When back in the Sanctum, Qifrey drowns. After he passes the 5th test, he decides, that maybe he could build a house out of a ribcage, at the bottom of the sea. He could keep whoever he wanted there. He would be paid to drown, and, really, what else was he better at than drowning.