Chapter Text
Yew berry. Adder’s fork. Coltsfoot.
Lee Felix scrunched his nose as he carefully measured out his ingredients, dropping them one by one into the beaker on his desk.
Buckthorn. Moonwort… Or was it mugwort?
His fingers hesitated over the row of jars. This was where he constantly got tripped up. It was a simple enough spell to make – even children mastered it in a day or two – but he could never learn it. The yew berry signified toxicity, and the adder’s fork was a ward, but he couldn’t remember what was supposed to bind them and negate the yew. Frustrated, he blew his blonde locks out of his eyes. Moonwort was for wounds but mugwort was for… uh…
Honestly now all he could think about was how he wouldn’t mind having mugwort soup for lunch.
Hell, he might as well just wing it. What was the worst that could happen? (Other than burning his eyebrows off again, of course.)
He took a pinch of mugwort and dropped the dried leaves into his beaker, swirling it around slowly. The water was already tinged a light pink from the yew berries, but if he’d done this correctly it would turn blue when he heated it up and said the spell.
He lit a match, already nervous. He should have been able to light his little Bunsen burner without any matches at all, but all his focus was locked on what came next. He set the beaker on top of the flame and stared deep into the pink liquid. Slowly, he began to murmur the incantation.
Felix knew what the incantation was supposed to be. He’d read it over and over again from the spell book, tracing each letter with his finger like he was hoping to absorb them through his skin. But for some reason whenever the words got to his mouth, they came out all jumbled. He chewed his lip.
Focus, ‘Lix, focus! He urged himself.
Witchcraft was all about control; if he lost even an ounce of it then all hell could break loose. But no matter what he did, he couldn’t get more than two words right.
The mixture on the burner shimmered… and then turned black.
When he’d tried this in class nothing had happened at all, but now the liquid clouded over into an inky black color, the sad mugwort leaves floating on top. Felix wasn’t sure what he’d done this time, but it was definitely worse.
He swore, snatching the beaker off the burner in his frustration.
Shitshitshit that burned!
It took all his willpower to set the beaker down gently on the counter – lord knew what could happen if whatever that was splashed all over him and the floor – before hopping up and down, flapping his burnt hand in the air.
All in all, the day was not starting out well.
There was a knock at the door, distracting Felix from the worst of his pain. He quickly moved to the front of his cottage before the knocking started again. If he knew Minho well – and he did – he only had a couple of seconds before his friend started double-fist banging on his poor door frame.
Felix swung open the door to reveal a boy with honey brown hair and big, round eyes standing on his doorstep, both fists raised in preparation to start hammering away. Lee Minho blinked, like he hadn’t been expecting Felix to open the door so soon.
“Mornin’,” Minho said, grudgingly dropping his hands. “You ready to go?”
“Almost. I was trying out that protection spell again and there was an… incident.” Felix held up his scalded hand.
His friend smiled knowingly. “Here, let me.”
He gently took Felix’s hand and muttered under his breath before blowing lightly on it. In an instant there was a tingling over the younger boy’s skin and the pain and redness immediately disappeared.
Felix sighed a breath of relief. “Thanks hyung! Let me just get my books and we can go. You want a drink?”
“If it’s anything like your potions, I think I’ll pass,” Minho teased.
“Meanie.” The younger boy grinned as he turned back into his house to collect his books. It only took a couple of minutes before he was back at the front door.
Felix’s cottage was tucked away in a little clearing in the forest, surrounded by a small picket fence that had seen better days. It was a little run down, but the flowers in the front garden were so pretty you’d hardly notice. The daisies were about to bloom, and seeing the tiny buds always brought a smile to his face.
Minho was looking toward the garden too, but it wasn’t the blooms that had caught his attention. He pointed at a symbol carved into the fence.
“You know you’ve drawn that backwards? That’s a summoning spell not a shrouding ward.”
“Seriously?! Wait, is that why pigeons keep landing on my roof? There’s a swarm of them every night, I thought it was the eleventh plague!” Felix complained.
Come to think of it, the sigil he’d meant to draw – the shrouding ward to keep his house invisible to unwanted guests – was supposed to be the other way around. And as a result, he’d received a multitude of unwanted guests instead.
“I’ll help you redraw them after class,” Minho laughed as they made their way down the forest path.
Witchcraft didn’t come easy to Felix, but it did to Minho. The older boy was one of the top students in their class, already set to become a full-fledged witch. Felix on the other hand was still struggling with the very basics, stuff that witches half his age had already mastered. It was embarrassing to have witches only ten or eleven already lighting candles with nothing more than a quirk of their fingers while he…
Well, there was no need to relive the Eyebrows Incident twice in one day.
Their class was already bustling when the two boys arrived. The bookshelf that ran along the back wall stacked floor to ceiling with spell books and grimoires, while the other two walls housed jars of ingredients that they used to concoct spells and charms. Several benches with beakers and burners facing the teacher’s desk and whiteboard. Near the back of the room a boy with a blonde mullet waved them over.
“Morning!” he said, smiling widely. “I brought bagels!”
“You’re here early Jeonginnie, that’s unlike you,” Felix teased, munching down on a bagel before he’d even sat down.
Yang Jeongin was a fellow witch and the youngest of their friend group. He was every bit as talented a witch as Minho, but he didn’t like to put much effort into it. Instead, he chose to do just enough to get by in his classes. This was the first time that he’d ever shown up to class before the teacher arrived.
“Hyung did you forget? We’re summoning familiars today!”
“Oh my god. Is that today??” Minho looked shocked. “I completely forgot; I was finishing up a lab report all week!”
“It is! Ssaem said this is one of the last things we’re going to do before we graduate, isn’t it exciting?!”
Honestly? No.
Felix could understand why his friends would be excited; after all, summoning a familiar and getting their own grimoire were the cornerstones of becoming a full-fledged witch. Miss Kim, their teacher, said that a familiar’s powers especially were unlike anything they could even begin to imagine.
Felix wanted to be excited. Of course he did. But there was no hope in hell that he’d be able to summon a familiar. He couldn’t even light a candle for crying out loud!
He smiled wistfully. “I can’t wait to see what your familiars are going to look like.”
“Don’t worry Yongbok-ah, I bet you’ll be able to summon one too,” Minho said reassuringly. “Maybe you’ll find harder spells easier to do than the simple ones.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” Felix grinned at him.
“It can if you choose to make it work like that.”
“G’morning. Ooh, nice, someone brought bagels!” A voice from behind them interrupted the conversation. It belonged to a boy with chestnut brown hair and a heart shaped smile. He reached over their shoulders and grabbed one. “What are we talking about?”
“Mornin’ Jisungie-hyung. We were talking about summoning familiars,” Jeongin said.
Han Jisung nodded thoughtfully and took a seat, both cheeks stuffed full. “Right, that’s today. I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it. I heard from one of the sunbaes that you need to have a strong elemental connection and I suck at that.”
Jisung was an exceptional spellcaster who could rattle off a hundred different incantations at the drop of a hat. You needed an extremely obscure, hyper-specific spell? Jisung was your man. But when it came to anything to do with working the elements he had just as much trouble as Felix.
The last two of their friend group, Seo Changbin and Kim Seungmin, joined them as they tried to guess what each other’s familiars might be. A witch’s supernatural counterpart could take the form of any animal, from a butterfly to a humpback whale. There was a famous story of a witch from a hundred years ago whose familiar had been a dragon, which would be a hard creature to top.
In the end, they decided on a cat for Minho, some kind of birds for Seungmin and Jeongin, and a squirrel for Jisung.
“I think Felix’s would be a deer,” Seungmin said.
“Or a duckling?”
“Ooh, that would be cute!” Felix lit up. “I wouldn’t mind a duckling. Or like a whole flock of them!”
“And for Changbin-hyung…”
“A walrus,” Jisung butted in.
“Yah!”
The group howled with laughter.
“Come here!” Changbin was just reaching to put Jisung in a headlock when their teacher walked in.
“Settle down class, settle down. Good morning!” Miss Kim said, setting her coffee mug on her desk.
“Morning ssaem,” the class said in unison.
“Today’s a very exciting day as I’m sure you’re all aware,” she said. “Today you learn to summon your familiars and take one step closer to becoming a fully realized witch.”
She surveyed the sea of enraptured faces. Every single person in the room was hanging on to her every word, a rare occurrence during class. She laughed.
“A witch’s supernatural counterpart is very important to our kind. They will bring you wisdom from the spirit realm, help you cast powerful spells and even assist you while crafting new ones. Each witch’s familiar represents something unique and important to them, so no two familiars are going to be exactly alike. I know you’re all very excited to get started, but as with everything to do with magic, there’s a lot of preparation to do first. Open your notebooks, we’ll begin summoning after we cover the history.”
The class groaned. They’d been hoping that, for once, they could get straight to the exciting part without having to do all the boring prep work.
Felix turned his book to a blank page, only half listening as his teacher rattled on about the first witch that was gifted a familiar by the goddess, to help aid them with their craft and protect them from their enemies. At first, all familiars came from the goddess, but eventually they taught witches how to summon them themselves, blah blah blah…
He doodled absent-mindedly in the margins, wondering what form his familiar would take. Although he was bad with pretty much every aspect of the craft, he had a fairly good elemental connection. He could control water and had even summoned rain a few times, and (even though he was terrible at using them) he could grow nearly any plant or herb.
Maybe that would affect his familiar and it would be a sea creature, or something earth-related? He wouldn’t mind a butterfly actually, even though his friends had laughed a little at the thought. Maybe he’d even get a whole swarm of them following him wherever he went. That’d be pretty. Plus, there were worse things to get; what if his familiar was an earthworm? Or a slug? He shuddered at the thought.
“Felix!”
He jumped, his pen slashing across the page. “Y-yes, sorry?”
“I hope you’re so deep in thought because you’re trying to understand how Kim Yongah used her familiar to craft a spell that allowed her to fly. Would you care to explain it to the class?” Miss Kim raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, um…”
There was an eternity of uncomfortable silence before she finally took mercy on him. “Seungmin?”
“I think it was a combination of her familiar’s advanced spellcasting skill and her own inclination for air to bind together a levitation spell with witch-wind.” Seungmin said.
“Very good. There is a little more to it though, special spells and charms that are required to allow for that displacement of the body to happen. We’ll be going over that in a future class. But you all seem bored enough, so how about we get started actually summoning, eh?”
The class perked up immediately, the air positively humming with excitement.
“Before we start though, Felix can I speak with you outside?”
Huh?
Felix blinked up at Miss Kim, then at his friends, but they looked just as confused as he did. Puzzled, he shut his notebook and followed her out of the room. She closed the door gently behind them, leaving them alone in the quiet hallway.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention, ssaem, I was just-” he started quickly, but she cut him off.
“It’s alright, Felix, I’m not mad. I know you’re feeling anxious about this summoning spell, and I understand why you’re uneasy.”
“How did you- you didn’t read my mind, did you?” He narrowed his eyes.
Some witches could do that, though they weren’t supposed to. Miss Kim herself had said many times that mind-reading was an unforgivable invasion of privacy, one of the worst crimes a witch could commit.
She laughed, waving him off. “No, no, just regular old deduction. I wanted to talk to you about it though because I know that you’ve been struggling with some aspects of the craft, but you must know that summoning familiars is hard work. Even skilled witches have trouble getting it right the first few times, so I don’t want you to think it’s through any fault of your own if it doesn’t work right away.”
Felix felt his cheeks heat up.
“I understand.” He said hastily, wishing the ground would open up and swallow him. He was good with earth, maybe he could make that happen.
“And you’ve got a good elemental connection, which is important for summoning familiars. I just…” she paused, patting his shoulder kindly. “All I’m saying is you might surprise yourself, okay? But if you’d rather sit out of this class and wait ‘til you’re a little stronger with spellcasting I completely underst-”
“No!”
Leaving early would be even worse than failing at the spell. Felix didn’t have high hopes about his skills with magic, but at the very least he could pride himself on trying. If he left, it would be like admitting defeat. Not to mention he wanted to be there to support his friends, too.
“No,” he said again, his voice more measured. “I’d like to at least try.”
Miss Kim smiled again. “Alright. Let’s get back in there, then.”