Chapter Text
Major Arcana: The Lovers
Heavy ice coated the tallest spire, forming dangerous crystals. You, your Rival, and a few others were assigned cleaning duty. The ice shifted unexpectedly, and Your Rival and another student slid down the spire. You could only save one with your magic. Who did you choose? The other person saved themselves from death with their own magic, but how bad were their injuries? How do the screams of them falling haunt you?
The week before Winter Break, Dr. Elvas makes an announcement: due to last year’s “sentient furniture incident,” all Dahlias, Panthers, and Celestials planning to stay on-campus must move into temporary quarters in the main castle. JT thinks this makes sense. The grounds are sprawling and shenanigans are inevitable when budding wizards are given too much space and free time. She’s only heard second-hand about The Battle of the Chairs, last winter break’s brief (but, apparently, horrifying) arcane accident. Something something hallucinogens. Something something self-cleaning enchantment malfunction. To this day, rumor has it that a faction of conflict-averse ottomans escaped the reversal spell, living out the remainder of their unnatural lives as peaceful denizens of the forest.
Regarding the excess time aspect of Winter Break, Dr. Elvas’ announcement also makes it clear that this year, all remaining students are required to complete a roster of chores. Many staff return to their homes for the holidays, they say, so it is up to everyone to do their part in keeping the castle and the grounds tidy. At the height of finals stress, JT received her list of Winter Break tasks: one a day, with one day off per week, all in small groups - four or five people max.
Lucian’s name appears beside hers for every assignment.
She hasn’t seen Lucian in forever. Not since she gave him shit for thinking their friends were trying to fuck with him. But now they can hang out all break! She’ll see him every day! The sudden appearance of this thought gives her an embarrassing amount of butterflies, which she quells by reasoning that working with a friend nets a person at least a 40% reduction in the inherent shittiness of window cleaning, food serving, and garbage portalling.
***
It is now about halfway through break, and JT cannot tell if she overstated or understated her prediction. She’s enjoying hanging out with Lucian but garbage portalling really sucks.
At the moment, she's spending a sunny Wednesday afternoon with Lucian, a third year Dahlia named Orson, and a fourth year Celestial whose name she keeps forgetting. The four of them meander about the castle spires, traversing the roof while using magic to melt dangerously sharp icicles before they can spontaneously detach and pulverize someone below.
“...no, Selene went home,” JT tells Lucian as the two of them work on a human-sized crag of ice. “Mara and Eleanor are really into Christmas. Like, really into Christmas, they host this elaborate party on Christmas Eve. At the table, after dessert, Mara gave everyone one of those little party crackers - you know, those things you pull apart and confetti comes out?”
Lucian nods.
He does not, in actuality, know.
He thought crackers were a food, and the confetti means his mother would likely proclaim such a thing tacky.
“There was all this gold glitter inside,” JT continues enthusiastically, “but there was also a paper crown and a whistle. Everybody got a whistle! And every whistle played a different note! So there’s, like, a dozen of us and Eleanor would point at us, one after the other.”
“A whistle conductor,” muses Lucian.
“The whistle conductor of the whistle chorus. Once we practiced we went up and down the street and performed Christmas carols for their neighbors.”
Lucian snorts at the thought of his family doing anything so genuinely joyful. He hails from more of a designer-clothing-at-the-ballet and photo-ops-at-the-Christmas-fundraising-ball kind of family.
Orson strolls by, smoking a cigarette. JT is unsure if it’s magical or real.
“My family’s Christmas is super annoying,” Orson says, “we host, like, sixty people for three days. No fuckin thanks. I stopped in for an hour for Christmas dinner. Anyway, I have shit to do here. I’m working with Professor Knepler on a cartomancy project, we’re trying to create a real-time map of the forest to study the habits of everything that lives there.”
“Hey, question,” says the fourth year Celestial, leaning dramatically around an ice stalactite, “is it true there are chairs from last year still living in the forest?”
JT frowns. She’s already been reminded of this person’s name, like, twice today and this isn’t even the first assignment she’s shared with them. Uh… Worth? Wright? Win… ter? It’s a W-name, she’s sure of it.
“Well, we’re focusing on plants first,” says Orson, “if we can pull off the spellwork we’re hoping to get a team from Creature Sciences to help us track the other stuff.”
Orson pauses thoughtfully, taking a long drag off his cigarette.
“Y’know,” he says, “I heard the chairs all grew paws with claws. Like, all of ‘em, even the kitchen stools. Is that true?”
“I wasn’t there when it happened, I was home,” replies the Celestial with a touch of regret, “but I did see the house before Elvas cleaned it up. Those chairs did a fucking number on the common room. They were, like, nesting I guess? String everywhere. All this scratchy wool yarn. Like, where’d it even come from?”
“It’s body horror with furniture,” cackles JT. “I can’t help but be impressed. Good for the chairs! Cheers to the survival of your species. Wait, do chairs have live births? Or do they lay eggs?”
The Celestial raises an eyebrow.
“You ever see Alien?”
“Sick,” says Lucian, grinning.
“No way,” says Orson.
“I’m serious, I saw eggs,” the Celestial insists, “they looked like piles of couch cushions all stacked up but… wrong, somehow. Like, too mushy. Angles in weird places. Elvas didn’t say it but they didn’t need to, those were fucking eggs.”
***
The students continue to theorize chair anatomy as they work together, using their combined magic to melt the leading edge of a mass of ice shards. Nature’s knives, the daggers protrude from beneath a stately eave like sharks’ teeth. One row melts and the group moves deeper, on to the next. Someone jokes about chest bursters that look like step stools. They grow into ladders! Wait, no, they have to grow into chairs, shit. The magicians have all shed their coats, they’re down to t-shirts - it’s so warm up here in the sun. Water is everywhere. Lively streams run around the feet of the workers and off the edge of the roof behind them.
The funny thing about practitioners of magic is how little regard for real-world physics they tend to possess. In their defense, who needs physics when you portal regularly? These are people who transform living things, pull fire from the ether, create food from the world’s loose molecules. These are people who, apparently, have absolutely no idea what an ice dam is.
An ice dam is the thing they’re melting. It’s a massive block of icicles attached to a gutter that, farther up the roof, holds back a less-visible but massive pool of water, snow melted from the sun warming the higher surfaces of the incline. Ice dams are not great for roof integrity. They cause a lot of ceiling leaks, ruin a lot of attics. They are also fucking dangerous to remove.
When JT thinks back on this moment (because she does - her brain is, unfortunately, sticky for trauma) she remembers sound. Noise. The crack of the ice, the wet slop of snow and water sliding downward, Wesley’s terrified scream. (JT finally remembers their name, too. Good job!) JT remembers a crunching slap, a frost giant’s palm reaching down from the heavens to swat a couple flies. (Because sometimes a liquid is also a solid. Like when you add cornstarch to water. A solid under force. A liquid if you’re gentle.) It’s called oobleck, people can run across it, JT thinks as the frozen slurry hits Lucian and Wesley, lifting the pair into the air a good six inches before ejecting both of them off the roof.
***
The ice cracking, Lucian registers, but everything after is sort of squished together, thought fragments rattling around in his head. Upside down. Wet! Cold!! Everything fine, now everything bad? Why??? Can’t breathe! Can’t see!
And then everything is fine again and he’s on his back, legs dangling awkwardly, coughing up dirty roof-water and squinting up at a cloudless sky. He’s freezing and covered in bits of wet gravel and soggy moss. It occurs to him he’s rotating slowly, like an ornament being assessed before its yearly installation on the Christmas tree.
I would not make the cut this year, he thinks. Merry Christmas! Get back in the box!
From far away he hears screaming.
Is that JT?
Shit, where’s JT?
Lucian turns his head. Is she–
The view causes his stomach to do a weird sinking flip. The snow-covered lawn is hundreds of feet below him, an expanse of glittering white split by a neatly-shoveled stone ribbon. The walkway to the grove. So thin, now splashed with what, from way up here, seems like a cheekily small amount of liquid.
The longer he stares at the sidewalk the more uncomfortable he gets, a primal anxiety, like gooseflesh on his bones.
There’s no one down there.
No one.
Not JT, not Orson, and not… Wesley, oh fuck.
Beside him, Wesley hovers, haunted. They’re frozen in place, mid falling flail. Their torn t-shirt waves in the breeze like a wet sail. A long gash runs from their right shoulder down the back of their arm.
Gnarly, thinks Lucian, we’re full of meat. Definitely not like a chair.
They must have caught the drain on their way over - Lucian can see a little bit of metal sticking out of the muscle just above Wesley’s elbow. The jagged wound bleeds freely, its steady trickle mixing with the water still dripping off their body. Crimson droplets rain onto the pavement far, far below. Wesley is shaking and getting pale, their focus waning, their spell weakening, so Lucian reaches out with a levitation charm to steady them.
It is only in this moment he registers the magic suspending him in the air is not his.
What the fuck.
He should be dead.
How did this happen?
How did he fail to cast literally anything to stop what was happening to him?
Wesley is bleeding onto the lawn like a fucked-up rain cloud and still managed a spell.
(Lucian cannot know this, but Wesley has practiced a variety of martial arts, both magical and non-magical, since childhood. For Wesley, halting a fall is second-nature. They can stop themselves from falling while stumbling drunk. While high. From a dead sleep. In fact, halting a fall after an ice-based attack, specifically, is part of a Russian magical fighting style Wesley has been especially into lately.)
***
JT’s been peeking over the gutter, calling out to Lucian and trying to keep her focus sharp. Lucian seems unhurt, so what’s his deal? He hasn’t said a word to her. It’s like he’s valiantly committed to ignoring her, looking literally everywhere but up. Shit, is he mad at her for using magic on him? Should she have let him do his own spell?
‘Keep your magic to yourself.’ That’s how it’s taught to children - children and Brackroot first years. Magic’s cardinal rule. Witches, wizards, magicians, “practitioners of the arcane arts” - regardless of what you call yourself, it’s extremely rude for one person to use magic on another without permission. Except for emergencies.
This was an emergency, wasn’t it?
Kind of!
Not really.
Not for someone at Lucian’s level of skill, not at all.
Shit. Dammit, sighs JT as she begins to reel Lucian in. He emerges above the roof’s edge, soaking wet and shivering, pulled by an invisible string connected to his solar plexus. He won’t meet her eyes.
Definitely cross with me, she decides.
Wesley appears just seconds later, passed out, bleeding, supported entirely by Lucian’s spellwork. JT cringes.
That’s an emergency.
***
Orson has been a thousand miles away during this entire ordeal, muttering quietly under his breath.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
He saw the tumble of frozen slush and a switch inside him shut off.
Click.
Haha goodbye, we’re out!
When he was eight, Orson was in an avalanche. His family had been on their way to a ski resort, driving Colorado’s winding mountain highways. He’d wanted to portal - he begged, but his parents insisted it was more important to “experience the majestic scenery.” There was no warning, at least none Orson was able to perceive. One moment, he was reading a book about trolls, the next, his dad’s van was covered in snow and being shoved across two lanes of traffic, a single guardrail preventing the vehicle from careening over the cliff at the edge of the road. Orson was inconsolable. He sobbed nonstop, from the moment the van came to rest until the moment a highway patrol squad dug them out.
Orson’s mom likes to tease him about it. She reminds her son that “everyone ended up okay.” His parents. His three siblings. His uncle. Even the van and all the gear on the roof! Except for the part where the sound of snow crunching or the crack of a broken branch fucks with Orson’s head - still, to this day, eighteen years later. This is, objectively, not okay. Louise.
Ironically, all the carnage snaps Orson back to the present.
“Whoa, that is a lot of blood,” he says under his breath as Lucian allows Wesley’s unconscious body to softly sag to the roof.
“So fucked up, oh my god.”
Orson opens a portal directly to the emergency wing of the Healing Center and jogs through, holding the tear in spacetime open behind him while he explains the accident to the receptionist. A small crew of staff preps a floating stretcher and hustles through the rushing void. The emergency techs move in an efficient, practiced dance - one to stabilize, one to note vitals, one to wrap Wesley in a charmed, heated blanket.
One of the nurses assesses JT and Lucian.
“Both of you are coming, too,” he announces to the shellshocked pair.
JT points at herself in silent confusion.
“Yes, my dear, you,” affirms the man, “and your charming wet dog.”
In a daze, Lucian and JT shuffle forward, following Wesley’s stretcher through the portal.
***
JT, Lucian, and Orson are all seen by healers, just in case. Once it’s determined the trio of students are reasonably healthy, they’re given a treatment to calm their nerves. Non-magical. Valium.
Now they wait to be discharged, slouching into their reclined observation chairs, cozy fleece blankets on their laps. They’re fucking around on their phones, the muted clicks of haptic feedback mean one of them is playing Candy Crush. Half an hour ago, Wesley’s partner portalled in from Moscow, sobbing with worry. In spite of the admonitions of the healers, she’s posted up cross-legged at the foot of Wesley’s bed. Wesley, who is now stitched up, on an impressive amount of pain meds, and proudly describing the move they’ve been practicing that allowed them to save themselves.
“I was just working on it this morning! It’s called Bear Mind,” they loudly announce to their partner, as well as JT, Lucian, Orson, and the second year occupying the bed at the end of the row, in for an allergic reaction to peanuts. Wesley raises their uninjured left arm and pumps their fist in the air, a series of sweeping, dramatic gestures. “Stoic! Immovable! Like the mighty medved’ standing firm against the elements! You’re actually supposed to practice it with someone throwing ice water at you, how wild is that? That’s nuts, right? The coincidence?”
“I dunno, babe, it is winter,” Wesley’s partner notes, “I think most accidents in the winter involve ice.”
“No, no, the move. Like a bear! In my mind!”
Wesley’s partner emits a weary sigh and rolls her eyes affectionately.
“I’ve never been tested like this, truly tested,” Wesley continues, radiating triumphant excitement, “and before you say it, sparring doesn’t count. That’s not real, it’s practice. This was real! I did it! BEAR MIND!”
“Lotta non-magical accidents today,” the head healer remarks, shaking her head. She’s got a couple clipboards tucked under her arm - one by one, she signs the paperwork with a spell and a tap of her finger. “Okay, you three can go. And be careful out there. If not for your own sakes, then for all of ours.”
On their way out the door, JT finally manages to broach the ‘keep your magic to yourself’ subject.
“Hey Lucian? I’m sorry,” JT says as the trio meanders away from the Healing Center. “It was a reflex, I guess. I didn’t mean to invade your… space. Or suggest that you couldn’t–”
Lucian glances over her, confused.
“What? Invade whose space?”
Orson peels off the main path, headed back to the Dahlias’ greenhouse.
“Later, guys,” he waves. “It’s been real.”
Lucian and JT pause at the fork, Lucian searching his mind for what JT could be talking about. What’s she sorry for? The silence is broken, only briefly, by quiet blips of activity.
Someone’s phone buzzes, an incoming silenced text message.
Somewhere in the castle, a student practices the flute next to an open window.
In the forest, a herd of creatures gallops away through the brush. Deer? Sentient furniture?
He’s not mad at me, JT suddenly realizes. It must have been something else, ignoring me. I mean, that makes sense, too. Lucian gets weird about all kinds of stuff, he’s a fucking mystery.
She shrugs.
“It’s cool, nevermind.”
Lucian shrugs, too.
Everything is fine.
Wow, everything really is fine, he realizes, and he wonders why he’s never taken Valium before now. He doesn’t really feel high - he feels… serenely capable, compelled to return to his temporary room in the castle, finish his reading, tidy up, and do all his laundry.
***
Later that night, while brushing her teeth, JT’s thoughts are stopped dead by a realization: emergency or not, she only saved one of them.
If Wesley hadn’t… whatever “Bear Mind” is–
Jesus christ.