Chapter Text
It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table
and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,
grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until
deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,
you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees – – – a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.
– Mary Oliver, Honey At The Table
✧
Childhood is a strange thing: warm and fuzzy around the edges, somehow both fleeting and endless. Qifrey can close his eyes and feel every second, all of it clear as glass. His imagination is sharply vivid and does not falter even when it reaches the parts he shouldn’t remember, those parts of him that have been so entirely lost.
It’s some kind of strange, hazy concoction of nostalgia, reflex, and false memory. There are half-recollections of a small bedroom, and a sun-soaked kitchen spun through with laughter and the scent of baking things.
He wouldn’t call these imaginings ghosts; they aren’t real enough to have any sort of name. They are simply… something—a sort of spectral phenomenon that rises up as he sleeps or springs upon him with the sudden and confusing bite of déjà vu. They come and go, fleeting filaments of a life he isn’t sure he ever truly lived.
Yet still, he dreams.
Sleep weaves tapestries in the shape of that distant home. That false, Elysian memory-place: it grows vivid in his mind, cradled betwixt flower fields and ambling honeybees, with gardens well-tended and fruit-laden trees. It’s a place intimately familiar, somehow, though not recognizable as what he now calls “home”— its details are slightly off, just left of right. It’s the atelier, though not quite.
Perhaps it’s a memory. Perhaps it’s something he simply… invented. As a nail driven into a tree will soon be swallowed by bark twisting ‘round the blemish, perhaps likewise his memory fluctuates—shifting itself and inventing a distant past to heal the empty spaces. A scar whose ridges he can map the rise and fall of beneath his hand.
Really, then, Qifrey is a man of two childhoods:
The invented, nebulous one that was lost; and the one that stands out in piercing definition, that with witches, magic, and the cool blue of the sea.
It’s strange, the difference between his imagined past life and the one he really grew up in (the one he indeed remembers in clarity).
Honey versus salt, sunlight versus candle flame. Soft grass and earth and wind versus, of course, stone and sea and damp.
It is a peculiar way to live, a peculiar way to grow up. If nothing else, Qifrey can look forward to the occasional gentle dream (save for those that leave him choking on imagined rain in the empty dark of his room).
But as always, Qifrey manages. He lives despite it all, using the same adeptness with which he has dealt with anything that has ever come his way.
✧
That make-believe past was intoxicating, especially during his youth. When Qifrey was still young and scared and angry , focusing on the dreams and make-believe memories had just seemed so much safer. Safer than magic , certainly; a dream could never hurt him the way spellwork had.
Magic took the life Qifrey must have had away. He had only ever known it as something to fear, so why, now, should he be made to live amongst it? To love it? Why must every lantern, every street corner, every book and page dance with its glowing face? A conjured flame could harm just as well as any living grave, after all, and Qifrey distrusted it all indiscriminately. Magic was magic was magic, and as the witch called Beldaruit never failed to trill— even the sweetest spell may be twisted to dreadful means, Qifrey, so one must always take care.
If magic was such a dire tool, then why wield it at all? To Qifrey—for whom pain was still a very recent, very real thing—it seemed equivalent to gripping a blade in one’s fist, only to wail in surprise when blood wells around its edge.
Enough introspection, though. Qifrey has always had a natural talent for continuing on, so— to the present! Or, perhaps for our sake, we should say the past.
Seven days have passed since Qifrey’s rebirth—
(this is a better phrase than simply discarded and found again, and better still than resurrection, which implies something Qifrey doesn’t want to think about).
Seven days. One week. Qifrey has been a witch for one-hundred sixty-eight hours and has already decided that lovely as its face may be, magic seems a grim, capricious thing. Never again will he veer close enough to feel its hurt. He distrusts it. He dislikes it. He fears it.
Yet Beldaruit seems obnoxiously intent on imparting its intricacies unto Qifrey. ‘Tis the nature of a teacher, he supposes. They are still very new to each other, Qifrey and Beldaruit, but Qifrey has already been able to quite easily conclude that. He has also concluded that Beldaruit is equally enthusiastic and persistent in his approach to quite literally everything. Qifrey is more than willing to attempt to match that perseverance—if he can last days in a water-logged box, he can certainly last a few weeks trying to avoid these pointless lessons.
(Meanwhile, Beldaruit’s parallel week-long investigation has divulged that Qifrey is very much like a scruffy street cat in both temperament and appearance. Don’t worry—this will certainly not stop him from his teaching).
Unfortunately for Qifrey, simply sitting in front of Beldaruit at his desk and refusing to lift a pen doesn’t seem to be doing the trick, though. It all starts simple enough—but inevitably, as most things involving two incredibly stubborn people do, it escalates .
Beldaruit starts to greet Qifrey with pen and paper the moment he enters the kitchen each morning.
(So Qifery begins sneaking his way into the pantry).
Then Beldaruit begins conjuring books of glyphs and magic theory from his big wide sleeves anytime Qifrey has the misfortune to pass him in the hall.
(So Qifrey starts walking very, very quietly ) .
He even leaves his room one morning and is suddenly face-to-face with an exuberantly cheerful Beldaruit, an array of shiny new pens laid out in his lap. The Professor’s smile grows impossibly brighter, his eyes almost sparkling. “Good morning, dear boy—!”
Qifrey slams the door in his face.
That was… surely a bit rude, wasn’t it?
(This internal monologue sounds disgustingly like Beldaruit).
Qifrey pauses, hand still on the doorknob. Rude, sure. But if he’s forced to look at one more glyph he’s going to burn this place down— and certainly not with magic. I'll do it the old-fashioned way, Qifrey thinks with a glower. I’ll put the effort into doing it properly. The matchbox he uses for his lamps must certainly have more purposes than lighting wicks.
In the end he doesn’t do that, though. He just starts climbing out the window.
And when even that eventually fails, Qifrey becomes very good at hiding.
He hides in Beldaruit’s crowded library, he hides behind the parlor’s curtains, and sometimes, unseen from the door, he even hides under the kitchen table. But his favorite nook by far is the linen closet.
Beldaruit’s house— atelier? —is large and has many linen closets, though this one is Qifrey’s. Leastways, he’s decided ownership of it, seeing how it’s the nearest to his room and in an otherwise empty hall. The space within is small and dark, though not in the way that makes his heart race. It is safe, it is hidden, and most of all, Beldaruit has yet to look for him here.
Qifrey likes to crouch beneath the shelves, shuffling back and back until he’s practically buried beneath the teetering stacks of towels, sheets, and spare robes.
It smells the way a home should—clean and warm, like soap and starch and well-worn cotton shirts. He can almost pretend he’s on the surface, too, thanks to the humidity-wicking spells tacked to the door that keep the fabrics from mildewing. It’s really the only bit of magic he’s come to like so far. How smart! How clever! How practical! Though perhaps they wouldn’t need a spell if they hadn’t built their city underwater, thinks Qifrey.
It’s no matter, though. He gets to enjoy its benefits and pretend, again, that he is somewhere far away from here. Qifrey closes his eyes and breathes deep of the room’s air. It feels so familiar to him, the hazy nostalgia of it all comforting in a way he can’t ever hope to place. And he will never be able to place it, the faintly warm, taunting ghost-touch of this nostalgia always just out of reach. Like clockwork the shape of it fades the moment he tries to peek at it head-on, shifting away and out of sight like an early mist banished by daybreak. It is a feeling that he knows will always press at the pack of his mind, always rising up whenever he starts to think that maybe it’s for the best that he can’t remember—pulling him out of any imagined comfort or routine with the reminder of what’s missing. There’s no hope of remembering anyway, though, even if he really wanted it. If he’s gathered anything about the magic that was done to him, it’s that it can’t be un-done.
(Or, perhaps even worse, the people here would not want to undo it. They think it better that he lives this fragmentary life than be altered by even one more piece of spellwork.
…Qifrey wishes they’d ask his opinion of all of it. It’s his life, after all.)
Qifrey presses his face to his knees. He doesn’t like thinking about it—of the magic, of the things that he doesn’t even understand but were done to him anyway. It isn’t fair that whoever he was before doesn’t have to remember it all. It’s not fair that he’s stuck with the fear and scars and the hateful looks of this dreadful city, but none of the good that came before.
His hands clench over his legs, bunching up and wrinkling the nice robes that Beldaruit had made for him.
It’s fine. It’s fine. He’s here now, even if he doesn’t want to be. It’s not like he has anywhere else to go, right? The witches here only found him because no one else had bothered to look— and even if there was someone out there, hoping for his return, it’s not like Qifrey would even be able to recognize them. He had died in that coffin; the person he was had. It’s not his fault that something remaining of that boy keeps stubbornly ticking. Forgetting is almost like dying, in that way. Either way it’s gone. Either way it’s something that you can’t bring back without terrible power and terrible consequences, unbalancing yourself and the world. It tears things apart, rending your being no matter the way you spin it; having his past taken from him nearly undid Qifrey’s very self, sundering him in a way he doesn’t imagine can ever be fully healed. It’s no far stretch, then, to believe that trying to return what was taken would have consequences just as cataclysmic. Qifrey just wishes this didn’t make him feel so hopeless.
There in the shadows of the closet, he wills himself to keep his eye closed so as not to get lost staring into the dark. This little space is supposed to be a comfort. It shouldn’t be something that scares him.
…But it is dark in here, isn’t it? How hadn’t he realized it before—? That the blackness of this space becomes impenetrable after the door closes, thick and cloying, heavy on his skin with the promise of hurt. It should be fine. It isn’t at all like that place, the one he wishes more than anything to forget. It’s warm and dry and soft here. It’s safe. It’s supposed to be safe.
And suddenly, it’s all too much. Qifrey hurls himself from the closet with a choked gasp, tangled up and stumbling over his own robes. In his haste, he smashes his shoulder into the doorframe, but hardly feels it through the panic that numbs his limbs.
The walls were too close, the dark too complete. He hates that he’s terrified by a closet. He hates that he’s terrified of everything.
✧
Qifrey lights every lantern in his room the second he makes it back, bolting the door behind him. His hands shake and he drops the matches a few times, but it’s not like he can feel how the flame bites at his fingertips anyway. He’s so cold. His fingers are stiff and icy as he tries— desperately, frantically, hysterically—to dispel the dark.
Between one moment and the next the room blazes suddenly with lamplight. It seems he lit them all, Qifrey thinks dazedly. That’s fine. He’s not paying for the oil, anyway.
Turning from the eye-watering light, Qifrey stumbles to his bed and wraps a quilt tightly over his shoulders. It’s dark blue, with loops of green and gold leaves embroidered about the edges. It must’ve taken a long time to make; he doesn’t think you can do this sort of thing with magic. Qifrey runs his hands over the threading, feeling the fine rise and fall of it beneath his fingertips. His breaths still stutter unevenly in his chest, each inhale thick and hard to swallow. It’s fine, though. The room is bright and warm, probably, and he has this nice quilt! It’s fine.
His hands shake. It really is very nice needlework.
Qifrey shuffles back over the bed, trying to curl up even smaller. He places his hand down on the mattress and—touches something smooth and cold.
He jumps, heart leaping up again, and—oh. Qifrey gasps out a slightly hysterical laugh.
It’s an ink bottle. He’d been forced into another lesson, earlier, and he’d been trying to practice. He’d been trying so, so hard. Beldaruit had been attempting to teach him some of the basics, but Qifrey’s hands were too unsteady to draw anything more than a lopsided oval, and— he’d left. Stood up with such force that the ink went spilling, and had fled from hall to hall and room to room before finally ending up amongst the linens. Beldaruit… must have left these here. For him.
Qifrey’s eye stings. He swallows, throat dry. Beldaruit should stop wasting ink on him. He doesn’t want to learn. He’ll never learn.
But Beldaruit went to all this trouble, didn’t he? He really is persistent. If Qifrey didn’t know any better, he might even think that the professor cares.
Qifrey wipes at his eye, sniffling. He’s twelve, probably. He should stop acting like such a little kid. He is in this world now whether he likes it or not, so maybe the least he can do is show a bit of spine. He could practice a bit more, maybe? Though certainly not for Beldaruit’s sake. For Qifrey. For himself. And certainly not because he cares to learn, but to… distract himself, perhaps.
But no, no—he isn’t any good at it. He can’t even remember any of the keystones, despite the hours Beldaruit has wasted trying to teach him. There’s no point wasting paper on spells that will never work.
…But Qifrey’s hand closes around the pen anyway.
Beldaruit had said a witch's pen was important. That it was a part of them, an extension. A tool to make the impossible possible, the intangible real. It is a paintbrush, a needle and thread, a beacon; strong as a set of sculptor tools, precise as a surgeon's scalpel. It is a tool of creation. An object of change. A weapon, if used incorrectly. And Qifrey can’t deny the way it seems to sing in his palm, the way it feels. He knows it’s just a normal pen, that all the power lies in its ink. But still… there’s a weight to it. He thinks it feels safe, maybe.
And the pen is such a small thing, cast in delicate filigrees of silver and steel, but it shines so clearly with potential. He does not trust magic, not yet, but Qifrey understands how something like this might help him. He can’t do magic. He does know his letters, though.
That is one of the few things that Qifrey hasn’t forgotten—like walking, and breathing, and how to hide when he hears footsteps coming. These are all muscle memory. He doesn’t know how he knows to do them, just that at some point he had needed to learn.
He’ll write. He’ll write, and it will be almost like magic, probably, and then his racing heart will calm.
Qifrey gathers up his blanket, the pen and ink, and a sheaf of paper he finds placed neatly on his bedside table. He practically falls from his bed as he moves to find a more suitable writing spot, arms stuffed with his newfound treasures. He looks around the room, swaying, squinting. Perhaps he had gone a bit overboard with the lights.
Finally, though, Qifrey spies somewhere perfect—he crawls up into the window seat and draws the curtains, crouching in the little hidden alcove made there. It’s become like a little room of his own! The window is wide and encompassing to his left, the heavy curtain muffling sound from the house, and after grabbing a lantern it is just bright enough in the small space that he doesn’t feel like he’s choking. And so, he writes.
The first thing he scratches into the paper is simple: I don’t like this place.
Qifrey flexes his hand, fingers stiff and still shaking a bit around the pen. He doesn’t know what else to say after that. It’s quite a good summary of the whole thing, isn’t it? He bites his cheek, squinting at the page.
It is better than the other place, Qifrey continues, but something here isn’t right. I still feel like I’m drowning, even when I’m outside.
His pen stills, and he watches from the corner of his eye as a rivulet of moisture runs down the windowpane. Qifrey’s chest tightens. He swallows.
He’s inside. This place is enchanted, Beldaruit has said, again and again and again—no water is getting in. He’s promised. He’s promised that the magic upholding this place is so ancient that it wouldn’t know how to stop working, even if it tried.
But Qifrey looks at the page in his hands and the way green light dances over it, distorted by distance and window glass. There is no sky here, he writes with a decidedly shakier hand. I cannot remember the sky.