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~The 3rd Day of Winter
In the early morning sun on a particularly crisp morning in the early days of winter, Qifrey and his apprentices stood together on a sandy bank by the estuary. The girls huddled together, their breaths fogging the cold air as Qifrey stepped back, unclasping the palm quire from his belt.
“You see, the water pen is an incredibly useful tool when one wishes to cast on a large surface, usually one like what we’re standing on,” Qifrey smiled, gesturing to the tamped down sand beneath their feet. He pressed the nib of his pen with the same confidence he’d always shown the girls. The tip glided over the paper, scratching out the familiar central water sigil and columns. A dagger-like glob of water hovered at an angle above the seal as qifrey replaced his pen with a bottle of ink. “Then you simply pour your conjuring ink into the water like so and–”
A thick splatter of ink dripped heavily onto the ground, and Qifrey could have sworn he heard the girls all suck in the same sharp breath.
“Ah… Well, not like that!” Qifrey laughed awkwardly, kicking some sand over the black spilled ink.
Without looking up at the girls, Qifrey held the palm quire up to his face. He looked very closely at the glyphs he’d drawn out. Everything looked as it should but the curve he’d sketched at the base did seem to be further away from the parallel columns, which had inevitably led the water pen to have a much too large of an opening, allowing most of the ink to all pour out at once.
Qifrey cleared his throat and took a step towards the girls, crouching down and holding out the palm quire to them, “Which one of you can tell me why that didn’t work?”
“Do you not know, Professor?” Coco asked with a short giggle.
“No, no. I do, Coco. I just wanted to show you a spell that was not quite perfected, sometimes it’s easier to learn this way. “A problem to be fixed”. Remember?” Qifrey said with a convincing but forced smile.
“The sigil for the tip, it’s far too open.” Agott said calmly, pulling out her pen and easily sketching on her palm quire a neater version of Qifrey’s ‘intentionally’ botched spell.
“There we go! I know it goes without saying, keeping your seals neat and uniform produces the best results, but it’s never a bad idea to refresh yourself on the basics. Even when you’re getting as skilled as you all are” Qifrey nodded, pouring the rest of his own ink into Agott’s water pen. It held the ink perfectly, as it should.
As he should have drawn it.
~The 9th Day of Winter
“Urgh! Are you trying to poison me, what is this?” Olruggio spat as he held up his mug of freshly brewed coffee. He peered into the deep maroon liquid, swirling it before looking up to Qifrey.
“It’s… It’s the same as I’ve always bought,” Qifrey stammered, turning back to the countertop and peering at the jars of coffee, tea, sugar and salt. “Oh…” Qifrey held up the jar of salt, turning to Olruggio with an apologetic smile, shaking the container.
In his defence, they all looked fairly similar.
“You really do need to get more sleep,” Olruggio sighed, joining Qifrey at the countertop and nudging him out of the way with a bump of his hip.
“Mmh… Yes, I think I do…” Qifrey mumbled, quietly nudging his own mug of unsweetened, un-salted coffee to Olruggio. “Have mine,” he said. His voice sounded a little airy and vague as he walked away from the kitchen, leaving a groggy Olruggio to safely sweeten his replacement coffee.
~The 16th Day of Winter
“Oh! You’re back, Professor!” Tetia chirped, practically skipping into the bathroom.
Qifrey was on his knees, leaning over the bathtub as he decanted various soaps and hair products into some newly bought, ornate bottles. Each one a unique shape and size, some tapered and tall with deep, decorative grooves. Some short and round, spotted with small glass bumps. Something Tetia became instantly drawn to.
“These are so pretty!” She sang, taking one of the deep green glass bottles and tilted it from side to side, watching as the liquid soap caught the light and shimmered as the lamplight shone through the glass.
Qifrey sat back on his heels with a soft smile. “I admit, perhaps a little on the more frivolous side of my recent purchases but as you put it so well, they are very pretty. I thought maybe the bathroom needed a few extra additions to make it feel more homely.”
It definitely wasn’t because this morning had been the third bath in a row where Qifrey had washed his hair with the sugar scrub and erroneously washed his body with conditioner. He could have blamed it on having soap in his eye… If he could even tell which was the soap anymore.
All the containers looked far too similar.
Tetia grinned at Qifrey and leaned over the bathtub to put the full bottle back on the shelf. She stopped for a second when she noticed the syrupy trails of soaps that hadn’t quite made it into the bottles as Qifrey had been decanting them. She giggled softly and turned to Qifrey.
“You should have used your broken water pen spell and used it as a funnel!” She said proudly, making a pouring gesture in the air. “You would have wasted a lot less soap.”
Broken.
Qifrey tilted his head with a smile, not wanting to dwell on how she’d referred to his mistake the other day.
“Do you have your palm quire on you? It’s a great idea, Tetia. Would you like to help?” Qifrey said, trying not to let the tension in his voice obvious.
Before he’d even finished his sentence, Tetia was sketching out the spell with a huge grin on her face. She gladly held it out over one of the empty bottles and Qifrey hummed in appreciation as he poured some soap through it.
“Thank you, Tetia,” Qifrey smiled with warm affection, knowing exactly how much it would mean to the young witch.
“That’s what I like to hear!” She said happily, practically beaming as the liquid trickled without mess into the bottle.
~The 22nd Day of Winter
“Oh Gods. Oh no, not now…” Qifrey muttered to himself, closing his eye and taking a couple of shallow breaths as the carriage carrying him and the girls travelled steadily towards town.
Was it him, or was the sun far brighter than it ever had been? His head was absolutely killing him, the glare of the low rising sun on the frosty roads seemed like it was saturating the landscape in a nauseatingly bright, white light.
It was extremely hard today to keep a brave face. He’d had a gnawing headache for days. One that had been lingering deep in his skull. He thought it had possibly been an ocular migraine. He could usually identify it with experiencing blind spots or strobing zig-zags in his peripherals, and he would have been able to pick up on those if everything wasn’t so sickeningly bright.
Qifrey took another steadying breath and dared to open his eye again, praying in vain for the earth to be dimmed and blanketed in a sudden thick blanket of storm clouds and fog. But, of course it wasn’t.
The second the light assaulted his vision again, he grit his teeth and swallowed thickly. It was impossible to smile through it. It was far too overwhelming, it felt like his entire nervous system had been seared by lightning. His body tensing from head to toe, almost feeling like in an instinctive defencive reaction.
Oh no.
“Hgh–” Qifrey retched, reaching for the nearest object he could hold in front of his face. Which unfortunately was his pointed cap.
Coco let out a squeamish squeal, leaping over to the other side of the carriage in one stride, clambering up and wedging herself between Agott and Richeh. The squeal really didn’t help. It was that same shrill sound with a volume that cut through you and instantly made you angry.
“Coco… D-don’t scream pleas— ugh” Qifrey’s quiet voice echoed into his cap, trailing off into a weak gag.
“No, no I really, really don’t like sick,” Coco said in obvious panic, pulling her feet up onto the seat and cowering behind Agott’s shoulder.
Qifrey really wanted to reassure Coco, or try to calm her down, but the darkness of the inside of his hat was actually quite pleasant and he couldn't quite bring himself to pull his face from it. So, instead he just gestured vaguely in the girl’s direction to keep their voices down.
Luckily, in a way, he hadn’t felt like eating in the last few days so he wasn’t as sick as he had been in the past. Although, it was still incredibly humiliating to be retching into his own hat in front of his apprentices.
Eventually they pulled over on the outskirts of town and Qifrey took the opportunity to stumble down into the shrubbery and throw up the only contents of his stomach. Which had been a “speciality soothing spicemint tea”. It was a well known remedy for migraine sufferers.
“Useless…” Qifrey mumbled, spitting one last time onto the ground and straightening up. He tried to find the same brave face he always graced the girls with, but couldn’t quite paint it convincingly across his crooked smile.
In the end, he and the now grumbling girls used the windowway on the outskirts of the town before they’d even made it to their destination. Qifrey had weakly apologised to no end for days after, but even the girls seemed to be getting tired of trips cut short because of his increasingly recurring migraines.
~The 30th Day of Winter
Manageable.
It had always been manageable.
It was still manageable, with a few more tweaks to his daily life. But Qifrey was used to that. It was all part of who he was. From his earliest memories of navigating The Great Hall, to the darkened, opaciting lens in his glasses. Then the sight-enhancing spell etched into the clear lens. The way he’d had the grip of his pen altered when he noticed he’d been holding it tighter and pressing it harder, relying more on muscle memory than his sight to cast.
Dinner was taking longer to cook these days too. He found himself triple checking labels and containers, not wanting to have another embarrassing salty coffee incident.
He was drawing an increasing amount of ‘incorrect’ spells when teaching the girls. They were clever youngsters, they were bound to notice that it was completely unintentional sooner or later. It was becoming increasingly frustrating having the girls correct him. It wasn’t their fault, but there was a limit to how many times it would happen before he snapped. A limit that he was hurtling ever closer to.
The spells looked clean. They looked fine… At a distance.
But, that wasn’t good enough was it? Not for someone entrusted with teaching young witches. Not for someone mentored by one of the Three Wise. Not for someone who’d been casting from the moment his memories began.
Why was it getting so difficult? Why was it becoming more and more exhausting? It had always been manageable. He didn’t need help. He could manage. He could find answers on his own. He could tweak and innovate and find ways around his problems like it was second nature. Why was he getting so angry each time he had to solve a new problem? They were little alterations, tiny changes to his surroundings and his tools. They were supposed to make things easier. They were supposed to make life manageable. They were supposed to help him exist like someone normal. Someone useful. Someone that wasn’t him.
It wasn’t even late when Qifrey found himself standing in the rarely used outbuilding. The desk and crooked floorboards were greyed with a blanket of dust. The shed was used by Olruggio more than anyone else as a graveyard of scrapped contraptions and used workbooks. Qifrey had initially hidden himself away in there to cool off.
One of the vapor bubbles had worn out in the kitchen and he’d been standing there as the girls ate breakfast attempting to redraw the spell. Needless to say, he couldn’t. He’d cursed and stormed out, almost slipping on the puddle of water that had mimicked the ink he’d spilled on the sand days ago. He’d felt the immediate awkward silence of all four apprentices, all not daring to move a muscle at his outburst.
Qifrey gripped the edge of the gritty desk and let out a shaky breath as his fingertips clawed at the wood. He shouldn't have sworn like that and he definitely shouldn’t have stormed out like a stroppy teenager. He could only imagine the girls in the kitchen quietly scurrying around trying to mop up the water and probably re-drawing a much more refined spell to mend the vapour bubble.
It was getting too much. Far too much. He’d done everything right, he’d been in control of everything that made him different from everyone else. The unusual child. The slow child. The clumsy child. The child ‘with the eye’. Scatter-brained. Haunted. Clumsy. Unfortunate. The child who’d get weird looks from witches in The Great Hall when he’d take an age to put the cork back in his ink pot because his depth perception was non-existent. The one who’d found an atelier far out in the meadows because he didn’t need to be around all the snide comments and whispered remarks when he’d decided to teach and take on his own apprentices.
It was fine. He was fine. Qifrey was just tired. Perhaps he was just having a few off days… or weeks. It happens to everyone and they always bounce back. He wasn’t going to start throwing tantrums like he had when he was a child when he had none of the things now that made him normal. Seem normal.
“Just go and apologise,” Qifrey said quietly, pushing his shaky, ever-thinning body away from the desk.
Qifrey turned towards the shed door, taking a single step before his shin smacked against a wooden stool that he hadn’t seen. Of course he wouldn’t have seen it. Even with his glasses, he was just a–
“Blind fucking idiot!” Qifrey snapped at nothing but his own frustrations, moving to kick the stool with all the strength he could.
And missed. Barely missed, but still missed. The stool just stood there in a mocking silence.
“Fucking– Fuck!” Qifrey yelled, roughly snatching the glasses from his nose and slamming the fragile frame against the desk. He felt insane, he hadn’t felt tethered to the earth for months, nothing felt real and everything hurt. His eye, his head, his ribs from dry heaving on a nightly basis, his hands from gripping his pen like a breadknife. He didn’t know or care how loud he was being, blindly scrambling over the old, splintering desk for the pen and paper that he knew was there.
He practically pierced the paper with the force he slammed the pen down with. It was a miracle how the pages didn’t tear as he angrily carved an extremely simple spell. He could barely see with his glasses on these days, so what even was the point anymore? There wasn’t a spell stronger than the one he’d already etched into the lens. His lungs felt on fire with how ragged his breathing was as he closed the circle.
And just like the stool, in a mocking silence the spell did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Qifrey tore the page out and held it up to his face and he could just about make out that he hadn’t even closed the circle. An obvious gap, an inch or so out. It wasn’t a careless slipup or a minor stroke that could be easily rectified. It was a chasm. The more he looked, the wider the gap seemed to appear.
There was always a gap though, wasn’t there? There was always an obvious void between Qifrey and everyone else. One that he’d spent over half his life trying to bridge with ink that felt more like blood the longer it went on. Hell, if the silverwood was going to take over eventually, what was the difference between his blood and the woodcruor?
As if his blood would be good enough to conjure magic. As if he were good enough to conjure magic. He was never even destined to become a witch, let alone one good enough to nurture the next generation of witches. He wasn’t destined for any of this. He’d been clawing his bloodied hands, splitting his nails and grazing his palms through a life he wasn’t supposed to have. A life he wasn’t supposed to want.
He’d been destined to die in that rain flooded grave in the forest, and it was now just an inevitability that had been drawn out for longer than it should have. He was going to end up the same way anyway.
Qifrey was still staring at the incomplete circle, his hands shaking but not through weakness anymore but something ugly and raw. A strange, strained laugh bubbled up his throat and before he caught himself he was sweeping his arms across the desk. The thin fabric of his shirt snagging on the loose splinters as various broken and obsolete contraptions clattered to the floor. It was funny in a way, maybe he belonged there. Discarded on the floor, incomplete and unfinished. Crudely put together just to be pulled apart again, tweaked and patched up until they were unrecognisable caricatures of their original forms. That’s what he was though, picked up and held together with the same glue flower paste he stuck his useless glasses on with every morning.
The worst part was, there was no reason. He’d gone over it time and time again and there was nothing he or anyone else could do. It was always just a temporary fix to a permanent problem, his flaws being kept on life-support rather than euthanising them. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ is just a poisonous notion that people who don’t understand like to say without thought to make themselves feel better.
“You can’t be Professor Qifrey if you can’t even fucking draw, can you?!” Qifrey growled at his hands, flexing his fingers as if some innate divine magic would come spilling from his fingertips.
Qifrey slammed his fists on the desk with that sick, ugly laughter again before spinning around to kick whatever abandoned box of useless junk was closest. It hurt when he kicked it, but everything hurt all the time now. The more he yelled the more his head hurt, which just made him angrier. He violently grabbed a heavy, ivory candle stick and launched it across the shed into some sorry looking shelving that collapsed on impact. He didn’t even know if he was shouting anymore, the pain in his head was deafening enough. The deep throbbing behind his eye socket felt like it was laughing back at him.
Years of dust was getting kicked up, clouding around his boots in thick puffs as he stormed to the far side of the room. He picked up another vague shape of an object and slammed it down against the work bench. Qifrey wasn’t even saying coherent words anymore, just half-barked curses and anguished grunts as more forgotten contraptions got strewn around his feet.
He could smell the years of dust the more he tore down the workshop. Each harsh breath taking in the ashes of forgotten, unneeded tools. Corpses of things that had once had the potential to be useful but were killed before they even had the chance.
Qifrey eventually grasped another pen, the tears in his eyes and the dust clouded his dwindling vision but he knew from Olruggio showing him years ago it was a prototype of a self-inking pen. He didn’t quite know what possessed him to, but Qifrey turned his hand over and scribbled a crude blob on the back of his hand and he could make out there was still ink inside. In a few heavy paces, Qifrey made it back to the desk. He roughly pulled up his sleeve and slammed his arm down on the desk, holding the sharp, silver nib to his exposed forearm.
He felt his heart stop and his breaths slowed down until he couldn’t even tell if he was breathing or not. He may have been the first person to ever hear dust settle. His arm on the desk didn’t even look like it belonged to him and he had to flex his hand once more to make sure it was real.
“It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair, is it?” Qifrey spat at himself, the pen in his hand hovering above his arm. “I’ve tried. I’ve tried. I’ve tried…” He rambled, with that ugly laughter which was simmering beneath the surface making his words feel jagged and out of sync. “What for? Nothing. Nothing. I’m bound for the same place, aren’t I? I should have just been left there. You should have just left me there!” His unfamiliar voice cracked the louder he got. The more questions he asked to nothing but the dust, the louder he got.
“Why didn’t you just fucking leave me there?!” He screamed hoarsely, jamming the pen into the desk beside his forearm. He didn’t even know if he’d intended for it to hit, whether it was his anger, his lack of sight or coordination, it missed. The delicate metal nib splintered and frayed as it was mercilessly forced into the rotting wood.
He should be that rotting wood.
Qifrey swung his hand up above himself, gripping the damaged pen and moving to stab it down once more. But instead, his arm was forcefully yanked backwards, the tendons in his still healing shoulder alighting with a burning pain that made him collapse to his knees. He pressed his forehead against the edge of the abused desk and just sobbed. Loud, choked out hiccups and sobs as a firm, but equally trembling hand held his arm limply above him.
“Olly… I’m–” Qifrey couldn’t even bring himself to say anything, whether it was in his own defence or pity.
Olruggio didn’t say anything for a long while and Qifrey couldn’t blame him. Olruggio had stopped him from being destructive and upset as a teenager, but that hadn’t happened in years. Never this bad. Never this scary. No one, not even Olruggio would have known what to do walking in on him like this.
Qifrey continued to sob, his whole body just a limp weakened heap at Olruggio’s feet. He desperately needed Olruggio to say something, or at the very least drag him up off the floor. Or sit down next to him. Lean on him. He’d even take a hug in that moment, even if it killed him.
It was the pen dropping from Qifrey’s hand that broke the silence, followed by a deep sigh that Olruggio had been holding in.
“Olly my… My arm hurts. Can you…” Qifrey mumbled with his forehead still pressed against the desk. When Olruggio let go, his arm fell just as heavily to his lap, but not before his wrist bone caught the desk edge as a final twist of the knife.
Qifrey didn’t dare look up out of shame, out of how he’d destroyed part of the half-forgotten archive of Olruggio’s contraptions. He felt terrible suddenly realising that perhaps some of the items weren’t as unwanted as he thought they’d been. The guilt was already tugging at his stomach, wondering how many years of Olruggio’s hard work he’d just killed off.
“What the hell are you doing, Qifrey?” Olruggio finally said, his voice flat and firm. When Qifrey didn’t immediately answer he gave Qifrey’s leg a nudge with his foot. When that didn’t work, he crouched down beside Qifrey and surprisingly harshly pulled his face away from the desk and half turned his face towards him.
Qifrey couldn’t really make out his features, but he didn’t need to, he knew Olruggio was frowning out of frustration more than concern and he could understand why. But Qifrey still didn’t know what to say; that wasn’t just a jumble of sorrow and self-pity. It only took a couple of breaths before Olruggio sighed and let go of Qifrey’s face.
“Your face is all scratched up and where the hell are your glasses?” Olruggio grumbled, finally taking in the full carnage that Qifrey had left in his wake.
Qifrey brought a shaky hand up to his face, feeling the grazes atop his nose. He hadn’t realised until now quite how violently he’d pulled them off earlier. He followed the shadow of Olruggio as he stood up, peering at various piles of tangled wirework and shattered glass looking for his glasses.
“I… I don’t know, I…” Qifrey stammered quietly, half-heartedly feeling around on the floorboards beneath him. It’d be a miracle if they did find them, such tiny, fragile things amongst the wrecks around them.
After a few minutes, Olruggio appeared beside Qifrey again. Without his glasses, but at least with a softer tone than before. He felt his exposed arm get picked up and inspected before the sleeve was tugged back down.
“What’s gotten into you? You about to draw some forbidden magic on yourself or somethin’?” Olruggio huffed, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Mmh… Would be nice wouldn’t it?” Qifrey said with the ghost of that ugly laugh still scratching his throat.
Olruggio didn’t seem to find it funny though. He just gave Qifrey another exasperated sigh. The kind that he hadn’t been sent in his direction for years. Olruggio was obviously tired in his own way of this too, which just made the guilt in Qifrey’s gut twist more.
“You scared the girls something rotten. You know that, right? Tetia comin’ barging into my room thinking you’d been attacked by some rabid animal.” Olruggio sighed with a shake of his head.
Qifrey knew whatever he’d been doing must have been loud, there was no way he couldn’t have sounded possessed. He was scared of himself, he couldn’t even imagine how shaken the girls must have felt.
Olruggio stood up and hauled Qifrey’s dead weight up with him. Qifrey leaned back against the desk, his limbs feeling so achingly heavy and numb. The adrenaline of his outburst slowly wearing off and bringing him back reluctantly into his physical body. But, he still couldn’t find the words or sense to even begin to explain the maelstrom of grief that had dragged him down into whatever you’d call what just happened. So, he just started to sob again as he hung his head and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes.
Being graced with patience from Olruggio would have been a small comfort but at the same time Qifrey understood people only had a finite amount of patience, and if his patience with himself was threadbare, he wouldn’t have been surprised if Olruggio’s patience had finally run out. But, as he pulled his hands away from his face, he could see the silhouette of Olruggio pawing through the debris on the floor silently.
The creaking floorboards and the sound of pieces of wood, glass and metal being moved around was the only thing that filled the air as both men dealt with Qifrey in their own way. It hurt Qifrey’s heart to see how quietly Olruggio moved around the workshop, carefully deconstructing the chaos in an attempt to find Qifrey the glasses he’d made him, that Qifrey had selfishly tossed to the side in his anger. It was as if Olruggio’s very soul oozed forgiveness that was both suffocating and a comfort. After everything, absolutely everything, he was still present, still piecing together Qifrey no matter how futile it was. Although, in more recent years he seemed to be quieter in his desire to help him, not that Qifrey believed his desire to help him was any less than before, but more he’d learned that whether he vocalised his need or not, Qifrey would find a way to deflect his offers.
It was something Qifrey wasn’t proud of, unintentionally moulding his oldest friend to align better with his fractured neuroses. But, it was the reality they found themselves in.
Eventually, Olruggio walked back into Qifrey’s line of sight. “Got ‘em,” Olruggio said with a kind, soft chuckle. Qifrey reached out to take the glasses from him, but Olruggio batted his hand away, opting to position the glasses back on the bridge of Qifrey’s nose himself. Qifrey blinked the last of his tears away and Olruggio vaguely came back into focus.
“They’re not broken?” Qifrey asked, touching the metal casting lain across his clammy, grazed face.
“I made ‘em, didn’t I?” Olruggio said warmly, far too warm for what Qifrey believed he deserved.
“Yes… I guess you did.” Qifrey said quietly, he wanted to sound as grateful as he could despite the heavy weight of the residual sorrow crushing his chest.
It was going to take days of cleaning to get the workshop back to how it looked before, and another few weeks to put it back together if they ever wanted to use it as a functioning workspace again. But, Qifrey couldn’t help but still feel like he belonged there, amongst the bits and pieces Olruggio had patched together.
“Maybe this whole fiasco is a blessing in disguise. You’ve been saying for years about how nice a greenhouse or somethin’ would be… We could get this place cleared out at last, knock some more shelves up, get some more plants and greenery in here,” Olruggio mused, pacing the floor and assessing the sturdiness of the existing furniture. “Yeah, I think it’d be nice. Then your plants would at least have somewhere cosy to wait out the cold winter months with.” Olruggio finished with an affectionate nudge to Qifrey’s arm. Obviously trying to diffuse the tension, or distract them both for a moment.
Qifrey looked around the shed, trying to imagine how it might look when filled with the promise of greenery and budding seedlings. Maybe he’d still belong there even then.