Chapter Text
"I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise."
– Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947
Death follows Olruggio.
It trails behind him, dark bones against fresh snow, fingers wrapping loosely around his ankles with every stride. Olruggio runs. He can't stop - if he does, he's sure it will drag him under until his flesh turns solid; crystalline and preserved for the next unlucky traveler to find. Like the ones he couldn't save, when the cold stole the breath from their lungs and froze the blood in their veins. Like the ones cleaved in two by giant claws, their final breaths bubbling and thick.
Of dozens, only two remain. They clasp Olruggio's tiny hands in their own, tears streaking down their flushed faces as they whisper thanks like prayers. He saved them, they say. Delivered them from certain doom. And he, still trembling to the bone, can only force what might pass for a smile through a painful grimace and pretend that death does not loom over his shoulder, icy breath furling into a fine mist just beyond the edge of his vision.
There are some, but there could have, should have, been more. Maybe it is greedy of him to reach for the heavens and brazenly demand more, as if the powers that be don't have much better things to be doing than listening to the pleas of a child who has not even become an apprentice yet. Well, if it is, he doesn't care. He will keep demanding anyway.
For what good is a witch who can't save anyone?
Something closes around his neck and squeezes. Olruggio sucks in a desperate breath of air cold enough to burn, huddling deep into the fur of his coat and wishing the ground would swallow him whole. It won't, of course. With another sharp puff of air, he turns his attention beyond the archway he's huddled under. There, just beyond, sits a woman with her trembling hands outstretched, fingertips stiff and deep black against a flame with no kindling besides the woodcruor scribed in the hand of another witch upon stone. Olruggio had tried to do it himself but his own hands refused to remain steady long enough to draw a single straight line. Ghodrey's shining star, and he can't even draw the simplest of fire spells to protect what little he was able to save.
The woman peers up at him, a small smile forming between her frost-kissed cheeks.
"Come here," she beckons, reaching for him with those blackened fingers she won't have come next moon, "Come where it's warm."
Before Olruggio's mind's eye, tongues of flame lick across flesh until it melts like hot wax.
It is not a pleasant feeling; to watch living things burn.
── ⋆⋅✧𖤓✧⋅⋆ ──
There are no such risks in the Great Hall, nestled deep beneath the crushing embrace of the sea where only magical light can touch and filled to the brim with witches of nearly every sort. Fire stands little chance to overstay its welcome here, there are no beasts to rend flesh and no cold to bite limbs. It's a relief large enough that it makes even the looming water and never-ending expanse of stonework bearable, no matter how much Olruggio may miss the smell of pine in the air and the crunch of leaves underfoot.
Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise. There's nothing down here to distract him from his studies, no snowy chill to climb his bones, no deer nor beetle to draw his attention. He can focus on what's important.
The other children, he realizes quickly, know no other life than that of the brick and water offered to them here. They needle him with questions about Ghodrey and Noz, blundering through the cabinet of his memories with all the grace of an eldroxen in a porcelain shop. Does ice really fall from the sky? Are all the animals up north humongous? What kind of monsters are there? Here's the truth, he tells them: snow is cold, the sky is bright, and the horrors are many. There are so many ways a human being can die, so many ways life can bleed into the snow or burn away until little remains beside cinder and ash.
Though he'd meant to scare them off asking any further questions, to talk about anything but that, their eyes sparkle with something Olruggio fears is more intrigue than alarm. One of the girls is already opening her mouth - presumably to ask another question that seems to bubble up in perfect time with an annoyed sigh from Olruggio's end - but she falters. Closes her mouth again. Her attention drifts to the far side of the hall, delicate features caught somewhere between curiosity and the glint of a magpie who's just caught sight of something shiny.
"There he is. He's that kid."
On the far side of the courtyard, a boy with hair as white as the barren snow-covered meadows of the Ghodrean woods carves his way around the fringes, shoulders back and gaze trained stubbornly ahead.
Don't bother remembering my name. You can trust I'll forget yours.
It's hard to forget someone like that boy named Qifrey, though. Instead of glimpses of Noz, Olruggio finds his most recent nights haunted by the image of him, suspended in the ocean above, his white cape twisting around his stilled form like a tongue of smoke. By the sheer serenity in his blank face, stilled by unconsciousness and beckoned by Death. When Qifrey had walked into the ocean's embrace, Olruggio had dragged him back and pried the water from his lungs until he drew air once more.
I can still be a witch that saves people.
In return, Qifrey had left him sitting in the darkened and twisting halls of the Great Hall, the sting of his words like an open-palmed strike across the face; when only moments prior he'd damn-near melted into Olruggio's relieved embrace.
Olruggio doesn't even realize he's staring until Qifrey's eye meets his like an accusation, striking true from across the hall. And like a thief caught stealing, Olruggio's heart drops right along with his gaze.
"Why not ask him?" Olruggio suggests, stretching languidly like he wasn't just rubber-necking, "Isn't he from the outside world, too?"
"He's..." The girl rocks back and forth, pigtails swinging alongside her, "Well, whenever we try to ask him anything, he kind of just... glares."
A round of agreement sounds from the other children, nods and mutterings about ill-ended encounters with this new kid who won't give anyone the time of day and rarely leaves Beldaruit's shadow. The girls seem to find this particularly interesting, if the delighted little squeals and hushed chatter is anything to go off of. Something about his air of mystery, or whatever. Olruggio hardly cares enough to listen with more than half an ear.
"My master said a boy like him's 'not long' for the great hall," one of the other boys sneers with unmistakable ire at Qifrey's retreating form.
Now that catches Olruggio's attention.
He whirls around to face him, bristling like an offended brushbug. "What?"
The boy shrugs, "I overheard some of the adult witches talking. They said he's missing an eye. The one covered by his hair. And when you've only got one, the other one tires out extra fast."
Does Qifrey really only have one eye? Olruggio wasn't paying attention, really; all he can remember is the haunted look in the one ice-blue eye not covered by an unruly mop of white hair. Even if, it's a slipshod excuse at best to preclude him from the ranks of witchcraft. Olruggio swallows against a sudden lump in his throat - not that it took a master witch to figure out Qifrey was troubled, it's just that he just hadn't yet considered that perhaps the snow-for-brains has more in common with him than vague notions of the great outdoors.
The ice and fire and death of Noz sit deep in Olruggio's bones, reverberating up his spine until his teeth hurt. They sent him here, to the bottom of the ocean and so far away from home - an exile under the guise of protection. What unimaginable horror could possibly be worse than scraping blood and ash from under his fingernails until they cracked and bled; than awakening in the dead of the night knowing that he draws breath when others do not?
He decides, then, that if nothing else, he's going to get answers.