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Qifrey inspected the seal one more time, carefully ran his eye over the now-familiar lines to look for anything faulty or missing. It all seemed to check out. In his chest his heart did a little leap, jumping towards the moment to come. He raised his head and called over to Olruggio: “Okay, I think I’m done. Ready to go whenever you are.”
Olruggio nodded where he too was kneeling on the rocky ground about twenty meters away, bent over his own work and deep in concentration. The fingers of his free hand played idly with the tassel of his hat resting in his lap, while his drawing hand moved quickly and confidently with the searneedle pen he’d recently settled on as the definitive iteration. Drawing directly onto the stone, he didn’t have to worry about weighing down a piece of paper at the corners lest it fly away on the wind, as Qifrey had. “Great. Give me five.”
“All right.”
Unable to keep still as he waited, Qifrey got to his feet and stretched his legs. He wandered aimlessly around the flat top of the mesa they’d picked out as the site for this test run of the spell. The landscape lay open and bare all around them, nothing but reddish stone with sparse yet dogged vegetation clawed into the cracks of it as far as he could see. Out of all the places they’d found in their travels they’d decided on this spot for its remoteness, and by that metric they could hardly have chosen better. Nothing seemed to stir in this desolate landscape but the two of them and the growing howl of the wind.
Qifrey eyed the heavy grey clouds above dubiously, their coverage so complete the world seemed thrown into a colourless twilight, though it was barely midday yet. It looked like it might rain soon. The smell of it was on the wind, too, which was kicking up even from the gale that had whipped around them during the preparation phase. Now that he stood upright it tore at his cloak and hair, made him scowl and gather his clothes more tightly around himself against the chill. His hat ribbon danced cheerfully in the wind, occasionally twirling around itself and straightening out with a snap before gleefully going for another round.
Words bubbled up in Qifrey with unusually irresistible force. “If this works, do you think we should try the full boilfire version next? Right away, I mean?”
Olruggio held up a quelling finger even as he kept drawing. “Hey, hey, hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. It’s only a proof of concept yet, we’re not raining boiling water all over the place until we’re sure we’ve got this right. Stickin’ to a light spell for the merge, for now.”
“Yes, Master Olly, safety first, Master Olly,” Qifrey sing-songed, and Olruggio sniggered and made a rude gesture in his direction with the hand that wasn’t drawing.
“You wanna explain to our masters why we got so carried away with whether we could, that we forgot to ask ourselves whether we should? That’s, like, the number one thing masters never stop nagging you about.” His deepening voice broke a little in the middle of the first sentence, but with just the two of them there he didn’t pay it any mind. It was a hazardous business, being fifteen. You had to let down your guard somewhere.
Qifrey sighed, shifting his weight from foot to foot restlessly. “No, no. You’re right, better safe than sorry. It’ll look cool with the light spell, anyway. I’m just — I’m excited.”
Despite the tired lines that lingered around his eyes, Olruggio grinned. “Me too. I’ve been staring at glowstone sigils for weeks, thinkin’ about this trip is all that’s kept me going.” He sat back on his heels and considered his work, absently rubbing his neck as if to soothe an ache there. As their apprentice days drew towards a hectic crescendo, getting a whole day to themselves was becoming increasingly tricky, but they had planned this for a long time now, awaiting an opportunity. The dark circles under Olruggio’s eyes were testament to the allnighters he’d pulled to make sure he got it, despite Qifrey’s increasingly worried nagging along the way. Qifrey trusted Olly with many things, but not ever with knowing to take care of himself. Finishing his scan of the seal, Olruggio grunted in satisfaction. “Okay, that’s it, got all the connecting signs in, and the resonance should be right. All that’s left is closing the circle.”
They looked at each other.
“Then — it’s time?” Qifrey said, voice wavering slightly.
Now that they were at the precipice, Olruggio looked a little out of sorts too, unsure before the jump of what they were about to try. “I… guess so? There isn’t some step we forgot about, is there? All the test runs are a blur in my head right now.” He chuckled at himself as he rubbed his eyes, shaking his head. “‘S just… we’ve been working on this so long, feels almost weird that it’s going to be, y’know. Real. If we get this right.”
“We will,” Qifrey said, with more certainty than he strictly felt. “Like you said, we’ve worked out all the most obvious kinks already with the smaller scale models. Besides, what’s the worst that can happen with this version of it — we get rained on, somewhat anticlimactically? I have the rainward spell ready to go, for such an eventuality.”
“You’ve a point there. It’s why it’s good to iterate in the first place. Uh. Positions, then?”
Qifrey nodded and went over to his seal, kneeling in front of it. He dipped his pen in the conjuring ink. “Ready?”
“Ready. Then… here we go. Count down together?” Olruggio’s pen was poised in the air, readied.
Qifrey gave a decisive nod and raised his own. “Yes.”
“Alright. On one. Like, one, and then go. Not like last time.”
“That was you who got it wrong that time, Olly.”
“Yeah, I know, I’m remindin’ myself. Okay, but for real, though. Let’s do this.”
Towards the heavy sky their voices, tense like drawn bowstrings, rose in unison. “Three… two… one, go!”
Their pens flared in twin arcs, closing their circles.
Qifrey was forced to squeeze his eye shut against the initial flare of light, but the ragged pillar of radiance tearing towards the clouds seemed to imprint itself against the inside of his eyelid anyway, leaving a ghostly afterimage. When he could squint to watch the thing directly, his breath caught in his throat.
The clouds above them tore and broke open as the water dragon drew the vapor that gave them substance towards and into itself. Through the tears came shafts of sunlight piercing down to the red earth, joining the golden light that shone at the heart of the spell itself — Olruggio’s light, clear and bold and unwavering, setting the water around it to shimmer and glow. Wings unfurled until they seemed to stretch from one end of the sky to another, encompassing all the world.
Next to him Olruggio stood with his face upturned to it the wonder of it too, his eyes wide and his hair fluttering around his face. Qifrey could barely believe what he was seeing, that their joined hands had created something like this, this creature that almost seemed alive, as glorious as a called dawn, a star descended to earth for but a handful of moments. He had cast the water dragon spell before on his own, many times now — Olruggio fondly teased him about making it a dragon, but it tickled something in Qifrey’s stomach every time to see it unfold its giant wings while they were still coming into being, something so of his own creation taking flight, the hateful fluidity and mercurialness of water turned to purpose, to something beautiful and true even in its shifting, dissembling basic nature. Master Beldaruit had long since been proven right in his advice: giving it a shape he already enjoyed made all the difference.
But even so it had never been like this. It had never felt like this. It had been magic before, but with Olruggio’s spell merged with his own it was something greater and more unknowable still, like the answer to some vast question Qifrey hadn’t known to ask. As if they’d passed beyond the realm of magic that could fit into a book and stumbled together, hand in bewildered hand, onto the divine.
As the first barely-there drops of falling water whispered onto his upturned face, Qifrey hurriedly stooped to close the circle of the big rainward spell they had prepared beforehand. Just in time the invisible dome rose up around them, leaving the water dripping off the dragon’s wings to patter against it and run off, while they and the ground around them stayed dry. The rainward didn’t stop the wind, though, and with no deference paid to the grandness of the occasion that wind had only picked up in ferocity.
Olruggio was running over to him, and seeing it Qifrey ran to meet him; they were both looking up as they went, and between that and the wind they almost stumbled, but Olruggio grabbed Qifrey around the waist to keep him from falling and by some miracle of counterbalance they kept to their feet by crashing together, limbs entangled in a merry mess.
There was a huge grin on Olruggio’s face, and Qifrey was grinning back, harder than he could ever remember smiling in his whole life.
“Olly,” he shouted, jubilant, his arm around Olruggio’s shoulders, “Olly, we did it! Do you see that?”
“I see it!” Olruggio laughed, pushing his forehead to Qifrey’s and then turning his head to gaze up, as if to see it again. Their cheeks pressed together. He was so warm. “It’s even better than I imagined, it really worked!”
Gazing up at the sky and feeling Olruggio’s body hot and solid up against his own did something in Qifrey’s mind, made him feel lightheaded. It caused some space to open up inside him he had never known before, dizzying and wide as the horizon all around. The ribbon on his hat — Olruggio’s ribbon — whirled in the wind and wrapped around their entwined forms, as if they needed anything more to bind them together. Olruggio chuckled when the end of it threatened to whip across his face, squinting as he flicked it down and away with practiced precision to flutter harmlessly against his back instead. It was almost hard to remember, these days, but he knew the little tricks of handling it too. It had been his, once.
All tiredness was banished from Olruggio’s face now, his features illuminated seemingly from within as well as from above, and it revealed to Qifrey’s eye the emerging new geometry of him, the boyish softness of his cheeks giving way to sharper, more decided angles, the beginning dark shadow over his jaw where stubble was coming in — sparsely enough yet that every new strand was duly noted and remarked upon when spotted in the mirror, but steadily. It made Qifrey stumble over the realization all over again that some day very soon, Olruggio was going to be a man. Well, so would Qifrey, probably, but that seemed a more nebulous and inconsequential proposition, more abstract. Less… apropos. It might occur with the gradual, untraceable transition as that of one season into another, and yet one day Qifrey would turn to Olruggio and see not the boy he’d always known but something — someone — else. Someone with Olly’s eyes and his smile, but also the broader, more defined hands he was already growing into day by day, and with dark hair marking his forearms, maybe other places too, someone who might grow a beard, maybe, as it sounded like the men up north tended to favour.
The idea made Qifrey feel strange. He’d think it dread, or grief, or hunger, but for the way it made his blood hum with burgeoning heat in his veins.
Olruggio’s chest was rising and falling against his own with his elated breathing. A flush had been brought to his cheeks by the gale and the excitement, and around his face his hair was wildly unsettled by the wind, a shifting, ink dark flutter against the brightened sky, gilded by the glow around the edges, like a crown of fire. His thick black lashes too seemed lovingly traced out, as if the light claimed him as its own, as of itself, with the caress. There was something in his eyes as he looked back at Qifrey, something like a gentle breathless question, or a promise.
His lips were pink and just barely parted, hovering around a smile, as if there was something he wanted to say, or maybe… It made Qifrey urgently aware of his own mouth, as if for the first time in his life, and less by conscious choice and more through some strange force like gravity he found himself moving closer — a drift that seemed like it could be endless, and he didn’t even mind, as long as he could feel Olruggio so near to him, and sense more than see him drawing closer too. It did seem to last forever until their noses brushed. Their faces nestled close together, breath to breath but not quite touching, as if neither of them knew exactly what was supposed to happen from here and were waiting to find out. Each remaining millimeter of the distance between them had grown electric, brimming with potentiality like a thunderstorm about to break open.
For one moment magic felt as unfathomable and full of infinite possibility as Qifrey had once imagined it to be, for good or ill, redolent of the boundless awe and terror it had held before study had made it at the very least explicable. It made him think impossible things, like that he wanted to stay in the shelter of this shared moment forever, and that maybe this was it, they’d finally found it, together, the thing that could fix everything, render the memory spell obsolete — maybe this light could get inside him and burn the tree out with the roots and then… and then —
At the thought, those roots clenched around Qifrey’s insides as if in savage anticipation. They anchored themselves in his guts, flexed their tendrils wound around and between his veins to gain purchase before the promised bloom. Qifrey gave a strangled gasp, flinching back — thankfully it coincided with a howling gust of wind, and he could pass it off as another stumble. With the ribbon still tangled around them both he couldn’t go far, at least not without bringing Olly down with him. Olruggio hurriedly grasped the front of his cloak to steady him, laughing a little shakily.
“You okay?” he called over the wind, his hand settling soothingly against Qifrey’s side.
“I’m fine,” Qifrey rasped, as both of his eyes burned — one with an absence where fresh shoots wanted to force his body open at the seams and break through, the other with tears he hoped would read as being caused by staring into the wind. His lips thrummed, strangely bereft, as he dug his teeth roughly into the bottom one until it tasted like blood. He blinked the tears back and set his jaw, a fierce, grim defiance coursing through him and filling the space where sorrow wanted to leak in, where normally he might decide it wiser to run, retreat. The fucking tree wasn’t going to take this from him. He refused. They’d made this together; no one and nothing was going to take it from him.
“Are you —” Olruggio began, but Qifrey had glanced up to hide the wet sheen over his eye, and all deeper thought fled his mind in an instant.
“Olly — look, the light…” Qifrey said, pointing, and Olruggio turned his face to follow his line of sight. Qifrey could feel Olly’s sharp intake of breath against him. Above them light broke through a thousand trembling shards of water, the pale indifferent splendour of the sun and the warm steadiness of Olruggio’s spell both, and in some places the shattering broke into rainbows around the edges, the entire visible spectrum of light laid out before them like a gift, like some unshackled version of the colours that sometimes danced across the skies up north, the dancing luminance that lit the night that Olruggio had told him about.
Olruggio swore reverently under his breath next to him. Qifrey could only nod in bemused yet perfect agreement.
Qifrey must have held on to his own inhale all that time, because when the water finally started losing its underlying coherence as the spell faded and the dragon surrendered itself to gravity, it shuddered back out of him. The droplets hit the ground with little sparks of brilliance, a localized thundershower of the ghosts of shooting stars that fell all around them.
Once the last lights had winked out, there was only the sound of the wind.
“Okay,” Olruggio said eventually. “Don’t know about you, but I think we hafta call that a pretty successful trial run.”
Legs suddenly going wobbly under him and threatening to fold, Qifrey let his head fall to the curve of Olruggio’s shoulder and leaned some of his weight on him as he laughed tremulously. “Yes, I think we must.”
Olruggio tightened his arm around Qifrey’s waist to keep them both steady. He had to hurriedly adjust for the new coltish height Qifrey had attained in recent months, where Olly’s, to his tangible disappointment and resignation, seemed to have leveled out at where it meant to stay. He’d mentioned once that his father was a tall man. At this point it seemed pretty clear that was not what fate had in the cards for Olly, particularly, but he rallied admirably under the sudden burden of Qifrey’s weight anyway — Qifrey had surrendered rather more of it than he’d intended, in his lightheadedness and the aftershocks of the silverwood stirring.
“Sorry,” Qifrey said, scrambling to get his legs back under him, “sorry, I just feel… I got dizzy all of a sudden, I don’t know what…”
Boldly if a little strained, Olruggio proclaimed: “No problem, I’ve got you,”
At Olruggio squeezing Qifrey to him slightly, once he’d braced himself to hold them both up, Qifrey stopped fighting to get back on his feet fully quite so urgently. Olruggio’s eyes were soft and very close when Qifrey turned his head against his shoulder to look at his friend’s face, and found it already tilted towards him, taking him in. The roots squirmed restlessly once more, but Qifrey fought to ignore it to have another few moments of this. Ssh. Pretend it’s a dream.
“Hey there,” Olruggio said, the smile making his voice low and warm, his eyes crinkling very differently than they’d done under exhaustion. “Maybe we should lie down to watch the show next time, all this looking up is hell on the balance, as well as on the neck.”
“Yes,” Qifrey said, closing his eye. He felt like he’d been falling all day, forever. Olly’s cloak was soft and slightly scratchy under his cheek. It smelled so familiar, the warm everyday comfort of the scent easily overcoming that of rain all around.
Aware that he was not just playing with fire at this point but actively courting disaster, he sighed and stood up properly, though he found his range of motion cut short by the ribbon that still bound them together. He had to find the end and delicately disentangle it to get the room to step back. The irony rested on his tongue like bile, but he swallowed it down, focused on the work of his hands. What use in dwelling, when dwelling would change nothing.
With the indefinable instinct he had for it these days — having his secrets brought to sudden wrenching light so many times had made him develop something like a sixth sense in this regard — he knew, without ever looking up from his task, that Olruggio was watching him closely as he struggled with the ribbon.
“There, sorry,” Qifrey murmured as it finally came free, stepping back hurriedly, before — he didn’t quite know what, but all paths other than to a quick and prudent retreat seemed like they would lead somewhere even more painful.
“Our mutual bondage is ended,” Olruggio intoned with mock solemnity, the gravity of ritual. In his black clothes he stood out starkly against the sky, once more drawing itself closed into indignant greyness after the startlement of its brief enforced revelation.
Qifrey snorted. Tendrils seemed to crumble back from where they’d been gathering around the roots of his heart, falling away like ash. “Oh, I’m very afraid it won’t be quite that easy.”
Snatching the end of the ribbon out of the air with a sparkle in his eyes and winding it several times around his own wrist before he cradled the fabric in his palm, holding without tugging at it, Olruggio declared: “Quite right, too, if you wanna get rid of me you’re gonna have to work at it a lot harder than that. You still have somethin’ of mine with you everywhere you go.”
Not sure whether to laugh or cry, Qifrey made a noise that could pass for either and that mostly was an admission of defeat, as Olly always seemed able to defeat him, and he took the offered hand in his, ribbon between both their palms. “So I do.”
Olruggio’s expression grew more serious, teasing mischief giving way to something tentative. His hand squeezed Qifrey’s slightly.
“Y’know, probably just a trick of a light in all the excitement, but for a moment back there, it was almost like…” Qifrey let his hand fall away and forced himself to seem blithely uncomprehending, nay, downright helpfully quizzical, under Olruggio’s searching gaze, even as a scream was born and smothered in its cradle a thousand times in his throat, and eventually the uncertainty in the line of Olruggio’s shoulders resolved itself into an amiable shrug as he let the ribbon unfurl from around his wrist and released it back to the wind. “Eh, nevermind, ‘s nothing. Silver stars. We really did it, though.”
“We did it.”
They contemplated this in companionable post-triumph silence for a while.
Qifrey touched his fingertips together thoughtfully. “The next step would be making sure we have precise control of it and how it moves even in the combined state, I suppose.”
“Well, that’s mostly gonna be on you. I think the water’d still be the base of the whole thing, and then we infuse the light or the fire or what have you later. Water’s more stable and less volatile as an element, doesn’t feed on itself like fire or come with a want of inherent substance like light, it’s easier to build on.”
Qifrey nodded slowly. “Yes, I see your point. But perhaps there could be a way to trade off who controls the movement of the main body, at least temporarily — you know, if one of us needs to switch focus to some other target for a minute, without letting the whole spell drop or the components split apart.”
“That… would be a whole lot more complicated than what we did here today. And also much, much cooler,” Olruggio allowed, thumb tapping against his chin, and Qifrey could practically see his thoughts dancing around like newly lit sparks behind his eyes as they seemed to unfocus from anything in the physical present.
“Magic is a vast realm with many strange paths to follow. At least that’s what Master Beldaruit always says. I think there must be a way.”
Olruggio’s eyes came back into focus. “And we’ll find it,” he said, with his craftsman’s confidence and the swagger that broke free whenever his mind really got going— less so these days than when they were younger, as if the sheer burden of work laid upon it had chastened it somewhat, but it could always stir anew beneath the surface with undaunted brilliance.
Qifrey laughed. “That’s the spirit!”
“Y’know,” Olruggio said after a while, “if I can get the glowstones ready for easy mass production, they’re probably going to be pretty useful in all kinds of situations. Hopefully they can make a lot of people’s lives better, even if it’s just by the tiniest bit, and that’s… well, at the end of the day that’s all you can ask for magic to be able to do, right? I’m not saying that isn’t important. But…” He glanced over at Qifrey, looking almost plaintive, a little guilty, like someone caught trying to steal from the petty cash. “...but it isn’t this. And I didn’t even realize how much I’d missed — this. Does that make sense? Man. I don’t know. Maybe you’re right and I should get more sleep.”
“It makes perfect sense, Olly. I think I know exactly what you mean. And for the record I am absolutely right, you should get more sleep. More than one thing can be true at once.” Olruggio chuckled softly and scratched at his neck. After a moment Qifrey added: “It’s not as if you have to choose one or the other, though. Magic is always going to be here waiting for you, no matter how you reach for it — for its own sake, or for useful work. I’m not planning on going anywhere either. I’ll drag you back out here for some new impossible idea, if you ever forget. I never tire of seeing your spells, and getting to see them first, as they’re coming into being, is a gift I won’t give up timidly.”
Olruggio smiled at him sidewise and gently knocked their shoulders together. At the unfamiliar, almost shy edge to his expression, Qifrey had to move his eye away to the horizon, his whole body humming.
It made Qifrey’s heart beat to a new tune, this feeling of sharing a secret with Olly that was luminous and wild, not about pain. Even if it couldn’t be what he’d wanted, for one stupid, futile moment, for it to… well.
Olruggio said: “Hey.” Qifrey looked over at him — Olruggio’s lips were quirking in a smile of perfect conspiracy.
The smile and the conspiracy mirrored itself unstoppably on Qifrey’s mouth. “Yeah, Olly?”
“You wanna go again?”
“Yes!” Qifrey said, and to hell with anything else for a few minutes, these precious stolen hours. “Yes, let’s go again.”