Chapter Text
Coco wakes up.
She is still stuck in an ivory tower concealed within an ink-blotted forest, a twisted, warped version of the Great Hall.
Her components are resting neatly on an ornate desk, her clothes hung aloft by some sort of magical hangers known to the brims.
A schedule is folded on gilded paper to her left, perched on the nightstand.
She has not decided anything in particular for herself in months.
Everything is arranged in a perfect, rotating order that spins, twirls, and dances around boredom. She’s learned more here in a few months than she’d have in years if she’d stuck with the pointed caps.
Coco does not doubt for a moment, she could have gotten just as far under her former master’s wing, learning something much kinder and gentler, filled with a comfort she misses more than imaginable.
But it is too late to turn back and she has a duty to uphold, so Coco gets ready according to the itinerary.
She takes her breakfast upstairs, avoiding eye contact with anyone she meets. Their gazes – worshipping, adoring, and reverent– settle somewhere in her chest and simmer before returning back to a steady level.
She takes to working on her notes as she eats, too fearful of thinking about her before as she eats in silence. Before she starts to reminisce on the laughter, the full tables, and the endless stream of warmth–
Her grip is too tight.
Coco adjusts her pen, rolling it in her hand once, twice. She spins it around, watching the way the nib catches the light of a flickering flame.
It would do her some good, to go outside. To feel some fresh air, the sun on her face.
Yet she cannot leave without an aide of some sort, and so instead, she makes a pyreball.
The seal is nearly perfect, but still holds a small mistake. She can’t quite figure out what it is.
Deep down, she knows that if she were still in her before, if she were still at Qifrey’s atelier, the problem would have been solved by Agott’s careful probing, Qifrey’s hand pointing at the exact error.
Yet Coco has made her choice, and Qifrey is no longer master Qifrey and before she can spiral into regret, there is a knock on her door.
She blinks, and checks the schedule.
Coco is late. So before she can get into thinking about regret, about how she misses her before, she picks up her components and walks out, not sparing a glance as she leaves.
The person leading her to her destination takes the stairs rather than using a seal to get around. Coco knows that Iguin and the rest of their inner circle would much prefer if she used that spell, but the night she’d put her cap on her bed and tried it for the first time, she’d thrown up and sworn to never do it again.
It was her first demand, and she knew they would never directly tell her no, so instead the topic was pushed back on the itinerary, its usage performed at a later date.
When they do eventually get to the right place – Coco’s private grounds within a space she cannot quite name and has never discovered on her own, Iguin and Sasaran are waiting.
They both give her a pointed look, disappointment obvious even despite concealed faces.
Then, Sasaran brings a paw to his brim, and tilts it. Wordlessly, Coco opens her quire and completes the seal she’d been working on this morning.
Water pools rapidly around her quire, and they stand in silence before she bites her lip, waiting one, two, three seconds.
The seal is much too slow, and she looks up from her quire as her teachers give her another glare, and Coco’s hands are shaking and she cannot be a failure so she rips the page in half, the water falling to the floor as she jumps out of the way to avoid getting wet.
She tries the seal again.
This time, it holds.
It forms and freezes into an icicle, sharp enough to hurt, to injure.
She’d known what she’d been getting into when she arrived.
Yet Coco is still Coco, and so she will hold firm, doing as little as she can to create harm.
Iguin’s palm is outstretched, and Coco hands her quire over.
They complete a seal of their own, and it is far faster, far more dangerous and dark than Coco could ever imagine.
Studying the how will be Coco’s homework tonight. She grits her teeth, wincing at the sensation, at how shallow her breaths are becoming.
They ask her to create a dragon made of water, false affection dripping from their voices as a pang of agony threads itself into her chest, the emotion threatening to overflow.
She makes the dragon. It is messy and deliberately worse than anyone in the room knows she can make, and Coco can’t help but grimace as the two teachers scoff, before disappearing into smoke.
She bites her lip again.
As the taste of copper fills her mouth, Coco lets herself breathe.
The next time Coco thinks about her homework, it is already midnight.
She had spent her day following the schedule, careful to not step too far out of line. She had, once.
They had stopped her from visiting the children. Stopped her from running away from the reverent eyes. Forced her to visit a feathered brim, and study healing magic with a former friend. Both had attempted to knock a stubborn affection for the before away from her.
She had learned quickly that sticking to schedule kept them out of sight.
So Coco spends her days running in and out of different ateliers, private classrooms and with teachers who have greedier eyes than she is comfortable with, so she has not tried to learn many of their names.
But the children?
The children are a different story, and she knows each by the familiar shape of their smile and starry-eyed gazes as she performs borrowed spells from her before, the children gathered around her.
They have taken a special liking to Agott’s bird of light beacon, and Tetia’s cushion-like beds of sand. Not a day goes by that they don’t ask, and so what will she do, but complete their spells?
What will she do except ensure their happiness, even over hers?
She shudders, and realizes, not for the first time, how much Qifrey had rubbed off onto her, how his spells have become part of her without even knowing, and how easy it would be to solve that one spell if she were back by his side, and not stuck in solitary training grounds and ivory towers.
But it is midnight, and her homework is resting on the desk that is far too grand to call hers.
She gets up from her bed, lights a candle, and lifts Iguin’s seal to it, resting her head on her hand and furrowing her brows, imagining that she was not by herself and instead, working through it with Agott.
The homework is done in record time, a sense of pride flickering in her chest.
Coco draws up the spell for a flying puppet, opens her window, and throws the assignment out.
The bird soars through a blackened sky, and she closes her window.
Coco blows the candle out.
She does it again the next night, and the night after that.
The children ask for glowing stones, smoke in the shape of dragons, contraptions to find each other, beds of sand, and beacons of light shaped like birds. They ask for ghosts of Coco’s past, and she fulfills each wish, emotions bubbling in her throat.
She draws each by memory, from now, the lines coming without thought, seals completing themselves before she’s even begun, before she’s glanced back at her quire.
Agott’s lines have gotten into her hands the way Qifrey’s patience crawled into her waiting, the way Tetia’s enthusiasm haunted her mornings before she remembered to suppress it.
Coco tries not to think about it.
The seasons move through the tower’s single window the way they have always done – indifferently, according to their own schedule, without consulting hers. Autumn comes and the ink dries faster in the cold. Winter, and she draws a pyreball without glancing back. It is exactly like the one she had drawn up against the snow – the one that had held until she’d made a dragon for the first time. One that held for three, four, five seconds.
The cold had taken that, too. She does not think about this for long either.
She does not think about how she’s become less of her before, how her hands have been stained by conjuring ink and new calluses and the children’s expectant gazes and how she is nowhere closer to saving her mother and everyone else than she was the year before.
She will refuse to think about the leaps and bounds those she loves are making, and choose to focus on the one in stasis – choose to focus on her mother, still encased in crystal.
Spring arrives, and she is still working on a familiar seal, littered with more mistakes than she can find.
She tries it differently this time – slower, faster, then with another anchor point, with the sigil in another place. The water forms and holds and dissolves. Forms and holds and dissolves, and the cycle continues.
She rips more pages than she keeps, these days.
The children have started calling her a predis. A teacher.
Coco has lost count of how many times she’s felt a sense of twisted pride toward the feeling, the word, the emotion, teacher.
Did Qifrey think the same thing?
Her heart cannot tear any more than it already has.
Another year passes.
When she closes the door, her components fall out of her bag as she slides down onto the floor, crawling into herself against the wall.
She’s older now, and can tell that by the length of her hair and the shape of her face and wonders if her mother would even recognize her anymore.
Her quire has been filled and refilled, her desk filled with all sorts of seals and trials, a new workbench stationed near the window placed at her request.
The brims would wait on her hand and foot until they were ready for her to do… something.
Whatever they were planning, whatever reason she’d been trapped in this ridiculous tower, unable to leave without a patron.
She knows that she has grown in the way a gnarled, rotten seed does. She knows that she has gotten better at magic. It is not a comfort.
Coco catches her reflection in the long-broken mirror in the corner.
Then the thought crosses her mind that she is older.
Her hair is longer, face more defined, and features formed out.
Would they really recognize her?
Would the brims notice she’d left?
Her head shoots up to look out the window, and she’s already tugging her sylph shoes on.
The journey to the Downs is a few hours, though Coco is sure she can get there faster under the cover of night.
The wind is beating on her face and she’s outside.
Outside of the tower, and nobody had noticed – had come to collect her.
It is almost midnight, and this time, Coco wants nothing more than to stay with those she loves.
It is midnight, and they are still awake.
His apprentices are spread across the atelier – Tetia bundled in blankets as she watches Olruggio and Richeh work on a contraption, Agott curled up next to the fireplace reading a book.
Richeh’s visits have become rarer, Agott’s even more so, yet the three still make time to visit. So long as they journey miles to catch up with older crones like himself and Olruggio, he knows his heart will be able to beat longer.
A teacher worries for his students, even after they’ve flown the nest. He worries for each and every one of his girls, whether they are present or not.
His eyes meet the window, and his hands itch to search. It has been years since they’d seen any glimpse of a brimmed cap, and the Wise grow lax under false security. The fools.
Qifrey has been spending more and more of his days down leagues under the sea, lobbying the Wise against such claims.
A glimmer of green light flutters across his vision.
His hand reaches the door before another breath, and Qifrey swings it open.
Cool air meets his face, and his head moves around in a frantic motion, searching for confirmation.
His heart catches in his chest, and he allows himself to hope – to think, Coco?
There is an arm pressing against his own, and Olly is holding onto him, eyes leveled and certain. He shakes his head.
Qifrey allows himself to be brought inside, tea pressed into his hands, and watches as a familiar ritual continues around him. Moments like these carried a comfort that wrapped around him like the rushing of the nearby river – steady and unwavering.
He scoffs. He is their teacher, and despite the fact that after all the years the atelier has been filled with five, and not six, they remain content to take care of him.
Qifrey worries nonetheless.
Coco holds her breath until she can’t anymore.
Her chest feels close to bursting, heart pressing for release until she lets go.
She cannot be caught – cannot allow herself to be seen by her former teacher and his company.
It was the door opening – the retreat behind a tree, her head peeking out just inches to watch as Olruggio held tight to the other man, shaking his head.
She watched as about half a dozen expressions ran across his face, before settling into a well of grief.
And Coco had nobody but herself to blame for that, did she?
Yet, she cannot help that she is human – that despite falling for honeyed promises and turning into whatever she has become – she is still fallible.
So she watches as Richeh runs from the room to retrieve more blankets, as Agott sits beside him and points at pages within an unknown book and Tetia pulls the brushbuddy from running under their master’s cloak and Olruggio refills Qifrey’s cup of tea.
Coco commits the scene to memory.
She waits until they are all tucked into their own blankets, curled around the fireplace and breaths slipping into the tell-tale rhythm of sleep before leaving.
The sun is slowly rising over Naakiwan Downs, and it is far past midnight.
Still, she will tuck this spell – this moment, into her heart for as long as she is able.