Rise of the Night Witch

Chapter 2.8 - A Looming Threat

Recap: Marissa looks at the Academy.

The trapdoor snapped down above my head. Torch-lit marble walls surrounded me as I descended spiral stairways reminding me of the Council's HQ. But the Cunning Folk Academy's underground tower was different. Instead of hiding eldritch horrors, the doors had harmless labels like "mathematics", or "divination".

I skimmed my Semester Electives parchment. A surprising number of subjects (Mathematics, History, Mundane Studies) were optional for apprentices schooled among mundanes. The only obligatory courses were Introduction to General Magical Theory, Combat Magic, and one of the four big disciplines (Potions and Transfiguration, Sympathetic Magic, Divination, Elemental Magic).

I wasn't the only one walking down the stairways. This Mark from before walked right behind me, along with a Latina girl named Crista and a white, black-haired all-American boy named Nick.

"So, what are you gonna choose?" Nick asked, his voice loud and proud enough that it echoed through the dungeons. "I'm gonna go with fireball elemental spells!"

It took me a while to realize he was talking to me. "Hm," I murmured. "Transfiguration, I guess. I've got better shaping than range, apparently. You guys?"

"Sympathetic magic," Crista said. "Other disciplines are based on it and incorporate its key principles. It's to other disciplines what physics is to biology and chemistry."

"I'll just go broad and take as much as I can," Mark said. "Where are you from, by the way?"

"New York," I said. "The state, not the city. Well, I was in the city, too, but now I'm in a town that's more rural and all."

"So, you grew up among mundanes," this dark-haired boy, Nick, said.

"Is this unusual?"

"Nah," he said. "I grew up in some hidden village in the Miles Standish State Forest which is also here in Massachusetts. Is it true that you guys all know how to shoot guns?"

"Only the American mundanes are obsessed with guns, Nick," Crista, said. "In Bolivia, only the criminals and the police have guns."

"But why? Guns are cool!"

"They kill people!"

"People kill people!"

"I'd kill ten people for you, baby, if I could go 'Pew! Pew!'."

Crista punched his arm. "You jerk!"

Mark laughed. "You two are like a married couple."

Nick rubbed his punched arm. "This aint like with mundies who marry whoever they want, Mark."

I blinked. "You mean, you guys can't do that?"

"It's not that we can't," Mark said. "But we're a small, isolated community. Our elders prefer to choose for us."

"'cept for daredevils like your Mommy," Nick added. "They won't have that."

"Mom went to this school, right?" I asked.

"Why not go to the library?" Crista suggested. "You should find her in the old yearbooks."

"Where is that?" I asked.

"I'll show you."

Crista led us through a skull-filled laboratory and a classroom with uncleaned blackboards before she showed us the door to a cobwebbed library. As she promised, it had a shelf full of arcane yearbooks. I walked closer, turned around the volumes like they were the pages of a book, and searched for the one that corresponded to my mother's year. I found her in the one for 1991. It contained an old-school daguerreotype photograph of her class standing in a dungeon and everyone smiling. As a sixteen-year-old, Mom had hair as bushy brown as mine, a body as skinny as mine, and a face covered in mischievous freckles like I never had them. She looked perfect. Dad got lucky that none of the male apprentices was good enough for her.