Lacmere University – Chapter 11 – A Witching Hour [2.7k Words]

Magic should be convenient.

That's what you get in stories, isn't it? The right words, the right gestures, and you get results.

No matter what those results may be.

Cut off a mermaid's tongue, and she gets legs. Stake a vampire through the heart, and she dies—unless you also have to cut off her head, fill her mouth with garlic, and bury the body under a crossroads, of course. But you shoot a werewolf through the heart with silver bullets?

It dies.

Cause and consequence. Easy. Reliable.

Convenient.

It very much fucking isn't.

I scratch the back of my hand yet again, my skin itching as it has since my third year in Lacmere started and things got even more interesting than they had already been when I enrolled.

For a moment, I can't help but look down, almost expecting to see blood like I'm a moron with a guilt complex in a Shakespearian play, but, well, it's not like I have killed anyone, is it? I have arguably saved lives! A true hero, that's who I am.

It just fucking itches.

It itches worse when I call the magic back.

There's a piece of string tied to my middle finger, and I almost raise it in the gesture it all but demands from a former goth-punk girl who should've been enjoying college by getting plastered in the middle of lesbian orgies, but, alas, here I am, closer to dawn than to midnight, in the middle of a goddamn forest, about to freeze my tits off while I wait for—

Ah.

There.

I straighten my back, shrugging my shoulders so that the heavy parka slides down to the middle of my bare arms and exposes the front of my black tanktop, a ratty, appropriately frayed piece of clothing scribbled with something I can pass off as the paraphernalia from an indie band, filled with white signs and characters that stand out against the black cotton in ways that could fool me into believing the circle holds a piece of the bright full moon above.

It doesn't.

But believing it can has its own power.

I close my eyes, standing between two tall trees that a proper witch should know the names of, but to me they are just green cones reaching up to a dark sky glowing with flakes of scattered silver while I am…

…

It makes me cringe to think about it.

Teen me did this so easily, I almost envy the nutcase.

I do not envy what she went through to become me, but, well, can't argue with results, can you, Mom?

And it's not like you could have—fuck!

I hold my wrist as the itch becomes stabbing pain, and I try to stomp down on the flood of memories tainting the magic I just called, like a fucking amateur who doesn't know what cleansing, rooting, and banishment are meant to do, but no, I just had to call a power that answers to wishes and desires before remembering that, didn't I? I just had to—

Okay, no, don't think of a polar bear never works, what works, what always works, is to think of a pink elephant, so there I am, first day of orientation, classes haven't started, and the cutest girl I have seen outside pirated porn videos prances out of the goddamn forest wearing a tight skirt and a sharp smile to tell us, group of clueless freshmen that we were, that we are about to start the tour of the campus facilities and, I, for the first time in my life, see an actual fucking castle.

A real castle.

Walls and all, tall towers reaching above them, gleaming in the noon sun like fucking King Arthur is about to ride across the drawbridge to welcome us into his court.

That's it.

My happiest memory.

And I didn't even understand why until almost a year had passed.

So…

So the stabbing goes back to the perennial itch I feel whenever I try to do spellwork, or, more accurately, whenever I try to do spellwork near Lacmere, because it definitely didn't feel like this when I tried to call down the Law of Fucking Three on Mom, or, if it did, whatever karma came down on her head was undistinguishable from the perennial cloud of misery the woman always carries with her.

Magic.

Convenient.

It very much isn't.

But…

I open my eyes and look straight up to the moon above me, the symbol of the Triple Goddess I read so much about in a place where what webpages I browsed wouldn't be spied on. Where a teen who wanted to be rebellious could stash a change of clothes and a case of make-up. Where I was almost as happy as I was on my first day at Lacmere.

Magic.

It's always felt like a woman to me.

"Spirits of Light," I say, bringing my hands to my chest, cradling between them the obsidian arrowhead tied to the piece of string spun around the base of my middle finger, "guide my path. Show me my goal. Reveal the hidden truth."

Even after all these years, it still makes me blush.

Younger me really had it easier.

But…

The itching soothes as something brushes down my arms, and I cast my hand forward, the black mirror dropping and bouncing thrice on the end of its leash before it starts to slowly spin on its axis as it gains enough momentum to trace circles over the black soil below, the edges and indentations gleaming with reflected moonlight.

'It's just a way to show you your own subconscious thoughts,' the closest thing I've had to a magic teacher told me. 'It's like automatic writing or drawing; movements that seem out of your control slowly building up to something that looks like somebody else is working through you.'

Seems.

I sometimes wonder…

But no, back then, that's what this was. I would use an improvised pendulum to guess if Mom would've gone through my things and I would be right, and sometimes I—

Deep breath.

Imagine… them. Giggling, winged beings encased in balls of pure light, dancing in spirals around my extended arm, playing hide and seek in the shadows of my fingers, slowly exploring the string of my pendulum out of pure-hearted curiosity that should make me smile in fondness if I wasn't me, but…

My heart speeds up.

I let out a shuddering breath that turns into white mist in front of my eyes.

My cold nipples fucking tingle.

And the pendulum traces a heavy, slow circle, far too slow for the amplitude of the movement, that gradually becomes an ellipse before it turns into a straight line going back and forth toward a gap between the trees somewhat off-course of the path I've been walking through for the past hour.

I close my eyes.

"Thank you, Spirits of Light."

A stupid, childish incantation, isn't it? I should know… names. True names. Pieces of arcane power or, or… something. Something more definitive than what I once practiced with a woman who had too many hobbies and kept finding excuses to hire me as a babysitter for a kid who shouldn't have needed oversight from somebody just a few years his senior, but the damn brat…

And now I am smiling.

Damn it.

I feel the ticklish, light sensation fade away, the silent giggles turn back into motes of bright night scattered from the obsidian arrowhead dangling from my middle finger before I reclaim it, the volcanic glass once again cooled from the few minutes I've let it out of my grasp.

And I keep walking.

Hiking boots I only wear on these little night excursions, black, ripped jeans that I should replace with non-ripped jeans given how often I find myself diving through brambles, and a heavy parka that once again disguises the symbols scribbled on my tanktop.

Those symbols, I didn't learn from her.

This is all me. All Lacmere.

And the one reason why I may, one of these days, get my throat torn out by something lurking in this forest.

But I can't stay away. I don't want to stay away. Here, in the night, surrounded by hidden monsters, it's where I am alive. Where I can be happy like I only dreamed of when I was allowed to be free in the house of the one woman who let me be myself, even if that self was a brash, foul-mouthed kid with cheap make-up and too many opinions about what magic should be.

Convenient.

No. It isn't that. Not really.

Mostly because, while in the middle of a night cold enough that it makes me wish I was wearing a bra for once, traveling in search of one of the biggest spikes of power I've felt since the leech got her pretty little empty head almost drowned, I feel another spike.

Behind me.

In the vague direction of the goddamn castle.

"You are fucking with me," I tell the full moon. "You are, specifically and purposefully, fucking with me. I don't care if you're Arianrhod, Hekate, or Selene, but you're laughing your Sapphic tits off, and it's all because of me."

I, stupidly, wait for an answer.

Not a single cloud so much as drifts close to the full moon, so I'll take it as silent confirmation.

Sighing another white cloud of mist, I open my hand and, once again, go through the kind of thing only teenagers who like black mascara entirely too much can mutter without an ounce of self-aware embarrassment.

It comes easier, this time around. Less intrusive thoughts. Fewer memories. Just…

Magic.

And now, for the part of divination that almost always screws everyone over in stories: formulating the right question.

"Which of the two will let me learn more of what I need to know?"

The pendulum stills.

Immediately.

I tilt my head, staring at the piece of mineralogy defying the laws of physics, and it refuses to budge. For an ill-considered moment, I am tempted to try and bounce the arrowhead, just to see if the string around my finger will present any opposition, but…

Yeah.

Not a good idea.

Not if I like being able to flip the bird twice at once. Which I do.

I really, really do.

So.

I could ask another question, but I usually only do that to clarify the results of the first one, and—

And, before I can come up with anything less vague, which is what I very often refuse to do after reading one too many Greek tragedies, the…

The balls of giggling, winged light in my mind blur the night.

I see them and I don't. My eyes are unable to focus on any detail but… but it's not only my eyes. I am more aware than I've ever been of the caress of a cold breeze on my cheek, a lone finger made of air caressing a single line over my temple, tucking my hair away as moonlight dances across the irregular surface of an obsidian arrowhead and the trees around me argue in rustled leaves and creaking twigs.

The forest smells… alive. Vibrant.

Like something I want to join and something I should fear.

My heart should be racing in my ears. I should be gasping. I should be turning around and fleeing right back to the dorms, and tomorrow, I should file for a transfer to the nearest community college.

But a single one of the dancing spirits alights on top of my middle finger, and I…

It doesn't have eyes.

It doesn't need them.

Not to laugh. Not to make me laugh.

And then, our joy, our mindless conversation, pours down the string, reaches gleaming obsidian, and…

Something shifts.

Minutely, the sharp tip tilts back toward the castle behind me.

Then toward the gap in the trees in front of me.

And…

'Learn more of what I need to know.'

My mind opens to a flood of memories, wishes, and aspirations. I see myself as a child, abandoned. As a teenager, shamed. As an adult.

As two adults.

One went back to the castle.

Another stepped forward.

One needed one thing. And the other…

I have the two lives in my hand, dancing on a string, quivering on the motes of moonlight sparkling off black glass, and I can just tug on my finger and crash them. Destroy them. Derail them.

Or choose.

What do I need to learn?

The question now becomes who do I want to be.

I can… I…

Regret.

So much regret.

I stop laughing, and so does the spirit on my hand, looking at me with a compassion I only ever found in the eyes of a teacher who wasn't.

I almost ask it. What should I choose. Who should I be.

But it's magic.

It's not convenient.

And, just with that thought, the pendulum tilts forward, pulling me with it for the single moment it takes for the spell to break and my hiking boots to crush the wet leaves beneath.

The memories of two lives vanish at the same time as the string goes slack. As the arrowhead falls.

And I keep walking.

Just with the knowledge that there once were two lives and now there's only one. A single path. The one I chose.

The one I choose.

With every step past black trees. With every white cloud of breath. With every moment of silence that isn't filled by the light of things I am no longer able to see, if I ever was.

I could be crazy. This whole thing could be a psychotic break, a hallucination, or the result of the lingering effects of a few of the things I have taken during parties sadly devoid of any lesbian orgies I was a part of.

I could be dreaming about things that I never remembered and that will never happen.

Or I could be about to walk right up to a fucking werewolf.

My steps stop miraculously silent, and I catch a last glimpse out of the corner of my eye of one of the motes of light that I called so they could show me hidden truths. So that I could learn the things I need to learn.

A condition that, to be fulfilled, seems to have the prerequisite of not getting mauled to death due to unwittingly awakening a werewolf before I can actually learn anything at all.

But there she is, on the other side of a narrow stream, her eyes closed, barely visible under the shadow of the tree she's sitting up against, her body clearly much larger than that of whoever the strained clothes she wears belongs to.

Resting.

The one monster I've been most scared of since she appeared out of nowhere last year, finally in front of me, and she's taking a fucking nap.

I start scoffing and stop, silently and slowly sliding a hand into my pocket to grab the snub-nosed revolver I paid for in cash. The one filled with six very expensive bullets.

Silver. Through the heart. Should be more than enough.

Except something shifts in the skies up above, and the moon suddenly shines down on the monster I am willing to murder at the slightest hint of the damn thing waking up, but now I can see her face, and it's too goddamn human for my tastes. I could still pull the trigger—I still will pull the trigger if she so much as twitches, because the beast has left clawed gouges on the ground this side of the stream, so there's a clear and present danger and—

She's smiling.

Placidly. Beatifically.

And she has a pair of arms wrapped around her waist, which makes me stop breathing as I wonder if whoever it is behind her is still alive or even if the corpse is whole or half-eaten until the dark-skinned woman shifts and nuzzles against someone who grumpily protests in his own sleep, a madman who would cuddle with a werewolf in the middle of a full moon, and—

What. The. Fuck.

Brian?!

━❖━⧫━❖━

So, for those of you waiting for the plot to start? Let's just say this will have consequences.

As in, a good part of my outline just got rewritten because I forgot to do that thing about always writing a POV section for important characters before actual plotting starts.

Damn it. Some of this really took me off-guard.

A bit more off-guard than the next chapter ballooning up to 9k words of Roberta and Brian doing their own version of will-they-won't-they (https://www.patreon.com/posts/lacmere-chapter-125003368?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link), but, well, that was a bit more par for the course.

… Just a bit, mind you.

Anyway, see you in about two weeks, after my brain has had enough time to recharge for what's going to be a few explosive conversations back-to-back.

As always, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true): aj0413, LearningDiscord, Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Vergil1989 Crossover King, and Xanah. If you feel like maybe giving them a hand with keeping me in the writing business (and getting an early peek at my chapters before they go public, among other perks), consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!