Chapter Text
The end of the school week brought a blissful quiet to Calla’s office. It was the perfect atmosphere to settle in with a steaming cup of tea and one of the many books on her wall, and Calla relished the thought of a morning of rest and solitude. Between the search for the stars of the constellation and the investigation into the Followers, even she needed some time to unwind. It would do no one any good if she burned herself out; she knew the consequences of that all too well.
As the distant, excited voices of Area Academy’s students rose up from the courtyard below, Calla closed her eyes, her mind drifting to memories of a similar innocence, a sense of excitement and discovery ages past.
“Dmitriy! Zephyros!”
The amphitheater overlooking Herimka lay nestled in a sunny, green hillside, where Calla found the two older disciples deep in conversation. The 11-year-old girl skipped happily down the slope, letting the crisp mountain air reenergize her after her teleportation. It was one of the farthest distances she had teleported so far, and she felt no small amount of pride in that as she waved down at Dmitriy and Zephyros.
“ –aqueducts to the settlement in…” Zephyros murmured as her finger traced a glowing line across the map laid out between her and Dmitriy. Calla’s voice rang out across the amphitheater, drawing her beaming gaze to the young, red-haired girl. “Oh, hi sweetie! What brings you out here? I thought you were out on the coast today with the others.”
“Hugo has a message for the two of you. He said it was an update on your project, but I think he just misses you,” Calla said as she pulled out the letter tucked into her robe. She grinned at Zephyros cheekily. “Especially–”
Dmitriy grabbed the scroll before Calla could finish. “Thank you, Calla.”
Her errand now done, the young girl bounced lightly on her toes, a small smile blooming on her face.
“I know that look,” Zephyros said, smiling. “What have you been up to this time?”
Shyly, Calla pulled a small scroll from her robe and unfurled it over Zephyros and Dmitriy’s project notes. She looked up expectantly at the two adults as they leaned over the table to look at the unfamiliar sigil.
“It’s…a heart?” Zephyros asked, tilting her head down at the scroll.
Dmitriy looked back up toward the young girl. “You’re going to need to give us a little more, Calla. What are we looking at here?”
“It’s a love spell.”
Dmitriy and Zephyros glanced at each other, trading bemused smiles.
“Or, well, not really a love spell. It doesn’t make someone fall in love with someone else, it just needs that person to be in love with the caster already.” Calla explained. She looked up to see the two adults still looking blankly at her.
Dmitriy seemed to shake off his confusion first. “Needs it for what?” he asked curiously.
“To teleport them to the person they’re in love with. See, it shares these elements with the basic summoning sigil and…”
Dmitriy swallowed a laugh as Calla earnestly continued explaining. “Well that’s…very creative,” he said in amusement once Calla finished. The concept and execution were genuinely quite clever, but even as he tried to steel his expression neutral, he couldn’t help the smirk still tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I guess we’re skipping the wining and dining then.”
“Oh, how fun!” Zephyros said brightly, ignoring Dmitriy to lean over the table towards Calla. “Have you tested it out yet?” She grinned at the younger girl conspiratorially, her eyes sparkling with humor.
Calla shook her head. “I’m pretty sure it should work, I checked it over five or six times already.” She rolled up the parchment with a sigh. “But no one wants to give it a try!”
Zephyros’ smile grew gentle. “It’s not the easiest thing for people to want to do. To admit what…or who…they want, and find out for sure if the other person feels the same way.”
Calla looked quizzically at Zephyros. “Why not? Wouldn’t it make sense to know?”
Zephyros’ expression grew pensive as she considered her question. Absent-mindedly, she opened her hand to sparks of light coalescing into a glowing sprout in her palm, tendrils opening into tiny, luminous leaves.
“Mm… I’ll tell you a secret: adults can get just as scared as kids can. We just don’t like to show it. It’s like… imagine your favorite dessert in the whole wide world is strawberry cream cake. You can see it in your mind, you can almost smell the sweet, light whipped cream and taste the strawberries, sharp and bright on your tongue.” The sprout glowed brightly as its stem elongated into a vine, shimmering as it curled up and around Zephyros’ arm. “You wake up every day with hope, picturing that magical moment you’ll walk into a bakery and all of a sudden, right in front of you, there’s the freshest, most luscious strawberry cream cake in the world.” Spots of light along the vine erupted into heart-shaped leaves and bunches of berries.
“Now, imagine that someone comes up to you one day, and tells you that you can find out in an instant whether you’ll either have strawberry cream cake every day for the rest of your life, or you’ll never have it again.” Zephyros smiled sadly with soft eyes. As she closed her hand, the glowing vine dissipated into motes of light. “If that happened, would you really want to know?”
The air was still between the three of them, the breeze barely a caress on the skin. Dmitriy watched as his friend shifted her gaze to the horizon, the ghost of a half-smile still on her lips. After a moment, he stretched out a hand as if to pull her back from her reverie, but paused as he glanced back toward the younger girl.
“…Zeph, I don’t think you explained anything beyond what a glutton you can be,” Dmitriy said dryly. “See for yourself.” Across from them, Calla was staring at the ground, eyebrows knit in confusion.
Calla eventually seemed to give up with a shrug. “Adults are weird,” she said finally, frowning slightly.
A bright laugh rang out over the grassy hillside. “That’s true,” Zephyros conceded, smiling gently at Calla. “Best not to grow up too quickly.” Grinning, she leaned down to brush unruly crimson waves out of Calla’s face.
She watched as Calla scuffed her foot against the grass, still playing with the piece of parchment in her small hands.
Zephyros perked up suddenly, a mischievous smile slowly spreading on her face. “You know, I’m not the greatest at summoning sigils. Dmitriy, on the other hand…”
“Oh, no. Absolutely not. You are not pulling me into this.”
“Aw, you’re not even a little bit curious?” Zephyros asked, pouting. “Don’t you want to know all the people who’ve been eyeing those broad shoulders of yours while you—”
“Zeph…”
“—it’s really not fair to your adoring fan club that you won’t give anyone a chance—”
“Are you quite done…?”
“—you know, Lyrion, the jeweler in the marketplace, just loooves watching you pore over his wares. I’d bet in a heartbeat he’d be happy to bring you out back in his shop to see all those shiny special commissions he gets and put your muscles to good use in his workshop—”
“Calla,” Dmitriy said abruptly, his face glowing hotly as he cleared his throat, “why don’t you just test the sigil yourself?”
The young girl was too embarrassed to say that the sigil was made for humans, not for goddesses. And even if it did somehow work for her, who was she to expect or ask for anything more from her teacher, when she had already given her everything? How could she dare try to impose her will, her desire, onto a goddess? Even just to pull her Master to where she was. It was selfish. Unthinkable.
“I want to make sure it’s the sigil that works. I already know how I want it to work. I want to see someone else try to use it so I know,” she explained.
Technically, that was also true.
“That’s very thorough of you,” Dmitriy said, ruffling Calla’s hair lightly.
“…I also wanna know if Lyrion has a crush on you.”
Dmitriy let out a sharp sigh. “All right, that’s quite enough, young lady,” he muttered, pinching her cheek.
“Oh, let the girl be!” Zephyros said, laughing. “I for one think that what she’s managed to create is already fantastic.”
Calla blushed at the compliment, smiling shyly.
“And I also agree with her. We must know of Lyrion’s passion for you, for posterity,” she said dramatically, bringing her palm to her chest with a flourish. Her voice dropped to a fake whisper as she turned cheerfully towards Calla. “Let me know if you get any takers for your sigil. I’d love to hear all about it!” she said with a wink.
Dmitriy sighed, shaking his head with a smile. “I guess I can’t stop you from being a terrible influence on her.”
“Excuse you, I am the best influence,” Zephyros lilted innocently. She turned her attention back to Hugo’s notes. “Now, where were we? We should be good here now, Calla, thanks for helping us out!”
As Calla skipped off, her errand complete, Zephyros called out over her shoulder, “And Calla, don’t forget!” She heard the distant sounds of Dmitriy scolding Zephyros amid the latter’s laughter as she prepared to teleport back to the coast, where Master awaited.
Calla blinked quickly as she returned to the present moment. She had forgotten about that conversation with Zephyros, and something about it now prickled in the back of her mind. But now, as back then, holding onto it was like trying to catch the wind, or contain the light of the sun. At least tea was something she could hold.
She had barely poured herself a cup when she heard a soft knock. “Calla?” came Lapis’ voice through the door.
Calla smiled, sighing just a little at the loss of a quiet morning to herself. “Come in,” she called out, sitting behind her desk to greet the girl about to upend any plans she had for the day.
Her eyebrows rose at the sight of Lapis slouching into her office, dark circles under her eyes. The girl shuffled across the room in a stupor. “One more study drill with Mapharam… just throw me to the dark beasts,” she moaned, falling into the chair in front of Calla’s desk. “If anyone asks, I was never here.” Lapis flopped onto the desk with a sigh.
Calla bit back a laugh. It was hard for her to resist patting the girl’s head, so she settled instead for sweeping Lapis’ hair over her shoulder. It was becoming increasingly harder to ignore how adorable she found the girl, and this morning was no different. If anything, seeing how comfortable Lapis had become around her only endeared her to Calla more. Even while said girl was faceplanting onto her desk.
Calla’s lip twitched. “I’m assuming you’re not here for office hours?”
A muffled groan was Lapis’ only response.
Calla felt herself smile with amusement. Maybe settling in with her book and a cup of tea wasn’t a completely foregone prospect after all. She gingerly slid her book out from under Lapis’ hair and leaned back in her chair, thumbing through the pages to where she had left off.
As the sun rose slowly in the cloudless sky outside, her eyes kept drifting over the edge of her book to the sight of Lapis’ hair splayed out over her desk, gleaming in the early morning sunlight. It was rather early, Calla realized. She’d never taken Lapis for a morning person. Maybe desperate times did in fact call for desperate measures, and waking up early to hide from Mapharam in Calla’s office was one of them.
It was a bit odd though, just how much Lapis struggled with exercising her dark power beyond a few given sigils. There were all manner of possible theories for what was blocking her control of her dark power, but none of them struck Calla as any more likely than the others. She couldn’t help but feel for Lapis, as the girl labored to overcome her invisible hurdles and achieve the birthright of her magic. She poured her all especially into sigil class, with only meager improvements outside of her special skill to show for it.
Then again, if the current theoretical treatise she was reading was any indication, magic in Lampas had stagnated. After all, who did they have to continue the tradition and teachings? Arverna? Calla ignored the ache in her chest as she scoffed at the thought. Dark power had never been more than a means to an end for Arverna. She was an outsider to it; it wasn’t what she lived and breathed. Calla didn’t know whether to be offended or smug that a thousand years later, so much of her own work with sigils was still foundational to current teachings.
But Arverna, and consequently the modern school of magic that rose in the Dark Lord’s absence, was still missing the crucial, fundamental understanding of the nature of dark power. There was no sense of the truth of magic. How it could be practiced beyond mere mimicry, to true mastery of and within oneself and within the wider world. Serves them right, Calla thought bitterly. They dared to reject and defile the very lifesource, the holy blood of magical power. Maybe there was a certain justice in the universe, given that.
At the same time, it felt suffocating. Dark power thrummed under her skin, the small, precious drops of Deitasterra’s blood within her burning to resonate with the world around her. She was holding her breath when she wanted to yell, to sing. Even just a sigh would look like a maelstrom, amidst the dearth of true dark power in the present day. And she was but a disciple; the first among the disciples, but still only a disciple, not even a mote of dust compared to her Master. The girl in front of her could not even comprehend how much more there was to her power, to the unseen aspects of the world that Arverna and her stolen kingdom had once tried to control. Having been unable to tame it, Lampas had labeled the deeper mysteries of magic as useless, archaic, uncivilized, wild. Eventually, they had simply been forgotten to time. What passed for understanding of divine power (and dark power, ultimately) was woefully shallow…
Maybe it was those limitations, as much as anything about Lapis as an individual, that held her back. But that had little to do with the apparent predicament she had gotten herself into. Calla shook her head with a smile. If sharing quiet company on a warm, sunny morning was the price to pay for giving the girl who was once her Master some respite from the stress and distractions of human life, so be it.
With the slow rhythm of Lapis’ soft, steady breaths in the background, Calla returned to pondering the implications of what she had been reading. Ever since she was a child she had always been a focused, diligent student, but even she couldn’t deny that Area's academic texts were so…dry. Page upon page of theoretical discussion, counterpoints, hypotheses…no book nor library could be extensive enough to disguise the lifelessness of the information they contained.
There was a flow to the universe, and thus so to the way dark power transformed and manipulated its workings. A pulse, a breath in each cycle of day, the movement of water in land and sky, creation and decay, the spark of life in each living being. Her Master had opened her eyes to a world not of chaos and randomness, but of a delicate order, fertile and malleable to one’s will. Ever changing, ever growing, with the practitioner of dark power flowing and evolving with it.
But to the knights, the world was lifeless. Inanimate matter to bend to one’s will with equally inanimate knowledge, rote steps. No true understanding of the world was taught as a foundation – no, the foundation – of magic.
Lapis had once related to her something that that boy, Hector, had told her of Astrad. “He said, ‘The wind tells me everything.’ Calla, what does that mean?” She had looked up wide-eyed at Calla, curiosity palpable in her voice.
Calla had considered her answer thoughtfully. “It means he’s far more perceptive than most people know, underneath all his peacocking,” she eventually replied. Looking back at that conversation now, Calla could see how his earnest empathy, open-mindedness, and free spirit could find kinship with an element like the wind.
So perhaps, despite the woeful state of current teachings, there were still those who intuited the truth of magic, or had such knowledge passed down privately within the powerful noble families. Why none of that had made its way into the foundational texts of current standard teachings, she could only speculate. To hoard power. Control. Silver-red eyes framed by pale eyelashes crept into her mind’s eye, and Calla couldn’t help the wince that crossed her face. Luckily, Lapis didn’t appear to notice; it was too early for her to know the full truth. As she was, she wasn’t ready to face the trauma that the full, bitter tale would bring.
Would she ever be ready? The question sat heavily in her chest. Calla didn’t even know if she herself would ever be willing to inflict that on Lapis. To know that she might be both responsible for and helpless to watch the girl buckle and break under the weight of that history. The events from Zycarphus still haunted her. “Stay the way you are…for just a little longer,” she had pleaded. To what end those words would lead, she still did not know.
For now though, those worries were as distant as the seas beyond the hazy blue mountains on the horizon. Calla sighed as she turned from the window. Lapis was safe. And safely human, with her most pressing fear right now merely the loss of a beautiful summer day to torturous essays and textbooks and stuffy rooms.
Perhaps they weren’t outside with the rest of the day revelers, but right now the girl was clearly quite comfortable where she was, laying on Calla’s desk. If her chest warmed at the sight, Calla could tell herself it was just the heat from the sun as she opened the window to let the summer in. Of course she’d want her Master to be comfortable.
The warm breeze also extinguished all thoughts of continuing that sorry excuse for a treatise that she had been reading. She had learned what she needed to, and any more than that threatened to burst into a headache if she let herself dwell on it.
But even in rest Calla was never one to be idle. Her hands ached to be kept busy, so she reached into her desk for the odd…gift, she could call it, that Dmitriy had handed to her not long after her arrival at Area. “This wasn’t exactly my idea,” Dmitriy had said awkwardly, rubbing the back of his head, “but you must know that Lampas is very different now. Some things will anger you. Just try to keep your head cool. You can’t just do what you used to do when you were upset, since virtually no one’s capable of that anymore these days.”
She pulled out a wide notebook bound in forest-green leather and a small wrap with pencils and charcoals. Her fingers brushed over the smooth leather as she opened it up to its first, blank page. “Astrad thought this might help. If you don’t like it, blame him,” Dmitriy had said with a shrug. Calla thought that this would do just fine.
First, some quick warmups. It had been literal ages since the last time she had done anything like this…not since before the war, perhaps. She let her fingers relax as she did a loose, rough sketch of the view of her office, then switched to copying the curves and ornate swirls on her teacup and kettle. She watched the lines grow smoother and more confident as her muscle memory slowly returned.
Her attention shifted to the view outside her window, the courtyard below and the expanse of the capital beyond it. As she blocked out the shapes of the buildings and began to fill in the architectural details—elaborate facades, domes and towers—she waited for her mind to slip into that near-meditative focus where each moment, each detail would magnify in her mind, where she would just follow one step into the next and suddenly look up to completion. But the world through the window beckoned to bend and flow with dark power once more, and here she was trying merely to create a facsimile of its physical form. She sighed harshly.
This wasn’t working.
Calla heard Lapis murmur softly behind her. “Do you need anything?” she asked, turning at the ready to fulfill her Master’s any request.
She heard, more than saw, Lapis’ smile as the younger girl hummed happily into Calla’s desk, her hair strewn around her striking a silvery aura of contentment in the sunlight. The girl was doing absolutely nothing and she was radiant.
The steady scritch of Calla’s pencils followed, curves and outlines flowing seamlessly one into another. Time slipped past as the page filled in with bold shadows and delicate highlights slowly coalescing into a warm, familiar likeness.
Eventually Lapis stirred, sitting back up with a sigh of resignation. “I should probably go…my textbooks aren’t going to read themselves.”
You could make a sigil for that, Calla thought casually, putting down her charcoals and gently blowing stray dust off the page. She breathed in slowly as the rest of the world slowly returned to her awareness, if not her focus. She considered the girl in front of her again.
It didn’t seem like a sigil would solve whatever was troubling her. Lapis remained steadfastly in her chair, showing no inclination to leave despite what she had said. Clearly there was still something on her mind. As the silence stretched on, Calla waited patiently. She quirked her head at the girl now steadfastly avoiding her eyes.
“...You don’t need my permission to leave. And you’re welcome to stay longer,” Calla said finally.
That seemed to break the seal on Lapis’ silence.
“Ughhh!! How the heck am I supposed to be the Dark Lord when I’m this lousy with sigils?! It was bad enough when I was just some nobody magician. Now it’s just embarrassing…” Lapis groaned, burying her face in her hands. “I swear these sigils are mocking me. If I see one more diagram, my head’s gonna burst!”
Calla blinked. In how focused she was in capturing the serenity of the moment that unfolded before her, she had almost forgotten how much Lapis was struggling with her dark power even so. The fullness of Deitasterra’s being was still beyond the grasp of Lapis, the barely-scraping-by apprentice knight now ranting about her failures as a magician. But… She glanced at the book she had been reading earlier as an idea crossed her mind.
“Do you want to go out?” she asked, interrupting the girl’s self-flagellation.
“—fail and get expelled and— Do I… what?” Lapis squeaked, sitting up suddenly.
“We could take a break and go somewhere outside the academy, if you wish. I wouldn’t mind a change of scenery either,” Calla said nonchalantly. She wouldn’t push, but she found a part of herself secretly wishing for Lapis to say yes.
“Oh, I—” For some reason, Lapis blinked quickly, shifting uncomfortably in her chair.
A flicker of disappointment crossed Calla’s mind. Did she go too far, suggesting that? Yes, Lapis seemed much more comfortable with her now than before, but what exactly she was to Lapis was still unclear. She wasn’t sure herself what she wanted their relationship to be, as the swirl of emotions underneath her placid demeanor reminded her none too gently.
“Let’s—Yeah, let’s do it!” Lapis exclaimed, a rosy flush framing the determined grin on her face.
Calla smiled. Now, that was more like Lapis. Despite her earlier lethargy, then anxious self-criticism, the girl now stood tall, poised to embark on a new adventure. Calla’s heart lifted as she realized that Lapis was just as excited about this as she was.
Lapis’ face fell suddenly. “Wait, I thought students weren’t allowed–”
“My, who says we need to ask for permission?” Calla responded, smiling innocently.
The smaller girl looked up at Calla curiously. “But— how?” She blushed softly as Calla reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Don’t worry about that for now. Wear something comfortable, and I’ll meet you outside your dorm in an hour.” She smiled wryly. “If you bump into Mapharam, tell her you’re having a private lesson with me.”