Chapter Text
-Olruggio, Day One-
Olruggio can’t exactly say he’s surprised to see Agott and Riche at his door. He’d rather suspected this would be the case when Qifrey told him about his planned lessons for the day, but he is rather proud they lasted out as long as they did.
It was nearing midday when he heard the knock, a full two hours past when he and Qifrey believed the girls would hit their limit, and a full, thundering hour into him nursing a migraine that just refuses to abate. He meets them both at the workshop door, leans himself up against the frame and watches as the two quieter girls formulate an attack.
“We won’t be any bother to you, Master,” Agott starts, dutifully, hands folded behind her back as properly as she can. “We simply want a quiet place to study. Our housemates’ current courseload is–”
They all flinch as a dull explosion rumbles through the front of the atelier, punctuated by Coco’s shriek and Tetia’s laughter.
“ –Rather distracting.”
“Riche notices Master Olruggio never seems to have a problem with the noise,” Riche adds, softly. “And Riche thinks–”
“Agott also–” Agott cuts herself off, flushing before rephrasing. “I mean, I also think–”
“ – You have a sound dampening spell,” Riche finishes, tilting her head. “One you’ve been hiding from us.”
She pouts up at him, folding her arms over her chest.
“You’ll earn an Ang-Riche point if you don’t show us.”
Olruggio raises a brow, unimpressed. He ignores how his head throbs with the action.
“And you two think threatening me is going to get me to show you?” He drawls, biting down a smile when Agott kicks at Riche’s ankle in retaliation.
“I told you that wouldn’t work,” she hisses.
“It would so,” Riche mutters under her breath. “Master Olruggio always gives in for an Ang-Riche point.”
She narrows her eyes.
“Maybe he needs two.”
“Maybe he needs us to give him something else!”
“Or maybe,” Olruggio says, watching as both girls freeze at the raised tone. “He just needs you to ask nicely.”
A flush blooms on both of their faces. Apparently, in their haste to find themselves a quiet space, they’d forgotten even the most basic of manners.
Olruggio can’t find he blames them, for anything really, but especially for this. He sighs as another, somehow louder explosion goes off in the distance this time accompanied by Qifrey’s chiding tone. The sound reverberates through his aching head like a drum.
“Girls,” he asks, opening the door further. “Would’ya like to come into my workshop and learn a dampening spell?”
“Yes, Master Olruggio,” they chorus, both of them darting inside to the thankfully quieter space. “Thank you Master Olruggio!”
“I ain’t yer Master,” he huffs after them, more reflex than anything at this point. The statement hadn’t even lasted past Tetia’s first week as apprentice before she was calling him out on it. By the time Coco got herself established, all the girls knew he was a softy.
He just wished it wasn’t exploited quite this much. Already, the girls were making space for themselves on his workshop floor, rearranging his own nest of blankets and cushions to settle themselves in their favorite places over the dimly glowing tiles.
He props the door to his workshop open with a stopper, ensuring that, while dampened, he can still hear some of the bustle of the outside world. It was never good to leave a witch, even one experienced as Qifrey, alone with students without someone closeby. Mistakes were a part of magic, especially when students were still learning.
You needed to be able to call for help and know someone could hear if needed.
“Master,” Agott asks, directing him away from his thoughts. She’s seated herself primly over what he’s come to know as her favorite cushion, a thick purple velvet pad he’s caught her more than once sneaking away to cuddle with in the middle of the night. Her palm quire is already in hand. “Would it begin with a wind sigil?”
“Riche thinks it would be more unique than that,” Riche says softly, from beneath her rather impressive bundle of blankets. “Does a sound sigil exist, Master?”
Olruggio lowers himself crosslegged in front of them, pulling out his own palm quire to sketch out the sigil.
“It does, though I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it. It’s rare to use a Call Spell when a WindowWay would get you direct contact, and the Correspondence Contraption is so commonplace that even non-magic folk keep them inside their homes. They don’t get used as often around the Great Hall because the water itself blocks most noise outside the Hall itself, but we do put them up when the Winged Whales have mating season.”
He turns the quire to showcase the sigil, a S-shape with a tail that curls around itself twice.
“Oh!” Agott says. “I’ve seen those before. I knew they were to keep whales away from the city, but I never had a chance to research the sigil.”
She scoots closer to get a closer look.
“It does look rather like an air sigil.”
“It’s derived from an air sigil. Good eye, Agott,” he praises. He smiles at her obvious preen.
“And good start Riche,” he adds, watching as she starts on her own version of the spell, with pull keystones pointing firmly away from the center.
“But you shouldn’t activate it until–”
There’s a deafening whoosh, all noise to nothing, a moment of silence before the spell ends. Olruggio’s ears pop, a striking sound that does nothing to starve off his migraine, as Riche and Agott jerk away from the paper.
“Too much-che,” Riche hisses.
Agott rubs at her ears.
“I’ll say,” she says. “It needs a dispersion keystone.”
“And a radial one,” Riche adds, leaning in again. “But the pull keystones might help if we wanted to push the noise away.”
“I don’t think we want to push it. We want to muffle it. Would we want to collect it and dampen it? All at once, almost like with the Serpent’s Bed?”
Riche sits up more at this to peek at Agott's already filling palmquire.
“Riche likes connected spells.”
Olruggio stares, looking over the spell half-finished in his palmquire to gape at the two students.
“Didn’t cha come in here to look at the dampening spell I already have?”
The girls blink up at him, seemingly mystified by his continued presence. They look over at the half finished spell in his quire, then at their own quires, then back at him.
“Riche thinks we can come up with a better spell,” she says, softly. “Then we can put it on Master Olruggio’s door as a thank you for letting us come in.”
“I don’t need a thank you–”
“That’s a good idea, Riche,” Agott says, ignoring his outburst to sketch out another tiny unfinished sigil. “What do you think about the placement of the signs here?”
“Good,” Riche nods. “But we need it to continue, like the sound.”
“Then a repetition keystone?”
“Yes but not too many.”
Olruggio sits back on his haunches, and can’t help but laugh to himself. Here he was, ready to show them a spell and be done with it, when they would rather sit in his workshop and work it out on their own. It was endearing in a way he refused to admit. He flips his quire to start back on his own never-ending projects.
“You’ll have to check it when it's finished, Master,” Riche reminds him.
“And the rest of our work,” Agott calls, never once looking up from her spell.
Olruggio blinks, then squints to keep the pain in his head down to a manageable level.
“The rest of your work?”
“What Master Qifrey had us study today. He said if we went in here with you, you’d look it over.”
The girls look, for once, too innocent to have this be their idea.
“Oh, did he?”
He probably wanted to get out of the incredibly tedious work of looking over combined sigil spells. While the fire-air mix he had Tetia and Coco out there playing with was certainly loud, it held nothing to the precision needed for water-fire mixed spells. With Riche and Agott’s skill level being above that of the two other students, the more complicated mix was likely set up to challenge their ability to balance the two opposing elements.
It was also, as Olruggio knew, something Qifrey abhorred. While he was good at it, Qifrey preferred practical magic with room for artistic flare. Mixed sigil spells, especially water-fire mixed sigil spells, had a tendency to be more practical than anything else, with little room for the sort of intricate fun you could create with a single element spell.
So he’d hoisted the work onto Olruggio knowing he couldn’t refuse the girls.
Sneaky and frustrating, but ultimately not the end of the world. He shoots a glare out the open window, despite the deafening pressure the light grants him, and hopes Qifrey knows it was for him.
“Fine,” he says. “We’ll go over this spell first, then we’ll move onto your primer work.”
The next hour is spent in a more-comfortable quiet, interspaced by the now dampened crashes of Tetia or Coco misjudging a spell and Riche and Agott’s voices as they parse together their own spell. They ultimately come up with two possibilities they present to him with a flourish.
The first is an interlocking spell, with a sound sigil surrounded by small dispersal keystones, inside of a larger spell surrounded by a larger spell boasting multiple repetition keystones surrounding it. It’s a pretty thing, well-balanced and intricate, but as Olruggio suspects, it doesn’t have the effect they’re wanting. Instead of muffling outside sound, it seems to muffle sound inside the room specifically.
“Drat,” Agott curses, the sound coming through much louder at the end as she swipes through a corner of the spell.
“That wasn’t what Riche wanted it to do at all,” Riche bemoans, burying her face into a pillow she’s stolen off Agott.
“A spell has no mind of its own,” Olruggio reminds them. “You have to be aware of who and what it may affect. There’s a reason it didn’t work, and I know you both are smart enough to figure it out.”
“We made it too broad. There’s no limit to what sound it won’t affect, so it’ll affect it all,” Agott says, scowling at her paper. “That means our other spell won’t work either, we didn’t–” she kicks at the floor frustrated. “It’s not detailed enough.”
“It’s not detailed enough, yet,” Olruggio warns. “If I stopped drawing every time a spell didn’t work, I’d never make another contraption. You can’t do everythin’ right the first time, Agott. These things take time.”
“Besides,” he says, huffing when it seems to bring the girls’ gazes away from the floor. “This spell has other uses.”
“Like what,” Agott snaps.
Helping with his headache for one. The muffled sound had certainly eased up the persistent ache at the back of his skull, but before he can so much as suggest it, his other student cuts in.
“Like hiding,” Riche says, a slow understanding coming over her face. She pulls away from her pillow completely. “It’d be a good hiding spell, if we changed it.”
Her eyes go distant, in a way that makes Olruggio sit up and listen.
“Sometimes, Riche thinks about when that Brimhat attacked us and Euni on the path.”
She fists her hands in her lap, only to have one immediately stolen by a stormy-faced Agott. Their fingers lace together between them, his quietest students comforting each other.
“We couldn’t keep the myrphons quiet,” Riche explains. “We could whisper but the myrphons couldn’t understand, so when they saw Euni they yelled.”
Her nose scrunches.
“It was very scary.”
What a simple admission. What a heartbreaking one.
“Aw hell,” he says, leaning forward to drop a heavy hand on both girls’ heads. The damn brimcaps. Couldn’t they leave his students alone? They certainly didn’t deserve it, the twin looks of fear and horror had no place on their faces. “I bet it was. You both did the best you could, and everyone made it out. That’s what mattered.”
Agott nods, tears she refuses to let fall clumping at her lashes, but she doesn’t shirk his hand. He rewards her with a slight tussle before doing the same to Riche, cupping the back of her head before pulling back to brush a thumb against her cheek. Tears smear over his hand, slight but enough to ruin him.
His poor girls.
“Later, we can work on it together. All of us. You’ll have the perfect hiding spell to use whenever you need.”
“We’ll be lucky if Tetia doesn’t use it to hide whenever Qifrey wants her to clean up her room,” Agott whispers to a now sniffly Riche. The conspiratory tap of her ankle against Riche’s makes Riche giggle.
“Master Qifrey is going to be the one to use it,” Riche counters, squeezing their fingers together. “He’s going to use it to hide from Master Olruggio when he makes gold-plum porridge.”
“Hey!” Olruggio says. “My gold-plum porridge is perfectly fine!”
“Riche, I think we’re all going to use it when Master Olruggio makes his gold plum porridge,” Agott drawls, the same tone in her voice that he used earlier to chide them. She turns to give Olruggio a flat stare, the combination resembling something Tetia would pull rather than Agott herself. “You should leave the cooking to Master Qifrey.”
Olruggio returns her stare, more than aware she’s playing it up a bit so that Riche can uncurl from her ball. She’s become a lot more emotionally in-tuned, their Agott, especially since she and Coco started getting close.
He decides that maybe the blow to his pride is nothing if he can continue to have this, these two softly teasing each other, the far-off sounds of Qifrey and the rest of their students causing havoc.
“Fine,” he says, softening his voice to a tease, partially for its effects on the girls, partially because his head is still killing him. “Then I’m certain you wouldn’t mind if I stopped baking as well. No more rockginger cookies–”
Riche squeaks.
“ –or toast with willowgrape jam–”
Agott goes still.
“He’s just joking,” she whispers under her breath, but the waver to her voice has Olruggio too entertained to stop.
“And we’ll let Tetia’s birthday pass next month without honeytree cake–”
“You wouldn’t!” They both cry. He resists the urge to flinch at the shrill sound.
They all know that Tetia loves birthdays, and that she gets especially sad if she doesn’t get her special honeytree cake. It’s as close to sacred as they get around here, and the outrage is as real as it comes.
“She’d never forgive us,” Riche whispers. “Riche doesn’t want to see Mad-tia.”
“I don’t want to see Sad-tia either,” Agott hisses, forgetting the act in favor of pure horror. They lean their heads together and whisper frantically to each other, before turning to face him as one.
“You can make one pot a month,” Agott says. “We’ll make Master Qifrey have some too.”
“Master Olruggio always says its healthy, so Master Qifrey can’t argue. He’ll be setting a bad example.” Riche nods once. “We won’t let him hide, and he’ll do the dishes.”
Olruggio raises a brow.
“He hates doing dishes.”
“And Riche hates not getting rockginger cookies. We all must make sacrifices,” she says solemnly. Beside her, Agott nods her agreement, so self-assured he has to turn to hide a smile in the folds of his shirt.
These girls. He’ll complain about this place day and night, but he can never regret following Qifrey out here, not if it means getting to do this everyday.
“Deal,” he says, coughing to hide the laughter in his tone. The ease of his expression serves to dull the thundering behind his brow. “We’ll fix up the hiding spell later, and the sound dampening one, I know you girls can get it down. For now, we’ll look over your primer spells, and then we’ll get the other girls and Qifrey and make lunch.”
He lets them panic for just a moment before he adds:
“It won’t be gold-plum porridge.” Twin relieved sighs. “And if we’re quick, we might even get a chance to make rockginger cookies.”
He practically has to dodge with how fast Riche’s quire is thrown at him.
“Alright, alright,” he opens her quire. “We’ll start with this first spell–”
It’s a tedious process, no matter how much Riche wants to rush it, and Riche’s spells, by nature of being Riche’s spells, are small enough that Olruggio has to bring the paper right up to his nose to make out each tiny detail. The constant squinting noly serves to anger that fist at the back of his skull, a dizzying sort of pressure that he does his best to stave off as he evaluates her work. There’s some small mistakes, irregularities he points out with his pinky nail; things like imbalances between the water and fire sigils or instances where she placed the sigils close enough for the lines to bleed.
“The sigils can’t mix,” he reminds them. “It’s a good way to get an uncontrolled explosion rather than a real spell.”
He lets her close the last spell on her own, a swirling warm water spiral that’s especially helpful for cleaning.
“It’s important that the fire spell is small enough to warm the water without scalding you. Your radial keystones are there to heat the water evenly. It’s all about safety with spells like this.”
He dries her off with the link rings, and gives her back her quire, smiling at the ready to use crystalline spell he sees on the open page. It’s bigger than her usual spells, and designed a bit like Tetia or Coco had a hand in it, something that looks pretty but seems like it would shield you from the rain and heat. Its good to see them both branching out. Riche into other spells and Agott into those soft emotions she so often swears she doesn’t have.
It’s faster to go through Agott’s work, if somehow more tedious. Not only is he going through the same spells again, with Riche’s spells there’s the added measure of something being wrong, even if those corrections are slight. Agott has such a well-grounded knowledge of the basics that her primer spells, especially those she can cast while gazing at her paper, are near-perfect. It worries poor Qifrey half to death because those few times Agott does have something wrong she practically fixates on it, working herself into the ground to fix those perceived slights. Even now, three spells in without a correction, she’s still watching his every move, waiting for him to chastise her.
Between the bouts of pain, he has a passing, dangerous thought about things he’d do if he got her hands on Adina Arklaum. After Qifrey told him what she’d said, what she’d done? They all know rejection from an atelier like the Arklaum’s is social suicide, and when Agott was what? Eight? No witch knows what she’s doing at eight. He’s hard pressed to keep his temper in check.
It’s difficult enough with Riche, but at least the perpetrator was apprehended. At least, Riche never has to see the man again. Agott has no choice but to face her mother if she plans to take the tests and become a librarian, and so she studies, tirelessly, day after day, more than aware that if Qifrey were to dismiss her, something Olruggio knows he would never do, she would never be accepted at another atelier again.
So her spells look like this, pristine, perfect, none of the slights awarded to someone learning because Agott Arklaum doesn’t have the privilege of gradual understanding.
It frustrates him to no end.
He shakes his head, forcing himself back into the spells. The headache coupled with the repetitive task of searching for an absent problem is making the work feel endless.
Beside him, Riche reaches out and tugs at his sleeve.
“Riche,” Agott snaps. The sound ricochets around his skull with all the rebound of a child’s new ball.
“But rockginger cookies,” Riche whines, as she returns to restlessly flipping through her quire.
Just focus on the sigils, he thinks, then it's over. Then we can eat, and drink some water, and maybe curl up in a ball in a dark room for a bit, the girls’ new spell wrapped around him so Qifrey doesn’t come across him clawing his eyes out. The fire and water sigil are well balanced, dispersion in place, even spacing between the three, check. Next spell: water sign slightly larger than fire, pillar keystones in their proper places, levitation keystones at the bottom, a well rounded smoke signal. Finally, the swirling water spell, that same little dishwashing spell Qifrey had perfected when they were teenagers.
“Master, how long until–!”
“Riche, you had your turn just wait–”
Olruggio trudges forward, for once ignoring the obvious spat taking place. Sigils in place, water with a smaller fire, dispersion in place; done, finally. He nods at Agott to take it, letting her finish it just as he had Riche, but right before she completes her circle, his brain seems to snag; eyes roaming and returning to the spell.
Wait. That’s– that’s not–
Dispersal instead of radial; fire smaller than water but too big, too big–
Agott’s pen hits paper, and its too late for him to stop her, too late to draw a spell, too late to do anything but snag the edge of the palm quire and chuck it as far as he can against the opposite wall.
Agott yelps as he throws himself over her, but there’s no time to be gentle, there’s no time to get to both girls. There’s only protecting the one closest and begging, pleading, that Riche is fast enough to do what he cannot.
“RICHE, CLOSE YOUR CIRCLE!” He screams.
Please, please let her still be on the right page. Please-
The thought leaves him with a hiss, not through mouth but through skin, the high-pitched screech of boiling water meeting flesh, followed by his own wail as his arm erupts in pain.
And Olruggio of the Torch burns.