Binding Lessons

Two students walked along the shadows of Old Queen’s Way, the great statue loomed over much of the 10 mile courtyard, overlooking the mess hall, gymnasium, and the dormitory. One walked with an awkward gait leading his colleague to raise an eyebrow. 

“Herkal, you alright? You look like you shit yourself”, he said.

The other man looked at him with a weak, embarrassed smile, “Huh? Oh yeah, these new pants were made poorly. Too tight in the waist”.

New pants huh?, he thought. Herkal had them for nigh on half a year which made an already obvious lie that much more obvious. They had known each other for twice that time, having been forced to work together after Herkal tried to make him stop his antics in the classroom, leading to a fight. They had grown close since then.

Herkal tried to distract him, “Lakon look, there’s the library. We may have the main book for class but we’ll find more comprehensive texts there. When we’re done with the serious stuff I’ll show you my favorite, ‘Kings and Queens of Fursagla’ it’s by Prime Master Quidranius, one of my favorite authors. He also wrote…”

Lakon listened to all the books written by the man which later turned into a rant about King Oglokor and the last battle which ended Fursaglan rule and caused the arranged marriage between Lady Sidhaia and Lord Amur-sin of Aroloth before settling on the talk about current political events and how they were shaped by these long ago battles and weddings. He didn’t remember most of it but found an unexpected pleasure in listening to Herkal passionately speak when he was normally quiet and reserved. By the time they arrived at the front steps to the library, Herkal looked confused.

“Why are we here again?”, he asked. Their conversations seemed to always make him forgetful. 

His friend chuckled, “You promised to help me study. Amarita will give us a test in two days and I find her class as interesting as a wet leaf in a desert. Well actually that’s not true, a wet leaf in a desert sounds like a fun mystery to solve. How did it get there? What blasphemous wind carried it so far out and defied the natural order?”. 

Herkal frowned but ignored him, they had arrived at the library. Lakon went ahead and opened the double doors in an exaggerated manner, spreading his arms out wide and with his head hanging back. He had a penchant for the melodramatic. 

“Oh yes! The library, the only place where you can find teachers that don’t tell you when to shit and eat and sleep”, said Lakon.

“Well there better be no shitting, eating, nor sleeping in my library, boys. I worked really hard to keep it nice and tidy”, said an old woman that emerged from behind a twelve story bookshelf. 

“Boys? I’m old enough to be your scandalous much younger lover”, said Lakon. 

“What?”, responded the woman as she wrinkled her nose. 

Herkal stepped forward ignoring Lakon’s antics, “Mother, I made a promise to my friend here that I would help him study. He has problems in class and needs attention and care that cannot be provided by a teacher dealing with fifty students at once. I promise we won’t make a mess of things and if we do then I will make sure we clean up after ourselves”.

The woman nodded reluctantly, clearly she did not trust his friend and Herkal couldn’t blame her, he had a habit of making a poor first impression. Herkal forgot all about the strange comment as he looked up at the ceiling. He made a noise of approval.

“Nice ceiling, I think this place will be good for studying”, he said.

“What does the ceiling have to do with studying?”, asked Herkal.

Lakon snorted as if it was obvious, “Well it looks structurally sound. If the roof were to fall on our heads then there wouldn’t be much use in studying. Can’t learn if your dead”. 

“Go on before I change my fucking mind”, said Herkal’s mother.

“Thank you Caestra!”, said Lakon cheerfully.

Once they were away and deeper in the labyrinth of books, Lakon widened his eyes at his friend, “She’s your mother? How come you never told me?”.

Herkal shrugged, “It never came up”.

“That’s very significant. How did that never come up? We talk everyday”, said Lakon.

“And if you studied with me you would’ve known”, Herkal said. 

They went up some stairs where emerged a forest of stacks upon stacks of books and scrolls and clay tablets. Herkal took a ladder and placed it against one of the shelves to climb up a dark corner where cobwebs and dust rained down with even the slightest touch. Lakon wandered about glancing at the books until his friend giggled in elation. Herkal climbed down the ladder and ran to Lakon while pointing at the book in his hand with a face of pure joy.

“Look! Look! Look! This is the one”, he said. 

The young man ran towards Lakon who had strayed away as he inspected other shelves and fell on his face. Lakon ram to help him up but found a second book slip from him. He took it and flipped through the pages. The contents intrigued him.

“What is this? Why do you have a book about magic?”, he said.

Herkal dusted himself and cleared his throat, “Your birthday is tomorrow and I wanted to get you something”, he muttered.

Lakon didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t expected Herkal to remember his birthday but smiled warmly at him, “Thank you. I actually wanted to show you a spell

I learned a couple of days ago. It’s nothing dangerous just blowing the wind. I’ve been practicing it so I can now control how strong the wind is”, he didn’t think his friend would understand the true significance of it but it was a hard earned skill he’ll be damned if he didn’t show someone.

“Don’t, I don’t want my mother to complain about us sneaking into the library”, he picked his book up and got three more from the bottom shelves.

“Loosen up, It’ll only be a simple spell nothing too big. I’ve done this before”, he said as he spread his legs out and planted his feet firmly into the floor. 

“Was your success based on luck or did you truly master the spell?”. 

Lakon felt a little hurt but continued just so he could prove him wrong. He cupped his hands and whispered the spell into them, a small green light flickered in his hands. He felt the light spark, tickling his palms. After a while it grew from the size of a pebble to fill his hands with a more intense light. 

“I thought you were just going to blow some wind! Why is there light in your hands?”, fretted Herkal. 

Lakon felt very confident he had it under control… at first. The light grew in proportion, enveloping his hands and sucking in the air rather than blowing it out. It was getting harder and harder to breathe and he could barely hear his friend’s protests against the use of magic. The spell had been like removing the pillars holding a roof so that he would have to hold it in the pillar’s place, and it was very heavy. Sweat trickled down his brow. He felt his chest constricting. Using all the strength left in his mind, he began to contract the ball of light that grew to the size of a human’s head. As it grew shorter everything got back to normal.

 Yet books and scrolls were thrown about as if discarded into heaps of trash. Many hundreds of sheets of paper torn from the glue that bound them to the spines of their books. Dust flew about, Lakon only noticed it when he tasted it in his mouth and it irritated his nose. Herkal immediately began to gather about the pages and fitted them back to their respective books. Lakon didn’t help, instead he looked at one of the shelves, ‘Something must’ve caused such a disturbance. Whatever it was it came from there’.

His thoughts were interrupted by Herkal’s sneeze, “Why the fuck did you make it so big? Why couldn’t you just flip a few pages and be done with it? All you had to do was show a little trick”, the bookworm gathered the books, occasionally reading passages in some and gathering a separate pile of the ones he would read later and the ones that he would place back in their shelves.

“I didn’t intend to make it so big. Something else did that. Well, I mean, the spell was all me but it was bigger than anything I can do with my skill”, he went to the nearly empty shelf and started feeling the cobbled wall behind it, “Look over here, these are symbols of sorts. Perhaps hieroglyphs from Old Aroloth. If you look hard enough you can see these lines where air blows out. I felt it while making the spell”.

Intrigued, Herkal gently placed the books and sheafs of papers in his hands on the floor and went to the hieroglyphs next to Lakon. He put his hands to feel them out too, “These carvings are as old as the school but the alphabet it uses is older than the Empire of Aroloth”.

With all the anger of his friend’s shenanigans gone from his eyes, he started trying to pull at the lines once he realized they led somewhere. Herkal abandoned his efforts and searched through the books, taking some and putting them back at the shelf.

“Wait, let’s discover what’s behind here”, said Lakon until he realized what he was doing. 

A second or two later, he helped him put the books back in a certain order. But instead of putting the spines of the books facing outward, he put them inwards facing the wall. 

“Any other time I would’ve cursed the person who did this to the tenth generation”, said Herkal.

Once they put all the books in a certain order, something clicked inside the wall. Both students stepped away and watched as the wall withdrew into itself and slid away to the side. Inside was a room filled with scratches of glyphs in every corner, some shrunk in different places to make room for more. In the very center sat an old woman.

“By the Gods! Are you alright?”, asked Lakon while Herkal simply gaped.

The old woman looked to be about her seventies with sunken eyes and skin hugging bone. The duo could see her skull. It was evident to the both of them that her confinement stretched back many years. 

“Are you alright?”, repeated Lakon. 

She smiled. The old woman licked her chapped lips and rapped her knuckles in the rough stone. A purple sphere appeared and fazed out of existence a few seconds later. Then a dozen appeared all over the room and they too disappeared. 

She stared at the two of them with bloodshot eyes, “Wh-who are you? You don’t look familiar”.

Lakon and Herkal looked at each other in confusion. Herkal spoke next, “My name is Herkal, ma’am. How long have you been here?”.

“Why are you here in the first place? Who would do something like this?”, said Lakon.

Herkal motioned for him to stop, “First let’s get her some medical attention. She looks malnourished and starved. We need to get her some food and…”.

Before he could finish, the old woman raised a hand to the air and screamed a spell. Lakon was pulled away by unseen forces and crushed by the wall of glyphs and whatever magic the woman had called upon. Blood ran down his nose and eyes, he groaned in pain from the spell. 

“Wait stop! We’re not here to hurt you!”, was all he had time to say before she uttered more words of power and he felt his stomach contract. He crumbled to the floor and crawled to the woman, intending to stop her, to do whatever it took to stop the intense spear of pain lancing through his body. 

More words of power were spewed out… by another woman. Caestra opened her mouth, within, her own purple sphere fizzled into being, it shot out a beam of sticky blue goo with enough force to knock the skeletal woman out of balance. Freeing both Lakon and Herkal. 

Lakon dropped to the floor, yet even in his weakened state he got on all fours and went over to Herkal. He shook his friend but could not rouse him from the floor. When he wouldn’t wake, Lakon stood on his wobbly legs and dragged him away from the two women before they began to fight.

“Caestra?”, whispered the malnourished woman.

A pang of guilt seized her soul, but she couldn’t afford to let that stop her. Caestra couldn’t let her prisoner leave or else she would harbor even greater regrets than leaving a woman to spend the rest of her life imprisoned in a stone room. The fool boy returned after dragging her son away to safety.

“Get out, this doesn’t concern you”, she told him.

Wordlessly, he looked at her and then back at the other woman, ‘He means to fight. Damn fool’, she thought. 

The prisoner got up effortlessly, speaking muttering words of power to herself. Every time she completed a spell her skin flowed purple for a second. To Caestra’s surprise, Lakon did it too, she was amazed the boy could muster such skill at such a young age. Yet it was not enough. 

She sucked in her breath and began another spell. Her arms shot forward, tendrils of green smoke slithering through the whole room before reaching her prisoner. The skeletal woman replicated her tendrils with her own fingers, both women pushing against each other to cover the whole room with the snake like smoke produced by their spells. 

Lakon touched Caestra’s shoulder, adding his own power to hers. The librarian took advantage of this, weaving another spell. Once cast, the purple sphere reappeared in her throat and, untethering the tendrils in one hand, reached down her throat and pulled out a shimmering yellow knife. She took one step forward. Then another. And another. Lakon had used too much of his strength to follow. His hand fell limp from her shoulder as she moved towards her prisoner. 

The tendrils dissolved with every step. The skeletal woman’s tendrils, however, grew stronger and enveloped more of the room. She made them coil around Caestra’s body, tightening like a snake around her neck. She knew Caestra had no defense against her. Casting spells required a great deal of concentration. Holding on to the knife required nearly all of her attention else it would dissolve like the tendrils. 

The tendrils constricted the airflow, she felt the throat get crushed, her vision blurred, a part of her made her gasp for air. Yet still she threw all her willpower to the one spell. When she reached the old woman, she plunged the knife in her abdomen. 

The old woman shrieked in pain. Her rags darkened, stained with her blood. The loss of concentration and the loss of blood led the tendrils to dissolve. She collapsed, drained of all strength. 

“You left me here for years”, she breathed. Blood bubbled in her mouth. 

“You could have done a lot of damage. Many people would’ve died. This was the only way to stop you”, replied Caestra.

“You and I both know there was a better way”, she said. Then she took her last breath. 

The librarian looked over her shoulder and saw Lakon trying to get up and failing. She went over to him and grabbed his hand, pulling him up. The student looked bewildered and horrified at the body of the old woman he had only just a few minutes before wanted to help.

“Please, don’t tell my son”, said the woman.