Defensive Magic

FALL TERM - DAY 3

I'm not here to make friends, but there's a fair chance I made one anyway. And no, it's not Aries. In my magical weapon tutorial class - one of the dozen sample lessons we attend in the first week at the Court, I met Aisling Warren. She's young for a mage, by any standard, only nineteen. New students aren't even allowed to apply until their eighteenth year, and given the number of years it takes some races to reach maturity, even then eighteen is supposedly more of a guideline than it is a rule. I've learned most elves attending are in their mid-fifties, not that they look it. I've yet to really connect more than superficially with any of the elves. At the Midnight Court a lot of the races tend to stick to themselves, despite how racially diverse it's always claimed to be. Elves with elves, dwarves with dwarves, and so on. There's a group of dracari I spotted in flight the other day, but something tells me, I won't exactly mesh with them either, not that I'm particularly miffed about it.

Caburh has made me a different beast altogether, for better or worse. I made up my mind from my first day here that I'm here to study magic and nothing else matters. It's easier to pretend I'm immune to loneliness than admit that maybe I wasn't exactly totally above all of it. Having friends.

And then came Aisling.

I was late to the magical weapons tutorial and took the first open seat - the one next to her. The instructor, Master Orion Lighthammer, carried on with his lesson talking through different alchemical properties of metals and how magic might change their usage, when eventually I noticed just why the seat beside her had been left open.

The girl sitting there - a waif with a mop of short auburn hair - had a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. Amid the lecture we exchanged one long, pointed look. She wasn't the strangest thing I'd seen, and certainly not the most terrifying. I went back to taking notes on the lecture after that as though it had never happened. I was new enough here, I wasn't exactly sure that it was strange. Better to be polite than abide by social norms. Especially given I was in Mesym now, what did I know of their social norms?

It wasn't until halfway through the lecture that her lips covered over her needle teeth and the next time she looked my way, she grinned. There was a gap between her two front teeth. The many rows of needle-points were gone. Her smile was utterly human and ordinary. How had she...? The answer had to be magic. It was magic. I'd never seen anything like it.

"You don't scare easy, do you?" she whispered.

This isn't what made us friends, but it is the reason I liked her immediately. We could spend all day psychoanalyzing the problems with that, but I think it boils down to how a strange and dangerous piece of me recognized the same kind of strange and dangerous thing in her. Either that or I really can never turn away from a terrifying woman.

The magical weapons tutorial carried on. This whole week of classes was especially introductory. Lighthammer came in with the assumption that none of us knew the difference between a magical weapon and an ordinary one - which was kind of a relief, because I too hadn't the faintest idea what the difference was. I assumed magic but it wasn't as though every magical weapon looked any different from the outset. Lighthammer explained that magic be brought into the weaponsmithing process at any step in its creation and it would be considered a magical weapon. This meant that if a mage cast the right enchantment on an ordinary table knife, it would be, under Mesym's law, a magical weapon, just as much as a weapon crafted from ore imbuing it with magical properties from the outset.

"So, tell me," Lighthammer asked the class. "Does anyone know any examples of ores with magical properties?"