Defensive Magic

WINTER BREAK - December 19th

I slept late into midday following the bonfire. The mark of Orendell itched enough to wake me, skin pink and already marked up where my nails had scratched in my sleep. It had been bothering me most days since returning the grimoire to the Sanctum and it was getting hard not to notice a correlation. If anything, it was very annoying, but I was getting used to it being annoying. I sipped wolfsbane solution to keep it at bay as much as I could. Not worth fussing over just yet. I had other things still on my mind.

Like the love potion on my nightstand. Aries had been wary of using it, but he'd also opted not to stay the night, so I don't think it was just the love potion that was making him skittish.

I should have been more frustrated over it. He'd been chasing me since we'd met, but too, by this point I knew him well enough not to be surprised. Instead, I ended up rereading the instructions Kelyn had written on the card for that love potion, half imagining what that might look like, until the stinging mark of Orendell got me out of bed to search for my flask of wolfsbane solution.

I prised the flask from my coat pocket and was struck by sudden dread when I realized it was too light. Of course I was out...

I know I'd taken a few sips from it throughout the night, but the full moon was still a few days off. The wolf in my head should have still been asleep. I felt it rousing more and more on days it wasn't meant to.

Generally, I dressed before leaving my room while staying with the Marblebrooks, but there were plenty of mornings where Kelyn and Elandria slept late and stayed in their sleepwear until late afternoon. It wasn't too weird for me to rush to the kitchen still in my winter robe and socks to start working on something to quell the mark. I was mashing up aloe for the poultice Kelyn gave me— it was faster than making a potion— when Elandria appeared in the doorway. She was more dressed than I was- in an oversized turtleneck with a gaping hole at the shoulder seam and a pair of flowy cotton pants she only ever wore around the house. She looked tired, but too, there was something else. I didn't notice it right away.

"Zephyr," she said.

I hummed in response, in the middle of crushing wolfsbane under a pestle. But I was only met with silence until I looked up. Elandria hadn't moved from the doorway. She pursed her lips and there was a kind of obvious pity that I hadn't seen from her before. Something had happened.

"Everything alright?" I asked. I already knew it wasn't, but where something had gone awry was still lost on me. My thoughts tracked first to Aries, then Kelyn, and then back to Aries again when Elandria asked that I sit.

I quickly finished the poultice and sat down at the kitchen counter next to Elandria. She didn't rush me, but that in itself felt like more cause to move faster.