Avari,

I hope you’re settling in as well as you can given your circumstance. Rest assured, I had absolutely no part in the decision to send you there. My hands were tied. They are sneaky and slippery and you should be wise not to trust a single one of them, not even any of your little friends. Manon Cotillard’s presence weighs down on us like a peppy, insidious cloud. Be glad to no longer be bothered by her.

I’m writing to let you know that I, along with some other Healers and Alchemists, will be visiting your Academy in 5 weeks’ time. It will be nice to see you. Manon will not be accompanying us. We will talk much when I arrive. I hope you are being wise and careful. Remember, they are NOT your friends.

See you soon,

Ivra Vonglo.

Note: I will bring your fox with me. The cats are unsuitable for such travel and will remain. Be prepared.

*

Laclan would not leave me alone. Of course, we weren’t friends, we weren’t anywhere close to a realm of forgiveness, but he was relentless. I wasn’t so stupidly emotional as to be upset or sad about what he’d done to me – I wasn’t so stupidly emotional as to be upset or sad about anything at all – but I could not escape him. Not friends, but I wouldn’t bother moving away whenever he sat by me for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Not friends, but he managed to coax conversation out of me in a way that nobody else – except, perhaps, Gaspard – could. After whatever he’d done to Ulyses d’Aigle-Blondeau and his friends, and after Ulyses’ expulsion, I was met with a lot less mockery (though not necessarily any warmth). I was sure that I, small as I still was, inspired some sort of…hesitance in the other boys; but Laclan, strong as he always would be, had fists that worked and a body that moved. He could get a smile out of anyone, and his friends at the academy were unnumbered, but I would best describe him as ‘no bark, all bite’.

I was in two classes with Wolfgang (he hated this), one class with Gaspard (he didn’t explicitly say, but his quiet smile let me know he was pleased), and five with Laclan (this was incredibly damning on my part, because Laclan was so disruptive and talkative during class that he hardly knew which subject he was currently in, and to be judged to be on equal academic level – this was incredibly damning). Still, I would never admit it, but to have my own timetable pleased me, and I did enjoy learning even if I hated being taught, and Laclan, though not my friend, though not capable of my forgiveness, was funny and lively and insisted on including me on all class discussions, on every single one.

A month passed. Then another. Gaspard and I spent many nights together in the huge library attached to the residence halls. The stained-glass windows of this building depicted cloaked men with Latin names (“saints and scholars,” Gaspard told me) and housed a lifetime of books on history, language, and arithmetic. I told Gaspard what I knew of the old books and he told me what he knew of the new. After the third month, my timetable was revised: two classes with Wolfgang, two with Laclan, and now four with Gaspard. He had a confidence when answering questions that he didn’t have outside of the classroom. He never gave a wrong answer. Or, even if he did, its falsity didn’t survive the confidence in which he said it.

To make friends outside of Gaspard and Laclan would have required me to be willing to speak to anyone else. I wasn’t. When asked a question (and the longer I stayed, the more frequent they became), if Gaspard or Laclan weren’t around to answer for me, then it would receive no answer at all. I knew I was an object of curiosity. I knew they wondered about my lineage, my sudden enrolment, my meditations. I wouldn’t answer them. I didn’t care to. Expectedly, mystery served to be good social currency, even if I personally received no benefit. Laclan and Gaspard were the only students to have heard me speak for extended amounts of time, but it was Wolfgang who seemed to benefit the most, as he was the one that saved my life all those months ago.

The Baron left me alone. Surprisingly, once I’d sat the aptitude test, once I’d been assigned to academically-appropriate classes, once I started eating meals in the Mezzanine, he left me alone. He didn’t question me on the missing lavender. He didn’t question me on the Monastery, on my healing, on anything at all. “All we want is for you to be well-educated and well-kept,” he’d said to me. “We’re not your villains, Avari. You can trust us.”

“Stop! Villain!” Laclan was on the clay ground, dramatically covering his face with his arm as if in deep distress. “Oh, somebody help me! Somebody big and strong and…Bah, are we sure I’m describing Wolfe?”

“Why couldn’t I be the damsel in distress?” Gaspard asked, shaky on his feet as he held his sword in both hands. His performance as ‘villain’ was always so terrible that I was sure Wolfgang and Laclan only insisted it be him so they could laugh. “I get called ‘pretty boy’ enough times to earn it, no?”

“We should give it to Avari.” Wolfgang, who was out of view because he wasn’t due in the scene yet, grumbled scornfully. “It’s not like he does anything else.”

Laclan considered this, then turned to me. “Avari, how do you feel about being the damsel?”

And because he pursued me so relentlessly, so persistently, I could consider a question like this for itself, without the context of what had happened. I answered, “To be saved by Gaspard, fine. But not Wolfgang. I would rather throw myself to the dragons, or the pirates, or whatever you’re running from.”

“You see? You see how I’m not the problem? He doesn’t even try to be civil with me!” It wasn’t his cue but he entered the foreground anyway, pointing his sword at me. “Make him the villain instead. Maybe his parents were executed for treason and he’s got their evil ideas in his blood.”

“Don’t talk about his parents, Wolfe.”

Wolfgang, exasperated, threw his sword down and stormed off. No one contested how he, despite having the worst personality, always played the hero. There were, however, increasingly frequent contestations about our treatment of each other. I don’t know what they expected. I made it clear I deeply disliked him and he made it clear he felt the same way about me. The other two I could tolerate. Wolfgang I couldn’t. I refused to. By this point, they knew enough to know I didn’t get offended at the constant jibe of my ‘dead parents’, because my parents being dead or alive was hardly something I even knew how to care about, but the intention to offend me offended me more than anything else. “He’s…trying.” Laclan would say, but how was this an attempt at anything other than enmity? “He’s just, you know, a little awkward.” Gaspard would say, but how would constantly insulting, threatening, and demeaning me classify him as anything other than evil?

“We must find common ground,” Gaspard suggested, “How can the four of us be friends if the two of you hate each other?”

“We’re not friends.” I muttered, but I folded my arms and leaned back in my chair, showing that I was willing to listen. “I have done nothing wrong.”

“You get up and walk away whenever he sits with us.”

“I’ve only done that twice.”

“You did it three times just yesterday alone.”

I scowled, looking away. “How do you propose we be friends if he doesn’t want to be friends with me?”

“Avari,” Laclan shook his head solemnly, like I was a little kid, “it’s you who doesn’t want to be friends with him.”

Well, of course that was true. I would openly admit that I deeply disliked him. This suggestion – and this was not the first time – that the feeling wasn’t mutual was preposterous to me. It was a tired conversation, and one that I didn’t like the solution to: Laclan would not leave me alone so I couldn’t shake his friendship; Gaspard and I spent too much time talking about history and politics to not have developed some sort of friendly feelings, and because they were both friends with Wolfgang, I was stuck having to tolerate him.

“Tonight, during dinner,” Gaspard suggested, “initiate a nice conversation and see what happens.”

If it were anyone other than Gaspard asking, I would have refused (although, stubbornly, I might have to admit that Laclan might have also gotten me to agree), and so I nodded. If just to show them once and for all that I wasn’t at fault in our rivalry, I would initiate a nice conversation with Wolfgang and let him devolve it into insults and derogatory remarks.

And so at dinner, I said: “Wolfgang.”

End of my sentence. The three of them all stopped their chatter to look at me, wide-eyed, confused, expectant, and then confused again. In fairness, what else should I have said? How are you? I didn’t care. How was your day? Similarly, I didn’t care. So, I’d said ‘Wolfgang’, and now he was looking at me, already irritated, already displeased, already a red tint in his eyes despite me just having said one word.

“You-”

“-catch more butterflies with honey than with bees wax,” Laclan nodded, pretending he was completing Wolfgang’s sentence, “that’s so true, and exactly what I told you last night.”

Wolfgang squeezed his eyes shut, as if calming himself down. He exhaled deeply, then reopened his eyes, a crystal-clear silver. “Avari.”

Both Laclan and Gaspard cheered, encouraged by the most civil conversation Wolfgang and I had ever had. It made us both scoff. It made us both roll our eyes. “That’s not even the correct expression,” Wolfgang muttered, but he didn’t raise an argument. They were satisfied with this little progress we’d made, saying each other’s names without immediately then hurling insults, and they weren’t going to push their luck by asking more from us. I stood up when dinner was over, off to do my meditations, and as usual, they were unbearable. “Oh no, big and strong Avari is leaving me all alone…” whined Laclan. Gaspard was clutching an imaginary arrow through his heart. “Avari…My closest confidant. Avari…” Even Wolfgang was smiling a little. He didn’t join in on their exaggerated farewells, but he didn’t sign ‘va te faire foutre’ at me, which was an improvement, if nothing else.

Ivra would be here in 5 weeks.

I attempted to stifle my contentment. I tried to conjure up more negative emotions instead, seemingly the opposite of standard meditational practice, but I did it in earnest. I looked for my anger, my fury at Laclan and his violence and subsequent cowardice. I looked for my apathy towards Gaspard. It was easy to feel my distaste for Wolfgang. I tried to dismiss all pokes and prods of friendship, all attempts to win me over, to lower my guard, to defrost my heart. Romilio, Delphia, and Ivra had all warned me of this before: not to misunderstand relationships. Ivra especially had warned me of the French nobility. Again, I asked for a hard heart. I wanted to sneer at the memory of Laclan’s intense cheer the first time he’d made me laugh. I wanted to heckle the conversations Gaspard and I had, conversations that bled well into the night. I wanted to remember what it felt like to be alone, because I’d forgotten the virtue of solitude in just three months, because I was setting myself up for betrayal that I knew was coming.

I opened my eyes. The water rippled in front of me gently. My gaze was guided upward and forward, to a place where Nature had so often guided my gaze after these meditations: to the forest.

An instruction? “What are you asking of me?” I whispered.

The water rippled more insistently, the wind moved in a gust that blew past me and ventured towards the thick trees. Yes, an instruction. “Not tonight,” I said, but I was curious. “But…you have my consideration. One day, I’ll go back. Give me a reason, and not just: because Nature says so.”

Cryptic, vague, even a little annoyed. The water rippled and the wind blew. “If you were calling me to a mountain,” I proposed, “yes, I would be more cooperative.” More annoyed: there were no mountains in the North District, what should Nature do, summon one? “If you were calling me to a mountain that you have newly summoned, then yes, I would be more cooperative. That forest is unnecessary. I have been there once before: it is unnecessary.”

An impasse. I sighed, touching the water with my fingertips and causing little whirlpools to shudder through the pond. With my other hand, I asked for the wind to stop blowing towards the forest and fall still. “You have my consideration.” I repeated. “But give me time to consider. To…ready myself to go back.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

I wouldn’t say we reached an agreement, because something in Nature’s tone felt conniving, mischievous, as if there was already a more convincing plan in action, but we reached a settlement. I narrowed my eyebrows, suspicious, but all I got was the wind ruffling my hair and whirlpools running through the pond. It felt like home. I didn’t have much physical experience with the feeling, because nowhere had ever truly felt permanent, but Nature always felt like home.

*

The portrait of Ophèlie de Perses – by this point, I could list its details from memory. I was unsure, still, if there was any point to standing here and staring at her. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe my memory or my sense of recognition was failing me, and I was misattributing her to someone similar, or, equally as plausible, someone fictional. I had a million questions I wanted to ask, but to ask a question would betray interest. Why ask after a topic you don’t care about? And if you care, why? What are you looking for? I couldn’t ask. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe I was misremembering. I couldn’t ask.

*

The lavender had rooted itself between the wood of my desk and was growing at a steady, rapid pace. I didn’t have it in me to de-root them once again, and so the desk was made unusable, drenched in a mischievous lilac and inebriating my room in a floral, springtime scent. Once aware they had my permission, they blossomed in no time at all, spreading into the floorboards, attempting to push itself into the spaces of the brick wall. Nature might understand, but I couldn’t bring myself to remove them, or even disturb them, so I had no choice but to care for them. They grew with my watering, my tending, and my nightly whispers for nutrients, rejuvenation, and grace.

Romilio could grow an apple tree in a day. I couldn’t, at least not yet, but lavender was easy to grow and my willingness encouraged its speed. It took no time at all for the right-side of my room to be drenched in lavender, for the chambre to be baked in that sweet, cloying smell. “You could get me in trouble,” I whispered, yet I kept tending them, unable to do otherwise. I brushed my fingers over the purple flowers. “How do I explain? Lavender should not grow here at all, but you have grown out of wood.”

The lavender was self-satisfied but offered me no answers, of course. I sighed, but watered them dutifully. I noticed, somewhere near the centre of the lavender clump by my desk, that the flowers had disobeyed the call of sunlight and had instead curled into one another, creating a dark patch amongst the lightly-coloured plants. Not enough sunlight, maybe, but how could that be helped? They had insisted on growing in my room, and sunlight was possible through one window at one angle and although I did my best, some spots must have been neglected.

In hindsight, I should have been more suspicious.

I spent some time mulling over how to remedy this dark patch. I could leave it to fend for itself, and I was spitefully tempted to do so given the lavender had been so arrogant as to completely overtake my chambre, but I couldn’t do that. Unfortunately, I cared for its growth, and so I stood there and I thought hard. If the flowers were weak and limply clinging to each other, I didn’t want to kill them by attempting to pull them out by hand, but perhaps if I touched just a few, I could remedy the ones closest to the surface until I found a more permanent solution.

And so, I reached my hand in.

I quickly found that I couldn’t grab it. I couldn’t grab any of the flowers in this dark patch at all, as if I’d pushed my hand into a hole. I pulled my hand back, surprised, then immediately reached in again, and reached in, and reached in once more, until I had to lean my whole body into the flowers even if my entire arm had long since disappeared inside the desk.

I could hear buzzing. I could feel a stronger heat than what the sun was outside. Again, I removed my hand, my heart thundering away, before reaching in one last time and truly trying to feel what should have been the hard wood of a desk,

and then I fell.

I fell into my desk, into the sea of lavender. When I sat up, startled, I was…I was in a much bigger sea of lavender underneath a much hotter sun, a blue sky, bees buzzing around me. I was outside, very much not in my room at all, seated by the edge of the field where the road was closest. It was right where we’d driven past on the way to the Academy, where the Baron had leaned out to ask for the lavender stems. In fact, right there, at the same spot, was the field boy. He spotted me immediately, yelled out in anger, arms raised, running towards me with a pitchfork, and immediately I scrambled backward and…

…tumbled onto the floor of my room.

I waited for him to tumble with me. He didn’t. I waited for my heart to stop pounding. Eventually, it did. The lavenders continued to lavender, somehow smug without smug faces, and I could feel the ‘Ha! There’s your prize!’ in their purpleness. Prize? A bee was buzzing around my room, hopping from stem to stem. Prize...

Immediately, I pulled out a sheet of paper and my ink pen, addressing the letter to the Monastery, starting with Romilio, an urgent development has occurred….

*

I could not:

1. Fall into the clay ground.

2. Fall into wood, metal, or glass.

3. [I did not attempt jumping into the pond]

4. Fall into brick.

The only thing I could fall into, seemingly, were these lavender flowers.

*

Nature was blissfully uninterested when I demanded for explanations on this new…thing. Were the lavender flowers to blame or me? Was this a symptom of puberty, or truly a ‘prize’ for being patient with the flowers? Had this been done before? Of…of course. All elves could do all things, and I still believed this to be true, but I had never experienced what I had experienced that afternoon, and Nature was providing me with no answers. Or, if it was, I wasn’t yet capable of deciphering them. If this was usual, why had I never seen Romilio disappear into his bed of roses? Or into the grape vines? Why had he never even suggested this?

“Ah, Wolfe, come save me from the big bad Gaspard!”

“Is this your impression of a damsel in distress?”

“It’s my impression of Avari as the damsel in distress.”

I knew the old history and I was reading the new, and so I could see that there were large, obvious gaps in the knowledge the military was allowing us. A recurrent idea of ‘nature providing restrictions’ was completely foreign to me, and yet it appeared in every science book Gaspard and I read. Some gaps I had expected – there was no explanation on why the Gotteird Plains had been evacuated, for example, beyond just an acknowledgement that it had happened – but this insistence of Nature being limited, restricted: it was incomprehensible to me. And so I knew I wouldn’t find an explanation of myself in one of those books. I knew I needed to wait until Ivra arrived so she could send my letter to the Monastery. If I sent it off myself, I didn’t trust that the Baron wouldn’t tear open the seal and read it. I didn’t trust any of them, not at all.

“Wolfe! Come save me, Avari, from the villainous villain!”

“Wolfe is more likely to kill Avari than save him, no?”

“Gaspard, shh. Wolfe! Come…euh…Come save me, and then ravish me!”

Gaspard turned a deathly shade of red. Wolfgang, who again should not have entered the scene yet, also flushed a deep pink. It was a curious colour, one I’d never seen on him before, and when he glanced at me to see if I’d heard, he glowered, grit his teeth, but his pink blush deepened to a red flush, comparable to Gaspard’s. Only Laclan was blasé about what he’d just said: “Oh, come on! I’m playing the part!”

“Then play the part as yourself.” Wolfgang hissed.

I cleared my throat, and they all immediately turned to me. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘ravish’. It’s stupid and literary. Either play me better or don’t play me at all.”

Laclan beamed, happy with my corrections. Wolfgang was furious (as always), and Gaspard had covered his face in his hands, unable to look at any of us. “Bah, these Catholics, huh? So sensitive. You spend all those hours in chapel calling forth a virgin mother yet the word ‘ravish’ makes you blush?”

At that age, we fell into two camps of thought. Boys like Laclan made vulgar jokes and laughed at any offense they caused. Boys like Gaspard balked at these jokes, refused to engage in conversations around the topic, found it all sacrilegious and inappropriate and too much to handle. I was apathetic, still coming to terms with the concept of beauty itself. Gaspard would sometimes squirm when I spent a concentrated amount of time staring at his face, wondering what about it specifically made him so attractive. Like Misa, or like that huntress I had seen. I had been tending to some herbs in my garden when a huge painting was brought in from one of the Art Schools, a gift for the Baron, and the painting had been so beautiful, so incredible, creating within me that same automatic sense of appreciation that an attractive elf would.

Some of the older Class A boys would sneak out on Saturday nights and reappear, dishevelled and satisfied, on Sunday mornings to say their Latin during their mass. I was ‘exempt’ from these services, but curiosity had made me join Laclan and the others once or twice, hearing a sermon conducted in their dead Latin language, watching them break bread and drink wine. Laclan did it because all students of the school had to, but Wolfgang seemed to genuinely believe it, and Gaspard even more so. I was unsure if the older boys did, if they somehow found a way to reconcile their obvious Saturday fornications with their Sunday prayers. Some of the Catholic laws I found logical: don’t kill, don’t lie. Some I didn’t, this fornication one, this strict requirement of an arbitrary ceremony to symbolise the crossover from a sin into expected practice. “You can’t ask questions like that,” Laclan whispered when I’d asked him. “They get mad. Trust me, I know.”

Logical or not, I could see its social value, if nothing else. A unifying ceremony every Sunday morning, where they had a collective belief to share. It reminded me of communal meditation at the Monastery. It made me miss it, even if I knew how futile, how detrimental an emotion like that was.

“Have you been to the neighbouring town?”

“Sure. In the summer, I spend some weeks at home before joining Wolfe and Gaspard in the South. On the way, I pass through the town. To get to the Low Midlands, you go right across the Jacobin Trail, through the nearest town of Dei Fura. Wolfe and Gaspard, they come in from the South, which cuts the Eurfesque, so I’m not sure if they’ve ever been.”

Dei Fura. They turned a blind eye to the older boys sneaking out so long as they were Class A, because they had ‘earned’ this small freedom more than their counterparts. I couldn’t remember if I’d ridden through the town. Coming in from the east coast seaside of the Monastery, or the west coast land of the Alchemist Academy made me feel I hadn’t. “How do they get to Dei Fura from here?”

“They ride through the forest.”

I knew this was the answer, that there was no other way to sneak beyond the Academy than through that forest, but them riding through was the specification I wanted. “Could I?”

“Could you what?”

“Ride through the forest?”

“To join them at their brothels?”

“No. To go into the forest.”

“I…I suppose. During the day, you can. You have to be chaperoned, but you can.”

Not what I wanted. I needed to go without supervision, and so I needed to go at night, but it was a journey I knew I would struggle to undertake on my own. Even the journey from where I currently stood to where the forest began was a long one, purposefully so, and to then venture through the forest would be impossible. I might have spent hours meandering through the forest at as slow a pace as necessary if this were the Alchemist Academy, where supervision didn’t necessarily double as surveillance, but I knew I couldn’t here. I couldn’t trust them. I couldn’t trust any of them.

But I doubted I had the patience to wait another four weeks for Ivra’s arrival. And to then wait however long it took for Romilio to write back.

Laclan wouldn’t suggest himself as my aid, and I would never ask for him either. He was looking down at his feet, wrecked with the guilt that always made him go quiet, and I let it wreck him, saying nothing to soothe the thunder in his eyes. I would give Gaspard the credit of not assuming he was scared of the dark, but it might cause a mild hysteria in him if I insisted he break curfew and break restriction to help me to the forest.

And so, Wolfgang.

*

At night, a chair firmly placed under my door to prevent entry, I held a gas lamp up to inspect the lavender. It had been a handful of days since my first tumble inside, and since then I’d made notes on whatever information was available to me. The science at an academy like this was technical yet lacking. It didn’t account for any of my experience, and to ask a specific question would reveal myself. So, after some rough sketches, some notes, and some fervent whispers to the lavender to behave, I placed the gas lamp down and threw myself in.

A good part of me had expected to painfully hit my desk and bounce off onto my wooden floor instead, that my initial experience was a stress-induced hallucination.

It wasn’t.

It took some seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when it did, I could see the night sky above me, stars twinkling with the moon. I could hear the low drone of grasshoppers among the weeds. The cool air, beyond the bassline smell of lavender, also carried with it dirt and mist. In my fingertips, pushing up through my palm until it soldered at my heart, I could feel a stream nearby. For many moments, I lay there in the lavender, my eyes transfixed on the nightness around me, on the open air that I was suddenly surrounded by. There were mountains far away in the distance. They even seemed within my capability, that if I walked and then ran, I could climb its height and shove my fists in the air, victorious, that I could be myself again, prior to that night when it had all been lost.

Mountains…I was sure I could hear Nature laughing at me, maybe even saying, “There you go! There’s your mountain!”. I stood up, but immediately I collapsed. I was without my cane, and going through this…this portal had drained me considerably. A bitter realisation swallowed me up, that I hadn’t suddenly regained all my energy, that I was just the same as before. Albeit, with whatever this new lavender-portal affination was.

A heavy gust of wind blew in my direction, then softened itself to tussle my hair and tussle the lavender around me. My heart was tugging me to follow the call of the water nearby. It was almost disorienting, the contrast in Nature’s audibility here versus at the Academy. It was as if I were back in the Monastery, as if I could hear my name on the wind’s lips, Avari, as if I could close my eyes but still know where to walk so that I could fall into the water and swim. And it had been so long since I’d swam. Romilio had disallowed me from swimming in the sea at the Monastery due to my ‘bad health’ and ‘worse temperament’, and I had no opportunity to do so at the Academy unless I dove into the pond, but I could almost feel the water gliding over my body now, the feeling of being welcomed home.

There wasn’t much around. A tall tree at one end, a windmill at another. Some homes with smoke billowing out their chimneys. I could see into one home, see a family by candlelight, chatting over their dinner. The pull of water was in the opposite direction, beyond a path I could see, and so I slowly pushed myself up to standing and began hobbling over. Then I stopped. It would take me all night at the pace I was capable of, and so I sat back down, ready to negotiate.

“I will return,” I whispered, “with my cane.”

This was accepted.

“And you will explain yourself to me.”

This was…debatable. There was no forest here, more so a creek, these fields, those houses, and the mountains as their backdrop, and yet I saw so clearly a forest before my eyes, knowing it was a picture that Nature was feeding me, an instruction that it was reminding me to follow. “Yes, I know. I’m organising that. Will it be explained then?”

A ‘hmm’ as a response. I lay down on my back, staring up at the night sky, at all this freedom despite not having the strength to venture through it. I must have smiled. The promise of what was to come: it must have made me smile.