The window was shut, the gray, dusty curtains drawn and the stuffy room was filled with candlelight and tallow fumes.

Cecilia was sitting on the floor, at the foot of her narrow bed. A circle was drawn on the stone floor before her, surrounded by dark purple candles. Opposite her, on the other end of the small room, stood a writing desk, supporting a pile of books, parchment paper, jars, dried plants, and more candles.

A pile of clothes was towering atop a lonely wooden chair and a large, tattered rucksack sat, slumped, by the door.

The flames atop the candles flickered in the still air, making the shadows shift restlessly.

Cecilia paid them no attention.

She was hunched over an old tome, her lips moving as she struggled to comprehend the ancient script.

At one point she looked up from the book and, pronouncing one foreign word aloud, threw a bunch of dried, crumbled leaves she had been holding in her tight fist into the circle.

Holding her breath, Cecilia waited.

This time the moving shadows caught her attention and she could not remember if they had been moving the whole time or had just started now, with her uttering the words.

For a while, nothing happened, and other than the dancing flames and shifting shadows, everything stood still.

The circle lay on the floor, lifeless and unchanged.

Cecilia took a deep breath, exhaled slowly through her nose, and was just about to dive back into the book - searching for the word she must have mispronounced or the ingredient she had gotten wrong - when all candles had gone out at once and the room was in complete darkness.

Cecilia held her breath, excited.

It’s working! She thought.

She kept staring straight ahead, at the place where the circle should have been.

It was an advanced spell and she had failed to get it right already twice before. She was trying to open a portal, of a sort, a one-sided mirror in the fabric of reality into a different place.

Lady Magnolia - her professor and leading expert in all deviation and scrying spells - used to say that it was best, in the beginning, to think about a place that was close to their hearts.

“The more you know what you expect to see, the easier it would be to locate the exact place,” she told the students during their last class.

Cecilia had locked her mind’s eye on her old room on her parents’ farm back in the village.

Sitting in her dark dorm she awaited to see the wooden walls and the little bed, the desk her father had made for her to use for studying, the shelves above it where an old doll and a stuffed wolf guarded a small pile of story books, and the other pile- which over the years grew even taller- of the books her parents had got for her on literature, herbs, natural laws, and the occult (though those were rare in her home village).

Cecilia thought of all that but no image came into view, and the circle, along with the room around it, remained draped in darkness.

She muttered under her breath and was about to get up when a soft glow sprouted at the base of one candle.

Cecilia watched as the glow spread, following the chalk marks on the floor and drawing a circle between the candles.

But something was not right.

A glimmering circle of pale blue was now sitting on the floor but no picture appeared inside it.

The color of the glowing line was changing: from bright blue to lush indigo, to shimmering green, then pink, and then pale blue again.

Cecilia was becoming aware of a creeping chill.

At least something worked, she thought, but what?

The right thing to do would have been to close the circle and stop the spell, but Cecilia found herself staring at the colors with fascination, unable to move.

She reached out with one hand, gingerly moving her fingers closer to the circle when all of a sudden she heard a voice.

It was a distant voice, hollow and dry. It sounded like it was coming from far away, farther than any place on the earth, and it said:

“Who calls?”

A cold current ran through Cecilia’s arms and legs and settled in her stomach.

She jumped to her feet and kicked the candles aside. The room was already getting noticeably cold.

When the circle broke, the pale light started to drift like mist across the floor, and for a moment panic engulfed Cecilia. She was relieved when it was beginning to fade until it finally disappeared.

Cecilia ran to the window, threw the curtain open, and returned to her desk, frantically searching for something.

She soon found what remained of her dwindling supply of sage and burned some in a metallic bowl, walking about the small room and trying to catch her breath.

She almost jumped when there was a knock on the door.

“May I come in?” a familiar voice called and Cecilia said yes, running a hand through her hair and trying to make herself appear as normal as possible.

The door opened and Lydnelle appeared at the entrance, her long black hair hanging loose, like a curtain of silk around her pale face and her pointy ears sticking out, ever alert.

“Is everything alright?” she asked, studying Cecilia with an air of concern.

“Yes, just clearing the air a little…” Cecilia said. Compared to Lydnelle’s, her voice sounded like a hoarse grunt to her ears.

The concerned look on her friend’s face did not change but Lydnelle nodded, leaving the subject. That was one thing Cecilia always appreciated about the elves - they minded their own business.

“So are you ready to go?” the elf asked, “We said we would go buy some supplies today or have you forgotten?”

Cecilia did forget, in fact, but she nodded back.

“Of course not,” she mumbled, eager to leave the room “Let me just get my bag.”

* * *

“So what do you make of the whole Malindra story?”, Lydnelle asked, cutting Cecilia’s rushing train of thoughts.

“Hmmm?”

They were walking down the busy road that led from the university into the market.

Cecilia hated going into town with Lydnelle.

The elf girl was too tall, too slender, her tilted eyes too green and her pace too graceful.

Back home Cecilia was considered the village beauty, with flowers waiting at her doorstep almost every morning and the boy's eyes following her every move, but here, in the big city, walking beside the enchanting elf, Cecilia felt that her figure was stout and her features brutish.

“Have you not heard?” Lydnelle’s voice rose in surprise and she leaned towards her, whispering as if sharing a secret “She got expelled.”

“What for?” Cecilia asked, her curiosity building up. It was not like Lydnelle to gossip.

“She tried casting a summoning spell, and to the lower worlds, of all!”, Lydnelle exclaimed.

“You mean, like, trying to summon a demon?”

Lydnelle shrugged, “I suppose. I mean, what other reason is there to cast a summoning spell?”

A rush passed through Cecilia.

“Why would anyone want to summon a demon?” she asked.

“I hear people say that she was trying to get arcane knowledge, in exchange for gods-know-what. All I know for sure is that she was experimenting with forbidden spells and they expelled her from the university, though, according to one version she left herself. Would you believe that?”

Cecilia’s heart was pounding.

“How did they find out?”

Lydnelle shrugged again, “I am sure they have their ways.”

They entered the large bazaar which spread under colorful pavilions and made their way through the stalls toward a row of one-story buildings on the other side.

Sellers and passers-by turned their heads to follow Lydnelle with their gaze but this time it failed to irritate Cecilia. Her mind was elsewhere.

“Perhaps it was a mistake? Maybe she was practicing a spell and got it wrong somehow?” Cecilia suggested, looking up to see Lydnelle’s expression.

The elf’s face was sealed as always.

“I suppose you could open a portal by mistake, but to sign a pact with an otherworldly being? You sure can’t do that without intention,” she said.

“Why would anyone want that? Who knows what a being like that might want in return.” Cecilia said, trying her best to sound disapproving.

This time Lydnelle smiled mischievously, preparing Cecilia for one of her rare jokes “Well, it would be cheaper than paying tuition, for once.”

They emerged on the other end of the canvas-covered square full of noise and commotion.

Before them, a row of stores stood huddled together. They walked to the one on the far right which smelled of herbs and incense.

It was late afternoon and there were already some people searching the shelves, gawking at the various items and, at times, haggling with the shop owner, whose checkered shirt and scruffy beard suggested he should have been out in the forest, cutting down trees and not selling arcane books and magic supplies.

Most of the shopgoers wore the dark blue robes of the university but once in a while the occasional enthusiast would stop by: those were mostly ambitious teens or strange old ladies.

As if by an unwritten rule, their paths separated as soon as they walked through the door and each was hellbent on her private quest: Cecilia saw Lydnelle walk towards a shelf overladen with bundles of herbs and little jars full of colorful liquids. Her own mission took her to the bookshelves where another student was following the names on the covers with a pointy finger and looked ready to fight if the matter came to it.

It was some hours later when Cecilia walked to the counter at the back of the store, carrying three books, a small bag of herbs, and a smudge stick made of sage leaves.

Petek - the store owner - was as usual nowhere to be seen and she had to ring a little bell to get him to appear from the back door.

He gave her a wide smile full of long teeth and scanned the items she had placed on the counter.

“That one’s in demand lately,” he said, picking up one of the books.

“Herbology is a popular class,” Cecilia said and watched as he was searching for the prices in a leather-bound book he kept under the counter. He wrote the numbers and summed them up on a piece of paper.

There were scratches on his hands and dirt around his fingernails and Cecilia thought, not for the first time, that she should try scrying the shop one night, to find out once and for all what he was hiding.

Petek looked up, at last, took a deep breath, and said, “I’m afraid that would be eleven gold ones and five silver.”

“You can’t be serious,” Cecilia said.

Petek gave her a mournful look, “These books are not easy to come by,” he said, “But we can settle for ten.”

She could feel him studying her while she counted her coins. His stare had the quality of a hunter studying his prey.

* * *

The rest of that evening was uneventful. Cecilia waited for Lydnelle to finish her shopping and they walked back together, complaining about prices and sharing their theories about Petek (“He’s quite attractive,” Lyndelle had said to Cecilia’s surprise, but then ruined it by adding “for a human.”).

They came across some classmates on their way to the local tavern and declined an offer to join - Cecilia had just spent the last of her coins and Lydnelle found that sort of time-spending untasteful.

They went their separate ways once they reached the three-story building which made up the student dorms and Cecilia spent the rest of her evening digging through her newly acquired books, trying to find an answer for her failed attempts to scry.

When it was late she lit a few candles - simple white ones - and read on.

It was harder than usual to concentrate, and every now and again she would find herself reading the same paragraph over and over again, her eyes locked on the text but her mind drifting back to her conversation with Lydnelle earlier.

She pressed her palms against her face for a moment and tried to focus but the thought would not relent.

Who would risk their reputation, skill, maybe even their lives, for a chance to maybe get some questionable powers from a questionable deity? And during the second year? After already having spent so much on tuition? Ridiculous.

How would Malindra’s parents, who must have paid for her to attend such a renowned university, feel once they’ve heard?

Cecilia sure wouldn’t want to be in her shoes then.

The hour was getting late but Cecilia was determined to succeed.

She drew a new circle, lit the dark purple candles, and sat down, cross-legged, on the floor. She made some changes to the mixture of dried leaves and used a quartz stone as the focal point of her concentration and flow of energy.

When all was ready she closed her eyes and once again, pictured her childhood room in her mind’s eye.

The desk behind which she had spent hours studying, listening to the other children play outside. Her parents went out of their way to buy her all of those new books on magic and she did not want to appear ungrateful.

The wooden dresser which was gradually filling with long black dresses and cloaks, because her parents heard that it was the peak of fashion among mages.

She thought of her father, telling her proudly how his mother graduated with honors from the Mist-Valley school of the arcane.

“The gift always skips a generation, you know,” he would tell her, “You were destined for this!”

The images floated in Cecilia’s mind, sharp and tangible enough for her to walk into.

When she was ready she cast the crushed leaves into the circle, spoke the words, and waited for the picture to appear.

The picture of her room. The room where her parents already put a nail in the wall and made a frame to hang her diploma in once she graduated.

The room into which Cecilia would not be able to return with a series of failed classes and empty hands.

The candles went out and a light flashed. A bright white (or was it pale blue?) dot under the top candle flowed and followed the line of the circle.

Cecilia was only half surprised when the glow started to change colors and the air around her was getting colder.

When a voice called she did not jump.

“So you came back,” it said from far, far away.

A part of Cecilia knew she should have closed the circle, ran, burned sage, and perhaps spoken to her professor to ensure she would not repeat the same mistake again, but she found herself reluctant to move.

What harm was there in answering? Being a student only meant searching for knowledge, and who knew what she could learn?

And who even said that the voice was about to offer her some dark pact in exchange for powers?

And even if it did, would that be all that bad? Was integrity better than disappointing her parents?

“My name is Cecilia, student of the arcane,” she finally said, trying to control her voice.

The voice did not reply instantly but when it did, it sounded like a dry chuckle, “And what is it that you’re seeking?” it asked, bemused.

Cecilia stopped, her thoughts clashing one against the other like waves. Was she really doing it?

A strange smile crept to her face, as if of its own accord.

Well, she thought, it would be cheaper than buying all those books, for once.