Those first couple of months passed in a daze. The morning classes were always what the teachers referred to as 'the arts'. Literature, maths and languages. If they had been something she cared about, then she may have tried to concentrate on the lessons. But they weren’t, so she didn’t, preferring instead to sleep through the mornings.
The inside of the school was all sharp walls and high ceilings. From a distance, the building had looked like a stack of child's blocks, and inside it wasn’t much different. It had been built up over decades, rather than all at once, and it showed in the layout, all halls and rooms and hidden places where walls had been moved for convenience.
Then, she had opened a door once, late at night, and found herself home. Or at least as home as she would ever be, within that broken place. The door was half her height, and she expected it to lead into a closet or air duct. Instead, she had found a dusty and forgotten room, lost to all. It wasn’t a large room, the size of the family bathroom back home, but it had a high dusty window to let in light, and it the space gave off an air of peace that she had been unable to find elsewhere.
Sometimes when things got too much after classes, and it was dark or raining, she would retreat to that room and read endless books.
She found blankets and pillows in forgotten cupboards, and she bought those back to the room, making it warm and comfortable. She wished she could sleep there overnight, but if she wasn’t in the dorms come morning there would be questions from the monitor, and the girl would be obliged to report her absence.
She didn’t want to get the monitor in trouble. She had suspicions that they knew about her nighttime expeditions, but the girl never said anything, and Twigseethe was grateful for that.
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She had the feeling, sitting there and staring up at those great high windows, that the school had once been more prestigious, with more than the hundred or so students that it housed now. She found empty dorms and classrooms that obviously hadn’t seen use in years, and she wondered how they maintained it all.
One night she came back to the dorm earlier than usual, and the monitor's bed was empty. She saw her return a half-hour later, and their eyes met briefly, before the girl turned and got into her own bed without saying a word.
It was the closest the two had come to actually speaking in the two months she had been in the school. She knew that the girl's name was Cottonspire, and dearly wished to hear the story behind it, but could never ask.
The afternoons were better than the mornings, the light lunch and micro-sleeps during classes restoring her energy. While the mornings were devoted to mortal arts such as language and mathematics, the afternoons were for magic.
The classes focused on Change were her favourite, but Growth and Rot were pretty cool too. Everyone in those classes had a Talent, if not one as strong as hers, and to be in the same room as others who could do the same things she could was a revelation. At her old school, she had been the strongest talent by far, the only other kid in the school who could Change being two years older than her, and only a minor talent.
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Those classes were interesting, and long discussions ensued on how they each saw the world or connected to the magic, and the teacher would often let the classes run on for an hour or even two afterwards, letting them experiment and talk it out.
But when it was over, she had to go back to the body they were enforcing on her, and she hated it. It was better than it had been for those first few weeks, but she still hated it, and over time she started to draw distant from the others in the lessons. They all had their own ideas about magic, mostly being somewhat local, and her viewpoint was seen as that of a yokel, an outsider, with the teacher backing them up.
Eventually, she stopped staying after classes, choosing to practice in secret on her own instead. She wasn't missed.
They did force her to consider the idea of growing older, which wasn’t something she had ever thought about. She had aged her body over the years, but hadn’t put conscious thought into it, mostly mirroring those around her and doing what felt right at the time.
One night, sitting on the edge of a building in her winged form, she tried making herself older, stripping off her dress and standing naked in the wind, taking on what she imagined she might look like if she was stuck teaching at this shitty school for the next 40 years.
It was boring, to say the least. She had abandoned the female form, her self eroded away by years of apathy and rules. A young man with a tightly trimmed beard. She couldn’t change clothes, but she imagined him in a boring white shirt and black dress trousers.
Another route she could go would have her looking like the headteacher. Stern, taking back something of her true self, but in a rigid, controlled manner.
Being taller was interesting, a different view of the world, but she could feel the magic resisting the change in size. If she wanted to be bigger, she would have to do it gradually, not having enough blood or mass in her body to go so far so fast.
Changing to her bird form was easy, she lost size and bone density, changing that mass into feathers, but she didn’t actually lose weight, merely shifted it around.
It was enlightening really, and as she changed back into her normal form and pulled the dress back over her head, turning to head back inside for bed, it gave her some things to consider.
Biology, Change. There weren't separate classes for Growth and Rot, the school believing them all to be part of a greater whole, and she didn’t disagree.
Rot and Growth were, to her, the same, and the insistence on them being considered two separate schools of magic had gotten her into several fights during class, before she had stopped trying.
To her, Growth was just Change, but in a different direction, pushing what would happen naturally into happening faster. Rot was, she insisted, the same, pushing Growth into the tiny living beings that broke down matter, accelerating what would happen anyway.
A couple of the other students had agreed with her, despite the teacher slowly going more and more red in the face. One of them was a boy named Blanketweaving. He had no talent for Change that any of them could find, but he could grow an oak tree from an acorn in a day. It wouldn’t be a good tree for construction, trees grown with magic tended to lack the integrity that ones allowed to grow naturally would have, but it was still very impressive.
After that class was over they had both received a dressing down from the teacher. Pushed together through adversity, they had eaten lunch together, and the sheer relief of not being invisible to those around her was intoxicating.
She wasn’t stupid though, she had been in the school almost three months by this point, and she was well aware that she was at the lowest point in the social pecking order. They had eaten that one lunch, and then she had distanced herself from further contact with him.
He nodded at her in the corridors when they passed, and she smiled back, but they didn’t become friends. He already had his friendship group, and she was a pariah.
Even if he had reached out, she wouldn’t have been able to accept his friendship at that point, so deep was she in her misery and isolation.