I really hoped the cabinet wasn’t another incomprehensible horror lurking in the school’s depths, hidden away and kept in check only by the Erudite’s ninth circle spells.
I followed the instructions as well as I could, weaving through the brass towers until I came to a long corridor marked with warning signs in just about every language I knew, as well as even more languages that I didn’t. Glowing runes were carved into the brass floor, walls, and ceilings all around it, and sigils had been painted to form three additional ward lines encircling the door. Framed on the wall, in front of the lines of wards, were the rules of the cabinet, while the item itself sat innocently at the end of the hall.
The cabinet looked to be hand crafted of a high quality wood heavy, solid and dark, held together with iron fastenings. Despite the good material, it was worn and old, with battered scratches marring its legs, like it had been moved and bumped countless times, or like a cat had used it as a scratching post. The iron was beginning to rust, and there were splinters where the pressured hinges had taken their toll over the centuries.
I wondered why exactly there were rules posted for the cabinet, but not for the library. I suppose there was the expectation of anyone in the reading room to save the stupid first years who wandered in? It still seemed inconsistent, at least to me.
I skimmed the rules of the cabinet, and felt my frown grow increasingly deeper with each line. They started off simple, just explaining the basics – you knocked on the door to the cabinet and described what you needed, and what you needed it for. The cabinet would evaluate your request, and either grant it, or not. You had seventy-two hours to return whatever it gave you, or else it would start demanding tithes of ether from you. The cabinet couldn’t produce raw materials or spell guides, but it could apparently produce almost any piece of artifice up to a certain degree of quality.
Then the rules grew slightly stranger, but still fairly logical. Try to avoid damaging the magic item it granted you, or else you’d need to repay the cabinet for repairs. Draw from it no more than once every seven days. If it offers you multiple items, take only one of them, unless they’re clearly in a matching set together, like if it offers you a pair of pants and a shirt that are color coordinated. If it offers you gold or gemstones, don’t take it. That last one seemed to run counterintuitive to the rule that it couldn’t produce raw materials, but I accepted that it was probably a classic test against greed.
From there, the rules went from strange to downright nonsensical. Don’t use the cabinet on Tuesdays if that Tuesday night is also the second full moon in a month. Don’t leave trash in the cabinet, unless that trash is partly eaten or even rotting fruit, in which case, please leave it inside the cabinet as an offering. Don’t try to approach the cabinet if you’re carrying a human leg in your left hand – right hand is okay, non-human legs are okay. Don’t approach it wearing shoes that are blue. Don’t approach it if your glasses are upside down. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to juggle in front of the cabinet. Even if an ancient dragon or a demon lord is threatening to kill you if you do not juggle in front of the cabinet, do not. Embrace death before juggling in front of the cabinet.
The rules went on and on like that, several pages of utter nonsense, but I made sure to read them, then crossed the wards and stepped up to the cabinet.
I knocked on it, then even though it felt a bit silly, I spoke aloud.
“Hello Cabinet. I was told to come here by my teacher for Conjuration One, since I can’t cast a shrinking spell. They told me to get a magical item that could shrink me for the three hour class, if you don’t mind? I’d really prefer to not miss out on the class, but I don’t want to demand that you give me an item.”
I opened the cabinet, and on the inside was a battered looking witch’s hat, made of purple felt. It was a little feminine for my tastes, but I took it and closed the door to the cabinet. I said my thanks, then set out to find the class.
It was set in the Pixie Ballroom, which was outside. I wondered what the point of having so many brass towers was if half the electives were outside, but I supposed that it wasn’t worth arguing with the powerful old mages about where they held their classrooms.
I glanced at the map and back up. The map was directing me to Spidershade Forest. Not just in the direction, but in the forest itself.
The forest was a thicket of oak and ash trees, with large redwoods scattered in among them and towering almost as high as the brass towers, and white aspen trees shivering in the wind.
Despite the rather ominous name of the forest, a well-tended trail led in, with the normal trail warnings about sticking to it and not going off course. I checked the trail map against my campus map, noting that there was absolutely some spatial distortion going on, because there was well over two thousand acres of woods. There were a few branching marked trails heading to various sights. A short two mile loop snaked past a living stone rock formation, a five hundred foot waterfall, and the pixie ballroom, but there were other trails that headed towards a spider’s den, to a serpent pond, the cave of a dragon that was the companion of the Erudite, a dryad grove tended by a powerful hamadryad, a naiad pool, and more. Each location was marked with various threat levels and warnings, but the pixie ballroom loop was the minimal danger trail.
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That was somewhat of a relief, though honestly at this point, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the forest had all sorts of horrors in it. It was par for the course, honestly. I felt like there was no reason that magic had to be this dangerous, but maybe Magyk had it as a fundamental underpinning of teaching the art, similar to how people who practiced life enforcement would have to suffer immense pain.
Hiking through the trail towards the pixie ballroom was a pleasant break from being cooped up inside, at least. White Sands hadn’t had the most trees, but I’d spent more than my share of time among the bamboo and palm trees while living on the road, and there was something nostalgic about this, even if the forests themselves weren’t very similar.
I wandered over to the waterfall and took a second to watch as the river cascaded down a massive cliff, the soft roar just enough to deafen some casual conversation, but not so much that you couldn’t be heard if you wanted to be heard.
I couldn’t spend as much time there as I’d like, since I’d already burnt a lot of my break eating, getting classes rescheduled, and tracking down the cabinet, so I had to leave after only a few minutes.
When I finally got to the bend where the Pixie Ballroom was, I immediately understood why it was called that.
Only a short ways off the trail, mixed in among a towering oak, gnarled hawthorn tree, and broad leaved ash tree, was a castle. The castle rose up about eight feet into the air, and was made of living wood, grown together with turrets and a roof and more. A drawbridge extended out towards the trail, leading to a castle gate that was only a foot or so high. I pulled the hat on, and felt myself beginning to shrink in size. My weight also reduced, and in moments I was only two feet tall.
That was still very large for the castle, but as I started to walk over the drawbridge, I felt magic wash up from the earth, and I began to shrink a second time. This second spell felt looser and wilder, so I assumed it came from artifice or affinity magic, but it held onto me until I was a mere six inches in height.
I entered the castle, and had a sudden moment of disorientation, as everything seemed… Normal. Mentally, I was aware of the fact that I was only the size of a door handle, but everything in the castle was sized just perfectly for someone of my height. There were suits of armor that looked like I could climb into them, chandeliers that had been set with weirlights in the ceilings, and polished floors. The only way I could tell that this was all faerie made was the fact that everything was made of either glass or wood, grown together seamlessly. Even the armor seemed to be made of wood and glass, blended in a completely unnaturally-natural way that was dizzying to look at.
The other dead giveaway that I was in a place where Etherius overlapped with the real world was the several small faeries wandering about, buzzing through the hall on wings that looked like they belonged to butterflies and dragonflies and moths. One of them stopped when they saw me looking around, giggling.
“You’ll be a student headed for Miss Toadweather’s class then? Up the stairs over there, then to the right.”
I hadn’t interacted much with the fae, but I knew better than to thank them, even when they were small and weak fae like pixies, so I just nodded.
“I am going to go now,” I said stiffly. The pixie laughed, the sound like bells.
“No need to worry dear, we’re in a deal with the school. We don’t make deals with students unless Miss Toadweather is there to facilitate, and debts implied through conversation made during your time as a student cannot be collected. If you thank me now, or in some other instance during your time as a student, that debt can't be used against you. Attacks or insults can be pushed, but only so far."
Fae couldn’t lie, it was part of their bloodline limitation, just like how dragons were horribly poisoned by dragonbane. I turned her statement over in my head for a bit, but honestly, it seemed about as cut and dry as I could ever hope to get.
“That’s good to know,” I said. “Well, thank you.”
“Of course,” she laughed, then buzzed away.
I walked up the stairs and into the pixie ballroom. It was a large, opulent ballroom, with four chandeliers, polished glass tiles on the floor that slotted together beautifully, and grown statues of hawthorne wood.
The room was mostly empty, save for wooden folding chairs that had been set up on one end of the ballroom, and a blackboard on glass wheels that had been rolled in front of it. Five students had arrived so far, and a pixie – professor Toadweather, I assumed – flittered back and forth in front of the blackboard. She had purple hair and moth wings, with huge, glowing yellow eyes.
Despite the fact I normally associated glowing yellow eyes with negative things like demons who wanted to skin me alive, dire owls who wanted to eat my flesh, or yellow-eye sasquatches who wanted to boil my bones, hers were surprisingly calming, like watching starlight or the first light of dawn breaking over the horizon.
She wore a dress of shimmering rainbow fabrics with gold and silver threads, but I could still make out the seal on her chest, blue with a violet marker, just like professor Gemheart. Fifth circle, but could stretch to cast seventh circle spells.
Standing next to her was a massive frog, easily as tall as I was. No, wait. I was tiny. This was a normal sized frog, it only seemed huge because of the magic going on in this place.
The professor burst over to me with shocking alacrity, waving happily.
“Hi-hi! I’m professor Toadweather, your conjuration teacher. Nice to meet’cha!”
She shook my hand vigorously.
“Pleased to meet you too,” I said. She nodded and buzzed back to the board.
“There are a few minutes before this class begins,” she said. “We’re supposed to have thirty-two, but I bet a lot of them get turned away by the forest or the spells on the castle.”
I glanced over my fellow students, but didn’t recognize anyone, so I took a seat in the second row from the front.
“Turned away by the castle?” one of the students, a tree-folk who looked faintly ridiculous with only a single belt wrapped around his trunk asked.
“Oh yeah,” professor Toadweather said. “It’s one of the faerie magics on this place. One of many, many, many, many, MANY! But yeah! It makes it so if you want to learn conjuration for a reason I deem as stupid, you’ll get lost trying to find the castle. Also if you mean ill-will towards me, your fellow students, or the fae who live here.”
“How many people try to learn it for stupid reasons?” I asked, leaning forward some.
“Oh, a lot!” the professor said cheerily. “Loads of them just want to learn it so they can summon succubi and incubi and the like. If that’s all they want, I say they can just look up that spell in the library.”
“Really?” the treefolk asked flatly, and I nodded, rolling my eyes. Humans were so… stupid… sometimes.
“Yep! Oh, someone new! She’ll be the last one!”