The next morning, I woke up in a cold sweat, heart thundering in my ears.

I lay still and silent for a bit, waiting to see if I’d shouted or screamed or anything and awoken the others… but no. It was five in the morning on the Dorm Australia Personal Clock, and the other two were still asleep.

I didn’t remember the nightmare. I never did. But it wasn’t hard to figure out what it was about – this was the third time I’d woken up like this in the past week and a half. Since the Pit.

My right hand itched, a crawling itch like a long finger being traced over the lines on my palm while my wrist was held immobile in the spellthing’s other hand. “Hmm. A pity there’s no room left in you for any of me, isn’t it? I’m half tempted to try anyway, but you don’t strike me as a natural prophet.”

I turned on my light and inspected my palm thoroughly, but there was no sign of a witch mark, same as there hadn’t been any other time I’d looked. And Malas had looked me over after I’d come out; he would’ve seen a new spell. That was his job. And liar though he might be, he definitely would have told me if I had a second spell.

There was nothing there. Just an itch. Just a memory.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Things were going well. We’d all survived, I had friends, I was learning magic, and the danger of the Initiation was a thing of the past. Things were, on all counts, objectively going very well.

But in the middle of the goddamn night, when my defenses were down, I kept ending up going through these…. meaningless goddamned fears and feelings.

There were a lot of them, and they made no sense. I’d spent my whole life not expecting to amount to much, living in fear of the thing in my heart killing me or others, and the fact that I didn’t have to worry about that, that I was here in this prestigious school and I would have a future full of job opportunities I’d never dreamed of, was a good thing. I shouldn’t be bothered that Kylie got the cool, powerful, mysterious curse that did stuff. I shouldn’t be bothered that the others all got nice, usable spells from the Pit that would advance their careers, even if half of them hadn’t quite figured them out yet. I had a work around for that, I could still do magic and still use the ichor in my mark; I shouldn’t be so upset that people like Max, people who didn’t even need to be amazing at runecrafting to get by, were already perfect at stuff I was struggling to even start on because they’d had fourteen years’ head start at summer camps with all the other rich kids, forging friendships and learning skills that would give them massive head starts in life, meaning they could dick around and to their politics and secure their futures in school while the rest of us wouldn’t have time because we were going to be too focused on schoolwork trying futilely to catch –

I shouldn’t be bothered by any of that. I’d never expected life to be fair, so it made no sense to be angry about it now. I was better off than I’d expected, and I should be happy about that. Why could I only be happy about that in the daytime, surrounded by people and distractions?

Why wouldn’t my hand stop itching, when I knew the itch was just a stupid illusion in my own brain?

Well, I was hardly going to go back to sleep. I got up and took a shower. Maybe I could see of the shop had the ingredients for any of the potions in my new book. I could book a workshop and get some practice.

I traced a finger over the network of lines that formed my mage mark. It was the simplest mage mark I’d ever seen, because only half of it was there – the triangles representing my elemental nature of ‘sound’. The central part, the part that was supposed to say what my spell was, was missing. Because we didn’t know what it was.

I’d been lucky in the chest department, and I could still see the mark over my heart unimpeded, but… had my chest grown larger? Maybe. That was going to be a problem, eventually. I wasn’t ashamed of my body; I’d made a promise to myself early on that I would never be ashamed of my body. But this early, coming down from a nightmare I didn’t remember with a heart full of unhelpful emotions, it was very, very hard to like it. It was hard to look at my chest and not think of my breasts as some kind of weird mutation that shouldn’t be there.

And they were going to present a practical problem, if they kept growing. Aside from the fact that I’d decided I hated binders and didn’t want to wear them any more than I absolutely had to, the location of my spell was going to make runecrafting a lot more fiddly with a binder.

Yes; my concerns were practical. I wasn’t ashamed of my body. I wasn’t weak enough to put that kind of stock in, in physical appearance or body type or anything. There was no reason that looking at myself should make me feel uncomfortable; I just… had practical considerations.

And getting the ball rolling on taking care of those practical considerations could take months, or even years. Why the hell had I put it off this long?

With the nerve and clarity of purpose that only comes to very tired people who have gotten up way too early, I dressed and fetched my tablet. Then hesitated. Instruktanto Cooper was still my surveyanto, but I didn’t really want to ask him this. It seemed… petty. After a moment, I messaged Instruktanto Miratova instead. I’d made up my mind to change to her, anyway.

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Instruktanto Miratova,

Are there any doctor I can see on campus who aren’t Kuracar Malas?

Cheers,

Kayden

She didn’t reply immediately, of course. She was probably sleeping, or teaching a class, or in her lab, or something. The whole ‘set your own clock’ thing at Skolala Refujeyo had seemed cool at first but mostly it made it impossible to coordinate schedules.

I grabbed my workout clothes and went to the gym. A bit of physical activity had always gotten me through rough spots before. I would climb that cliff face, and in a little while my friends would get up and there would be classes, and I would feel better.

Except the cliff was, of course, above ground, its lighting subject to the sun, the planet’s rotation and the whims of physics, and apparently it was night time wherever it was.

Ugh, whatever. I probably shouldn’t tire myself out before my morning yoga with Max, anyway. Instead, I did something I should’ve done months ago – I took a proper look around the gym.

Before the Initiation, I’d only really hung out in the weights area and the cliff. I’d sort of felt like an intruder, surrounded by the colourful robes of ‘real’ students in one of the few spaces I’d regularly see them. The suspicious part of my mind wondered if that was a deliberate psychological thing, like it was supposed to make initiates feel off-balance and look forward to the Initiation, but it was probably unintentional.

The gym was massive. Various doors lead to small hiking trails in different sorts of environments, there was a huge gymnastics setup that looked appropriate for training an olympic team, and there were even boxing rings, which I didn’t think was a smart thing to encourage among teenagers with magical powers, but what did I know? About two thirds of the gym was full of stuff I didn’t even recognise. I didn’t want to watch the people using it too closely, to see how it was used, in case they thought I was staring.

I was surprised to find a familiar face running some kind of… parkour obstacle course, I supposed? I’d never seen Magista do much in the way of intense physical activity, but given her lean, muscular form, I shouldn’t have been surprised. You don’t get a body like that just cooking cakes and organising parties. She practically flew through the course, leaping over and sliding under obstacles, face a picture of focus, long blonde hair streaming out behind her. Great, so I was physically outclassed by both of the Magistae.

She completed the course, downed half a bottle of water in one go, then spotted me. Her face broke into a broad smile. “Kayden! You’re up early, aren’t you? For your schedule, I mean.”

“Did you memorise all of your friends’ schedules?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It’s just the sort of thing you pick up, right? Everything okay?”

“Yeah, fine. I just. I’m just checking out the gym, you know? I didn’t know you…” I gestured at the course.

“Oh, yeah; I’m trying out for the Amazons this week. I’ve got to make sure I’m ready.”

“The what?”

“You know. The Pit comp team?”

My blank stare apparently informed her that no, I did not know, because she rolled her eyes.

“Okay, next week, we’re coordinating schedules and you’re coming to see a pit comp. It’ll be either a celebration or commiseration for me, depending on whether I make it onto the team.”

“I’m sure you’ll do great,” I said.

“You obviously have no idea what I’m even trying out for.”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

Intruktanto Miratova got back to me in another hour or so.

Kayden,

Malas is the only medical professional on campus with such powerful healing and diagnostic magic. If you have an injury or possible illness that you want looked at or treated, he is easily your best resource. However, he does have several apprentices who either have or are currently gaining the training that would be considered equivalent to your country’s GP training. I will include a link to the intranet booking sheet.

Said booking sheet listed seven such people, with brief biographies including their training and specialities. I didn’t understand what most of it meant but I picked the one whose specialities looked close enough to what I wanted, figuring they’d probably be the fastest at putting me onto the psychologists and all the other bullshit that everyone made you do before actually getting any help with trans stuff. I wasn’t looking forward to spending months proving myself over and over to doctors, but it was going to have to happen sometime.

I spent the rest of my time before class having an unnecessarily luxurious breakfast and looking up good beginner potions to practice with. Apparently a very popular student potion was one that banished weariness and focused the mind; I looked into it and, so far as I could tell, it basically worked the same as coffee. So why not just drink coffee? One of the basic tenets we’d been taught right away was that when it comes to putting stuff in your body, if you had magical or non-magical means to do the same thing, it was best to use the non-magical means. This was because if something went wrong, magical injuries were often a lot more difficult to predict and treat. I couldn’t find anything that the potion did that coffee didn’t, so there wasn’t really any reason to make it.

Except, of course, that it was easy and mostly harmless, which made it good practice. I made a note of it.

The potion I really wanted to try was listed as intermediate difficulty. It was a topically applied healing potion, one that promised to heal skin extra fast. It was one of the few potions in common use in nemagisto hospitals, for severe burns and soforth, but I’d never known anyone who’d actually needed it. According to the description, the massive boost in skin healing was strictly temporary and didn’t come with any risks of cancer or soforth, but it did tend to scar if used on deep or severe wounds and, since it only healed the skin, wasn’t adviseable if there was untreated muscle damage underneath.

I wasn’t an idiot; if I had deep or severe wounds, I’d take them to Malas. But if I had something that could quickly heal up nicks and scratches, well. There was some motivation, then; get good enough at potions to deal with small surface injuries myself.

I could do that.