Marin was a good student. Not one of the top five, not even the top twenty, but she paid attention and turned her assignments in on time. 

For their winter break assignment, the class had been told to make a new spell. That in itself wasn’t hard; just take an existing spell, tweak it, make sure nothing blew up, and submit it. But Marin wanted to prove she was capable of more than just tweaking a spell to meet her needs. She wanted to create something truly new. 

Besides, with most of the school away visiting family, there wasn’t much else to do. 

Her first idea had been to make a tree grow. As in, make it grow to insane heights, stupidly fast. After a few days (and quite a few splinters), she discarded that idea on the basis that wood can’t take that kind of pressure, and would simply explode. Her second idea had been to make a portal. She… well, she sort of succeeded, but she had no control over where the portal went. 

The groundskeeper wasn’t sure if he ought to have thanked her for getting rid of all the weeds in the courtyard, or have her expelled for flooding the courtyard with lava. In the end she promised to burn the spell, he decided to claim lava was a “new trend” so he wouldn’t have to spend weeks getting rid of it, and they spent an enjoyable evening sharing tea while they discussed these things. 

The groundskeeper hadn’t spent thirty-seven years working at a magical academy without picking a few things up. He suggested to Marin that what she needed was an anchor. Summoning a portal into a volcano or an ocean was all good and well, but it wasn’t useful. She needed to think of a portal more like a door. They didn’t exist just to be opened, they existed to let you go somewhere you couldn’t go without one.

Along that line, he suggested she go into the library basement, where a section of the caverns had been bricked off. If she accidentally summoned a portal into the vacuum of space, the only thing that would be lost were things no one cared about anyways. But since she now had a specific place for the portal to go, the chances of that happening were significantly lower. 

It took Marin until ten days before the assignment was due to figure out how it should all work. She shared her success with the groundskeeper, with whom she’d become friends. He knew a fair bit about alchemy, and together they turned the caverns into a place they could work and share tea when they weren’t doing official work. 

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Finally the day came. Classmates returned, school resumed, and everyone handed in their assignments. 

The professor looked over each spell before checking the next one. Some spells received a smile, some an eye roll, and a few received a frown and a raised eyebrow. When the professor got to Marin’s spell, she did a double-take. She frowned, pushing her glasses up her nose as she studied the spell. 

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“Where did you get this?” the professor demanded. 

Marin shrank. “I made it, ma’am. All by myself.”

“You created this spell with no base? You didn’t copy off something else?”

“No, ma’am. Why? Did I do som-“

“Come with me,” the professor ordered, and left the room. 

The silence as everyone stared was deafening. Marin slowly followed, hands trembling and feet feeling like lead. 

The professor led her to the headmaster’s office, where she put the spell on his table without a word. The headmaster looked it over, looked it over again, then jumped to his feet. 

“Where did you get this?”

Marin wished she could activate it and escape to her nice, safe cavern. “I made it, headmaster.”

“How?” he demanded, glaring. 

“I- I just… I made a portal, then anchored it, and made it work?”

“Miss…” He glanced at the professor. 

“Marin,” she supplied. 

“Miss Marin, do you know what a forbidden spell is?” he asked. 

Marin gulped. “A spell that’s forbidden?” she guessed. 

“Yes. They are spells which have been deemed too powerful or dangerous for common knowledge and use. Doorway spells, such as the base of this one, are among the forbidden spells,” the headmaster explained coldly. “We have to look into how you created this spell. If we find that you didn’t create it all on your own, as you claim, we will have to inform the Council. Do you understand what that implies?”

It implied death. “Yes, headmaster.”

The professor cleared her throat. “We’re going to need all your notebooks. As many of your test papers as survived. We might need to burn them, so you will be allowed to copy things from them into new notebooks, under supervision.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And, of course, you will never be allowed to perform this spell again.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The headmaster had been examining the spell. “It’s missing an activation glyph,” he noted.

Marin rolled up her sleeve and untied her bracelet, showing the glyph burned into her wrist. The adults looked at it grimly. 

“I won’t ask you to harm yourself in removing or defacing it,” the headmaster said softly, “but I will ask you to keep it covered at all times.”

“Yes, headmaster.” She tied her bracelet back on, the knot perfectly covering the scar. 

“Where does the doorway lead?” he asked.

“To the bricked-off cavern in the library basement,” Marin answered. 

The headmaster nodded. “I don’t think the library needs a basement. I’ll have it sealed off tomorrow.”

Marin almost objected, but self-preservation kicked in at the last moment. She rolled down her sleeve, eyes drifting to the spell. She felt cheated, in a way. It was her spell; why couldn’t she use it?

“Will I get a passing grade on the assignment?” she had to ask. 

The headmaster gave a soft laugh. “Yes, Miss Marin. That, at the very least, is assured.”