“Is it almost done?” Jonny pesters, peeking over Thanatos’ shoulder. “Also, has anyone told you you’re really good with your hands?”
Thanatos, on his knees and hunched over their dorm’s coffee table, handles two sets of jewelry pliers. With one in each hand, he manipulates small silver wires around the citrine in a wrap, connecting it to small decorative pieces on the top and bottom. Attached to those is a long silver chain, and at the other end is a keyring loop and tiny, cutesy keychain, a star made of lapis lazuli. The blue matches Jonny’s eyes.
He sighs for the umpteenth time. “Yes, now be quiet.”
“Yes to which part?”
Thanatos shoos him with his hand. “Both, now either sit down and stop looming or I’ll make you be the one to grab the bra from the laundry room.”
Immediately, Jonny zooms to the other side of the coffee table and takes a seat, back straight, legs criss-cross like a kindergartener. Thanatos chuckles, small and approving, and Jonny huffs.
“Hey,” he calls. No response. He leans forward, hands in his lap, “Hey, Toasty!” Jonny flicks at the long chain. “What if it takes us somewhere crazy or like super far?”
“I doubt it will, but if so, we follow where it goes or until your magic is exhausted. Whichever comes first.” Thanatos connects the top decorative piece of the pendulum with a jump ring to the chain.
Jonny flops onto his back, and he stretches, mewling, arms out wide. “But who knows how late that’ll be! Hate to say it, but we gotta be back before curfew.” He stares long and hard at the ceiling until he hears a small hiss of pain from the other side of the table. He sits up fast. “You alright, dude?”
Thanatos nods. “Just a cut. The pendulum moved, and it made my hand slip.” He holds up his finger, and though it's similar to a paper cut in size, it bleeds. “A bandage, if you would, and then it’s finished aside from attunement.”
Jonny nods and runs to the bathroom, but when he can’t find his own first aid kid, he checks Thanatos’ side and grabs his. He rummages for a bandage and returns, choosing to ignore the overwhelming amount of unusually professional medical supplies stuffed inside the large box. Without much thought, he takes Thanatos' injured hand by the wrist and brings it forward. He applies the bandage with a one, two, and done attitude.
“All better!” Jonny laughs, and Thanatos rolls his eyes.
“So’s this.”
Holding up the citrine pendulum, Thanatos lets it swing from side to side rhythmically. Jonny tracks it without moving his head, and the comedy of it almost brings a smile to Thanatos’ face. It’s an obviously handmade thing, but it’s not half-bad looking either. There’s decorative swirls and patterns to the wire wrapping, and the orbular polished citrine sparkles in the afternoon sun peeking through their curtains. The piece on the bottom of the citrine is pointed to mimic the standard shape of a pendulum crystal.
Jonny reaches out for it, grinning wider and wider, and the citrine pulls into his hand the rest of the way. The chain slips out of Thanatos’ fingers softly. “Definitely remind me to thank Sib for this thing again.” He pauses, thinking. “And the jewelry pieces.”
“Of course,” Thanatos responds. He watches Jonny swing and twirl the pendulum delightedly.
“And thanks to you for making it!” His expression saddens a little as the citrine comes to rest in his palm. “You’re so good at everything.”
Thanatos frowns and looks down at his lap. He opens his mouth once, twice, trying to decide what to say, but in the end, he only frustrates himself further. “It’s not. . .” He sighs. “Learning to do things by hand comes with the territory, I suppose,” he decides on saying. “We make do with what we have.”
“And that includes making jewelry?” Jonny runs his fingers along the chain.
“It did for me.” Jonny looks up at him, finally. Thanatos reaches forward and takes the dangling half of the chain into his fingers. “If it’s something that Sibylla will like, I try my best to learn to make it. Plus, it’s cheaper to repair broken things or make them into something new than to buy it all over again.”
Jonny stares at him in silence, concentrating hard on the floor, and the citrine vibrates. “Sib’s here on scholarship, right?”
“Correct.”
“That must mean a lot, then, for you guys.” He scratches the back of his neck. “This school costs an assload of money. . . and the university is even worse than that, so it wouldn’t really be possible for anyone below the upper class without it.” Jonny gives a few stutters. “So, uh. . .”
Thanatos drops the chain. “Leave it be.”
Jonny nods. “Yeah, uh, okay.”
“Anyway, attunement. You did the research, right?” he prods, and Jonny stands up, heading for his desk.
“Yeah. This thing is pretty attached to me, but for the pendulum to work, I need to ask it questions.” Jonny sits and holds it out in front of him. Thanatos, much the same, sits at his own desk and watches from afar. “Plus, it’s a citrine, which is connected to happiness and purity and stuff, so if we wanna use it for dowsing, we have to have a connection to the thing or person we wanna find with a good memory or feeling tied to it.”
Thanatos watches Jonny’s hands work the pendulum. Nonchalantly, “Hopefully the bra has seen Miss Freeman through some good times, then.”
Jonny sputters and nearly drops the pendulum. He flushes. “Dude!” Pointing his finger, accusatory, he clutches the citrine like pearls. “If that was a joke, that’s not funny!”
Thanatos frowns, gives a moment of consideration, and drags his hand down his face when it dawns on him what Jonny means. “Get your mind out of the gutter. Focus.”
Regaining his composure, Jonny clears his throat and once more holds out the pendulum in front of him. He asks a series of basic questions, beckoning the pendulum for how it says yes or no or maybe so. He asks for the cardinal directions and the ones in between, and he asks it to do a sick spin. It does. It’s a rather successful attunement by Thanatos’ standards. Jonny finishes by placing it back in his palm and cheering for himself like a child proud of his new high score.
“With that out of the way, we’re losing daylight, so we should hurry and begin the dowsing session.” Thanatos reaches for his bag, and Jonny groans.
“This means I’m gonna have to carry a girl’s bra around for several hours!”
Thanatos doesn’t dignify the complaint with a response and, with a habitual flourish, dons his favourite coat heads for the door. Jonny scrambles to follow suit.
----------------------------------------
Surrounding the infamous school is an even more infamous— by the students’ standards, anyhow —forest that spans at least 0.5 square kilometers before being fenced off. Thanatos feels his gut sink when the pendant takes them in that direction, and Jonny appears to not feel much better about it.
He swirls the pendant round a few times, eyeing the trees surrounding them as they trudge forward. “We’re either going to meet demons, angry bears, or an axe murder,” Jonny whines. “I can feel it.”
“My bets are on demons,” Thanatos casually replies, and Jonny whips around to look at him, accosted.
Jonny shakes the bra at him. “Don’t even joke about it!”
With a roll of his eyes, Thanatos gets them back on their magic-led track. The forest is massive, and while it may be beautiful when looked upon from the always trimmed grass of the school’s campus, it’s easily as dangerous as any other forest once inside. If they’re not careful, he knows they could get lost, even with Jonny’s pendulum. Being in here after nightfall isn’t even an option to consider.
At the very least, they’re in casual clothes, not risking their expensive uniforms. Thanatos has his coat over a dark purple turtleneck crop top, black high-waisted pants, and combat boots that zip up the back. Across his waist is a belt with a circular buckle and across his shoulder is his messenger bag. Jonny, on the other hand, wears a large black jacket over a high-collared shirt and cross-body bag, hoodie strings tied together in a knot. Below that are hand-me-down denim pants and tennis shoes. It’s probably not the best for hiking the woods at sundown, but nonetheless, it's what they have to work with.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Also, on occasion, as Thanatos has learnt, sometimes teachers would hold carefully spectated competitions or assignments in the woodiser parts of the forest. Less dense areas and clearings make for good observations between magic and nature, so it doesn’t surprise him, but Jonny’s knack for this does. He carefully navigates tree roots and thickets like they’re nothing, and twice already, he’s stopped Thanatos from slipping down into cricks.
He does so once more with a tug to the back of his companion’s coat collar.
“I swear, if you were alone in here, you’d die.” Jonny laughs much to Thanatos’ unamusement. “It’s true!” he claims in response to the stink eye he’s given. “You’d break your ankle and sit there until you were found or eaten.”
“You assume my pride would get in the way of asking for help?”
“Am I wrong, though?” Thanatos smacks his arm away, huffing. “Yeesh, okay, Rebecca .”
“You—!” Thanatos’ shoulders hunch, and he curls his fingers into fists, holding them at his sides in visible restraints, he takes a step back, but finds no footing as he slips down a steep ledge.
Jonny lunges forward wrapping both of his arms around Thanatos as the two tumble and cling to one another. Jonny presses his friend’s body close to his, ready to take the brunt of the fall, but Thanatos reacts quickly. Before they can hit the bottom of the rocky hill, he reaches with both hands and summons his magic through them.
Words in Greek spill from his lips in whispers, and the tree standing tall about to crack their spines in half upon impact creaks, blackens, and dies. Its trunk rots until it cracks in two at the base and falls with a deafening crash. It lands upon its side, and with good timing, Thanatos kicks his leg and plants it onto the trunk. There’s another audible but lesser crack, and he bites instinctively into his own lip to muffle himself. At least, however, the two have finally come to a stop.
Jonny opens his squinted shut eyes, and he glances around, still gripping onto Thanatos. “Holy mother of. . .” His attention shifts immediately to the man in his arms, awkwardly tangled. “Shit, Thanatos!” His full regard and concern coagulates to the other’s presence. “Are—”
“Are you alright?” Thanatos bites out.
“A little bruised from some of the rocks on the way down, but worry about yourself first!” Jonny eyes the leg trapping him between Thanatos and the tree trunk. “You managed to stop us?”
“The tree was dying anyway, so I forced it down lest we be snapped into a ninety degree angle.”
“You forced it? With magic?”
“Yes?”
“That’s a big-ass tree!”
“So are you, now please let go of me.”
Jonny looks down to his hands, though still clutching his pendulum and the bra, bunching up the fabric of Thanatos’ jacket in his hands. He snatches them up and holds them high in surrender, and Thanatos attempts to move his leg off the tree, but it makes him whimper. He slaps his own hand over his mouth to prevent another when he shifts onto his rear. Jonny does much the same, leaning his back against the tree trunk with his legs out in front of him.
He tucks the bra into his bag so that he may cautiously reach for Thanatos’ leg, but Thanatos scoots back, stifling another pained noise. “C’mon, man,” Jonny pleads, and the other slowly sticks out his leg. Jonny unzips Thanatos’ boot and pulls it up. After, he rolls up the pant leg and removes the sock. He hisses.
“It could be worse,” mumbles Thanatos.
“Just because it could be worse doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be taken care of!” He turns the ankle in his soft hands. “That second crack sound… I felt you kick right before it happened, so I bet you fractured it. Are you any good at healing magic?” Thanatos shakes his head.
“It’s. . . not my forte.”
“Okay, uh, hold on then.”
The olive skin there already swells purple and red with bruising. Another glance to Thanatos’ face, forcibly calm, reveals the sweat of enduring pain mixing with the dirt of their fall. Jonny bites his lip, frowning. He pulls out his cell phone, but when he opens the internet browser, there’s no service this far in the dense wood. He tucks it away and instead reaches to the dead tree behind them and rips off strips of bark. After, he undoes the knot of his jacket string and pulls it from the hood.
Thanatos gives him a curious squint, but he says nothing. Instead, he watches as he replaces the sock, places the four bark strips evenly around his friend’s ankle, and holds them in place by tightly wrapping the string around it and tying it in a double-knotted bow. He tucks the knot into the sock and fits the shoe back on, loosening the laces on the front enough for comfort before zipping up the back.
“Ta-da!” He gives a reassuring smile. “We should head back maybe? Get this fixed.”
“No, we’ll keep going.” Thanatos pushes up with both hands on his knee to get to his feet, and he tests his ankle. It sends sharp pains up his leg, but he ignores it as he hobbles to the tree and strong-arms a branch from its head. Jonny is quick to follow, reaching out in concern, but he steps back in shock when Thanatos wrangles the thing just fine. “I can use this to walk. Where’s the pendulum?”
“Safe and sound,” he responds. He scratches his neck while dangling the dowsing device. “We really should just head back, dude.”
“We don’t have time for that, now hurry up and lead us.” Light emerges from Thanatos’ palms and creeps down the stick in veins. The bark peels away, as do shreds of wood, to make a smooth but brittle walking stick. He hobbles up to Jonny, looking up.
A stern, determined staredown is all it takes for Jonny to cave, and he summons his magic through the pendulum again.
It takes another half an hour for them to finally reach a clearing, the citrine pendulum pulling hard at Jonny’s hand, and with a glance to the sky, the sun is beginning to set. Fall is still early, but it bleeds into winter with cool gusts of wind and grass that’s beginning to brown. Amidst it is a clean stone pathway a few feet away from the two, but it doesn’t lead back into the woods. Instead, it starts at the trunk of a large tree and travels further into the clearing, to its center.
There stands a large, olden style house, similar to that of the original academy buildings with its Victorian Era age, but without as much white paint to cover its stains. Instead, it’s a cozy, rustic thing with grey siding and brown trim, and vines trail down some sides of the house with purposeful placement. As the boys trek up the path and up the porch stairs, they see closer the rocking chairs and closed blinds, the pots of house plants covering the porch. Some even sit on the railing, greens that pine for sunlight. It smells of old wood and magic.
“This is some old storybook shit,” Jonny laughs nervously. “We— We’re not going to break in, are we?”
“Or we could just knock.”
“Right, yes. We can do that.”
Sheepishly, Jonny raps his knuckles one, twice on the front door. He waits a beat before trying again, a little louder and with more confidence. Again, however,there’s no response. He tries the knob, but it’s locked.
Thanatos tries as well, testing his magic, but no dice. “I could pick it. . . but we should try for other entrances. The pendulum is still pulling.” Glancing down, Jonny notices he’s right. Instead of the front door, the citrine reaches out for something further down the wooden porch.
Around the other side is a massive, wooden cellar door, and the pendulum, no matter which way he moves his hand, points at it with fervor. He tugs at the handles hard, even placing his foot on the wall behind it for leverage. His hand slips, and he falls on his ass, yet Thanatos leans against the wall, watching. “Also locked,” Jonny calls.
“I noticed.”
There’s no lock on it, though, and neither of them can see a sigil. At Thanatos’ instruction, Jonny summons magic to his fingers and touches the door, but nothing appears then, either.
“I could try jamming into the crack to pry it open.” He gives it a thought before lightly bopping his fist against his palm in revelation. “Make your stick pointy! You could carve it, so make it like—” He presses his hands together to make an upside down “V” shape. “—a flathead screwdriver kinda thing.”
More wood shaves from the walking stick until it’s thin enough at the tip. “Be careful, it’s still just dead wood.” Jonny nods and begins wiggling the stick into the door crack.
Thanatos, however, continues doing what he does best: snooping. On one foot, he wibble-wobbles his way to the windows surrounding the first floor of the home. “It’s on school property,” he mumbles to himself. “Could it be a staff member’s?” Most of the windows refuse his nosey gaze, blocked by curtains or blinds. “It could be the home of the groundskeeper. . .”
He comes full circle to the window on the opposite side of the cellar from where he started, and a flush of irritation runs through his veins when he finds the damn curtains to be open. He glowers from the window, to his ankle, and back, but he leans in nonetheless to see.
It’s a kitchen space, relatively clean, ivory walls decorated with kitchen ware and family photos. He squints. Family photos? It’s hard to see the wall opposite given the distance and limited view of the curtain crack, but when a familiar face catches his eye, the glass against his forehead feels colder than before, and the chill runs all the way down his spine. He backs away.
“Jonathan!” he shouts, whipping his head around. Just as he does, Jonny’s managed to pry the door open, and holds it via stick with a victorious grin.
“Got it! See?” He gestures with his other hand into the cellar. “I did it!”
Thanatos instinctively makes a run, but he soon falls to his knees from the excruciating pain. Jonny abandons the door to tend to him, helping him up.
“Woah, dude, what’s up?!”
“This—” Thanatos wheezes. “This is—!”
The cellar doors blast back open, and breeze not cold with the season but with a force that rattles the auras in their chests rolls across the entire clearing. The doors slam shut, as does the curtain, and there’s audible locking sounds coming from the inside and outside of the house. Thanatos and Jonny share a wide-eyed, shaken glance.
“This is Headmaster Waurelt’s home,” Thanatos confesses, low, body stiffening. Jonny pales.
“Oh, shit .” Without any hesitation, Jonny leans down and readies himself for Thanatos to ride piggyback. “Hop on, Toast.”
Thanatos knows he doesn’t have time to complain, so he hops on, nervous about his weight but pleasantly surprised when Jonny hoists him up, no problem. Abandoning the walking stick, he jogs as fast as he can back towards where they came from. There’s plenty of stops to catch his breath, but despite Thanatos’ insistence to run back without him, Jonny refuses. He pushes forward over every tree root and around every bush. He doesn’t collapse until they reach the perfectly cut green of the school’s massive lawn.
Jonny wheezes and clutches at his chest, knees hitting the ground hard, and Thanatos slides off his back. He reaches for Jonny’s back, but his hand hesitates. A beat, and he rests it gently between the blond’s shoulder blades. He gives an awkward pat, pat, pat. It earns him a tired chuckle.
“Thanks, dude.”
Eventually, they get to their feet and traverse the campus ground towards the dorm buildings. Jonny slung Thanatos’ arm over his shoulders and holds him up by the waist every limping step they take. About halfway there, they’re stopped by a song blasting from Jonny’s pants.
A phone call makes itself known from Jonny’s pocket, screen lighting up in the night air through the fabric, and startles them both. Jonny checks it, bracing himself to see the number of the school’s secretary office, but instead, both men stare at Sibylla’s face smiling at them from the call screen. Thanatos hits the answer button before Jonny can, and he sets it to speaker.
Immediately, there’s a loud slam, and the sound of glass shattering, and before Jonny can stop him, Thanatos runs full force through the pain of his ankle towards the girls’ dormitory, gritting his teeth, heart skipping too many beats for comfort. Jonny follows soon after.