When all that is waiting for you won't come any closer... Who: Quenten Delacreaux (Narrative) What: Black Mage Exam Where: Mages Tower When: Early Friday morning Rating: G Status: Complete
She'd awakened early that morning, far earlier than she'd needed to, with the sensation of steelings fluttering about inside her stomach. Unable to get back to sleep, she'd risen and dressed, seating herself beneath the open window in her room with a cup of tea to listen as the city came awake.
Today was perhaps the most important day of her entire life thus far. She'd entered the tower fully six-and-a-half years ago, recently turned twelve: the somewhat shy little sister of Darius Delacreaux, who had already made class the year before. Most of the older mages who remembered her brother had been eager to welcome her into the tower, in spite of the challenge she represented. She took to the classes and the studies like a born scholar, and when she learned her first spell, Cure, at the age of fourteen with relative ease, it had seemed she was destined to follow in her brother's footsteps.
Quen had other ideas, however. As much as she loved Darius, as much as she idolized him, she'd spent the entirety of her nearly-three years at the tower being compared to him at every turn. She knew if she became a white mage, she'd never escape from his shadow. In secret, she began to experiment on her own with the lower-level spells in the other mage classes. The sustained spells she tried had fizzled and died impotently, but many of the other spells she tried had failed in more spectacular ways. There had been the Slow spell that had caused her to miss an entire week of classes, and the Thunder spell that had darkened every light in the tower. More than any other spell, though, Quen longed for the ability to cast Fire.
In the next three years, she’d tried that spell again and again, with increasingly disastrous results. She’d blown up her fireplace countless times, burned her hair so often she’d stopped wearing it down, removed her own eyebrows at least twice, sent herself to the clinic with third-degree burns on nearly every inch of her skin at one time or another, and had found herself standing, more times than she cared to remember, before various council members and senior mages with her head bowed and her hands clasped in front of her while she listened to yet another ear-blistering lecture on recklessness and irresponsibility and how she just wasn’t ready for what she was trying to do.
The night she’d run away from the tower to join the battle at the docks was the last straw for many of the senior mages, she knew. If Chloe hadn’t taken the brunt of that punishment for her, if Peony hadn’t volunteered to take personal responsibility for Quen’s education, Quen didn’t know what would have become of her. It was truly a blessing from Faram that had brought her exactly the help she needed at a time when she despaired of ever amounting to anything. In the four months she’d been working with Peony, she’d not only cleaned up her Fire spell, but she’d also learned Aero and Blizzard, and had more control over those spells than she would have thought possible only that spring.
As she gathered up her books and scrolls and rod, preparing to leave for her exam, her fingers brushed against something that lay forgotten on her nightstand. She picked it up and rolled it between her index finger and her thumb, examining it. Then suddenly she remembered: it was the strand of beads Stone had given her for luck. Setting down her things, she tied the beads around her neck, adjusting them so that they lay against her collarbones. If there was a day she needed luck, it was today.
Gathering up her things, she paused with her hand on the doorknob. Closing her eyes, she imagined taking the test that morning, alone in one of the classrooms with the scribe and the proctor. The questions as the scribe read them aloud would be all of the things from the books she’d read cover to cover, from the lecture notes she’d meticulously reviewed. Then, after lunch, the practical exam, wherein she’d cast Blizzard, Fire, and Aero. All summer, she’d been far more worried about the practical exam, but now she realized that she could cast any of those three spells in her sleep, and they would come out perfectly, because she knew them.
She breathed in and out, and then opened her eyes and turned the doorknob. She was ready.