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It’s hard to see the room around him through the stabbing pain in his head, but at least it’s not a coffin. It’s the small things to be grateful for that Qifrey must find as he sits on the cold, hard floor in a strange building. It’s not quite a dungeon, which he somehow knows, because the doorway is open; it isn’t exactly meant for a child, either.
He thinks that he might’ve made a soft, groaning sound under his breath, but he’s so far removed from his own body. His body is nothing but a vessel for pain. His body is not a vessel for memories, except for the one he has and wants to forget the most.
Everything is strange to him. He’s in a safer space than before, but he’s alone. His face has been washed of blood, yet blood pounds in his ears. He’s been given a fresh dry shirt to wear, but dried mud clings stubbornly to his palms.
He feels pain, and he doesn’t know how it feels to have none.
He has no sense of time, only a sense of consciousness, which threatens to slip from him. As much as he wants to escape the blinding pain in his head, he doesn’t want to lose awareness of himself again—not when he’s barely been awake at all.
That’s when a sharp, repetitive sound enters the small room, and Qifrey flinches. He doesn’t look up, however. He knows instinctively that his head would only pound more at the movement.
“Hello, child.”
Qifrey’s eye widens, and the skin around his missing one pulls tightly. Tears spring to his eyes, but he doesn’t dare move to wipe them away.
“May I ask you a question?”
The blood in his head pounds louder. The witches with the spears asked him questions that scared him, questions he could hardly know the answer to. But this voice was different. It was familiar, like one of those shouting in panic when he first saw the sky. It was easy to remember with how little competition there was.
This time, however, the voice is calm. It’s warm and—a word springs to mind amongst the chaos—kind.
Qifrey manages to lift his head carefully and slowly. He has to really crane his neck in a way that makes the edges of his vision blur and swim. After a second of adjusting, he meets eyes much like his own.
The pale blue eyes are framed by long strands of silver hair, and small crinkles at their corners. They widen slightly as Qifrey steadies, and Qifrey worries he did something to upset this strange man who looked like him. He finds himself a little intimidated by how he’s being towered over, and he feels horribly small.
“Oh, how rude, I didn’t introduce myself! My name is Beldaruit, and I’m a witch.”
“…a witch?” Qifrey whispers hoarsely. He bites his lip, surprised at his own boldness.
Beldaruit only smiles gently and nods. “I know how you must feel about magic, but it’s nothing to be afraid of once you understand it. The magic used against you isn’t approved by our kind.”
He gestures to his conical hat as he says the last part, which gets no reaction from the confused boy.
“Ah, of course. You have much to learn.”
His body smoothly lowers to the ground, and only then does Qifrey notice the chair he’s sitting on. It looks like a horned animal, but some hazy part of his brain knows that animals aren’t chair shaped. He gently raises a hand to push hair from his vision to get a better look at it. The hooved legs of the animal bend at the knee as if they had a mind of their own, and have assumed a resting position that places Beldaruit slightly more eye level than before, but still taller than Qifrey’s sitting height. Beldaruit manages to elegantly rest his legs alongside the chair’s as if they were one.
It’s such a fascinating contraption that for a moment, the absurdity of it overpowers the orchestra of pain in his head
Beldaruit follows Qifrey’s attention and lets out a light, delighted laugh.
“Oh, my sealchair! Speaking of magic, this chair is an example of it. It helps me move around,” he explains while moving a grateful hand along a powerful curled horn. “Wonderful, isn’t it?”
Qifrey nods as small as he can, but he still winces from the pain. It’s like his blood is slashing in his head and water logging his thoughts. Beldaruit’s eyebrows curve down with concern. He briefly reaches a hand out before taking it back, eyes narrowing on the tangled hair of Qifrey’s head.
“No one even…” his lips tighten in an unreadable expression, and he lets out a long slow exhale. Frustration twitches at his eyebrows before he composes himself and smiles at Qifrey again. “Apologies. I got distracted.”
Qifrey swallows nervously and picks at the fabric of his borrowed shirt. “You wanted to ask me a question.”
Beldaruit’s eyes light up and he claps quietly. “Oh! Yes, how kind of you to remind me. Do you want to stay here? I would teach you how to master magic so it couldn’t harm you again.”
A cold feeling washes down Qifrey’s back at the word “magic”. That's the core of the problem, isn’t it? That he’s been touched by the spells of witches. He overheard how the spear wielding witches talked, how they argued in the hallway.
They mentioned erasing his memory again. He wanted to cry at the mere thought of losing what little he had gained.
Qifrey pulls himself back into the present and weighs the heavy paths of his future. He could live a normal life and forget the kindness of Beldaruit, and the reason behind his pounding pain. Or, he could stoke that burning coal in his chest that begged to do something about this, to do something to the people who did this to him. And that coal, he knew, could only become a fire with the help of magic.
He looks up at the older man with a set expression on his face. “I want to stay,” he answers with as much strength as he can muster, but even then his voice wobbles a little at the end.
Beldaruit’s gaze lights up again, but his smile remains calm and comforting.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” he says with such abundant joy that Qifrey doesn’t need any more convincing of the fact. “Take my hand, boy. You shall study the ways of the witch with me.”
It’s a statement that sounds so far away from the cold stone floor he’s curled up on now. Strangely, though, the sight of a composed and wise witch taking the time to sit on the floor with him makes him believe it. A strange feeling flutters in Qifrey’s chest, and the tiny part of his brain untouched by pain or magic supplies a word: hope.
So when Beldaruit reaches out a hand, Qifrey doesn’t hesitate to grab it. He allows himself to be carefully pulled to his feet.
Careful isn’t careful enough, however, as his head still reels from the massive change in movement and he finds himself stumbling face and elbows first into Beldaruit’s lap.
Beldaruit is quick to place a supportive hand on Qifrey’s back as he lets out a small oh! composed equally of surprise and worry. The man might mutter some more concerned phrases and spare some curses for the guards outside, but Qifrey’s world is spinning and everything is too loud to make out.
A few grueling seconds go by before Beldaruit tries addressing him directly again.
“You need to get to the healing spire, child. You shouldn’t walk there, either. Would you be alright with sitting on my lap until we get there?”
Qifrey, too dazed by the spikes of pain in his skull to think about how strange physical touch feels, nods permission. Instantly, Beldaruit scoops him up and holds him securely against his chest, making sure Qifrey’s head doesn’t move too much as his chair stands back up and begins to walk.
In his condition, Qifrey only catches one snappish remark from Beldaruit, which sounds like it’s coming through a tunnel of water. After that, his world fades to black.
There’s a dull hum in the back of Qifrey’s mind as he glares down the wind rune on the paper in front of him. The fine lines of the swirl blur where the lines intersect and it’s getting harder to focus. He knows by now that the pain will only get worse from here, but he’s so close to completing the challenge Beldaruit gave him.
An apparition of his teacher had appeared at his door in the morning bearing apologies for using a smoke sculpture. He’s been staying in bed more often than usual, so Qifrey spends meals with Olruggio instead.
As much as Qifrey hates to admit it, he does miss the more private meals. Beldaruit annoys him slightly less than Olruggio.
The challenge, however, takes priority at the front of his mind. He’s practicing with the wind sigil, and is attempting to direct it in the most controlled, precise stream he could. Beldaruit likes giving assignments that allow for creative interpretations, and Qifrey quickly caught on that his teacher is easily delighted by showy, sculpted spells.
The shape he was attempting to make now was akin to a flower—an upward funnel with precise ridges along the edges to replicate petals. Beldaruit told him it was easier with water, but he’s still working up to forming any water spell that’s not a contained ball.
By now he’d tried every combination of signs he could think of: pull, dispersion, convergence, or just simple direction.
This time he alternates between pull and dispersion, pulling tight corners inward and dispersion rounded streams of air in between. He carefully closes the circle, and leans back with a tight expression.
If he squints, he can make out an outline of where the air flows. It doesn’t look like any particular flower, but it does look organic and blooming. Qifrey reaches out and hovers his fingers along the edges, tracing the exact ridges he was aiming for. After double and triple checking, he allows a small smile to creep on his face.
Qifrey picks up the successful spell and holds it to his chest so it doesn’t blow his hair out of his face. Then, he stands up, maybe a little too fast, but he stays on his feet and leaves his room. He tries not to walk too fast, more out of embarrassment than anything else, but he can’t help feeling energetic.
Some of that energy leaves by the time he gets to Beldaruit’s door. Doubt crowds his mind; he might wake his teacher up from a much-needed nap, and his magic might not be worth such an intrusion.
He looks down at his paper again, and is horrified to find that the wind has stopped flowing at some point during the walk over. Whether it was from him obscuring the airflow, or from moving its location, he feels silly either way. Qifrey knows he can recreate it, but some common sense things are still clicking in his mind.
Qifrey didn’t focus for so long and use so much ink and paper for nothing, however; he knocks as quietly as he can.
The response is immediate, with a light breeze smelling of sea salt urging a door inward. Qifrey wrinkles his nose a little. It confuses him how Beldaruit has to add a little extra something to every spell.
The man in question is sitting up in bed with a drawing table in his lap and a curious shine to his expression.
Upon seeing his apprentice, he breaks out in a grin. “Qifrey! How nice of you to come, do you have a spell to show me?”
A little piece of Qifrey’s heart warms at the sound of his name. He had picked it out himself while staying in the healing spire. He had to relearn how to read and write, if he ever knew at all, so Beldaruit had patiently gone through records and lists of existing names, pronouncing each one with great care. It took a long time until Qifrey heard one that just sounded right. He didn’t know why, but he did learn it was an older and less common name that had become gender neutral with time. Now, whenever he hears it, he feels more like a person—like he’s truly meant to be here.
“Oh! Um.” Qifrey pulls at the hair covering the right side of his face. “Yeah.”
Beldaruit folds his drawing table down and slides it further down his lap so he can lean forward and look at Qifrey’s spell. Qifrey fiddles with the corner of the paper by folding it and unfolding it repeatedly.
“I have to redraw it,” he admits. “It went out on the way here.”
Beldaruit nods towards the collapsed desk on his legs, where a pen and some ink are slotted into the side to keep from spelling. “You can go ahead and use this.”
So Qifrey does, even if the feeling of Beldaruit glancing over in anticipation is a little nerveracking. Eventually he steps back and closes his circle, and the spell activates smoothly.
Qifrey watches as Beldaruit’s eyes light up and he slides the desk closer again to get a better look. He does the same thing as his apprentice, running his fingers along the edge of the sculpted form and nodding in satisfaction.
“This shape is excellent, I love where you took the prompt,” he comments warmly as his right hand starts working almost on its own.
Beldaruit continues to compliment his choice in signs, but Qifrey is too distracted by the replication his teacher has already completed. The key difference between their spells is that Beldaruit’s is floating, levitating above his palm.
The compliments fade as he takes note of Qifrey’s newly focused face. He flushes a little with embarrassment.
“Don’t pay any mind to my spell. Your spell is great on its own and your signs are well placed, I just get a little bored here alone for so long. Your magic is excellent inspiration! I can’t thank you enough!”
Looking back up at Beldaruit, Qifrey shakes his head. “O—I wasn’t—” the compliments catch up to him and he smiles again, in his own barely noticeable way. “Thank you.”
Beldaruit has returned to Qifrey’s spell and traces the petals thoughtfully. “I do wish there were more flowers down here.”
It’s such a strangely wistful tone, that Qifrey is speechless for a second. It’s rare that his teacher shows any signs of sadness and regret about anything. It seems Beldaruit doesn’t like lingering on it either, because he looks back up and gestures towards a chair with a smile.
“You can sit down and stay if you’d like, my boy.”
Qifrey scoffs. “Yeah. I know.”
He pulls up a chair and settles into it easily. Admittedly, he didn’t plan on staying. But now that he put him down he’s able to word something that’s been on his mind.
“Why…why have you been in bed so much?”
Beldaruit doesn’t look too surprised at the question. If anything, he looks prepared to answer it.
He leans back into his pillows as he answers. “Well, you remember when I visited Ezrest a few days ago?”
Qifrey nods. He remembers because he wasn’t allowed to come with, even if he would be allowed outside with supervision in this case. He was still a little confused and a hint bitter as to what “official business” occupied his teacher and stopped him from seeing the city.
“I like seeing what the locals are up to, but I completely lost track of time and was out for way too long. I really strained myself by visiting too many stores on top of my meeting…”
Almost as if reminded of his own bodily pain, Beldaruit shifts to support his upper back more. In doing so, he turns a little harshly and makes a small noise of discomfort about it. Qifrey frowns. He’s never seen him affected by his mobility this much before. He wonders…
He bites back the question on his mind, but it’s too late. Beldaruit already caught the quick flick of a curious expression.
“I don’t mind talking about it, Qifrey,” he says, both amused and sympathetic.
“But I didn’t—”
“You don’t have to say anything. You aren’t the first to want to know.”
Beldaruit allows the beat of silence to sit between them. Qifrey sits, silently frustrated by the fact that he’s become so easy to read after working so hard to control his face.
He lets out an annoyed sigh. “Yeah. I was…wondering why you don’t walk.”
Strangely enough, Beldaruit looks delighted by the question. Qifrey’s eyes widen, wildly confused by the mix of emotions in this conversation. “W-what?”
“Most kids your age ask that sooner. I don’t mind, really. It’s good to be curious. I’d rather you learn about other people's experiences than be ignorant and rash in your thinking towards someone,” he explains while smoothing out the covers over his lap. He looks composed, worthy of the respect given to him.
Qifrey pauses at his description. He doesn’t find himself similar to any kids his age.
“But the question! It’s not that complicated, honestly. I was born with brittle bones, so it’s always hurt to put too much pressure on my legs. If I do, they take much longer to heal than your legs might, and it’s far from a painless recovery,” Beldaruit sighs, wearied by the mere memory.
“In Ezrest,” he continues. “I had to engage my muscles more for my chair to traverse the streets and stairs, so my body is in quite a bit of pain right now. Since I spent all day there, it’s taking me multiple days to bounce back from it.”
Beldaruit gently picks up Qifrey’s spell and smiles fondly at it, rubbing the paper with his thumb.
“Like a flower. It can come back from being trampled, but it needs to be left alone for a while to gain its full strength again.”
He sets the paper down and looks at his apprentice expectantly, searching his young face for any follow up questions. Qifrey fidgets with his hands as he thinks.
“So…you hurt a lot right now?”
Beldaruit responds with a small shrug. “Medicine helps, but yes, it’s preferable that I don’t do too much right now. Luckily my arms are not yet heavy enough to stop me from drawing.”
“I don’t get why you look so happy then,” he mutters in a tone that echoes grumpiness without the real feeling.
Beldaruit laughs lightly and leans back in bed again. “When you’ve lived with a condition as long as you’ve lived, pretending like it doesn’t bother you from time to time becomes easy.”
“As long as you’ve lived” doesn’t feel very long to Qifrey. The empty, cobwebbed corners in his brain haunt him, but he’s still angry. Whenever his head starts to hurt, it only reminds him of the eye he doesn’t have and the childhood he doesn’t remember. It's a bad feeling, but it’s all he’s known. He doesn’t know life without it.
“Do you ever get…” a more bitter, personal word is on the tip of his tongue, but it slips away and another replaces it. “Sad?”
Beldaruit blinks in surprise. “You’re very direct—I appreciate it. Not many people talk to me like this.”
Qifrey frowns, suddenly self-conscious. “Like what?”
His teacher entirely ignores the interjection to answer his question instead. “Some people think it’s sad and pitiable, and they treat me like I should feel bad for myself. But I can’t imagine myself without my symptoms. Perhaps people are just jealous they aren’t one of the greatest witches ever, hm?”
On an invisible cue, Beldaruit summons a smoke sculpture of himself that gallops around the room. Qifrey looks entirely unimpressed.
Beldaruit pouts and waves the smoke sculpture away. “Alright, you caught me. I get a little bored and lonely when I have to rest like this sometimes. However, it gives me more time to come up with new magic, and I always appreciate a visitor.”
He winks as he says the last part, and Qifrey tries to act annoyed. Secretly, he’s glad he stayed. One day, he wants to make a gift for his teacher that’ll make his life a little less boring.
“I hope that satisfies all your curiosities,” Beldaruit says, with a look in his eyes that encourages more.
Qifrey nods slowly, then frowns when he’s reminded of the incoming headache he felt earlier.
“I think I get it…it’s like how my head hurts a lot, and sometimes it hurts worse and for longer when I don’t go to bed early,” he winces. “Or when I focus for too long.”
All of Beldaruit’s composure melts, and he suddenly turns himself in bed to get a better, wide eyed look at his apprentice’s face. Qifrey backs up on instinct, bewildered.
“Professor, doesn’t that hurt?”
Beldaruit only narrows his eyes. “That doesn’t matter—do you have a headache right now? Have you been pushing yourself?”
“You’re pushing yourself right now!”
He ignores Qifrey’s concerned shouts again and waves a dismissive hand. “You’re young, you have more time to treat your health better. I’m more worried about you, dear boy!”
Hearing Beldaruit state that so frankly flusters Qifrey; most witches in the assembly won’t even look at him for too long, so such direct care and affection feels like way too much. He’s so caught off guard he speaks without thinking.
“M-my head was hurting a little earlier, but—”
“So it’s time to take a break!” Beldaruit sets Qifrey’s spell on his bedside table and levels a stern look at the boy. “You’ve worked very hard and created some wonderful magic, but even if you failed a hundred spells, you’d still need to rest!”
Qifrey groans. He hates when Beldaruit gets all lecture-y, and he hates even more when he’s right.
“I will if you’ll stop yelling at me…”
That makes his teacher immediately relax, like a big cat successful in his hunt. Qifrey feels a weird mix of being both threatened and comforted by this.
Now that he’s been nagged about it, he does feel his energy crashing a little after working on his spell without pause. The thought of laying in bed does sound nice, but the chairs in Beldaruit’s room are so comfortable it’s hard to leave, and he doesn’t want to make that walk back to his room.
His gaze lands on Beldaruit’s bed. It's comfortably large, with plenty of pillows and blankets to spare. It’s no wonder he’s able to spend so much time there and only miss having company.
Even if he just glanced for a single split second, Beldaruit is quick to catch onto his train of thought.
“I don't mind if you stay here. It would be cruel of me to send you off for a comfort that’s right here,” he softly offers. It's so different from his usual confident expressiveness, and yet it doesn’t feel divorced from his personality at all.
Even the way he words it, the way he works flexibly around Qifrey’s unpredictable feelings. It reminds Qifrey why he’s comfortable staying down here to begin with, despite the terrifying water outside the windows and doorways; only down here could he find kindness towards an outsider that was so rare in witch society.
So, wordlessly, he stands up and makes his way to the other side of the bed. Once he props himself up there, he slips off his boots and quietly places his hat on the ground next to them.
He finally swings his legs over the side and onto the mattress, and hesitantly reaches for a throw blanket hanging off the side of the bed. He sends a quick look up to Beldaruit, who nods encouragingly. Qifrey ends up shifting around for a bit, and feeling horribly embarrassed by it, until he finds the sweet spot of pillows overlapping at the perfect angle.
After that, it doesn’t take long for Qifrey’s busy, buzzing mind to accept comfort, and he’s out like a doused flame.
The whole time Beldaruit just smiles, content, and folds his drawing table back up to work. He hums as he works, and the soft scratching of ink on paper fades into pleasant white noise. He has a new mini project in mind—spells that ease the pain of headaches.
Qifrey stands, armful of pillows ready, in the hallway of the sleeping quarters. Mentally, he tried recalling how many pillows each girl had on their bed at the moment, and how many more they might need.
Ever since Coco worked herself into a fever, he was determined to make sleeping look as appealing as possible. The girls, especially Agott and Coco, are too young to already be ruining their sleep schedules and worsening their health. It worries him, more than he lets on. And if he learned anything as an apprentice, nagging only had an opposite effect on kids.
There was another reason, though. If any of them got injured to the point where they had to stay in bed for a while, and it wasn’t bad enough to be at the hospital, he wanted them to be comfortable. Every day he tries making the atelier the most homely he can, separating it far from the assembly in his mind.
And one’s bed, he finds, is the center of what makes a place a home.
Which is exactly why he doesn’t enter their rooms, he only carefully piles a few pillows outside of their doors with a note on each of them.
Agott is practicing using her new sylph shoes outside, and Tetia dragged Coco and Richeh into helping her cook some dessert she found in an old cookbook. Richeh was likely playing with Brushbuddy instead of helping. Qifrey trusted he’d be able to sense if anything went horribly wrong—he has a six sense for when to step in.
It eases his heart to know that Coco can have fun so soon after overworking herself. He knows the ideal season for the second test is approaching, and it doesn’t help to have them thinking about it and getting worked up.
Despite not always following his own advice, Qifrey remembers to take breaks sometimes. Usually it’s when his empty socket starts to hurt again, a drum beat around his whole skull. It flares up after a domestic night with Olruggio, or when he thinks he spots a brimhat on the horizon. In the good times and the bad, it’s an unfortunate constant.
It is a part of him, though— a part of him he’s grown intimately familiar with and only knows how to remedy more with time.
It’s the quiet moments like this, where he really feels like a professor, when he thinks about Beldaruit. He wonders how he’s doing, though he’ll never say it and he only calls for business reasons. He wonders if his old teacher is in bed or entertaining the children of witches with his over the top magic. When it gets cold he wonders if his teacher's health wanes and weakens with the weather the way it did when he was an apprentice. He still remembers how concerned and startled he was the first time it happened. He hopes if Beldaruit is in bed, Riliphin is keeping him company, the same way Qifrey got used to working there in silence just to be in the same room as him—at least, until things got complicated.
Maybe next time he’s in the area he’ll stop by and say hello. He was too busy last time.
(Of course, Qifrey is always busy, or in a hurry, or feeling avoidant and drained. But that doesn’t change the fact that he leaves extra pillows for his apprentices and reminds them to take breaks, especially if they feel sick or overexerted.
Some lessons can’t easily be forgotten.)