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A glass scalpel in a hand made of light. Bloodied flesh parting under the blade.
The flapping of wings. Nightingale song.
Green eyes, once bright, now glassy and sightless. A youthful face frozen in terror and agony.
Blood and entrails spilling from a body torn savagely open.
A black and silver candle unmelting in a gauntleted hand. “Remember,” a voice intones.
A breath.
The door to Dean Tallbarrel’s office stands open, so Murray just raps on it with one knuckle as she strides through. “Hey. You got a minute, Ellipides?”
Tallbarrel looks up from his paperwork and blinks at her, pushing his thick glasses back up on his nose. “Ah, Miss Mag’Nesson. What can I do for you?”
“I need someone removed from my Advanced Ossomancy class. I can’t teach him.” She hands him a form, then folds her arms and waits, tapping her foot impatiently, as he reads it.
The dean adjusts his glasses again and squints at the page, frowning. “Hmm. And what is this student’s major?”
“What’s his major?” Murray gives an incredulous snort. “I’ll give you one guess, Ellipides.”
Tallbarrel hums thoughtfully. “I see. You are aware, of course, that you are the only professor here who teaches Advanced Ossomancy.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And you are aware that your class is a graduation requirement for all necromancy majors.”
Murray sighs. “Yeah.”
Tallbarrel hands the form back to her with a gentle, if placating, smile. “You’re going to have to teach him eventually, Murray. Give him a chance. Have you even met the boy?”
“No, but…” Murray tugs at her beard in frustration. “I mean, have you seen his transcript? I can’t even find his grade for Oss 101. And that ain’t the only class he’s missin’! If he thinks he can ride his daddy’s coattails to fast-track—”
“He tested out, Murray.”
Murray’s jaw drops. “Tested out? The hell do you mean, tested out?”
“I mean I gave him your final exam from Ossomancy 101 last semester. Essay questions and all. You graded it yourself, remember?”
“No, I don’t remember,” Murray spits. “And believe you me, that is a name I’d—oh.”
Oh, she does remember. She remembers the extra exam paper tucked in with the rest. No name, nothing to identify who’d written it at all, but demonstrating a thorough and remarkably insightful comprehension of the arcane and divinatory properties of bone. Impressed, she gave the work almost full marks before going back to see who it belonged to. She remembers laughing to herself about how the smartest kids are always the ones to forget the stupid shit like putting their names on their assignments. She remembers planning all the ways she would playfully needle them about it.
She remembers realizing that, no, all of her students were accounted for among the other exams. She remembers concluding that one of the other faculty must have slipped this paper in here as some sort of prank. She remembers bringing it to Dean Tallbarrel, and she remembers him simply saying, “Thank you.”
Murray groans, defeated. “That was him?”
“That was him.” Tallbarrel folds his hands on his desk and gives her a pointed look over his glasses. “He’s a smart lad, Murray.”
“But what’s he even doin’ here?” she whines. “Ain’t that family all sorcerers, anyway?”
“Not all of them, it would seem.”
“Ugh. Fine. I’ll teach the Tachonis brat.” Murray clenches her fist around the page in her hand, crumpling it into a ball, and levels a finger at Tallbarrel. “But I swear to you, if he gives me any of his daddy’s condescendin’ lip, I can’t be held responsible for my actions.”
Murray has indeed never met the youngest spawn of House Tachonis, but she can nevertheless pick him out immediately among his fellow students. All the members of that family bear a strong enough resemblance to one another that she could have identified him even if she weren’t expecting him. Surely that’s why, when he walks into her classroom for the first time, he looks so dreadfully familiar. Like she’s seen his face before.
Perhaps they’ve crossed paths elsewhere on campus. After all, the Penteveral is not a large school.
Yes, that has to be it.
He otherwise isn’t anything like what she expected. He doesn’t carry himself like a noble, doesn’t try to command the room or draw any attention to himself. On the contrary, though he must be close to six feet tall, Murray feels as though she, a Dwarf standing a solid four-foot-nothin’, could tower over him. He doesn’t speak to his classmates—but she’s forced to conclude that’s out of shyness rather than haughtiness, judging by the way he drifts along the back of the room like a ghost. Even his clothes, though obviously expensive in their elegant cut and fine materials, are understated and modest. His only real concession to his social station is the signet ring on his right hand, the crest of House Tachonis disproportionately large for his slender fingers. It seems to fit him poorly.
A couple of his more perceptive classmates notice it and start to whisper, in that obliviously unsubtle way teenagers always have. Some of them openly stare, and one of the girls giggles. Young Tachonis clocks this, and stands a little straighter, his face darkening in an expression of mingled annoyance and embarrassment.
Oh, here we go.
Murray braces herself for the inevitable outburst of offended noble sensibilities… but it never comes. The Tachonis boy instead turns away, takes a seat in the last row, and pulls his textbook out of his bag. He seems to relax a bit as he reads, as though the dense academic discussions of advanced arcane theory are easier for him to understand than the people around him.
Well, he has some self-control, at least.
“All righty, folks, everyone have a seat,” Murray says loudly. She nods, pleased, as the low buzz of conversation dies down and the students do as they’re told. “Welcome to Advanced Ossomancy. I’ve had some of y’all for classes before, but for those I haven’t met, I’m Professor Mag’Nesson. Before we get started, I’m gonna take attendance right quick, so I can put your names to all your pretty faces.
“Deena Corrin?”
“Here, Professor,” a half-Orc girl responds. Murray begins to jot notes on her attendance list to help her remember who’s who. Glasses and freckles.
“Lysander Faro?”
A human boy raises his hand. “Here, Professor.” Blond curly hair.
“Julius Kerazur?”
“Yeah, here.” Left tusk broken.
“Sybil Laurian?”
“Yo.” Attitude.
“Alistair Maris?”
“Present, Professor.” Prim and proper.
“Hiraeth Penning?”
“Here.” Yellow eyes.
“Arcaya Salomere?”
“Here.” Forest green skin.
“Iphenia Seratolva?”
“Right here, Professor.” Hair dyed blue.
“And Occtis Tachonis.”
The less observant students—the ones who didn’t take notice before—whip their heads around, wide-eyed, when they hear the name. Whispers sweep across the room once more as the boy in question mumbles, “Present, Professor” without making eye contact with anyone.
His thin, reedy voice suits his thin, reedy figure far more than it does the ominous crest on his ring. Honestly, he comes across as just another anxious, sheltered teenager. Nothing she hasn’t seen a thousand times before. In fact, if he were anyone else, he’d be exactly the kind of student she would be determined to draw out of his shell.
Nevertheless, there remains one detail that needs to be established. “I don’t exactly see a lot of nobles in my classes,” Murray says. “How do you prefer to be addressed, m’Lord?” She tries, she really tries, to keep the sarcasm out of her voice on that last word. But it still rings somewhat mockingly even in her own ears, and the faces of the other students range from delighted to scandalized.
The Tachonis boy flinches and keeps his eyes downcast. “Um. Just ‘Occtis’ is fine, Professor.”
Not a great reaction. She knows she should probably handle with care—after all, if this kid complains to his family about Murray, it’s going to end very badly for her. Possibly for the whole school. But hey, in for a copper, right? “All right, then, ‘just Occtis.’ You’re the only one here who did better than ‘barely acceptable’ on the Oss 101 final, and you didn’t even take the class. So how about you refresh your classmates on the divinatory properties of bone as a spellcastin’ component?”
“Uh, yeah, okay.” Occtis clears his throat and, for the first time, looks up at her as he begins to speak.
Murray doesn’t hear a word he says.
Those bright green eyes, wide and nervous, are more than just vaguely familiar. It’s no use lying to herself anymore: she knows exactly where she’s seen those eyes before. Memory superimposes a glassy stare and a frozen expression of utter betrayal on that face. The smell of blood is so thick she almost gags on it.
(A thick black candle reconstitutes itself. Remember.)
Murray is a diviner. She knows how to tell when a recurring nightmare is a regular-ass dream, when it’s a portent, and when it’s a full-on clairvoyant vision of the future. And the distressingly gory one she’s been having for the past three weeks now is undeniably—as much as she’d like to deny it—the latter of the three.
This boy is going to die.
And soon, it seems. The face in her dreams can’t be more than three or four years older than the one she’s looking at now.
Aw, shit. He’s barely gonna make it out of school, isn’t he?
Murray has never considered herself to have particularly strong maternal instincts. Sure, she cares about her students. She’s even kept in touch with some of them long after they’ve flown the Penteveral’s nest. But she wouldn’t say she feels especially compelled to protect or mother any of them. Especially a scion of the Sundered Houses—surely Occtis Tachonis doesn’t need her to fuss over him.
(Then again, maybe he does. Look how anxious he is.)
But the question remains, should she tell him? Doesn’t he deserve to know the grisly fate that awaits him? Or would it be kinder to keep it a secret?
It’s not like there’s anything that can be done about it either way. That’s the problem with glimpsing the future: most of the time, the things you do to change it end up causing exactly what you were trying to avoid. The tides of fate are not so easily turned.
What if the roles were reversed? Murray considers for a moment what she would want if someone foresaw her violent, painful, and imminent death. Would she want to know? Or would she rather live in blissful ignorance? And if she found out later that someone knew about it and had hidden it from her…?
The room simmers with whispers once again, but this time all the staring eyes are focused on Murray. She realizes with a start that Occtis has finished speaking. Everyone is waiting for her to say something, but her mouth has gone dry and her brain is sputtering like a spent candle.
“Are you all right, Professor?” the Orcish girl, Arcaya, ventures hesitantly.
Murray clears her throat and tries to look cool. “Yes. Uh. See me after class, Occtis.”
“That’s all for today. Read Chapters One to Three and give me two pages of analysis for next week. My office hours are in the syllabus if y’all have any questions. Bye.”
Murray begins to organize her things for the next class as the students file out of the room. A shadow falls across her desk, and she freezes. Right. She asked the Tachonis boy to come talk to her.
And she still hasn’t decided what—if anything—to tell him.
“You wanted to see me, Professor?”
She looks up to find him standing rigidly straight, clutching his books to his chest and staring fixedly at the wall behind her, eyes wide. Turning to see what’s caught his oh-so-rapt attention, she finds… nothing. He’s just standing there, staring at nothing two feet over her head instead of looking at her.
Murray plants her hands on her hips. “This is wizard school, kid, not a military academy,” she snaps. “No need to stand at attention.”
Occtis jumps a little at her tone. “W-what?”
“My eyes’re down here.”
“…oh.” Occtis’s gaze flicks down to her face, then strays a bit lower before snapping back up to meet her eyes, a look of panic in his own as his face flushes red.
Murray has to bite back a chuckle. When you have tits like hers, they’re always on display unless you dress like a Candescent Creed nun. And while it’s never not hilarious to watch the young men (and some of the young women) try desperately not to stare, this is not the time, nor the person, to tease about it. So she does him the mercy of pretending she doesn’t notice.
But what to say? Her stomach turns when she looks at him. He’s all of seventeen years old, full of promise and potential. All she can see, though, is blood and pain and death.
She can’t tell him, she decides in that moment. Regardless of what she thinks of his family, he’s still practically a child. He doesn’t deserve to have that sword hanging over his head for whatever short time he has left.
“Occtis, I want to be very clear,” she says sternly. “Your family may have gotten you in here, but you only stay here on your own merits. I don’t care what your name is. I don’t give a rat’s ass who your daddy is. You will not get any special treatment from me just ’cause of your station, you hear?”
Occtis nods, a look of… is that relief?... washing over his face. Apparently, he was expecting a very different conversation. “I know, Professor.”
“Good. You seem like a bright kid—keep earnin’ your place here, and you’ll get far.” Not far enough, her traitorous brain adds snidely. Perhaps that’s why she lets her voice soften as she continues, “You’ll need every advantage you can get after you graduate. You gotta keep your wits about you. It’s a dangerous world out there.”
Occtis frowns at that. He studies her face intently, all the awkward hormonal panic fading away as she can practically see him rolling her words around in his mind. “Okay,” he says slowly. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Why am I—” She hoped he wouldn’t ask that, but apparently he’s more insightful than she’s given him credit for. She folds her arms and cocks an eyebrow, letting a little irritation creep back into her voice. “Because I think you’re a sheltered rich kid who needs a reality check now before he gets a real hard one later, that’s why.”
Occtis pulls himself up straighter, an expression of indignation, even defiance, hardening his delicate features as he lifts his chin and glares down at her.
There’s his spine—and some of that good ol’ Sundered House arrogance.
Just when I thought this one might be different.
“I think I might surprise you in that regard, Professor,” he bites out stiffly. “May I go?”
Murray sighs. “Yeah, go on, get outta here.”
As he turns to leave the room, fluttering movement at the window catches Murray’s attention. She glances over and sees a small brown bird perched on the sill. It seems to be watching Occtis.
The door swings shut behind him, and only then does the nightingale begin to sing.