owo hello. i'm currently almost finished with a darker shade of magic by v.e. schwab but i literally didn't have the attention span to read to the end today because writing this fic was so hugely on my mind. because magic. note that a.) this is equally lenrin as it is gumirin, except one is a lot more mutual than the other, u kno which, and b.) past tense is the most aggravating thing but i [clenches fist] had to do it to 'em. that's all! enjoy!
rated T for violence & blood in future chapters, and probably swearing on gumi's part, uhhh
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fiat lux
❝ let light be made ❞
Rin carried with her a very strange satchel.
It had in total twelve pockets, one of no more importance than any other, meant for insistent packing and quick getaways. Both its fabric and color changed as frequently as did the phases of the moon, which goaded Rin's nerves more than it alleviated them; in the midst of hoisting the strap over her shoulder, burgundy leather would melt to patterned wool, leaving her to curse at the impracticality of having a thousand bags guising as one single (incredibly annoying) bag.
But Rin was fond of it. She'd thieved and cheated her way through an already rigged game of cards — albeit a far more magical version of the game — against a witless man for that satchel, plus whatever the fiends of past dilemmas had stowed in it over time. The man, Gakupo, had looked so righteous when he set his winning hand down, a full row of 3's, just to find one of them a fraud by Rin's magic and her hand deemed the winner by default; her cards had beat out his. Her magic had disheveled his. He'd almost wept at his loss.
Poor fool. Not that Rin had quite sympathized for him, not really, but a loss was a loss, and it picked at imperfection, insecurity, all the same. How many rounds of cards had Rin lost in her life just to win one? How much frustration had she endured, blood had she shed? She'd been robbed of clothes, weapons, her favorite spellbook, her mother's pendant. What was the point of a risk when it was tampered by faithlessness and bad intention?
If a mortal game was unfair, a game of magic, then, was devastating.
Rin, at the time, had in a rare act of selfless generosity offered Gakupo a ruby talisman she'd discovered inside the bag that he'd unsurprisingly rejected, probably for the sake of preserving his pride (what was left of it, anyway, having been mercilessly bested by a girl). Oh well. At least the bag was Rin's.
She kept more things inside it than she'd kept in her own home. Old home, rather, for to her great disappointment it had been burned to the ground alongside everything within it. Years' worth of trinkets and idle possessions turned to little else but dust. Unfortunate, but not unexpected; being hunted was the consequence of hunting. To all magicians, the volte-face of success arrived only in a matter of time. Rin considered herself lucky to have avoided it for as long as she had.
That fire had been impressive for a novice. Or maybe it was just the spellwork that had sparked Rin's interest — prim, proper and pretty. Too bad the boy was dead now (or so the stories all proclaimed), overachieving potential diminished by a bounty. A shame. Rin would like to have met him once.
She thought of him as she dug through her satchel, at present a splotchy gold made of cotton, searching for something that might've gotten lost in her most recent nervous transfer of applications. When pockets stretched endlessly on, defying physics and eternities by all means, organization grew impossible, and so did maintenance. Rin had learned that a long time ago. Then she'd given up.
"What're you looking for?" a voice asked, and Rin looked up.
No one was there, which meant—
She frowned, sighing, and looked down.
There stood a sleek black cat at the edge of the table, the one crammed into Rin's apartment's kitchenette. The cat was watching Rin with blatantly curious green eyes, more like a dragon than a dragon itself.
"Do you always have to do that?" Rin said. She returned her attention to rummaging through the satchel, slicing the tip of her finger on a sharp fringe and gritting her teeth to blot out her annoyance.
"Yes," said the cat, who went exclusively by Gumi, and who seemed to get off on Rin's suffering. "I do."
Rin cast her a half-hearted glare. "I don't even know why I let you stay here."
"I pay rent," Gumi meowed.
"You're a cat."
"Not always." Hopping onto the table, Gumi prodded at the satchel with a paw and cocked her head, ears twitching their appeal before flattening. "You didn't answer my question," she said.
"What question?" Rin asked. She shifted past an orb that reminded her of a star caught too low and too close to the earth and shoved it aside. Lovely, but not what she wanted. Where had she put it?
Gumi nudged the bag again until Rin agitatedly swatted her paw away. Taking a step back and licking the paw instead, cleansing it of Rin's filth, maybe, she said, "What're you looking for?"
"A parasol," Rin explained. She swept across a dapper kind of suit she didn't remember ever obtaining and frowned deep enough the corners of her mouth began to ache. "The, um—" Rin gave a flippant wave "—it's blue, had that sewn-in spellwork, the golden brand? It looked Utsurian."
If a cat could smile, Gumi imitated the expression perfectly, crooked and wicked, nearly threatening. Her tail flicked. "I haven't seen it," she meowed. "You've bludgeoned your touch, Rin."
"No," Rin huffed, bemused, and she snapped the satchel closed with a loud pop, "but at this rate, I am going to be late. I'll find the parasol later."
"You mean we," said Gumi.
"I don't," said Rin, desperate.
"Bite me." Gumi leapt off the table, and mid-way to the floor, her aura shimmered, fragmented — in a blistering swell of magic, a girl emerged from the mist and splayed herself facedown on the tile floor, naked. Rin worked her jaw as if to make a comment, but Gumi raised a hand to quiet her, saying, "Don't worry. It's not gonna last."
"One can only hope," Rin said, stepping casually over her fallen guest to don her jacket off the coat rack. "Please do us all a favor and put some clothes on, or I'm leaving you here to die."
Gumi propped herself up on her elbows, peered at Rin, and flashed a smirk that proved prettier on her when she was less animalistic. Still riled, sure, green hair gnarled in striking resemblance to a canopy of treetops, with faded scars and fresh cuts smattered over dark skin, stubborn sunburn, patches of freckles dusting her shoulders, the muscles of her back flexed taut. Whether she preferred Gumi as beast or woman, Rin wasn't certain; regardless of her form, Gumi would probably forever be a squirrely kind of weirdo.
To that, Gumi had infinite protests.
"I thought you were past the staring," Gumi said, breaking Rin's focus.
Rin narrowed her eyes and said, "I am. Now get dressed."
Gumi stuck her tongue out, but obliged without further banter, ascending the stairs with a deliberate, irking slowness that had Rin in blind impatience whipping her shoe off her foot and at Gumi's exposed back. Gumi sort of laughed at her, then promptly disappeared past the landing.
Sanct, Rin thought, and she rummaged through her satchel one last time.
.
Len lived in a house perhaps stranger than Rin's satchel.
Technically, according to everything he had confessed to her (as a client buying her trust ought to do), the house had no more than one floor and two rooms; a bedroom, his bedroom, and a bathroom. The rest of the space was for the tiny half-parlor, half-kitchen in which Rin currently sat on a plush leather chair.
Magically, Len said, the house had over three floors and thirty rooms, something of a maze, or a cube configuration puzzle; much like Rin's satchel, its affinity for never ending altercations to decor and scenery left Len more despaired and frazzled, even, than it did encouraged. He tended to circumvent the magic's throes, settling happily, if not contentedly, for his confined way of living in a dingy house on a dingy street in a dingy part of town.
In a way, Rin admired him for that. He was being challenged for his free will, his magic, his personality and surely his home — his life, were he victim of such luck — by a source and a force he knew next to nothing about, but here he was. Here was Len, calm, more himself than any client Rin had ever at the very least attempted to cure, before.
Len and his lankiness, his skeletal scrawniness like food was his foreign luxury, spine a hollow jut and fingers spent to thread; Len and his hair, wound to an unkempt ponytail, his full lips and aquiline nose. Len and his strangeness, for how little he'd said, yet how much he'd already become.
He was an oddball, and Rin rather liked him.
"Coffee?" he asked from the kitchen.
"Actually," Rin said, "I quite prefer tea."
But either Len had misunderstood her or not heard her (or downright ignored her), for he poured two mugs of coffee and smacked one down in front of her, beaming.
"Sorry I made your friend wait outside," he amended, nervously touching the back of his neck. "A lot of people freak me out."
Rin lifted a shoulder and the mug, clasping the warmth between her clammy palms, product of pre-speculative anxiety. She made as if to sip the coffee — black, no sugar, no cream — but decided against it, set it down, and said, "She's less of a friend as she is an accomplice, an old client that came to stay with me after I broke her curse." Smiling gently, she gestured to dismiss the issue. "It's no problem. She'd've run rampant in here, anyway. Can't guarantee she wouldn't've broken something."
Len sat in the seat across from her and puffed a loose-lipped laugh. "There's not much of value for her to break," he said.
Rin drummed a finger on the mug, thinking. "Still," she managed. "I intend to make good first impressions."
"You're doing a fine job," Len told her, then leaned eagerly forward and pressed, "So... What was her deal?"
"Hm?"
"Your — accomplice. Her curse?"
"Oh." Rin's brow pinched. "Well," she said, "Gumi is a familiar. The witch that summoned her didn't like her enough, apparently. Too curious, which is…" Rin didn't say true. She shook her head and watched Len sip his coffee. "Gumi was cursed to murderous humanity. She was arrested for criminal affairs, but a guard noticed the spellwork and the Council of the Citadel hired me to break her curse and determine if, considering her state, the charges were fair."
"They must not have been," said Len.
"No," Rin said. "The moment the brands were unsealed, Gumi became her familiar self again. A cat. The Council sent out a magician who traced the spellwork and captured the witch to atone for what she'd done, and further separate Gumi from her curse."
Len raised a finger and smiled brighter. "But Gumi's not a cat," he indicated.
"Not always," Rin said, repeating Gumi's earlier sentiment. "The magic the witch used to curse her remained partially intact, so she's... this, now. She's both. And I think she'll follow me to the grave."
"Wouldn't you be the luckiest."
Rolling her eyes and crossing an ankle over the other, Rin said, "I would not. But this isn't about Gumi. This is about you." She reached for the mug and sipped the coffee, inwardly cringing, but as awful as it tasted, it gave her the opportunity to stall and gather what she wanted to say. It eventually came out as, "You said you have brands?"
"Yes." Len gave an overly enthusiastic nod. He noticed her attention toward this, blushed, and abashedly ducked his head to tuck a chunk of shaggy blonde hair behind his ear. "I'd agreed to deliver something for this... woman, I guess, but I'd derailed from the task once I realized it had been used to set me up."
"You were set up?" Rin echoed, her concern piqued.
"To deliver a dangerous relic to an even more so dangerous man, yes," Len said, "and in the process get myself killed, so they'd have no one on their trail. I abandoned the duty, but I still must've corrupted a magical bond because without so much as an incantation, the brands appeared on my wrists. And somewhere along the way—" his expression dimmed significantly "—I misplaced the relic."
Rin related to that. With her satchel hung from her shoulder, she hadn't been able to completely quell her thoughts as they drifted toward the parasol, and her burned possessions, and the witch that had cursed Gumi — now this. She squared her shoulders and asked, "May I see the brands?"
"Of course. You see," Len said, baring his wrists and his ambition at Rin's request, "it seems that I've been cursed by the Chronoward."
The breath knocked itself from Rin's lungs. Unprecedented fear beyond anything else snapped rigid jaws around her heart as she jerked forward and firmly seized Len by his wrists. She gaped at the brands, symmetrical from one wrist to the other, deep etches in his skin like a wood carving brandished instead through porcelain or glass; a dotted triangle branched an arrow to a circle, cut lines past lines past lines to the cusp of his palms, fingers twitching with the thrum of magical energy.
She'd seen this brand before. On the parasol.
The parasol she'd lost.
"Rin?"
But it was the spellwork that had her stomach aching, her teeth grinding, her blue eyes wide in a flurry of flustered bewilderment. The spellwork that had Rin's magic pulsing, staccato as her building heartbeat.
It was the same spellwork responsible for burning her house to the ground.
"Rin?"
"Yes," Rin said immediately. She tried to withdraw her hands, but Len scrambled to hold them, tightly, tighter, tighter, steadfast and unable to release a solid grasp at understanding. Breathing shakily, Rin fixed her gaze on his, and she bore witness to a sky of winter blue within. "I know. I'm going to help you."
"You're—"
"Yes," Rin stressed, her thumb pushing down upon the brand. "But first—" She stopped, and swallowed thickly, hearing the distinct click of her tongue. She felt the emblem of gold hissing out of Len's wrist to greet her magic, welcoming, sultry, but thieving, too, feeding off of her. This was strong magic, angry magic — not that of a witch, nor of a divine, but of a magician. Someone akin to Rin. Chronoward.
"First, tell me what you know about the Chronoward," Rin said, "and everything about the relic."
.
.
end prelude.
there we go, i think i'm going to stretch this out over ten chapters in the next couple of weeks, so, narrows eyes. wish me luck 'cause i am so, so easily distracted and i waste so, so much time blankly staring into space when i want to write.
anyway! rin will develop more personality, i promise, and if god obeys i can finesse .3 seconds of gumiku into this, as that is who i am. until then: this, my guys. a review or fav or both would be appreciated!