Praefatio
Mother never held my hand before. Something was impossibly wrong.
In slow-motion we approached the revered Instituti de Tenebris Magicae. It took two-thousand steps (precisely, for I counted) and four rocks in my shoe to finally reach the Institute for the Dark Arts. It was so massive it rivaled the height of the surrounding trees. Tall, arched windows stared at me like a monstrous set of eyes. Along one wall were a few snaking arms of ivy, which blossomed into a twisting patch of green along the roof. The building was decaying in color, and doubtlessly old. The brick was rotting in some places, and while the rest of the forest was rich with life, here the fauna was brown and dry. Here was the Institutum, buried in the middle of absolutely nowhere, to ensure that absolutely no one could arrive or leave without getting lost in the thick woods that surrounded it. It was a wonder Mother found it so well.
With her free hand she pried open the towering iron gates. Everything was so tall. Well, perhaps I was just tiny.
She didn't dare release me, as if I'd make a run for it. Twenty-one hundred steps in and my hand was more sore than my legs. My fingers were buried in her unrelenting grip. That's when it occurred to me this wasn't holding. This was gripping something before throwing it away.
Mother stopped at the bottom of the wide, crumbling front steps (I was convinced they led to the gods). I stiffened.
"Don't you feel excited, Henry?" she asked, kneeling down to match my height. "You are going to learn magic, like in all those adventure books you read." I wasn't sure how to answer her. None of my stories ever mentioned dreary, looming buildings with fingerprinted windows and decaying lawn shrubs. I didn't even know I wanted to practice spells. But Mother insisted that of course I did. And she knew best, apparently.
"Gracious, child, have you any words?" she remarked, her brows in a knot. Her white hair fell in tangles around her face, contrasting sharply with the youth of her skin. Her eyes were cloudy, and even on good days I was never able to read them. She was more beautiful, I concluded, from higher up, where I couldn't fully see her.
She sighed. "Bonus puer eris, Henricus." Be a good boy, Henry. She unfolded herself and grew again, and looked down at me for what would be the final time. If I had known how long it would be before I saw Mother again, I probably would have said something. But for so long my tongue was trained to stay still. Bonus puer eris. Good boys didn't waste their breath. Not even by breathing.
"Magistra Melaena is waiting," she told me now. "Go on, ire, and I'll be right behind you." She offered her rotten smile, but at five years old nothing is rotten, only stale. With desperate faith I accepted her order, exhausting all my strength to ascend to the sky. When I reached the final step I was on top of the world, but six feet under.
Later in my studies I would learn antigravity spells. But by then I knew I'd already had my battle with gravity; when Mother finally let go of my hand, when she tossed me into a world separate from her own, I didn't hit the ground immediately. It was a slow, slow fall back to earth; it would take years, actually, before I connected with the land again.
To this day, my knees have bruises.