Jonathan lowered his sword, the sounds of battle dying away as the last foe hit the floor. Behind him, he heard a muffled snap. He could completely relax when he heard that – the sound of Charlotte closing her spellbook was her way of saying her side of the room was clear.

He'd taken a few strides when he realized something was missing, though – her footsteps beside him, a quill scratching away as she recorded one detail or another about the monsters they'd just fought. Raising his weapon again, he turned.

He lowered it again when he saw the scene, but blinked in confusion. Charlotte was fine – a few cuts and scrapes, sweat beading her forehead, but that was normal after this long without visiting a restorative shrine – but was standing still, spellbook hugged tightly to her chest, staring at the corpse at her feet.

He identified it as he got closer – an apprentice witch, one of many in the strange academy hidden within the so-called Forest of Doom. This one had clearly been on the wrong end of the Rock Riot spells he'd heard cascading down behind him during the battle, but was relatively intact despite a broken arm and leg both sitting at disconcertingly unnatural angles, her glassy eyes staring up at the roof.

"Charlotte?" Jonathan asked uncertainly.

"How was she any different to me?"

He was rather surprised by that response. Normally if he asked Charlotte if anything was bothering her, he was summarily told to shut up and mind his own damn business (well, except for that time a couple of years ago, when she'd gone into excruciating detail about why he should check the time of month before ever asking that question again). Hearing her say something like that without any of her usual verve actually had him worried.

"...huh?"

Not that he was particularly eloquent about that fact. For once, his lack of words didn't seem to bother her.

"She was just a trainee trying to learn some spells. You've seen them – they can't fly, they don't carry weapons, they probably can't light a candle in less than thirty seconds. What made her any different from me, a few years ago?" She looked up at the chalkboards on one wall of the room, which bore some half-completed magical equations. "Why did she deserve to have her entire class slaughtered?"

He'd actually wondered if it would come to this. Taking down the clearly unnatural beings the church usually sent them after was one thing, but some of the disturbingly humanoid monsters in here were quite another. Jonathan's training with his father had prepared him for this (They were enemies before anything else. This fact was absolute.), but Charlotte, for all her powerful magic, simply didn't have the conditioning he did. After a moment's thought, he offered her the best alternative.

"They're not real," Jonathan offered with a shrug. In retrospect, he really should have expected that to earn him a spellbook to the side of the head.

"How can you say that?!" Charlotte demanded. "Look at her! She's right there!"

Jonathan backdashed out of range of her next swing, giving him a moment to speak while she was off-balance. "And where are we, again?"

"In a magical academy. A school, Jonathan! We've..."

"And where's the school, again?"

"In the..." The fight when out of her, her face reverting to that familiar expression she took on whenever an interesting thought struck her. "We're in a painting."

"Exactly," Jonathan said. "They're not human. They're ink and magic."

"Magical constructs," she elaborated. "No true soul or substance. They do only as they're programmed, and don't even feel pain." She straightened up, a weight almost visibly lifting from her shoulders as she followed him out of the room this time, scribbling away in her spellbook. She paused when they reached the door.

"Jonathan?"

"Yeah?"

"What do we do if we find a human outside the paintings?"

He shrugged. "We'll find some way to free them. You have my word."