-Tristain Academy of Magic-
The Springtime Summoning Ritual. A time for the youthful mages of Halkeginia to summon up a familiar of their very own. Take, for example, the red-headed, well-endowed Kirche Augusta Frederica von Anhalt-Zerbst, who summoned a Fire Salamander, or a small blunette girl known simply as Tabitha, who, against all odds, summoned a Wind Dragon. Louise thought it looked a little weird for a Wind Dragon, but she wasn't not an expert on dragons. On the topic of familiar summoning, though...
"An excellent familiar, De Roeselare." A nondescript boy - De Roeselare - preened through the crowd with a falcon perched on his shoulder, as the falcon preened itself in mimicry of its new master. De Roeselare gave Professor Colbert his thanks as he passed by. "Now then, has everyone had their turn?"
"No, not quite." Answered the aforementioned Anhalt-Zerbst. "Miss Valliere hasn't done it."
Louise de la Valliere. The youngest Valliere daughter, The Problem Child, The Fraudulent Mage, The Explosive, The Zero. Just a few of many insults thought up by her classmates. Louise just so happened to hate each and every mocking name, especially the oldest and most prominent of which being 'The Zero', first conceived by the very same Anhalt-Zerbst. Louise glared at Zerbst for pointing her out. She stood at the back of the crowd to avoid attention, damn you! Huffing, she quickly preened herself and stepped forward, tuning out the crowd just as it started to murmur.
"Louise the Zero.." A boy muttered.
"What will she summon?" Another whispered - the De Roeselare boy if she wasn't mistaken.
"There's no way she can summon anything! We'll just have another explosion, nothing else!" That voice was one Louise could put a name to - one Elise du Bois d'Aische, a Count's daughter. And that voice was certainly not whispering, Louise thought, the whole courtyard could hear it, no matter how 'hushed' you thought your voice was!
"After all that boasting -" Zerbsts began, rubbing her new Fire Salamander's head. "-you'll summon something more, 'divine, beautiful, and powerful', than this little guy, right, Louise?" Louise quickly decides that she is not in the mood for Kirche von Zerbst's particular brand of mockery today, ending the conversation with a sharp "Of course!"
'I can't fail this one. I can't blow this one up too. Under absolutely no circumstance can I fail this. Please, Brimir, don't let me fail this one spell.' She pleaded in the voice of her mind.
After a moments hesitation, she steeled her grip on her wand. Under her breath, Louise muttered "Please.." don't fail me again, Magic - was she wanted to say. But in front of all these people? A better chance of her summoning a peasant boy than ever showing weakness. She started to speak, raising her wand. "My servant, that exists somewhere in this vast universe!"
"Whats with that spell?" A girl, Montmorency Margarita La Fère de Montmorency asked, voicing the opinion of the entire student body. "W-well, whatever it is, its original." Said her betrothed, Guiche de Gramont.
"My divine, beautiful, and powerful familiar!" Tabitha, in a rare instance, took her eyes off of her book, and set her gaze upon the girl in the middle of the crowd. With a final prayer, Louise finishes the chant. "I wish and assert from the bottom of my heart, answer my guidance and appear!"
The whole courtyard went up in smoke in that very same instant. "Just as expected.." Came the voice of du Bois d'Aische. Guiche de Gramont made his agreement known through a coughing fit, before he opened his eyes to see Montmorency on her knees before him. "Are you alright, Montmorency?"
"Look." Montmorency pointed at the summoning circle.
Louise had disappeared, with but a simple wand left where she stood.
And then, The Devil shrieked his warbling, inhuman war cry, at least a mille passus off into the forest.
-Lost-
-Underground-
Louise had failed. Spectacularly.
This much she understood immediately. She failed so spectacularly that she managed to teleport herself into a cave. And, not just any cave it looks like - Louise never heard of glowing fungi, but the walls of the cave were practically lined with the stuff. Mycelium, she corrected herself. Glowing mycelium. She quickly decided that in the interests of not getting any form of mycosis, she had better leave sooner rather than later. Luckily for her, the bioluminescent sclerotium gives off enough light in the cave for visibility - albeit barely. Firstly, though, she took inventory.
Which turned out to be completely pointless, considering all she was carrying with her were the clothes on her back and her wand, which is pointedly no longer in her hands.
She froze. Her wand. 'Where is it?'
She must have dropped it- but where did it go? She scoured the cave floor, it had to be here! The blue light of the fungal colonies on the walls should have reflected nicely off of the polish of the wand - which meant one of two things; the wand was either excessively filthy to a point her polish was rendered null, or simply wasn't there in the first place. Louise desperately wanted to think it was the former, but she knew that it logically had to be the latter.
Her wand was gone, and with it any magical capability.
She scoffed - as though her magic ever worked in the first place! She had been cursed from day one to be a failure - she realized that now. Louise had tried everything to find what was broken, else change what she did wrong. She had memorized the exact process to every single incantation, every nuance with every invocation, every variation in every casting - she had done everything perfectly, by all accounts - she had her academics and theoretics down perfectly, but it wasn't enough. Every spell she cast resulted in an explosion, whether it was the intended result or not.
Thinking back on it, in fact, Louise must have left a crater behind at the summoning ritual! She couldn't have left a corpse behind as she was pointedly still alive - so the whole school must have thought she vaporized herself! And when news of this reaches her family, poor Cattleya.. No, no! She couldn't think of this now. She needed to get out of the cave before she could have such a distressing epiphany. Having steeled herself, she took her first step, and distracted herself from further thoughts with a textbook passage on Wands.
'The Wand - A Tool for exerting a Mage's will upon the world. Most things pointy and straight would work as a Focus, but simply 'working' is often not enough. A stick torn off of a branch would work as a wand just as well as a crude iron knife would, but it is inefficient and inelegant - any spell cast would either require more Willpower, or simply degenerate to a fraction of its normal power. Most proper wands are simply sticks, yes, but perfectly straight, carved and polished. A wand such as this wastes minimal willpower, and will have no trouble in casting. This is because...'
Louise's footfalls echoed deep into the dark cave, both behind and ahead of her.
-Lost-
-Underground-
Louise must have been wandering for hours, she's still no closer to the exit and her legs are screaming in exhaustion - not to mention her hand had started burning half-way through the trip! It was too dark to see what had happened, but hands don't just start burning. The burning had gotten so bad, she wouldn't be surprised if her screams had collapsed the cave entrance. The burning had subsided a good hour ago, and the adrenaline from the pain gave her enough of a second wind to keep moving.
'...Some wands, however, are specialized - Certain metals are better at conducting certain elements - Iron, Ruthenium and Osmium are excellent when dealing in Earth, where Cobalt, Rhodium and Iridium will deal in Water. Nickel, Palladium and Platinum in Air, and Copper, Silver and Gold in Fire. For this reason, some wands are fitted with a metal core of one of these twelve metals. Alloys of these metals will conduct two elements, however only half as efficiently - Copper and Cobalt for example would create an Alloy Core that would more efficiently conduct both elements when compared to other metals, however would only be half as conductive in both elements compared to a Pure cor-
eeeEEIEEAAAAAHEEIIII-I-I-E
Louise froze. An ear-piercing screech echoed off of the cave walls - sounding like the last thing from 'human'. Higher-pitched than any animal should be able to make, she found her ears ringing momentarily after the scream before fight-or-flight kicked in to give her a second wind.
'Founder above, what unholy beast on this earth could make such a sound?!'
Her Limbic System decided flight was the better of two choices. She quickly turned away from the source of the terrible sound and sprinted as fast as her legs could take her - She tripped up on the uneven stone floor, but quickly recovered before she had the chance to hit the floor.
It wasn't long before her legs grew weary and her lungs empty while her strides grew shorter and slower. But the running wasn't for nothing, the narrow tunnel she called a Cavern had given way to an enormous chamber, at least two stories in height and a great deal more elbow room! She could feel a breeze, and though it carried the terrible stench of death, she realized that she was almost out of the cave! The newfound hope gave her a third wind-
eeeEIEAAAAAAIIEEEEEEEHEII-I-I-E
The abysmal sound, Louise had likened it to the unholy crossbreed of tortured metal and tinnitus, had made Louise stagger with how loud it was compared to the first, just before tripping on something in the dark. Though her coordination was interrupted, her momentum went unimpeded and she fell into a roll. The gnarled slate, while bearable from under shoes, wrought hell upon cloth and pristine skin alike. Tears, cuts and scrapes marred both her outfit and skin, and more than a few bruises would make their presence known later, she knew. Staggering up, she took a look at what tripped her.
A corpse.
There was something wrong with that two-word sentence that had made Louise blood run cold. She retreated from the lifeless form, only for a second to trip her again. Her elbows proved to be enough to stop her head from smacking the ground, at the price of a robust pain jolting up her arms. Her mind, however, is distracted by the million questions clouding it. She looked around, noticing the floor of the cave was a pigsty, only instead of mud and hay, coffin liquor and numerous cadavers.
'Dear god above, why are these here!? What killed them - the same thing making that abhorrent sound? How did they die? Its the creature making that shriek, isn't it? It's coming for me, too, isn't it?!'
Every question only put more wood in the now blazing panic-
eeeEIEAAAAAAHHEIII-I-I-E
-before her train of thought is yet again interrupted by the shrill, warbling, echoing howl. And it was much, much louder than the first or second. Oh, it was much closer now. Oh, what she wouldn't have given for a wand! No, even an axe or a dagger, anything to defend herself!
And for once, The Founder must have heard her prayer. The dull glint of old steel shines from the chest of the closest corpse. A sword! A short and thin one, yes, but its certainly forged for battle! She could just tell by how it was currently stabbed into the chest of the dead man. Too rotten to make out what he was in life, but it was certainly once human. The corpse was, by all accounts, absolutely putrid with its sunken and notably perforated skin, and a visible, blackened skeletal structure - or, visible where the 'skin' isn't covered in adipocere. She tried to think of how long it would take for a body to decompose into this.
Her mind doesn't really produce an answer.
A large part of her protested when she grabbed hold of the dagger. 'Am I really doing this? This is grave robbing, right?' Another much smaller part of her squashed it like a bug, which was impressive for how small a part of her it actually was. 'No! I'm about to die! Take the dagger! Moral quandaries later!' She punctuated the thought by hurriedly pulling a thirty-seven centimeter blade out of the man's chest cavity. Surprisingly to her, there was no blood. No blood, because a thin coating of that foul-smelling Corpse Wax was in its place. Small mercies, she supposed.
Under the rust and adipocere was the word 'Seitengewehr 98/05' along the base of the blade's Fuller. Strange name for a short-sword, even stranger that she could read the foreign runes. She decided to take the man's sheathe as well, considerably cleaner than the blade. With nowhere to put it, she decides simply to hold the sheathe in her off hand.
pfmph-pfmph, pfmph-pfmph
Heavy, galloping Footsteps echoed down the cavern walls, alerting Louise to the rapidly approaching presence. Her grip on the weapon tightens. Maybe it was only her treacherous mind playing games, but the glowing mycelium seemed to dim as the footsteps grew louder. And then, Louise saw it. And Louise only thought one thing.
'Please, 'O Founder, My God, Preserve me.'
Blacker than the Void, and though its limbs were as thin as twigs, it was almost larger than the the Servant's Quarters back at the Academy! It hardly fits in the narrow tunnel it just crawled out of - the thing had to be five, six times bigger than Louise! Enormous antlers jut out from the top of its head, while the rest of its body remained vaguely humanoid in the 'two arms two legs' sense. The pale, whites of its blank eyes contrast against its coloration so starkly that the eyes seem to glow in the dark. Maybe the Founder didn't hear Louise's prayer, but judging by the dead stare it gave Louise, this Devil - for that was the only truly fitting name - certainly had. And it certainly had not liked what it had heard. It opened its mouth, the teeth - no, the needles in its maw practically unsheathed from the opposing gums-
eeEIEAAAAAAHEEII-I-I-I-I-E
It let out its warbling, unearthly shriek, and it froze Louise in place. The trembling in her hands quite nearly caused her to drop her shortsword.
Wait, sword! 'Most things pointy and straight would work as a Focus' - But just what would she cast?
The Creature took her moment of hesitation, picked a horse-sized boulder off of the wall and chucked it at Louise in the same manner a child would a tennis ball, changed from a crawl to a squat, and proceeded to let its spindly arms and legs squat-stomp forward to carry it to its vibrant pink prey, in perhaps the most off-balance, quadrupedal, demented jousting charge Louise had ever bore witness to.
Louise blessed her short stature, because if she had been but a Palmus Maior taller, she would have been the victim of the most casual decapitation in Halkeginian history. She also blessed the boulder, as its proximity to her head, or the very nearly lack thereof, had been enough to shake her out of her freeze-up. Her mind thought fast - She couldn't outrun this beast, she'd be crushed under its foot! Melee with such a short blade would only serve to scratch something the size of a house - So Louise thought she'd do the one thing she could do.
Let it be known that Louise was anything but a slow thinker - The Devil hardly had time to complete two stomps over before Louise raised her blade, and felt a fraction of her willpower drain into it. "Fireball!"
The spell went wide. Very wide.
The resulting thunderclap managed to perforate the ceiling, creating a hole large enough to catch glimpses of the sky above. A hole created by such explosive force that the resulting earthquake could be felt ten miles away. Louise was incredibly lucky that the resulting earthquake did not catastrophically damage the structural integrity of the cave, nor the apparent mountain resting just on top of it, considering the possibility and lethality of falling rocks of unusual size.
The resulting earthquake did, however, seriously disorient The Devil such that its footing had slipped under its own weight. The Devil let out another demented cry of alarm as its tumble shook the earth again, and Louise could feel the vibrations of the cave in her teeth - an uncomfortable feeling, but one that was so greatly overshadowed by fear that she paid it no mind.
Louise had another spell at the tip of her tongue, and The Devil staggered to its feet-
eeEEIEAAAAHE-I-I-I-E
The Devil screeched its warbled cry to the heavens, and the enclosed cavern trapped its hell-sound and reverberated. The war-cry interrupted her chant before she could have even spat the first syllable, deafening her and giving The Devil more time.
Louise had finally recovered when The Devil resumed its charge, marginally faster than the original charge. Louise sprung almost immediately, reflexes kicking in quicker this time - She had only enough time to leap barely out of the way as an oversized Devil's hand swiped past where she was. Its finger- no, its claw grazed past her back, tearing cloth and skin. Louise's lungs compressed a moment, letting out a shout - the graze had sent her off balance, but she kept her steel vice on her Seitengewehr.
Let it also be known that when soft, delicate skin meets hard, jagged rock -
Her shoulder erupted in pain, rock tearing at skin and flesh in a way that would mar it forever.
- that skin should tear first.
As her shoulder tore open, the sting of pain felt like a lance run through her lungs. The impact of the fall forced out a choked cry and tears gathered at the corners of her eyes from the pain. She felt something snap somewhere in her collarbone, and boy founder-damned howdy was that a horrible feeling.
The Devil crashed into the rock wall behind her, The cave shook again, for what Louise felt would be the last time before the granite above gave way to sky. She could feel the reverberations aching in her teeth, just from her position on the floor. Her shoulder had taken a brunt of the impact, bloodied and stinging - but while it hurt, Louise was fairly certain it was only sprained at worst - it felt mostly numb aside from the stinging skin, actually. Teeth grit, She quickly staggered up, picking the sheathe up off of the ground.
Louise reaffirmed her grip on the bayonet, and quickly scanned the chamber for an exit - The sun's light shone in the cave, from both Louise's hole in the ceiling and from the entrance of the cave, she's so close to freedom! Picking up the Sheathe again, Louise began her sprint for safety. The Devil had already gotten up, its shocked cries of pain only served to motivate her sprint.
Its cries grew louder, Louise could hear its footfalls begin from behind her - It would catch up fast, she knew. She dropped the sheathe, stopping as quick as she could. Her foot skid a moment, before she placed her second one down again and raised her bayonet, with both hands this time, and saw just how close The Devil had gotten. It was hardly twenty meters from her.
Fear gripped her heart for a moment, replaced by an iron will to survive. Her wrist moved first, then her tongue. "Fireball!" She set the Seitengewehr pointing straight at The Devil, and a good portion more willpower drained than last time.
krak-KHOOMNN
The spell hit dead-on, and Louise felt the concussive force from the blast nearly throw her off her feet. The top of the cave shook, and The Devil was stunned into silence, its momentum halted completely by the explosion. By its wriggling movement, it was certainly still breathing.
Until the cave started to collapse, and a falling, human-sized chunk of granite smashed its head like an overripe and overgrown watermelon. Any last desire to remain in the cave was crushed along with The Devil's cranium, and Louise picked up her sheathe and ran for the Entrance, where a heavy breeze nearly froze her solid.
-Lost-
-Outside-
An arctic wasteland.
She hugged herself, flinching back from the biting winds.
An arctic wasteland - the first words to come into Louise's mind after her hasty departure from that detestable cave. It was supposed to be spring, so where had all of this snow come from? Rather, where had she gone, that the snow could be so deep? The trees - Oak, by the shape - look to have been long-since killed off en-mass by the temperature, and then mummified by permafrost for good measure. The framework of what once probably looked like a shack rests deeper in the woods, but Louise didn't see any smoke around, so it was likely just as cold as the outside. Worse yet, the sun was setting! Had she spent that long wandering in a cave?!
While she felt fortunate that it wasn't actually snowing right now, the subzero air still bit at her, and especially at her wounds. She knew she'd die much faster out here than in the cave, but looking back, the cave's entrance had already collapsed. Louise bit back a shout of frustration, and looked back to the road she found herself on. On that note, actually, the road is a very curious sight.
Below the soles of her shoes, is a straight, paved road - not dirt nor paved stones, but rather a straight, single concrete road, stretching beyond the horizon. She couldn't place her finger on what kind of concrete, but the road had to be ancient - Why, it looked like it hasn't been maintained since the day it was paved! How had no Earth Mages noticed this insult to infrastructure everywhere?, she thought to herself. 'They'd ought to have jumped at a chance to work with something like this. Concrete hasn't been used since the Romalian Empire!
But, Louise couldn't let her mind wander. She started off for the cabin, leaving short strides in the snow behind her. She passed up oaken trees, though she did notice an old, rusted lantern on the ground. The thin glass had been broken in, and the metal had warped and bent in ways it didn't quite look like it was designed for. The trees she passed didn't so much as shake in the wind, as they were far too brittle, courtesy of the icy coating over their bark.
The Adrenaline from her fight slowly started to wear off, and the pain in her shredded shoulder started to manifest just as she reached the door of the empty structure. She entered the building without bothering to knock, her survival took a much higher priority than propriety ever could. It wasn't much warmer inside, she realized, but at least it kept (most) of the wind out. And only after her entrance into the cabin, did she let herself rest.
Louise sat down, letting her legs finally rest. Her eyes drifted to her shoulder, and the stinging sensation erupting through collar bone. Blood dripped down her arm, staining her shirt. An idle part of her mind noted how that stain probably wouldn't come out no matter how hard the servants would try. The bleeding was slow, but the left side of her shoulder was just about skinned. She quivered at the sight - she would've likely done more had she not been so exhausted.
Her eyes drifted to her clothes, torn and dirtied over the last few hours, but mostly from the last five minutes. Founder, had that fight only been a few minutes ago? Her aching everything said it had lasted an hour, but her mind said sixty seconds, at her most liberal guess.
A whole minute where she could've died. She very nearly did, twice no less! And for what, that she dared to persist? That she kept trying to advance, in the face of a stone wall called her magical ability? That she dared to try and prove herself? She had tried to make something of herself - and all she had to show for it was, what, a broken shoulder and a countdown on her life? She'd die cold and alone in a frozen wasteland, far enough away from home that it would freeze over in spring.
'Founder, just where am I, anyway?' She asked in her head. 'Far from Tristain, anyway... and far from home.'
Home.
Just yesterday, home felt far enough. Half-way across the country and a day-long carriage ride, in fact. At least a day's carriage was do-able, though.
No, Forget how long a carriage ride it'd be - she had no idea how far she was from home. Louise was well and truly lost.
Could she go home? Would she even get the chance to? No, she'd die here in this back-of-the-woods cabin that hardly even keeps the breeze out, bleeding out while trying to keep her mind on anything but the searing (not to mention growing) pain in her everything. She would never see Tristain- no, she would never see Halkeginia again. If Louise was being honest with herself, that freed up a few problems. Social expectations, her magical inability and its effect on those social expectations, Kirche, her classmates, Mother, Eleanor, Cattleya.. She felt her stomach drop.
What would become of Cattleya? Would the stress of learning that she had died be too much for Cattleya? Her failing health teeters between lethargy and bed-binding fever already, would her inborn illness be the end of her? Louise couldn't bear the thought. Her eyes dampened.
She let herself lie on her good shoulder, and cried herself to sleep. With her aching exhaustion, it took but a moment to lose consciousness entirely.