Arcane Tangle ch. 2 [MF] [fantasy] [magic university] [long] [plot] [world building] [character development]

*This is the second chapter of a story that I posted here a while back. This has accidentally grown way longer than what’s usual on this sub, but since some people enjoyed part one I’m posting here just in case :)*

To Yolanda’s surprise the air in her room was fresh. There also seemed to be an odd feel about the place, a feel she couldn’t quite place. Oh well, it’s only to be expected that a massive exorcism would upset the texture of reality a little bit.

The door swung open and Diane burst in.

“Hey,” Yolanda, said, “do you want to…”

“Sorry. Got to go.” Yolanda peered at her roommate. She seemed very tense, her motions urgent as she threw a bunch of books and tools into her bag.

“Got to go…? Don’t you have time off now usually?”

Diane flung the bag over her shoulder and gave Yolanda an empty look.

“Found a mistake in my Patterns homework. Got to fix it quick.” With that she rushed off, and the door slammed shut behind her.

Yolanda shook her head. There was a lot to admire about Diane’s drive, but she sometimes worried that the girl would burn herself out.

*

Niko stood in the gate, horrorstruck, and watched his open hands. How… how even…

Diane’s presence was one with him, as sure as the heat of his body, as the sensation of his nerves, as his own magical field. Oh, no. No, this simply couldn’t be happening.

An arcane entanglement is a very confusing phenomenon. Your magic shouldn’t exist in a different place from your mind, any more than your sight should exist away from your eyes. (There is a theoretical explanation, but includes some truly awful words such as “thaumaturgical flux,” “phenomenological n-space,” “strand theory,” “dark logic,” “anagogical,” and “orthogonal”). The good news is that it is obviously an unstable state. The magic must eventually seep back to where it belongs. The bad news is that this can take months.

Niko tugged at this new force within him, but it was clear that it wasn’t part of his own will. He couldn’t actually use it, which meant that he couldn’t channel it, which meant he couldn’t possibly give it back to Diane by reversing the whole process. He rubbed his forehead. There had to be some other way.

How do you wring magic out of a focus? He only hoped that since Diane fucked it into him, she’d know how to take it back.

*

Life is dismal when you’re in a hurry but you can’t use magic. You can’t do so many things which you take for granted. You can’t even open a door with your mind, you have to slow down and use your hands! And should both your hands be occupied – well then, you have to kind of comically shoulder it, perhaps trying to push the handle down with your elbow while also trying not to spill your coffee. Please spare a moment and think about those who are unable or untrained to use magic, and sympathize with the thousand little hardships that they have to brave every day.

The front door of the women’s dorm thudded.

Then it opened, and Diane, shoulder hurting from the impact, stepped out. She had to be careful now that her will only reached as far as her arm.

She rushed through the lawn towards the medieval wing, where she’d hopefully find Niko. Unfortunately, it was a terrible place for finding anyone; they wasted almost an hour scurrying around the many courtyards, passages, galleries, cloisters, and arcades, before they finally bumped into each other in a narrow cobbled alley under the outer wall.

“Niko! My—”

“Yes! I sensed—”

“We’ve got to—” she looked to the sunny courtyard just off to the side with many people milling around, and dragged him behind a column, a shadowy and forgotten nook between two buildings where the crevices between old stone blocks were all filled with moss.

“Can you actually not do any magic?” he asked. She blew air out of her mouth.

“No.”

“Holy shit, how… So I’m like your conduit now? You can only do magic when I’m near you?”

She grabbed his hands and closed her eyes. She focused for a moment, and scowled.

“No. Worse.”

“How can it possibly—”

“My magic didn’t get channelled through your body in general. It is stuck in your… in the sexual side of you, specifically.” She grabbed his head and pressed her brow against his, in a hopeless effort to reach at her power flowing in him.

“So, you mean… you’ve got to be holding my dick to do magic, or what?”

He was quite startled when she immediately tested this proposition, grabbing his crotch and closing her eyes. She groped around for any connection to her abilities. She found only a faint echo, a hint in the back of her head. She let him go with a sigh.

“No, I need a total connection. Just like we were when it all got tangled up. Completely naked, full penetration, all the works.”

He swore under his breath. They were at a university of magic. They were supposed to be performing it near constantly, in classes, as homework, at practical exams. He pictured Diane explaining to a commission of examiners that in order for her to perform the assigned spell, her friend over here will have to keep his cock inside of her, hopefully that’s not a problem.

“Okay, well, that’s not very convenient. So how can we get your magic back into you for good?”

“I don’t know.”

“What.” Oh, come on. Oh no.

She shuddered, as if shaking off cold water.

“Yes, no, there must be some ritual for that. Let’s go to the library now, not leave until we find it, and fix this mess before—”

“Ehem.”

Surprised, they jumped away from each other. Next to them there was now standing a shortish, owlish man with close-cropped black hair, unusually large round glasses with thick metal rims, and a crisp white robe of one of the magical orders that had been nesting in this wing for centuries.

“I was not aware,” the voice coming out of the man was surprisingly low, “that this institution was allowing such frivolity between its students.”

Shit. Had he seen Diane grab Niko’s privates? Niko spread his arms and stammered an assurance that nothing was happening, just two classmates discussing classwork. The man’s head turned to him, and for an instant his enormous lenses caught a stray sunray, and beamed like limelight.

“An unmarried couple whispering face to face in a secluded corner! A fine behaviour indeed! Is this a university, or is this a dockside brothel? Am I perhaps confused?”

Okay. He’d only seen them talking in private.

But this was Vallnord. Talking in private was already quite improper.

“Look,” Niko ploughed on, “we’re just on our way to class, and…”

“And what class is that?” Niko hesitated. “What are your names, please?”

“Diane! Niko!”

Now all three of them – Niko, Diane, and the man – jumped, startled. There was now yet another new person in the alley. To be honest to them, the newcomer was way below the eye level – a very short woman, with long black hair streaked with grey, a dark complexion, in a professor’s gown, carrying in her hands a wooden box about half her size. And Niko and Diane suddenly breathed with relief, in a mistaken belief that things were going their way.

They’d wasted so much time looking for each other that now they actually *were* about to have a class here. Standing right in front of them was Professor Yohanna Girmay, of the Department of Natural Magic, who taught their Patterns workshop. Everything was entirely normal and excusable.

“Here!” she chirped, shoving the box into Niko’s hands, “help me with this, please! Come on then, don’t want to be late!”

The spectacled mage huffed and strutted away in disappointment.

Professor Girmay was one of those friendly, chatty ones (as evidenced by her shocking habit of addressing students by their first names), and on their way Niko and Diane had to lie to her that they were doing fine and their day was going just great. The box rattled in Niko’s hands – it seemed to be filled with many small objects. He turned it lightly, trying to figure out its contents.

“No, don’t guess,” the professor caught him and laughed. “You’ll ruin today’s surprise!”

And this was when Diane’s relief started turning into alarm.

She was presently walking into a practical magic workshop while all her magic was caught inside her classmate due to a botched sex ritual. But that’s not even the really alarming part yet.

Over the past month, this workshop had been all about discerning, the art of recognizing magical patterns in nature. The students had been tapping into enchanted objects and figuring out what sort of magic they were imbued with. It’s a vague art and very error-prone, and to avoid personal biases it’s best to practice it in pairs.

Before she’d left for Vallnord, Diane had a long talk with her father. He’d sat in his favourite chair by the fireplace, chewing on his pipe or stroking the sharp point of his beard. He’d given her a lot of advice that afternoon, including this: he’d met many influential people during his own time at Vallnord, and these contacts later helped him immensely in his professional career. If she ever noticed an opportunity like that, it was an opportunity worth taking.

She’d gotten one such opportunity in the Patterns class. Her regular discerning partner was Lady Louise Frances Oltean, the heiress to the County of Anvar. For reasons which may already be dawning on anyone who’s ever interacted with South-eastern aristocracy, this was incredibly alarming.

It was idiotic to keep walking to that workshop. She should make up a bad excuse and dart off right now. But then there was Professor Girmay, walking cheerfully along them and now chatting to Niko. Catastrophically, she was a friendly and open person, genuinely concerned about the well-being of her students. Diane, who was a member of her Natural Magic Club, in fact quickly became one of her favourites. There was a real risk that if she failed to appear in class, she would later find Professor Girmay calling in at her room to see if everything was alright. And, what with teaching discerning at a major university, she was an incredible discerner. She could very accurately spot curses or disbalances that were afflicting you with the briefest examination. She’d know. She’d know immediately.

They entered the coolness of an old stone hall, and Diane exchanged glances with Niko. Their best play was to stay around and hope for the best. They greeted the students already gathered before the door, and walked onto the smooth worn flagstones of the classroom. Diane approached her black and shiny desk. The equally black and shiny eyes of the already seated Louise Oltean curtly turned to her. Diane nodded, but with enough length and depth that the nod could conceivably be seen as a bow. Louise’s head dipped graciously, and she adjusted her bangs. Her hair was very straight, and as black and shiny as the items already discussed. If piranhas ever adjusted their bangs, they’d be doing it with exactly the same energy as Louise Oltean.

Diane was aware that Niko sat down right behind her. At least they’d go through this reasonably close.

Professor Girmay talked for a little bit, joked for a little bit, and then started filling the lower portion of the blackboard with notes and drawings. Niko and Diane did their best to act normal. Diane’s hastily grabbed bag contained the wrong notebooks. Niko, who didn’t even have his bag with him, just sat up straight in his chair, committed to nodding sagely whenever the professor said “make sure to write that down,” and miserably pretending that nothing was wrong.

Around them, twenty or so students were scribbling away. In the courtyard, behind the lattice windows of old thick glass, people were going about their business, free. Diane focused on controlling her breath. Any second Professor Girmay could drop the chalk and get them to do something practical; and if that happened, she had no idea what she’d do. Her and Niko’s little sex adventure could very well be exposed right here in front of the entire class.

But a half hour later, their anxiety was beginning to give way to a tentative hope. It seemed like Professor Girmay wanted to spend this particular afternoon to summing up the discerning part of the course. Every point that she made, every digression, every follow-up question from the students – one by one, they were bringing the class closer to a happy end. Only that box, placed by Niko on the professor’s desk, was still sitting there like a bad omen. At one point, as Professor Girmay wandered over to the rearmost window in the classroom, she abruptly stopped talking and blinked as if she suddenly remembered something, or maybe noticed something. But maybe it was just their imagination, because after a few seconds of silence she just went right back to her clarifications.

It was about five minutes before the end of the class, when it was already certain that no practical magic would happen that day, that the box attacked.

“Alright,” Professor Girmay pronounced, clapping her hands clean of chalk. “This concludes the discerning part of the course. Next time we’re starting with tracing. But before that –” She took the box in her hands and leaned with her back against the desk, “– you’re getting an assignment!”

The lid flew open. The inside was tiered and divided into compartments, like a box of chocolates. Twenty necks craned forward. The compartments were filled with small trinkets – painted pebbles, glass beads, metal medallions.

“These are actual, used talismans, from the collections of our museum. You will discern what sort of protective magic is contained within them, and what is it protecting against. This is a good part of your final grade, so take this seriously! Drop by my office if you’re in trouble. You’ll write a short report for our next meeting in three days. Yes, you’ll do it in pairs, of course.”

Louise turned to Diane and opened her mouth, about to speak. In a split second, Diane whipped around.

“Niko,” she said.

“Yes.” For a second, they looked each other in the eyes, trying to figure out what now.

“Niko, you’ve mentioned that you’re getting good results by doing spectral analysis. Shall we do it together, I want to see?”

“Okay, sure,” said Niko, who’d most definitely never mentioned such a thing in his life. At least this was news to Yohan, his study partner, who watched the exchange with raised eyebrows.

Louise sat perfectly still, save for her black shiny eyes darting between Diane and Niko. Then, without any comment, she inclined her head very slightly towards Yohan.

“My good man, we appear to have been abandoned by our partners. Shall we do this assignment together?”

Yohan cringed a little bit.

“Yes. Of course.”

“Excellent.” Louise’s head inclined back. Her eyes had never left Diane.

A small queue of paired students formed in front of Professor Girmay, and each received a single talisman. When she saw Diane approach, she beamed.

“Diane, as a member of the Natural Magic Club, you’ll want something more challenging for extra credit of course.” Diane suppressed a sigh and made herself nod, and it was at this moment that the professor noticed the blank-faced Niko behind her. “Oh, you two are doing this together…? Very well, you’re up for this, Niko?”

Niko closed his eyes. “Yes, sure.”

As Professor Girmay reached into the box, he exhaled through his nose in frustration. Diane looked at him askance. Niko rolled his eyes, indicating that of course she had to be in the Natural Magic Club, too. Diane curled her lip, indicating that how the hell was this her fault. Niko shook his head, indicating that forget it. Diane imperceptibly flicked her hand, indicating that no, she’d like to hear how it was her fault. Niko and knitted his eyebrows and jutted his jaw forward, indicating that yes okay, drop it. At this point Professor Girmay found the talisman she’d been looking for and held it towards them, interrupting the conversation.

It was a large silver medallion, whose awkward and bent metalwork betrayed its early medieval make. Thirteen amber beads – four missing – encircled a coat of arms in the middle, a well-worn rampant griffin.

“This will be difficult, but very fun,” the professor chirped, handing it over to Niko. Niko received it with care, and then he and Diane directed forced smiles at each other.

“See you in the library at five?” he asked.

“Suits me.”

The last students left the classroom. Professor Girmay closed her now-empty box and walked over to the corner, right by the rearmost window near the blackboard, and there she seemed to ponder the thin air in silence for a long while.

*

A self-respecting university can’t skimp on its library. This is the place which receives the most guests; visiting scholars divide their time between poring over texts and taking in the building itself, comparing it to the one at home. A swanky enough library will elevate a school’s prestige. And Vallnord is the most prestigious magical university of them all, no matter what those imbeciles at Torsted or Auring or Nivental think!

There were enormous arched windows crossed with delicate metal latticework. There were marble statues of people in togas aggressively reading from scrolls. There was a rich chestnut glow of bookshelves whose tops were only reachable from wheeled ladders. There was a kaleidoscopic gleam of countless leatherbound tomes. There was the ever-present, sacrosanct silence.

Four floors’ worth of those bookshelves surrounded the vast space of the main reading room; on its floor there were long rows of desks topped with green-shaded brass lamps. Diane was already at one with a small stack of books in front of her when Niko walked in.

“So, how are you doing?” he whispered, taking the seat next to her. Fortunately, this was the one place where you could have a long whispered chat without looking suspicious.

Diane was already calm and collected, which would have been strange in the circumstances – had this been anyone but her. She looked at her hands and lifted her fingers off the desk top.

“It’s really strange. Like a sort of numbness in the back of my head. But I’m fine.”

“So, what do we do?”

“The Patterns class is in three days, in the evening. That gives us a hard time limit to get my magic back in me.” She looked at him. “Unless you think you can crack that talisman alone…?”

“I can’t. See, I figured out why it’s going to be difficult.” He rummaged in his pocket and placed the silver pendant on the desk. “It’s alive, that’s what’s difficult about it.”

“Alive, as in…?”

“There’s a wisp inside.”

Diane clicked her tongue. This was worth Professor Girmay’s extra credit, then. A discerning and a communing job both at once.

And wisps are difficult to commune with. They may be the most common kind of a spectral being, those ever-present little nature spirits, but their sentience is just so strange. They don’t think at all like humans do, if they can even be said to think. I mean, this one here was satisfied to rest in a piece of silver for several hundred years.

“Alright, then. I need to get my magic back two days from now, at the latest. Simple as that.”

“Simple as that.” He half-smiled. “Wish we could wait until it seeped back to you naturally, and meanwhile we’d just have to have sex every time you wanted to cast a spell.”

Her eyebrows moved up a tiny bit. “So, about fifty times per day?”

“I’d do it for you in this trying time.”

“That *would* be the simplest solution.”

As fun as the idea sounded, the unfortunate reality was that in this place full of respectable people, alarm wards, and spying ravens, every session of fucking was a whole operation that usually took days to plan. This emergency work-around was definitely not a thing that was going to happen even once (definitely). They had to stuff Diane’s magic permanently back into Diane, and fast.

At this point they heard quiet steps approaching from behind; and a moment later a librarian, a tall woman with greying hair and kind eyes, stood at their desk.

“Here’s the one you’ve asked about, Diane,” she said, placing another tome on top of Diane’s stack. She then noticed Niko, and smiled. “Oh, hello.”

“Thank you, Ms Marin.” Niko’s eyes followed the librarian all the way to her desk far in the front of the room. He waited for her to sit down before he spoke again.

“So, what books are you looking for? Don’t tell me you actually got your hands on a manual of sex magic?”

“We won’t get this lucky. Those are restricted.”

“You seem to know this librarian lady. Would she let you take a quick peek at the restricted texts?”

Diane took a while to respond. The restricted section, which housed works on all sorts of illicit, forbidden, and straight-up dangerous magic, was housed in a room here somewhere. To do research on those books, you needed approval from the university’s ethics committee. They were certainly not for impressionable undergrads. But the ethics committee could only disapprove of actions that it knew about.

“Maybe she would. I don’t know Ms Marin all that well, we shared some cups of tea here and there… she does seem alright to me.” But then she shook her head, and opened the new book, an old compendium on organic magic. “We don’t need her. Look, many general-purpose old books cover sex magic at least in passing, it would be impossible to censor them all. There should be something in them on accidental entanglement, we can’t be the first people to whom this has happened.”

That much was true. They split the stack and got to work. But as they went from Hodoi’s *An Introduction to Biological Arcana* to Arun’s *New Manual on Magical Examination of the Abdomen*, and from Xanthippa the Elder’s classic *Treatise on the Common Misalignments* to Grau’s *Overview of Magical Physiology*, and as the sky dimmed and both the gas lighting overhead and the green lamps on the desks gradually came to life – it became clear that Vallnord’s guardians of morality had in fact done a good job restricting anything that would go beyond very general information and a dry anatomical sketch or two.

As they left the library and went into the cool evening air, Niko was worried, but Diane just shrugged.

“This was always a bit of a long shot,” she said. “Don’t worry, tomorrow we’ll try a different approach. There’s plenty of material on focusing accidents and arcane tangles.”

Back in her room, she pretended to feel sick and went to bed early, in case Yolanda asked her for any normal, everyday magical assistance. She lay under the covers and contemplated the absence within her. Normally there’s that quickening when mind connects with matter, that little jolt of energy that can be shaped into magic. Diane only felt numbness, like from a nerve that’s gone to sleep.

She should be able to feign sickness and avoid people for the next two days. No matter how disturbing this felt, the situation was salvageable, she told herself. Just got to be careful, and smart.

Niko lay in his bed for a long time that night, looking at the ceiling. This had been a long day – felt like about six months. He couldn’t sleep. He felt Diane’s presence in him, faint and warm. He was worried about their situation and, on top of that, about the pendant.

He grabbed it from the night stand. He at least recognized the worn coat of arms that adorned it – the rampaging crowned griffin was the ancient symbol of Cillia, the mountainous province that had once been a powerful duchy. This talisman could have belonged to its reigning family, centuries ago. He closed his hand around it, and focused.

A wisp’s mind is so strange. Like a river or a weathered rock. Yet as Niko felt the ambiences floating within the talisman, he soon detected something discernible in there, right at the edge of perception, like a forgotten dream…

And like a forgotten dream, it came suddenly in a flash. Another night, a very long time ago. A man in a chain mail and a red cape embroidered with the Cillian griffin, his eyes wide open. More men, peering at a forest down a glen. Moonlight shining in the grass after a recent rain. And then from the forest, an awful howl, humanlike and animal, a sound that made your very blood sting…

Niko snapped out of the vision and breathed out sharply. Alright. He knew what that was. Not a solution yet, but a good start.

He put the pendant away and again tried to sleep. But still it was there, Diane’s magic, a gentle buzz inside, as if part of her was here in his bed with him.

Nearby, his roommate Anton was breathing evenly in his bed, asleep. Niko grunted quietly, lowered his pyjama pants, and helplessly watched himself point straight at the ceiling. His cock was so hard it ached, and there was no way it would just let him sleep while she was clearly so close. With a defeated smile, Niko grabbed a tissue from the nightstand, gripped his shaft, and let himself think about Diane’s smirk.

*

“So, the Dukes of Cillia hunted manticores?” Diane asked, picking another volume from the library shelf.

“At least they met one. The wisp’s memory is clear on that.”

“Interesting.” Both laden with books, they returned to their desk.

“Maybe this pendant protects from demonic magic? That would do against a manticore.”

Diane considered that. “I don’t think so. It’s based on a wisp. Wisps sharpen magic, they don’t dampen it. Like water to an electric current.”

The mystery of the pendant was interesting, but it had to wait. Books on focuses and channelling assembled, the priority of them was now to design their own ritual for disentangling their magic.

But have you ever tried to skip ahead in your magic textbook while at school, just out of curiosity what would you cover by the year’s end? You can kind of expect what happened, then. The technical descriptions were full of terms which required them to take steps back to more basic books, until finally they found some solid ground to stand on in their theoretical metaphysics textbook from this trimester.

That left them with a large pile of material to burn through. While Diane looked resolved, Niko was increasingly anxious.

“Got today, tomorrow, the morning after that at most… what if we don’t make it?”

Diane briefly eyed Ms Marin, who was filing in some card at her desk in the front of the room.

“We’ll make it. We’ve got it under control.” She opened her book with such confidence that he pressed no further.

Fortunately, all the classes that Diane had between then and Patterns could be skipped without too grave consequences, and so she could remain safely tucked away at this desk. They both agreed that Niko should still go to his, if only to avoid drawing attention to the time they were spending together. But while he found the ritual design difficult to begin with, his constant comings and goings ended up putting him completely out of his depth.

By afternoon she claimed that she had a clear idea what they needed to do – a neat little piece of controlled chaos invocation, based on the usual fission process used for crystals, which would briefly invert Niko’s own magical current to have zero covariance with Diane’s. But of course since living things are manifold beings (in the Erle – Rehlis sense), the whole procedure would need to be adapted to account for the inversion of an entire arcanic matrix, rather than the traditional simple crystalline integer.

By now Niko was understanding about as much as Dear Reader just did[1].

Some time already after sunset, Diane lifted herself up from her hill of notes and stretched her hands above her head.

“I should be done tomorrow,” she said. “It’s a simple ritual, just a normal sequence of steps, gestures, and words. Two minutes tops. Then we’ll have the whole night and until next afternoon for the report.”

“As you say,” he replied, pondering her sketches.

His mind was strangely blank as he went back to his dorm under the first stars. So, Diane was on the right track. Good. Very good. He stopped at the front door without quite knowing why. There was a cool wind in the darkening trees. At the boundaries of his mind, Diane’s magic tingled.

Back at his room he sat at his bed and grabbed the pendant. Wouldn’t hurt to look for more hints. Maybe if he focused, he could commune with the wisp again and get another memory.

He closed his eyes… and it came, much faster than the last time. A room, a palatial chamber, people in courtly gowns from centuries ago seated around a table on which a huge map lay unfolded. One of the people, an elderly woman with lively black eyes, was firmly refusing something, and the rest of the nobles were looking at her, taken aback…

This scene was as different from the previous one as it could be – warriors in a damp forest against luminaries in a stately chamber. And yet both shared some clear and present danger that the wisp had been protecting against. What the—

Suddenly though back in the present the bedroom door burst open and Anton was upon Niko, relaying a far newer story and laughing… and half an hour later Niko was already in the cellar room with the billiards tables, a glass of slightly dubious spirit in hand, and engaged in a heated discussion whether Vallnord’s fireball team stood any chance next week against Nivental.

Diane entered her room carefully, found no Yolanda inside, and lay her note-filled bag on her bed. She was tired. Didn’t feel like reviewing the notes at all. Some chamomile tea would be great right now. She grabbed a cup, and then remembered that she had no magic to heat up the water. She slackened, lost. She guessed she had to go to the canteen.

There was already no trace of yesterday’s ritual in the dorm. The hall was alive, and many doors stood open or ajar. She had almost reached the stairs when from one of the open doors a familiar voice rasped at a great volume.

“Diane! Bring your arse over here, we need a fourth for whist!”

Diane swore under her breath and turned her head. Inside – it was a corner room, much larger than the regular ones, despite being a single – at a bare wooden table, three students were seated indeed.

To the first of them belonged both the room and the booming raspy voice. Bea, one year Diane’s senior, stocky and loud and sprouting a huge mess of light curly hair. Diane knew her from the Natural Magic Club, in fact. Bea was a rather bad mage and her personality was entirely unlike Diane’s, but the two had taken an immediate liking to each other.

The second one was Flora, a small and quiet girl from Diane’s year, who nonetheless was an absolute demon at cards.

And the third one was Louise Frances Oltean, her stark black eyes pinned on Diane.

Diane hesitated for just a moment. It was, as a rule, utterly useless to try and resist Bea’s invitations to anything, and she’d already given Louise the cold shoulder one day before… it would be safest to avoid all socializing at present, but one round of whist maybe wouldn’t hurt.

Bea immediately poured her port into a carved crystal glass from a bottle which had been standing ready at her feet. Diane took the glass and pretended to watch Bea shuffle the cards to her left, while actually side-eyeing Louise to her right. Louise, unfortunately, was always hard to read. It was actually funny to sit right between the two – it was like sitting between a particularly stiff block of ice and a particularly foul-mouthed beehive. A difference made even more striking that Louise and Bea (Baroness Beatriz Sophie Wilhelmina ter Hauge-Ogara to you and me) (yes, *those* Ogaras), both belonged to the same social class and were probably distantly related.

The teams were drawn.

“Right, Louise, we’re together!” Bea took a swig of port and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Come on girl, we’re wiping them off the face of the earth!”

Cards were tossed to the players at a great speed. The final one was slammed face-top on the table. Diane pondered her hand, and leaned forward to the edge of her seat.

Bea and Louise did start strong, but Flora was only just warming up – and so, in fact, was Diane. By the ninth hand, to the tune of Bea’s howling laughter and are-you-shitting-mes, they were firmly in the lead. And Diane got too into the game to note the increasing tightness of Louise’s lips, and the growing annoyance with which she flicked her cards.

The last card thus annoyingly flicked was a king of clubs, which Flora immediately followed with an ace.

“Ah, curse your eyes!” Bea, also oblivious to the foul mood directly in front of her, started joking around. “Damn, Louise, they kicked our butts! I need you to focus here!”

Slowly, deliberately, Louise finished her glass.

“Apologies, I am tired,” she said. “I had to spend hours today on a Patterns project with a classmate who is an insufferable boor. Because, guess what, my regular partner had abandoned me.”

Bea laughed, Diane stiffened. Maybe if she didn’t comment, there would be no follow-up?

There was a follow-up.

“And how is your partner, Diane? Intellectually stimulating?”

Diane’s eyes were on Bea shuffling the cards. “He has a good mind for experiments,” she responded.

“Experiments.” Louise now addressed Bea, who finally realised that something was amiss and was looking back and forth between her two friends. “See, Bea, Diane here values experimenting over loyalty. Admittedly a useful trait if you come from a lineage of craftsmen.”

“Louise!” Bea shot back.

The four of them were equal partners in studies, and equal partners at whist, but they all knew that this equality was, in the end, temporary. Some of them were only at Vallnord because being magic-literate was becoming to a well-rounded aristocrat; but if they actually encountered any magic problems in their future leisured lives, they’d simply pay somebody to solve them. And those who would be getting paid had no place snubbing those who would be doing the paying, especially publicly in front of the entire classroom, Louise’s eyes argued as she stared at Bea.

But no class solidarity was found. Put down by Bea’s unforgiving stare, Louise crossed her arms, scowled, and looked away.

Diane’s face set into a perfectly neutral expression as she looked straight ahead over Flora’s shoulder. Bea glanced at her, and then back at Louise.

“Shall we play another round,” she said, her voice low, slow and pointed. Louise exhaled, and relented.

“Let’s.” She fidgeted in her seat. “Diane… would you do the lights?”

Whenever whist got serious in the Vallnord dorms, somebody was sure to do a little bit of photomagic and drive the glow of the gas lamps into the ultraviolet, which made the room dim and the cards phosphorescent.

This was probably a genuine olive branch on Louise’s part. Diane really enjoyed doing this, and always performed the piece of magic with great ceremony. It was probably an olive branch that should be taken – while Louise could be an enormous twat, she did actually have a latent sense which at times made her realise that she’d gone too far.

But in this moment Diane was reminded that she could do no magic; and the sudden fear that it could be discovered at any moment only roused her anger; and besides, Louise had said neither “sorry” nor “please.” Face still completely controlled, Diane turned to her.

“I’m not your monkey,” she said quietly. Then, in the silence that followed, she rose up. “Let’s play some other time. I’ve had a long day, and I’ll also have one tomorrow.” With that, she left the room.

The silence continued for a moment still, and then Bea slammed the deck on the table and leaned violently back.

“Wow, real nice, Louise. Real genteel.” Louise, who had been staring at Diane’s empty chair, snapped back to Bea and opened her mouth—

The argument which then broke out in that room was very picturesque. Because it broke out between two aristocrats, it touched not only on their present conduct, but also on the conduct of their ancestors over the past two hundred years of wars, fox hunts, and cocktail parties. Unfortunately, since it had little to do with this story, I must skip it; let us just spare a thought for poor Flora, caught like a peaceful hamlet between two opposing artillery battalions, and move on.

*

On the sketch pad, a circle of runes took its final shape. Diane put her pencil away and brushed her hair from her face.

“There. I’ve got the basic flow scheme. Now I can figure out the exact motions of the ritual.”

Niko frowned. “And you’re sure this will work?”

“This is how you get out magic that’s gotten tangled in crystals and such. I just need to substitute you for a simple object, the principle is the same. Look.” She pushed into his hands a book which she’d bookmarked, the *Principles of Channelling*. “It’s all there, see?”

The page was in fact bookmarked with a notebook sheet full of Diane’s writing.

“Wow, you really worked this out,” he said.

“I’m good at working things out. I come from a long lineage of craftsmen.”

Niko’s mind was already occupied trying to figure out the magic, so it let this cryptic comment fly by. Diane leaned back and looked around.

The midday sun was filling the library’s reading room. She watched the enormous stately architecture, the flags and coats of arms hanging from the roof above the top-most floor with bookshelves, at the school motto carved in stone above the librarians’ desks. *Knowledge and Virtue*.

Vallnord. Its purpose wasn’t merely to teach magic. The virtues so keenly advertised here included obedience and an unquestioning respect to the order of things. Vallnord’s other purpose was to yoke magic to the service of the Louises of this world. Everyone, even the most laid-back professors, even the nice Ms Marin, worked here to achieve just that.

Was this why it felt so good to hunt for frowned-upon knowledge in old books? To probe the school rules and see where they bent? To free a cute boy’s body from Vallnord’s velvet uniform and take his cock right under everyone’s nose?

She glanced at Niko. His eyes were lowered down on the paper, and there was a slight furrow by his right eyebrow. Yeah, he was absurdly cute. On some holidays they should secretly rent out some secluded vacation house or a mountain lodge, and for a few days non-stop do such depraved things to each other that all respectable society ladies within fifty miles would keep clutching their pearls without knowing why.

Niko lifted his eyes and was a little startled to find Diane’s fixed on him, with a faraway expression on her face.

“Well, I get the gist,” he said.

“Good.” She cracked her knuckles and got back to work.

“So, how can I help now?”

“Um.” She was already engrossed in her circle of runes. “I’ll tell you if I need anything.”

“Okay.” There was a pause. He took the talisman out of his pocket and examined its coat of arms. “I’ll look up some info on this family, then. We’ll pad our report with some historical bullshit.”

“Yeah.” She did not lift her eyes. “Yeah, good idea.”

He dallied among the bookshelves for a while. Some other students were quietly browsing the leather spines with a sense of purpose, like herons watching the water. He got a history of Cillia, in a sumptuous gilded red cover, and walked back to the central floor. At the desks, diligent students were seated with a sense of purpose, Diane foremost among them. Around the central floor, large wooden lecterns were placed to serve as alternative work stations; the students standing behind them had the most sense of purpose of all. He tapped his fingers on the book uncertainly.

*[continued below]*

Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/rxcsoz/arcane_tangle_ch_2_mf_fantasy_magic_university