That strange new kid

It was another day at Pyridekk much like any other day, except today there was something different and… strange. Possibly even, concerning.

Wilhelmina drew her hooves down the stone wall, feeling for divets, cracks, differences in composition. Those were all things good to know before she started building a spell. It was easier to get a feel for this in her bipedal primal form, since it had fingers and greater height, so that was the form she usually worked in.

Renfinus wanted a semi-decorated shelf made into this wall and railings where there were stairs.

A bit of crumbly stone came off the wall and she rolled it between her fingers, testing how brittle it was. It smelled musky, wet. Small grains came off as she rolled it. Not great.

Just the foundation was what Wil was in charge of. Blocking things out, removing weak components, making it stable. Better ground mages would take care of the rest.

As she looked at the expanse of rock infront of her, mottled with moss and cracks and a mixture of compositions, her energy seemed to drift out of her, like a balloon she’d she’d accidentally let the string go of. To say the least she was feeling her 4 hours of sleep. The task ahead of her made that weight of exhaustion pulling down at her shoulders feel even heavier. It would be nice to work on some more decorative bits sometimes… but she wasn’t good enough at that yet, so it almost always foundational work like this.

Fishing out some chalk from her bag on the ground, she started to mark some sigils onto the wall. The pink chalk made a pleasant scratching sound as it met the stone.

A combination of spoken and written spells worked best for her. Really good mages could work with only spoken spells but… that required much more concentration and control than Wilhelmina liked. Or maybe was even capable of. Though she did try her damndest, sometimes, since her instructors worked primarily spoken-only.

As she scratched out another angular sigil she felt a chill rush down her spine.

Someone was watching her.

Chalk half-raised, she turned.

Oh, there was the new guy. A brown-furred striped keyhorn. Before Wil could so much as ask why are you staring at me or maybe can I help you, the scraggly furred creature was speaking.

Not only speaking, but trotting forward in a bundle of energy and noise that had Wil instinctively stiffening.

“Hey, uh- OH are you doing spellwork, why’s the chalk in different colors?”

“Um.” Wilhelmina glanced at her sigils. “I make the major sigils a different color from the accessory, or erm, modifying ones to keep them straight.”

The major sigils, larger and more elaborate were in pink. The accessory, a few dots or altering marks to the major sigils, in yellow.

“Oh, cool!” The keyhorn bounced on her feet, she seemed really focused on one sigil near the ceiling. Though she was smiling there was something… odd about it Wil couldn’t figure out. “Does placement matter?”

Wilhelmina’s fur was fluffing up, it was weird to have her spellwork picked apart by a creature her own age. Or a creature her own age who wasn’t Boris. Boris didn’t count. Even if the keyhorn seemed more genuinely interested than critical, Wil’s mane-fur was starting to clot with sweat.

“Kinda,” Wil said. “Depends on what I’m doing. For this it doesn’t matter that much.”

“Okay, you should put it down here then.” The keyhorn slapped her paw on the wall where she meant. “I think it would look a lot better if it were down here, lot more aesthetically pleasing, yeah?”

Wilhelmina blinked at her. After the spell was done she would erase the chalk, that’s usually what creatures did for these kind of spells? But this creature was new… maybe she hadn’t learned a lot about magic yet?

A sleep-deprivation headache was beginning to pulse behind her eyes, and Wil decided she did not care enough to question it. Less in an apathetic way, and more that there was probably a real reason this keyhorn wanted it there, and it was no trouble for her to move it.

 “Sure,” she said, erasing the sigil and redrawing it where the keyhorn had indicated.

The keyhorn clapped, looking satisfied, “See, looks much better that way!” Her gaze flicked back and forth between the new sigil and where it was before, then nodded. “Yep, so much better.” She turned to Wil, “What’s your name by the way, I’m Hyun.”

Oh, Hyun. Wilhelmina froze. She hadn’t realized it was Hyun, that Hyun. It’d only been a week or so since the creature came to Pyridekk and even she had already overheard stories… She  wasn’t one for gossip, but creatures talked loud, and Wil could often disappear into the background.

She wondered if giving her name to Hyun would be a mistake.

“It’s Wilhelmina.” Belatedly, after feeling a bit bad for possibly coming off as cold, she added, “It’s nice to meet you, Hyun.” There weren’t a lot of teenagers at Pyridekk, the atmosphere was jarring when Wil first joined, at least. Maybe that was why creatures were talking about Hyun?

Even as she thought that, it felt more like trying to convince herself. Gossip was always exaggerated, but there was an energy about Hyun that made Wilhelmina’s backfur prickle. She had learned to trust those kind of feelings, her gut feelings about creatures.

Then Hyun grinned brightly, as though Wil had made her entire day, and Wil’s stomach twisted.

“You too! Anyways I’ll let you get back to all this, bye!” With a wave, Hyun scurried off before Wil could get in another word.

She stood still for a moment, just holding her chalk and thinking. The chalk felt slimy in her clamy palms.

Had she just made a mistake? Would Hyun seek her out again? Why had Hyun really wanted her to move the sigil? Surely not because it was more aesthetically pleasing…

Her thoughts got interrupted as a yawn pulled at her mouth.

Okay… she’d just finish this spell and go eat her lunch. Nothing to do about it now.

After finishing her work, getting lunch, working some more, and then finally being done for the day, she met up with Boris.

He dragged her (both tails wrapped around her legs) out to one of the ledges where they could see the sunset. He’d been wanting to show her this for a while, but she’d been too tired lately for it.

She was still too tired.

With dry, sleepy-heavy eyes, she squinted at the fiery oranges and reds reflected on the ocean. A cluster of bead-wings flew over the clouds, close enough that the silhouettes of their round, segmented bodies and triangular heads could still be distinguished.

“See, isn’t it pretty,” Boris lightly slapped her shoulder, which jolted her eyes wider for a moment. Then as he looked at her, he huffed, “Oh, you’re barely awake.”

Wil grumbled, “… sorry.” Her vision became bleary as she blinked, the colors all blurring together in a way that was a little dizzying “It is pretty.”

He snickered, “Why’d you say that like a question?”

She hummed, not being able to come up with a better response. Her brain had long become mush, but having mush-brain around Boris wasn’t an issue so it was okay.

A trilling noise escaped her as Boris started pushing at her with a sigh. “Come on, let’s get back inside, you’re about to crash.”

“Noooo,” she whined. And unfortunately for him, she was much heavier than him and not keen on moving just yet. “I’m fine sitting.”

Boris stopped pushing at her for a moment. Then said, deadpan, “Your eyes are fully closed, Wil.”

A cool, salty breeze pulled at her fur. It carried with it the whistling calls of beadwings.

 “I like sitting with you.” In the distance, waves crashed against the coast, a lulling drone of sound that made Wil instinctively relax. “And the breeze is nice.”

Sometimes she and Boris didn’t see eachother until the end of day. Occasionally, they were assigned to tasks in the same area, but Wil was a ground-mage in training and Boris more of an errand-boy, so they usually didn’t have time to talk anyways. It was nice just to sit with him.

Wil heard Boris’s tails thumping against the dirt and smiled. He always did that when happy.

“Fine,” Boris said, “But if you fall asleep on me I am not carrying you back, I cannot carry you back. You realize you’re too big for me to carry anymore, it absolutely, positively won’t work.”

“Maybe you’re just small.”

“No,” Boris scoffed “I am of perfectly average size,” and headbutted her side with his snout. Being weird and semi-boneless as he was, it didn’t do much, and Wilhelmina only chuckled.

That keyhorn was also small. Though a bit larger than Boris, Wil had a feeling she seemed much bigger than she actually was because of her fluff.

“What do you think of Hyun,” she asked.

“Hyun?” He hummed, tone shifting into something more serious, contemplative. “To be honest I haven’t really spoken to her. She is peculiar, that’s no doubt, but…”

Wil opened her eyes, though it was an effort, and they felt grossly sleep-crusted. She finished his sentence, “She’s nice, I think.”

Nicer than how other creatures talked about her.

By the look in his eye, she thought Boris understood what she meant.

“Is she?”

“Mm-hmm, I talked with her a bit today. She’s talkative like you, but even more, somehow. Like the words just,” Wil made an explosion motion with her hands, “came out of her, so fast.”

Boris squinted at her, “Now I can’t tell whether you’re insulting me or not.”

Wil glared at him, and he held up his paws. She knew that he knew that wasn’t what she meant.

“Maybe I’ll try striking up a conversation next time I see her then,” he said.

A soft smile slipped onto her face. She didn’t think he would have to try very hard.

“Though,” he added, eyestalks swiveling to focus pointedly on her. “she already has some wild rumors going around about her, which I’m not positive you’ve heard since you do live under a rock.”

She frowned, ear twitching at the accusation, “I’ve heard some…”

“So you know she was invited into the clan by Kir Brutus specifically? Personally? Just saying, that doesn’t happen to a nobody.” He waggled his fingers in a sort of anxious emphasis.

Oh. Her eyes widened. Wil had not heard that. Kir Brutus? Really?

To others this may have been a greater shock, may have made them look at Hyun much differently going forward, but Wilhelmina didn’t care much for stuff like that.

“No, I hadn’t heard that. Maybe she has some good magic potential then. Or combat potential?” Enough good about her to catch Kir Brutus’s attention, at least. Maybe she even knew more about sigils than Wil and that’s why she told her to move her sigil earlier. “Maybe I’ll ask her how she even met Kir Brutus, that has to be a story.”

“Ah, just.” Boris’s voice sounded tight. “Maybe, don’t? You know, creatures like you and me,” he pointed to himself and poked Wil, “We shouldn’t get mixed up with beastguard things.”

Wil tilted her head until her ear flopped over her eye. “What do you mean? We’re on the beastguard.”

“Yeah but-“ he grumbled, his fur frizzing up, “stuff with the Kir, or- or Doh Chrrris,  that’s serious stuff! And it would be seriously bad to get mixed up with, erm- any drama of that sort, wouldn’t you say? Just, be careful, okay? For little ole me.”

Oh. Boris was worried after her. It made a little warm tumble happen in her chest.

But, she didn’t think simply talking with Hyun warranted that much worry, even if Boris was a certified worrywart. “I’ll be careful, don’t worry,” she said.

Though predictable, Boris’s fur still looked frazzled. Wil’s ears drooped, her words didn’t seem to have done much to ease his anxieties.

Not knowing what else to do, she patted his head consolingly.

As she did so, one of his eyestalks turned to look at her hand. He scoffed, eyestalks perking all the way up, “Please I’m fine, Wil.”

She gave him too extra pats even so, and he didn’t protest beyond his eyestalks scrunching slightly smaller. And after enjoying the view for a little longer, they both headed back inside.