“I too have been pressed beyond the limits of all endurance and forbearance. Driven unto  the point of total breakdown, bereft of all strength and will. It is from times such as these that an important lesson can be learned however: value your laziness. It is not a moral failing, it is the mind’s stalwart protection against the depredations thrown at the scant resources available to us.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame after taking out the garbage.

While laying on the floor as a featureless blob of goo made for a great disguise, it wasn’t a perfect one. With as much speed as they’d fled the prison, the people who were supposed to be guarding the Reaving Beasts returned and were put to work cleaning up the wreckage of the cells and the adjoining rooms. I was lucky beyond words that the people I’d freed had gone on as complete a rampage as they had. I was even luckier than Mellina and Yarrin came looking for me when I didn’t exit the prison in anything like a reasonable amount of time.

“She’s right here,” Yarrin’s ghostly voice whispered less than a foot from where I was doing my best impression of nothing whatsoever.

“I can feel her with my magic but I can’t see her,” Mellina said. 

That made me feel a little better. If I was hidden from someone that close to me then I wasn’t in as much danger as I thought yet.

Mellina and Yarrin, on the other hand, were in “that much” danger though. The space in the prison was limited enough that a worker would eventually bump into them and then all the anti-magic effects in the world were certain to come popping out of the woodwork.

Since it had been a lengthy five whole minutes from when Idrina was taken away I’d…well I really hadn’t been able to recover much strength at all, but some of my usual magic reserves were refilling. Enough that I was able to manage the change back to my human form. In theory something smaller, like a mouse would have taken less energy, but what I was primarily lacking was control and focus and my human form was by far the easiest to manage in that regards. It was just so comfy and natural and sliding back into knocked a few stones off the mountain of exhaustion I was buried under.

What the transformation didn’t fix, and what I didn’t seem to have the energy, focus, or control for however was fixing my vision.

“Here,” I whispered, once I’d finished morphing to a puddle of girl at their feet rather than just a puddle.

“Grab that sheet,” Mellina said. “No one will notice it’s missing.”

I was momentarily afraid that was something I was expected to do, but a moment later I felt Yarrin wrapping a course canvas sheet around me. 

“Clothes,” I managed to say, proud of myself for forming the thought that we shouldn’t leave the clothes I’d been wearing behind since they would make for rather incriminating evidence.

“I’ve got those too,” Yarrin said. 

“Can you walk?” Mellina asked, even though it sounded like she knew the answer already.

“Yeah,” I lied.

I don’t think it was unreasonable to expect my legs to perform their assigned duty. They hadn’t been the body parts that had been torn apart repeatedly by opening and clearing rifts. In the grand scheme of things they really had very little to complain about at all.

The counterargument they proposed went something like this: “Oww. You. Are. Stepping On Broken Glass!”

As counterarguments went it was a well reasoned and compelling one. 

“Help her,” Mellina said and I felt my right arm – wow it was nice to have an intact right arm again – being supported by Yarrin’s shoulder. 

Leaving prison was less fun than it had been a few days prior and this time I didn’t get to punch a jailer in the face. On the other hand I got to make sure that this prison wasn’t going to be misused again for a while and left behind a storm of chaos which gave me a warm little glow inside, so there were some upsides.

 Mellina didn’t drop the shadow cloak from us until I’d had a chance to change back into my clothes, by which point Ilyan and Narla had managed to evade their pursuers and circle back to join us.

“So were you able to bust out the Reaving Beasts?” Ilyan asked.

“It seemed like there was plenty of commotion at least,” Narla said.

“And what was up with my sister?” Ilyan asked.

“Give her a moment,” Mellina said. “She’s not in good shape.”

“We’ll need to be careful about going to the healers,” Narla said. “They’ll be watching for anyone who got hurt since we’re all supposed to be safe at lunch.”

“I don’t need a healer,” I said. “My body’s fine.”

“Is it?” Mellina asked.

I felt a slight waft of air in front of my face and smelled her move her hand in front of me.

“Oh, well, apart from my eyes I guess,” I said. “Caught a slight case of blindness.”

“Doing what?” Narla asked.

“You really don’t want to know,” I said. “It was stupid even for me.”

“What happened with the Reaving Beasts? Did they do this to you? Or was it my sister?” Ilyan asked, an amusingly protective tone in his voice.

“Idrina didn’t do this,” I said. “She didn’t do anything wrong at all.”

Mellina gave a single snort which managed to convey a world of disbelief without putting any of it into words.

“We had a discussion,” I said. “With our fists. She  was very polite about it though.”

I mean, she was, but I could hear how that sounded too.

“The Reaving Beasts didn’t do this to me either. This was all my own doing,” I added, hurrying past any further discussion of how Idrina and I resolved our impasse.

“Why?” Ilyan asked.

It wasn’t much of a question, but it was a good one.

“I needed a lot more of my magic than I normally use,” I said. “Turns out it came with a price tag.”

“Will you get better?” Narla asked.

“Don’t know. This has never happened before.” There wasn’t any reason to lie to them, and being blind wasn’t the end of the world for me. I wasn’t used to relying on only my other senses, but I could, at least for a while.

“If it’s backlash, the effects should fade,” Yarrin said. “It’s a strange backlash though since your magic doesn’t seem to be focused on manipulating light?”

“Backlashes can mess you up with some really strange effects though,” Narla said. “I had a cousin with water magic who backlashed himself into being randomly intangible to metal for a couple days.”

I didn’t think my blindness was the result of a backlash – I hadn’t lost control of my magic during the whole grueling process of sending the prisoners back home – but explaining that seemed like a lengthy endeavor.

“We should go back home and have Pastries or someone make us a quick lunch,” I said. “We’ll need that as an excuse for where we were.”

Food was a sentiment everyone could get behind and so we set off, once again hidden by one of Mellina’s shadow cloaks so that no one would notice exactly when we went back to Doxle’s place.

With the Academy grounds being smooth and level and a crowd of four other people to navigate by, I didn’t think it’d be hard to manage the journey home. Mellina’s shadows binding me into my form even felt comfortable for a change since they allowed me to relax a bit and not worry that my less-than-entirely-stable-at-the-moment magic would warp me into an odd shape if I didn’t pay attention to it.

When I tripped regardless of all that though Narla caught me and whisked me up into her arms.

I opened my mouth to protest that I was fine but Narla jiggled me a bit to interrupt that  idiocy.

“Why don’t you take a break. I think maybe you’ve done enough for a little bit, okay.” She was most definitely not asking for a reply there or permission. She probably should have asked, but as embarrassing as it was to be carried like a baby, I couldn’t argue that she kind of had a point.

Also that let me take my attention away from keeping myself upright and onto the important things in life, like worrying!

“Your sister got arrested,” I said, assuming people would know I was talking to Ilyan. “Falsely arrested.” I amended to make sure they knew how wrong it was. It was the height of eloquence. Or the best I could manage. One of those two.

Yeah, rocking back in forth in Narla’s arms was not helping me stave off the exhaustion I was feeling.

“Are you sure?” Ilyan asked.

“Yeah. Heard ‘em put the cuffs on her,” I said. I didn’t like that sound. I didn’t like magic suppressing anything, but especially not shackles. Had enough of that in prison.

With a groan I tried to force myself back to wakefulness. Letting my thoughts go all sleep-loopy was not going to help anyone, and Idrina almost certainly needed our help.

“She’ll be fine,” Ilyan said. “She’s never broken a rule in her life. The worst they’re going to do is throw a disapproving glance at her before they drop some new award at her feet.”

“They think she let all the prisoners out though,” I said.

“Why would she have gone back if she did that?” Narla asked.

“They’ll invent some reason,” Yarrin said. 

“If they propose something dreadful, we could help her escape from it,” Mellina suggested. “If it’s bad enough you might be able to talk her into joining House Riverbond.”

Ilyan laughed.

“Sorry. Have you met my sister though? The last time I talked her into anything was, uh, never. She knows everything that’s expected of her and that is exactly what she does. All the time. No matter what.”

Which, I noticed, wasn’t actually true.

By rights, Idrina shouldn’t have fought me, and certainly not fairly. Heck she took a handicap into our fight with the distraction of the spear fan she was casting. If she’d been following the rules, she would have calmly left (or fought through us) and then gone to inform the relevant authorities. 

Fighting me herself might have merely been an act of hubris, but the fact that she covered for me afterwards? That was not at all the behavior of someone who follows all the rules all the time.

And I’d lain there like a blob while they dragged her away?

“I can stand,” I said a spark of anger pushing my fatigue away.

“Good. Cause we’re here,” Narla said and dropped me gently (and on my feet) in front of the door to Doxle’s home.

Rather than one of the mist women, Doxle himself was there to greet us.

“Returned for lunch?” he asked. “Your repast awaits you in the dining room.”

I raised a hand slightly to ask how he could possibly have known we’d be coming back when no mention had been made of returning to our dorms as being an allowed possibility but decided not to bother. Food was waiting and I really didn’t need to know why, just that I could smell at least twelve different dishes and each one promised to be more delicious than the last.

 “If I could have a moment of your time Lady Kati,” Doxle said as we all filed in.

I suppressed a groan. A ‘word’ meant no food right away. Also I had a guess what he wanted to talk about and I wasn’t in the mood to be scolded, even if what I’d done was worth it.

Letting my shoulders and head slump, I gestured for the others to go enjoy the wonderful food, while I got to sit through a lecture and they, fast friends and trusted companions that they were, scampered off without a second look backwards.

Doxle led me into a study that we’d used before and I plopped into the chair that I’d plopped into the last time we’d been in the room.

“I’d like to ask what you have to say for yourself,” Doxle began, seeming terribly, terribly severe.

And then he dropped into the chair opposite mine with a hugely delighted smile on his face and added, “but first I must congratulate you. That was magnificent. I really could not be more proud of you!”