"Oh, Mercy, there you are."
Mercury stumbled back. She had been so lost in thought that she almost hadn't seen Raoul until she was inches from knocking into him, sitting at the dinner table and looking up at her with curious eyes. "'Sup?"
She shrugged and smiled, placing down her tray of food and throwing down her bag as she sat next to Raoul, starting to shovel food into her mouth like she hadn't eaten in weeks. Over all the trouble she had completely forgotten how hungry she was until now.
"Where you been?" Raoul asked between two mouthfuls of food. "You missed enchantment class. Pretty cool stuff, easy though." He grinned smugly. "I got to show off again."
Mercury smiled, secretly relieved to have missed the class. No matter what Raoul said, there was no way a practical magic class would have gone over without further drama, and at the moment she really needed to lay low or she might end up in detention or suspended. She had ruined her reputation enough for today. To say nothing of the fact that she still had no idea how any of her magic worked.
"I got sent to the principal," she explained, taking a momentary break from shoveling down her food.
Raoul swallowed his mouthful with a giant gulp. "Dude, you what?"
Mercury laughed and explained everything that had happened in the principal's office, from the not-scolding to the reveal that Blake was another illusionist and the set of instructions he had given her for damage control. Her smile faded and faded as she spoke, and when she finished all that was left of it was a weak, unhappy attempt at a grin.
"I mean," she added, "that sounds pretty impossible, right? It's not like I can just turn it off or something, that'd be nice..." She tried to laugh, but it sounded sad even in her own ears. "But I mean, if he says it works..."
Raoul stared at his mug, forming patterns in the surface of his cocoa, a slight frown on his face. "That's rough."
"Yeah..."
Mercury resumed eating. Her food had cooled down significantly, but she was hungry enough not to care, and it definitely gave her an excuse not to answer. Next to her Raoul did the same, and they kept on munching in silence until they had both cleared their plates.
Then Raoul looked up, a glint of renewed hope in his eyes. "But you know what, Mercy?" he said. "I think you can do it."
Mercury shrugged. "I have to."
"I'm serious. I mean, you've done cool impossible stuff before, right?" He counted it on his fingers. "Like the thief you caught on that rail thingy..."
He still hasn't remembered the word, Mercury thought. "But I wouldn't have made it if you hadn't stepped in."
"...the time you got here through the Otherworld..."
"That was luck."
"...the water bird earlier..."
"That was an accident!"
"Who cares." Raoul looked unfazed. "You got a lot of luck and a lot of guts. Yeah, you do," he insisted as Mercury raised her hands in protest. "You're gonna make it. I mean, you're confused and stuff but you're not really gonna give up, right?"
He was right, Mercury realized. She had no intentions of giving up. Principal Blake had tasked her with this, so she would find a solution, or at least keep trying until she either found one or had to admit it was impossible. Everything else would mean disappointing one of the few people in here who had faith in her, and she couldn't let that happen no matter what.
But first of all she had some serious reading up to do. Catching up on the basics of magical theory and a full hour of missed enchantment wouldn't do itself.
~ ~ ~
Georgiana let a hand slide over the rows and rows of books, inhaling the scent of old paper, lovingly caressing the rough, age-worn leather. Yes, she thought. This was it. This was the reason she had come here, to this very school...to this very library.
As a child she might have squealed with joy at this beauty, this vast, irreplaceable treasure of knowledge, thousands and thousands of pages filled with things she had yet to know, wisdom she had yet to understand. As a child she had always dreamed of coming here one day and reading her way through everything in this building, sitting somewhere between the shelves, hidden from nosy people who might interrupt her. It was the same way she had spent her childhood at home, except that the library of her guardian's house was nothing compared to this place, and she had long read everything that could be found in it. This, however...this was more than an ordinary human could read in a lifetime.
A true paradise.
Behind her a set of footsteps passed by and disappeared in the distance, and Georgiana snapped out of her trance. She wasn't alone here, she remembered. This place was accessible to everyone in the school...including the people who shouldn't be here.
A flash of anger shot through her. All this knowledge, all this wisdom, scraped together from countless centuries of magic, rescued and hidden from the persecution and book-burnings and witch hunts of the Light Mages as they attempted to destroy everything the Dark Mages ever knew. This was such a small part, such a tiny fraction compared to what had been lost. And now the very descendants of the people who had thrown the Dark Mages centuries back and forced them to rebuild their knowledge from scratch should have access to these books? It was mockery.
Maybe not just access, even.
If all the theories and suspicions she had read were right, all those theories and suspicions that sounded so much more plausible than anything the official sources would tell, then they were here to destroy that knowledge too.
But this time they wouldn't get a single page. This time they wouldn't lay a hand on so much as an old bookmark forgotten in the books. She would ensure that herself.
But now wasn't the time to think of that, she told herself as she continued down the rows of books, gazing lovingly at old covers and foreign titles. She had come here to read. There was no time to waste on traitors who were trying to push their way into places that should be safe from people like them.
Where should she start, she wondered? There was so much here that it was impossible to choose.
Lost in thought, she rounded a corner...and stumbled back as if she had run into an invisible wall.
That girl...
"Mercury," she said to the figure sitting behind one of the desks, huddled over a worn-out textbook.
Mercury jumped in her chair and nearly dropped her book, startled. With a quiet yelp she spun around to stare back at Georgiana with wide eyes that turned horrified as soon as she realized who was standing in front of her, horrified and almost guilty.
"Georgiana!" she stuttered out, shuffling back in her chair and straightening, her entire body tensing up with sudden nervousness. "I–I was just–"
"Trying to decide which books you want to burn first, are you?" Georgiana stepped closer, cold, venomous hatred creeping throughout her body as her glare turned to stone. The very person she could never allow to be here, the enemy inside her sanctuary... "Or perhaps," she added maliciously, "you would prefer to find out how to burn us at the stake?"
Horror flashed through Mercury's eyes, then anger, the telltale anger of someone who had been caught red-handed at a crime. "Wha–?" She gave her head a violent shake. "I'm not trying to start a witch hunt!"
Georgiana flinched at the word, a new wave of fury shooting through her chest.
"Do not say that word," she hissed through gritted teeth.
Mercury blinked up at her in seeming incomprehension. She was a good actress when she tried to be, Georgiana had to give her that. Or maybe it was yet another one of her monstrous illusions. Georgiana didn't care. She knew a liar when she saw one, and this one was sitting right in front of her.
"I told you," she said, "do not ever say the word witch again if you value your life. Or are you already beyond pretending not to be associated with the bastards who called us witches and witchers to make the common people hunt us down and burn us one by one?"
Mercury stared at her for a very long moment, processing the information. Her eyes went wider and wider. "Wait, so those wi– I mean, the...the...hunts from the history textbooks...they were started by–"
"Your kind," Georgiana answered flatly. "You have no right to say that word unless you are one of us. We have heard it enough from you."
Mercury's eyes flashed, but she didn't say anything. She simply looked back down at the book she had been studying, trying to focus on the text.
Georgiana observed her from the side, still seething with disdain but no longer filled to the brim with fury, half wondering if she should really throw her out or leave her be after all. It might be a masquerade, a cheap pretense, but the way Mercury looked right now, poring over the book and jotting down important points in a quick, scribbly handwriting...she looked almost normal.
Well, she supposed that as long as she kept an eye on her and made sure she wasn't up to anything extraordinary, she might as well leave her alone.
~ ~ ~
Mercury stared at her notes, then at the pages of the textbook, then back at her notes. She had no idea how long she'd been sitting here. It must have been ages. And still she had no idea if she had learned a single thing.
Her hand hurt. So did her head. She had been staring at the same sentence of the textbook for at least twenty minutes without comprehending a singe word. Her thoughts kept drifting off, sometimes to Blake's advice, sometimes to Raoul, sometimes to the conversation she'd had with Georgiana.
It was weird, but for a short moment she had felt something akin to understanding for Georgiana's anger, even if she still thought she was wrong. For a moment, a flash, barely more than a second, Georgiana's emotions had felt almost human.
She had known that the Light Mages had hunted and killed Dark Mages. But this was bigger. She had heard about the witch hunts. The people who had died there hadn't just been a few hundred, or even a few thousand. What the Light Mages had done was shamelessly abuse and manipulate the fears of the people to create a giant mass murder– no, a genocide.
What else had they done? What else were the Light Mages guilty of...her own ancestors?
Only one way to know. Only one way to stop stumbling into traps and accidentally hurt the people who had already suffered enough.
With a sigh she put down her pencil, stood up, and went towards the history aisle.
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