The Cloister, the Church of the Moon
She stared down at the floor as he began to cast; with a little jolt, she noticed that he’d amended the spell to cast it the way she had done it, to affect a larger area. Madeleine swallowed, trembling, and took a deep breath. He asked if he should drop the pebble, and she glanced over at him.
Madeleine took another breath, and began to cast, beginning with the invocation and moving on to her request of the mona. Her voice quivered midway through, and she lost track of the spell; she didn’t stop, finishing the words, but the gathering quantitative mona around her seemed to fizzle out.
Madeleine’s lips trembled; a sharp, sudden wave of blue washed out from her, and she took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I’m sure an awful partner,” she told Orthosophos, miserable; she fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief and rubbed at her eyes with it, taking a deep breath. “I know what – what I did wrong, that time. I’ll… I’ll just – I’ll try once more, if you can hold it."
Madeleine’s lower lip was trembling now; a few tears spilled down her cheeks. Maybe she wasn’t ready to come back full time to classes, she thought, miserably. But she had missed them so much – she’d missed dancing, mostly, but casting too; doing classwork from bed wasn’t the same as going to lectures and being around other people, even if they hated her for things which weren’t her fault, not really.
Sometimes it felt like the mona hated her too.
Madeleine took a deep, steadying breath. The air around her was still hazed softly blue, the blueshift of her field washing quietly out through the pale lamplight of the cloister room. She took another deep breath, and didn’t try to dampen her field or pull the feelings back into her chest. She straightened up, like she would have to dance, her chin lifted and the long line of her back straight.
Madeleine began to cast once more. One last time, she promised herself, miserably; like trying a new jump or a move en pointe. One last time, and if she fell again, that wasn’t an excuse to give up, was it? She didn’t give up on dancing, even when her legs and arms hurt and she was bruised all over from falling, even when she couldn’t do it as she had before. It would come back, her instructors had promised, even when she’d cried.
Madeleine chanted, steadily, through the blue haze around her. Her gaze was fixed on the pebble in the other student’s hands. This time, she curled the spell and she felt it take hold, the quantitative mona in the air around her shifting softly as the request washed through them.
“Drop it!” Madeleine gasped, her eyes wide, suddenly unsure how long it would hold.
He did; Madeleine watched, intently, as it fell to the ground. The number washed into her mind, and she hurriedly reached for the paper, writing it; it was two thirds of the measurement Orthosophos had taken before.
Madeleine sniffled; the blueshift was draining from her field, and if there were tears on her cheeks, she didn’t seem to mind. “It worked,” Madeleine said, shyly, glancing down at the paper and then up at the other student, a trembling little smile coming back to her lips. She offered him the notebook, taking another deep breath.