Chapter Text
Coco thinks, holding Tetia’s hand in the wet, damp, darkness of the cave, looking at the two strangers lost with them, that she and her fellow apprentices might maybe, maybe, end up in some amount of trouble.
Few clock marks earlier,
Richeh was a few steps ahead of them holding Agott’s hand in her right palm and her beacon spell in her left, squarely opposite to how Coco was. The dripping of the stalagmites was like a metronome, counting down the seconds until something happened, something predictably terrifying. Tetia sneezed.
“Bless you,” Coco whispered, and all at once wondered why she was whispering when it seemed, plainly, that they were alone in the black. The cave dripped again. The cold breeze and damp atmosphere was probably the cause of Tetia’s illness. Tetia thanked her, sniffing. Then she groaned,
“Agott,” she started, “how long do you think it’s been? Will Master come looking for us soon or—or should we start to make a camp or something?”
“Neither,” Agott replied swiftly. She was always so assured, Coco’d found, it was very admirable. It made her seem older, just a bit. More mature. “We’ll find our own way out.” Richeh sighed, as she had been since they’d found themselves—wherever it was that they were.
It had been sunny that day, and the girls had begged Master Quifrey to allow them to have a picnic. It had rained near all week and this was the first bout of sunshine Coco had seen in what felt like ages. They all pleaded, and pleaded and Richeh even persuaded Agott to pull as cute a face as she could! He’d relented, as expected, and told them to be careful—this was especially because, he’d said, he couldn’t supervise this time. Something had come up with one of Master Olruggio’s commissions and their teacher’s presence was needed but, he reassured them, he trusted they would stay safe and not stray too far from the Atelier. They’d really, honestly, tried to stay close but when a sudden gust of wind blew Richeh’s pointed cap off her head, it was much too fun to not make a game of seeing who could catch it fastest.
It was sudden, when the ground opened up and swallowed Tetia and Agott. It was even more sudden when Coco slipped after them and Richeh, trying to hold her up, was pulled in after her. The glyphs on their Sylph shoes had been smudged beyond quick repair and, more worryingly, the hole had closed up over their heads.
“It must be the Brimmed Caps,” muttered Agott, “I—this is just our luck.” Coco had to agree.
Now, they were in a cave, moving ever forward. The darkness was abated somewhat by the glow of their beacon seals, Coco’s lighting the right side of the cave while Richeh’s lit up the left, and Tetia and Agott held their pens in their hands. All this to say, the mood was not quite as light as it had been just—minutes? hours?— before.
Tetia sneezed again. As Coco opened her mouth to say ‘Bless you’ again, there was a faint noise in the distance.
Clearly, they were not alone.
They all held very still. Agott turned to them and held her finger to her lips. She’d let go of Richeh’s hand and had some seal at the ready. The dripping sound continued, breaking up the silence. Coco refused to shiver. Again, a now louder but still faint sound rose deeper in the cave. Whatever it was seemed to be nearing them.
Coco pointed forward and titled her head as if to ask if they should keep moving forwards. Agott hesitated. Tetia nodded. After a moment, Richeh did too, quite slowly. They were in favour, it seemed.
As the wind blew, their beacons threw long and lurid shadows onto the cave walls, shadows that looked like grotesque perversions of people and, Coco thought, these spectres appeared sort of how the gilded people of Romonon had appeared as they melted under the heat of Master Olruggio’s Snugstone.
The sound became ever clearer, but the knowledge that another person was in the cave running at a measured pace in their direction wasn’t all that comforting. The footsteps slowed. Up ahead was the distant outline of.. a person? Two people? Beside her, she heard Tetia hold her breath.
Now,
Nobody says a word, no-one dares to. No-one but Agott.
“Whoever you are—show yourselves! Else, I’ll do it for y—”
Before she can complete her threat, one of them shouts back, “Try me! Whoever you are I’ll beat you off without even a sweat! I mean it! I really will—I swear—”
“You’re not c—convincing anyone. Take a minute—and look. They’re witches.” Two people then, Coco thinks. She inhales deeply. They’re witches. It’s their duty to help people. She will help whoever these people are, she decides.
“Um—excuse me! You’re right, we are witches!” Richeh and Agott look back at her like another head has sprung from the stump of her neck. “Are you both okay? Do you need any help?”
She thinks she hears a scoff from one of them before the other shushes them. “Ah—no. We, uh, we don’t!” Coco hears a sneeze. She says,
“Bless you.” Absent-mindedly, very, very, much not expecting one of their fellow-cave dwellers to murmur a ‘thank you’ from their side of the long winding cave. Tetia shakes her head when Coco looks at her, as though she’s denying any part in the sneeze. He (she guesses by the timbre of the voice) sniffles, sounding quite wet. “Are you, um, sure that you don’t need any help?”
“Very!” One shouts back at the same time the other yells, “Like we would!”
Tetia’s clearly starting to get fed-up with the attitude. ‘Hey! Y’know, she’s trying to help you two! You don’t need to be so, so—like this!” She huffs.
“And you don’t need to be so unwieldy! I—we—don’t need your help because we’re witches.”
Silence falls uninvited and unwelcome in the cave. The dripping slides back into the forefront of Coco’s focus. She’s remarkably uncomfortable. Should she—should she apologise for being so—so rude! She can’t imagine how—this is so embarrassing—she must’ve seemed so patronising! Agott, her saviour, speaks up.
“And how was she supposed to know that? We can’t even see you.” She crosses her arms.
The (Coco hesitates to say—) nicer one answers somewhat awkwardly, “Er—I guess you weren’t. Sorry?”
Tetia pipes up, “It’s alright!” And Coco feels so ungainly she could curl up into a ball and melt into the ground. “I think we got off on the wrong foot—I’m Tetia, a witch’s apprentice. This is Coco and the one with long blue hair is Richeh—” Tetia puts emphasis on everyone’s names as she introduces them to the strangers and as she gets to Agott, she tries to shush her. “—and the one who’s as prickly as a Scalewolf is Agott. We’re all from the same Atelier. And you?”
The, presumably, boys pause. “We’re.. from the Great Hall. We are also apprentices.” The other boy sneezes as his friend stumbles through their quasi-introduction.
“Oh come on!” Tetia pouts. “We told you lots and lots and you gave us nothing. ‘Agott’a say that hurts my feelings!”
Richeh speaks for the first time since the others appeared. She says quietly, “Tetia, it is rude to assume everyone can be so open. What if they’ve a dangerous secret? Or a humongous bounty on each of their heads?” Her eyes are shining too much now to not be a result of her making up an extravagant story about why they can’t reveal themselves. “Maybe they are on the run.”
Before Tetia can jump in with more details about where they could be escaping from, Agott asks a question.
“Are you wet by any chance?”
The boys go quiet before one admits, as if under duress, that she’s right. “Qi—He fell in a puddle.”
“I did not! Th—the ground—”
“We have a contraption that could help. If you, um, would like it?”
They deliberate. “Could we?”
She and Richeh walk over together and Agott takes two of Master Olly’s Link-rings out of her pouch and places them on the ground in front of them. Then, they back off. It’s almost funny to Coco, they’re treating them like over-reactive wildlife. As the light retreats with Richeh, a hand comes out and takes the rings. He gasps as he holds them and Coco feels a silly pride in how thoughtful and helpful Master Olly’s inventions always are. He holds them to his friend and the water blows off of his skin and out of his clothes.
“Who made this? It’s—”
“—Phenomenal.”
“I was gonna say ‘practical’.”
“Does it even really matter when it’s so helpful, Ol—ahem.”
Coco decides to chip in. “Our Master’s Watchful Eye made the sigil and everything. He’s always making useful things, and, y’know, sometimes I think he was born to be kind.” She feels like she may have said too much.
“..right.”
She definitely said far too much.
Agott changes the subject and asks them, “So, how did you two get down here?”
“He fell in a—”
“Don’t finish that sentence. Didn’t your Master teach you that lying is wrong?”
“I know that your Master tried.”
“Bel—he lies as he breathes.”
“He has to, if he wants to even maybe keep you in the Great Hall.” Agott clears her throat. “Right. Well, he snuck out. I had to come with him. He fell in a hole—”
“The ground opened up.”
“Mighty convenient excuse, huh?”
Tetia cuts in, “It did for us too! It went poof! And, sorry, how did you know he was wet Agott?”
“He kept sneezing—”
“So do I and I’m dry.”
“—yes, but he was also shivering and stuttering. And the stalagmites keep dripping so I assume there’s a larger water source deeper in the cave.”
One boy affirms, “There is. He fell in it.”
“I think they get it now. Just maybe. You don't need to keep repeating it.” The other replies, likely pouting.
“Really?” he wonders sarcastically, “are you sure? Should I say it one more time for good luck?”
Looking upon them, Coco is reminded that the Great Hall is very different to Master Qifrey’s Atelier and thus the relationships cultivated there are also different.
Richeh hums. “This means that it may not have been intentional. They might have set traps for any unwitting participants, not necessarily just us.”
“So you assume they are not physically present then?” Agott furrows her brow.
“I think it is safe to.”
“I do as well. Usually, they would have done something by now. Like—remember your second test?” Tetia is making sense, to Coco’s mind. Agott bites her lip and Coco, unconsciously, follows the movement with her eyes. Then she looks away, hoping she might not have seen her.
“I suppose you may be right.”
One of the boys coughs for attention. “I don’t suppose you’ll share who these ‘they’ are any time soon?”
“We—ah—we can’t.”
The other mutters back, “How are we going to get out then?”
And with that, they begin to discuss possible escape methods. Coco offers the Wall Breaker seal and is promptly shut down, as they could cause a cave-in if they just haphazardly remove the ceiling stones. Tetia suggests that they just look for an exit. This sort of stuns her audience into silence before one of the boys exclaims,
“Of course! How stupid am I! The wind!”
He tells them that with wind, there must be an opening. “There could never be sustained air-flow without one,” he explains.
“Would it be at our level or above us?” Coco asks, “Because our Sylph shoes are smudged..”
There’s a silence in which she imagines he’s looking at her strangely. “Then fix them?”
They move against the wind for what feels like days and find themselves staring at a hole above them. An animal must have triggered a seal similar to the one that had led them to fall. But it’s closing, the rocks reforming solid ground above them and blocking out the disappearing sun.
“Quick!” Tetia shrieks.
Coco, like everyone else, puts her feet neatly together and activates the new and improved seal on her Sylph shoes. She, Tetia, Richeh and Agott blast up so swiftly that Richeh, who has never been at the whim of Coco’s extra-fast seal, can’t orient herself as well as usual. Her feet slip apart. She falls. Tetia screams and Coco loses her breath. Agott turns to fly down and catch her but—
“I have her! Keep going!”
—one of the boys got to her first, their shoes being somewhat slower. Coco swears to herself that this time she won’t let her guard down. Relief can wait for outside.
As they barrel out of the mouth of the cave, it shuts cleanly behind them. Tetia sighs with exhaustion. Coco turns to thank the boy holding Richeh and—
—finds herself face-to-face with what could only be Master Olly’s doppelganger.
Yes, she thinks, they are going to be in so much trouble.
* * *
The yellow-haired girl’s mouth is still wide open and Olruggio is sure it must have been some time by now.
“You’re going to catch flies.” Qifrey sniffs from next to him, evidently still irritated from being drenched after their fall. Olruggio hadn’t been joking. Alright, he may have under-embellished—but honestly, it was far more entertaining to call the large vessel of water they’d fallen into a ‘puddle’ and watch (as much as he could in that low light) Qifrey’s face contort in aggravation. Qifrey was right, it was more of a lake or pond or something but it was much funnier this way. He was always in a bad mood when it came to water, despite his plans to master it.
“Uh..” The girl—Coco, it was—seems struck dumb by—what, Olruggio’s face? He’s not ugly as far as he can tell.
“Is there somethin' on my—”
“No!” Agott, Tetia had called her, interrupts, eyes glazed over as she stares at Qifrey. “We just—you look like someone we know. You both do, actually..”
“The resemblance is uncanny,” comes Richeh in his arms. Still in his arms.
“Ah! Sorry!” He puts her down, horribly embarrassed.
“It’s alright, Mas—uhm. It’s alright.” She seems more awkward than she was before, which is really something.
“Ah—could, um, could we know your names now?” Tetia fiddles with her hair.
And she’d been very accommodating towards them., even when faced with quite some attitude, so he supposes it was the right thing to do.
“Alright, then.” He watches them all hold their breaths, for whatever possible reason, and dismisses it. “I’m Olruggio, Apprentice to—” The girls all gasp in disarming sync. “—er. This is Qifrey, Apprentice to Beldaruit.” They gasp, again, in sync, again.
“We are in so much trouble. Agott! We’re in so much trouble!”
“What? Why are you all so—” Qifrey looks ready to flee, honest.
Tetia nearly bursts with how suddenly she speaks,“It’s because y—”
“Nothing!” Agott yells, eyes squeezed to lines. “Nothing is wrong. But—but we’re really far from the Great Hall.”
Olruggio sighs. “Yeah, someone wanted to sneak out when his master wasn’t lookin’—”
“Beldaruit is rarely ever not looking! Who can blame me for taking a chance? You didn’t have to come, but you did. You swore there'd be no complaining.” Olruggio sighs again. Sure, prosecute him for not wanting the ever-clumsy, ever-lacking-in-foresighted Qifrey go off on his own with no words to his master.
Agott’s words rush out of her mouth, like she’s scared they’ll disappear if she's not fast enough. “Why don’t you come to our Atelier then? You can make use of our window-way and we’re not too far from here!” She’s smiling in such a nervous manner that Olruggio would feel terrible to turn her down.
“Er—”
“That’s very kind of you, but—”
“—we’ll come.”
“—we couldn’t—what? Olly—”
“—what ‘what’? We can’t get back in any good time on our own.” Because of course Qifrey would rather rough it, just the two of them, then accept help from strangers. Qifrey sulks. Let him sulk! Olruggio turns back to the girls.
“We’ll come.”
The sun is setting, which is quite unfortunate news, but their Atelier is within sight which, Olruggio supposes makes it a fair exchange. Qifrey had whispered to him on the way,
“Who even has such a rural Atelier? The closest town is Kalhn, they said. How do we know they’re trustworthy?”
“Maybe it’s so rural that we’ve never heard of it.” And Qifrey shook his head lightly at that.
“You’re much too nice, Olly.”
“You’re much too worried, Qifrey. It’s okay,” he teased, “I know it’s your way of showin' you care.” Qifrey’s face flushed and he shoved at Olruggio’s shoulder.
“What—whatever nonsense are you spouting now?” But it lacked bite, so Olruggio snorted.
All at once, the four girls snapped to attention and turned around. It was so weird. Then they turned back as though it had never happened.
The reddening sky made the sun melt into its surroundings and, strangely, make Qifrey’s face look just that much softer, calmer, even. His white hair made wonders with the light and shone so artistically that Olruggio had to wonder if there was a problem with his vision. The Atelier slid into focus. They landed some way from the door. The girls took the lead, nearly running up to the entrance and slamming into it. Fortunately for their faces and the door, they managed to catch themselves before knocking with extraordinary impatience. Seriously, what was going on?
Coco began to shout, “Master! Master, you have to—”
But the door was flung open before she could even finish.
Standing just beyond the threshold was—himself. Olruggio flinched. Standing just behind him was Qifrey. They were both older.
Something had gone horribly wrong.