Enchanting filled me with a sense of dread before even stepping inside the room. It was the only class I didn't have with any of the others.

Opening the door to see Krakens and a blend of Basilisks didn't really help. Basilisks probably wouldn't be too bad, but the purple was feeding the dark pit as my center.

The class had rows of long shared desks too. Which was somehow even worse. I ended up sitting in the back of the room in the far right corner. It was the best way to limit how many neighbors I was going to have to deal with.

I could do this. Just had to get through one class.

As students filtered in, I ended up with a Basilisk whose name I didn't know sitting next to me. I kept my urge to panic down.

Ugh. People.

Deep breaths Serafina. Focus on getting through this.

I recognized the professor before us. It was the Tower Head for Basilisk Tower.

"Greetings everyone, for those of you who don't know me, I am Hecatome Mjolnir," he greeted the class.

I'd seen him a few times, but had never spoken to him before. It hadn't been a situation that came up. Which meant I didn't have a good read on this guy yet.

I just hoped we wouldn't get into the enchanting part of this class until after Botany's current project was done. I still felt drained from it. My hands felt cold at the fingertips.

"I'm sure all of you use enchanted objects every day," Professor Mjolnir spoke. He was wrong for the most part, I only used enchanted things here. I'd probably learned more about them in the past few months than the entire rest of my life.

I doubted any of what I knew would help me here though.

This was nothing like my Alchemy class last semester. It would be harder, but if I was even a little bit serious about spending more of my life in the magical world I would probably need to know all this stuff. For them, enchanted objects were barely different from human electronics.

"By the end of this semester you will all complete an enchanted project of your own. The first step in a project this complicated is a plan. I want you all to turn one in by the end of the week. It needs to have the kind of object you want to enchant and what kind of spell you intend to use."

Wonderful. I had no idea where to even start.

"Don't worry, it doesn't have to be ground-breaking. Just functional."

Functional. Meaning I could go extremely simple. I would probably have to. The first problem would have to be figuring out what to even enchant. One of my rocks? The textbook?

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(*********)

I was feeling a bit better about Geography, mostly because I knew Fethris was going to be there. He was standing by the door of the classroom, we were somewhere in the depths of the schools mazelike hallways. Closer to the side where the professor's offices were.

Fethris was smirking and that probably should have made me worry but I was just relieved to see a bit of red after last class. We'd really just seen each other at lunch, but the relief was still real. A friendly face was always welcome.

"How have your classes been treating you?" I asked as I approached.

"It's been a slow day, what about you?"

"About the same. Accident free which is good, looking forward to it being almost over."

He chuckled, "You're not the only one. Jarec wants to compare notes about our extracurricular projects tonight."

It took me perhaps a moment longer than it should have to figure out what he was talking about. The plans to deal with Death's Echo and the object to help me communicate with them over long distance. "Sounds good. I'm sure you guys are gonna do something great."

We walked into the classroom together.

The layout of the room was almost shockingly straightforward after what I had the rest of the day.

At the front of the room was a map I'd seen before but barely knew. It was a straightforward map of the island, drawn in a style that reminded me of early nautical maps.

When I was young, I wondered how Maginisi went undiscovered by humans for so long. Now I wondered if humans had but hadn't been allowed to leave. It was right in the middle between Greenland and Norway, above Iceland by about a hundred miles.

It was zoomed in so much you couldn't see any other land masses except for a small island just off the southwest coast labelled Aisling. It took me a moment to remember that Celica was from there.

All over the island were labelled cities and rivers and what I assumed were mountains I'd never heard of.

The school was on the map too. Probably because it was drawn for this class, if I had to guess maybe even by the professor standing by it. I didn't know him, but he had a cane in his hand supporting his right side. The wood of the cane was a very pale and desaturated color, yellow but only barely.

Fethris chose a desk on the right side of the room, one spot from the wall with five in front of him. I chose the empty desk by the wall. The rest of the class filtered in. Mostly yellow and white with dots of blue scattered about.

The front wall wasn't entirely taken up by the big Maginisi map, I noticed as I tried to focus on class. It was a world map, almost like every other one I had ever seen. Except this one had Maginisi on it. It was the first time I'd seen it on one. Usually maps were focused on the island and blocked out the human world entirely.

Maginisi was roughly twice the size of Iceland, if this map was accurate. I hoped it was, if we were going to be learning from it.

"It's a big world out there," the professor was saying, "and finding out where you are in it is a skill you should all have. Sometimes, it's easy to think of your place in this world as massive when in reality we're all just specks of ink."

Maybe. I'd rather be a speck of ink than a bloodstain.

"So, for our first class, why don't you all come up here and put a pin on the map of where you come from?" He framed it like a question, but I doubted we had much of a choice. He snapped his fingers and a small tea saucer like plate filled with needles appeared.

I waited and watched as other students got up from their desks and stuck the thin pieces of metal into the map of the island. There was a scattering of places, most on the southern end of the island. We were at the northernmost tip so everything was south of us.

Fethris didn't get up right away either, letting the crowd thin itself out and glancing over at the world map. Which no one had touched yet. I almost wanted to ask if it was part of this exercise.

Fethris glanced over to me but then stood up. I followed a little bit after. He handed me one of the needles, and I looked over the world map.

The professor looked more curious than anything else. Like he hadn't been expecting someone to need to use the world map. Then again, considering I was the only one that was a little fair. Considering the scale I wasn't sure I could hit Massachusetts perfectly, but I think being close was good enough.

Fethris looked at it as he pulled his hand away from the map, his needle north of the biggest city on the map and above something called The Howling Lake.

Hundreds and hundreds of miles apart, and yet here we were. Standing in the same classroom and in the same color uniform. The Fates were strange.

But I was finding I liked strange. And whatever needed to be done to keep it, I was willing to do.

No knife was going to take this from me. I wouldn't let it.

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