Solstice

by Scorpius

The Magic of the Stars

The magic of the stars is static. It holds the night sky together, weaving great threads of something like hornglow across the stars, like a spell magnified a thousand times. And like any spell, it may be studied, and if it is studied for long enough it can be reverse-engineered. Nobody quite knows what the spell of the sky is casting, but it seems made of a hundred thousand effects. This year, my students, you shall be attempting to unravel just a handful of those effects, and you shall see in them the origin of many of the spells that you have come to take for granted…
—Professor Alice Andromeda Fenglade

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It was about ten past eleven at night, and the fourth year students were being escorted by Guards from their dormitories in the Western tower to the Northern wall, where Professor Alice Andromeda Fenglade was waiting for them. In their hornglow they carried their own telescopes, charmed themselves the previous year, and in their saddlebags they brought rolls and rolls of star-charts.

Maria’s head was too full of Illusion to really pay all that much attention to the stars. An evening of marking essays on a subject she hadn’t fully studied herself was enough to set her thinking about all kinds of practical applications, and her plans for new Illusory furniture in her room were far more interesting than anything Fenglade might want them to learn about the mysteries of the cosmos, and the triangulation of the stars. Still, because she had to keep up appearances, she was more than willing to spend an evening staring through a small tube at the tiny pinpricks and lights in the sky, and compare their position and brightness with the charts in her textbook.

As the Guards led them up the final staircase, and onto the roof where Fenglade was standing patiently, Maria carefully twisted her telescope around to make sure that it didn’t get caught on the low ceiling, or hit any of the other telescopes hovering in front of her. She tried to make her movements as delicate as possible—despite her loathing of the subject, she had put a great deal of time and effort into the charms on her telescope, and she was rather proud of it. As she emerged onto the rooftop, bringing up the rear of her classmates, she trotted briskly over to her usual spot at the very fringe of the group, and started to unpack her saddlebag.

Astronomy lessons had become routine: the Professor would have already mentioned which stars they’d be looking for during the lesson earlier in the day, and so would simply watch as the students carefully trained their telescopes on various patches of the night sky. For the last three years, they had done little more than sketch what they had seen, and make detailed measurements; this year, they would be training their telescopes not on the stars themselves but on the magic that held them in place, though the process wasn’t all that different.

After checking that Fenglade was on the other side of the rooftop, Maria let out a quiet sigh, and trained her telescope on Orion’s back hoof. Rigel, the star was called, not that she’d be looking at it.

With her hornglow, Maria flicked a switch near the very end of the telescope, and watched as strands of deep blue faded into existence across her field of view. It was magic—wild magic—and with the enchantments she had made she was actually able to see it. It was exciting, for all of five seconds. Observational spells weren’t exactly difficult, or even all that uncommon, but she had cast it, and it worked, even after a Summer away—which was more than could be said of some of her classmates’ efforts.

And all the while, as she made notes on the strands, and the formulae that would make them, Maria’s mind kept drifting back to her detention with the Deputy Headmaster.

It was… nice, knowing that one of her teachers trusted her to help them, to be good enough to help them. It was a wonderful change from her normal school life, where she stayed quiet and let her own accomplishments fade into the background while her peers’ work shone. And yet, it hurt that she could only be trusted in private—that anywhere else, her being considered anything beyond an average student would be a grave insult to her classmates.

When she looked up from her telescope, she almost jumped: Professor Fenglade was standing next to her, reading her notes with a look of distaste on her face. Frowning, Maria looked down and re-read what she had been writing. Oh. Squared, not cubed. A quick flourish of her quill, and the offending index was fixed; with a huff of satisfaction, Fenglade walked over to the next student.

Maria shook her head, and turned back to her telescope. If she was right, Fenglade couldn’t say anything about her error because none of her fellow students were even close to where she was in the exercise. She didn’t consider practicing over the Summer break an unfair advantage—if she could even have an unfair advantage, as a neophyte, when everything seemed stacked against her.

She very, very nearly missed the flash of purple that darted along a thread of magic, before fizzling out as it reached the end that seemed almost tied into Rydel. For a moment, she found herself paralysed in shock, before quickly reaching out with her hornglow to adjust a few dials on the telescope, glad that she had thought to work in a spell she’d borrowed from Security Orbs, one that allowed her to replay what she had seen. With a careful, gentle turning, Maria watched the flash play out again, and again, and once in slow-motion. It was like nothing she had ever seen before.

“P-professor Fenglade?” she called out, her voice catching briefly in her suddenly dry throat. “Could you take a look at something for me?”

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There are, of course, a few accounts of those individuals who claim to have seen the magic of the stars change. Accounts too few and far between, in the olden days, to possibly verify; in modern times, all are more easily demonstrated to be faulty equipment, or simple error. If you believe you have seen the night sky alter, my students, you may perhaps want to fix your telescopes.