The Frigid Lady

Enid was a pacer.

By that, I mean when she was nervous, which she clearly was, she paced back and forth while nibbling on her fingernails like a rodent at some cheese.

For myself, I took a seat behind the desk with the flowers on it. The leather chair was very well made and cushioned quite nicely. I wondered who had made them and if I could get one for my own little office.

It was also able to spin around.

I spun around in it quite happily until I noticed she’d stopped pacing and was staring at me like I was mad.

Which, given I was a void mage, wasn’t an unreasonable assumption as I’m sure I’ve said before.

She frowned at me in a way only a teacher can do. “What are you doing?”

“Enjoying this chair,” I told her. “Do you know who made it?”

“Why would I know who made it?”

I shrugged. “It was worth a try. It’s a very comfortable chair. I would like one.”

“Well, you have one,” she snorted. “Feel free to sit in it until you die.”

“Hmm.”

“How much air do you think we have left?”

“In here?” I looked around. The general dimensions of the room were quite large. “Oh, more than we’ll need, I think. Although I must say, Enid, that’s a very gruesome subject to bring up.”

“What else should we be talking about?”

“How about you tell me why you were banned from using magic in, of all places, the Mage Guild?” I stopped spinning and instead steepled my fingers thoughtfully at her. “I would have thought magic would be encouraged here.”

“We’re going to die, and you want to know about that?”

“Yes.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Alright.” She shook her head and started pacing again. “It’s all because of Henry.”

“The Headmaster?”

“Yes.” She waved her arms as she paced, which made me relate to her. I liked to wave my arms when I was emotional, too. “He’s a complete and utter prat! We went to school together. And then came here. To the Guild together. At the time, I was very interested in ice magic while he was more interested in fire. As you can tell, we did not get along at all.”

“You said you beat him at duels?”

“Many times,” she smirked. “He was hopeless at magic. He could barely summon a fire big enough to light a candle, let alone duel somebody. But his mouth was always braver than his ability. I do believe he thought that if he challenged me in a loud voice, I’d feel intimidated. I never did.”

“What spells did you use?”

“Oh, nothing special. I was young, Taran. My most powerful spell at the time was Frost Nova. Eidich’s version if you must know.”

“Better than Groom’s.”

“Oh, much better,” she agreed. “But harder to cast. It took me about three months to really get a good handle on it.”

“That’s quite impressive,” I said, meaning it. I’d known a few mages who could cast Eidich’s Frost Nova, but many of them had spent almost as year trying to master it.

Three months was pretty good.

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“Well,” she flushed. “I was young and enthusiastic. I worked harder.”

“So, he’s jealous of you.”

“Oh, yes.” She scowled. “As soon as he became Headmaster, he did everything he could to make my life miserable. He’s been trying to push me out of the Guild for years. A student of mine used an ice spell on another student. During a duel, so it was perfectly reasonable. But the other student was Henry’s nephew. He lost a finger to Frostbite and ice magic has since been banned from duels. I made some comments and was advised that if I cast even a single ice spell within the halls, I would be booted immediately from the Guild.”

“That’s awfully mooky,” I said, frowning with her.

“Yes, it is.”

“Hmm.”

“Honestly, I’ve been thinking of leaving anyway,” she sighed. “My aunt has a little shop in Norfell. I thought… Well. She’s getting old, and has no one to pass it down to. I thought I could take over. It’d get me away from… Away from this place.”

“Norfell?”

I winced. I’d been to Norfell.

Let’s just say, it was a terrible place and leave it at that.

“I’m sick of it here,” she dropped into one of the chairs along the wall. “Taran, you don’t know what it’s like. You can just do what you want. Nobody can stop you. But for us normal people, we’re not strong enough to keep fighting. And why bother? If Henry wasn’t in charge, it’d only be some other… mook.”

“Yes,” I said. “There’s been three so far.”

“Four.”

“As you say.”

“Anyway. It doesn’t matter, does it? We’re stuck here.” She thrust her bottom lip out angrily. “Do you know what bothers me the most?”

“What?”

“I didn’t get to duel him. I mean, I wouldn’t mind if I’d lost and been imprisoned here for it. But to be trapped in her like this? Oh, it’s going to eat at me.” She gave me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry. I’m going to rant about it quite a bit.”

I nodded.

I didn’t mind ranting about the Mage Guild and its Headmasters myself. It was one of my favourite ranting subjects if I was honest.

“So,” I said. “You can cast Frost Nova. What else?”

“What?”

“What about Ice Bolt?”

“Of course.”

“Berriman or Watts?”

“Berriman.”

“And Ice Storm?”

It was her turn to wince. “Watts on that one, I’m afraid. I could never get Berriman’s to work for long.”

“That’s because it’s inefficient with its mana,” I told her. “Berriman was brilliant with projectiles, but on everything else he was mediocre.”

“Can you cast his version?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Oh, that’s not important…”

“How long?”

“About twenty minutes? I never bothered to do it any longer. It gets boring.”

“Twenty minutes?” Her eyes boggled. “How do you have that much mana?”

“The void,” I told her. “It’s endless.”

“It’s what?”

“And that is why I did what I did to your Library!” I growled. “You see? A decent library would have Histories of the Void Entities, where you’d have learned all about the basics of void mages.”

“But… Twenty minutes?”

“Like I said. It wasn’t important.” I shrugged. “How about Ice Crystal? Ephrain’s version if possible.”

“What about it?”

“Can you cast it?”

“I think so.”

“Could you cast it for six seconds?”

“Perhaps in a pinch,” she said, not looking very confident.

I smiled, tapping my chin. “Excellent.”

Ice Crystal froze the caster for a period of time depending on their mana. While frozen, they were protected from most attacks. The drawback was they couldn’t see, hear, or move.

Few mages actually learnt the spell, though, as it had limited uses.

After all, who wanted to freeze themselves solid? In a duel, it’d give the opponent more of an advantage as they’d have time to recover while you simply used all your mana doing nothing.

Having said that, more often than not, talented ice mages would learn it in their youth to impress fellow mages at parties.

It seemed Enid might have some frightfully interesting stories from her student years.

As though reading my mind, her cheeks reddened.

“Please tell me you can get us out of here,” she said, not quite pleadingly.

“Well,” I said. “I can guarantee I can get both our bodies out of here at least.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“It’s your mind I’m worried about.”

She squinted at me, her eyes shrouded with suspicion. “Why?”

“The universe is an onion. We live on the physical layer. This room is on the layer directly beneath, called liminal space.”

“I do know how the rooms work, Taran.”

“And you know the Destination is just a beacon which draws the room up to the surface? Without one, we cannot rise back to the physical world.”

“Of course I do. I wrote a paper on it.”

“I’d like to read it.”

“Get me out of here first, and I’ll send it to you.”

“Getting out is easy,” I told her. “You see, no layer actually touches another. They’re separated by distances so vast yet also so close that they make no sense to calculate.”

“Are you sure?” She looked doubtful. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. My understanding is they’re like two pieces of paper. We punch a hole between the two, and that’s how we get from one layer to the other.”

“Alright. It would’ve been easier to stick with onions, but if you must change my metaphor... Between your sheets of paper is a gap.”

Her eyes narrowed as something occurred to her. “You’re not serious…”

“I am.”

“But that… that changes everything we know about the universe.”

“I know.”

“I’m not sure I can believe it.”

“Believe it,” I told her. “I’ve seen it. Between the physical and the liminal is a layer of void. In fact, below the liminal is also void. Between every layer above and below, is void. The void is, unlike every other layer, infinite. It’s everywhere. It’s nowhere. It’s all things. It’s nothing.”

Her face paled. “Knowing what it will do to my mind, you want to take me into the void.”

“I do,” I said.

“For how long?”

“Exactly six seconds.”