Chapter 16. Of Business and Advice.

  [Lorelei]

  The next two weeks flew by in relative calm. Well, ‘calm’… You’d have to be drunk to call studying at Armarillis Academy calm, but at least there were no dangerous incidents.

  I threw myself into studies and endless practice: mornings were practical sessions with our Group Five, then Calypso and I worked on our individual program, and in the evenings we’d rejoin our classmates — usually for evening drills on the training grounds combined with other groups.

  During those sessions I got to meet all the Fortemins I hadn’t crossed paths with before. It was quite a motley crew. And — insanely interesting.

  Sometimes Calypso and I fell asleep in each other’s arms after another passionate evening. And there were plenty of those evenings, because we still couldn’t get enough of each other.

  Other times we were both so exhausted that we’d just collapse face-down from fatigue, each in our own bedroom. On those occasions I usually woke up before Calypso, who liked to sleep in. He absolutely hated early mornings and was always a grumpy sleepyhead in the morning.

  “So who’s the night owl here, huh?” I giggled, watching Calypso struggle with all his might to get out of bed.

  “I’m a fluffy bunny, subspecies owlish,” he mumbled sleepily as I burst into peals of laughter.

  Calypso didn’t go easy on me, and our budding relationship didn’t stop him one bit from torturing me during individual training sessions so badly that a couple of times I dropped to the ground from exhaustion and refused to get back on my feet, doing my best impression of a swan dying of exhaustion. A very convincing impression, I might add — I think my lovely dark circles under my eyes and barely moving tongue were quite eloquent.

  The sadist named Calypso not only didn’t help me in those moments but actually cracked a fire whip at me, waving it menacingly through the air dangerously close.

  “Imagine you’re not in the safety of the academy but in actual combat,” Calypso would say, his hair whipped by an energy vortex.

  “And instead of thinking about how you have no strength left to crawl anywhere, you need to think about crawling off the battlefield at any cost, just to stay alive.”

  “You know what?” I said thoughtfully, lying on my back in the grass, looking at the dangerous fiery vortex that was currently backlighting Calypso very dramatically.

  “When you wave that fiery thing in the air, I get an irresistible urge to surrender myself to you.”

  Calypso burst out laughing so hard that the whip in his hands flickered out and vanished — he literally doubled over with laughter. I would’ve loved to laugh too, but I really had no energy left for anything after an exhausting five-hour training session.

  “The-e-ere you go, learn from me how to take out an opponent,” I said weakly with a crooked smile.

  “One phrase and the enemy is demoralized! Meanwhile I get to keep lying on the nice soft ground…”

  When he finished laughing, Calypso came over and suddenly scooped me up in his arms. I actually yelped in surprise, clutching his crimson shirt.

  “Come on, my little wonder,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Fine, I’ll carry you.”

  “Mmm, I’m a wonder?” I tiredly buried my nose in Calypso’s chest, my lips stretching into a contented smile.

  “Yep, a wonder,” Calypso agreed cheerfully.

  “The most spectacular one.”

  But instead of the bedroom I was expecting, he carried me to the dining hall, and I don’t even want to think about how we looked from the outside when Calypso carried me in his arms into a room where many Fortemins were having lunch at that hour. Judging by the deafening silence, the effect was something else.

  “Why’d you drag me here?” I yawned, literally falling asleep on the go.

  “You absolutely have to eat after such a hard training session.”

  “Are you kidding? I have zero energy. I’ll eat later…”

  “Now,” Calypso said firmly, setting me down on a soft little couch by the window.

  “In your case, after every session like that you need to eat a full meal immediately, otherwise you risk having an episode in your sleep. So either you eat now and then sleep like you deserve until evening, or you don’t eat and don’t sleep, because your magic won’t let you sleep properly.”

  “Eat up while it’s hot!” piped up a tiny squeaky little voice.

  Oh wonderful, Calypso had also brought me a talking bowl. Some of our plates and dishes were enchanted that not only kept food at the right temperature but sometimes chattered nonstop. Our Mrs. Vorjania loved to have fun with enchanted dishes. I usually preferred to eat in silence, but — not this time, apparently.

  I had no energy to argue with my warden, let alone with a talking bowl, so I had to comply.

  “I don’t even have the strength to hold a spoon,” I grumbled, looking longingly at the tub I mean, bowl of hearty soup that Calypso had placed in front of me.

  “I’ll be eating this bucket for two hours.”

  “Well then, I’ll feed you,” Calypso said cheerfully.

  I thought he was joking, but he actually started feeding me with a spoon. And mockingly cooing ‘a spoonful for the a-a-angels, a spoonful for the de-e-emons, a spoonful for the Me-e-entor, a spoonful for the wa-a-arden!..’ I tried to eat without choking on laughter, but only managed it about half the time.

  Calypso was teasing me mercilessly in the sweetest way, all while keeping such a serious expression, as if he wasn’t mocking me but delivering an important lecture on the benefits of healthy eating. And the talking bowl kept agreeing with him, reminding me how good soup was for digestion, and that such a ‘poor exhausted thing’ like me absolutely needed to finish the hearty broth down to the last spoonful.

  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed one of the Fortemins crossing himself while watching us.

  Still, I was so sleepy that all I had the energy for was weakly chewing my food — I couldn’t care less about the people around me. But I did manage to take the spoon away from Calypso and continued eating on my own.

  And that’s how I ended up falling asleep at the table with the spoon in my hand, having almost finished the tub of soup. So Calypso had to carry me in his arms again — this time to the bedroom. Patricia told me later that Calypso left the dining hall looking triumphant, accompanied by absolute silence, with several dozen pairs of eyes following him.

  ***

  I usually came down to breakfast in the dining hall before Calypso, who woke up slowly and always had trouble getting going in the mornings — though he also never went to bed before two in the morning. And while he was lazily shuffling toward the shower in the morning, cursing everyone in the world for ‘godforsaken mornings’ as his ‘morning exercise,’ I was already sitting in the dining hall with Patricia, Mia, Polly, and the girls from Group Four, who I’d also hit it off with and was happy to chat with.

  Right now I was scarfing down millet porridge with pumpkin, chatting with my classmates about everything and nothing. Talking about various topics, listening to gossip that Patricia — who was always sticking her nose everywhere — reliably supplied us with.

  And battling a little glass dish of cherry jam for my porridge. Battling “because the dish I’d gotten was enchanted: silent, but with a very nasty personality. The glass container kept running away from me on its thin little glass legs every time I tried to scoop out some jam with my teaspoon. I was winning by a landslide so far, but the dish wasn’t giving up.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “What are you reading so intently?” I asked Mia, after clinking my spoon against the runaway dish so hard it finally stopped, as if stunned by the blow.

  The elf girl looked very focused, as if she were reading a philosophical treatise on the meaning of existence. But she wasn’t holding ancient tomes and scrolls — just some women’s magazine. I didn’t know much about those, never really got into them, I just guessed from the bright cover and headlines like ‘How to Find Out Your Soulmate’s Name.’

  “A recipe for omelet with Carnolian herbs,” Mia answered importantly, as if she were talking about some high-level magic spell.

  “Never heard of those. What kind of herbs? Extra tasty or something?” I asked, trying to retrieve my spoon from the frenzied little dish, which had gripped the teaspoon with its little glass ‘hands’ and refused to give it back.

  “They have a very positive effect on men,” Mia answered, tracing her finger down a long list of ingredients.

  “Look, it says here that with the right ratio of these herbs, the effect will be immediate! ‘Any man will be charmed by a woman who can masterfully prepare such an omelet.’ What do you think, true or not?”

  “God, what spectacular nonsense,” came Calypso’s lazy voice nearby.

  He'd approached our table and cast a disdainful glance at the magazine the elf was reading.

  “My dear Mia, take some free advice: if you want to charm a man, forget the omelet, just focus on the eggs. The effect will be immediate. Guaranteed.”

  “Oh, get out of here!!” Mia exclaimed in embarrassment and hurried to hide the unfortunate magazine from sight.

  Her cheeks were bur???ning with embarrassment, while the rest of us girls were howling with laughter.

  “Cal, there are children here, you know!” I said through my laughter.

  “Where?” Calypso elegantly arched an eyebrow, surveying our group of girls, and his gaze stopped on Polly, who was rolling with laughter.

  “Oh, you mean this ‘child’ who understa????????????n??ds everything and is laughing louder than all of you? Right…”

  I kept laughing, looking at the elf girl, who had turned red all the way to the tips of her pointy ears, I think.

  Meanwhile, Calypso walked around to my side of the table, took a piece of toast and spread cherry jam on it. Spread it with that very same spoon that,let me remind you, the dish had refused to give back to me. But it gave it to Calypso right away, even scooted closer to him. Unbelievable. Even the dishes here are drooling over my warden, or what?

  “Anyway, bon appétit, ladies. Lori, in seven minutes we’re heading to training, so wrap up your breakfast.”

  ‘And do me a favor, when you get a chance, give poor Mia a helpful lecture about how to get a boyfriend. She needs to stop reading magazines and actually talk openly to guys and stop acting like some impenetrable fortress, for starters,’ Calypso sent me a mental message after he’d already walked away from the table.

  ‘Otherwise with her narrow thinking and her omelet with magic herbs, she’ll be an old maid forever.’

  I snorted in agreement and glared indignantly at the treacherous little jam dish. Under my heavy gaze it slowly retreated to the other end of the table, where it ‘spat out’ all the remaining jam onto the table. If it had a tongue, it definitely would’ve stuck it out at me, I swear.

  ***

  Training, training, training… My studies were incredibly active — I rarely got to just sit and listen to some professor's lecture. Most of the time I had to listen on the go, on the run, in the middle of hunting down some dangerous creature.

  Studying at Armarillis wasn’t easy or sweet, but I absolutely loved it. We all loved it, because we learned something new almost every day, often went on dangerous missions, took down dark creatures… Basically, there was never a dull moment.

  Between all these training sessions, Calypso regularly caught me in the corridors for a passionate kiss, and I constantly felt an intoxicating dizziness from off-the-charts happiness. I was exhausted beyond belief, but I’d probably never been as happy in my life as I was during those two weeks.

  Right now I was living… Living fully, at full capacity, if you could put it that way. I’d even stopped worrying every single minute about hurting someone. Can you imagine? I, oh gods, stopped constantly flinching from touch and obsessing over my gloves! I mean, I wasn’t taking them off voluntarily, of course, but a huge weight had lifted off me. I could literally feel some inner knot loosening inside me. It felt like even breathing had become easier.

  What was behind this? Mostly — our meditation sessions with Calypso. They really were helping me. They were stimulating my magical Spark, stabilizing the flows of magic. Calypso did it very delicately and professionally, keeping tight control over me while also giving me freedom where it could be given.

  Every day we went to Kalacen Cemetery, where we sank into deep meditation. We’d sit facing each other, knees touching, holding hands without gloves, eyes closed, breathing in and out in a specific rhythm of breathing exercises, gradually relaxing and letting our auras merge and unite on their own.

  Each time, reaching the right level of relaxation came easier and faster for me. If the first day it took me a whole hour to get into the right state, now I only needed about ten minutes. Calypso was thrilled about this and about our progress in general.

  After merging our auras, we tried weaving different spells together, and each time we created amazing things.

  For example, we discovered that combining dark and shadow magic through the light aspect could create a protective dome of staggering strength.

  “I’ve never seen this kind of density,” Calypso said admiringly, shaking his head as he studied the golden dome we’d created around us.

  “It’s so strong that I can’t even say off the top of my head how to break it… I don’t see any gaps in the spell formula, you know? And that’s… amazing.”

  Through trial and error we also figured out that when we wove our magic together correctly, we generally amplified any spell we knew, sometimes changing it beyond recognition. That’s exactly what happened in that situation with the kernals, when a regular fire ring spell became an incinerating golden flash.

  The freezing charms changed just as incredibly, turning objects into what looked like statues molded from pure gold. The funny thing was, all these combined spells were exclusively golden in color. Not black, not crimson, but bright gold, shining, beautifully sparkling in the sun.

  But the most spectacular change was to the levitation charms: through extended training we discovered that these charms, when we cast them, produced something like force wings. They looked very much like wings on one’s back — huge, translucent, as if woven from streams of golden light. They sparkled incredibly beautifully in the sun and looked quite impressive. Only Calypso managed to create these wings — I couldn’t produce them no matter how hard I tried.

  “Hmm, strange, according to my calculations you should be able to manifest wings too,” Calypso would say thoughtfully, twirling a pencil in his hands and studying his endless notes with formulas that I couldn’t make heads or tails of.

  “I don’t see any obstacles. I must be missing something… Oh well, we’ll figure it out later.”

  But through trial and error we discovered that I could feed Calypso’s aura from a short distance so that he could unfurl these energy wings. We both agreed this could be an extremely useful skill in battle.

  None of our adult colleagues had abilities like this, let alone my classmates. Only my father, being a fallen angel, had real wings in his battle form, but he was the only one among us who could fly freely high in the sky. It was more of an exception to the rule that Fortemin power had awakened in him at all.

  Calypso could even control his flight, and each time he got better and better at it as he circled low over Kalacen Cemetery. I watched this incredible spectacle with undisguised awe, my jaw dropping in amazement as I admired the beautiful shimmers of the translucent golden wings.

  And I actually screamed in surprise and fear when, during one training session, Calypso scooped me up in his arms and soared into the air with me. Only about fifteen feet, no more, but to me it felt like we were sky-high! I dug my fingers into Calypso’s shoulders, threatening to shred his shirt with my nails — I was so afraid of falling.

  “I’ve got you, Lori, don’t be scared,” Calypso smirked.

  “Relax.”

  “Are you kidding me?!” I shrieked, staring in horror at the gravestones beneath our feet and thinking that if Calypso’s force wings gave out now, we’d fall right into a grave. How convenient, the fastest funeral ever.

  “Trust me, Lori. Relax. I won’t let you go,” Calypso whispered against my lips.

  ‘Relax’ was basically his favorite phrase, which he repeated to me several times a day. Yeah, I had some issues with relaxing, though lately I’d been getting better at it.

  Right now I could only relax after a kiss — sweet and so slow and lingering that I quickly forgot not only that we were floating in the air, but forgot about everything in the world. When Calypso kissed me, only his sensual lips existed, his gentle hands that were now holding me tight by the waist.

  I buried my fingers in Calypso’s long hair, scratched the back of his neck with my nails — I loved doing that! — and completely surrendered to the kiss, feeling our magic continue to weave together, to penetrate each other. The wind tousled our long hair, intertwining it as if visually showing how our magic was mixing. I felt so good, so light and comfortable… The euphoria of these sensations was impossible to fully put into words.

  “Mmm… I’ve never kissed anyone while floating above the ground before,” I smiled, nuzzling my nose against Calypso’s cheekbone.

  “It’s like you’ve made it your mission to be my first for all kinds of intense emotions.”

  “And your only,” Calypso said softly.

  My heart started racing from his velvety voice and the meaning of his words. I was afraid of ruining the strange idyll that had formed between us with the wrong words, so I just covered his lips with mine, drawing him into a deep kiss. Tender, sensual, mercilessly dizzying. A kiss — worth a thousand words, yeah.

  We kissed for so long, enjoying each other and not noticing that our magic had intensified so much that Calypso’s wings glowed even brighter in the sun, and we rose even higher — the power itself was lifting us up, raising us above the trees.

  We noticed it later and quickly descended on our own, but in doing so we must have temporarily left some dead zone of Kalacen Cemetery and briefly became visible for tracking our exact location…