Lies & Labyrinths

There was a feeling of relief that spread through the school soon after the Yashmari departed. Arleigh had escorted Lilith to the Library, apologizing profusely as she was led along. “I am so sorry that happened. No adult should ever treat a child like that, especially not one trained in teaching.”

“I think no adult should ever talk to a child like that period, Monsieur Arleigh. But don’t worry, my parents are dead remember? You won’t be getting an angry letter.”

“Right. Well. I’m glad you’re okay, and so is Master Emil. Just focus on your class today, we’ll ignore this tardiness since it was out of your hands.”

Scrollmaking seemed so pointless after the day Lilith had, but that did not stop her from being trapped with Arleigh. At least it was better than writing her name on the board. She spent most of the class learning to copy the new scroll, then focused on the slow repetitive process of inscribing something she didn’t understand. The more that Lilith wrote the spell (and dreamed of an easier way of doing such things), the more small bits of it seemed familiar to her, the individual pieces creating a sense of deja-vu. It was about the tenth one of the day that Lilith realized what exactly she was writing, as she had personally felt its application no less than hours ago.

She was writing a Truth Spell.

Lilith nearly crumpled it, a sick feeling in her stomach.

They were using them to craft the spell scrolls being used down below.

The quill slipped from her hand, a tremor of anger forming there.

“Lilith? I didn’t say you could stop.” Arleigh had just passed by, sipping hot coffee from a mug etched with “World’s Greatest Scrollmaker” on the side.

“You’re using us.” Lilith said, staring at the desk.

“I-I beg your pardon?” he said, nearly spilling some coffee as he sat it down on an empty desk.

“You’re using us to make scrolls. To sell.”

Arleigh’s pupils widened. It was his tell. That and the way his face turned purple, he stammered, then covered his mouth while his eyes darted about.

“This spell. Euroch and Edgar cast it on me, when they were interrogating me unsupervised.”

“Lower your voice.” Arleigh hissed, then motioned for Lilith to move away from the tables and towards a row of books on Astronomy. “Do you realize the bedlam that would cause if the Deltas learned their main use to the school was being copywriters? We tried to give them typewriters but the iron interfered with the spell components, and then the idiots are so bad at grammar that one fool typed Cloud of Dog instead of Cloud of Fog, and summoned a pack of very confused but excitable golden retrievers![37]”

“So you are selling scrolls to them.”

“I… ehrm… Yes.” Arleigh admitted. “But with good reason! The school is hemorrhaging money, and there is an apparent power vacuum out in Canaan. We were funded for millenia by the Fey Court alone, to the point that we never had to ask for funding, actually. And now that there’s no Fey court, well…” His voice trailed off.

“So we all have to be given detention so you can make quota?”

Arleigh’s face changed a few more shades of color as he tried to understand how he was being out-rationalized on morality by someone who had never even passed a single class.

“No, you all have to be given detention because you’re ungrateful failures who have no talent and are wasting the resources of the other students!”

The pair locked a death glare at one another, the truth viciously laid out. At least, Lilith thought, she wasn’t the only one that Arleigh saw as a failure. She was quickly coming to understand the unspoken class system, and how not much changed about humans, whether magic or mundane.

“I want out of here.”

“You can’t, too late.”

“Then I’ll tell every single person who will listen what you do. And I’ll sit here in every detention and find fun spelling errors. We’ll see how well you do with a stack of Message spells changed to Massage spells? Or maybe make a bunch of dwarves appear with Miner Illusion instead of Minor Illusion? Or maybe barkskin to barfskin?” Those were just a list of spells she had seen in the table of contents of My First Spell Scroll. Lilith was sure if she did some digging she could make some truly disastrous spells with some well placed puns.

“You wouldn’t.”

“You’ll find, Monsieur Arleigh, that I am very petty, easily bored, and prone to find lovely ways of filling my time.”

Lilith furrowed her brow the best she could.

Arleigh glared back.

“I cannot permit you to run freely in this school. But if you were to eschew your assigned work for more… individualized learning approaches in the library during detention, I suppose I could look the other way.”

This was a victory, and another critical lesson: Leverage was the great equalizer.

“This seems acceptable.” Lilith tried her very best to not smile, nodding with a pensive look, scratching her lips with her thumb like Mayor Mayor of Whatsville did whenever he wanted to look more important. “Does that include the Veil Model Room?”

“I...Sure…” Arleigh replied, making less of a sigh and more the sound of a deflating tire on a hot summer day. “But not a word of this. Not to any teacher, not to any student. Not to any living breathing thing. Do you understand?”

“Quite.”

“Good.” Arleigh looked about, then adjusted his collar and glasses. “I’m happy to hear you’ve taken this adjustment so well. But this does not get you out of my coursework, young lady. I expect during my class at least double the work you had before. And thank you for the conversation, Lilith. I think you’ve clarified that I need to take more precautions in scroll-making as a whole.”

Lilith went back to scroll-making feeling as if she had finally been handed a moral victory over Arleigh. It kept her going.

Detention had more students than the prior day, and from the mumblings and grumblings that Lilith heard, most of the guilty were doing time for minor infractions. It probably had nothing to do with it being the end of the month and Arleigh most likely having a quota to fill on spell scrolls. He seemed smug as he walked into the center of the stack of tables (all which had been swept off the debris of the attack the day before), and set down a stack of neatly created cards.

“Alright students, I’ve found a solution that will be making all of this a lot smoother for all future scroll-making endeavors. This-” He lifted up a sheet of thick paper, waving it for effect as it made a warble noise from the plasticity of the material. “-is a trace card. You will not even have to write free hand any more, simply fill in the blanks and go. Simple, easy brush strokes that anyone could do. This should make the whole process much more efficient, have less errors, and is simple enough that anyone that even a Delta on her first week couldn't mess up. Now, because of this advancement in scroll making, and because it will make it more precise, I expect double the amount of scrolls from each of you.”

There was a loud groaning. It made Arleigh perk up, emboldened and empowered by the chorus of protests from the primarily Delta student body. He began to walk around to each table, placing a copy of the tracing card down, pausing only at Lilith’s desk to pass on some words. “The same goes for you. You owe me double the amount, card or no.” That smug smirk came back as he said the words, holding the sheet out. Lilith’s eyes stared at it, and a flash of inspiration hit her: how close that sheet looked like the punch card to the Model Veil’s inner workings in the steam room beneath the display.

“Well, do you want the punch card Lilith? Yes, or no?”

“I’ve got it!” Lilith shouted, standing up from her desk. Her voice echoed through the library, the head librarian giving a loud “SHH!” from her desk.

“What?” Arleigh blinked, confused. This was supposed to be his crowning moment, where he had given an impossible task that would force the young girl to not only do his work in detention, but be reliant on him to do so expediently.

“That’s how I’ll solve it! The-nevermind! Thank you!”

Lilith hugged him, forgetting herself in the euphoria of the Eureka moment.

“You’re supposed to be punished right now! You can’t just do that!” Arleigh shouted in vain (The Librarian glaring daggers into the back of Arleigh’s bald spot as he did). He sighed, shaking his head and going back to his desk. What did it matter? She wasn’t leaving the building, and she was learning, which by his thoughts was unquestionably impossible. He returned to handing out the cards to the other students, content with the fact that his teaching could inspire someone as impossible to learn as Lilith Lavoi.

Footnotes:

[37]: Which were all rehomed to loving families