The next morning, Fabrisse did the responsible thing: he went back to the Synod.
The world had not ended. The Eidralith had not incinerated him in righteous fla. No magi in crimson robes ca knocking in the night. He even got six hours of sleep, which was a personal best under magical duress.
The dormitory hallway was dim and unusually silent as he padded through on socked feet. Maybe everyone else had fled while he slept. Maybe the Synod was under quarantine. Maybe—just maybe—he was going to get away with it.
His room door stood exactly where it had been the day before. Except . . .
The ‘ROCK WITCH’ sign was gone.
The scrap of parchnt that had been nailed directly into the wood, complete with childish skull doodles and an anatomically impossible stick-figure casting “Gravel Curse V,” had vanished.
Fabrisse opened the door and quietly asked. “Are you in there, Greg?”
“Statutorily, yes,” ca the reply.
Greg Johnson sat cross-legged on his bed, eating a perfectly peeled orange over a page of The Unified Sanitation Codex: Vol. II. His hair was combed, his robes were pressed, and there was not a single piece of loose parchnt or unaligned sock anywhere in the room. He blinked once behind thin glasses, then resud reading.
Greg had been assigned as Fabrisse’s roommate less than a year ago and had sohow, across all available assessnts, asured exactly neutral. No magical irregularities. No aberrant resonance spikes. No weird affinities for insects, ghosts, or screaming rocks. His Resonance rating was ‘Temperate’, and his elental alignnt was listed as ‘Undecided.’ His main contribution to the Synod was helping faculty correct citation errors in procedural texts.
“You took the sign down?” Fabrisse asked.
Greg shrugged. “It was a fire hazard.”
Fabrisse lowered his voice as he walked in and took off his boots. “Greg, Cuman cursed it. It scread if you tried to remove it.”
“I used gloves.”
“Oh.”
“Also, so girl just climbed the window earlier and asked to see you,” he said, then resud reading.
“What? Who? Where?”
“Look out the window.”
The curtain across the shared dormitory window fluttered. A muffled grunt ca from outside, followed by the squeak of rubber soles skidding against the sandstone fra.
Then—
thump.
Liene dropped into the room headfirst, sohow landing on her shoulders. Her legs still tangled in the windowsill, one boot stuck behind the curtain. She wriggled like an upturned beetle, groaning.
Greg turned the page. “She knocked first.”
“I did!” Liene huffed, kicking her way free and rolling upright with the grace of a dropped quill. Her braid had leaves in it. Her jacket was on inside out. “Hi, Fabri. Hi Greg.”
“You learned his na?”
She nodded like a spring-loaded bobblehead.
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“Why are you here? You don’t study in this departnt . . . And how did nobody see you . . .”
“I found your freckles!”
There was a beat of silence.
“I was feeding the duck-things in the lower pond,” Liene continued, as if this were a coherent segue, “and I swear I saw one of them swim away with a shadow that looked exactly like the constellation on your left cheek. You know, the one that shows up when you’re stressed? So I followed it. But I lost the duck-thing, which ans we’re going to find it together.”
[NEW QUEST AVAILABLE: “Trace the Freckle-Star”]
Type: Location Unlock — Sidequest Trigger
Triggered By: Witness Account: Liene Lugano
Associated Pathway: Southern Channel Grounds → Fifth Cathedral of the Twelvefold Fla
Objective: Aetheric residue from an emotional overload has been sympathetically absorbed by a class-III migratory creature (duck-thing).
Locate the affected duck-thing in the lower channel ponds.
Retrieve the stone it took.
Reward: Passive Skill — Stonebound Synapse (Rank I)
Spoiler
Description: Your connection with emotionally resonant stones deepens.
Reduces invocation ti for all [Earth (Stone)] spells by 10%.
Increases control precision when manipulating multiple stones by 10%.
Increases speed and velocity of Stone manipulation by 5%.
Decreases the difficulty of ranking up [Earth (Stone)] spells by 5%.
[SYSTEM NOTE: The duck did not eat your feelings. But it might be nesting on them.]
Fabrisse stared at the glowing prompt, then looked back at Liene. “You were actually being serious?” And the spell is incredibly useful too? It helps cast faster, level up my spells faster, and fling the stone at a higher speed!
Liene grinned, triumphantly holding up what looked like an oily duck feather and a piece of quartz. “So? You’re in?”
“But I have morning classes . . .” He must admit, though, that no morning class was going to teach him Stonebound Synapse.
Greg said, “Attendance is tracked, you know. I’d advise filing a leave of absence form under ‘psycho-emotional artifact retrieval,’ but I don’t believe that category exists yet.”
Liene leaned in. “You skip class half the ti to pick rocks anyway, Fabri.”
“I do not—”
“You once skipped a lecture because a rock ‘looked sad.’”
“That was Gravelkin, and it was sad. And it wasn’t a lecture.” It was a spellcasting practice session masquerading as a lecture. Fabrisse had no need for those.
Greg said, without looking up, “I’ll submit the excuse note.”
Even if Lorvan had specifically told him not to do so, Fabrisse felt like skipping class, especially today. He wasn’t yet ready to deal with the potential staring and questioning of his classmates regarding the incident.
He sighed, already reaching for the boots he’d just taken off. “Fine.” His usual morning routine involved ticulous rock sorting and internal debates about sedintary layers, not chasing empathic waterfowl. Yet, the thought of Stonebound Synapse was rather tempting, a practical skill far more valuable than any Earth Thaumaturgy spell he’d learned in a lecture hall (a grand total of 0).
Liene grabbed his hand and tugged. “Good. Now hurry, before Lorvan finds out and ruins the fun.”
He bit the inside of his cheek as his fingers tapped the side seam of his robe—four beats, pause, two beats. He made a ntal list: (1) Liene was upside down. (2) She had clearly tracked him through duck-feather divination. (3) The System had just validated her logic. Sohow. He sighed. Resistance, as they say, was probably not thaumaturgically optimal.
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