[Fic] "A Splash of Color" -- Enchanted Forest Chronicles

[edenfalling]

wistfulmemory said: I would love to claim "color" with Morwen and Telemain and the results that come about when Telemain gets distracted from a tricky experiment.

Note: Stokey's Academy in Otterton is a bit of fanon I made up for a trio of backstory fics about Morwen. I wrote one of them (The Affairs of Dragons) for Femgenficathon 2008. The other two remain sadly unfinished and thus unposted. (1,600 words)

[ETA: The slightly revised final version is now up on AO3!]

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A Splash of Color
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Stokey's Academy of Magic was too new to have many traditions, but the students and faculty were working hard to make up that deficit -- primarily by declaring any particularly interesting accident 'a new tradition!' and egging people on to repeat it the next year.

Between them, Morwen and Telemain started five traditions in their first two years of study. It would have been six, but in light of the previous year's repair bill, the headmaster declared that henceforth anyone who performed an unauthorized building relocation spell would be charged for any and all damages and prosecuted under Otterton city law for reckless endangerment and destruction of property. The other students, showing what Morwen considered an implausible increase in their usual quota of common sense, decided moving the Academy across town each spring wasn't quite that necessary.

Their third year had been surprisingly uneventful so far, but Morwen knew better than to expect that to continue for long.

"That looks impractically complicated," she said as she steered her broom through the tall, narrow window of the workroom she and Telemain shared in the Academy's attic. (It was a very nice attic, all things considered, since the Academy had begun its life as a rich merchant's mansion (before he had lost his fortune and eventually moved in with his youngest daughter, who'd married a cursed prince). That didn't disguise the fact that the faculty clearly wanted Telemain kept out of the way, and were still somewhat uncomfortable teaching a young woman who intended to be a witch rather than a sorceress.)

Normally Telemain kept his mess to his own side of the room, but today he'd shoved their worktables together in the center of the oak-beam floor, scrawled a massive diagram in multicolored chalk onto the slate tabletops, and laid a series of bowls and bones, mirrors and powders, and other magical items on intersections or in small containment circles within the chalk.

"It's not any more unwieldy than some of the greater arcana," Telemain mumbled, the silver nail clenched between his teeth impeding his enunciation. "In any case, half of this setup is for real-time analysis of the spell process and its effects. Even if my hypothesis proves unsound, I should get some interesting data to study."

"That actually makes it even more impractical," Morwen said, shutting the window behind herself. (Fresh air was nice. Wind disrupting Telemain's more delicate arrays was less so.) "We should work on developing more portable analysis tools. Remind me tomorrow and I'll see if the headmaster will accept that as a final project."

"Yes, of course," Telemain said in a distracted tone.

Morwen smiled wryly and wrote herself a note instead, which she pinned to the eastern wall over her open and strangely empty ingredient cupboard. Then she began to examine the chalked linkages and nodules, trying to puzzle out her best friend's intent. "What is your new spell meant to do? Something about... refraction of light?"

"It occurred to me last night--" Telemain began, then grimaced. He took the silver nail out of his teeth and shoved it unceremoniously through the already-tattered fabric of his left sleeve. "As I was saying, it occurred to me that most color-change spells work by changing the physical matrix of the colored material, but since color is, fundamentally, a perception based on the properties of light that enter the human eye and brain, it might be possible to produce a color-change effect by magical interference with the wavelength of light as it reflects from a surface rather than by changing the nature of the reflecting surface itself, and since this would be a qualitative physical change in the light rather than a manipulation of the mind's perceptive faculties, it should be self-sustaining in a way that traditional illusions are not."

Morwen examined the spell again with that somewhat unhelpful explanation in mind. Right. Change colors without changing them or creating an illusion, which meant... Oh. "I see. You want to stick a layer of magic on top of that teacup that will make it look yellow instead of blue, but won't actually change the paint or involve forcing people to disbelieve their own eyes."

"I don't know why you insist on using imprecise layman's terms," Telemain said, "but yes. And it goes further. If I've correctly calculated the theoretical underpinnings, we ought to be able to refine the parameters to alter light in any pre-defined area, whether there's a solid reflecting surface or not. Eventually we could create entire spell diagrams out of magically manipulated light instead of being restricted to two-dimensional approximations in chalk! Think of the research applications!"

"I am. I also think people would be more likely to use that in advertising," Morwen said, imagining the already garish painted signs decorating Otterton's business establishments lit up all hours of the night. And probably moving and glittering, too. Ugh. Although, judging by this test setup, the ingredient and consulting fee outlays might be prohibitive. Good. "On second thought, this is an excellent level of complication. Let's make sure not to streamline anything."

"Hmm?" Telemain said. "Morwen, I'm about to start the invocation. Use this to stir a teaspoon of powdered hens' teeth into the vinegar after I add the crocodile tears, and then lay it across the chunk of quartz." He tossed the silver nail across the tables.

Morwen caught it before it could land somewhere unfortunate. "All right. Where did you move my hens' teeth?"

Telemain gestured vaguely toward his desk, which was covered with pages of scribbled notes held down with half the contents of Morwen's ingredient cupboard. As Morwen sighed and retrieved the relevant jar (and a teaspoon from her sleeve), he began muttering rapidly under his breath and moving bits and pieces around in his chalked diagram.

Liquids burbled, a peacock feather burst into flame, the quartz began to hum, and a strange glitter began to fill the air, a bit like a heat mirage without any accompanying change in temperature. As the spell activated and gathered power, Morwen frowned. There was something slightly off, something she couldn't quite put her finger on. All the modules were correctly defined, the items correctly placed to increase their symbolic power draw, the linkages robust, and yet...

As she touched the wet nail to the humming quartz, a fat yellow spark raced up her fingers.

Which should not have happened. Not unless the actual energy requirement of the spell was dramatically lower than Telemain's predictions, and even in that case the excess should pour through that chain of modules until it hit the bottleneck of the target definition and then shunt safely aside into the overflow buffers, which... weren't there. Because the analysis module was taking up all the room Telemain would have needed to draw them.

Oh, blast.

"Telemain, it's going to overload! And you forgot the safety buffers! Where's the key for the emergency shielding spell?"

Telemain glanced up, still muttering, and gestured vaguely toward his shelf of reference books. His tattered sleeve caught on a sharp spine of coral and tore, dropping a swatch of linen over several intersecting chalk lines.

The spell clamped prematurely shut. A fountain of light whirled into a knot at the center of the diagram, paused just long enough for Telemain's suddenly worried eyes to catch Morwen's from across the table, and soundlessly exploded.

When Morwen blinked away the sunspots enough to see again, everything was yellow.

She pulled off her suddenly opaque glasses and squinted around the workroom.

Everything was still yellow.

The walls. The floor. The rafters. Her clothes. Her skin. Telemain. The tabletops, the chalk, all the spell components, all the other items in the room. Even glass in the window was solid yellow.

With a sinking stomach, Morwen lifted the latch and pushed the windowpanes outward.

The whole city of Otterton was canary yellow and predictably unhappy about it.

"We are in so much trouble," she said.

Telemain peered out beside her. "Yes, I can see that. On the bright side, even though the spell misfired, the results clearly prove that my hypothesis was correct."

"I don't think the faculty will care," Morwen said. "In fact, I bet that once we get this mess untangled, they'll forbid any further research on the topic so long as we're still students."

Telemain attempted to frown in a disapproving manner, which looked unspeakably silly when his skin, beard, and eyes were all brilliant yellow. "They have no sense of scientific curiosity."

"They have a keen sense of what will get them sued by the city council," Morwen countered. "I also bet someone will try to repeat the trick next year anyway, because it's exactly as ridiculous as all our other mistakes that they're trying to make into traditions."

Behind them, someone began to pound on the (yellow) workroom door.

Morwen sighed and went to face her fate.

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Next year, someone did turn all of Otterton purple for six hours. The year after that, it was a beautifully delicate sky-blue, then rose-pink, then green with orange stripes, and so on. Eventually the people of Otterton declared September eighth a municipal holiday and promoted the color changes as a tourist attraction.

Two years into the stalemate while they waited for Daystar to grow up, Morwen sent Telemain one of the brochures.

He sent back an invitation.

They drank fizzy scarlet cider, ate scarlet chicken and scarlet chocolate pudding, critiqued the architecture of the addition to the Academy, purchased several types of rare magical ingredients, melted one interfering (and temporarily scarlet) wizard, and had a lovely time.

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That was fun! :)

Comments

[watersword]

Morwen ♥♥♥♥♥

[edenfalling]

Morwen is my hero. :)

[wistfulmemory.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was fantastic! Thank you so much! I truly felt that this was a scene from a prequel to the series. The experiment was brilliant, and I loved the results (including it becoming a school tradition). Thank you so much for writing this for me. :)

[edenfalling]

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! (Back in the early 2000s, I spent a fair amount of time trying to imitate the prose style Wrede uses for the Chronicles. I still don't think I have it completely mastered, but the work was both fun and useful.)