99 - Attack of the Portal

Selena wasn’t sure what made her open the door.
Arielle Blacksoil was not her favorite person–far from it, actually. She was a rude, obnoxious, know-it-all who somehow managed to act oblivious while holding talents that Selena did not entirely comprehend.
At the same time, she was profoundly arrogant, a first-year student who consistently overstepped and showed no respect for authority. Just watching her [Levitate] people–fourth years for that matter–out of her way, and storm over to the door like she had every right to, displayed the blatant disregard she had for them.
It was a good thing she didn’t try that nonsense with Selena.
She must have been smart enough to understand that Selena was not like the rest of them and would not tolerate such behavior. She was, above all, a superior fighter. Even if Arielle tried to get past her, she couldn’t catch up with Selena’s speed,
Even if she did somehow catch up the last time…
But that was different.
That last time was simply a game that Selena herself had not taken seriously. She’d underestimated Arielle Blacksoil, but if she had battled her sincerely, she would have defeated her fair and square, within just a few minutes. Seconds even.
She had absolutely no doubt about that.
So she could have definitely dispatched the girl if she wanted to. But there was something about Arielle’s gaze–maybe the quiet plea bordering on desperation–that soothed Selena a little and made her want to help out.
She didn’t actually think Telip was in trouble, despite the silence from the room. Professor Flintwick had stepped out for a meeting, and they were waiting for him to return to continue their stage 2 final project evaluations.
Telip had been about to start his right before the professor left, and he liked to soundproof the room before he started.
As though anyone cared what he was doing in there. As though his research was even worth spying on or stealing.
Whatever.
Selena had assumed that he was making final touches before his evaluation. She halfway thought she would open the door and find Telip scowling at the air while holding out his hands in that dramatic fashion that he used to summon portals.
Instead, she found him caught in a vicious vortex dragging him into one of the largest portals she had ever seen.
“[Lightning Whip],” she barked, and the spell cracked out of her palm and looped around his wrist.
The whip, under normal circumstances, was enough to slice through his arm, but she could vary the intensity so that it was little more than the heat of a regular rope.
She began to pull him toward her, but then the vortex fought back, clinging to his lower body, dragging him closer to the portal.
Selena’s legs shifted forward, and she braced herself against the doorway, pulling with all her strength.
It still wasn’t enough.
As though the portal was angry at being denied its prey, it sent out a shockwave of pure chaos that turned everything in the room into turmoil.
Desks were flying. The lanterns crashed to the floor. A board ripped out of the walls.
All of it was getting caught in the vortex.
“Telip!” Selena yelled, but he appeared unconscious. His eyes were shut, his body moving like a rag doll. What on Earth happened to him?
Suddenly, James was also rushing into the room. Selena was about to tell him to be careful, as he grabbed Telip by his other hand and yelled, “[Increase Density].”
The spell cemented James to the ground and should have caused Telip to fall too. But it didn’t.
James gritted his teeth, using his considerable strength to pull. He was the strongest in their class, but even he wasn’t enough to overcome the force of the portal.
“[Flame Shield, Major]!” Selena cast a lot of shields in quick succession to block and incinerate any of the objects that rattled toward James.
The other fourth years ran in too, one of them using an air rope and the other attempting to bend the walls around the portal to cover it up.
It didn’t work.
Instead, somehow the portal was moving now, getting closer, Telip’s legs nearly dangling within.
“[Void Vortex]!,” Selena cast the spell that created a large whirlpool in the opposite direction. Its center was like a mini black hole that she hoped would be enough to combat the intensity of the portal.
It did for a second.
But then the portal grew stronger. It was undeterred, determined to swallow up its victim.
What the hell was it? Was it actually sentient?
Where did it come from? Why did it seem set on taking Telip?
That didn’t matter right now.
Selena thought about another spell she could use against the portal, but the destructive capacity of that spell was too great. It might just level the entire building.
“First year,” Prim yelled in the middle of casting her spell. “Get out of here and get a professor!”
But Arielle didn’t move. Selena didn’t glance at her at first, but from the corner of her eye, she saw Arielle was motionless.
She was staring at the portal.
“Arielle!” Selena ordered, finally looking over, and though Arielle’s ears perked up like a puppy, she still did not move. She narrowed her eyes at the portal, her eyeballs moving in a very peculiar way. Left, right, and then a sharp tug to the side. Then steady. And again to the side. Her eyebrows furrowed with annoyance, and Selena halfway thought the girl was losing her mind.
Then something happened.
The portal…glitched.
It was strange. It was like someone had disrupted its flow somehow, and it fought back, trying to recover it.
But before she could digest that, something even stranger happened.
It splintered.
The darkness broke to pieces and was held in place for a few trembling seconds.
Then it vanished.
Its gravitational pull vanished as well, and Telip fell into James’ waiting arms.
They all stared at the air in disbelief for a few seconds.
“What just happened?” Prim asked.
“Was it you, Selena?” James asked.
Selena shook her head. It hadn’t been anything she’d done. She hadn’t even gotten the chance to cast her spell yet, because she’d been wondering what Arielle was doing.
But Arielle…
She hadn’t said a single word. Her lips had not moved once, not even a whisper. Neither her wand-holding hand nor her other hand had moved either, for that matter. There was nothing to indicate that she had cast any sort of spell.
But she had done something. Selena knew she had.
“What did you do?” she asked her.
“What do you mean?” Arielle answered.

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“You did something, didn’t you?”
Arielle blinked and pressed her lips together, her gaze straying to the ceiling. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re lying to me.” Selena took a step closer to her, and Arielle’s eyes darted to the other side of the room.
At baseline, Arielle Blacksoil avoided eye contact. Selena knew this.
But this was different.
Her body was stiff, anxiety disturbing her normally smooth expression. Her lips even moved, nearly forming words of protest. She was desperately trying to think of a lie to get out of the fact that she was hiding something.
“Tell me what you did to make the portal disappear,” Selena demanded.
“I did nothing.”
“Do not lie to me.” Selena’s temper flared, so much so that she heard the tentativeness in Prim’s voice when she said, “Erm…Selena?”
She glanced over to see her classmates eyeing her with worry. As though she were a crazy person.
She couldn’t blame them.
She felt like a crazy person.
What she was suggesting was insane, too mad to even comprehend, yet there was not a single shred of her that could deny what she saw.
Arielle, the first-year, a fifteen-year-old so-called genius and suspected hack, had somehow made a giant portal disappear.
She had made it glitch and then made it vanish with no traces of its existence except minor black particles that fluttered in the air and the furniture that was thrown around the entire room.
The portal that four mages in Cohort 4, including one Master, hadn’t managed to overcome was now gone with no explanation.
The discovery felt like it was splintering Selena’s world apart.
As Arielle tried to walk away, Selena grabbed her arm and yanked her back into place, peering down at her.
Arielle considered her without expression.
“Tell me,” she demanded, but before the question could be answered, were it to be, the doors opened, and the clipped but notable steps of Professor Flintwick echoed towards them.
“What’s happening?” he demanded.
He had been the one supervising the exam, chosen because the other professors were busy and fourth years didn’t need as much supervision.
“What happened?” he asked again when he got closer, and Selena finally tore her gaze away from Arielle to gesture to Telip.
“We don’t know what happened. We opened the door and found him unconscious, about to get sucked into the portal.”
“What portal?”
“There was a giant portal right there,” Eva said, pointing at the air that had seemed so imposing and dark but was now deceptively inconspicuous. The walls around it had been bent, but there was not even a mark on the brick behind it.
“Where is it now?” Professor Flintwick asked.
“I…we don’t know. It suddenly vanished.”
“It didn’t just vanish,” Selena said and inclined her head toward Arielle. “She did something to it.”
There was a moment of silence which Selena knew wasn’t born from acquiescence. If anything, it was a protest. They didn’t agree with what she’d said, but they were too cowardly to tell her that, which managed to irritate her even more.
She glared at them. “I’m not lying.”
Prim and Eva looked away, and James scratched the back of his head awkwardly. But rather than defy her, they remained strategically silent.
Selena turned her attention back to Arielle. “Tell us what you did.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Arielle said.
“Stop lying.”
“I’m not,” she insisted, and Selena felt her anger ticking up with each word the little liar said.
“Why is a first year here anyway?” Professor Flintwick asked.
“Um…Telip asked me to help him, but I had a family emergency so I forgot.” The lie rolled off Arielle’s tongue in an unconvincing staccato. At least this time, she kept her eyes on Selena’s collarbone instead of at the ceiling. She still wasn’t meeting anyone’s gaze.
The untrained eye might think she was simply intimidated by Selena’s foreboding demeanor and the threat of an incoming explosion.
But Selena knew Arielle wasn’t afraid of her. She might not be afraid of anything.
She considered the girl, with her tiny bones and her blank face.
Selena could crush her right now if she wanted to.
Could she?
She gritted her teeth. This was annoying. The frustration ate at her because she finally had to admit then that Arielle Blacksoil wasn’t just lucky, above-average talent. She wasn’t even just a genius.
There was something about her that wasn’t normal.
No normal person could break a portal like that, not even Selena herself.
Not even Telip, who was a master at portals.
Not even her own father.
So what on earth did Arielle do to herself to make her capable of ending a portal with her eyes?
Unless she wasn’t human.
Unless she was something else entirely.
Selena narrowed her gaze, scanning her heat signature, analyzing as much as she could to figure out what was wrong with Arielle Blacksoil.
Meanwhile, Professor Flintwick was in motion.
“Is Telip breathing?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” James said.
“Take him to the infirmary. The rest of you, the trials are cancelled for today. First Year, you’re restricted from this floor, and Telip should have known that. I don’t know what he was thinking, calling you here or attempting to cast such a spell without my presence.” He sighed. “In any case, you all can leave. Except you, Selena. I need a more detailed report.”
Arielle nodded and basically scurried away.
Selena watched her leave feeling wholly unsettled with everything that just happened.

---

Arielle was happy that she could save Telip, but she was concerned about Selena.
She’d thought she had disabled the portal as inconspicuously as possible.
Then again, there hadn’t been enough time for her to ensure that.
She had urgently been trying to close the portal before it sucked them all into its maw. It had not been difficult to figure out. The vast expanse of the typhooning Vacu that formed the portal was pretty solidly linked together, but all she had to do was overcome the force of attraction to break it.
However, she was concerned that such a backlash would kill Telip and injure everyone else in the room. So she had to not only worry about breaking the spell but also mitigating the backlash.
She held the pieces in place, stopping their motion while gradually drawing the orbs apart, bit by bit, until it hit the breaking point. The snap had sent a wave of force, but she’d managed to hold that in place too, and then she had waited until the orbs were settled once more before letting them disperse.
It was difficult to do, at least with just her eyes. But her connection to the orbs had gotten better, and Vacu liked her, so it worked out.
She wondered what happened to trigger a portal that big. Did Telip do it? How was he knocked unconscious? And what was the strange signature she’d seen at the base of the spell?
The image was imprinted on her mind as she made her way to Professor Valeria’s office.
She assumed that with Professor Flintwick’s appearance, the emergency staff meeting was over and they could discuss blood magic now, which was the first thing Arielle asked once she got there.
“Blood magic is magic spurred from the activation of a blood covenant,” Valeria said. “Which is not something everyone can do. It’s a rare and specific specialty reserved for certain bloodlines, because of properties in their blood or their souls, depending on who you ask.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know exactly,” she said. “The prevailing theory is that it’s a gift from a primordial or a dhampyr or a Fae. Or some combination of that. Or some other creature we don’t know yet. However, what we do know is that it is nearly impossible to break a covenant without the caster dying. But that also depends. Sometimes blood covenants can involve entire families and generations, and so the death of one person does not necessarily break it.”
“What about blood covenants imbued on objects? How do we break those?”
“That would still require the death of the individual who made the covenant. And again, if the individual is clever enough, they can enable a loophole that means that it will remain active even after their death.”
Hmm. Yseult was definitely clever.
She wished that she could get a trace of his blood and use it to deactivate the spell on the journal, but she didn’t know if that was even enough. What if it needed to be his whole person, not just a part of him?
At the very least, with some of his blood she could attempt to study magical components of the covenant.
Or maybe she could use Inara’s blood. But if she attempted to use either in the journal and she was wrong, the book itself might self-destruct.
There was also the possibility of backdoor access. The demons had used a soul signature. Was that a different kind of magic? Soul magic?
Her mind spun so fast, but she tried to settle it on a single thought.
“So only certain families can use blood magic?” Ari asked.
“Yes.”
She pursed her lips in thought. She would need to find a way around that, but for that she needed more information.
Professor Valeria had warned her that she didn’t have much time thanks to the delayed trials, so Ari moved on to the next topic on her mind.
“I also wanted to ask about abyssal spells,” she said. “I heard the Lis have a monopoly on them.”
“Yes. They keep that information under lock and key. I can’t tell you anything about that.”
“There’s no other way to research the abyss without them?”
“No. Not unless you somehow magically happened upon one of the lost spells of the Vaelors. But that is even harder than getting access to Li’s family Grimoire. The Vaelor’s lost spells are one of the biggest magical wonders of the world that hundreds of mage-researchers are currently looking into. I wanted to work on it too, but I doubt I’ll get much headway when most of the others who tried haven’t.”
Arielle was silent, and Valeria cocked her eyebrow. “Unless you want to help me.”
Arielle thought about it for a second, then nodded. “I think I do.”
Valeria’s eyes widened. “You do?”
“Yes.” She was busy but she also didn’t want to not be busy. She didn’t want to dwell on anything else, right now. Besides, this was important. If she learned the abyssal spells, then she could enter and leave by herself. She would no longer be scared of being trapped there by the Drift, unable to find a way out. “As long as we keep my involvement a secret.”
“Of course! Yes. But…” She stammered, but was already getting to her feet, shuffling to the shelf at the back of the room. “I thought you would be busy.”
“I am, but the abyss is something I’m very interested in. I’m also curious about the Vaelors. So I will help you with this spell and then maybe another spell if I’m also interested in it.”
There was a dry chuckle that followed her words.
“Okay. Good. I appreciate your honesty.” Valeria finally returned, having retrieved a giant leatherbound book and placed it on her table. “I don’t have much time, but let’s get started.”