Tess conjures her wand into the wrong tool for the job. Save her!

You and Tess stand poised at the door opening from the bathing chamber into Beavertail's secret guest suite.

"Not so safe, then," you whisper to Tess.

"Sneaking in the side door probably did it," she whispers back. "First time anything noticed. Well, then." Tess traces her wand in a complicated pattern. "IGNEM GLADIO," she incants. Instead of a wand, Tess is now holding a flaming sword. She pulls a thread from the sleeve of her robe and twines it round her finger. "RETICULA." A net drapes down from her hand, rippling with eagerness to catch something in its strands. "Pretend this is a doubles duel, Fay. Get ready to banish and deflect."

"Shit," you say. You raise your wand and trace a sigil of focus. "Alright then."

Tess opens the door to the main room of the secret suite. Her jaw clenches as the open door reveals a whirl of creatures, semi-abstract humanlike shapes with empty eyes, moving forward menacingly. Tess interposes her flaming sword to assert her presence, but the creatures seem undaunted. Their glassy eyes flicker in the sword's flames.

"Tess, step back and cast a ward," you urge. "Or turn them to butterflies. Don't...!"

Tess looks from left to right, her posture going taut as she balances on the balls of her feet.

"Tess, we're not crazy Leonteans. We're Minerval Beavertails and you are not Red Sonja!" you warn. "Cast a SPELL!"

But Tess's attention is fully on the menacing figures, her gaze tracking the point of her flaming sword and scanning for points of attack. Some of the creatures are aping her movements, shifting their footing and moving their hands in the same directions that Tess is.

You frown. Something familiar in that interaction, that mirroring. Tess bends her knees slightly, preparing to attack. The figures bend in a ragged mockery of Tess's fierce intention, gibbering and hissing half-intelligible threats. There's another flicker from a glassy eye. They're indistinct of form, but you start picking out the common factors within the shifting blurs.

Tess brandishes her flaming sword. "Begone or face my blade!" she threatens. "BEGONE!"

The creatures grope forward. Tess's flaming blade flashes up, fully illuminating the nearest ones.

They all have thick eyeglasses.

"Tess NO!" you shout.

Her blade changes direction at the top of its arc and flashes downward. The creature is cloven asunder, falling into smoking bits. Tess screams. A red slash appears on her shoulder. Smoke rises from her wound and blood drips. The pain drives her into a greater frenzy, and she leaps toward the next creature, slashing, felling another creature and collecting a fresh wound, smoking and dripping.

"Tess you ABSOLUTE GOOSE, they're THOUGHT FORMS! STOP!"

Tess slashes about in rising pain and confusion. Blood covers one eye.

Fuck it all.

You raise your wand, call on all your energy, and start laying dismissals into the whole sorry crew. "APO PONTOS, KAKODAIMONOS! APO PONTOS!" Alternating between invoking magical commands and insulting their mothers and their hairdressers, you drive them all away in a furious whirlwind of mastery, riding your own frenzy to a complete victory,

A complete victory, featuring yourself as a twitching, retching blob of Beavertail-robed jelly, fighting nausea, headache, and the shakes. Probably nightmares to come, as well. A few of the thought-forms wore your face instead of Tess's.

Tess.

Fuck it all twice.

You recite a little charm to compose yourself. What was that formula that that Leontes bit taught you? "I will not chunder. Chunder is the buzz killer, the little lapse that spoils the whole party..."

With a few charms to bolster yourself, you feel confused and giddy and not a little silly, but at least your head feels like it's going to stay in one piece and your stomach seems likely to stay inside rather than out.

Tess.

Tess is crumpled in a heap, weeping. Her wand lies close to one outflung arm, no longer a flaming sword but a supple tool of magic.

Tess recoils at your touch, but after she wipes the blood off her glasses and looks into your eyes, her breathing slows and evens out, and her sobs fade away.

"Tess," you say. "Tess?"

"Fay?" she answers. "Those demons. What were they?"

"Empty shells," you say. "Hungry ghosts. Each one took a piece of your soul while... While we were in the bath and weren't paying attention. "And the easiest parts to steal?"

Our self-hate is a whisper from manifestation, Whiplash had said, back when you were a first-year and he was still Tutor. Each of us must practice fiercely to guard against the greatest risks of awakening magical power. With power we must learn control, for without control, our hungers and desires, fears and hates, will wander the world, sowing meaningless chaos and conflict. We must master ourselves, or we shall defeat ourselves.

Whiplash preferred to objectify his hungers, desires, fears and hates no further away than the swishing arc of a rod, a scourge, or a whip. A bully, a blowhard, a drama king, capricious in praise and punishment, a collector of pets. But he was no emptyheaded ninny.

"Oh," Tess says. "The parts of ourselves we don't like looking at."

Tess reaches out for you and you wrap her in your arms.

"When you hide a space, like here?" you say. "When there isn't properly enough space for this apartment, and you have to stretch and borrow? Any hole you've left in the wards, the sad trash of the inbetween spaces wanders into the light."

"Oh," Tess says.

"Yes," you say. "Probably they all got in when you brought us in the side door. You glance at the room. "Shit, what a mess. At least we didn't actually break anything or light anything on fire."

"Why did it hurt?" Tess asks. "Why...?" She picks at the red slashes on her skin, still oozing blood.

"They were hardly anything, those thought forms," you say. "What they were, they took from you." You bow your head. "From me too, a few of them. After I went all Rumplestiltskin and stomped around banishing them willy-nilly, I feel like I'm missing some pieces."

"Fay?" Tess says.

"I'll be alright, Tess," you assure her. "Is there an easier way out of here?"

"Escape door," Tess says. pointing. "Opens up on the tor above the Chilly Tarn."

You snort. "The Chilly Tarn? How about the House kitchen, can we go out that way? I'm not dragging you out into the winter night for a bum-freezing barefoot midnight ramble."

Having just been there quite recently with Morgan at your side, and feeling a little less steady than the night when Fiammetta Hawk had defrocked and dismissed you into the frigid, breezy darkness.

"Alright," Tess says. "You're right. Easiest way back."

You look around the suite again. "Give me a couple to set things to right and we'll wend our way back. "How are you at poppet magic?"

"Fair," Tess says. "More than fair. Tutor makes me keep in practice."

"Right then, Tess," you say. "Let's get you up and have you sit here for a little bit." You bundle Tess into a broad armchair -- more a chair-and-a-half than a proper loveseat -- and drape a knit blanket across her shoulders. The gray strands of fine wool take on a rainbow opalescence as you tuck the blanket snugly about Tess.

Pushing yourself to stay with your intention, you fashion a pair of poppets to leave behind you with a simple task. Taking clay, wool, and beads from the materia magica stored in the little magical practice space, you fashion two dolls in the shape of yourself and Tess. You finger-comb out a few strands of your hair and mingle them with the wool of your doll's hair. You take a drop of fragrant, honeyed oil and anoint the thirteen openings of your doll's body, eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, nipples, navel, piss-hole, cunt, and arsehole. You return to Tess and pause to sponge her face and limbs before helping her make a magical connection to her poppet.

Tess looks at you and raises her eyebrows with inquiry when her poppet's link is sealed.

"Clean-up poppets," you say. "Shabtim like the old Pharaohs." Yours had a couple other intentions set, but really it was all about Letting Someone Else Clean Up. Even if that someone was a poppet connected closely enough to you that you might have night-long dreams about being a tiny creature scrubbing a giant's guest chamber of the sticky, fallen blood of conflict.

You clear your throat. "Let's set ourselves to work."

You and Tess each enchant your poppet. Tess's seems more energetic and lively, if prone to making false starts. You have to encourage Poppet Fay to get herself in gear. Leaving your poppets with instructions for cleaning up and then hiding when complete, you and Tess hold hands, steadying each other as you prepare to return to the real world.

As real as House Beavertail is, anyway.

You're in luck. The kitchen staff is busy elsewhere than the door to Beavertail's secret guest suite. When you turn a corner into the kitchen proper, Cook and Second Cook are busy kneading out bread. Cook seems to be doing it by the sheer power of her brawny arms, while her assistant appears to be applying some small domestic magic to ease and speed his strokes on the bread dough.

"Oh you poor dumplings!" Cook says. "Fay and Tess, what happened to you?"

"We took a wrong turn and got lost," you say, pointing your sweetest insincere smile at Cook.

Curiously you don't detect any of her mouthwatering cinnamon apple tart scent. Perhaps it comes and goes. But you remember it so vividly that looking at Cook's hands, her face, anywhere she has bare skin -- it brings back your recollection of Cook's surrounding air of EAT ME NOW.

Well, you had arranged to, perhaps, eat her later. Your smile warms from sweet and insubstantial to warm and interested. Looking forward to our date. You let your head and shoulders droop a bit, to communicate But I'm dead on my feet.

Cook pulls you aside, gives you mugs of warm tea, and sends you out of her kitchen with an admonishment to go straight to bed.

"Let's stop at my place," you tell Tess. "I need to tell Morgan but I don't want to leave you alone."

Tess squeezes your hand. She's been fading in and out of being fully compos mentis, but she is still on her feet.

Your fatigue is catching up to you fast. "Actually you better stay once we get there."

By the time you make it back to your shoebox dormitory room, you and Tess are having trouble staying upright.

Morgan turns round from the cramped little vanity where she's been combing her hair. It's still a nest of disarranged black broomstraw, but that's Morgan. You feel the itch to conjure a little body and condition into Morgan's hair, but fainting at your lover's feet trying to be Fay Applebum, Attack Hairdresser... well, it wouldn't look good to Tess.

"Sorry Morgan," you say, giving her a feeble wave. "Tess and I are all wrung out."

"Are you bleeding?" Morgan asks. She dabs at your cheek.

"I'm alright, it must be Tess's," you say. "We're dead on our feet. Just tired, that's all. Adventures stomping all over us. Can you take the loft?"

Morgan's eyes sparkle. "I'm sleeping over with Golondrina."

"Alright then."

That's your last coherent thought until you open your eyes to an unfamiliar curtain of carrot-orange hair moderating the low-angle glare of the noon sun of winter, flooding your chamber with light.

Noon? You could probably sleep another day. Maybe Tess could too.

Tess is snoring. You're both wearing last night's smudged, rumpled robes, having crumpled into bed and not moved since. You raise your head and look at the deep scratches across her cheek and shoulder, showing a black crust of caked blood.

Was Tess a cutter? you wonder. When feelings were too strong inside, or when you just didn't feel real, sometimes pain would anchor you. Hawk was big on that, you'd had lectures from her about pain for focus, pain for concentration, pain for distraction.

Tutor Hawk's favorite lesson book was an exercise called TO GET THE SIGHT, and applied to transcending pain into awareness, clairvoyance and vision.

The hell of it is that it worked really well on you. Fifteen minutes of moderate lashing accompanied by incense and invocations had given you Goddess eyes. You had plundered a dozen souls of secrets, you had glimpsed Boarbristle as a living, changing creature across the centuries. But then your Goddess eyes had lighted on a soppy broomstick scarecrow of a hedge witch wearing a white-trimmed black robe. The world had tilted and fallen into a black abyss, and the next thing you remember was Hawk administering smelling-salts accompanied by a brisk slapping of your cheeks.

"Morgan," you whisper, holding your tongue before you get to muttering about swooning princesses. Or swooping princesses. Golondrina.

Gain +1 XP. You now have 3 XP.
You have Ambition +2, Bravery -1, Cunning +2, Diligence +0
FRIEND: Morgan, who also owes you a FAVOR.

You have a date to HAVE SEX with Cook, who walks about in a mouthwatering scent cloud of cinnamon apple tart.

You have the CONSEQUENCE: Drained. Take a -1 on all Move rolls. You're not at your best. Maybe it's time to rest.

Possible next moves:

• Go to the Infirmary. Miss Wormwood may try and put you right quickly to get rid of you. But you don't like her much either, and you're not sure you would actually feel better. Roll +BRAVERY(-2) (-1 Bravery, -1 CONSEQUENCE) to GET OUT OF THE INFIRMARY
• Ask your FRIEND Morgan for some help. Maybe three meals in bed and a good long soak. Roll +DILIGENCE(+1) (+0 Diligence, -1 CONSEQUENCE, +2 FRIEND) to ENCOUNTER Morgan. On a 10+ you may remove a CONSEQUENCE. On a 7-9 you may use Morgan's FAVOR to remove your CONSEQUENCE.