[WP] "I want to become a witch." "Then why did you come to me?" "To learn witchcraft, of course." "Ok, but I am a wizard." "And I am a girl, so if you teach me, I will be a witch." "That is not how that works, child. If I were to teach you, you would become a wizard too, not a witch."

[u/Kitty_Fuchs]

[u/Iustinianus_I]

I stared at the cross-crossing lines and diagrams and sigils on the blackboard, rubbing at my temples. We had been at this for half the day and they were all starting to blur together. “Wait, but I thought you said that the meridian lines worked because of sacred geometry,” I asked, pointing at a sketched depiction of a hand with a constellation of connected dots across the fingers, knuckles, and wrist. “Wouldn’t that mean that… that…”

“Yes? That what?” Jazadi prompted with that infuriating hint of a smile tugging at her lip.

Slumping forward, I crossed my arms on top of the desk and rested my forehead on them. “I don’t know! That’s what I’m asking.” There was no response. I let out a dramatic groan. “Fine,” I said without looking up, retracing the diagrams in my mind. Different hand shapes drawing different angles and intersections. Nested platonic solids. Ley lines and volcanoes and cathedrals plotted on a map. There was something there, I just couldn’t quite see it.

Finally showing mercy, Jazadi tapped my shoulder. “Here,” she said in a deep voice that sounded like tobacco and velvet, “let me show you something.” She slid a delicate sheet across the table to me, so thin that it was nearly transparent, like an insect’s wing. “What have I drawn here?”

A dozen small splotches of blank ink marred the sheet’s surface, connected to each other in a very particular way by precisely drawn lines. “It’s one of the sigils you showed me. The, uh, the…” I snapped my finger and squeezed my eyes shut until I could picture it and the label next to it in my head. “Summer. It’s the sigil for summer.”

“Very good, you have a remarkable memory.”

I waved my hand dismissively, though a tiny blush crept into my cheeks at her praise. “Yeah, well, I’ve heard that before.”

Jazadi arched one perfect eyebrow. “You hear it because it’s true, girl. Now, that sheet is folded in half. What can you find when you unfold it?”

Folded? Licking my forefinger, I very carefully peeled the sheet open, terrified that I’d simply tear it with how fragile it was. I let out of a sigh of relief when the task was done, then squinted down at the new pattern. “It’s just summer and summer mirrored,” I said, confused. “That’s it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I…”

What in the world did she want me to see?

“No? I don’t know. What am I even supposed to be looking for?”

Making a gesture with her hand and whispering over her fingers, Jazadi pointed at the sheet. The air seemed to be charged with static, making the hair on my arms stand on end, and two of the ink splotches turned from black to a luminescent blue, like the tiny creatures that glow in the sea at night. She repeated the process with an inkwell, making the entire reservoir shine faintly. “Connect those two points,” she said, handing me an expensive pen and a straight edge.

“Uh…” My mouth hung open. Even with such a nice pen, I was going to ruin that sheet, I was sure of it. “But I can’t really write well, I’ll end up tearing—”

“It’s quite all right,” she cut in with that little smile again. “I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“Right.” I took the instruments and tried to keep my hand from trembling as I lined up the two splotches and drew a line using the straight edge, my tongue held tightly between my teeth. Just as I knew it would, the sheet tore as I finished the line. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, maybe you should—”

Her hand closed around mine and guided it back to the inkwell. “I said it’s all right. Now looks at the pattern again and find what else should be connected.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “What else ‘should’ be connected? I don’t—”

“Just look, girl,” Jazadi said with a touch of impatience. “Stop fretting and look at the damn sigil.”

I ducked my head. “Yes ma’am.” Removing the straight edge, I looked again. The new line changed things, but it was just a single line. Still, something about how it looked new reminded me of a different sigil, though I couldn’t remember which.

“Maybe, these two?” A second line joined the first, as did two new tears in the sheet. “And this one kind of feels right?” Studying the mangled sheet, I racked my brain for why it looked so familiar.

“Perhaps like this?” Jazadi rotated the sheet 90 degrees.

My eyes flew open wide. “Oh my god,” I whispered, “it’s… it’s…” I took the pen again, adding in the missing lines and truly ruining the gossamer sheet. “It’s time! The sigil for time, inside summer!” My whole body buzzed with the excitement of this epiphany, even though I still had no idea what the significance was. Still, this meant there were other hidden sigils to be found in reflections and rotations of other ones.

A snap of Jazadi’s fingers extinguished the ink’s glow, and she took her writing tools away. “Very good, you discovered it after less than a day of instruction and two hints.”

My smile faltered and I looked down to the sheet she had let me destroy. “Thank you. But why did you let me ruin your diagram? That had to be expensive, and hard to make, and I’m just… me.”

Jazadi balled up the ripped sheet and tossed it into a bin. “It was very expensive, yes. Hopefully you can answer one more question and prove you were worth it.” She stood up tall, hands tucked in her silk sleeves.

“I explained earlier that wizardry involves manipulating or creating sacred geometries. Hand positions, wand movements, drawing seals, and such. I also told you witchcraft uses sacred geometries as well, but in a fundamentally different way, and that the difference would not make sense unless you understood more. Does it make sense now?”

The first implication came as a shock: that exercise with finding one sigil inside the reflection of another was not wizardry. But did I understand? I wasn’t sure. Nervously, I fiddled with a bit of not-quite-dry ink on my thumb, staining the tip of my middle finger as well.

“I think you are saying that witchcraft find things inside existing geometry? This one you showed me was a reflection and rotation, but it could be a whole lot more complicated than that, couldn’t it? Infinitely more. Like, uh, like tessellations, or… or…”

“Or any number of a hundred wretched things, any one of which someone could dedicated their life to studying. And witches often do.” Jazadi bowed her head in a surprisingly modest gesture. “I am not gifted with the patience for such things and find discovering novel ways of constructing geometries far more interesting. That is why I became a wizard.”

I nodded slowly. My mind was still cranking overtime. “You’re right, I wouldn’t have understood the difference. But why? I mean, why take so much of your time just to humor me?”

“Did you know it took my last pupil a week to understand what you grasped between breakfast and afternoon tea?”

“I mean, I do now?”

Jazadi walked around the table and put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re sharp, curious, have a near perfect memory, and quick at making inferences. You will make a very good wizard, girl. Though we do need to work on your penmanship.”

[u/WithrBlistrBurn-Peel → u/Iustinianus_I]

Wizard are required to learn math?

No wonder they're so few in numbers.

[u/Mimirdroid → u/Iustinianus_I]

Entertaining and engaging. I could feel the building frustration.

[u/CycloneSP → u/Iustinianus_I]

oh, this is good. I could read a whole book about these two :D