Page 28 of Skyblossom
Seemed like it had worked. Everything about it looked according to specifications. Guess I’d… made the potion. Wouldn’t have been able to do it without Cadence’s help, without her sifting through dozens of different herbological compounds to track down the right one.
I couldn’t even thank her. And she’d never let me pay her back for it.
“Dammit.” I popped open an empty vial, placed it under the sealing funnel, and I poured the flask through and into the vial, protective magics shining up through the funnel and infusing into the potion before it settled into the vial in a final product with a shimmering movement inside that looked almost like a pair of spectral wings. Almost like… lumini wings.
Seriously?When Cadence had said everything about thatskyblossomflower, I’d assumed it was just fey tricks, just a silly little legend she was using to blame herself, but this was too on-the-nose. Maybe we had been cursed.
I shut the vial, putting it away in my potions sleeve, turning to a notebook with one line after another, one potential extension recipe after another, each with an X marked down after it, and I scrolled down to the bottom,winter-blue lichen,and I put a checkmark next to it.
Congratulations to me.
I drifted through the rest of the day, making it to my next class, where I sat staring into the distance thinking about Cadence, and then my next class, the alchemy class where I was turning in the potion extension project, and when I showed it to Professor Song after class, she lit up.
“Oh—you’ve absolutely outdone yourself,” she said, holding it up to the light, her pet galobalo Mothball climbing up onto a window ledge to sniff at it, big bushy tail flicking as he did. “The fact that an extension of this degree has this much stability…” She drew her wand, coalescing a single drop of magic at the tip of dropping it into the vial, light shimmering up from it, and after a second, she nodded approvingly, eyes sparkling. I breathed out slowly. Normally I’d have been of half a mind to cry from relief—Professor Song was an absolute sweetheart unless she was disappointed in you, and then she could make an ancient dragon cry—but right now I wasn’t feeling anything, about anything. “Well done, Miss Bailey.”
“Thank you… does it really seem steady? I haven’t actually tried it. But if you think it’s good, I guess I could just turn it in right here and get it off my mind.”
Her look softened. “You seem to have something else on your mind.”
I looked away. “Oh, um… well. Don’t worry about it.” I shrugged. “Breakup.”
“Oh, Miss Bailey. I’m sorry. Look after yourself. This potion is perfectly solid. I’ll take it now and it’ll be one less thing on the burner for you.”
One less thing on the burner. Great. That freed up more mental space to think about Cadence.
I tried to sit alone for dinner after classes, going to a small café in the Blackwing District for a sandwich. I must have really been moping, because they gave me fries for free, a heaping portion of smiley dragon-face fries. Cute. I couldn’t even smile at smiley dragon-face fries. But I didn’t even get to mope into my smiley fries before a couple people I knew from one of the earlier Championship Trial parties came into the café, and they gushed to me about how it had been so long and we sat together catching up, and I’d never so resented being surrounded by people who wanted to chat about nothing.
By the time I finally made it back to my dorm, I shut the door and sat down just to do some studying, get ahead for my final exams, but I couldn’t make sense of a word of it right now, and casting directions and potion lines were strange magic to me.
So I closed it all, and I stared out the window for a long time, watching the night get thicker, darker, and I guess I followed that night sky, because the next thing I knew, I was up in the Dragon House observatory, glass ceiling open to the night sky above us, shimmering magics twinkling down like falling stars. The magic here shut out the light pollution from the rest of campus, and the sky was alive with streaks of the Milky Way, more stars than I could ever count in a lifetime, nebulas in red and violet and blue streaked distantly through the sky, and standing on a floating crystal platform below the ceiling, gazing distantly up into it, was Lumi, who I could tell wasn’t really seeing the stars in the sky.
“Hey,” I said, and she screamed, whirling around so suddenly she pitched and fell off the platform, and I swore, grabbing my wand and firing off a flare of magic that sweptaround her and caught her and cushioned her fall. “God, Lumi, I’m not a wild wyvern.”
“You sneak up like one!” she said, pouting as she stood up from the floor, dusting herself off.
“Uh. Wild wyverns, they aren’t, uh, they’re not known for sneaking.”
She looked away wistfully, clasping her hands at her waist and swaying slowly. “So… are you here to yell at me?”
“No—no. I’m not.”
“I had a hissy fit and ruined your relationship because of my own issues.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets, looking down at the tiled floor, speckles like stars that moved slowly over the surface. “So you know about it, huh? Did you scry on our conversation?”
“No. I just assume because you look so… sad.”
I kicked at the floor. “It’s not your fault… I shouldn’t have hidden things from you.”
She pouted, just a little, and she turned back to the shimmering crystal stairs that led up to the platform. “Let’s go sit up top. It’s easier to talk under the stars.”
We sat under the stars—up on the platform where it felt like the domed ceiling embraced us and the stars were all around, sitting side-by-side on the edge of the platform and staring up at the sky, and she was quiet when she finally spoke.
“Cadence is really good.”
“I know.”
“I feel like my vision screwed it all up.”
