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StLQ Chapter 3 - Winter
🕑 Added 2025-08-10 11:05:06 +0000 UTCI smiled and spoke in a light, hopefully polite tone. Despite having been killed by this girl just an hour ago, I spoke to Luna like she was a friend.
She raised her eyebrows, surprised for a moment. She observed me suspiciously, as if I was trying to trap her in some sort of spell. Then her gaze lowered back to her meal, and she continued eating.
“Nobody is there,” she said, while nibbling at a tiny spoonful of soup.
Is that a yes? I wondered. The Lich Queen made no sense.
I placed my tray down across from her and sat, still with a friendly smile on my face. I had practice forming the expression after working as an investigator. It wasn’t honest, but it was better than not smiling.
Although, sitting down, I realized I didn’t know what I was actually hoping to achieve with this conversation. Was it you who sent me back in time? Did you have something to do with this? Or are you just fourteen year old Luna from the past?
I glanced at her, as if trying to find a weakness in her expression. She continued eating with her head low, slowly taking tiny spoonfuls, not looking at me at all.
“Boring classes today, huh?” I said. “Does anyone actually gain anything from Mrs. Camila’s classes?”
Luna shrugged, sparing no words for my poor attempt at small talk.
Well, I guess that was to be expected. This was definitely the Luna I remembered from thirteen years ago. Quiet to the point of arrogance, and Lokora’s top student by a long shot. Luna was a girl who saw friends as a waste of time.
We had very little in common. Fourteen-year-old me was a mediocre, if not below average mage, and though I wasn’t the most outgoing kid, I was always weirded out by Luna’s shyness. Most of my classmates agreed that Luna was pretty, and she was amazing at magic, but she was just too weird to actually hang out with.
Right now, however, I was back in time, sent here through a vision. My real body was bleeding out and dying. I asked, “Was it you who sent me back in time?”
Luna raised her head. She studied my face, now genuinely curious. She still said nothing.
“You sent me here,” I said. “Just an hour ago. Let’s not play dumb.”
Luna looked utterly confused. The Lich Queen, if Luna was still the lich that had killed me, was a damn good actor. Nothing on her face indicated that she understood what I was talking about.
She did, however, look weirded out by my questions. She picked up her tray and stood. “Sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”
Then she walked off, leaving me alone on the empty table. Students from all classes were glancing in our direction, whispering amongst each other. I’d probably be added to the list of kids rejected by Luna.
I sighed. It seemed Luna had nothing to do with this odd time travel. Modern day lich Luna hadn't moved with me. Or if she had, this fourteen-year-old Luna wasn’t the Lich Queen. Lich Luna didn’t have cheeks, and she didn’t need to eat. Here, Luna used her muscles and facial expressions exactly like a real human would. I doubted a lich could adjust to having a full body so quickly.
“Kai?” Joshua said, sneaking to my seat. “Goddamn, you actually went for it. I did say you’d get rejected, though.”
“I didn’t ask her out, Josh,” I said.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a small problem…”
“What?”
Luna is perfectly ordinary… I thought. Just like she was thirteen years ago.
And the vision still wasn’t ending.
***
I faked sickness to skip the remainder of my classes.
For some reason, I recalled that skipping classes was a terrifying task to only use in absolute emergencies. Lying to the nurse was difficult, and if I was caught, my mom would get mad for wasting the tuition she worked hard to pay.
The trick turned out to be much easier than I remembered. I didn’t even need to meet the nurse; I just told Joshua that I felt unwell, and that I’d be heading home. With that, I headed out. I’d get marked off as absent and my mom would be informed. She’d probably be pissed. But if my mom was alive and well, an hour-long lecture about skipping school sounded like a dream.
Whatever the consequences would be, I didn’t exactly care. I walked down the long spiraling stairs, and opened the double doors leading out of the World Tree.
And a chilly gust of cold winter wind hit me in the face, bringing with it a whirl of snowflakes. I shivered and quickly closed the door.
Right. Winter.
I winced internally. Summer had just started when I died…
I turned toward the multiple rows of clothes hangers on a metallic rack, where hundreds of winter jackets of each student awaited. I always left my jacket somewhere there, if I recalled correctly, though I didn’t even remember what my jacket looked like.
“Kai!” someone called after me. I turned to see the blonde girl from my class running after me.
“Ah, hey, Emm, Enn… Uh…”
“Ella!” she said. “Kai, what has gotten into you?”
“Sorry, my head is a bit wonky,” I said and let out the umpteenth awkward laugh of the day. “Why are you here?”
“To take you home, obviously,” Ella said. “You’re unwell. We can’t just let you head home and collapse in the snow!”
“That’s kind of you,” I said, while glancing around myself, as if identifying an exit. I found nothing.
Ella crossed her arms. “I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t Dr. Michan’s Enchantment Properties class. I’ll take any excuse out of his rambles. And I do get points for helping you. Let’s go, where’s your coat?”
“It’s fine, I’m only faking sickness,” I said. “I don’t need to be escorted home.”
“You look like a lost child!” Ella said. “You’ll probably get lost in a ditch. Where’s your jacket?”
“Uh…” I said, looking around the hangers.
Ella blinked. “You do know where your jacket is, right?”
Goddammit, I cursed. All these awkward moments were starting to get tiring. I could have probably found my jacket on my own if I searched hard enough. But with Ella here, I had no choice but to admit that I, in fact, had no idea where my jacket was.
Ella merely sighed. She helped me search for my jacket. Somehow, she looked like she knew what she was searching for better than I did.
“You talked with Luna today,” Ella said.
“Yep,” I said. “She’s a peculiar one.”
“She rejected you,” Ella said. “Immediately. I’m not surprised.”
“Actually, we had a long and wholesome conversation about the origins of the universe,” I said.
Ella paused. “Really? Luna likes that kind of stuff? You like that kind of stuff?”
“No, we didn’t get to talk about anything, really,” I said. “Luna escaped halfway into my first monologue.”
Ella laughed lightly, uncertain whether I was joking or not.
We kept searching the hangers, until Ella found a thick dark blue winter jacket. I immediately recognized it as mine. The old jacket was a second-hand jacket my mom bought for pennies from a neighbor. Fourteen-year-old me bore a special kind of distaste for that jacket. Seeing it now, however, my heart skipped a beat.
Ella tossed it at me. Then she nervously asked, “How long have you been practicing? In secret?”
“Depends,” I said. I tightened the jacket and found my beanie and gloves in the pockets. “If we’re speaking in years, I’d say getting a stable flame took me maybe three years. Months, probably around ten. Weeks, some haphazard nine on and off. That’s about how long it’ll take to cast a simple flame.”
“That makes no sense,” Ella said, while putting on her own bright white jacket, far newer than mine.
“Everyone here has been learning magic for at least two years,” I said. “But how many hours of those two years are they actually practicing and studying? That’s what really matters. So even though casting that flame took around three years, I actually practiced for just a few months.”
“So what you’re saying is that you’re talented,” Ella said. “And you’ve been hiding it.”
I’m dead average, or slightly worse, I thought. The spells I knew were mediocre at best. I had practiced magic even after the academy disbanded, but I had quickly learned that I was no genius. I’d decided eight years ago that becoming a career mage wasn’t actually my thing.
Compared to the sophomores here, though, any learned mage was practically a god of magic.
We opened the double doors and entered the snow-struck campus. Lokora looked a lot more depressing than the summer I remembered prior to waking up. The ground was half a foot higher thanks to the layer of reflective snow. More flakes were steadily falling, adding flakes to the white hats atop the dormitories to our right. Fountains were frozen, and the paved paths that were pretty and rich during summer were today just snow.
My breath left a cold trail as I exhaled, face already feeling the weather. Summer really could have lasted longer…
Janitors and dedicated snow-plowers were pushing snow off of paths and onto mounds. Their jackets were coated in snow, continuously plowing throughout the snowfall. If snow wasn’t plowed now, with the storm still ongoing, they’d need to plow upwards of three or four feet after the storm, which was far from pleasant.
Exiting campus, a lone restaurant and a convenience store stood a short distance away from the gates. The suburbs started immediately after that. Family homes with yards and a lot of trees between each house. Lokora was very much a town. A rich one thanks to the academy, with a pretty town centre, but the outskirts were hilly and filled with snow-topped trees, and not much else.
Ella was strangely nervous as she walked beside me. The conversation quickly grew stupid—mostly thanks to my insane answers to all of her questions. She tried to pry me for my training regime, and I responded with wit and nonsense, like I would have with my sister. Ella wasn’t nearly as skilled at steering the conversation back to the topic like Nelly was, but I was still amazed that Ella was so interested in talking to me the whole time.
“Thanks for the company,” I said when approaching my house ten minutes later. “I’ll teach you my tricks someday.”
“Is that a promise?” Ella asked.
“Sure,” I said. “But I might be busy for the next few days.”
“You’re in my debt for today,” Ella said. She was holding her jacket tight, shivering a little. She had a thick winter jacket, but she wasn’t from Lokora. Like most students, she lived in the dorms, and she wasn’t nearly as resistant to the weather as locals. “Recover well, Kai.”
I smiled and waved her goodbye. Ella headed back to school.
Then I sighed, thinking back on my life thirteen years ago. Had Ella always been so talkative with me? Was she crushing on me?
I ran my boots through the snow scraper and patted my outfit free of snow. I searched my pockets for my keys and stepped into our old unrenovated hardwood home, where my sister’s high-pitched voice called, “Kai is home!”
