a Queen of Butterflies

Chapter 12: I have a lesson in magic and I dramatically fail

"Visualise!" Hades bellows from the other side of the roaring river. "I'm trying!" I shout back.

"It doesn't look like that to me", Hades lifts his shoulders and the ledge I'm standing crumbles away just a bit more.

Dick

We're currently Thursday, two days after that horrible hike. This morning Thanatos gave us another lesson on the gods of Olympos and Okeanos who are supposed to arrive tomorrow. After that class all of us are free to train on our own and I wish I hadn't spent all of the free time I had before on just hanging around instead of something actually useful like attempting to learn something about magic on my own.

It would obviously also be too easy to just let me learn something from a book the first time I come in contact with actively using magic. No, it is very much necessary to drag the poor mortal girl away from safety so that we can scare the shit out of her.

I'm convinced our oh so noble king is a sadist.

At noon I walked into his pretty little office and he just snapped his fingers and teleported me here.

But hey, let's look at things from the bright side of life, I didn't hurl my guts out this time which can either be because you get used to teleporting really quickly or because Lucas is really bad at it. I think it's the latter.

"Nola", Hades warns, "Focus!" Even more of the small rock I'm standing on crumbles away from underneath my feet.

"I am focusing!" My voice is barely audible over the wild gushing of the river.

"No you're not!" Hades is losing his temper, "You, are throwing a tantrum and I'm having enough of it. All magic in the world answers to you should you wish for it to do so. Make it answer!"

Hades had started his lesson by teaching me how to ground myself in my magic. Not everybody has to do that but according to him it was necessary for me to learn how to ground because I would be able to use such large amounts of magic for such a wild array of things. He told me that the illusions I saw around him were there because he - after millennia of practice - no longer needed to ground because he would never allow his magic to drag him out of control and so all of the magic around him became a sort of shadow - an illusion if you will - of what his actual magic could do.

Our lesson had started on a peaceful meadow, glistening like a sea of emeralds and he had thought me how I was supposed to ground.

He explained to me that I would need to construct a room around myself - a room that was safe and that nothing was allowed to enter without my permission - and that inside that room there would be a door. This door could be opened and closed and it would be the only way for magic to get to me. I think we practiced for around two hours and all I had to do was make sure that that room around me was left standing whilst I carefully dragged some of the raw magic floating around everywhere inside, controlled and shaped it and then sent it back outside through the door - in the form of a small shadow.

Hades had told me that this was initially how everybody's magic worked and that the only exception there was with mine was that I could shape it into anything I wished.

He also warned me to never let the control slip because a flare of my magic, even though I didn't send it out on purpose could trigger or provoke magic that was otherwise benevolent to attack me, yielding similar results to what happened in his tower on Tuesday.

And after all of that, the bastard just snapped his fingers and created this illusion around me, a slowly shrinking island surrounded by a raging river. He gave me a - according to him - simple task; cross the river without dying, and even though I'm pretty sure an illusion can't kill you I have no idea how I'm supposed to get out of all this.