The Finer The Line

Prologue: O Children

'Forgive us now for what we've done
It started out as a bit of fun'
- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Aidan rolled his eyes. He was doing a lot of that these days.

"Mom, I am not going to Red Fountain, okay? I'm not going to switch schools just to be a hero."

Bloom huffed angrily at her son, crossing her arms and glaring at the redheaded boy.

"Your father went to Red Fountain and he loved it!" she said.

"Well, he didn't have magic powers," Aidan argued, waving his hand and watching as fire blossomed from his fingertips.

"Okay, well, my good friend Nabu has a school for wizards and-"

"I am not going to Darkwin Academy for Wizards," he said finally. "There is no way you can get me to go to that goody-two-shoes wizard school. I've made up my mind."

Bloom groaned in frustration and said, "Why couldn't you have picked anything but Murmire?"

Aidan shrugged, summoning a portal and grabbing his suitcase. They had this argument every year before school started and she had just never been able to accept it.

"I'm a warlock, Mom," he said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. "I hope you can understand."

With that, Aidan stepped through the portal, leaving his life as a prince of Eraklyon behind.

The fifteen-year-old sighed as he reached the other side of the portal and took in the sight of the dark, towering spires of the school he had come to call home. It was his second year going to Murmire's School of the Ancient Arts (a.k.a. dark magic) and he was once again sharing a dorm room with his five best friends. Speaking of...

"Aidan!"

He turned just in time to be barreled over by a ball of blond energy. Aidan disentangled himself from the enthusiastic prince and took a step back so he could breathe.

"Hey, Ray," Aidan greeted, laughing. "How's it going?"

"Same old, same old," the sunburnt warlock said, slinging an arm around Aidan's neck and turning to survey the crowd of students entering the school. "Look at all these new kids! Hey, check this out."

He stuck out his foot, tripping a freshmen warlock who tumbled to the ground and spilled his stuff everywhere. The two sophomores laughed. Murmire was definitely not a place for the thin-skinned or the kind-hearted. Speaking of...

"Oh, Aidan, look! Look!" Ray exclaimed as his excited brown eyes caught sight of something else. The vivacious blond dragged his tolerant friend away from the poor freshman warlock and towards a shaded tree off to the side of the courtyard. "It's Thorn and Marin!"

The two warlocks made their way over to their friends, shoving through the crowd and ignoring all the nasty looks they got.

"Where have you been? You went, like, radio silent for two months," Aidan asked Thorn.

His guyliner-ed friend replied, "Mom had me working the apothecary all summer because Ivy's backpacking across Lynphea with Sirena and Clover's still too young."

"Oh, yeah," Marin remembered, "Sirena told me about that. I'm just glad she was out of the castle. Then I didn't have to deal swooning over  Ivy all over the palace. Like, I'm happy for her, but it's been non-stop talk about that nature fairy since they started dating. Even sweet little Bay is getting sick of it."