VENEFICA

[02] Lavender Ink

Sibling rivalry is expected in all families. In fact, a small altercation in any relationship is healthy every now and then. The Quires, however, unlike other siblings, took "small altercation" to an entirely new level. Abelle and Nick were brother and sister, and to most people, that's all they were, a pair of siblings. But, those who truly knew them understood the real reason they picked at each other, the intricate bonds that fueled the whole quarrel between each member of the Quire family. No one truly grasped the depth of their sibling rivalry until much later. Even now, it's hard to say why Nick was so relentlessly petty toward Abelle. Was it her empathy? Her innate likeability? Her power? Or maybe it was just because he failed History the previous year and had to retake that class, only this time with his sister and her friends.

Lavender Ink

Lily was the first one to break the silence. "You turned your sister into a bird?" She asked, Her pink glitter pen moved in careful loops across the page, dotting each i with a tiny star as if the question were ordinary enough to decorate. Only the stiffness in her shoulders gave her away. "That's harsh."
A few students still whispered behind their hands. Someone near the windows had collected two loose feathers and was making them duel across the desk with quick flicks of a wrist. Mr. Ednill stood at the blackboard, his back to the class, writing the day's lesson in letters so compact they looked more like scratches than words. The chalk snapped in Mr. Ednill's hand. Only Claire seemed to notice. At the front of the room, the teacher paused for half a breath, then continued writing with the broken piece. Chalk dust scattered over his fingers.
Nick leaned back in his chair until it balanced on two legs. "She had it coming, rummaging through my things without permission. Why I needed to be so harsh is my business," Nick glared at Lily for her audacity, "and mine alone." Letting out a malicious grin, he laughed, "And may I state for the record what a lovely bird she made. A pity Lawrence had to intervene." His muscles tensed as he took out his notebook and placed it on his desk.
Behind Claire, Abelle made a sound under her breath—too sharp to be a scoff, too wounded to be a laugh. There was the rustle of fabric, a quick, frantic brushing. Feathers, Claire guessed. Still clinging to her dress.
Claire did not turn around. She wanted to. The urge pulled at her shoulders, hot and insistent. But Nick sat beside her with one elbow on his desk, rolling his silver ring beneath his thumb, and looking back felt too much like stepping into the middle of something sharp.
Elora's pen scratched across paper one row back. "I guess it's a brother-sister thing."
She said it lightly, almost carelessly, but Claire glanced over her shoulder and caught the rest of it. Elora's mouth tilted upward; her eyes did not. They flicked from Nick to Abelle with the fascinated uncertainty of someone watching a spell she badly wanted to understand but knew better than to touch.
Lily looked up at last. "That is not a brother-sister thing. I would know."
Elora tapped the end of her pen against her chin. "Are we sure? I don't have siblings. I guess my information is limited."
"You have cousins," Mystic said from the row behind them.
"Cousins don't count."
"They absolutely count when they steal your things and blame household goblins."
Elora pointed her pencil at Mystic. "That happened one time."
"Three times." Mystic did not raise her voice. She did not need to.
Lily made a small strangled noise that might have been a laugh trying not to become one. Abelle did not join in.
Claire lowered her gaze to her desk. The girls spoke around each other with the ease of long practice, passing remarks back and forth without looking to see if the other would catch them. Elora pushed. Mystic corrected. Lily worried from the edges. Abelle, even silent, occupied a place in the rhythm, a missing note everyone kept leaving room for. Claire did not know where she was supposed to fit.
Beside her, Nick tipped his chair back a little farther. The front legs hovered above the floor. Mr. Ednill, still facing the board, said, "Four legs, Mr. Quire." Nick's chair dropped with a crack.
Claire jumped.
Nick did not. "Yes, Lawrence."
A ripple passed through the room. Not laughter exactly. Anticipation. Mr. Ednill turned slowly. His gold-ringed eyes fixed on Nick, and for a moment the strange stretched quality of him seemed less odd than deliberate, as if something taller than a man were standing inside his skin and deciding how much of itself to show. "Would you like the fifth week added now," he asked, "or would you prefer to earn it more creatively?"
Nick's ring stopped moving.
Claire noticed because everything else in him kept performing boredom. The loose shoulders. The lazy mouth. The half-lidded stare. But the ring stilled under his thumb.
"No, sir," Nick said. The sir came out like a swallowed thorn. He must have finally ceved into the gravity of his situation.
Mr. Ednill held his gaze a moment longer before turning back to the blackboard.
Claire tried not to look impressed. She failed.
Nick caught the glance. His smirk returned at once, smaller and colder.
Claire faced forward. Do not get involved, she told herself. It was a practical rule. A necessary rule. On her first day, after everything that had happened at O.A.M., Claire could not afford to become the sort of student teachers watched with tightened mouths and carefully worded concern. No fights. No scenes. No magic that drew attention. Nick laughed under his breath. The sound slid under her skin. every smug word scraping like nails on coral. She had wanted to ignore him.
Then he laughed. It was sharp-edged, like he thought he was untouchable. Every smug breath beside her scraped at her nerves. He had turned his own sister into a raven, stuffed her into a backpack, and now sat there as if the rest of them should admire his creativity. As if Abelle's humiliation were nothing more than proof of his talent. Claire's fingers twitched. A bead of water gathered above her hand, no larger than a marble. It trembled in the light, perfect and clear. She kept her wrist low, shielding it behind the edge of her notebook. She should let it fade. New school. New start. No fights on the first day.
Nick leaned closer, still looking at the board. "Careful, Fishsticks. You're dripping," he whispered.
The bead swelled. Just a nudge, Claire thought. Nothing dramatic. Enough to splash across his notes. Enough to wipe that look off his face.
Nick's lips barely moved. His fingers brushed the silver band of his ring. The water stopped trembling. Cold snapped through it so fast Claire's breath caught. Frost flowered across the surface, turning the bead white from the center out. Before she could pull her magic back, Nick flicked two fingers. The ice skittered onto her desk. A thin web of frost spread beneath it, lacing over the wood in delicate, branching lines.
Claire stared at the frozen bead. Then at Nick. He did not look back at her. "I would hex you for that," he said, "but I have bigger fish to fry."
Heat climbed Claire's throat. "Show-off," she muttered.
His smirk sharpened. "I would hex you for that," Nick smirked, "but I have bigger fish to fry." Nick finally looked at her. For half a second, his expression flickered from repulsion to intrige.
Mr. Ednill's gold-ringed eyes swept over them. "No more chatting. If your thoughts are so urgent they cannot survive until the bell, I suggest you write them in your private notes, where they may bore only the paper."
The clock's ticking seemed to grow louder with every second. Mr. Ednill resumed his lecture, and the moment vanished beneath chalk dust. "Contrary to popular mundane scholarship," he said, underlining Thomas Edison so hard the chalk squealed, "the development of electric illumination was not merely a mechanical achievement. Edison's true genius lay in translating contained brilliance into a repeatable enchantment. The bulb, class, is not the invention. The bulb is the cage."
Claire copied the sentence because it sounded important. Then she stared at it until the words stopped meaning anything. The lesson had something to do with light, energy, and the early failure of containment spells. Mr. Ednill grew almost animated when he spoke. His chalk moved faster whenever he reached a detail he considered impressive, the letters shrinking to fit his enthusiasm. He drew diagrams of filaments, spell circles, and something called a luminous retention field. Claire tried to follow. At O.A.M., light lessons had taken place in open water. Teachers had split sunbeams beneath the surface and let students swim through the colors. Claire remembered reaching for a ribbon of violet and watching it scatter around her fingers.
Here, light was trapped in chalk diagrams.
The clock began ticking. Not loudly at first. Just enough to slip between Mr. Ednill's sentences.
Tick.
Scratch of chalk.
Tick.
Whisper of paper.
Tick.
Claire copied two more lines before her notes thinned into doodled waves along the margin. Her pen paused mid-doodle. The ink on her notebook shimmered, then twisted, rearranging itself into words that hadn't been there a second ago. A thin line of unfamiliar black ink threaded itself across the page beneath her notes. It was neater, darker, pressed hard enough into the paper that each letter seemed to stand at attention.
"Did anyone do the homework for Advanced Potion Studies yet?"
Claire's heart skipped. She glanced at her pen, then at the page. Had she written that? No. Her own handwriting wasn't nearly that neat.
Before she could move, another line appeared beneath the first. This one bloomed in pink glitter gel, the letters wide and bubbly, each loop sparkling faintly under the classroom lights. "Wait. We had homework?" It wrote frantically.
Claire's breath hitched. Her fingers hovered over the page, hesitant. The words had not rearranged themselves out of her ink. They had arrived, one by one, as if invisible hands were writing on her paper from somewhere else in the room, conversing back and forth between the different colored markings. She could almost hear the matching scratch of pens behind her, each stroke appearing in her notebook at the exact moment it was made. Claire's stomach twisted. The words had appeared on their own. Her hand had not written them. No ink had bled from her pen. Magic, sure—but whose? Indeed this was not how standard notebooks worked. A note-passing spell? She rubbed her eyes and glanced back down at her page. Could this be some sort of joke? She glossed her eyes over to the girl on her left and peered down at her notebook. It was empty. Reluctantly, she looked to the right at Nick's notebook, and it was clean from any marked messages too.
Lily sat across the room with her head bent low, a pink glitter pen moving in quick, nervous loops. Thew pen danced across the page, pink glitter ink sparkling under the classroom lights. The same swirling, bubbly handwriting appeared in Claire's notebook, perfectly synchronized with Lily's movements. The patterned rhythm of her words seemed to match the bounce in the pink lines on the page. The way she bubbled the curve in the "n"s and how she hooked her "j"s in one large swooping motion matched how her words hopped out of her mouth when she spoke.
"No, seriously, did we?" The pink ink swirled.
Claire looked down again just as a bold black ink line cut beneath it.
"Lily, how do you forget homework while actively asking about homework?"
Claire did not know how she knew, except that the handwriting looked exactly like Elora moved—quick and impossible to ignore.
Another faint graphite line appeared, tiny and perfectly spaced. "Because Elora started the panic before giving context. Again."
Mystic, Claire guessed.
Then, slowly, lavender ink curled onto the page in elegant loops "We had reading. Not written homework. Pages 43–61."
Abelle. Claire's gaze caught on the lavender letters. They swept across the paper with controlled grace. It suited Abelle in a way Claire could not explain.
A final bold black line appeared almost immediately. "So what I'm hearing is: no homework."
Pink glitter followed. "That is not what she said."
Claire should have closed the notebook. This conversation was not meant for her. It belonged to the girls behind her. It was their spell, their rhythm, their easy back-and-forth. She was intruding, even if she had not meant to. But then another line appeared. Lily, check the link charm. Someone else is in here.
Claire went still. Across the room, Lily's pen stopped. Claire watched her look down at her own notebook, then around the room, her face paling slightly.
Lily tapped the end of her glitter pen against the page once, twice, then wrote again. The pink words appeared in Claire's notebook at the same time. Hello? Who is this?
For one ridiculous second, she considered pretending not to exist. But the words were sitting in front of her, waiting, and Lily was still staring at her own page with growing horror.
Carefully, Claire lowered her pen. "Sorry, I didn't mean to intrude," Claire wrote in reply. "Claire here."
Her handwriting looked plain beside theirs. Blue ink, slightly uneven, with a smudge where her hand had dragged across the final e. There was a pause. Not long, but long enough for Claire's stomach to tighten.
Then graphite appeared. "Oh, this is excellent. We accidentally adopted the new girl."
Claire coulfnt tell if this was scarastic through the written letters. She turned around and gave an apologetic smile behind her.
Pink glitter followed so fast the letters nearly overlapped. "We did not adopt her. The spell misfired. Claire, I am so sorry."
The harsh balck ink wrote beneath it: "Technically, Lily miscalibrated the recipient circle. Adoption status pending."
Then lavender ink curled across the page. "Don't worry about it. Messaging spells are tricky. Sometimes this happens."
Claire looked at the lavender words for a moment longer than the others. Abelle's response did not make the accident less embarrassing, exactly. But it made the embarrassment easier to breathe through. She wrote back: "It's okay. I was just surprised."
Elora's black ink returned. "A reasonable reaction. Lily's magic usually only causes mild confusion and occasional property damage."
"One time, "Lily wrote.
Mystic's thin pencil scratches appeared. "Two times."
"The umbrella incident does not count," Lily added.
Claire's gaze flicked to Lily's enormous umbrella leaning against her desk. "Do I want to know about the umbrella incident?"
All four replies appeared at once.
"YES." — Elora, in ball point.
"No." — Lily, in pink glitter.
"Depends on your tolerance for amphibians." — Mystic, in mechanical pencil.
"Absolutely not during History." — Abelle, in lavender.
Claire bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. For the first time since stepping into the classroom, the desk did not feel quite so much like a trap.
Then a shadow fell across her notebook. Claire snapped it shut.
Nick's hand rested on the corner of her desk, his silver ring glinting against the wood. "What's that?" he asked.
"Notes," Claire said too quickly.
His eyes narrowed. "You always smile at your notes?"
Claire kept one palm pressed over the closed cover. Beneath it, she imagined the girls' words continuing to appear, hidden now between the pages.
"I'm very passionate about..." Her eyes narrowed at the white board trying to make out the topic of the lesson "...Edison."
Nick's mouth curled. "Sure."
Across the room, Lily had gone rigid. Elora watched Nick with open suspicion. Mystic's eyes flicked from Nick's ring to Claire's notebook. Abelle's expression was harder to read, but her lavender handwriting had stopped appearing.
Then Mr. Ednill's voice cut across the room. "Mr. Quire."
Nick withdrew his hand.
"Unless Miss Freed's notes contain the missing portion of my lecture," Mr. Ednill said, "I suggest you return your attention to the board."
Nick leaned back in his chair. "Yes, sir, " he mocked again.
But Claire kept her hand on the notebook a moment longer. Beneath her palm, the cover felt faintly warm. Like the conversation was still alive inside.
The bell rang. The sound sliced through the room with a sharp and metallic ringing, nothing like the low chimes that had drifted through the halls at O.A.M. Her hands twitched toward her ears before she caught herself. No one else seemed bothered by the noise. She clasped her notebook close and tucked it into her backpack, waiting out the roar.
Weaving between desks with her bag half-open and bouncing against her hip, Elora spring towards Abelle. Somehow, the loose papers, broken quills, and a sloshing container of yellow slime inside did not spill. "Any chance I can—"
"No," Abelle said. She did not even look up. She was too busy brushing black feathers from the sleeve of her dress, each movement brisk and irritated.
Elora stopped beside her desk and placed one hand dramatically over her heart. "You wound me."
"You were going to ask for a summary of Advanced Potion Studies homework."
"I might have been going to ask how you were."
Abelle lifted her eyes.
Elora held her gaze for half a second, then sighed. "Fine. I was going to ask for the homework first and then ask how you were. But with feeling."
Lily came up behind Elora, both hands wrapped around the handle of an umbrella nearly as tall as she was. The umbrella's black fabric was patched in three places, and the curved handle looked worn smooth from use. "She is not giving you the homework," Lily said.
Elora glanced back at her. "You don't know that."
"She said no."
"She says no to most of my best ideas."
"For good reason," Mystic said. She had joined them quietly, as if she had simply appeared there. Her short curls framed her chin, and her pale-blue notebook was tucked neatly against her chest. She looked at Elora's bag, then at the yellow slime rolling dangerously toward the open edge. Without a word, Mystic reached over and nudged the container back into place with two fingers.
Elora looked down. "Oh. Thanks."
Claire wasn't the type to eavesdrop, but for some reason, she decided to put her backpack on a little slower than usual. She only needed a few more seconds to arrange her books. And maybe another second after that to fix the buckle. The girls were walking past her now, close enough for her to catch the faint scent of Lily's ink, something sugary and chemical, and the sharper smell of whatever lived in Elora's slime jar.
Abelle passed last. A few black feathers still clung to the pale fabric of her dress. One had caught near the hem, trembling with each step. Abelle noticed Claire looking and brushed at it quickly, her mouth tightening. Claire looked away too late
"Ms. Quire," Mr. Ednill spoke out. The room seemed to thin around the sound. Students continued filing out, but Claire noticed how Lily went still, how Elora's grin faded, how Mystic's eyes moved immediately to Mr. Ednill's hand. A folded piece of brown parchment had appeared between his long fingers. Claire had not seen him take it from anywhere. "For when you see the headmaster."
Abelle tucked the parchment into her book without opening it. Her fingers lingered on the cover for half a second, pressing down as if she could hold the message shut by force. Her expression tightened, then it disappeared beneath the same controlled calm she had worn since Nick changed her back.
Elora stepped closer. "Want us to come?"
"No," Abelle said.
"You sure?"
"Yes."
Lily hugged her umbrella against her chest. "We could wait outside."
Abelle's eyes softened slightly. "You'll be late."
"Elora's late all the time," Lily said.
Elora lifted a finger. "Strategically late."
Mystic looked at her. "Chronically late."
"That too."
For half a second, Abelle almost smiled. Then she looked down at the parchment again, and the almost-smile vanished.
A moment ago, they had been joking about homework and slime and umbrella incidents. Now, their formation had changed. Lily stayed close to Abelle's side. Elora hovered on the other, restless and ready to speak but not quite daring. Mystic walked behind them, quiet and watchful.
"I'll find you after," Abelle said, as she walked out of the room.
Elora did not look convinced, but she nodded. "You better."
Abelle left before anyone could argue.
The three girls watched her go. And Claire watched too, though she knew she should not. Abelle walked with her head high and the parchment tucked into her book, but there was something too deliberate about her pace. Like slowing down would make everyone see what she was trying to hide.
Claire understood that better than she wanted to. She realized too late that she had stopped moving.

-------- Author's Note-------

Thank you so much for reading Venefica: Stories From Your Memories up to this point! Venefica means a lot to me on a personal level. A peek behind the writer's laptop; this scene originally did not go down this way. In the original version of this story, Elora's friend is the one trapped inside a mysterious goo and Elora is the one to run in and save the day, revealing the culprit; a mystery mermaid!

This chapter's question: What would you do in Claire, Mystic, and Elora's situation? Run in to help yourself or run to get a professor?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

And as always, thank you for reading Venefica!