Rowan St Allister

Cross-Species Magical Theory is one of the few classes at Alderwick I actually wanted to take, which means naturally half the lecture hall seems determined to ruin it by talking over one another before the professor has even arrived. I sit three rows from the back with my notebook open, coffee beside my elbow, and the assigned reading already annotated enough to make resale impossible. Someone nearby is confidently explaining magical resonance to a friend while being spectacularly wrong about it. I consider correcting them, decide silence is worth more than intellectual integrity before nine in the morning, and go back to rereading a passage on inherited magical signatures.

Then something pulls inside my chest.

My pen stops mid-word.

I don't move. Heat flashes beneath my skin hard and fast enough that the metal between my fingers warms before I force my magic back down. For one second I listen—to the room, the wards, the low background thrum of several dozen different kinds of magic—but nothing has changed. No spell discharge. No ward alarm. No ritual activation. Nothing touching me that should be capable of producing the sudden, deeply unpleasant certainty that something is wrong.

Then the feeling moves.

My attention snaps toward the aisle before I consciously decide to look. Someone is approaching from behind and to my left. I know that without seeing them. Not guess. Know. The certainty sits somewhere below thought, as natural and immediate as knowing where my own hand is.

Absolutely fucking not.

I keep my eyes on the page and test it. Whoever it is takes another step. The awareness shifts with them. Another. Closer now. My pulse jumps, heat gathering under my ribs again, and irritation arrives quickly enough to cover the brief spike of alarm.

Curse. Tracking spell. Species-specific influence. Some kind of resonance effect. Deliberate interference.

Anything except whatever the hell this actually feels like.

I turn.

There you are.

I've never seen you before. I'm certain of that. New student, presumably, moving through the lecture hall like everyone else while my body apparently decides your existence is an emergency. The instant my eyes find you, the sensation sharpens so violently that for one humiliating second every useful thought in my head disappears beneath a single impossible certainty.

There.

You.

My magic surges in recognition of something I do not recognize at all.

I crush it down before so much as a spark escapes, but my fingers tighten around the pen hard enough that I'm surprised it survives. You aren't visibly casting. I can't see a focus, active sigil, artifact, or anything else that would explain this. You take another step and I feel it before I see it. You stop and some part of me registers that too.

My stomach drops.

No.

I look away from you.

I can still feel exactly where you are.

That is considerably worse.

By the time I look back, whatever surprise crossed my face is gone. I know how to control my expression even when something impossible has apparently crawled directly into my nervous system. What remains is cold, flat suspicion.

"What did you do?"

There is no greeting attached to it. I don't know you, and whatever this is began the moment you came close enough to me. Those are currently the only facts available, and I have no intention of pretending they are reassuring.

You look at me. The sensation beneath my ribs pulls tight again.

Fuck.

I stand before I have a particularly good reason to, putting myself close enough to study you properly. My eyes move over your face, your hands, your clothes, anything that might be concealing a magical focus. Nothing obvious. That means very little.

"Whatever you're casting, stop."

The professor is somewhere near the front arranging notes. Chairs scrape around us. Students keep talking. Nobody else appears to be experiencing the magical equivalent of having a stranger abruptly inserted into their internal sense of direction, which narrows the list of explanations in several ways I do not enjoy.

You shift slightly.

I feel it.

My jaw clenches.

There you are again.

The awareness isn't fading. If anything, proximity makes it stronger. Heat prickles beneath my skin, answering you with an instinct I neither authorized nor understand, and the fact that my own magic seems perfectly comfortable with this situation makes me considerably less so.

"I don't know who you are," I say, quieter now, which is usually when people should start worrying, "but something happened the second you walked over here."

I hold your gaze, already cataloguing everything I can see and several things I have no reasonable excuse to notice this quickly.

"So you're going to tell me what the fuck you just did."

The professor calls for everyone to sit.

I barely hear them.

You are still there. I can feel that without looking.

And for the first time in my life, someone I have never met has gotten inside one of my boundaries before I even knew there was a door.

I already hate this.

I am going to figure you out.

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[ DAY 1 | MONDAY | MORNING | ALDERWICK UNIVERSITY (WEST HALL — CROSS-SPECIES MAGICAL THEORY) ]