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Qifrey hadn’t had much to do all day other than sleep, and now he thought perhaps he’d slept enough for an entire lifetime just in time for the magic lamps outside his window to dim, artificially signaling the fall of evening over The Assembly. He could draw all night if he couldn’t sleep again, but he also felt like he’d drawn every idea in his head, and being stuffed in his bedroom at the top of Beldarut’s spire for five days straight with a cold wasn’t a good way to get new ideas germinating. His room was big, but in Qifrey’s mind that mostly just made it empty. He didn’t have much in the way of personal items other than magical contraptions he made himself. He had two bookshelves stuffed with textbooks–leftovers stolen from Beldarut’s extensive library–but these weren’t really personal either, not even his own. There was room for a low tea table he didn’t use except for drawing. His bed was too big also, and too fancy. He felt swamped in it.
And lonely. He felt very lonely.
There was one thing magical about The Assembly, though, other than learning the beauty of magic itself. There was a person here who always seemed to know exactly when that loneliness had sunk into the coldest, darkest corner of Qifrey’s heart.
A noise startled Qifrey, a clattering of the windowpane, and he turned to see… No. No way.
He was out of his bed quickly, the smock serving as his bedclothes falling over his bare knees, and his feet were cold on the stone floor, but that didn’t matter because his face was warming up with the pressure of his heart pounding away in his throat. He unlatched the window and pulled it open.
“Hiya,” said Olruggio, with a much too satisfied grin.
His face was ruddy too, perhaps with mischievous excitement, and his arms were bundled up under his black cloak. Qifrey looked down… Olruggio was floating three stories up in the air as if it were nothing, hovering right at Qifrey’s eye level. The long satin line of his hat’s tassel swayed slightly under him.
“Olly…” said Qifrey breathlessly. It was not the first time this friend had simply blown him away.
“Sylph shoes,” Olruggio explained. “I finally got a pair to work. They weren’t on my syllabus for a few months still but… well, Lord Beldarut wouldn’t let me see you.”
“I’m sick,” said Qifrey dumbly.
“Yeah, and I’m bored,” said Olruggio. “Can I come in or what?”
There was an echo of nerves to his giddiness, and Qifrey realized that perhaps Olruggio had been lonely too these past five days, just like him.
That was even more of a miracle, even more incomprehensible. To be missed by such a person.
Qifrey’s heart was doing funny things, but there was no way he could turn Olruggio down, at the very least. So he did a shy sort of nod and stepped aside, letting Olruggio climb unglamorously over the windowsill. He alighted on the floor with an awkward shuffle, still not entirely used to dismounting in those sylph shoes, but his grin was somehow even bigger.
“Are you feeling any better yet?” Olruggio asked. He wasn’t even looking at Qifrey though, he was taking in all the details of his best friend’s room, which he’d never seen before now. Again, there wasn’t much to see, and Qifrey was self conscious about that. He wrung his hands, as Olruggio removed his hat comfortably.
“I’ve just got a bit of a sore throat still,” Qifrey mumbled. He’d never been a host before.
“What are those?”
There was some work on the tea table. Qifrey was drawing water sculptures earlier.
“They’re not very good…” he said, but Olruggio was already sliding to his knees to investigate. Qifrey awkwardly sat beside him, rather than across the table as he probably should. It was just so much more natural to sit beside Olruggio.
“Are you kidding? This is sparks,” said Olruggio. He used slang like that from time to time, words Qifrey didn’t know the meaning of–-apparently a result of growing up out in the middle of nowhere. Olruggio extended a finger to gently trace the nose of a little goat made of solidified water. It was not cold like ice. It was still wet, too. He pulled away and rubbed his finger and thumb together wonderingly.
There were three small sculptures, in varying stages of completion. The goat was finished, just not very good. Then a simple spherical design, hovering a bit above the table, like a lopsided globe (Qifrey was never good at drawing symmetrical things). And finally a dragon, which was the worst of all. It was still a WIP so it was mostly just a pair of batlike wings sprouting out of a puddle, contained in one place on the tabletop, never seeping into the wood.
It was embarrassing.
“I was just bored,” Qifrey said, falling back on the same excuse as Olruggio, but now he was worried that might reveal too much too.
I don’t know what to do with myself without you around.
If it was possible to bore yourself to death, Qifrey had felt very close to it these past nights.
“Can you show me how you do it?” Olruggio asked. His excitement was again impossible to refuse. His easy affection.
Qifrey wondered if he was getting a fever again, the way he felt so clammy and overheated at the same time.
“Alright,” said Qifrey, standing to shuffle quickly to his bed again to pick up his pen and notebook from the bedside table. He was downright tingling with a desire to please… Alighting on a thought, he pulled open the bedside table drawer with a dull thunk-unk and took out a crinkling bag of contraband snacks. It was his secret stash from the kitchen in case he ever felt like skipping dinner to avoid Beldarut–usually not particularly because of Beldarut as a person but more because he sensed Beldarut was in a mood to ask Questions or be Concerned and Qifrey hated his own inadequacy during such dinners. Part of the appeal of magic in Qifrey’s mind was that it did not need words to express his ideas.
He brought the snacks as he sat at Olruggio’s side again, close enough for their shoulders to bump, and Olruggio hooted appreciatively.
“Shh,” Qifrey said. “Don’t be too loud or Bel will hear.”
It slipped–-a nickname not for a teacher but perhaps not too far from “Dad.”
Olruggio didn’t care. He was picking through all the snack options systematically, ordering the different candies and dried fruits and nuts into piles.
“I’m starved, honestly,” Olruggio said. “I had to skip dinner to finish testing the sylph shoes. Safety first, you know?”
“You’d do that for me?”
“Who do you take me for?” Olruggio stuffed pretty much the whole pile of his favorite sweet into his mouth without even asking. He already knew Qifrey didn’t like it much, or at least that was what Qifrey had told him. Secretly, Qifrey just enjoyed letting him have them whenever they shared a mixed bag. It might have been one of his favorites too if it weren’t already Olruggio’s favorite, which he viewed as more important. It was a purple, chewy candy that turned Olruggio’s lips blue. “Go on, go on. Show me the sculpting spell!”
Qifrey obediently flipped open his notebook to a new page and dipped his pen in his travel inkwell. Then he hovered the nib over the empty white, the ink quivering slightly at the tip, not quite falling in a droplet.
… This was even more embarrassing.
He was so excited to be with Olruggio that he forgot he was completely out of ideas.
Olruggio caught his small pout and bumped his shoulder on purpose, almost making the ink splatter. “You don’t have to make it good, it’s just me,” he said, misreading Qifrey’s trepidation.
Qifrey shook his head. Perhaps someone better with words might correct him or explain himself, but Qifrey had never felt he needed to be good at words with Olruggio. Olruggio was patient and clever enough to just wait for Qifrey to continue the conversation in whatever way made sense to Qifrey.
“What should I draw?” he asked instead.
Olruggio was chomping at some peanuts now. “Whatever you like, I guess.”
“I’m not sure I like anything,” said Qifrey, and Olruggio laughed, because that had been a ridiculous way to say it, but Olruggio understood what he meant.
“It doesn’t have to be good,” he repeated. “Oh! I know!” He smacked Qifrey’s arm excitedly, again almost making that drop of ink at the tip of his pen fall. Qifrey had to counterbalance a little comically to keep it steady. “Draw me!” Olruggio said with a huge grin. The blue on his lips also smeared a little on one of his crooked front teeth. His eyes were blue too, of course, bright and sparkling. It made Qifrey’s heart squeeze and shrivel again.
“I… I don’t really like drawing people,” Qifrey admitted, sorry to disappoint.
But Olruggio was undeterred. “Then don’t draw me as a person,” he said. “Come on. It can be like a game. Draw my vibes.”
Olruggio was on such a roll with his own genius, Qifrey couldn’t help but smile shyly back. Olruggio loved magic so much. When he had a good idea, he practically burned with it.
“What does that mean?” Qifrey asked, half chuckling but indulgent.
“Oh, you know,” said Olruggio. “Just draw something that makes you think of me. I wanna see what that’d be.” He pushed a final pile of sweets slightly away from himself. They were little hard lemon candies. A candy that Qifrey had named as his favorite, whether that was true or not. Olruggio also remembered. “Go on. Show me myself.”
He was half-joking, half-serious. Qifrey could tell by the eager light in his eyes, barely suppressed.
Qifrey let his own eye trail over Olruggio’s familiar face, catching all those tiny tells that gave way to Olruggio’s own self consciousness here too, usually so well hidden from others under his facade of cleverness and general charisma. A slight pinch to the little lines around his eyes. A crookedness to his smile.
What do you think of me, Qifrey?
He really wanted to know.
But Qifrey thought of many things when it came to Olruggio, that was the problem…
~
He thought of when they first met:
Olruggio was the first child Qifrey's age to ever approach him, without any half-heartedly diplomatic coaxing from a professor. At first, Olruggio looked like a girl to Qifrey, the sort of girl with short hair and scuffed knees and a bandage across her nose. Olruggio grinned at him in greeting, just because that was how Olruggio treated anybody. Brilliantly. They were at the edge of the main market street. Olruggio had caught Qifrey lurking in one of his quiet corners, trying to work up the courage to pick up Beldarut's groceries for dinner.
"Hey, you're that girl everyone talks about," Olruggio said.
"I'm not a girl," Qifrey mumbled, tearing at the edges of the grocery list in his hands. "I'm a boy."
He didn't deny the part that everyone talked about him. He knew it. They didn't say good things.
Olruggio's grin went smaller, more thoughtful, and Qifrey saw his first glimpse of this person's deep intelligence.
"... How?" Olruggio asked, not really having the language yet to ask the real question.
Qifrey shrugged, the rising of his shoulders allowing him to shrink further into himself, like a turtle. "I just wanted to be a boy," he said.
It really was that simple. Maybe it was easy for him because he was so unattached to witch society and its expectations anyway, as well as cut off from his past life pretty much completely. Gender had never seemed particularly binding to him. Beldarut, for his part, just let him, didn't make a big deal about it either way.
But it was a big deal to Olruggio, this "girl," this "tomboy." Olruggio's thoughtfulness deepened, watching Qifrey for a long time.
"... Cool," she finally said, almost awestruck. This hadn't occurred to her as a possibility.
Not so long after that first meeting, Olruggio found Qifrey out for groceries again, in the same spot. Later Qifrey would wonder how many days in a row Olruggio had waited for him there. Either way, Olruggio's friendly grin was back and Qifrey still didn't know what to do with it.
"Hey!" Olruggio said. "I'm a boy now too."
He didn't look any different, but this made sense enough to Qifrey.
"Ok," said Qifrey shyly.
"I decided my name is gonna be Olruggio now."
This was a silly name, much too grand for an eight year old, but it somehow fit this precocious kid. It was perfect for the bigness of his personality, how bright he shone.
"Ok," said Qifrey again, but he was listening carefully and, bless him, Olruggio could tell.
"You're Qifrey, right? Let's be friends!"
Qifrey had never had a friend. He wasn't even sure he wanted one, but he was no match for this shining boy.
"Ok."
Just like that.
Just like that, and these boys became inseparable. Surely it shouldn't have been so easy or random, but perhaps life could be plenty complicated somewhere else.
Even when things got darkest, got unbearable, Olruggio would always be the part for Qifrey that made perfect sense.
~
He thought of how much Olruggio had taught him over the years:
He became Olruggio’s little pupil almost immediately. He followed Olruggio around like a gloomy duckling, and Olruggio would prattle on and on into the silence about one thing or another that Qifrey really needed to learn about witch society and spellwork. Maybe Olruggio kind of liked having an audience for his own thoughts, somebody who wouldn’t be annoyed by how fast he talked or how smart he was. Somebody who wouldn’t call him a show-off when he was just trying to spend time with someone the way he knew how.
Qifrey, for his part, found learning from a peer rewarding in ways even his magic lessons with Beldarut could never achieve.
He would quietly wait outside Olruggio’s dormitory after Olruggio’s lessons in the afternoon, and Olruggio would emerge in a burst of energy and drag Qifrey somewhere-or-other to see something-or-other. He always had a plan, something new he wanted to be the one to show Qifrey first. Sometimes it was something Qifrey already knew about, but he pretended not to because he just liked listening to Olruggio talk. Maybe that was the whole point of it, really.
“We’ve gotta get you to the Silver Night Festival, Qifrey!”
“You have to try this lady’s doughnuts.”
“You have to stay up and watch the underwater fireworks, Qifrey, you just have to.”
They were the first requirements of witch society that Qifrey was willing to accept for himself, because Olruggio’s goal was always just to make Qifrey happy. For no reason other than he just liked Qifrey.
How wonderful friendship was.
Olruggio made a good teacher too, especially when he drew magic. He was top of his class for a reason, absolutely brilliant, but he also just loved magic so completely that watching him work through a problem or be struck by inspiration was spellbinding in itself. His love reinforced Qifrey’s own love for magic, and perhaps vice versa, until they became a feedback loop of excitement for each other, easily getting into little tizzies where they’d talk all over each other, just getting ideas so fast, faster than words could accommodate. In the heat and light of those moments, Qifey could talk more than whole less-inspired days put together, without even noticing the strength of his own voice.
One day, as Olruggio was rambling at Qifrey about how to draw a spell for smoke without any fire, another boy their age walked behind them. He wore Olruggio’s same uniform, his same cap.
“Hiehart was looking for you,” he said in passing, and for some reason this made him smirk.
Olruggio rolled his eyes. “Tell him I’m not his teacher, the Professor is!”
Olruggio talked about Hiehart sometimes to Qifrey. Despite his exasperation now, he loved the younger student like a kid brother. Qifrey got the impression Olruggio’s academy was large and somewhat impersonal. Despite being so well-liked by everybody, Olruggio had few actually close friends, so of course he cherished this hapless Hiehart even as he complained about him.
None of this mattered to this other boy though. This did not seem to be a friend of Olruggio’s at all.
“You sure?” the boy sneered. “You seem to like playing Professor with that cursed kid, at least.” Qifrey realized somewhat belatedly that this was referring to him, the stranger’s eyes sliding to Qifrey for just a moment before returning to his main target. “I guess you finally found somebody who’s too fucked up to talk back, and that’s perfect for you to keep on being the special one, eh, Olruggio Of The Torch?”
Qifrey glared, but his reaction was nothing compared to Olruggio’s. Olruggio’s face went paper white and he jerked to his feet, his pen clutched in a fist.
“Th-that’s not true!” he stammered, the fierceness of his movements all at once losing their assuredness at the last minute and coming out as such a lame rebuttal. The words failed him. The other boy was already half gone. He’d only thrown this over his shoulder, like it didn’t even matter to him.
“Whatever you say, top of the class!” the kid said, and turned his back on Olruggio.
What a prick, Qifrey thought, wishing some particularly mean fates on this person.
He didn’t think he had to say this out loud, it must be obvious, right? But then he was alarmed by how distraught Olruggio looked when he turned back to him, how he wasn’t just hurt or pissed off at a jealous bully. His eyes were big and scared.
“That’s not true,” Olruggio said, still with that breathless quality, struggling for words. “It’s not… You’re not my student or, or…”
He looked like he might even cry, and that brought Qifrey to his feet, taking Olruggio’s shoulders.
“I know,” Qifrey said, lacking words too, but he met the desperate tying in Olruggio’s watery gaze and sent back trying of his own. “I know you wouldn’t do that.”
“It’s not about me or what I’d do,” Olruggio said. “It’s about… You’re not fucked up… You’re not just my… or anybody’s… That’s not what you mean at all!”
His eyes just kept getting more desperate, and Qifrey was admittedly shocked as he started to understand, his heart fluttering away at his ribcage like a trapped bird.
Maybe Qifrey hadn’t fully known he wasn’t just a student, but he did know in this moment.
Somehow, just by being himself, he had become Olruggio’s dear, dear friend too, same as Olruggio had become for him. He wouldn’t let such a precious knowledge out of his hands ever again.
This was perhaps the most important thing Olruggio would ever teach him, before either of them had even begun to realize what they were building together.
~
He thought of their first night camping up on the surface, just the two of them:
It went wrong because it started to rain. They took shelter in a small cave, lit by the campfire Olruggio so easily cast between them. In this warmth and familiarity, Qifrey finally confided in Olruggio that he didn’t just dislike the rain. He hated it, was terrified of it.
Olruggio’s words were so loving and so perfect – If you ask me, it helps to learn more about what you’re afraid of. Then it won’t have so much power over you, will it? Before you know it, you’ll be able to sleep soundly even this close to it.
A part of Qifrey didn’t fully believe he would ever sleep soundly… But he believed in Olruggio, with his whole heart. In this moment, he felt safer than he perhaps ever had in his life, even with the sound of the rain thudding the earth outside the cave’s mouth. He felt peeled back and exposed, and he allowed it. His soft, horrible insides could be seen, but he knew so solidly Olruggio would not be disgusted.
“I’m also afraid of the Brimhats,” Qifrey said, with all the implications that entailed.
Olruggio looked at him long and hard, with that quiet intelligence. He saw him.
“... I guess we can work on that too, if you want to.”
He said this without looking away. Qifrey’s whole wound-up body felt like it sank in his relief, his shoulders turning liquid.
“We,” huh?
Could he really have such a thing?
He wasn’t sure what he was even going to say when he opened his mouth next.
“I came from a forest like this,” he said.
Olruggio still held his gaze, brave and unwavering. “I’ve heard rumors…” he admitted, trying hard for casual but his voice caught just a little with how important this was to him. “But they were just stories. Somebody would say one thing here and then something completely different somewhere else…” He trailed off and left the conversation in Qifrey’s hands.
Qifrey had never told his own story before. It had always been crafted by others, even by experts like the Knights Moralis and the Sages and Lord Beldarut, but never himself.
He worried his bottom lip. But with equal bravery, he held Olruggio’s gaze as well.
“I was… buried,” he said. “In a dark, damp place under the earth. That’s the first thing I remember. I was alone and… my whole head hurt so badly and I could barely move. There was hardly any room… I thought I was drowning.”
The words, stoppered up for so long, fell out of him all willy nilly, barely making sense, but maybe that was the right way for him to tell his story. Chaotic and emotional and painful. By the end of his telling, Olruggio was no longer across the fire from him. Instead he had moved to glue himself to Qifrey’s side, to wrap an arm around him. Qifrey couldn’t see the expression on his face, only the firm set of his jaw, solid and determined.
“We’ll be ok, Qifrey,” Olruggio said at last. “We’ll work together… We’ll be ok, I promise.”
It was only later that Qifrey realized Olruggio wasn’t only talking about that night, making it through the rain.
Olruggio was at Qifrey’s side to stay, wherever he needed to go. However far he needed to journey to rest peacefully.
~
… Finally, he thought of Olruggio now.
Just this boy sitting beside him, watching him all antsy with his candy teeth, visiting in the middle of the night because five days apart was simply too much for both of them.
Maybe that’s all a favorite person is, at the end of the day. Just your boy. It’s not about reasons or deserving, but just about the person who is there. Your shining, lovely boy.
Qifrey was all action suddenly, scrawling on his notebook page almost too quickly and yet not quickly enough to keep up with his ideas. Olruggio made an appreciative noise, munching more nuts as Qifrey worked.
What Olruggio felt like to him…
He closed the glyph’s circle, and the water rose from the page in an ornate, thin column, a bluish glow pulsing through the strands. Of course, a sculpture of Olruggio couldn’t just be water. It needed light. Just a trace of Olruggio’s own wonderful magic.
The water danced and curled in on itself as it rose, and then it hung there, legs sharpening out into sparkling points.
It was a star. A beautiful diamond of gently glowing water that flickered, its spines growing longer and falling shorter again rhythmically, just like the light of a real star. Fire from water. But more importantly than that… Something brilliant. A guide, a light in the dark, a friend.
Qifrey was so pleased with how it came out he just grinned at it, open-mouthed. When he turned to Olruggio, his friend was staring at him, his eyes enormous and vulnerable, something about his eyebrows almost painfully pinched.
Before Qifrey could ask him what was wrong, Olruggio threw his arms around Qifrey’s neck and squeezed him so tightly.
Olruggio really was a genius, of course, top of his class. But even he didn’t always know that he could be seen as so valuable by someone, that of course the thing that described him most to Qifrey would be a treasure.
“You know you’re my best friend, right?” he said, his voice muffled in the side of Qifrey’s neck.
Qifrey held him in return, a little awkwardly.
“Yeah. I know.”
He wasn’t good at words in response. But then again, he’d already said it without them, hadn’t he?
They spent hours just tinkering around afterwards, Qifrey teaching Olruggio the basics of the water sculpture spell and laughing at him as he drew his own horrible things. They didn’t talk about the star again but it sat above the center of the table as if watching them, a beacon of comforting light until Olruggio finally had to sneak back to his own dormitory.
Olruggio came down with Qifrey’s cold shortly after. Both boys hated it, but it would be alright.
They would have many years to spend together.