Ved blinked at the white ceiling for a few seconds before turning his head. Across from him, a very bruised and a very sulky Javi lay pretending to be unconscious or asleep to avoid any conversation.
"So," Ved said at last trying his best not to laugh, "did the floor hit you first, or did Rose just slap you with her cheekbones?"
Javi groaned. "Of course they put me beside you."
Ved smirked. "Mmm-hmm. They also told me how you ended up here."
"Of course they did." Javi said trying to adjust his leg on the bedrail.
"How long did the duel last?"
"I don't know." Ved said turning his back to him.
"Five minutes…" Ved waited "three minutes…seriously less than three"
"Just under a minute." Javi said in a low voice. Ved tried to but he still burst out laughing because it was funny. A duel lasting under a minute meant you were as bad as one could be. When Javi didn't say anything else, Ved asked him in a serious tone "What the hell happened? Huh. "Nobody knows potions and elixirs like you do in our class. Why didn't you take some?"
"I did take some, okay?" Javi protested finally turning. "I took Yewroot, Daggergrass, two drops of Sabertooth Ash. My eyes were bloodshot as hell."
Ved raised a brow. "And?"
"And it worked for a while. Then she hit me with Black fire!"
Ved whistled that was a tricky bit of magic. It was hard very hard to control black fire, one needed a lot of practice just to create that fire, much less said about dissipating it.
"She was ruthless Ved, and she did it was like it was routine work. And you know what pisses me off, she looked good doing it. I think I saw someone clap when I fell."
"She's efficient." Ved agreed.
"Efficient! Psssh…" ved said making a whooshing sound "Brother, she will be the greatest Alchemist this school ever produced. Mark my words."
"Eh! Maybe."
"And where the hell were you?" Javi muttered, trying to shift without grunting. "How did you end up here?"
"I was smoking long-grass by the lake and the damned groundskeeper saw me."
"Did he hex you?"
"No, I managed his hexes well enough, what I couldn't manage was not falling in the dark dungeon staircase while I could see starlights in my hands." and showed Javi a deep cut in his abdomen.
Ved heard Javi finally chuckling and he knew this was the perfect time to ask.
"Hey, I was reading on something the Tulsarium plant, do you know anything about that?"
"The Tulsarium plant, the extinct kind."
"Yeah…yeah."
"Why do you always ask me the weird stuff?"
Ved just smiled in response.
"Well, it was a resuscitator of life. The Bible of Potions says that no matter the spell, curse or poison if the person has a shred of life left in him the Tularium plant could bring him back to life."
"How?"
"Well, I'd have to look into it. But from what I remember a fresh juice of its leaves."
"What if that doesn't work?"
"Well, you would need a little powdered starroot which the people of Vizar often used it with until it went extinct."
"Ok" Ved said and started whispering a spell under his breath and grabbed his satchel beside the bed
"Where are you going?" Javi asked raising his head.
"Get some rest, Javi." Ved said waving his wand, and a soft puff of silver mist hit Javi's face. His eyes rolled back instantly, and he collapsed into deep slumber with a contented snore.
****
Ved moved swiftly through the hallways. The security had been upped the last few days and he had to make the round of East wing three times to get to the row of lockers behind the Potion-house, halting at a rusted, dented one that bore no nameplate.
He pressed his palm to it and whispered "Keyless by blood, opened by need.". With a click and, the metal frame shifted and the locker expanded first up, then inward, until it unfolded like paper into a narrow passageway of blue light and whirring mechanisms.
Ved stepped inside, and the entrance sealed behind him with a metallic hiss. He walked down a spiraling staircase carved into marble, lit only by floating embers the size of fireflies. They buzzed around him like curious children.
The chamber below was vast and curved like the hollow belly of a dragon. Shelves stacked high with ancient scrolls and glittering artifacts lined the stone walls. A rack of swords, jars of preserved magical flora, and crates filled with forbidden stolen, relics from the Otherworld sparkled in every corner.
A dented automaton blinked at him sleepily from the corner. A phoenix feather quivered in a bell jar. A miniature thunderstorm rumbled over a cauldron in the far back. But Ved's attention went to a single wooden table beneath a glowing canopy of starlight moss.
He pulled out the small Tulsarium plant, its leaves glowing with a soft blue hue like ocean water. Carefully, he clipped four leaves and dropped them into a mortar. With a slow, almost reverent hand, he ground them to pulp and poured them into a crystal flask and added the starroot in the mixture as Javi had suggested.
The juice shimmered like liquid sapphire. Ved sipped it, just enough to clear his thoughts. It hit him like a shot of ice, sweet at first, then a burn that coiled down his throat and into the wound beneath his ribs. He exhaled sharply.
Then, nothing. He didn't remember falling. Only that the room tilted, stretched, and spun—and then darkness folded over him like velvet.
He woke up after what felt like a deep sleep. But the chamber was gone.
Ved found himself standing in front of a tall mirror he did not own. Its surface as dark as spilled ink and its jagged frame carved from red dragon scale and runed silver. It stood in the centre of a space that looked like his chamber and yet... it wasn't. Everything here shimmered like reflections on black water. Like he wasn't really in the room, just somewhere adjacent to it.
Ved did not move. He did not touch the mirror but the surface of the mirror rippled. And within it, like a vision across worlds, Ved saw the river serpent whom he had rescued was coiling now through the Snow Rivers, frost trailing behind its fins, eyes half-lidded as if dreaming in movement.
The mirror then turned black like it had a mind of its own. At first, he thought the surface had gone dead. But then the blackness shifted. The waters turned dark and a pair of red eyes blinked open in the mirror. Haunting. Beautiful. Human... and not.
A girl's face, pale as porcelain, half-shrouded in shadows. She stared not into the serpent's world and at Ved. He tried to run but the mirror darkened again and he felt himself standing on the other side of the mirror and the woman's hand were on his face.
Ved woke up with a scream. He sat up in the chamber, drenched in sweat, gasping like he'd surfaced from drowning. The mirror was gone. Everything was where it should be. Except his hands were shaking.
And the air still smelled faintly of frost.