A couple of days later, I awoke early after a restless night battling a stomach ache. I’d assumed it was food poisoning, until I found the blood between my thighs.

Oh.

I stared blankly for a few seconds, then took a deep breath and trudged off to the shower. It was too early for the others to be up, yet, so I’d have some time to myself to deal with… this.

It wasn’t like it was a surprise. Honestly, I was really lucky to have made it all the way to fifteen without a menstrual cycle. I’d just been kind of hoping I’d stay lucky. I knew that testosterone halted some people’s cycle, so when I’d gotten on it I’d sort of hoped to avoid the issue altogether.

No such luck.

I pressed the back of my head against the shower wall, tilted my hips forward and let the hot water soothe the cramp in my gut. Okay, so this was happening, now. I’d need to, um. Go get some stuff from the shop. Pads and painkillers. That’s what people used, right? It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out how to use them. I’d seen TV.

I could probably talk to my hormone guy. I knew that different bodies responded to different hormones of different strengths in different ways, and if we monkeyed around with my course we could probably find something that would stop… this… from being a problem. But I didn’t really want to do that. My current dosage was working for me, and I didn’t want to mess around with something that had such big effects on my mood and my body in the middle of everything. Anyway, we had no idea how drastically messing about with my hormones would affect my connection to Kylie’s spell. It was too drastic a step, just to deal with a little blood. I’d bled plenty, over my lifetime. Should I even be bothered by this?

How did I feel about this?

I tried to dissect my own thoughts and feelings on the matter, and came up with nothing useful. I’d been letting myself properly have negative emotions without fear of killing anyone with them for about a year, and it still wasn’t all that long ago that I’d destabilised said emotions with hormones and now nature was doing the same, so I wasn’t exactly great at them yet. So far, negative emotions seemed more trouble than they were worth, but whatever. Point was, I didn’t know how to feel about this, exactly. Was I bothered? Was I not bothered? Was I bothered that I wasn’t bothered?

I had bigger stuff to worry about than this. If I was going to be freaked out about my body being unusual, I should be focusing on my spell, or being a familiar, not on a perfectly normal thing that fifty per cent of the population, including most trans men, had to deal with at some point. Something that wasn’t even dangerous. I felt like I didn’t want this to happen, but… was that because it genuinely bothered me, or because I felt like it should bother me, because I’d heard so many stories about how much it bothered so many trans men so I thought it was ‘supposed’ to? It wan’t bothering me as much as I’d expected to, so did that mean it didn’t bother me and I was subconsciously faking discomfort? Or did it mean that it really did bother me a lot and I wasn’t letting myself feel that, because I’d been so diligent about my promise to myself to never be ashamed of my body?

Or there was the obvious option, where it didn’t bother me at all as a man specifically, and what I was feeling was the perfectly normal discomfort that anyone would experience having blood leak out of their genitals for the first time, no matter their gender. I could talk to some girls about… ew. No. I wasn’t going to come out and explain this to any of my friends, and I certainly wasn’t going to participate in “girl talk”. That would just make me, and probably them, even more uncomfortable.

I wish I had the internet.

I supposed… I didn’t need to feel anything about this. Not right away. It was a thing that was happening regardless of how I felt. I wasn’t going to demand experimental changes to my hormones, meaning there was nothing I could do about it, no matter how I felt. So it was okay not to know. I’d treat it like another minor injury, some pain and bleeding I’d have to manage until it ‘healed’ in… however long it took. I’d look it up. I had plenty of experience letting injuries heal, so yeah. That would work.

I cleaned myself up and headed to the shop. I mentally rehearsed an explanation about buying pads for my girlfriend on the way there, but the cashier barely glanced at my purchases. Painkillers got me through my classes and some training with my new pit comp team, and I started to feel like this didn’t have to be a big deal. Not so long as I didn’t let myself think of it as a big deal.

It was fine.

That afternoon, I lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the quiet scratching of Max’s pen while he did his runecrafting homework. (Max had moved onto a more advanced runecrafting class, along with most of the kids who’d been trained in runes before coming to Refujeyo, and always seemed to have a lot of homework.) Kylie was off hanging out with friends, or something.

“Hey, Max?”

“Mmm?”

“What do you think about all that stuff that Kylie’s spell said to us? At Duniyasar?”

“Oh. Profoundly unimpressed.”

I looked at him in surprise.

“I don’t understand the personal details of any of those readings,” Max explained, “but the overall shape of each one is pretty obvious. I’ve seen hot reads from fake commonfolk psychics that are more inightful. I hope that the Destiny’s still limited at Duniyasar, because if that’s the limit of abilities when it’s home, Fionnrath’s been conning the world for a long time.”

“You thought they were obvious?” I asked. I didn’t understand them at all.

Max rolled his eyes. “Tell the child of the High Crone, someone destined for high political office, that if there’s a conflict she’ll either have to lead it or try to stop it? Tell Alania, who’s put herself and a lot of resources on the line to protect Clara, and help Kylie, and presumably countless other students before we got here, that she’s racking up debts she’s ignoring while protecting her charges? Tell the guy who’s always falling off cliffs or nearly drowning some stuff about scars? They’re hardly cutting insights.”

“What about yours?”

“I’m not sure what valuable truth I’ve apparently lost, but ‘your resources are going to run out and leave you in trouble if you’re too obsessive about pursuing truths’ isn’t news. That’s how I got lost in the tunnels last semester in the first place.”

“And it doesn’t bother you that it said you’ll break the world?”

“Technically, it said ‘if you are to break it’. Which leaves a lot of room for doubt. But no – the one thing people like as much as an accurate prophecy is a dramatic one, and very old prophecies were shaped and trained by people whose ‘worlds’ were smaller. ‘World’ could mean anything. Best case scenario, it might mean I figure out this whole human familiar thing; if it’s replicable, that would have a massive social effect on the magical world.”

“Worst case scenario?”

Max shrugged. “This is Fionnrath’s Destiny we’re talking about. Its ‘world’ could be the town of Fionnrath. If it came here with a motive, as I suspect, then the most likely one is to help Fionnrath by harming Refujeyo, so… well, the conclusions are obvious. It did say ‘if’, though, so it’s quite probbly I’ll have the option to, ah, not break the world.”

“You’re really not worried?”

“I have more concrete things to worry about than vague, dramatic declarations of change. I am a little concerned over the part about breaking myself three times, but since it seems to think I’ve already given my mind and whatever that means was too unimportant for me to even notice, I’m not too concerned that body or soul would be a problem.”

“For someone who isn’t worried, you’ve thought this through pretty thoroughly.”

He shrugged. “A prophecy tells you things, you listen. I analysed it before deciding whether it was important, obviously. It sounds like you’re worried, though?”

Was I? Maybe. “I have a lot of things to worry about.”

“Ha. Don’t we all, these days.”

I let him get back to his homework. I should probably do mine, but… eh. It could wait.

A little while later, he started cursing quietly under his breath.

“Problem?”

“This runic circle will not behave.” I couldn’t see his face, as he was hunched over his desk with his back to me, but I could feel the strength of his scowl. “I’d swear it makes sense, but I cannot find the problem.”

“Can I see?” I asked. He came into the main area of the room and handed over a piece of paper covered in complex scrawls written in ichor. I stared blankly at it for a while. “Um. What am I looking at?”

“Theoretically, you’re looking at a runic circle that should light up when power is pushed through it.”

I frowned at the complicated pattern. “Um. Isn’t that just about the easiest thing to do? I can make a circle that does that. Why is this one so complicated?”

“Because we were given specific limitations. It’s an exercise in… in ingenuity, or understanding the basics of runic construction, or something like that. I don’t know. It’s a pain. We were given specific runes that have no place in a circle like this and told we had to incorporate them, and I’m pretty sure I’ve done so in a way that should work. But it’s not. I’ve been picking through this thing stroke by stroke for fifteen minutes and I can’t find the problem.”

Hmm. Well, I didn’t have Max’s head for runes, but…

“Do you have something to write with that isn’t sharp?” I asked. “A normal fountain pen or something?”

“Uh… I have a paintbrush. Why?”

“I might be able to help.” I held out my left arm. “Paint it on my skin.”

“Uh. Okay? Why?”

I shrugged. “If it works, I’ll explain.”

Max thought about this for a moment, shrugged, and went to fetch a brush and a pot of stored ichor. For lack of a communal workspace, we ended out sprawled across the floor of the room while Max painstakingly painted runic symbols up my arm as small as he could, given the limited width of the ‘canvas’.

“Okay,” he said after a while. “Done.”

I closed my eyes and focused all of my attention on my arm. “Activate it.”

I felt the light pressure of Max’s fingertips against my skin, a slight tingle… and then the familiar wave of oddness as the magic inside me adjusted to accommodate intruding magic. Normally when I felt this, I grit my teeth and did my best to ignore it; this time I tried to pay attention to where in my arm the magic was reacting.

The sensation faded. I opened my eyes. “This part,” I said, indicating a big chunk of my arm that had felt fine, “isn’t doing anything. Your magic’s not getting to those runes.”

Max shot me a calculating look, then grabbed my arm and studied the runes closely. He compared my arm to the paper and nodded to himself. “How,” he asked carefully, circling a rune on the paper, “did you know that?”

I shrugged. “That’s just what I felt.”

“What you – ? Kayden. We’ve known each other for a while. Are you telling me now, after everything, that you can somehow detect magic, and just never thought to bring it up?”

“Of course I can’t detect it.”

“Well then – ”

“I can detect where it isn’t.”

“You’re being insufferable on purpose.”

Okay, maybe I was a little bit. “It’s because of Kylie’s magic. It’s like, uh… okay. Being a familiar is like having an umbrella that you can’t fold up or put down. Right? You’re just going through your day with this damn umbrella up all the time. It’s not a big deal, it’s not heavy, but it does reduce what you can carry and get in the way and it’s mostly just something you have to be aware of all the time, right, so you don’t smack yourself or other people with it. It’s fine so long as you stay aware of it and moderate your own movements so you don’t hit anyone with it. Right?”

“Weird choice of metaphor, but okay.”

“No, it’ll make sense. Give me a minute. At first having the umbrella is weird and takes a lot of time and attention, but then you kind of get used to it. Your arm gets stronger, and you grow accustomed to always kind of keeping its position in mind; it’s just another thing to deal with.”

“Like an externalised spell.”

“Actually, yeah, that would’ve been a way better metaphor. Too late, we’re working with umbrellas. Anyway, the thing about your umbrella is that it’s mostly a mild inconvenience, sometimes it’s handy if there’s rain or whatever, but mostly, it interacts with the world in ways that people who don’t have umbrellas don’t need to think about. An umbrella drags on the air. It makes you far more sensitive to wind or changes in air pressure, and in most cases this is a hassle. But it also means that you can pick up tiny changes that other people have no way to detect, because they catch on your umbrella.”

“And air is magic in this metaphor?”

“Yeah, air is magic, keep up. So it’s a bit of a hassle, but…”

“But it’s also a detector. You’re hyperaware of otherwise undetectable changes because of how they change the way you need to hold your umbrella.”

“Exactly! See, my metaphors are great. I know what Kylie’s magic normally feels like in my body, and I’m always making tiny adjustments, like adjusting your balance while you walk. But if any other magic gets in me, it’s something the magic needs to shift around. It’s impossible not to feel that.”

“So you can just… detect the magic around us?”

“No, no. Only if it’s in my body. If someone stands next to me and casts something then I can’t feel it unless they’re casting it on me.”

“How about the force fields on the beds?”

“Nope.”

“Not even going through your own?”

“No.”

“The school’s portals?”

“No.”

“Malas’ medical scans?”

“They feel horrible.”

“Potions?”

“I haven’t been game enough to drink any. Given that those runes interfered, I think putting empowered water in my body would be a terrible idea.”

“And yet the force fields and portals don’t affect you. Even though the portals physically move your body to a new place… the magic doesn’t get inside you? Fascinating. Do you have any idea how useful this sort of thing could be in magical research?”

“No, but I bet you do.” I was beginning to regret explaining.

It was an idle comment, but my tone must have been unintentionally harsh, because Max flushed and looked away.

“Uh, Max? You okay?”

“Yeah. Um. Thanks for your help. With the runes.”

“… No problem?” I waited for some kind of hint as to where this change in mood had come from, but got nothing. Max just headed back to his desk and got back to work, this time with his curtains drawn. Had I said something wrong? Or maybe I was imagining things, and he just wanted to focus on his work. I should probably do some of mine, at some point.

And wash the ichor off my arm. I’d been covered in enough unexpected body fluids for one day.