Inkworld

Two

Inskrifa. A word Erin Schwartz despised from the bottom of her heart, with every fibre of her being. Well, perhaps not the word itself, but how casually these half-wits flung it around, without any inkling as to what it truly meant. If it was up to her, she would have liked to scratch the word out from everyone's collective memory, from the pages of history, tear it out root and stem. Instead here she was on a dull winter morning, sweating to fish a coin out of a fountain in a bid to be spared being labelled that very inane derogative by a bunch of self-appointed gatekeepers. The very thought brought a bitter taste to her mouth. Why had she let Linus rope her into this again? Regardless, the end to her ordeal was within reach now. She pressed her thumb to the tip of her middle finger and tucked at some invisible thread, and in response her courier started slowly descending towards her, the recently seized coin cradled snugly between two folds of creased paper.

Did she feel sorry for the unremarkable bag of bones whose dreams she had just sent crashing to the ground? Not one bit. If anything, she felt irritated by how easy it had been. Erin had been setting up her trick slowly and silently, while everyone else had been busy brewing a storm in a teacup. Weaving a puppetry glyph was delicate work, requiring extreme precision and foresight. Magic doesn't like to be ordered around. To capture its nuances in a handful of symbols is never a mean feat. On top of that, she had had to fold the spelled paper, piece by piece, flap by flap into an ornate crane. And she had been rather pleased with the result. She had decided to call her latest puppet 'Rigsby'. But she had to be grateful to whoever sent the coins soaring into the sky, making her work that much easier.

She had just breathed life (or a semblance of it) into Rigsby when she spotted the boy on the other side of the fountain, diametrically opposite to her. With a head full of overgrown frizzy brown hair that framed his square face with small beady eyes and a sharp aquiline nose; he seemed to be smiling to himself. For a moment, Erin couldn't be sure if he was delusional or simply over-confident. Then upon peering a little closer, she realized that his gray eyes were lost in a daydream. Curious. His attire comprised of a vest missing a few buttons over a half-tucked shirt of coarse fibre, the thread-work having thinned at places. A rather large rucksack lay at his feet. With the amount of effort he was expending simply to hold the coin suspended, it was plenty clear that he didn't stand any chance of succeeding. It would perhaps be better if she snapped him out of his illusion. That's when she sent Rigsby after his coin. But she had expected at least some resistance. The way he just folded under the pressure -"What a pushover", Erin mused to herself, casting another stray glance across the plaza. The boy was already headed out and away, his frame bent under the weight of his rucksack.

Rigsby had just crossed the fountain's edge, when a wall of water rose out of nowhere and engulfed it in the blink of an eye. Erin saw aghast as the water seeped into the folds of the paper, weaning away the strands of magic infusing them with life. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a blonde-haired boy smirk. Not everyone had clearly given up and resigned themselves just yet. She could respect that. By now, Rigsby's appendages had completely come apart, leaving behind only a drenched coin wrapped in a crumpled piece of paper imprisoned within a transparent wall of water several feet up in the air, like some museum artefact behind a glass case. The wall collapsed just as suddenly as it had risen, with a rude splash, and the coin started sinking, free of its paper cage like a caterpillar shedding its chrysalis. Erin could feel the enthusiasm surging in the examinees around her. Hope, she realized grimly, the opium of the weak and the naïve. Too bad, she would have to snatch it away from them once again. Then again, did she absolutely have to do it? She didn't care whether she got into this institute. If not for Linus, she could have let it go, let someone claim that coin who had dreamed their whole lives about it; someone who wouldn't throw their life away.