Guitar Strings and Flower Petals

The Game Begins

When Skara woke up, she wasn't groggy in the least. Her eyes didn't sting or flinch at light, and she didn't try to roll over to get back to sleep. Her eyes just shot open, looking up at the ceiling. She laid on her back, rigid, almost like she was standing to attention, just, well, laying down. Her alarm screamed a few seconds later, and she reached her arm out and switched it off instantly, without even looking at it. She blinked a couple of times.

Then, it all hit her at once.

And she felt like she had ingested a ball of lead.

Today was the day - The Grudgby match between Hexside and Glandus.

The day that the last couple of weeks had been building towards. A day Skara was both dreading, and thankful for, because once it was over, and she was laying in this bed tonight, she wouldn't have to worry about waking up at the crack of dawn to do drills that defied all common sense and logic. A weight would be lifted from her shoulders, one way or the other.

It was what was supposed to come next that had Skara worried. And that depended on how well they played today. How well she played. Win or lose, Skara honestly couldn't care less. It was Boscha she was concerned with. How she would take it if they lost. If she would blame Skara for it, and how... Fun that would be.

But after today, it'll be done, she reminded herself. After today, this is all done with.

With a sigh, Skara sat herself up in bed, leaning back against the headboard. She glanced around her room, noting how messy and unkempt it had gotten. These last few weeks, she'd had no time to focus on anything else other than Grudgby training and doing whatever homework she could do to keep her teachers off her back. She had kept telling herself she would clean it up, but just never did. She never had the time to. Granted, she was never the tidiest person on the Isles, but normally there was at least an attempt to make it look organized. Now there was no rhyme or reason whatsoever. Everything was just strewn about all over the place. Books, shirts and skirts thrown about the floor, instruments disorganized - She was pretty confident that some of her percussion instruments were buried under a pile of clothes in the archway of the door.

In all that clutter though, there was a space at her desk that was relatively clear, so she had a workspace to actually do all that homework. Just some books and papers laying around, nothing too major. In the center of it, left there from the night before, was something that recaptured Skara's eyes, and pulled her away from everything else, just as it had done the night before.

The glyph.

Once again, it had all her attention. She looked at it, and somehow, Skara felt like it was looking back at her. Like it had questions of its own - Like what it was doing here.

That at least, in a physical sense, Skara could answer: It had been a rough few weeks, but the last five days in particular had been, in a single word, brutal. Every new training drill was more intense and insane than the last, and nothing that anyone did seemed to be good enough for Boscha. Each drill, they ran until it was as close to absolutely flawless as possible. Then, they'd run it another hundred times. And every time they bested their previous times, Boscha wouldn't be happy until they bested it again.

This match means a lot to Boscha, Skara reminded herself. Things will return to normal once it's done.

So when Skara was taking care of all her Grudgby equipment the day before, she took pause for just a fraction of a second. Made her run her eyes across the books lined up in her locker, and land on a piece of paper between Magical Musical Theory, and Petrimo's Greatest Compositions. The glyph Willow had given her on Monday. And like the Magic it was supposed to invoke, it seemed to glow in front of Skara.