#craggedness

[acemoppet]

Aretuza produces broken girls.

In their year, Fringilla is the first one. One moment, her hand is normal, just another limb she doesn’t think much about- in the next, it’s a graveyard, shriveled and undead. She pleads with the rectoress to heal her, begs her and begs her and begs her- but no, says the rectoress.

“This is your punishment,” the ice-eyed woman says, coolly puffing at a pipe. “You shouldn’t have been so hasty- Chaos is not for the impatient.”

At Fringilla’s stifled sob, the rectoress softens and sighs. “You can get it healed if you Ascend.”

The second one is Anica. They’re at Tor Lara, trapping lightning in a bottle. She steps up to the stage, turning away from the sky in fear, but she does it. She does it!

And then the bottle explodes.

She doesn’t manage to turn away in time, and the shards hit her eyes.

She begs the rectoress to heal her. How will she complete her schooling if she can’t see?

“You should have thought of that before turning away,” the rectoress says, shuffling through papers disinterestedly. “Let this be a lesson to you- Chaos is not for the cowardly.”

At Anica’s silence, she sighs. The rectoress looks at her- or at least, Anica thinks the rectoress looks at her- and says, “You can get it healed if you Ascend.”

Next is Doralis. Miraculously, the lightning that hit her dead on in Tor Lara didn’t harm her at all. She’s secretly relieved for it, and even more secretly guilty about that relief when she sees Anica stumble through the world.

So of course she’s the next one to break.

Caught up in the swell of emotions, she hesitates for a moment too long- and the bolt of Chaos hits her straight in the ear.

“Chaos is not for the indecisive,” the rectoress says when she comes to plead her case- and she knows, she knows she shouldn’t have hesitated, shouldn’t have let Anica land the hit on her just to boost her up, but please, please she can’t hear- “You can get it healed if you Ascend.”

Surprisingly, Sabrina’s the fourth one of them to fall. And she falls hard.

There’s a saying about a sun god and a boy who, in his arrogance, flew too close to him, and then fell burning into the sea. Well, Sabrina doesn’t burn as she falls during their lesson to gather cliff-top mushrooms, but fall she does, shattering her ankle completely.

“No, I cannot do that,” the rectoress says when Sabrina asks her to fix her ankle. When she protests further, asking how she’s supposed to walk around the craggedness of the school, the rectoress just hums neutrally. “You will have to manage. Perhaps it will teach you not to be so prideful that you neglect the warnings of others- don’t even try to argue, I know your professor warned you not to climb that high-”

She didn’t, Sabrina thinks desperately, remembering the professor’s cool, approving gaze as she’d climbed higher and higher. She didn’t… did she?

“-and in the case she didn’t… well. You should have had common sense over pride. Chaos is not for the arrogant.”

Sabrina grits her teeth, helplessness washing over her. The rectoress sighs.

“You can get it healed if you Ascend.”

Lark’s turn comes. The poor girl is tormented by nightmares, tossing and turning each night as she watches her classmates- her friends- break and crash and burn.

Is it really such a surprise that she drifts off in Potions then, only to wake up when her cauldron boils over onto her chest?

When she finally stops screaming, she notices the burns- the ugly, painful burns.

“I will not heal it,” the rectoress says before Lark can even open her mouth. “You should not have been sleeping in class- do you think that will fly in court? Remember this- Chaos is not for the lazy.”

Lark croaks, and the rectoress sighs. Always, always sighs. “You can get it healed if you Ascend.”

The last of them to break is Yennefer.

Or maybe she was the first? Because the entire time they’ve been having lessons, she has been striving by herself, doing her best to carve herself a place in this shitstorm of a school that so wildly opposes her. Tissaia’s little moment of camaraderie aside, none of the teachers look at her with any other than cool disgust, especially when, in a moment or two of weakness, she asks for accommodations for the scutwork in her class.

The look in their eyes as they reject every tentative ask is enough to give her nightmares for weeks.

So she learns to bite her tongue against the perilous twinge of her shoulders when she rolls out ingredients, learns to swallow down the dangerous burn in her arms as she struggles to lift her cauldron, learns to hold back the stitch in her side as she races clumsily with the rest of the girls to find potion ingredients.

Until, one day, something snaps.

She tries to lift her cauldron, focusing entirely on the heavy, brutish thing. She misses the stool leg sticking out in the aisle.

Luckily, her cauldron is empty- otherwise, she might have ended up like Lark. But when she slams to the floor on her knees… well. Two weeks later, her right knee still hurts.

It’s not shattered like Sabrina’s ankle- she can still walk on it, after all- but it is swollen, and tender to the touch.

It’s fluid build-up, she later learns, naturally occurring when a body falls that hard on a joint. Still, it’s not severe and easily treatable.

But of course, the rectoress won’t treat her.

“You have been stubborn from the start,” the rectoress says. She fiddles with her quill, shooting Yennefer a sharp look when the girl growls in frustration. “One thing you will need to learn before you go to court is how to work with others- and that means learning how to ask for help.”

“I did!” Yennefer cries out.

“Hm. Not well, I see.” And Yennefer can hear the judgment in her voice- in the future, she will refuse to feel shame, will, as an adult, build up walls so high and a self-assurance so strong she will never feel shame again.

Now though? She is just a child, and the shame of not doing enough- not being enough- drowns her to her core.

“Learn from this, and remember- Chaos is not for the obstinate.”

“You won’t heal me, then,” Yennefer says, disappointment coating her tongue.

“No,” the rectoress agrees. “But you can get it healed if you Ascend.”

One by one, the rectoress chisels away their flaws- impatience, cowardice, indecisiveness, arrogance, laziness, obstinance. One by one, she traps them with promises of a better future- just as she’d been promised when she’d been younger.

Her currently unscarred lungs can attest to the veracity of that promise.

Because Aretuza produces broken girls, yes, but it fixes them too.

You just have to make it to Ascension.