01/23/2026: Entering Silverquill

Horse-Reyna’s hooves clatter on the marble pathway as she canters into Silverquill Quad. The elegant colonnade rises before her, its pristine white marble marred by scorch marks and hastily erected ward-stones.

A gelatinous cube blocks the right side of the walkway ahead—translucent and vaguely greenish. It has engulfed one of the building’s supporting columns, embedding it within its gel.

A voice enters her mind—apologetic, oddly formal, accompanied by pictures rather than words: “Hello, it’s Debbie. I’d go with you, Reyna, but I’d only slow you down.”

Whickering and tossing her head in acknowledgment, she breaks into a gallop. Her mane whips across her neck as she goes around the cube and heads toward the main doors of Silverquill at the back of the Quad.

⚔

Through blindsight that perceives the world in ripples of movement and density, jelly-Debbie registers two frightened faces pressed against a glass door some twenty feet ahead. Students sheltering. Terrified of the gelatinous cube oozing toward them.

A thought drifts through her transformed mind: “If I dissolve this column inside me, will the building collapse?”

She considers this with the unhurried deliberation of someone whose brain chemistry has been fundamentally altered by polymorph magic. The column hisses as acid eats into it—a sound entirely beyond her perception. Gelatinous cubes have no ears.

The students behind the glass door stare in horror at the approaching cube that seems intent on entering their building.

Jelly-Debbie flows forward, her body splitting cleanly around the pole, then fusing back together on the other side. She presses against the glass. The students scatter as she begins to squeeze beneath the door, her body compressing and flowing like thick honey.

Behind her, the column continues sizzling, continues holding up the ceiling. For now.

⚔

Flumph-Hester drifts across campus with a serene, pulsing glow. Her jellyfish-like body undulates gently, tentacles trailing beneath her as she navigates toward the Biblioplex. The great Star Arch dominates the Main Quad ahead—a massive structure of intertwined magical energies that normally hums with stable power.

Today it sparks. Loud, crackling bursts of energy leap between its components, accompanied by a high-pitched fizzing that sets flumph-Hester’s teeth on edge. Or would, if flumphs had teeth in any conventional sense.

And every living creature anywhere near the Star Arch is subjected to waves of polymorphic energy.

She passes the casualties of the polymorph crisis scattered across the lawn and sidewalk like bizarre art installations. A single fluffy bedroom slipper lies on its side near a bench, occasionally twitching. A hamster in a plastic exercise ball rolls past, propelled by frantic running, its tiny face frozen in an expression of existential despair. Beneath the bench, a pair of red parrots huddle together, their feathers ruffled, both chirping what sounds like fragments of a heated argument about semester schedules.

On the pathway, someone has become a half-eaten sandwich—roast beef, by the look of it—still wrapped in wax paper that crinkles with each attempted movement. Nearby, a woodchuck snarls protectively at passing flumph-Hester, positioning itself between her and the sandwich.

“At least I can move,” she thinks. “At least I have agency.”

She glows a bit brighter and continues floating toward Silverquill.

⚔

The blinding flash fades, and KFC attempts to shake her head to clear the spots from her vision. Her head doesn’t move. That’s wrong, but she has no time to work out what’s going on with her neck.

She passes a large gelatinous cube that appears to be impaled on a pole. She keeps going, scurrying onward.

The Silverquill Quad’s elegant architecture looms ahead. Spider-KFC spots a set of glass doors on the south side of the building—tall, ornate, with elaborate metalwork in the frames. Two students shelter just inside, their wands drawn, and then think better of it. They flee.

KFC doesn’t slow down. She slams against the glass.

The doors explode inward in a shower of crystalline fragments. Freeing herself from the twisted metal frame, she enters the building, glass crunching beneath her feet.

Then she freezes.

Staring at her from a room identical to the one in which she stands is a monstrous spider. Nine eyes are distributed across a fanged face. From the creature’s enormous, hairy abdomen protrude eight long, jointed legs covered in bristles. Each leg ends in a delicate, terrifying claw.

It’s a giant spider the size of a hippopotamus. And it is blocking her path.

Thinking fast, spider-KFC darts to her right, and the massive spider does, as well.

And disappears.

Relieved, she scurries toward another door, her eight legs moving in perfect coordination, out of view from the mirror she has been staring into. 

Too many limbs, too many joints—but her arachnid body handles them instinctively, moving the barbarian forward without conscious direction. And without realizing she has been polymorphed into a massive spider.

⚔

On stumpy, bark-covered legs, blight-Titania toddles past jelly-Debbie’s bisected gelatinous cube form. The fey’s needle blight body moves with an awkward gait. Tiny thorned branches extend where arms should be. Their vision—such as it is—picks up movement ahead: a horse at the top of the stairs—Reyna—turning to kick backward at the glass door.

⚔

Horse-Reyna bucks backward, her powerful hindquarters driving into the glass door. It shatters spectacularly.

Polymorphic emanations flood through the broken door. The two Silverquill students who’ve been guarding this entrance vanish in simultaneous flashes of blinding light.

As horse-Reyna’s vision recovers from the sudden magical discharge, an overweight orc stands in the entryway, staring down at a crumpled set of windchimes on the floor where the students had been only moments before.

The orc’s gaze shifts to Titania. Their expression suggests deep, personal offense at the day’s unexpected turn to the bizarre.

“Telling the Dean you broke down our door,” the orc mutters through a set of impressive tusks before stumping off down a corridor, footsteps heavy. It slams through a door and disappears.

⚔

Jelly-Debbie forces her gelatinous body through the narrow space between pole and wall, splitting herself neatly in two. Her two halves flow past the obstacle and immediately fuse back together with a wet squelching sound.

Oozing slowly up the stairs, jelly-Debbie navigates each step. At the top, she encounters another set of glass doors and presses against them, finding the smallest gaps around the frame. She flows through the cracks into the entryway beyond.

Two more Silverquill students flee at her approach, diving through a door marked “Health Services” and slamming it behind them.

The moment jelly-Debbie crosses fully into the building’s interior, the polymorph effect releases. Her gelatinous form collapses, destabilizing without the magical field maintaining it. She finds herself suddenly very human again, lying on the cold marble floor.

Also missing all of her clothing.

As a gelatinous cube, she had jettisoned her clothing to keep it from dissolving when the polymorph took hold.

Debbie grabs a nearby throw rug—a tasteful runner with Silverquill’s black and white color scheme—and wraps it around herself like a toga. In the next room, she finds a white lab coat hanging on a hook and adds that to her ensemble.

Not her finest moment, fashion-wise, but better than nothing.

⚔

The horse and the needle blight shove open a door marked “Student Lounge” and tumble inside. The door clicks shut behind them.

Immediately, the polymorph effects cease. Reyna’s equine form ripples and contracts, her chestnut coat flowing back into pale skin and dark hair. Four hooves become two hands and two feet. She staggers slightly, unused to standing on only two legs again.

Titania’s needle blight body collapses like a deflating balloon, thorny branches withdrawing into normal humanoid arms. They sit heavily on the nearest chair, catching their breath.

They search the lounge quickly—overturning cushions, checking behind the coffee maker, examining the bookshelf where students have abandoned textbooks with titles like “Arcane Rhetoric and Its Discontents” and “The Magical Art of Persuasive Silence.” No orb.

They move to the next room. A closed-down classroom, chairs turned upside down on desks, dust sheets covering filing cabinets and bookshelves, a semicircle of half-packed crates around a podium. A chalkboard displays half-finished notes on metaphor theory in spellcasing. Papers litter the floor.

Titania checks behind the podium. Reyna examines the supply closet.

And there, tucked behind a stack of blank essay paper in the bottom drawer, they find it.

The Orb of Unwritten Words.

It’s the size of a grapefruit, made of cloudy crystal that shifts between translucent and opaque. Inside, small slips of white paper float, making it appear to be a snow globe. The Orb pulses with dim red light, and whispers emanate from it—fragments of sentences, abandoned ideas, the weight of every brilliant thought that never made it past the outline stage.

“Let me,” Titania says, reaching for the Orb with the confidence of someone whose previous artifact interactions have been… mixed. “I’m sure I’d be able to communicate to the spirit of the Orb. My communication with the Crown has been exemplary, and I’m sure I’ll be excellent with the Orb as well.”

Reyna tries very hard not to roll her eyes. Titania pointedly ignores this.

They hold the Orb up to eye level, peering into its cloudy depths. “Orb, tell me something important about yourself!”

They shake the globe vigorously. The interior fills with swirling white fragments, some of which begin affixing themselves to the inside of the glass, forming letters.

“It’s spelling out a message!” Titania’s voice rises with excitement. “This is a message from the spirit who possesses the Orb of Unwritten Words!”

The Hexmates crowd closer, squinting into the globe, breathlessly awaiting revelation.

The letters form slowly, deliberately:

I… AM… WAITING…

“It’s waiting!” Titania says, with mounting excitement. “Waiting for what, Orb?”

More letters arrange themselves:

FOR… A… FIVE…

“Five what?” Titania demands, nearly shaking with anticipation. “Five hundred? Five million? Five what, oh Orb?”

The message continues revealing itself with agonizing slowness:

A… FIVE PARAGRAPH ESSAY DISCUSSING WHETHER THE ABSENCE OF FOOTWEAR ENHANCES OR DIMINISHES MAGICAL POTENCY IN FEY CREATURES.

Silence fills the classroom.

“That sounds,” Reyna observes carefully, watching Titania’s face turn an interesting shade of red, “like a question you’d be uniquely able to answer.”

Titania’s eye twitches.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​