02/27/28: Back to 1487

Olga Drebas. Murgaxor. Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos, WotC. 2021

“So you have decided to go back to 1487. “Sigurd sets down his wrench and leans against the Witherbloom sink he has been repairing. “I appreciate this, Titania. It’s goodbye, then.” He smiles, and it is a sad smile.

“No, Sigurd, as I’ve promised, you’ll be here when we bring you back!”

He shakes his head slowly. “Still so optimistic, Titania. It’s one of the things I remember best about our short time together.” He looks into the middle distance, somewhere past all of them. “Farewell. And thank you for everything.” He presses the chronomancy scroll into their hands.

⚔

On the way out, someone floats the idea of bringing Quentillius back with them—leaving him stranded in the deep past, far from his father and his father’s expectations. The group doesn’t pursue it, but they take a moment to consider it. They don’t like Quentillius. There is an unspoken feeling of pity for him.

Titania stops at the Restoration Center to collect seven healing potions from Nurse Ratchet, tucking their teleportation crown into their pack alongside them. The others gather their things. They rest, and prepare to leave in the morning.

⚔

They assemble in the main room of the Hex. Reyna reads the chronomancy spell aloud.

The floor drops out from under them.

Wind hits them from every direction at once—icy cold, then scorching hot, cycling without pattern. Glittering clouds close in, thick enough to blot out their companions, though they can sense each other close by. Below, a silver-gray river runs backward. On its banks, fallen leaves spring upward, reattaching to branches that thicken and green and then bow under new snow. Time moves in reverse, and they are moving with it.

Then they hit stone. Hard.

They land in a painful heap at the top of the Biblioplex steps and spend a moment untangling themselves. When they finally stand and look out, it is 1487.

The plaza in front of the library is gone beneath rubble. Where a large building once stood, only wreckage remains—fractured brick, split stone, deep gaps through which lime-green arcane energy flickers and pulses. Above it all, a Star Arch rises from a glowing wound in the earth, but the familiar constellations are absent. In their place, a thick smear of green light arcs across the sky, high and silent and wrong.

⚔

They are still debating where to start when footsteps approach from below. Two professors climb the Biblioplex steps, and behind them, trailing slightly, a young bullywug in a graduate student’s mantle.

The larger of the two professors is a broad, bearded man in sorcerer’s robes. His eyes are ringed with kohl, which makes his stare—now fixed on them—feel like something to be survived.

“Strangers. What are you doing here?”

Titania begins, “We are—”

The sorcerer’s hand goes up. “Fey will not speak unless given express permission to do so.” His voice fills the landing. “I do not give my permission.”

Debbie steps in quickly. “We’re here looking at the campus. We’d like to be students at Strixhaven. We’re visit-shadowing today.”

The professor turns to the bullywug at his elbow. “Murgaxor. Are these prospective students shadowing you? You are, after all, one of only two students remaining on campus.”

The young bullywug blinks his large, damp eyes. “N-no, Professor Starkfellow. I have no shadows scheduled. And besides—the school will be closed for the next two years.”

He draws himself up further. His beard trembles. “Furthermore, we would never have prospective students shadow with one such as Murgaxor. You are ghoulish tourists come to gawp at our tragedy. Be gone.”

Titania cannot help themselves. “That’s extremely prejud—”

“SILENCE, FEY!” The word cracks across the stone landing. “I will not have you stealing my soul through my eyes. And you—” he sweeps his glare across the rest of the Hexmates, “—if you are going to keep company with such a creature, you would be wise to be wary. Fairy folk are untrustworthy. Especially at close range.”

He turns on his heel and bangs through the Biblioplex door.

No one says anything for a moment.

Then the young bullywug turns to Titania. His voice is earnest and a little urgent. “I really am sorry. I know how it feels. When they treat you as—” he stops, and gestures toward the ruins. The green light flickers in the gaps between the broken stone. “If they had listened to me, that might not have happened. They couldn’t bring themselves to listen to a bullywug. Not even my father, who brought with him the very artifact that was needed to—” He hesitates. “You don’t really need the details of Arcane Integration Theory.”

“I’m interested,” says Hester.

The young Murgaxor’s face opens into a broad, genuine grin. “Really? Where do you go to school?”

Hester hesitates. “Just—reading I’ve done on my own.”

Young Murgaxor looks puzzled. “I had no idea the researchers published any theoretical hypotheses before—well, before they were killed in the accident. You must tell me which publication their work appeared in. It must have been posthumous.”

“Sure thing,” says Hester carefully.

He looks at the ruins again, and his expression goes quiet and sad. The Hexmates are having difficulty resolving this Murgaxor with the one who has been hunting them for years.

He brightens again, looking back at Hester. “Then you’d probably like a tour of the Biblioplex. Your companions would be more than welcome to join us.”

Young Murgaxor pulls the door open and steps aside to let them in.

⚔

The interior of the Biblioplex is largely recognizable—the same shelves, the same layout, the same quality of light from the high windows—except for the fracture. It begins at the front entrance, a jagged split in the stone floor that runs toward the back of the building, in the direction of what will become the Hall of Oracles in their own time. Young Murgaxor steps over it without breaking stride.

“Mind the fracture. The magical maintenance crews have their hands full.”

He leads them through the stacks, narrating the building’s history—all things they already know. The crack follows them at a remove, a reminder of what happened outside.

The tour ends on the second floor, in the map room. Every table is clear except one. A large atlas lies open to “Volcanos of the Strix Peninsula.” Next to it, a fragment of a half-chewed chequer piece sits on the desk.

Alister goes still.

Squid was here.

“Tsk.” Young Murgaxor shakes his head at the atlas. “Someone’s torn out the map of Mount Strix. A valuable volume made incomplete. Why would anyone want to visit a dead volcano?”

The Hexmates exchange glances. In their own time, Mount Strix is quite active—steaming and rumbling regularly, throwing green sparks from its cone on clear evenings.

“A few weeks ago,” young Murgaxor continues, “someone also broke into the Scroll Lab and took a very valuable Fireproofing Spell. It must be someone on campus—there are so few of us left. I can’t be a suspect. I was at my mother’s funeral when it disappeared.”

Hester’s voice is careful. “Your mother just died?”

The bullywug nods and wipes at his eye with the back of a webbed hand. “Her passing was sudden. Unexpected. But it allowed my father to find me. We’ve reconnected after years of silence. I suppose that’s something.” He does not look as though it is something.

“And my father brought a valuable artifact to campus,” he continues. “Something our research—now my research—required. I had no idea the Crown of Winter’s Last Snow was a family heirloom.”

At the back of the group, Debbie smells something burning.

She is carrying the Sewermancer’s Staff and the Orb of Unwritten Words. The Staff, jutting from her pack, has begun to fizz. The green arcane energy pulsing through the fracture in the floor below is interacting with it. In a flash, Debbie is surrounded by the Staff’s aura.

When it clears, she knows two things: she is incapable of lying, and she is afraid of something she cannot name. She bolts for the nearest worktable and dives underneath it. KFC crouches down to coax her out.

Young Murgaxor watches this with polite concern. “Is your friend all right?” He pauses. “I was going to ask if you all if you’d like to join me and my father for lunch.”

⚔

Hester and Alister make their excuses and slip out separately.

Hester is small and can fly, and she navigates the dim hallway easily, keeping to the upper shadows.

Alister is less fortunate. Coming up the stairs toward them, they hear the slap of webbed feet on stone before they see the figure.

An older bullywug stops on the landing. Compact, pugnacious, he looks Alister up and down. “Do I know you?”

Alister keeps their voice neutral. “Possibly, sir. I’m a custodian here. New hire.”

The older Murgaxor taps his foot once on the step. “Room B15—the room I’m using as an office. Go down and make it presentable. I’m expecting a lunch guest. If it isn’t tidied, you’ll regret it. Touch nothing on my desk.”

He turns and continues upstairs. Alister goes down.

⚔

Room B15 is a classroom being used as a temporary office. The moment Alister steps inside, they feel it: a large cold-iron key hanging on a hook near the chalkboard radiates cold and a low, poisonous nausea. Even across the room, it is unpleasant.

Alister forces their attention away from it. Under a pile of loose parchment, a scroll case catches their eye. They cross the room despite the cold-iron’s pull and work the case free from the papers. Down the leather side, in elegant script: Scroll of Fireproofing.

They pop the end cap, slip the scroll up their sleeve, roll a blank sheet of parchment to the same dimensions, slide it in, and recap the case. They rearrange the papers as they found them.

Just as the door opens.

The elder Murgaxor takes in the scene—Alister, hands on his desk—in an instant. “Step away from there, ‘janitor.’ Go stand over there.”

He points to the wall beside the cold-iron key.

Alister moves to the spot. The cold works through them, bone-deep. They begin quietly preparing a Hold Person.

From down the hallway, raised voices carry into the room. The sound is familiar in a way that doesn’t quite make sense.

Quentillius?

⚔

Coming down from the map room, led by young Murgaxor, the rest of the group hears it too—an argument, fierce and hushed, a father and son hissing at each other in the hallway.

“No son of mine will— poetry is no way to make a living, Quentillius! We’re here to withdraw you from Strixhaven. This time next week you’ll be at work at the firm. You know enough to be an Arcane Attorney. Pass the bar and the world is your oyster. Something you will never have as a poet.”

The younger voice pushes back, insisting, passionate.

They come into view. The faces are close—but not quite. This Quentillius is taller, broader than the one who lives in their Hex.

From the shadows where she has positioned herself, Hester watches them move down the hall and thinks: Generational trauma.

Father and son pass a pot-bellied orc in a paper hat and a plain black servant’s uniform, pushing a cart that holds a large silver tureen and a stack of crocks and spoons. The cart rolls into Room B15.

⚔

The soup is served. Before the bowls are distributed, the elder Murgaxor gestures to have the cart rolled to him. He tastes the soup from one crock and growls, “It needs salt.” He salts every bowl himself. Every bowl except one.

Debbie, still burning under the Staff’s wild-magic effect, cannot keep quiet. She notes the omission.

The elder Murgaxor smiles thinly. “I must watch my sodium. Cardiac issues.”

Across the room, Alister stands beside the cold-iron key and holds their preparation for the Hold Person spell, very still.

From his seat, in a voice that has gone slightly watery, the young Murgaxor says, “My mother died eating soup.”

The room goes quiet.