Vician returned the next morning as promised, bringing with him some apples, dried meats, and cheese which he offered Seraphine. He didn’t stay long, and Seraphine learned that though he supplemented his income by making potions and minor enchantments on the side, he was employed as by the local merchant guild to help ensure that ensure that dangerous magic was not brought into the center market and that items that were advertised as magical were indeed magical, benign, and did as advertised.
When he returned late in the afternoon, he brought with him two relatively nice curtains and some nails to hang them with. He and Seraphine then spent the afternoon looking over some of her spell books before he left for the night.
Over the following weeks the two of them settled into a routine with Vician visiting in the morning, bring breakfast and emptying the chamber pot. In the afternoons or evenings he would return and the two of them would study and practice spells until late in the night. When he left, he would always lock the warehouse behind him.
Sometimes, he would bring things for Seraphine and over time she took over one of the corners of the attic, hanging the curtains around the chamber pot and the washtub he brought for her. In addition to the washtub, he brought simple chairs, a small table, a cot, a dressing screen, blankets, and a small sewing kit for her.
The shirts he had given her her first day she cut long slits in the back and across the shoulders to the neck and then added leather laces so that she could wear them with her wings. On the few days she shifted into a more human-like form, she simply laced them the rest of the way. She hemmed and drew in the waist of the pants he had given her and typically wore the dagger Melrazia had given her tucked into her belt.
As a result, even though she often tried to avoid forms that overly attracted Vician’s attention, she still tended to have an exotic edge to her look that Vician couldn’t always ignore. This sometimes made things awkward when a spell they were working on required them to be in extremely close proximity.
Despite this awkwardness, Vician proved to be a good teacher and Seraphine an apt student, and within a few months Seraphine mastered most of the simpler spells that Vician tried to teach her though she had trouble with many of the of the . Seraphine noticed that while she could easily remember spells but wore out after the casting of several spells that Vician tended to need to study spells before being able to cast them, but could cast almost twice the number of spells she could before tiring. More if he used scrolls.
Though he never admitted it, Seraphine could tell that he was jealous of the fact she almost never forgot a spell once she learned it, and that she rarely needed to prepare her spells the way he did. Though sometimes he let slip a caustic remark, he usually hid his resentment but the bond between them meant she could still feel it no matter how much he tried to hide it.
Eventually, she began practicing her spells during the hours he was away and only demonstrating them for him when he tested her or taught her new spells. There were many advantages to this arrangement. In addition to him resenting her less, it gave him more time to study more advanced spells which more often than not allowed her to see him at his happiest. It also helped her pass the lonely hours between his visits.
Even so, the loneliness sometimes closed in on her. Sometimes, she would look wistfully out the boarded up windows, gazing between the narrow slits between the boards to watch the busy street below. Other times she contemplated slipping into the statue which Vician often left on the corner of one of the work benches.
She had been banished into the statue a few times. Once just to see what it would be like for her, a couple of times when Vician had to take short trips out of the city, and once when Vician had an unexpected visitor to his hidden workshop. The statue cast her into a kind of grey forest realm where everything seemed hazy, shadowy, and almost insubstantial. Various creatures seemed to inhabit the realm but they all tended to give her a wide berth and the few that didn’t seemed to pass right through her leaving her feeling both numb and slightly weak and nauseated in their wake. Time also seemed to neglect this realm and she never could quite tell if she was there minutes or days when she returned to the mortal realm.
Despite all this, at times she almost found the realm the statue banished her to preferable to the sheer loneliness that consumed the majority of her days. One day while she was flipping through one of the spellbooks Vician left for her she ran across a spell called Knock. She read through the spell a couple of times to be sure that her mind wasn’t playing tricks on her. Reading through it once more to commit it to memory she looked around until she found one of the small locked boxes of spell components that Vician kept some of his rarer spell components in. Setting the box on one of the work benches she recited the spell. With a faint click the clasp of the lock fell open.
Quickly, Seraphine shut the clasp and repeated the spell. Again the box unlocked itself. The Succubus relocked the box and sat it back where she got it from. Silently she sat down on the cot and stared at the trap door in deep thought.
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