White Magic Academy

By Emily Martha Sorensen

Rulisa doesn’t want to be a good witch. She wants to be a bad witch. But after her second expulsion from a powerful magical school, Rulisa’s father sends her packing off to White Magic Academy.

Not only is this school a laughstock in the witch community, her goody-goody-two-shoes death-enemy is thriving there. When you add visits from her con artist father, an assigned friend who won’t leave her alone, and the minor matter of assassins from Black Magic Academy, things are looking annoying.

And why, why, why does her death-enemy keep trying to be her friend?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emily Martha Sorensen
• Release date: Aug 17, 2019

Emily Martha Sorensen

Books were my first love and best friends growing up, which I did in five states and four countries. My love of storytelling has never waned, and I've always wanted to write -- and share -- my own stories.I love fantasy, especially fairy tale retellings, fascinating magic systems, humor, and clean paranormal romance. I like science fiction too, but the more magic in a story, the more pleased I'm likely to be.I have two comics, the first of them complete, the second ongoing. I enjoy reading, writing, drawing, crafts, editing, and I occasionally play videogames.

Book preview

Chapter 1: For the Right Reasons

There were two people in the world that Rulisa loved, and only one of them she respected.

Her father wasn’t that one.

She knew perfectly well that he would disapprove of what she was about to do, especially if she ever told him the reason why.  But she would save the annoying man’s life despite that, and in doing so, she’d also save her boyfriend.

Rulisa looked up at the gorgeous sculpture before her.  Ice crystals glistened in an endless fractal pattern, looping and twisting and spiraling, encased behind four layers of glass so that nobody could touch it.  She’d been enthralled by its beauty ever since she’d first come to the Sukanil School of Magical Studies.

Too bad she was here to destroy it.

Ice sculpture made by the Great Witch Laverne during her years as a student, the plaque in the ground next to the towering case said.  And then it had a paragraph about the Great Witch Laverne, her work with elemental strengtheners, and the honors she’d received in the years she’d been a student, before some unnamed accident had caused her to meet her end.

Rulisa snorted.  Yeah, right.

Almost everything on there was a lie.  Even the dates were wrong.

Rulisa had a talent for digging up buried secrets, probably because she could read several ancient languages, and what the plaque claimed about this ice sculpture had nothing to do with its chilling reality.

First of all, the witch Laverne had been considered eccentric at best, and insane at worst, during her lifetime.

At no point had the witch been given honors.  She had actually been expelled from this school.

And her work had not been with elemental strengtheners.  For some reason, despite being a water witch, Laverne had been fascinated with water-patterns.

In other words, an elemental reverser.

Witch society had once been fraught with tensions between the four elements.  Every witch eventually bonded to earth, water, wind, or fire, and it shaped everything about your magic, including what you were immune to and most vulnerable to.

These days, in most places, there was an uneasy truce between the elements.  Most families had members of each element in them.  Rulisa was a fire witch, her father was a water witch, and her boyfriend was a water witch too.  As long as you respected that their magic was theirs and yours was yours, you could coexist happily.

But elemental reversal threatened all of that in the most horrible way.  It was a type of magic that could turn a witch’s own power against her.  It was a betrayal.

Rulisa remembered the horror of witnessing another fire witch experience the effects of a fire-flower.  The fact that it had been a girl she had disliked changed nothing.  The thought of a similar experience happening to her father or boyfriend was . . . no.

Elemental reversers were fleeting.  Fire-flowers wilted, earth-songs faded, wind-stones crumbled, and water-patterns washed away.

Yet somehow, that lunatic Laverne had found a way to freeze one permanently.

And that was the supposed sculpture she was standing before.

Both the men Rulisa loved were water witches, extremely powerful, and way too stubborn for their own good.  Far worse, their family’s most vicious enemy hated men and specialized in elemental reversal.  If this weapon ever fell into the wrong hands, it would likely be hers, and those two would be the most likely to be targeted.

Rulisa breathed in deeply, taking one last look at her surroundings before she destroyed them.  She felt no regret, but some reluctance.

The midnight garden of the Sukanil School of Magical Studies was truly a work of art.  With glowing lightberries and luminous twinkle flowers, the patterns danced off of the ice sculpture in endless chaos, enhancing the beauty of the mathematical perfection of the sculpture even further.  This garden was the reason Rulisa had chosen to come here, and the school would be bereft without it.  In the morning, when the teachers discovered the loss of the school’s greatest treasure, Rulisa would mourn beside them, with no need to feign.

But that wouldn’t stop her.

If I found an obscure counter to the wards the school is using to protect the water-pattern from molestation, Rulisa thought, stretching her fingers in preparation, somebody else could, too.  Oplisa is as clever as I am.  She was the one who orchestrated the death of both my mother and her own sister, after all.

Oh, the story went that Drakin and Welsa had killed each other in a death-match instigated entirely by their own hatred for each other.  But Rulisa’s father’s sharp eyes had caught several instances of water magic slipping into the arena, and the only water witches present had been him and Oplisa.

I didn’t call foul, he’d later explained to Rulisa, because she seemed to be helping both sides equally.  Even the parting shot from Welsa . . . I’m not sure that she had enough life left in her to get that off, honestly.  If she didn’t, it was probably Oplisa who killed Drakin.

Her father had kept this a secret from everyone except for Rulisa, because he had no interest in others thinking that his wife hadn’t killed her death-enemy herself.  He had only told Rulisa the truth about his suspicions in order to warn her to be wary.

You are going to Black Magic Academy, he had told her, where both Drakin and Oplisa were valedictorians.  There is no doubt that the daughter of your mother’s death-enemy will be sent there, too.  And Oplisa, the one who has raised that child, has no regard for rules.  Be very, very careful, or you might end up dead before you graduate.

Of course, Rulisa’s death-enemy had turned out to be a good-hearted idiot, but the threat that Oplisa represented to her family remained.  In fact, it was probably stronger than ever.  Both of them had been expelled from that school for using white magic, after all.

Rulisa was fairly certain that the woman put the blame on her for corrupting her niece, even though it was aggravatingly closer to the reverse.  Rulisa had entered Black Magic Academy with the determination to become a wicked witch just like her mother.  Mildred was the one who had forced her to do the opposite.

Rulisa sighed in irritation.  And here she was again, about to do the right thing, this time all by herself.

That doesn’t make me a good witch, she told herself defensively.  Even wicked witches can do things to protect the people they love.

But unfortunately, she knew that the most rational thing to do would be to take the water-pattern and use it as a weapon to kill Oplisa.  That was what her father would tell her to do.  That was what she could have researched and found a way to do.

And that wasn’t what she was going to do.

Rulisa drew in a deep breath, knowing that the outer ward of wind was going to try to suffocate her, and reached out and touched the glass.

Her ears caught fire, then her arms, then her hair.  The fire ward was doing its job.  She ignored this, being immune to heat.  As the haze rose up from her arms, it shimmered in the air visibly.  Rulisa grasped control of the heat and fixed the shimmer underneath the wards, holding it steady.

She had the desperate urge to draw in a breath, but the wind ward would steal any air that was still in her lungs, so she managed to keep from trying, though her arms were shaking and she was starting to feel lightheaded.

Trying to ignore the screaming of her lungs from the outer ward she wasn’t immune to, Rulisa focused her fire magic upon the inner wards, which were part of the glass itself.

Glass was liquid sand.  That meant it could be manipulated equally well by earth or water magic.  Enhancing it with both and then fixing it within outer wards of both fire and wind should, in theory, have made it impenetrable.  And this was half true: you couldn’t slip any kind of magic into the glass, pry it open, or shatter it.

But the water magic was weak, corroded by the water-pattern it had guarded for centuries.  That meant the immunity to temperature had been weakening all this time.

Which meant you could boil it.

Rulisa’s right hand turned white-hot as she held it against the glass.  Bubbles formed, and one of them popped, parting a hole for her.  She darted her hand through and moved on to the second layer.  Then the third.  Then the fourth.

Each layer bubbled more quickly than the last, weakened further by closer proximity to the water-pattern.  It was proof that her theory about what it held was correct, which was vindicating.  If it hadn’t been this way, she would have wondered whether she’d judged incorrectly.

Her consciousness was starting to waver in and out.  She tried to use her left arm to slap herself in the face, but it felt dead and rubbery.

Through!  Her right hand was through!

Clinging to the last of her consciousness, Rulisa lanced fire at the water-pattern.

It collapsed with a terrible roar, evaporating into steam that poured through the tiny bubbling openings in the glass around her white-hot right arm.  She yanked out of the hole, toppling backwards more than moving purposefully, and collapsed in an awkward sprawl.

Tears pricked at the edges of her eyes as she watched the glass smooth out and re-form into its previous cylindrical case.  She had to assume the wind ward would stay active for as long as the other three, and the glass was not yet inert, and her hair was burning.

Could she breathe yet?

Could she?

Could she?

Could she?

The rippling glass fell still, and the fire on her head extinguished.  Rulisa sucked in a desperate breath, her head starting to feel a little less weak, and coughed desperately.  She gasped and gasped and gasped as if all the world could be contained within those first breaths.

There were spots in front of her.  Perhaps they had been before, and she hadn’t noticed in her intensity.  Shaking her head muzzily to try to clear the blurriness and blinking colors from her vision, Rulisa staggered up to her feet.  There was something else she needed to accomplish now.  She had to get out of here before somebody —

There was a sudden scream of rage.  Then a flurry of movement around her, as if hundreds of people were running.

What did you do?! somebody shouted, seizing Rulisa by the front of her cloak and hauling her up to her floppy feet.  "What did you do?!"

I — I tried to save it, Rulisa gasped.  I tried, but —

Somebody else screamed, perhaps just now noticing the steam within the glass case.

That’s a flat-out lie! someone shouted, shoving Rulisa away.  Rulisa stumbled and barely managed to regain her footing.  "There’s nobody else here!  You destroyed the ice sculpture!  Why would you do that?!"

Rulisa’s vision regained clarity enough to see that High Witch Dal was the person standing in front of her.  Behind her were Witch Dangan and Witch Gorfal, who was known for making truth poison that would kill anyone who told a lie.

An innocent person would demand to have Witch Gorfal test her to prove she was telling the truth.  But she hadn’t thought to mix an antidote.  She hadn’t thought she’d be caught.

They weren’t going to believe she hadn’t done it.  And she couldn’t tell them the truth.  If she did, the shocking nature of that sculpture might inspire others to recreate it.

So Rulisa raised her chin and said, I didn’t like it.  It was ugly.

The High Witch’s dark skin turned a mottled red, and she smashed her hands together and yanked them apart.  Both of the armbands Rulisa wore to mark her as a student ripped and fell from her arms.

You’re expelled, High Witch Dal hissed.  Count yourself lucky you’re not a Normal, or you’d be dead right now.

Rulisa bit her lip.  Expelled?  But I’ve already been expelled from Black Magic Academy, and I burned my bridges at Smoldering Institute when I smashed through the school!  Where am I supposed to finish my education?

But I’m one of the best students in — she began to protest.

"Expelled!" the High Witch thundered, pointing off at the sky.

Rulisa looked over at the teachers’ faces for mercy, and saw none.  Then she looked over at the coils of steam within the glass that had once held a fractal pattern, and couldn’t even say she disagreed.

Without a word, she summoned her broomstick.  It came flying from the broom shed at such a pace that it left trails of fire behind it.

Then she zoomed up into the air.

I have nowhere to go, Rulisa thought with regret as she dove through the darkness, spinning wildly to let off some of her frustration that she’d allowed herself to be caught.  Nowhere but back home.

Her father would be incredulous that she’d managed to get herself expelled from another school.  Her boyfriend would point out, sarcastically, that this was not the best way to intimidate potential enemies away from attacking her.  Her future mother-in-law would be insufferably disdainful and threaten once again to break off the engagement, not that Kyre would let her.  No one could tell Kyre what to do, not even his mother.

But he’s not going to be wild about this, Rulisa thought with a sigh.  The longer it takes me to finish school, the longer it will take before we can get married.

They’d been betrothed since they were two and three, an agreement between their mothers, and Rulisa had looked forward to that future for as far back as she could remember.  As for Kyre, who’d graduated