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Icy is wickedly smart; too smart to be baited into giving out any information she doesn’t want to. This makes her a fantastic, if ruthless, teacher – because she’s blunt and willing to condescend Bloom into whatever realization she’s after – but it makes her frustratingly vague on certain topics.
Bloom learns that Cloud Tower does not give its students textbooks. Witches are expected to do their own research into spells, hexes, incantations, and curses. Primarily, this information comes through the grimoires of past alumni; and it is through this exchange of knowledge that Cloud Tower functions.
Witches agree to share their work, their knowledge and discoveries, with Cloud Tower. This is a stipulation of enrollment, the cost of enrollment, because unlike Alfea Cloud Tower does not charge tuition or rely on large donations from rich families of students. They don’t get donations; no family is proud that their daughter is a witch. This ensures future generations have access to their work, and that they go down in history – their names will not be forgotten. That alone soothes some of their – drive, Icy calls it. Ambition, hunger, desire.
Any competent witch starts her grimoire when she learns her first spell. There is a ghost of a suggestion there; Bloom takes it into consideration.
Witches primarily work alone. Fairies are tied to their homeworld, to their families and countries and kingdoms and planets. They are also tied to Magix as a whole; there is a history here that Bloom is not able to find, but something changed those vows of service to include their neighboring worlds. Changed, she says, because not every history book has been updated, and the vows are so specific – it is a vow of action.
Witches, on the other hand, are free agents. They do as they please, where they please, when they please. The only hierarchy they acknowledge is that of skill and power, and only amongst other witches. It is widely acknowledged that the Headmistress of Cloud Tower is the most powerful and most cooperative witch in existence; anyone more cooperative than her is weaker, anyone more powerful less willing to put the greater good before her own gain. She strikes a balance few other witches try to obtain.
Icy tells her this is because witches are evil and more likely to kill their competitors than befriend them. But Icy has her sisters – they are a coven, a real coven – and none of them seem interested in stabbing the others in the back. So; there’s something there.
Stormy had been half-right about the sources of their magic; witches do draw on external sources. That is one of their most feared attributes. Every living thing has some magic in it, after all – every living thing except all life on Earth, apparently – and while drawing on that doesn’t necessarily murder everything because there seems to be some kind of automatic area-of-effect leeching, there are…ways. Bigger, more complex spells with more than a handful of casters, typically. Bloom can find no mention of a cast of this type that succeeded – and to not succeed leaves nothing but death and devastation – but she has such a hard time finding accounts of failed castings that she doubts Alfea would have records of it.
But though they do draw on other living things – they don’t have to.
If fairies are powered by the strength of their positive emotions; love and joy and happiness and courage, witches are powered by the strength of their negative emotions; fear and rage and hate and grief.
The distinction seems poor and arbitrary, and Icy laughs derisively at her when she says as much. Too much love can turn bad for the fairy consumed by it. Fear isn’t necessarily bad. And – she should know, she can still draw on anger to power her spells. It’s her easiest pull.
Any questions pertaining to this in class get immediately shut down, and she gets an extra after-class lecture about staying on topic and focused on her studies. Bloom’s afraid to draw attention to herself; she stops asking questions at Alfea.
Icy spends most of their conversations talking shit about Alfea and mocking fairies in general for not knowing anything, but she’s cognizant of Bloom’s status, fresh to the whole world of magic, and that’s…nice. Bloom appreciates that she gets called a stupid bitch for fucking something up, not for being born on the wrong planet or whatever.
It takes her three weeks before she manages to wheedle a simple spell out of Icy, and it takes her three days to determine that she cannot cast it by drawing on fairy magic, which is incredible. She gets so angry and frustrated on that third day that she screams out the incantation and promptly turns the bouquet of flowers she’d been experimenting on into a vase full of slugs, and.
Well.
What does it say about Magix, that a fairy could be a witch – and presumably a witch could be a fairy – so easily? Bloom’s been mildly paranoid about all this since she first realized her lessons were scripted, but this is – this is a genuine fear. There is a balance in Magix that apparently rests very strongly on the distinction between fairies and witches, and if anyone finds out she’s disturbed it –
Her meetings with Stormy go well, too. She has to explain the concept of racism to her, which is a little weird, because that leads into a discussion of privilege and whiteness and slavery and property and all of those fun topics, and Stormy looks both repulsed and awed by it all.
Which.
She’s proud to come from Earth. She knows nobody else thinks she should be, but fuck them. She hasn’t looked deeply at the history history of Magix yet, but there’s enough – enough echoes, enough ghosts for her to tell that it isn’t all peachy keen.
The boys come over one night and she spends half an hour spitting fire into a bucket while Riven and Musa laugh at her, because Musa hasn’t lived it but she gets it, and Riven has, and it’s – it’s nice to get support from them. Brandon always looks so absolutely confused when she starts defending her fucking home and – that’s not a fight she wants to have with someone she thinks she likes.
The witches make a half-hearted attempt to break into Stella’s room at about the three-and-a-half week mark. Bloom doesn’t find out about until she gets back from class and finds scorch marks and puddles in the common room. Nobody was seriously hurt, and the witches failed, and so Bloom doesn’t bother stressing over it; she’d known what she was getting into. It’d be unfair of her to bitch about it now.
She finds a book under her pillow that night. She has to wait until Flora finally falls asleep and then try to dim her phone’s brightness before it sears her eyes out of her skull, and only then does she pull it out.
It’s thin and old and worn, and it the words are smeared a little, the handwriting messy. It’s a grimoire from a young witch, chronicling her experiments and findings. The ink is blue.
About three spells in, on a page dedicated to changing a fog-summing spell into a gas-summoning spell, red and purple ink shows up. Annotations and notes in two other hands.
Oh fuck, Bloom thinks, and closes it carefully and tries not to mash the thing to her chest as she stares up at her ceiling.
Oh fuck.