Sleepless nights followed rounds in the sparring ring.

Rather than lie abed with thoughts racing, Mingxia turned to all nighters studying. Turning the light up in her bedroom, she would curl up on the floor, her back against the wall, and devour not just her textbooks but extra resource materials from the library too. Perhaps if she knew everything, she would stop feeling so insecure in debates.

She could beat the other students into submission with knowledge.

Even more of a draw than papers on practical spellcasting — and the deep knowledge of underlying mechanics that often came up in discussion — were the resources she found in ad-Dafira on neuromagic and advanced formulae for psychopathology and psychiatric remedies. 

Entire chapters on social anxiety turned beneath her fingers. It would be years before she could take classes on psychiatric remedy spellcasting, and even then it would be prohibited to cast the spells on herself without a licensed practitioner, but as she highlighted, recorded, and worked out figures, she wished she could learn to cast an anti-anxiety spell right now. Even if it wasn't allowed. Certainly this was a rule worth breaking, worth any consequence (short of expulsion) they could throw at her.

Til dawn she would read. Til her eyes were stinging from the strain. Solving this problem became an addiction — solving it through magical means sounded so much less painful than Doctor Azikaze's exposure therapy.

Weekly catchup naps in the ad-Dafira library became her habit. At times she didn't make it to tutorial. It wasn't as if it were Storm Gloriam alone she had to fear; loneliness itself brought on its own stress and constant humiliation. (At night her thoughts raced What do they think of me? Have they all noticed I have no friends? Do they talk about how much of a loner I am when I'm not there?)

It wasn't as if Storm were only unkind to her; even if someone said something smart, even if Storm seemed to partly agree or see her point, her remarks had a careless tone. Thoughtlessly unkind. "Sure, but such considerations are pointless," she would say when Inyanga pointed out how if they could have tracked spellcasting from the stellar router a century ago, modern understanding would be so much further along by now. "That's only the third most ridiculous thing you've ever said, Amafu," was her reply in neuromagic when when Amafu said that according to the research papers she had read, mental link communication could easily be possible within the century.

When Mingxia once said that stellar energy calculations were the least important aspect of spellcasting due to the negligible impact on the source, the corona of a star, Storm had answered, "That's kind of true, maybe half, but it would be idiotic not to account for solar energy depletion when casting as high powered a spell as a temporal link. Time travel can wipe out small stars."

Outrage had wiped her mind clear but somehow she had managed, "The majority of stellar energy from the majority of spells can be regenerated by the star within twenty-four hours," which was true, considering the careful choice of mitigating terms she had made.

And Storm had answered, "Yes, let's just keep assuming the majority of cases will be true all the time and completely ignore outliers. Like cave people."

Halfway into the first semester of Secondae, Mingxia wanted to strangle the girl. She did not understand why she didn't think before she spoke. It was infuriating.

So when Storm and Inyanga started hanging out together, Mingxia felt like two worlds had crashed together and hers had exploded.

Always together, even if in loud debates, the two became inseparable. It seemed to begin when they had detention together after the link spell test fiasco, and one afternoon Mingxia observed them running out of al-Maysan as fast as they could race, then stop and start practicing airweave captions. Which was curious.

Working on levitating a model skyscraper, Mingxia got distracted mid-spell when she found herself reading their conversation, which floated in the air between them.

Storm's words were backwards, but she could read Inyanga's.

As she read "Now, what were you going to say about the taboo?" Mingxia started, startled, almost hopping backwards in surprise — and, gnomon in hand, mid-spell, she misdirected the anti-gravity spell she had been aiming at the miniature skyscraper, accidentally lifting Inyanga's kimono — for just a second — into the air. A cute, and very short, skirt and her long legs were momentarily revealed entirely, rather than merely allowed a hint of.

Eyes wide, Mingxia forced out the word, "Sorry!" in a panicked yell she had tried to fill with a friendly and apologetic intonation — and then she just RAN. She didn't look back to see a reaction, she just ran.

Her feet took her into the hedge maze beneath al-Maysan, where she thought about what she had read, and she wondered what Inyanga had been talking about the taboo spell for, and why Inyanga didn't see through that horrible, horrible girl. As she turned a corner, a fiery azaleawood near the portal to class caught her eye, and a memory jumped out at her.

She remembered something that, perhaps, no one else had ever known. The first day of second semester, in Ianuaria right after the exam break, she had been sitting on the ground, back to that giant red azalaewood tree whose branches cupped around the bottom of al-Maysan. The entire cohort waited for the evening assembly for Magical Economics, and a crowd waited, surrounding her, and she felt alone and almost within it, yet just outside.

Once in a while she would look up and glance around for a friendly face. Perhaps Inyanga's. Dozens of times she glanced up to watch Amafu entertain a circle of friends with funny stories and wicked commentary. When the portal opened, Mingxia fell in with the mass queue, near the back, and never saw Inyanga show up.

Hundreds of girls had hovered around Maestra Alondra, who delivered a lecture the students would not be allowed to take notes on. "Information pertaining to the artificial scarcity of magic is highly classified and will appear throughout your studies in a codified, encrypted format. All second semester Novae must memorize the key code to decrypt this information before leaving al-Maysan tonight. You must not ever write down the encryption key.

"While we hope to foster a generation of magicians capable of critical thinking and independent creativity, of the sort that leads to innovation and advancement, the economics of magic is one area in which Constellation relies on one point five millennia of research, experimentation, and experience, to dictate that the information you are about to receive is not up for debate, nor should it ever be publicized. It is not to be the subject of hypotheses or experimentation.

"Magical economics pertains to the pricing of magic, as well as the amount of stellar energy in the system available for spellcasting use. It is a subject tackled only by licensed magicians working in Constellation's Department of Economic Development. In this class, you will learn only those aspects of the economy of magic deemed necessary for your calculations in spellcasting. Those with extended interest in magical economics and contributions to its development should pursue a role in that field after graduation. Those who do not should accept the conclusions of the Department of Economic Development, as no external input will be considered."

The problem of artificial scarcity took a moment to wrap one's head around, but it was fairly simple. To conceal the fact that magic can run out from all non-magicians, every calculation of magical energy is recorded as if magic has a limited supply. Every magician acts as if this is true, publicly maintaining the ruse that there is only so much magic to go around. Most every spell required the encryption key to calculate how much magical energy to actually use.

Which meant that if Inyanga had missed that assembly, not only had she not been placed under the taboo spell, she was also missing a necessary factor in spellcasting calculations: the key to decode them.

How could Inyanga cast spells correctly if she didn't have the key?

Perhaps Mingxia was wrong. Yet throughout that lecture, part of her mind had been wandering. Part of her mind had been wondering whether Inyanga was absent, whether she would need to have the taboo spell placed over her separately, and as the taboo spell was placed over the entire cohort levitating within the library, she had assumed so. As she absent-mindedly toured the labyrinth now, she wondered — was it possible the spell had never been placed on Inyanga?

A voice came from around a bend in the hedge maze, and in moments she could make out words. Back the way she came. It was a familiar voice, well-known from a million overheard gaffes, jests, quips, and gags, but Amafu now sounded serious. Professorial, even.

"I can't recommend that you two rewire each other's brains with spellcasting."

Drawing closer to the hedge, Mingxia found herself summoned by Amafu's voice as close as she could get to the corner without being seen.

"The spelling and writing of regular words exhibits activation in the superior temporal gyrus. . ." She could almost picture Amafu stalking back and forth, pacing like a maestra. It was difficult to make out every word, but Mingxia had read far enough ahead in her neuromagic textbook, trying to unlock an anti-anxiety spell, to fill in some of the blanks. "If the taboo spell prevented you from speaking about the taboo by limiting your ability to activate phonological working memory, it's possible . . ." Why was everyone talking about the taboo? Was Amafu with Inyanga? 

As Amafu lectured on, Mingxia didn't hear Inyanga's voice. In fact, when Amafu ended with, "Fun, right?" Mingxia didn't hear anyone reply at all.

The silence lasted quite a while. And it was certainly long enough for the instinctive move to eavesdrop, out of extreme curiosity, to begin to fade. Her mind halfway to putting together the coordinates to open up a tiny surveillance link (portals were allowed, direct linking still prohibited), she began to come to her senses. Spying on them through a link just big enough to peep through was tempting, and it was as if what she was sure were the correct coordinates just appeared in her mind, but . . . this wasn't really her business.

That's when Amafu started to raise her voice. "I just love how you didn't notice, Inyanga, when I helped you work the teleportation spell."

Out of a totally new and urgent concern for their privacy, Mingxia started to creep away backward from the voice that rose up above the hedges, because Mingxia didn't want to hear the two arguing. She didn't want to witness any cracks in their bond.

She kept slinking backwards (while her mind worked on the question, was this somehow Storm Gloriam's fault?), and accidentally heard, "I'll leave you two besties to your lunch," (and she had her answer, yes), and hearing the stomp of perhaps three sets of feet moving toward her, running her way, she turned and, again, ran away between the hedge walls.

Mingxia is just one star in a constellation. Inyanga is another. If you're looking for more Constellations, the series can be read in any order. Bay's Star, Izara's Star, and a novel in the universe entitled Stars Rise can all be found on my profile.

Thank you for reading; if you enjoyed it, please fuel my magic world by leaving a star for me. This story updates on Fridays.