The Fertile Grove
Chapter One - The Beginning
A "Detachable" commission
Goddamn it. Even with the drizzling rain, the fireflies were running rampant tonight, and that was going to make this shit a lot harder than it needed to be, but I knew that my best option was to go tonight, because I knew something nobody else knew about. It was an ace in my back pocket that I'd been holding onto for four years since my older brother had told me about it.
I was atop of the alchemical studies building, overlooking the Kenaz Jera Dagaz Sorority House across the street, focusing much more on their garden behind their building than the building itself. It was the middle of April, and the fireflies had appeared early this year, much earlier than they normally would, probably the result of some frondmancer tampering with the local ecosystem for a class project. For all I knew, creating hordes of lightning bugs had been one of the assignments for Fauna Magic 304 or something. There were far too many classes being taught at Eternal Wayfarer College (EWC for short) for me to keep track of all the assignments and what got let out into the nearby area.
April was the month of all the senior challenges, though, and that meant all the professors were encouraged to introduce anything that caused spectacular mischief with the students' pranks and schemes. You see, every April, all the fraternities and sororities held these legendary skill challenges for seniors only. That meant there was all sorts of madness going on across campus, although only seniors were eligible to participate in the challenges, and even then, only seniors in good standards. Juniors had been expelled for less, and the one time someone too young had tried to sneak into the challenges, he'd nearly lost his life. These challenges are a Big Fucking Deal, so everyone treats them with the utmost respect.
There were some caveats to all the challenges - some ground rules that were unbreakable, designed to keep the classes running without too much disruption. Students engaging in the challenges weren't allowed to miss a single class session, otherwise they would instantly forfeit. But, that also came with a caveat - none of the Sororities or Fraternities could do anything to a student engaged in a class or school activity. Nobody wanted the weekly football game against another college to be disrupted by sorority sisters attacking a student who was out on the pitch, and no professor wanted to be mid lecture as two students broke out dueling or some such. While a student was busy with schoolwork, they didn't have to be constantly looking over their shoulder.
A century or so ago, when EWC had been founded, three fraternities and three sororities had sprung up, mostly composed of a mixture of noble highborn humans and erudite elves with the occasional wild card thrown in. The Secret Six, as the six orders were often referred to, each had their own specialty, and eventually expanded to have branches at other magical colleges across the planet, but the ones at EWC were the originals, and therefore, the most prestigious.
What you need to know about me is that I'm not human
or
elf - I'm a goddamn dwarf, and proud of it. My name is Wedge Deepcopper. I'm the youngest of five brothers, and only two of us displayed any magical acumen growing up, so us two were both eventually sent off to EWC. It was expensive, but our parents had always fostered any skills we had growing up, so when my brother Bellow and I both began to display magical talents at an early age, money was set aside so we could go and attend college when we were old enough.
My brother Bellow was something of a hero across Eternal Wayfarer College for his last few months because he had actually beaten one of the Secret Six's challenges his senior year, and a specific challenge that had perplexed students for lifetimes. It was something nobody had ever thought even vaguely possible. His success had been nearly a decade ago though, so his tale had somewhat been diminished. That was all the better for me because it meant few people had even considered that I might build upon my older brother's success, at least after the first few months of my classes anyway. They wrote me off as the odd kid, too mercurial to see anything through to completion.
Which was exactly what I wanted them to think.
I'd been planning this night's escapades since my arrival at EWC almost four years ago, and during those years, the plan had gone through multiple iterations. I would've
loved
to have been able to just coast on my brother's coattails and use his exact plan, but the housemembers of the sororities and fraternities that made up the Secret Six weren't idiots, and they had patched over what they thought was the most important part of what he'd exploited.
Each of the Secret Six houses specialized in a few forms of magic, and as such, offered different challenges to anyone brave enough to take them on, with prizes equal to boot. Gebo Sowilo Tiwaz Fraternity, for example, were known as the concealment masters. At the beginning of April, they as a group made their Fraternal House disappear and relocate. Each day after class, each brother would return to the house using secret pathways. Anyone who could find the Grebo Sowilo Tiwaz Fraternity House (who
wasn't
a member) during the month of April won their weight in diamonds and ten-year contracting gig with the Inescapable Dowager Brothers Bounty Hunters Club, generally an invite-only firm that specialized in hunting down the most troublesome magical criminals. They'd given away their prize four times in a hundred years.
My father had hoped I was going to take on the Ansuz Hagalaz Othala Fraternity and their so-called Invincible Challenge. During the month of April, all members of AHO had a simple proposition to any senior on campus who'd signed up for the challenges - draw a single drop of blood from any one of our members. The winner would claim possession of one of a legendary series of weapons made by the great dwarven weaponsmith Alaxion Chasmflame, as well as a high-ranking position in the Nightcloud's military army.
Dad had been drafted to serve in the Nightcloud army for a decade when he was younger, and had described several of the commanders, who were often AHO brothers, as entitled pricks. But I'd never been one for combat magics, and the idea of trying to find a way to penetrate a series of shield magics that had withstood a lifetime of challenges didn't much appeal to me. Having something made by the great Chasmflame was certainly appealing, but it didn't lean into the sorts of things I was naturally good at. Only two people had ever been able to beat the AHOs at their game, and I had no plans on trying to be the third.
No, my eyes were on the Kenaz Jera Dagaz Sorority, who were known for two things - their transportation magics and their defensive wards. Their challenge was simple - get into their garden in the back of the sorority house, take any of the protected objects and get out. Without being caught or detected, of course. You also lost if they were able to
retrieve
what you'd taken from them before the month was over. My brother had done it, nine years ago, and only just by the skin of his teeth, but he'd dined out on that story for a lifetime, and his now-wife always seemed to take great delight in him telling it to someone new.
The garden out back behind the sorority house was known during the month of April as The Fertile Garden, because that's exactly what it was, and why so many people would spend much of the month trying to break in. The women of KJD were
so
confident that their magics couldn't be beat that each of them hung a talisman from one of the trees in the back garden, each about the size of a teacup saucer, so they couldn't be easily moved or concealed, which was important.
Because each woman of KJD placed her very own pussy in one of these talismans and hung it in the back yard of the sorority house for any mage brave enough to make a go at it. They were connected to each woman via magic, a sort of portal kept open for an entire month, and if you could take one out of the garden without being caught, you could do whatever you wanted to with it for the rest of the month. More importantly, if you could prevent the owner from locating their pussy after it had been taken, keeping it with you for the rest of the month, then you won the challenge. You and the owner would be betrothed on the first day of May. You would also gain a ten-year contract with Impregnable Madeline's Potent Securities, or the IMPs, as a sneaker.
Sneaker was the shorthand term for someone who was hired to test security systems for flaws and defects. Sneaker teams were typically made up of ex-law enforcement and ex-prison management, but they had also been known to take on reformed ex-convicts and criminals, people who had spent a lifetime finding flaws in these sorts of things.
My brother was the only person who'd ever beaten KJD in a hundred years, and his wife, Eleanor Glassflower, the kind of beauty that every man on campus would've slit the throat of the guy next to him to just have had a chance with. Thankfully, Eleanor had been so impressed by my brother's sexual skills before they'd even met that she was already falling for him when she was formally introduced to him on the first of May, and they had been an excellent match since. Even had a couple of kids now.
"The key, Wedge, is that once you get it out, you have to be prepared to
hide
the thing for a few weeks, and that's where everyone usually gets tripped up," my brother had told me about five years ago, on the night we'd found out that I'd also been accepted at EWC. On that night, my brother had dared me not only to repeat his performance, but to improve upon it. "I'd say someone breaches the defenses about once a decade or so, and then about two-thirds of those make it off the grounds, but I'm the only one who's ever been able to avoid getting caught afterwards. I'll tell you completely how I did it, and I won't exclude the one detail that I have every other time I have or will tell the story, which'll give you an edge. It'll give you my way in. But you'll need to figure out your own method of not getting caught. Keep that in mind. If you want to do this, you're going to have to be twice as clever as I am, and at least twice as ballsy."
