know no shame

"No, no no. Hold the line!" One of the two under the bed hissed while the second clamored from beneath it. She dusted off her blouse and open robe, her eyes downcast with mock shame.

"I tried to tell them this was a bad idea." Ms. Amanda Ripley, a teachers pet to the highest degree, stated. "Also your glasses are on your head, sir."

"Ah, would you look at that!" he flipped them down onto the bridge of his nose. "Now would Ms. Yusupova and Ms. Antuma like to come out as well?"

There was a groan from the cupboard as Leila Yusupova, the leader of their little cohort, stepped out. Tahel Antuma, the mousiest, crawled from under the bed. All three women hung their heads and did their best to look remorseful despite that clearly not being the case.

"Ms.Yusupova, Is there anything you'd like to place in my hand before I look your way? Perhaps I simply forgot I had picked it up." Professor Vann didn't want to be harsher than the situation required. It may have been many years but he still certainly remembered being young and stupid from anxiety over his grades like they were.

He was expecting one of his notebooks of arcane wisdom to be placed in his outstretched hand, not a picture frame.

"What were you three even looking for anyways?" he expected it would be one of the many he had of himself and the dean of their school, or perhaps one from when he was young enough for his hair to still have color. He wasn't expecting to see a picture he'd kept hidden away for decades when he brought it forward to look at it. "This... couldn't be what you were seeking."

"It wasn't..." Yusupova said with a sigh. "You mentioned knowing a method to summon a stronger familiar. We have our summoning next week and well... You and the rest of the staff are always going on and on about pushing ourselves and taking every bit of the power that we can earn. Why shouldn't we get the strongest familiar's we can?"

"Your conviction is admirable, but did you not listen when I told you summoning a familiar stronger than what would come to you naturally is a grave danger?"

"The Dean says you summoned your familiar when you were nine- What nine year old could support Any familiar?"

"When was the last time you saw my familiar?"

"It's the bird in that instant painting, isn't it? You had to be thirty and it was still fine. Clearly a wizard can grow to make themself good enough for any familiar-"

"Ms. Yusupova, this was made only weeks before my poor little Rook was killed," the image was so small that Rook was only a black blur on his shoulder. He stared at his own smile, not being able to bring himself to look at the other men in the photograph.

"What?" she paused, apprehension in her gaze. She clearly understood that it was a great loss to lose a familiar of over twenty years, but not how it could make a wizard like him so insistent that his students push themselves in every aspect of their craft besides this one.

"Yes... I suppose it's a good thing the story has faded from the rumor mill. It was such a dreadful time."

"Professor..." Ripley spoke up, her brain had whirred away until it came up with the obvious solution to her and her friends current conundrum; getting the geezer to talk about some old story until he forgot to punish them for breaking into his rooms. "What happened? It seems like something my classmate might need to hear."

"Hmph. Yes, it probably is. Do you see this man here? The one in our old uniform. That was my dearest friend in the entire world. We met here in our very first class and we were absolutely inseparable. That other fellow beside him was his familiar."

"Wait- That's a human!" Ripley's faux-interest suddenly became real. "Familiars are supposed to only be Animals. I've heard of some taking human form under exceptional circumstances- to save their summoner or something, but I didn't know they could just, be human."

Professor Vann laughed. "Yes, that is true of all but the most powerful. A familiar's shape is not easily changed and they are all molded after animals. But the very most powerful, the ones who could rival most of your teachers in power, may choose to take other forms. Lavi was something astounding.

"Never before or since had I seen a familiar as powerful as him... He is why I forbid my students trying to summon familiars they are not strong enough for. Anta, my friend, was skin and bones. He slept near constantly and had to work so hard to keep enough magic flowing through him and into Lavi that he had burns in his every vein. He couldn't keep up with Lavi even when Lavi did everything he could to take up as little magic as possible... Hell, I think half the reason Lavi spent so much time as a human was so he could take care of Anta better."

"There had to have been a way to keep him sustained." Yusupova stared at the picture like she was seeing a prize she had never known she needed before. "You kept Rook fed beyond your means, didn't you?"

"There were many. And Anta pursued every last one. I and the Dean helped where we could, the three of us were a triad like you girls are, and eventually it all balanced out. It was precarious, and I never envied the work it took."

"So, then what happened? It sounds like things were fine after he adjusted" Yusupova scowled.

"Lavi was incredibly powerful. Anta could feed him, but often he couldn't control him or the effects he had on Anta's magic. I know it was an accident. I knew it then too.

"We had been out in the maze training. It was just a game of capture the flag, Rook and I were winning, Anta gave Lavi a spell to cast to knock Rook out of the sky. Nothing that should've done real damage but... but it did. Anta had fed too powerful of a spell into Lavi and Rook paid for it with his life."

There was silence from the women as the weight of century old grief settled back over the room.

"I'm so sorry," Antuma said, she laid her hand on his sleeve. Her condolences as genuine as she always was.

"How was Anta punished?" Ripley asked, her tone less sure than her words. "That- Rook would have been old enough that his death would have been classed as murder, right?"

"It would have been... We are not bound by any law but our own. You know that. No council nor king, only the wider community's will. The punishment for your actions are others' reactions to them.

"I... could not express to you the rage I felt when I held my little Rook's body. All that pain and grief boiled into something dangerous, something Anta knew was coming for him. I was not a powerful enough caster to have a chance against him and Lavi. He knew that, but he also knew I wasn't thinking straight. I wanted death, and I didn't care whose it was.

"He was my best friend. He'd known Rook for years and loved him almost as much as I did. He was grieving too, and wracked with his own guilt...

"He dispelled Lavi, and I ... No one ever attempted to punish me for what I did."

"You killed him," Ripley was looking at him like he was a stranger again.

"And I have regretted it every single day," he sets the frame back where it belongs tucked away behind a box of things he has not touched in a century and straightens himself up with a sigh. He unfortunately still had a job to do so he looked to his students and said, "A familiar is a grave responsibility. We let them chose us because when you take a familiar stronger than yourself you are wielding a power you definitionally can not control. If you want a more powerful familiar, become a more powerful wizard."

He got a chorus of nods, some more accepting and eager than others, before he escorted them from his room with a wave. They were good students and would make for phenomenal wizards, however like all others in their field ambition was a venomous snake they wore around their shoulders with pride.