Students scream. Rosaline dives back into her book, pink petal skirts disappearing after her. Smoke billows through the jagged glass in ghastly shapes: effigies of hanged men, headless children, broken bodies. The screams pitch like a violin in pain, the sound so twisted and piercing it tears through Constance's innards as she stands frozen.

The dark mist, now that it's broken through the window, prowls with leisure through the classroom. Its lazy swirls remind Constance of a wolf's tongue, licking its lips as it prepares for a feast. It laps up the students' fear and slowly circles them, one by one, like sheep.

There is no handbook for this, no training manual. Constance shouts for them to run, but those cognizant enough to do so already have. The rest scream so loudly nothing else can be heard. Or perhaps Constance didn't shout, and the reason she can't hear herself is because panic has shut her throat.

As the mist creeps closer, one of her father's old adages echoes in her ears with his warm, measured timbre: Fear, my darling, is death before the blow.

Hands shaking, she scribbles across the pages of her fairy tome. A few students stumble out the door, and the mist creeps ever closer, two desks away, then one, and still she writes, cold sweat slicking her pen.

The mist curls around her feet, and now she feels it too, the awful, lonely, crushing dread. It's hearing all over again that her mother deserted her, that her step-mother got the wasting disease, that her brother would wed and abandon them all. It's the nights she sobs, those wracking, heaving things that make her feel like she's not her own, forged deeper and heavier with no one to hear her. It's sitting in her father's favorite chair—the chair he lectured her from and regaled her with tales and taught her philosophy and logic and life—just to feel closer to him and feeling nothing at all. It's all the neighbors at his funeral patting her hand and saying, You poor dear. He died of a broken heart, didn't he?

Her pen has slipped her grasp, but now she takes it up again with fervor because her father did not die of anything so ridiculous as a broken heart. Neither. Will. She.

An ugly flourish completes the end-marker for the spell, and Rosaline leaps from the pages. Her pen-tip sized slippers dance over Constance's letters. 

begin

define black gas as subject
define this 4 walls as room

while subject in room:
• room += AIR

end

Rosaline glows gold, and a rush of air from outside the door blasts into the room. It buffets the black mist, blowing and blowing and filling up the room until at last there is no room for the mist anymore. As soon as the last curl escapes the windowpane, the spell ends.

Constance's pen still flurries over the page, already prepping a second spell lest the mist trail back in. As she sweeps the flourish on the end-marker, Rosaline glows gold again. One by one, the broken pieces of glass fly back into place, seamlessly melding into one another.

Her caution appears unnecessary. Constance rushes to the back to check on her students, but outside the window, the black mist is dissipating and wisping away. The old library sits unobtrusively like it does most of the time (though less and less so anymore). Constance spares it one last dubious glance before reaching down to give a shaken girl a hand up. 

Constance barges into her department chair's office only to be reminded by the secretary that the entire college faculty is in the dean's monthly meeting. She, thankfully, often gets to skip these dull, frequently pointless affairs since her class meets at that time. But if ever she had a reason to be at a meeting, now is the time. If she hurries, she can just catch the (scheduled) tail end. (Since they often run late for no apparent reason, perhaps she needn't run, but she does.)

It's in this manner that she bursts through the door, loose hair flailing around her face and lungs puffing for air. Dean Dyrandulen, a skinny tree of a man with eyes like dead bark, pauses mid-sentence. The professors in the front rows look up at her, while those in the back continue doodling in their notepads. Dr. Carulus, the Fairy Logic department chair, tilts his bald head and knits his narrow brows. He mouths something to her, but Constance has never been good at reading lips, much less so when the entire College of Maths, Science, and Architecture (some ninety professors) are staring at her with a distaste usually reserved for tardy students.

Dr. Carulus stands and waves her over to an empty seat next to him. With everyone's attention on her, she should share her news and ask what's being done about the long-standing library problem. (Not, of course, that sparkling, dread-inducing smoke regularly rolls into classrooms, but that it's the latest, and gravest, in a long-line of recent oddities.)

Yes, she should make an announcement, but her throat is dry and her face is flushed and her feet find themselves moving up the rows toward Dr. Carulus.

With the voice of a creaking oak, Dean Dyrandulen says, "We're glad you could join us, Ms. Wylf. Now, as I was saying about these five-year retention figures..."

Constance cringes, then drops into her seat. The dean drones on, and Dr. Carulus leans over to whisper. "What happened?"

"No one was hurt," she murmurs back.

His eyes widen. "Well, that's an ominous way to start a conversation."

"Fairly ominous, yes."

One of the maths professors cuts a pursed-lips glance at her, and she swallows. Perhaps it would be better to explain when they get back to Dr. Carulus's office. Sitting here, as Dean Dyrandulen makes plans to increase the balance in their coffers with the power of goodwill and (non-fairy) wishes, the urgency of the situation begins to leak out of her. The library is a known, long-standing problem. Measures surely are being taken to deal with it. Her incident must be reported, certainly, but like she said, no one was hurt, and she even repaired the window. (Though if some of her students turn up at the tavern tonight, she will not be surprised.)

She is about to let it drop when the trailing end of Dean Dyrandulen's speech hits her ear. "And remember that the Library of Gifts will be open for its annual venting in three days. Remind students not to enter. That's all. Thank you for your time."

The doodlers at the back shoot up, lest the dean might remember something else before they get out of the room. Dr. Carulus rises too, stretching. But Constance sits rooted to her chair. "That's it?" she mutters.

"What's what?" Dr. Carulus asks brightly, but she hardly hears him.

As professors mingle and make their escapes and shake hands with the dean, Constance shoots to her feet so fast her chair clatters to the ground. People stir and stare at her for the second time today. "That's all we're doing about the library?" she demands.

"Excuse me?" the dean asks (in a polite tone that implies he doesn't understand her question when he good and well must, and if he doesn't, that's an indictment in and of itself).

"Venting the library, like it's any other year? When the reports of strange sightings have increased tenfold in the last ten years? And half of that in just the year I've been here!"

Sensing discussion reopening, the last of the doodlers escape through the open door. Other professors settle into nearby seats.

Dean Dyrandulen folds his hands flat in front of his lips. "Ms. Wylf," he begins with condescending patience, "this is standard procedure. The Library of Gifts must be vented of the excess wild magic or else the pressure will build up and cause the whole structure to explode. The resulting blow of magic would be far worse than whatever effects arise from the slow leak during the single day that we leave the doors open."

Constance's fists ball at her side. He's quoting logic from over one hundred years ago, when the library was first boarded up, as if nothing has changed between now and then, as if more magic isn't leaking every day without anyone opening up the doors.

But perhaps... She draws in a deep breath, relaxing her hands, tying back up the irrational emotions threatening to taint her thoughts. Perhaps they've put measures into place to protect the students and university from the leaking magic. Of course they have.

"My apologies for the outburst, Dean," she says. "I was just startled because of an incident in my class today." She gives a brief account of the mishap, ending with, "I was unaware protective measures were being put into place."

"Apology accepted."

The shoulders of professors throughout the room relax, and people start heading for the door again.

"Protective measures... are being put into place," Constance says. "Correct?"

"Dr. Carulus and I have consulted about it," he says curtly, and Constance's heart lurches. That, she knows, is politician speech for no.

With her heart thrumming in her throat, she can't help but speak up again. "Because as a college, we have both a logical and moral imperative to protect the interests and safety of the university, no matter the—"

Dr. Carulus's hand clamps down on her shoulder before she can say cost. Because that's the out and out truth of it. Measures exist to make the library safe. But those measures are expensive and intensive and don't factor into shiny recruitment brochures.

Saying as much aloud, though, in a setting like this, is political suicide.

Dr. Carulus fills the steaming silence for her. "I'll fill Ms. Wylf in on the protocols we came up with, Dean. Thank you for your time."

The dean gives them both a cloying smile, sweet as rotting blooms. "Thank you. I look forward to seeing you both at the next meeting."

Constance lets Dr. Carulus steer her out, thoughts whirling in ever more chaotic circles. The library, similarly, had become increasingly unstable. Last year when they vented it, everyone in the area walked out a little taller, a little prettier, a little more charming. It wore off, thank all that's right and true, and everyone got a good laugh out of it.

Everyone except Constance and the other Fairy Logic professors.

If the dean vents it again this year, as bad as things have gotten, and does nothing to protect the people of the university...

Constance trips on her skirts, barely righting herself. Who knows what kind of 'wishes' the fairies trapped inside might bestow?