'Forgive us now for what we've done
It started out as a bit of fun'
- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Aidan rolled his eyes. He was doing a lot of that these days.

"Mom, I am not going to Red Fountain, okay? I'm not going to switch schools just to be a hero."

Bloom huffed angrily at her son, crossing her arms and glaring at the redheaded boy.

"Your father went to Red Fountain and he loved it!" she said.

"Well, he didn't have magic powers," Aidan argued, waving his hand and watching as fire blossomed from his fingertips.

"Okay, well, my good friend Nabu has a school for wizards and-"

"I am not going to Darkwin Academy for Wizards," he said finally. "There is no way you can get me to go to that goody-two-shoes wizard school. I've made up my mind."

Bloom groaned in frustration and said, "Why couldn't you have picked anything but Murmire?"

Aidan shrugged, summoning a portal and grabbing his suitcase. They had this argument every year before school started and she had just never been able to accept it.

"I'm a warlock, Mom," he said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. "I hope you can understand."

With that, Aidan stepped through the portal, leaving his life as a prince of Eraklyon behind.

The fifteen-year-old sighed as he reached the other side of the portal and took in the sight of the dark, towering spires of the school he had come to call home. It was his second year going to Murmire's School of the Ancient Arts (a.k.a. dark magic) and he was once again sharing a dorm room with his five best friends. Speaking of...

"Aidan!"

He turned just in time to be barreled over by a ball of blond energy. Aidan disentangled himself from the enthusiastic prince and took a step back so he could breathe.

"Hey, Ray," Aidan greeted, laughing. "How's it going?"

"Same old, same old," the sunburnt warlock said, slinging an arm around Aidan's neck and turning to survey the crowd of students entering the school. "Look at all these new kids! Hey, check this out."

He stuck out his foot, tripping a freshmen warlock who tumbled to the ground and spilled his stuff everywhere. The two sophomores laughed. Murmire was definitely not a place for the thin-skinned or the kind-hearted. Speaking of...

"Oh, Aidan, look! Look!" Ray exclaimed as his excited brown eyes caught sight of something else. The vivacious blond dragged his tolerant friend away from the poor freshman warlock and towards a shaded tree off to the side of the courtyard. "It's Thorn and Marin!"

The two warlocks made their way over to their friends, shoving through the crowd and ignoring all the nasty looks they got.

"Where have you been? You went, like, radio silent for two months," Aidan asked Thorn.

His guyliner-ed friend replied, "Mom had me working the apothecary all summer because Ivy's backpacking across Lynphea with Sirena and Clover's still too young."

"Oh, yeah," Marin remembered, "Sirena told me about that. I'm just glad she was out of the castle. Then I didn't have to deal swooning over  Ivy all over the palace. Like, I'm happy for her, but it's been non-stop talk about that nature fairy since they started dating. Even sweet little Bay is getting sick of it."

"Ivy isn't any better," Thorn told the water warlock. "Everything is 'Sirena this' and 'Sirena that.' The worst part is, Clover joins in so then they're both swooning over Sirena. It's gotten to the point where I sleep in the old treehouse out back just to get away from all the lovey dovey talk."

"Dudes, you guys could have come with live with me on Eraklyon," Aidan offered. "The palace is definitely big enough and with Rory studying on Earth, the place is entirely sister-free."

Just then, a hovercraft pulled up in front of the four boys. The door opened and out stepped a purple-haired woman with a pixie cut and her face close to a tablet. Without looking up, she called into the hovercraft, "Electro! We're going to be late! Come on!"

"Coming, Mom!" a male voice groaned from the inside.

Out stepped a very tall, very pale teenager with green glasses and scruffy orange hair. He also had his face shoved in a tablet.

"Electro!" Ray called, making the ginger look up from his screen. His face was by default an apathetic mask.

"Hey, guys," he answered coolly, making his way over to the tree.

His mother looked up from her screen too and grinned, waving at them when she noticed the other warlocks.

"Hi, boys! Tell your mothers I say hello!"

"Sure thing, Mrs. Tecna," Aidan answered as the technology fairy climbed back into the hovercraft and flew away.

Electro pulled his tablet back out the second his mother was gone. Aidan and Thorn shared a look over Ray's head as he chattered with Marin about their summers.

"Where's Reed?" Aidan asked his brunette best friend. Thorn just shrugged. "He's always late. I mean, I know Melody is farther from Magix than the other realms, but this is a bit ridiculous."

Just as he was saying that, a portal appeared in front of them and out of it hopped a small boy with magenta Bieber cut, clunky black headphones, and a distant look in his narrow dark eyes.

"Sorry, guys," Reed said as he pulled a suitcase through the portal. "My mom wanted to take pictures. I don't know why."

The other boys snickered as the quiet boy blushed a bright red and muttered, "Shut up."

"We better head inside," Aidan said, pointing towards the large double doors that lead to Murmire's main hall. The other five nodded and followed him inside.

They sat down in the large auditorium for the beginning of the year speech that no one listened to because they were all warlocks so who cares? It wasn't until the end that Aidan zoned in.

"All warlocks are joined together in teams of six, subteams of three. You will live together, train together, and work together throughout the school year. You are also assigned to a team of fairies from Alfea in your same year who you will train against in order to practice for the real world. Fairy teams come in groups of five or six and they are also assigned to a group of four or five Red Fountain heroes. In addition, fairy teams are assigned to a trio of Cloudtower witches, also as opposition. These will be your allies. You will all be receiving files on the groups- fairy, hero, and witch alike- that you have been assigned to," the headmaster explained as papers magically flew from the stage into each warlocks hands. "They shouldn't be any different from last year, but if you have any questions, figure it out."

He laughed nastily, as did the rest of the auditorium, and then dismissed all returning students to go unpack in their dorms. As they were walking back, Marin groaned loudly after reading the files they were given.

"We got the Magix Club again," the water warlock said disappointedly.

"It's the same every year," Electro pointed out.

Marin shrugged and said, "I can dare to dream."

A warlock with green hair styled in an All-American swoop who none of them had ever seen before came up to them and said, "You guys are so lucky. The Magix Club is super hot. Wanna trade?"

"Hot?" Aidan asked incredulously. "You need to get your eyes checked, Greenie. While you're at it, get a better haircut. You look like a Red Fountain jock, not a Murmire warlock."

They all cracked up laughing, leaving the strange boy confused as they continued toward their dorm.

"I can't believe that guy thought the Magix Club is hot," Ray said once they finally reached their dorm. "As if. They are most unattractive girls on the planet."

"True," Marin said, collapsing onto the couch by the door. "It's so unfair that we get stuck with them and their stupid heroes every year."

"The witches are cool though," Thorn said as he wandered into the kitchen.

"I guess," Ray added, pulling his blond hair into a small man bun on the back of his head. "Jan's kind of annoying, but Alexandra's cool."

"Char's a bit of a loose screw," Marin added.

"Still better than the Magix Club," Reed commented as he walked by into his room.

"I hear Darkwin's going to add their wizards to the whole group assignment thing," Electro said.

"Ew, seriously?" Ray asked.

The technophile checked the files and replied, "Yeah, but apparently not this year. They're definitely thinking about doing it later on though."

"Gross," Aidan said as he finished unpacking his things and walked back into the common room. "I hate wizards. They're good guys with magic. It's like heroes and fairies combined."

The warlocks all took a second to shudder at the thought before they all continued unpacking their stuff. Aidan, who had finished first, took a seat on the couch and started thumbing through the files. He checked the witches first.

They had a group of witches who liked to call themselves the Coven Grimm. It was common for the teams to come up with names for themselves. The first file had a picture of a familiar monster-ish face with chubby cheeks, Asian eyes, and a feral grin. She had miles of wild black hair that made her look like one of those kids who gets lost in the woods and ends up raised by dogs. Her name was Charybdis and she was the Witch of the Void. If he recalled correctly, her mother was a member of some royal court, maybe Cosmosia or Solaria. She was as stupid as she was powerful and as ruthless as she was ugly. Aidan considered her a close friend.

The second in the trio was actually someone he had known for a long time. Alexandra, witch of gemstones, was one of the many princesses of Isis, one of Eraklyon's moons. Her mother was a vicious queen, a loyal ally, and a formidable enemy to the Eraklyonite throne depending on the time of year. His mother never liked her very much, but his mother didn't like a lot of people. Mom had lots of enemies. Anyway, Alexandra was a beautiful and seductive witch who made up for her weak powers by using her cunning and lack of ethical restraint to win. Aidan never wanted to be on her bad side.

Lastly, the leader of the trio was Janus, the most toxic person he had ever met. Her powers over passageways were pretty unassuming, but she used her domineering and self-consumed perspective to drag herself to the top. She was average in beauty, power, wit, and overall personality. Her hair was blonde, her eyes were blue, her skin was tan, and her body was a perfect hourglass. Despite this, everything about her was lackluster, from her bad jokes to her weird obsessions. Out of them all, Aidan liked her the least, but at least they had a common enemy.

Speaking of enemies, Aidan flipped past the Heroes to the fairy section. The Magix Club (a.k.a. the bane of his existence) was a group of fairies who somehow all wanted to be guardian fairies. Other warlocks got assigned to fairy godmothers or fairy princesses or if they were lucky, fairy damsels. But, nooooooo. Aidan had to be assigned to a group of girls who wanted to use their magic rainbow powers to rid the world of all evil and replace it with goodness and sparkles. Remarkably, they could even hold their own against the warlocks. Aidan flipped through their profiles with disdain.

The first picture was of chubby cheeks, Asian eyes, and a sweet smile framed by a black scattered bob and blunt bangs. Sound familiar? That's because it is. Charybdis's twin sister Scylla was a fairy of constellations and obnoxiously uptight with a stick so far up her ass she would need serious intrusive surgery to have it removed. Unfortunately for him, she was also incredibly smart and as confident as any woman of the Solarian Royal Court would be. Oh, wait! Now he remembers who her mom is! It's Lady Chimera of Solaria. He had always respected her for breaking the glass ceiling of Solaria, although by shady means. Her daughter was not as cool.

He flipped the page to a picture of a brown girl with round brown eyes and a hooked nose. Her name was Nell Digby and she was from Earth for some reason. Gardenia, actually, which was also where Aidan's mother was raised. He assumed it was sort of the same situation. Anyway, she was the fairy of air- boring, I know- and she had a pretty bland personality. No dark secrets, no hidden past. She was a squeaky clean as you could be. It gave him the creeps.

The next page had another familiar picture of a girl he had known for many, many years. Ruby was Alexandra's younger half-sister and another of the ridiculous amount of princesses that came from Isis. She was just as prissy as her mother Diaspro with the same power over gemstones, but that was where the resemblance stopped. Ruby had ruby red curls that she kept in childish pigtails and big brown eyes set in light brown skin. Unlike her mother, Ruby only ever played by the rules. She was so black and white, believing that the law was right and everything else was wrong. Unfortunately for them, Aidan and his friends fell into the everything else category.

The following fairy was Skye, daughter of Stormy. I know, right? How can such an awesome villain give birth to such a lame hero? Skye looked exactly like her mother with fair skin, sea-green eyes, and frizzy purple hair that she kept pinned behind her head in a half-up half-down, but other than that, they were nothing alike. Skye was an archetypical teenage girl who only ever thought about two things: boys and shopping. It was ridiculous that someone with such an awe-inspiring power over a force of nature, the weather, should also be so weak and girly. It blew his mind.

The second-to-last picture was Ebony or, as she prefers to go by, Bonnie. Bonnie was the daughter of Darcy, another famous member of the Trix, but she did not at all act like it. The shy, quiet girl liked to work in the shadow of her teammates and hated taking the spotlight, which sort of makes sense considering her powers but still. She was so mousy and boring. The only thing interesting about her were her dewy purple eyes set in her dark black skin. Sure, she was pretty, but personality-wise, she was way too shy and way too sweet.

Very lastly was the leader, Snow, Fairy of Ice. Her little white face stared up at him from the page, taunting him with that stupid smile. Her fluffy hair was as white as her skin which was as white as snow which was her namesake and power. This was the one that stumped him. How could Icy, Mistress of Evil and Queen of Ice, give birth to such a goody-goody, hearts-and-sparkles fairy? She was just so, so, UGH. If there was one person in the entire world that he absolutely hated, it was Snow.

"Aidan, you good?" Thorn asked, sitting down on the couch next to the pyromancer. "What did that paper ever do to you?"

Aidan threw the file on the table in frustration.

"It's nothing. Just these fucking fairies. I don't understand why we had to get the most annoying fairies ever. Like, why did we have to get crime-fighting fairies?"

"I don't know if they're the most annoying. I hear our moms were pretty annoying in their day. Always saving the world and shit."

Aidan rolled his eyes.

"Other than the Winx Club, the Magix Club are the most annoying fairies."

"Hey, don't talk shit about my mom like that," Marin said with a laugh as he walked into the common room. All the boys laughed with him.

"Well, Cabal Knights," Aidan addressed the warlocks as the laughter died down, "let's find some fairies and start some shit."

Comment with what you think should happen next!