The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen

The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #311, 27^th August 2020) sees a geomancer returning to the magical university where she studied twenty years after a disaster that occurred there. She meets her former tutor/advisor, and they go to the walled up “Vault of Potions”—the site of two recent deaths—with the with the aim of opening it and forcing the university to deal with the contamination that has been festering inside ever since:

I’d handed those very stones to the professors who were standing in the entrance walling up the Vault, me and Ev Minor, shin-deep in the floodwaters with that eerie pink glow from the spilled potions’ ill-fated summonings getting brighter every second. That was the night everything I owned washed away and it was the least of my troubles. That was the night we lost Alden Glasshand, my first-year Incantations professor, and two students whose names I’ll never forget but whose faces I can never remember, pulled under the waters by the vortices that had suddenly surged beneath their feet when the powerful magics in the potions were accidentally combined. That was the night we slept on the top floor of the Library and didn’t know if we’d get down in the morning.

The only complication in this otherwise straightforward account is (spoiler) an alchemy professor who intervenes and stabs the narrator’s tutor as they are in the process of opening the vault (the alchemist wants them to leave it alone so the university can continue on as before). The narrator subdues her, and then makes what I presume in the story’s point:

“Putting something behind you doesn’t mean ignoring it. It means making sure it can’t hurt you anymore. It means making sure it can’t hurt anybody anymore.”

The setup/resolution structure of this piece is too simple,¹ and seems constructed with the sole purpose of delivering the story’s message. That said, the setting and events are evocatively described.
** (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. I’ve found that a lot of BCS stories feel rather fragmentary.