gisladottirs:
She didn’t know how Aria lived with it. If she’d killed someone with her magic, she never would have done it again, would have left Aradia and given up her powers and found some way to live without it. People who lost control like that, people who didn’t respect magic enough to understand that there were rules to keep them safe, that magic was something beyond them you really had to work to control… they didn’t deserve to be allowed to call themselves witches. It was only on a technicality that Aria had managed to avoid expulsion; if it had been Imogen, she would have turned herself in and accepted the punishment rather than keep on the pathetic charade of acting like she could make up for what she’d done.
You could hurt someone with pattern magic as readily as you could with chaos magic – that wasn’t the distinction. If she’d wanted to, she could have used the pattern to drive an innocent stranger into a murderous rage, could have used it to turn the air in someone’s lungs into water and drown them on the spot. But she didn’t, because there were rules, and the first rules of pattern magic were that you didn’t try a pattern until you knew what it would do, so that you couldn’t mistakenly get somebody killed. The chaos witches had no such qualms about making unwise decisions, and the fact that that mentality had rubbed off onto someone Imogen had once trusted so thoroughly was what stung most of all.
“There are a lot of good witches who suffered at the hands of chaos magic, too,” she said. Not just the students who’d been hurt by what Aria had summoned, but throughout history. Imogen had grown up on horror stories of what happened when you didn’t take magic seriously enough, of the chaos witches who had thought themselves above the Council’s restrictions and guidelines. “Witches, humans… that’s what you get when you tell a group of scared little girls that all they have to do to get what they want is break the rules.”
Aria didn't have to be a social witch to know that Imogen was judging her, the negative emotions rolling off of her in droves. On some level, she couldn't blame her for it. They might not have been best friends, but they did talk and Aria had once enjoyed her company. Imogen was a woman of order and rules, just the type to look down at the average chaos witch, but with Aria it was different. Even an outsider could see the respect that she viewed magic with, the amount of care she gave every spell and hex that was given her. She never did anything until she was confident she understood everything about it.
That's what really hurt her about the whole accident. Everything was /supposed/ to work out and she doesn't know what went wrong--she may never know. For all she knew, it wasn't even her fault. It could have been a heavy breeze that rustled the perfectly set up leaves or a misstep by Brigitte. Aria just didn't know. That ate up at her more than she realized. If she knew it was her fault, at least then she knew exactly what kind of mistake she had to fix. But now it was assumptions and guilt for an event her mind refused to bring to light.
"There's a lot of good witches who suffered at the hands of magic in general," she countered. Magic is a curse as well. She shook her head, biting her tongue to prevent her from repeating those haunting words. "Chaos magic isn't just about breaking rules. But I'm sure it seems that way when you're trying to contain something that was never meant to be." There is a reverence in her voice despite everything. Regardless of her own horror and bad experience, she still had an innate respect for the discipline in the way people chased after tornadoes or hurricanes.
