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Y'shtola seemed to think that you might have been able to do what she did. To see something that shouldn't belong to mortal eyes. You agreed to try; not because you believed her vague rationalizations about the Light and your barely confirmed mortality, but because you liked the idea of her voice and her hands guiding you along.
It had been a silly fantasy. Y’shtola had been a matriarch before the scions had ever needed such a thing, and now with the Night’s Blessed looking to her, there was little and less chance that she would have interest in your overtures. You had stopped making them almost a year ago—or four years, for her. Long before the Light had made you into something hideous that only she could see. Before it had scarred you in ways that you could feel, that were hidden from every gaze but hers. You had given up that idle dream.
The gentle brush of her fingers against your hair as she tied the blindfold around you burnt.
“Let us begin by summoning your preferred Egi.”
It was an immense hassle, to hold the complex visualizations of the summoning in your mind without being able to see your grimoire. But, not so hard as to be impossible. You had been summoning your stalwart companion for too long to make such a mistake. A rush of air wrapped Y’shtola’s heavy skirts around your bare arms, the rough cloth and fine fur lining too defined in the darkness of the blindfold. You could not see it, nor anything you would approximate to sight really, but you could nonetheless sense your emerald carbuncle, thrumming with the captured essence of Garuda.
Y’shtola spared no time for compliments on your successful unguided summoning. “Point to it.”
You cocked your head to one side, listening for the soft hum of its condensed aether. For a moment. Y’shtola’s hands were warm and dry, her skin toughened by her years in the First, as she clasped her palms over your ears. “Not like that.” Her voice was muffled by your own blood rushing beneath her hands. “Its power comes from your own. Find it.”
Long seconds passed, perhaps minutes. There was an offputting timelessness to the dark and the quiet. And, with each moment gone, you were less and less sure of your carbuncle’s position. It was a construct, but not wholly mindless. It would wander, with its peculiar juddering gait, its twitching tails. It would snuffle at leaves and twigs, though you weren’t entirely sure that manifestations of the aether could really smell anything. Maybe it sensed the faded aether of the detritus littering the ground of your physical world. Maybe for it, scent was the same as Y’shtola’s stolen sight. A projection of another dimension laid your own. You could almost see it. The geometry of carbuncle’s summoning, drawn onto the page of your grimoire, drawn onto the gem in its forehead. The same reality, broken into two distinct wholes, each complete in its fraction. Each the same, identical, and unique, individual. You teetered on the edge of some great revelation for long, choking moments.
Y’shtola adjusted her stance behind you. Your awareness snapped back into the meat of your body, into the heat of closeness, the soft pressure of her hands on each side of your head, the soft blindfold pressed against your eyelids, the rise and fall of your breath. Her hands slid away from your ears. Had your posture changed, or was this another of her supramortal insights?
“Ah, well, perhaps not then.”
You swallowed thickly and refused to feel shame. Not everyone was a suicidal witch willing and able to burn her own life away for the chance to study the intricacies of the world around her.
The flood of daylight into your eyes as she untied the blindfold was hardly failure.