Chapter Text
After months of practice, you finally get the spell right. The flowerpot floats in the air without a single tremor, held aloft by an ethereal projection of your own hand. Your aunt cheers quietly beside you, then reminds you to keep your breathing steady while you repeat the incantation, because the lesson isn’t over til you’ve ended the spell properly as well.
The front door slams open downstairs, hitting the shop bell almost off its post. It clangs over the teenage racket of your brother and his friends pouring in. You lose your concentration, the pot shatters on the floor. The noise startles you backwards and you knock over her tea. China shards join terracotta ones.
She bends down to mend both with a touch and a murmur. You promise yourself that you’re going to be able to do that as well, and soon. She stands back up to ruffle your hair and tell you that she’ll bring a cake when she comes over for dinner tomorrow to celebrate.
She brings a pen as well, a square cut quill that your grandfather made for your grandmother decades before any of you were born. Your older brother does his best to help you write the letter with your bid for the apprenticeship. He’s always been better with his hands than his words, but his presence is what keeps you at your desk long enough to finish it in time. Your younger siblings keep you distracted while you wait for a response. Your younger brother breaks his wrist falling out of the neighbour’s tree when he tries to race you up it to retrieve your little sister’s kite. All of you swear til you’re blue in the face that you have no idea how it got up there, and couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it because you were far too busy helping her braid flowers into her hair for a playdate.
When the time comes for you to leave home for your studies, you are showered in hugs and kisses and friendly shoulder punches. Your mothers squeeze you extra tight and tell you they’re so proud of you.
✧
It’s the last time you hear those words for a long time.
✧
One day your enemies will cower in fear as they wait for you to destroy them with great ball of fire! You must memorize these 50 runes that all translate to “fire” then sort them by what stage of the combustion process they’re most closely tied to. If you mix up the draconic “ember” rune with the sylvan “spark” rune then your candle will explode so make sure you don’t make the third stroke on the left shorter than the fifth because that’s the only difference.
One day you’ll be among the wisest of men, consulted by kings and lords and powerful creatures. Mucking out the wyvern cage by hand is excellent motivation to learn a vanishing spell quickly.
Your brother has been able to turn into a cat a dog a hare a spider a deer since he was 13, but you’ll be allowed to learn how to change the colour of a rabbit pelt next month. Shouldn't take more than a few weeks of practising. You get it in 6 days. Your teacher tells you that you did a god job, but it’s the wrong shade of green. Try again, and this time make sure to roll your Rs properly.
The most exciting times are when you’re helping him with his experiments. When he tells you to put down the essay and hold up an empty birdcage with a bunch of coils of metal attached to it over a fire that’s flowing through orange, red, pink, green like a sunset.
He explains that he has to spend exactly 8 seconds drawing each rune in the dizzying array sprawling out around the flames. Write it any faster and the structure won’t coalesce properly, any slower and the resonance will fail to cascade. Apparently, it’s all according to the standard theory of weave-demarcation. You do your best to hold onto the words so you can look them up later, because they definitely weren’t in any of the books he’s given you so far.
The birdcage grows hotter and colder in spurts, but you mustn’t drop it unless it gets painfully hot to the touch for more than 9 seconds at a time. You probably should have asked for an oven mitt to hold it with, but it’s been 20 minutes, and you’ll look stupid if you admit that now.
The reagents crackle into vapour as he initializes Helioche’s 7th Supposition in booming but precisely enunciated Primordial. The fire suddenly goes out in a billow of smoke that sends you into a coughing fit.
When the air clears there is a tiny crystalline songbird sitting on the perch in your hands. Its’ call rings out like fingers on a wet wine glass. Seeing it is worth every moment of reading and re-reading theory and staying up late recording the tiny changes in glow as you add Sylvan essentia to a base Mugdrum potion a few drops at a time.
You spend all of your time with it. It’s difficult to haul your books in and out of the experimental chamber, and your neck hurts from writing notes on the floor instead of at your desk, but its so pretty and all you want to do is watch it. When it flutters around the room its wings throw rainbows of refracted candlelight across your papers.
The bird slowly fades out of existence over the next week. He paces back in front of a floating quill and paper excitedly dictating a letter to the Archmage Hereda about the implications this has about the disruptive effects of alternating ley-nodes on Olexi’s Axiom of Epiresonance.
✧
The times when he was gone weren’t too bad. When he was locked in his study or laboratory he could come out at any moment and snap whatever you’d been working on into his hands. Sometimes he would nod and send it back for you to keep working, but more often he would wipe his hands over the page to cover it with little red marks and annotations and make you start over, or start lecturing you about how you’ll never make it anywhere in the field of arcanum if you can’t make the effort to properly understand the fundamentals .
But there were many long stretches of time when he was off doing Important Wizard Business, speaking with this lord or advising this council or conferring with some dragons. Then you had time to look around in the books he wasn’t giving to you and play around with some of the tools and treasures he had in the hundreds. You felt like you learned much more in self-directed study, when you didn’t have to stay bogged down perfecting every detail before you tried something new and interesting.
✧
You don’t know what the ritual is supposed to do. His narration of anti-thetic constants and morphogenic fields flies entirely over your head even after almost a year of being immersed in his vocabulary. Your job is to stand in between the center of the octagram and the constellation of Zygós reading numbers off of a dial and adjusting the alignment of some petrified cloud fragments to his specifications as the numbers change.
Everything is fine until it isn’t. Until your hands fold in on themselves and tear themselves into ribbons in front of you.
The cloud fragments multiply and twist together as they elongate into a space you can’t see that’s right in front of you and as unreachable as the end of the universe.
You hear your own voice.
You hear it gasp.
You smell roses and ozone for the briefest moment before your olfactory system is no longer connected to your brain.
Every candle in the room is screaming.
You are screaming.
You would scream if you had lungs.
The light eats away at you in an instant and you are everywhere (a frozen mountaintop the roof of the parliament building a dingy basement your older brother’s workshop a humid jungle a fiery inferno a crystalline cave a gore-drenched battlefield a tranquil lake a dusty library a storm-tossed ocean the surface of the moon) and you see everything (the setting sun a soft drape of silk light shining prismatic through mist a blade flashing into flesh trees growing and falling and growing a ship falling through stars ravens taking flight tearing paper a kiss a chain pulled taut a flower plucked) and you are nowhere and nothing exists nor ever did.
It lasts forever and ever and ever until the world runs out of time. The tiny specks that make up everything in the universe all spin and the tiny specks that make up you spin away with them in a beautiful dance. The dance slows as entropy takes hold, and it all slows and fades away to empty void.
You cannot feel the agonizing pain of being wrenched out of step with the matter your world is woven from. If you’d had a moment of rest in the eons of eternity, if any time had passed at all since everything stopped making sense, you might have wondered why. Maybe you would have been grateful that at least through all this turmoil you were at least spared that hurt. You are shattered, but the fragments of you feel nothing but the pull. Maybe you would have preferred the pain. Pain exists. You don’t anymore.
—a voice
After a few weeks that lasted 2 minutes over the course of centuries you are standing exactly where you were, except you’re facing the opposite direction, as you look down at yourself falling from the ceiling onto the shattered dregs of your own thoughts and everything is spinning and overlapping itself and fracturing and reforming twice over.
. are you?
sensation—
movement. physicality.
Your legs are shaking and you fall to your knees and you drop the fucking cloud fragment . The shards scatter across the floor for a moment, then lie there, still and shining.
✧
Later that evening he tells you that as far as he can figure he shouldn’t even be able to remember that you exist. He asks if you’re able to see normally yet. You close your eyes for a moment to focus on where his voice is coming from. When you open them again you make sure you’re looking at the old man in front of you and not the one six inches to the left overlapping him, or the one ten feet to your right. You nod. You reach for a glass of water and see your fingertips protrude from the far wall of your room.