Chapter Text
“You’re sure that this is what you want to trade?”
You do know that this is the third time you asked me that, right?
“…”
I’m sure.
“Very well. Then hold it at the front of your mind; the more you focus, the easier this will be. For both of us.”
--
One of the first things that every child learns, whether human or non, is this: magic is about sacrifice. For everything gained—material or not—something is lost.
Alchemy, while also centered on exchanges of this type, differs in that magical exchanges are entirely subjective. What is lost and what is gained in a magical exchange are of equal personal value to the one initiating the trade. A breath for a spare moment of time. A precious heirloom for the cure to an ailment.
One who wishes for something great must always bear in mind how much they are willing to lose.
--
When Kaveh was young, a sea beast attacked the seas surrounding his village. There was a ship in the trajectory of the attack, and, as stubborn and naïve as he was (the naivety he would grow out of, but the stubbornness, he would not), Kaveh could not sit by and do nothing when people were in danger. He was raised to do better, after all – his baba wasn’t planning to sit idle, either! So, although Kaveh had been sternly instructed to stay home and stay safe, he trailed along behind, determined to do his best to help.
In the end, they were too late to stop the ship from sinking. The loud crack when the ship broke in two reverberated through the sea, and the currents as it sank swept Kaveh’s hair back where he’d hidden amidst the sea grass, near enough to see but not to be seen by the sea beast. When he saw the small form of a boy begin to sink, far enough from the beast that he must have been flung from the ship before its descent, Kaveh darted out from his hiding place as fast as he could.
He caught the boy, and managed to drag him to shore – the shores of the land-dweller settlement nearest his home. He’d heard the sea witch call it “Port Ormos,” he thought; it was fairly near to the cove where she lived. He pushed the water from the boy’s lungs and stayed at his side until he woke, though he slipped back into the water once he saw other, bigger humans marching down the beach.
That should have been the end of everything.
But when Kaveh went home, he found his mother inconsolable, and his father… His father was gone. Somewhere in his childish heart, Kaveh had wanted to protest, ‘gone where?’ as if death was a place that anyone could be retrieved from. He had been so occupied in saving this stranger-boy that he hadn’t had the chance to save his own flesh and blood from the creature, or anyone else. In the end, that boy was the only one who made it out alive.
(That boy, and Kaveh. But Kaveh wouldn’t say that hiding in the sea-grass really counted as being there. And he wouldn’t call coming home to a world shattered beyond repair making it out alive.)
--
Alhaitham’s parents died at sea when he was young. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they were killed at sea, though that makes it sound too intentional.
What happened was this: two researchers and their young son were returning home after a short trip abroad, and their ship crossed into the territory of a particularly angry sea beast. The researchers, along with everyone else aboard that ship, perished, lost to the waves or to the hunger of the beast itself. All except the son of those two, who found himself ashore, just west of Port Ormos, and quite alone.
This is what Alhaitham remembers of those days: the pacing back and forth along the beach, scratching nonsense into the sand with a stick; the worried looks from the Mahamata and Matra and Corps of Thirty, who looked after him by turns until his grandmother could arrive to take him to live with her outside Sumeru City; long days of staring out to sea, lost in his own mind.
He doesn’t remember feeling sad, or lost, or particularly lonely.
He knows that there is a time there that he’s forgotten. That part is rather simple, you see – he knows that he traded memories of that time. But he cannot explain to himself why. Why would memories of such a tragedy be precious enough to him that he could trade them for his hearing? But it’s something he’ll never know, and awareness of a loss is part of what gives a trade its power.
So, what Alhaitham knows is this: when his parents died, he must have been saved. He was the only survivor, after all, and being such a small child and so far from shore, it was unlikely that he would have made it on his own. Since he doesn’t recall being lonely after, this person perhaps kept him company. And that time, that person, must have been very important to him, to make a trade worth so much at the cost of them. But it’s unlike him to hold someone from so long ago so close to his heart, especially considering that their acquaintanceship must have lasted only those few days until he left Port Ormos, or he would, at the very least, know who it was that he was missing memories about.
But in the end, it didn’t matter much. He didn’t know, and he never would, and perhaps he would always wonder, somewhere in the back of his mind. But the outcome of the trade is his ability to hear, to learn languages in more than just theory, to speak and understand in the way that almost all sentient creatures do. To advance his studies, about different types of magical cultures, and how they communicate between themselves despite linguistic differences, how pidgins and creoles evolve, how verbal communication takes form as written characters. And, he thinks, that must be worth more than some paltry memories of a time that should have been tragic, so far back in his childhood.
(Must be, and yet, if that were the case, he could not have exchanged one for the other.)