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I remember someone
once sang here, once strung together
a garland of near-holy moments.
It’s serious business, this living.
As long as the earth continues
its stony breathing, I will breathe.
When it stops I will shatter back
into gravity. Into quartz.
Kaveh Akbar, Rimrock.
The magic came first, for Essek.
Before everything else – before his brother, before the pain, before strings of tense conversations with his Umavi, before the Tomes and the Bastion and the books and the titles – was the Light, and the magic.
He remembers being young, so young that he had to focus on the stepping of his feet under his finest clothes to ensure he did not trip, and being led into the Bastion for a special occasion by his Umavi. He remembers her crouching next to him, and saying, in the softest of voices, “Essek, dalharust, look.” He remembers the touch of her fingers on his chin, lifting his head up—not to the stunning geometric stone and quartz of the room, or to the Bright Queen resplendent and glowing, but to the Shard of Light itself, the Beacon, resting on its plinth.
He swears he remembers what that first moment felt like—the way the Dunamis in the room tasted on his tongue; the impossibility of looking away; the feeling of strings in his soul, being plucked at their natural frequency for the first time, resonating.
In the quiet hours of the morning, he can admit that it is unsurprising that for years, he called that feeling faith.
He is familiar with the resonance, now.
He can describe it in more academic terms now (a natural attunement to the Weave, coupled with prolonged exposure to Dunamis, has resulted in a sensitivity to the innate magic of various objects), but it feels the same.
Actually—that is a lie. More than a hundred years later, it feels stronger.
When he focuses, he can feel the variations in fundamental frequencies between every Beacon he’s encountered; when he shuts his eyes, he can taste the subtle difference in flavour between his casting and Verin summoning an Echo. On his first day at court as Shadowhand, he returns from the Bastion, nerves alight and sparking with leftover arcana, and he presses his fingers against his lips, tries to chase the ozone.
Perhaps in love is a better descriptor for him than faithful.
He does not remember when the pain came.
More times than he cares to admit, he has floated in the midst of pages of writing – notes and theories, half-finished spells that went nowhere, hastily-scribbled thoughts from lectures and meetings – spun them round and round, sorted them by date and type, looked for clues in his own cramped handwriting, and then gotten nowhere and banished them to his Wristpocket.
It will make no difference to anyone, he tells himself, to pinpoint an exact date (no difference to anyone except himself). It feels… nonsensical, to have something shape his life so thoroughly, and not be able to identify when it began. It fills him with the unease of an unbalanced equation; a spell with no anchor runes.
(This does not help him remember.)
Somewhere in those months, he remembers understanding gravity.
Of course, he had been aware of gravity long before this—had learnt the basics of empirical observation as a child, had copied out the foundational runes of Graviturgy in his first classes at the Tomes. But it was not until his fourth decade that gravity went from abstract – from an acquaintance – to an unwelcome, intimate interloper in every moment of his life. He remembers the mathematics occupying his mind—not calculations for altering the density of set spheres in his classes, but weighing himself up against the distance to a door, the shape of a pen, the mass of an ornamental music-box.
He remembers it grating, the indignity of it; the absolute fucking waste.
He remembers realising he can do better.
He remembers stepping into the beautiful, floating elevator in the central House of Radiance in Rosohna on a Holy Day, as he had done so many times before, and his Umavi asking him to explain the function of it to whichever members of Den Biylan had the poor fortune to be trapped with them. He remembers launching into the spiel, automatically, explaining how many graviturgists it took to keep the elevator running for these hours, the sheer expense of arcana. As he had so many times before, he said, “If it were not for the immense amount of energy and magical resources this expended—well, we could expand this to many other applications. But as it stands, it is only worthwhile to do so in service of the Light.”
He remembers whoever it was from Den Biylan nodding, murmuring in understanding, and he remembers thinking, Light knows I could come up with an application or two, if only someone would solve the efficiency problem.
And then, he remembers, bracing himself against the wall of the elevator, the moment when the doors opened onto the worship hall, the sudden flood of Light, and bathed in it, his realisation that he had never tried to solve the efficiency problem.
Levitation comes to him as easy as breathing, now. Dunamis sparks across his fingers reflexively—when he reaches for a too-thick tome, when he floats through his Queen’s court, when he enters the Dungeon of Penance and into the cell of the latest captive from a skirmish somewhere along the Ashkeepers.
Through it all – through the endless worship ceremonies under the fractal ceilings of the House of Guidance, through meetings where he considers the repercussions of using graviturgy to crush the skulls of every other person in the room, through dozens of denied requests for time and access to study the Beacons at length – the reverberation of strings being plucked, the hum of magic in his chest, is his dearest friend.
It swells and grows with every new spell he writes himself, and he can hear in it possibility—the sense that a Teleport will land off-target just before he completes the spell; the knowledge that a glass is about to slip from his clumsy hands; the feeling that his lies are landing, connecting, and he is not suspected.
(One night, he slips a Beacon into his Wristpocket, feels its low-pitched murmur in his bones, starting from his fingers and all the way into his spine, a warm buzz that almost alleviates the pain. He tells himself, This is the only way to make the music stronger.
He will learn, later, how wrong he is.)
Then, one windy evening on a street in the Firmaments, a redhead from the other side of the mountains conjures up a cat’s paw. The Weave bends, in a manner he’s not used to. He tastes wood-smoke and the deep, bitter tang of transmutation magic.
Before he quite knows what he’s doing, he says, “Are you busy right now?”
(He does not know, then, just how familiar the taste of transmutation will become to him.)
He remembers learning about time.
In a lecture hall at the Marble Tomes, he remembers his second Chronurgy instructor, dozens of spell-glyphs floating behind her, and through all of them, a single repeated, glowing rune—time. Manipulation of time has been dreamt of by arcanist after arcanist. Mastery of time is, of course, impossible, she had said. But understanding of time, that is what sets the chronurgist apart.
He does not hunger after time in the same way as he does gravity. But—he is still the most accomplished dunamancer of his generation.
He understands time.
He does not understand time.
It takes meeting Caleb Widogast for him to learn this.
Time is no longer familiar to him—it stretches, without his permission, on the deck of a ship, and it entraps the moment of a kiss, so he can never escape the sensation of warm lips on his forehead. It blurs the days between Sendings and ever-stranger requests. It coalesces into a bright point, into a crystal, into a moment in a laboratory in a long-fallen city.
Time, Caleb says to him, a warm hand on his arm in the freezing North, It takes time. He remembers the spell-glyphs, and thinks perhaps he has been missing something all these years.
Sometimes, he is very glad Caleb Widogast is not a chronurgist.
Later, much later, he will find himself in the middle of a room of sleeping friends, and remember every lie he has ever told (and find he cannot regret any of them, when they have led him here).
Later, he will hover in the middle of the ninth floor of Caleb’s tower, and he will remember every bitter prayer and pretended prayer he has ever said (none of which have come close to this).
Later, he will watch as an Empire-born wizard uses the magic of his people – casually, instinctively – to halve the weight of a spellbook before he passes it over, and Essek, tasting the particular wood-smoke-flavoured Dunamis of this particular arcanist, will say, “Danke.”
Later, he will kneel in a garden, flex his fingers in the soil, and learn, as his wisest friend instructs him on the finer points of planting bulbs.
Later, he will host his brother in this home, half a continent away from the grand house of their childhood, and remember what his laugh sounds like.
Later, he will find himself in an ancient, buried city, and feel – between one breath and the next – a reverberation in his chest, a resonance down to his toes, the sudden, sparking taste of Dunamis, old and familiar and different. He will follow it through corridors and abandoned laboratories, past rubble and corpses, and will dig out of the ruins a Shard of the Light.
Later, he will press his lips to its smooth surface, taste the lightning-ozone, and feel small, and light, and beautiful, his head spinning with the rush of a kiss.
(His partner will ask, laughing, later, if he should be jealous.)
Later, he will take the Shard up into the Demiplane, and they will watch it, suspended in this space that was inspired by it. They will talk, and they will keep each other up all night, and they will study it, and Essek will look, and touch, and feel every cell of his body ringing with magic, and perhaps he will cry.
And later, he will fall asleep – exhausted, actually asleep – to the music of Dunamis in his ears, and he will wake to that same sound.