Category: Novel Drafts

Intermagia — Part 6

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A frantic man paced about his cell, his decorated silk coat trailing behind him as he practically bounced off of the featureless stone walls. He was under arrest for the murder of his wife, and no matter how vehemently he denied it, they refused to listen, which made him absolutely certain that he was being framed, although by whom, it was still unclear. In these days of prosperity, the House of Concordie had many who viewed them with distrust, although few enemies bold enough to risk committing such a heinous crime. He chewed his nails, the ends of his shoulder length golden hair reaching his knuckles as he hunched forward. How could it even have been done except by some cruel magic that mimicked his own?

“Lord Arioste,” came a loud voice from beyond a door.

He recognized it at once and his nervous energy leapt up into throat. He responded with vigor rushing to the bars of the cell, “Hans! Thank the fates you are here, my friend! I had hoped to see you again under better auspices!”

The door opened to reveal the tall figure with a student in robes trailing behind him, as well as his mother, veiled in a shimmer of youthful magic. Hans Hadler tipped his hat without reply, inspecting the man up and down. “You are in poor shape, Lord Arioste. Bruises on your hands, a swollen lip, a rash on your wrists, and your nails filed down to the pink. I don’t need magic to know you were in a physical altercation, most likely with the constabulary officers. And also you’ve been biting your nails.”

“It is quite obvious, isn’t it?” the man’s mother said condescendingly, the dulcet tone of her youthful guise almost like a songbird’s, “To think a member of our esteemed house, no less my own son would be locked away like a swine in a crate.” She held her hand to the bars of the cell.

As she did, the man in the cell shouted, “Mother, no! Those bars are enchanted with-”

Nothing happened as she placed a few fingers on the metal. “They have released you, my son. The name of Concordie holds weight with the city magistrates, but not enough to drop the charges, so upon your release you are to speak with an Inquisitor. You are still to be tried in court for the murder of your wife, and we have only until tomorrow to prove your innocence.”

“Tomorrow?!” the jailed man cried, grasping onto the bars of his cell, “Couldn’t the weight of our name be worth more time? Tomorrow?”

“Names are actually quite weightless, Lord Arioste. Consider yourself lucky to be out on bail at all.” Hadler said with a soft smirk, “And it seems there are parties interested in your downfall.”

The woman interjected, “Our downfall. I suspect House Scai-Silva will be arriving to greet you before long.”

“It must have been her brother,” Arioste growled, his wild eyes still warped by adrenaline, “Bloodthirsty, sadistic dog. To kill Bellona and cast the blame on myself.”

“That is what we’re here to figure out, my lord,” Alam said eagerly. Catching himself, he lowered the tone of his excitement, “And our condolences on your loss. You must still be in grieving.”

“Grief? My boy, do you not recognize fury?!” he bellowed, slamming the cell bars with both of his worn hands, “My Bellona asphyxiated in a pool of her own blood and vomit, paralyzed by some dark magic, and then made to look as if I had a hand in her murder!”

His mother sighed, “That girl had enemies, but she was still a member of House Scai-Silva.”

“House Scai-Silva? I have never heard of them,” Alam pointed out.

The detective answered, “They are a branch family of the larger House Silva, which controls territory to the east of the Imperial border. They splintered to form a trade relationship with the Empire and serve as a march to ease tension along the border. It is no small wonder that they have also elected to marry into the house of diplomats.” He looked back at the old woman, puzzling, “And so their olive branch was a bright, charming, young woman of political importance. To have been slain in such a way would suggest premeditation, and House Silva would gain nothing from severing ties with House Concordie, so there may be other actors at play. Pray tell, what other enemies could she have made?”

“Yes, too many to name. Ignore my foolish son,” the woman said, “He suggests her own flesh and blood to be the perpetrators, but it could never have been them. They stood too much to gain from her inquiries into intermagia. Normally, we would not discuss it with outsiders, but considering the circumstances…” she paused, “She was a member of a research group seeking a means to fuel magic without mnemos.”

Alam raised his hand, “But without it, there’s harmful feedback. Casting magic without using mnemos is like starting a fire with one’s own flesh.”

Hadler seemed deep in thought as he affirmed, “That’s right, which has given mnemos considerable value, to the point where the amount one has stockpiled will determine one’s prestige and authority. To even attempt to upend that power structure would be the equivalent to declaring war on every powerful house in the Empire.”

“That is not how she saw it,” Arioste declared, rattling the bars of his cell once more, “She wished to end the system of enslavement that produces the mnemos we so freely use. Our people’s reliance on it has made us a pariah on the world stage. This research was meant to ease the suffering of people as well as improve our diplomatic edge.”

“Say a major power was aware of her research – why kill her? Why not move instead to be the first to acquire and amass the means to produce a better conduit of magic? In the past, assassinations among noble houses may have been more commonplace, but we live in an enlightened age, with enlightened means to uncover who may have committed this crime.”

“Go on, my friend.”

“I propose we begin our investigation in two stages. We uncover the means by investigating the murder itself. I believe in your innocence, but we must prove it first to ensure you are no longer under suspicion. Afterwards, we shall immediately begin investigating the motive. This is just a hunch, but I suspect that the motive will be the deciding factor in finding the true culprit. I have just one more question. Where were you and what were you doing during the time of the incident?”

“We were asleep together in bed. When I awoke this morning, she was on the ground of our bedroom, dead.”

“What?” Hadler exclaimed in bafflement, “Murdered in an occupied room with no witnesses?”

“I don’t know what it could have been. No curses could survive the wards placed along our manor grounds. It must be poison or some other conventional means. While I may have been in the same room, I do not know when precisely she died.” The jailed man slackened his posture and fell onto the seat in his cell, “Once I speak with this Inquisitor, I shall return to your side post-haste to offer whatever aid I can.” He forced a pained smile, but the wild fury failed to leave his face. “Whoever is responsible shall die as she did,” he shook, tears welling in his frenzied eyes, “Vengeance shall be wrought on them and their kin to every generation…”

“Quiet, boy,” his mother scolded, “The heir of Concordie driven utterly mad by the death of one woman? Gather your wits about you. Foolish son of mine, enraptured by visions of love and idealism like some daydreaming schoolboy. You are a man! Behave like one!”

Hadler nodded, his eyes focused on something beyond the walls of the room as if distracted, “We expect your swift arrival, Lord Arioste. Come, Alam. We must make our way to the Concordie manor at once. There is something most unusual about the timing of all of this I must confirm when we arrive.”

“The timing, Lord Hadler?”

“His discovery of the body in the morning and Lord Arioste’s arrest nearly overlap. It could not be more obvious that he was indeed set up. We first will speak with the key witness, the chief butler of the Concordie household.”

The pair moved to the carriage that had been waiting for them on the cobblestone street. The matriarch bade them farewell with a stiff flick of her hand and left to find another, less menial vehicle. Once they climbed aboard and inside, Alam asked in hushed tones, “What was it, Lord Hadler, that she was researching exactly? How can one fuel magic without using mnemos?”

He leaned into his seat as the carriage began moving and replied, “Strictly speaking, mnemos is not fuel. It is consumed in binding the infinite to the finite, and that is how impossible feats can be performed. Such as it comes from nothing, it returns to nothing, limited only by one’s imagination and ability to draw out the infinite. Thus do I believe it to all be hidden behind a veil. We as a people have become too comfortable with the idea of digging our hands through unknown places.”

“But it’s functionally no different from being a resource that is consumed in casting magic. The Academy teaches us that it is ultimately safe to consider it as fuel.”

“The Academy has a vested interest in ensuring no one is investigating magical interfactants, which is what perhaps the late Lady Bellona was studying. I cannot imagine that they would resort to murder, but that is what we are meant to discover.”

“Interfactant? I have not had a single lesson mention this word.”

“It is short for interface active agent. Mnemos reduces the tension that exists at the interface between reality and fantasy to the point where the two can mix, but the interfaction phenomenon occurs even without the presence of mnemos under very specific circumstances, which can result in uncontrolled effects. The earliest inquiries into magic before the development of intermagia were all accidental studies of this very phenomenon, whether it was an attempt to divine the future via finding patterns in nature, beseech spirits, or discover the cure-all medicine, panacea.”

“It mixes two things that don’t naturally mix.”

“That’s right. There’s nothing natural about magic. We humans who can perform it are committing crimes against nature itself. Perhaps we mages are guilty enough to be put to death.” Although the man’s words were grim, his tone remained light enough to be considered jovial.

“Why do you say that? Magic occurs in nature, does it not?”

“I suppose this is a debate about whether the works of man can be considered natural,” he laughed, amused for reasons beyond Alam’s understanding. “The world is a wide place and the range of human beliefs are even wider. I hope to leave the Empire some day soon to travel and witness it with my own eyes. Perhaps you shall attend my travels, young Alam, and see what I mean.

Practically leaping in his seat, whether from the bumpy ride or his own excitement, Alam fervently agreed. Anything to leave the Academy.

The journey continued for an hour before they arrived at the manor of the Concordie family, where a small group of male and female butlers dressed identically in sharp livery were awaiting outside with a stiff bow. A young girl, the junior butler of the group, opened the door of the carriage for them, and as the detective took her outstretched, gloved hand to step down, he asked her, “What is your name, miss?” Her thin blonde hair was tied into a bun with a pin decorated with the banner of House Concordie like the other butlers. Even the men sported long hair tied into a bun — a mark of submission to a house.

Her training faltered for a moment as she made eye contact with the gentleman, and looking away, replied, “Pana, milord.”

“Very good, Miss Pana. Thank you for your assistance. I am Hans Hadler. I have been invited here as a consulting scholar.”

He went ahead to the other well-dressed slaves and greeted them one by one, learning their names and their rank. Alam followed suit, greeting each one after the other in the same order. With a cheerful jog, he caught up to his mentor and eagerly asked him, “Were you suspicious about the butlers? Is that why you learned all of their names?”

With a shake of his head and a pat on the back, he responded with a question of his own, “Is it so strange to introduce oneself to a person you have never met before?”

“I suppose, but typically no one goes to the trouble of being so polite to house slaves.”

“They are people first before anything else, Alam. You or I could end up in precisely the same situation if our fortunes were to turn.”

Alam grunted in affirmation, although it seemed he didn’t get the answer he had wanted. The butlers had been following them when he met the stoic gaze of the youngest named Pana. He looked away sheepishly upon realizing that he had in fact not truly seen her as a person. Perhaps as no more than furniture in fact. His own father would tell him to do as such. “Perhaps I think you’re right, Lord Hadler,” he said at last.

“How I long to hear those words,” his mentor said with a chuckle, entering past the threshold of the manor to be greeted by a tall, graying man dressed the same as the other butlers if not for a pair of white silk gloves. He appeared distinguished, as if he himself were noble-born, the rightful master of the manor.

With a slow bow, he spoke, “Welcome to the Concordie Estate, valued guests of the Mistress. I am the Head Butler Octavius. She has tasked me with guiding you to the room where you shall be performing your work. If you would follow me, Lord Hadler.”

“The interior is incredible,” Alam remarked, marveling at the high ceilings that rivaled the halls of the Academy. Down one hall were poised portraits and marble busts of old men and women, and down another an open door revealing a slice of an expansive library. A grand staircase was the centerpiece of the foyer where they noticed the elder matriarch of the Concordie family looking down from above her familiar frown yet still etched onto her face. She turned and left without so much as a word.

“She insisted that she be left alone. Do understand, but she shall be surveilling from her chambers,” the head butler requested of them as he lead them upstairs, “This situation has been taxing for her.”

“There’s nothing to explain, Mr. Octavius. We are all here to fulfill our role, and hers is the protection of her family. I can imagine this situation has her more than a little distraught.”

“Indeed,” he muttered, “She alone does not feel the blame in failing to fulfill her role. We have all had a great affection for Lady Bellona. She was a warm ray of sunshine in this old manor.”

“Where are the other members of the Concordie house?”

“This manor is for the head and her direct family. Branch members have taken residence in smaller individual homes across the estate. The unique nature of the family’s work leaves us to care for the land while the members of the house are abroad.”

“I see, then the only other people here besides Arioste, his mother, and the victim were the house staff.”

“And their daughter, Isybelle.”

“I was unaware they had a child at all,” he said with some surprise. “How precious. A daughter.”

“She is confined to her room due to a long illness,” the butler explained, his hand pointed towards a closed door at the far end of the hall way. He moved in the opposite direction down another hall as they rounded a corner.

Alam could feel the air stagnate with tension. “The ground is very plush,” he couldn’t help but remark, practically marching along the carpeted corridor, “You all have done impeccable work maintaining this manor.”

Octavius smiled for the first time since they had arrived. “We serve good masters. Many of the staff who come under their care are released from service with compensation within five years. There are very few others who offer such generosity. I myself have stayed with the Concordie house for eight of such terms. We take pride in our work.”

“It sounds like you’re employed, not enslaved then.”

“According to Imperial legislators, we are legally possessions of the Concordie family. They are allowed to do with us as they will.”

“Fascinating.”

“It was not always so benevolent. The master has changed much in the past eight years since he wed Bellona and she was brought into the household. I have been at his side since the day he was born in this very manor. He was the sort of boy to do as he pleased with his belongings.”

“Yes, I recall. Arioste was renown as a troublemaker among the instructors at the Academy,” Hadler mused, thinking back to a time he did not care to be reminded of, “And quite a scourge among his fellows.”

“Did he bully you as well, Lord Hadler?” Alam asked in disbelief.

“A story for another time, perhaps,” he concluded, opening a door to the bedroom of the lord and lady of the manor. As the door swung open, they saw a sight neither could have ever expected. A large iridescent dome of what seemed like glass shimmered on the ground, as if a film of oil danced in the air. Hadler entered without hesitation, crouching to inspect the strange bubble affixed to the floor. “It’s interfaction. There can be no doubt.”

Alam held position at the door, hesitant to even breathe the musty air emanating from the room, “What does that mean? This is the interfaction phenomenon?”

“Yes, but it’s not like any I’ve ever seen. Interfaction is invisible such that it is infinitesimally small. To see it at such a scale should be impossible. I cannot explain what happened, and it is still not clear what the cause of death was, but this is a supernatural occurrence, indeed. This is where the body was, yes?”

“That is where the lady was last,” the butler confirmed.

Hadler reached his hand past the boundary of the half-sphere as if feeling something on the ground. “And it still remains, shrouded by this bizarre aura. This is like witnessing a fraction of a second stretched out across hours. I shall see if it can be dispelled through conventional means first,” he said, opening the curtained window to the room. Nothing seemed to shift save for a ray of sunlight causing light to refract into a kaleidoscope of colors throughout the room as it hit the bubble. “It appears to be becoming more transparent. Let us give it some time.”

“It should not have been possible for such a powerful curse to have been placed on Lady Bellona without our wards having detected them… The other butlers and I have gone to great lengths to ensure the perimeter of the manor itself is well monitored.”

“It may not be a curse, Mr. Octavius, and I still suspect this was not what killed her, but it may be a vital clue as to what happened. Alam, I must take some time to look into this, and thus it falls on you to conduct a thorough series of interviews of all of the members of this household. You know what to ask, yes?”

“I do, Lord Hadler. Names, alibis, connections.”

“Good, and be quick. I must know if young Isybelle heard anything last night. Take extra care to jot down what she says.”

The butler intervened, blocking the boy from moving. “You mustn’t disturb Lady Isybelle. She is barred from your investigation. I can assure you that she knows nothing of what has happened here.”

“They are permitted to speak with Isybelle,” came the words of the old matriarch, echoing through the room as if four different people spoke at once from each corner.

He stumbled over his next words, sputtering for a moment before regaining his previous composure. “Yes, madame.” With a bow, he stepped aside to allow Alam to leave.

“So something transpired that escaped even your ever-present gaze,” Hadler noted, “And went unnoticed by the wardens of the manor and the man who should have been witness to it in this very room. A true mystery, indeed. If we are left with no other options, I may have to employ a rather undesirable means to gather the information we are missing.”

“And what would that be?”

“In a manner of speaking, the resurrection of the dead,” he paused, watching the head butler for his reaction. Upon spying not even the faintest glimmer of emotion, he continued, “Not exactly. We’ll be reading her now deceased mind. It is an expensive spell, one that would normally cost multiple lifetimes of mnemos to perform, especially for one with little knowledge of the deceased like myself. However, utilizing someone close as a channel can lower the cost to manageable levels. We await Lord Arioste to perform this ritual, but until then, I shall attempt to remove this barrier from her body or otherwise extract her brain intact.”

“We cannot allow you to desecrate her body in such a fashion,” the butler grimaced.

“Very well, then let us continue to examine this strange barrier that’s formed around her.”

The butler leaned forward as if he had heard a grave secret and said, “Lord Hadler, though I am unversed in the esoteric, are you truly capable of reading the minds of the dead?”

The scholar knelt, then stopped, as if to think. “House Hadler has the most interesting origins, and few know of it, not that it is some great secret. Your mistress already knows this story well. We were originally known as Hadellieres, or men of Hell, for my family took an interest in opening some rather forbidden gates. So the story goes, our ancient founder was said to have been able to access some form of true magic involving the raising of the dead long before the invention of intermagia, now lost to time. My esteemed grandfather was obsessed with replicating it, his life’s work resulting in what was ultimately a lie, but the promise of it brought the Hadlers into the graces of Emperor Nepheleger — may he rest in peace. In a cruel twist of irony, my father worked himself to death in order to find the means to conquer death. The task fell on me. The great work of all mankind fell on me alone, you see. I had no wish to join him, and so I sought to abandon the work. No others in my family were better suited for the magic than I, and none more noble, it seems. I was but a child, denied the opportunity to reject this call and forced to toil alone as they feared the work would be stolen and so too the glory of our house. After many long years, this is the culmination of that effort. This little, neat trick of mine.”

“So it is possible?”

“Only if you believe. This is a failed magic that requires the suspension of disbelief, which is why I am loathe to use it unless absolutely necessary. In fact, I fear it is a waste for myself to have ever learned the practice in the first place for I have no talent in acting.”

“You speak as if this is theater. Are you suggesting then that you are performing a play?”

“This method of reading the minds of the dead with intermagia leaves room for some doubt, especially as it will be knowledge that only the channel and I will have access to. But even then, what glimpses Lord Arioste and I may see could differ. To make matters significantly worse, to a third observer, there’s no telling whether he and I will have colluded to falsify this information beforehand. It very well may be seen as theater.”

“Has this happened before?”

“Not on a case, but given the lack of time and the strangeness of this particular death, I fear this may be our only recourse. A rather expensive one at that.”

“Good, this is why I have called you after all,” came the voice again, resonating in thin air. “My son is arriving shortly. It seems his interrogation is complete.”

“I hope you’re prepared to pay the price then, milady. I estimate that this will take nearly a kilogram of mnemos to conduct.”

“We can spare 800 grams and no more.”

“I can make do with that,” he answered without looking up.

Octavius did his best to hide his astonishment, for never could he have imagined that a necromancer would be in his midst, dressed and behaving so normally. Those who studied the magic of the dead were said to be deranged, long addled by overuse of intermagia paid for by darker levies than mnemos. They were without the kind of moral scruples that would prevent an ordinary person from disturbing the bodies of the dead. How utterly plain this man seemed, unadorned by a necklace of human skulls or hides of human skin. A man of Hades masquerading as a man of letters.

“Before the lord of the manor arrives, I must ask you a few questions, Mr. Octavius.”

“I am at your service.”

“Who alerted the high authorities of Lady Bellona’s death and why? It is a scandalous thing for a nobleman to murder his own wife, and yet would it not have been obvious that he would be the first to fall under suspicion?”

“The first witness was Pana. She was a favorite of Lady Bellona’s and thus served them in the mornings. She found her body on the floor there before Lord Arioste awoke at approximately half past six, and so she made the report under my orders. You could say that I am responsible.”

“The interfaction had not happened by then, and Lady Bellona was found covered in blood according to the man himself,” Hadler muttered.

“I believed in his innocence, which is why the report was made as soon as possible. Any delay would have cast suspicion on himself and this entire household. If you must speak of haste, however, I did find it unusual how quickly they were able to respond. Not half an hour after the call was made, they arrived ready to arrest Lord Arioste.”

“If I have the order of events right, they arrived within the hour, arrested him on the spot after a cursory look, and then the Lady Concordie sped to my doorstep and sought my consultation. These events took place within two hours this morning. The high authorities did not bother to investigate either. It seems there’s naught much else to learn from this line of inquiry, save for the confirmation that someone knew Lady Bellona would die last night. At least we have confirmed that this is a murder, but to be quite honest, it would have been more intriguing had this been anything but.”

“Intriguing?” the butler interjected, leaning forward, “Is casual curiosity how you intend to approach this situation, necromancer?”

“You serve your house. I study death. Our interests coincide as if directed by fate. There is a romance to this, is there not?”

“I fail to see it. Try to see the gravity of the subject, sir.”

Hadler looked at the man through shaded eyes, his gaze moving past him as if speaking to someone else entirely, “Grave, indeed. We can move quickly to assure all interested parties of Lord Arioste’s innocence. Worry not. There is not even a need to expend any mnemos and perform the rites in order to do so. However, I have a hunch that this is a mystery that will not be so easily resolved.”

Heavy thumps resounded from the hall as a haggard man drenched in his own sweat, hair matted to his forehead appeared ascending the stairs. “Expend all you require!” he called out, “I have been listening in on the journey here!” The lord of the manor returned, casting off his coat as another attendant caught it in his wake.

“Ah, you have been surveilling your room. But of course.”

“We must know!” he wheezed, panting between words, “The killer! Who killed her?! How was it done?!”

“Silence!” his mother’s voice echoed, “If Hadler can assure them of your innocence without use of his talents, then so be it. We need not waste resources in confirming anything else.”

“No! Bellona lies dead! The mystery must be resolved! Isn’t that right, Hadler?!”

“Foolish!” she retorted, appearing from another room in person, stomping towards the group, “You continue to prove that you are unfit to be the heir of our house! There are plenty of eligible, young brides you can take to do as you will, and you would be so selfish as to insist upon losing your wits over one that has already perished?”

“Have you no heart, you miserly hag? Have you no shame? The mother of my child and the love of my life cannot be discarded and replaced,” the man plead, tears streaming down his bruised cheeks, “I shall deliver myself back to the authorities should you refuse me. I go to the gallows to rejoin my beloved if that is what it will take.”

“Not a gram shall go to this senselessness, Arioste. I know you better than you know yourself. A warm body in your embrace will make you forget all about Bellona. Gorge yourself on whatever desires your willful heart needs to heal and move past it. Your duty to the house comes before all else.”

“Then I gorge myself on ashes and earth!”

With a swing of her wand, Arioste’s legs buckled, his body crumpling to the ground as if a marionette had his strings cut. She stepped past him with scorn, an icy glare trailing behind her, her blue eyes leaping from her head, “You waste my time and magic with your stupidity, my son. Fill yourself with dust, if you insist, but the investigation is over.”

Hadler rose to his feet slowly. Head hanging, he sighed, “Ah, it does leave a bitter aftertaste.”

“The matter of your compensation will be settled upon my son’s acquittal.”

“My professional opinion is that the matter is far from settled. I must look into the murderous interfaction of Lady Bellona and the full circumstances of her death. How certain can you be that others in your family are not the next target?”

“That’s right!” Arioste groaned, his voice like grinding gears. He lay pinned to the floor, struggling and resisting with all of his might, “We are not yet in the clear, mother. The investigation must go on.”

“Then continue the investigation without the use of the family cache.”

“That is what I am good at,” Hadler said with a crooked smile, “Specialist of the mundane, indeed.”

Intermagia — Part 5

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Shiny black leather shoes covered in dust swung like a pendulum in the air. A hanged man spoke to Arche, “Our noble house wanes. Peace is failing. A time of catastrophe is upon us. What will you do?”

A child gripped tightly onto her mother’s hand. She wanted to hide but there was nowhere to go. She looked up at her mother, her face, multitudes, warped into a melting mask of fury. “It has to be you! You’re all that’s left!”

She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She wanted to run, but there was no where to go. The hanged man and the enraged woman of many faces were all she could see. She held tightly onto her mother’s hand. “Stop being angry with me. I’ll do whatever you say. Please don’t be angry. Please don’t leave me with them.”

“It has to be you!” the mother screeched as the masks fell, all of them clattering onto the floor where they stared up at the child, laughing, resembling young, feminine faces. They began to hop and clatter, chomping and gnashing, taking chunks of her flesh as they ate her piece by piece. The laughter rang in her ears.

Arche’s eyes flickered. She was once again back in her tent. No crystals had formed during her slumber; she remembered her dream vividly this time. With a groan she stepped off her cot, her stomach ringing silent alarms of hunger. The clamor of returning soldiers echoed around the room instead. She recognized at once the low, powerful voice of General Porfyrian giving urgent commands, wondering if she might at last have an opportunity to meet her.

She peeked outside only to find Rania waiting, as if guarding her tent, cast in the golden hue of a setting sun. Their eyes met. Rania smiled as she bowed and said, “Are you well? Lord Hadler wishes to speak with you.”

Arche scowled instinctively. A beat too late, she replied weakly, “What are you, a messenger? Then tell him I shall be in my quarters.”

Rania had already begun walking away holding an empty bucket as she taunted, “Unlike you, we are both busy. Seek him in his tent.”

Arche gave another tired groan before disappearing back inside, already exhausted from the brief encounter. Seeing Rania only drained her of whatever motivation she could muster for the moment, but she realized something. If the soldiers had returned from battle, most of them would likely make their way to the rear market in order to purchase provisions. It had long been the case that caravans of merchants would follow the Imperial Army to trade spoils and loot for various goods and services, but she herself had nothing she was willing to part with for food. Perhaps it would be best to pay him a visit after all, she thought to herself, since he had all of their coin to purchase food, and she had no desire to go there by herself.

The mages were cordoned off in a separate part of the army campus, so neither was very far from the other. However, as she walked along the empty beaten paths, she wondered to herself where the other mage cavalrymen were. There were at least nine others besides the aged Lord Hadler, who wasn’t meant to enter the front lines regardless, but perhaps they were elsewhere. Announcing her arrival, she entered the only illuminated tent there. General Porfyrian was huddled onto the ground staring, her scarred face twisted into a grimace, her large, masculine body completely covered by her draping, crimson cloak. They had both been inspecting the body, an air of absolute quiet dread having fallen over the two mages. Arche stammered, “What is that? I’m not responsible for that, too, am I?”

“No, this is not the reason why you were called,” Hadler answered, rising to his feet and stretching his back. “I’m afraid the battle turned sour. According to the general here, the Cybelean counterattack was quite effective. This is the body of one of our cavalrymen.”

As if offering a prayer, Porfyrian muttered, “The only mage we could recover in our retreat, hewn like dry wood by a barbarian’s axe. I saw them myself, those Cybelean lords. They fall but rise again, undying. They move as swiftly as the horses they ride with an uncanny strength in their blows. They are bound by a far more dangerous esoteric than we could have known.” She too stood and continued, “It has become a top priority to understand and undo their magic. They are completely impervious otherwise.”

“Impervious?” Hadler said almost taken aback, “Could it be that the body we recovered is not then one of the immortal lords? We truly knew nothing of the Cybeleans, did we? For instance, the fact that the boy and I could communicate in the same langauge is nothing short of a mystery.”

“There is naught to know. The only thing of value in Cybele is their magic, which has rotted their culture and their people. They have no achievements or monuments. They engage in no diplomacy. Every messenger was turned away and they have abandoned themselves to isolation. The only knowledge that could be attained was to strike them with an iron and see how they react.”

“In such a scenario, oft it is the iron that reverberates.”

“None could have imagined the legends of their immortality to have been underplaying their power. Ask the Cybelean you captured what he knows. It appears we knew and still know next to nothing.”

“I’m afraid he is unavailable for the moment,” Hadler said with a quiet glance at Arche, “And we must act fast to restore his trust or what knowledge we acquire may not ring true.”

Arche spoke at last, “Why do we need his trust? We can wring the information out of him with magic.”

“There is no such magic which can be relied on,” Hadler continued, “Unless you mean to say we torture the information from him.”

The general nodded, “If that is what it takes.”

“No,” Hadler shook his head, “In my youth, working with my predecessor, I have witnessed the futility of coerced interrogation.” He froze, struck by a dark thought. “There is another method of inquiry, but it still requires Nils to cooperate of his own free will.”

“Again, whatever it will take. I must tend to other matters. You and your apprentice are to get this done as soon as possible. You have full access to the reserves in order to do so, but you must be discreet. I will inform the guard captain.”

“He will certainly not like that,” Hadler chuckled, “But yes, thank you again for the visit, commander. I hope to offer a report worthy of your confidence.” He gave a half-hearted salute. She returned it and left in a hurry with the rustling sound of chainmail.

Arche hunched down to inspect the body, too. This was not her first time seeing a corpse. She fought the urge to run. Her chest felt heavy as she scanned the body. The cause of death was immediately obvious; there was a gaping hole where the heart should have been. “What are we to do, Lord Hadler?” she said trembling, barely hiding her terror, “Truly will the fate of this entire affair rest on our shoulders?”

“Firstly, Arche, you are to apologize to Nils. Rania has already informed me that he is conscious and unscathed; nevertheless, you have wronged him, and you must repay your debt to him in kind.”

“What debt do I owe a prisoner?” she said with an intense glare, her chest still heaving, “Why do I have to apologize?”

“Because you nearly killed him. It was a miracle that he survived, considering the amount of energy that was expensed. Imperial law dictates that a captive is the property of the captor, and he is my captive, so I believe a fair punishment for the crime of private vandalism is for you to ensure he still trusts in the mission.”

Her breathing seemed to worsen as she listened. “What if I fail? Will I have to return to the Academy?” she panicked, “Is there no enchantment that will bind him under our control?”

Hadler’s expression was stony, his eyes tired, “That is a far more ancient magic that intermagia shall perhaps some day replicate, but for now, the best you have is to say sorry. Now, I must find a vacant tent to retire for the night. It has been a long day. We shall resume in the morning.”

“But-“

Hadler stopped just as he reached the exit and added as his expression loosened, “The mention of punishment was in jest.” He drew a deep breath. Then he sighed. “But it is only right for a lady of Concordie to make amends, not enemies.”

She fell silent, her heart still pounding as she was left alone with the corpse, the heart once buried in his chest exhumed. She knew already who he was. He had a reputation as a cruel and vicious soldier, adept at a particularly gruesome form of intermagia that would create thin blades of highly pressurized air. She had no fondness for him, but to see his lifeless body filled her with foreboding. This kind of mage on the battlefield should have been unstoppable. For someone to have gotten close enough to scoop out his heart so precisely was unimaginable.

“Oh, I had nearly forgotten,” she heard Hadler from outside, snapping her out of her trance. “You’ve probably not eaten all day. Fortuitously, the best way to apologize is over a meal. Seek out Nils in Rania’s quarters and buy yourselves something from the market. She should be familiar with the vendors there and can tell you which stalls won’t upset your stomachs.” Her mentor held a silver coin between his fingers. “A milligram should cover the three of you. Prices are higher here than you might expect.”

“You want me to dine with them now? How much further must I humiliate myself?”

With a frown, the man took her hand and opened it himself, placing the silver coin called a milligram into her palm before he gently closed it like a locket. “Pay close attention, Arche. This is no place for pride. I have long since cast mine aside joining this endeavor. The magic there is to be learned from Cybele will far outweigh what personal concerns you may have. It may alter the course of the Empire itself.”

She took the coin and pocketed it without complaint, merely asking, “When should I return with the prisoner?”

“I’ll have Rania fetch you tomorrow morning an hour after sunrise.”

Without another word, she did an abrupt about-face and left, her rapid gait overflowing with nervous energy. Her thoughts raced as she approached the tent she would usually go out of her way to avoid. “It is only right to make amends,” she muttered to herself, a short mantra as if to persuade herself. “As a lady of Concordie.”

She announced herself as she entered, seeing Nils alone, stunned by her presence. He leapt out of the low cot and scrambled back. Arche hardly knew how to react, simply watching as he glared from the corner of the tent, his body arched and tense like a wary housecat. It would have been humorous had she not felt so awful about it. Everything felt awful about this.

“I’m not here to attack you,” she said firmly, “Relax.”

He did not yet speak. He lowered his shoulders and stood upright, still on guard. “For what have you come?”

She swallowed, unsure how to word her response, her mouth opening to form them before she shut her eyes. Her hand gripped the single silver coin her mentor had given her as she found herself holding it out in front of her. “This.”

The boy flinched, “What is it?”

“It’s enough to buy food. You will accompany me to the market.”

He stared at her hand, not knowing what to do, only able to muster up, “I’ve never actually handled coin before.”

She cocked an eyebrow, almost smugly, “See? I knew you were nobility. I’ve never had to touch something as base as metal coinage until I got here, too, but this is all the market deals in. The rations given out to the soldiers taste like dust and sweat, so we must make do.”

“Why should I accompany you…?” he asked warily, meeting her gaze.

“Do you have no sense of duty? A lady is requesting an escort, and you’d deny her?”

“I am under no such obligation to you. You attacked me,” he said bluntly, lowering his guard at last, “You belittled me, and now you are pressing me into your service. It is just as Rania said about you.”

At her name, Arche threw down the coin in her hand. She could feel heat and tears rising to her eyes as if a mental dam had broken. “It’s because of her… that I can’t go to the market by myself…” She stood there, her arms stiff. “She spread malicious lies about me to the other merchants so they won’t do business with me. Don’t ever listen to Rania. She pretends to be sweet and compliant, but she’s a liar!”

Nils lowered his gaze, “Is it proper for me to waste time like this?”

The two stood in silence.

Suddenly, she shouted, “Fine! I have given you ample opportunity! I’ll go by myself!” However, her legs remained rooted to the ground as tears streamed down her cheeks. “I’ll go! I’ll go!” she stamped her feet.

The tantrum stunned the young knight. If Rania was a liar, she hadn’t lied about Arche’s fragility thus far. Nils shook his head, knowing full well what his master would think in this situation. With a strained effort, he let out, “Very well, I shall escort you.” He stepped forward and picked up the fallen coin. “I apologize for the hesitation,” he said as he bent down, as if not to Arche but to his late master.

“What?” Arche said, rubbing an eye, “Don’t apologize. Please. Just be quiet and come with me. And you do all of the talking.”

“Verily, which is it then?” Nils complained under his breath, shuffling behind her driven almost entirely by hunger rather than honor.

They navigated across camp together towards the rear market, which to Arche seemed livelier than usual, although it appeared that many of them had started to tear down their stalls. She had expected the smell of roasting meats and fried dough, but there seemed only to be the sight and sound of furious movements. “That’s strange…” Arche noted, “Night time is when it is most active. Why are so many of them packing up?” Her voice was somewhat muffled by the scarf she had wrapped to keep her face concealed, although anyone could tell from her outfit that this out-of-place girl could only have been Arche of Concordie.

“Do you know where a food merchant might be?”

“It was harder not to run into someone hawking grilled meat on a stick or baked goods here,” Arche said at a loss.

They continued to meander where they could until they had finally found one food vendor still willing to do business. The two eagerly approached, dodging in and out of the crowd, only to find vegetables brined in clay pots. “Surely we cannot just eat pickles,” Arche groaned, holding her nose.

Nils, however, was beaming, “I happen to relish pickled food. My mother would pickle eggs in a sweet vinegar for my sister and I. Radishes as well. And carrots. If we can find cheese and bread, this would be more than a feast.”

“Your mother did all of that?”

The old merchant finally noticed the two as he peeked up from under a wide brimmed hat. He rasped with a smile, “None of those, I’m afraid. Just cucumber and cabbage left.”

“Will this coin be sufficient?” Nils asked boldly, holding up the coin that Arche had thrown between his fingers.

Arche forced his hand down with her own, “Are you crazy or just stupid? That coin could buy almost five whole giant pots of pickles!”

“Oh,” the old merchant reacted, “I recognize you. You’re famous.”

Arche wrapped her face back up and turned away in silence.

“Sir, if I may ask, does she hold some disrepute at the market?”

“She stole something that wasn’t hers. Ain’t no bigger taboo among merchants, my boy.”

“It wasn’t like that! That wasn’t what happened at all!”

The old man grinned, showing off a smile of several missing teeth, “Gossip travels faster than sickness. When one of us is hurt we all react quick.”

“And if I may ask one more thing,” Nils continued, “What has caused the market to stir in such strange ways? It appears many are closing earlier than expected.”

“Ah,” the old man stood up, stretching his back, “Well, I answered your last question for free, but any more will be for paying customers only.”

“Let’s go,” Arche said, tugging on his shoulder, “I don’t even want any dumb pickles.”

“Then I shall purchase a pot, sir,” Nils said.

“What?!”

“Heh,” the merchant smiled toothily, receiving the silver coin from Nils, “Take whichever one you want. Take two in fact. The market is shutting down as of today anyway so it won’t matter none if I sell to a thief or not. I’d rather not carry these back home anyhow.”

“It is shutting down?”

“The Empire has never lost a battle for as long as I have been alive, my boy. Until today. We’re not sticking around to see what will happen in a retreat. Our livelihood is trade, not war. We profit off of it, but we don’t engage in it.” He, too, started to put away the small blankets and goods into a cart. “You look surprised.”

“The Empire… lost?” Nils said, stunned into a wide-eyed stare, “I had thought with our vanguard decimated it would only be a matter of time before the rest would fall. Were the other Lords truly so powerful?”

Arche looked at him quizzically, “You mean you didn’t know? Aren’t you Cybelean?”

“Our people have not engaged in conflict in over a century. There is not a person alive save for the Lords themselves who would have seen battle. They were keen to ensure our martial prowess was honed for such a day, but the mages of the Empire wiped out Lord Labroaig’s unit before we could even realize what had happened. I had thought intermagia invincible.”

“It seems like it’s the opposite. The other Lords launched a counterattack that wiped out all of the other mages. Lord Hadler, Lady Porfyrian, and myself are the only mages left in the camp for now. I’m sure they’ll send reinforcements at once though.”

The once carefree old merchant’s grin had loosened into a frown as he heard the two children speak, “You are both far too young to be speaking such words.”

“I am old enough, although perhaps not as old as you,” Arche spat.

“Do you dislike our manner of speech?” Nils inquired.

“You two are both looking for food, right? Haul up those pickles for me, boy. I’ll take you to my tent where I can feed the both of you some dinner and some wisdom.”

“Wisdom? I need no lecturing from some common pickle peddler,” Arche scoffed, “Come, Lord Nils.”

“We are invited as honored guests, Lady Arche. Is this not the opportunity you so desired to soothe your hunger and restore your reputation?”

She was silent, the tension in her arms causing the scarf she held to her face to shake. “It is only right as a lady of Concordie,” she relented, “You make a fine advisor, Lord Nils. I shall humbly accept.” Despite all of this, a confident smile returned to her face. The prospect of food must have driven away all other thoughts of humiliation, or so Nils thought. He picked up the pots of pickles the old merchant indicated and followed behind Arche, who had already begun trailing the old merchant and his cart.

It wasn’t a long way before the backroad lead them to a series of large circles of exotic tents, where the clamor of a communal dinner ritual was taking place. “Do you not purchase food among yourselves here?” Nils asked, taking in the sights and smells of frying oil, meal preparation, and children squealing and running in play.

“It’s all based on promises organized by the women of the caravan. Coin is used for dealings with the Empire, but among our group, it’s a matter of trust. Makes it easier to survive that way when times are tough. What you’re looking at ain’t usual, though. Looks like we have to start preparing enough rations for the trip back home now that it’s dangerous to stay. We’ll likely leave first thing in the morn.”

Both Nils and Arche remained unfazed by the chaos of the languages and movement at the merchant camp, both doing their best to hide their overwhelmed senses. They entered a smaller tent towards the center where a lively old woman with braided hair was perched on a stool over a pile of unusual root vegetables amassed on a woven mat, peeling them. She greeted the old man first with a wave, “Hurry up and sit. We’re gonna be up all night if we don’t get to it,” she paused, peering past him at the children, “Good, tell them to get cracking, too.”

The odor rising from the tent hit Arche first like a slap. “What is that?” she coughed nasally, holding her nose and turning away.

“It’s dinner, and if we don’t hurry, there won’t be none for us, little thief girl.”

“Wha-” she started, “Does every one of you people know who I am?”

“There’s only one other Helikan girl in camp besides little Rania, right?” the old woman guffawed, her deep voice far mightier than her age would suggest. “My baby brother brought you here to make amends, I’m guessing.”

“That’s me,” the old man grinned, “I’m her baby brother.”

“I gathered,” Arche said flatly, still holding her nose aloft in the air.

He ushered the two of them inside, “We’ll make sure the two of you get fed, but nothing in this life is free.”

Arche recoiled at the very thought, “You want me to do this? Peeling vegetables? No. I’ll be waiting outside. Alert me when dinner is ready.”

“There is no dinner if you don’t do your part, young’un,” the old woman chided.

Nils sighed, sitting at the mat and crossing his legs, “I shall do her part then,” he said, “It would be sooner done myself than convincing her to cooperate.”

“You’re wrong there,” the old woman said as she bounded to her feet, stomping towards Arche with a paralyzing glare, “If you care about someone, you’ll make sure they participate and do their share. You’re doing them no good by abandoning them like that, you know?” She grabbed Arche by the arm and started to drag her back inside. The girl flinched at first shocked at the sheer strength of the old woman, unable to peel her thick, worn fingers wrapped like deciduous vines around her slender wrist.

Her feet scrambled as she plead, “Wait! Wait! We can negotiate! He’ll do the peeling and I’ll do anything else! I have a very sensitive sense of smell!”

“You can cry all you want, but working with your hands will make you forget all about the smell soon enough.”

“I’m going to gag! I’m going to throw up!”

“Stop your wailing!”

As soon as Nils looked up, Arche tumbled to the ground, wheezing and dry-heaving, her eyes watering as her chlorine hair seemed to shudder, draping her face. Everyone watched quietly, stunned as she picked herself back up, involuntarily sniffling. Just as she was about to say something, she turned and ran from the entrance, wiping her face with her open palms.

“I shall return not long hence,” Nils said, rising to his feet.

Arche did not make it far, and the figure of her hunched over, retching, stood out enough for him to spot her at a distance. He hesitated for a moment just to see her whispering something. As he approached, she looked up and seemed almost relieved to see him. “I told them that the smell was too much. They didn’t even bother listening to me,” she rasped.

Nils noticed her eyes glittering, illuminated by the large bonfire at the center of the encampment where people were congregating, the setting sun causing them to sparkle like gems. She was doing something strange he did not immediately understand. It appeared as if she was gathering her tears into her hands, gently sifting her finger across her palm.

“I shall acquire food enough for us both,” Nils said. “Despite what happened, I cannot believe that they mean harm.”

“I don’t feel like eating anymore,” she muttered, moving to sit on the trunk of a recent felled tree, “You must think I overreacted, too, don’t you? That I’m being too dramatic?” Her chest slumped into her knees as she caught her breath.

He thought about it for a moment and said firmly, “I do not. My lord did always say that individuals have unique weaknesses that must be compensated for with mutual cooperation.”

“Cooperation?” she stared up in disbelief, “The way of this world is domination. It is ridiculous that your lord of all people should say such things. The weak obey the powerful; the powerful do not cooperate with the weak. It is eat or be eaten, and the more weakness I show, the more likely I’ll be no more than food.” She spoke as if those words were being spoken by someone else, her stiffened composure nothing like the frightened girl from earlier. “Therefore, I must be powerful, too.”

Nils wished to disagree but remained still. Certainly it was true that there were people like that, but Lord Labroaig was never domineering. To Nils, he was a good lord. “Is that why you have become a mage? For the sake of power?”

“Is that not why anyone would pursue intermagia? There doesn’t exist a person alive who studies magic for the pure love of it. You study for wealth, fame, power, and success. Anything else will get you trampled underfoot in the Empire. Isn’t that why you chose to become a knight?”

“I wished only to serve my lord.”

“What could this lord possibly have done to earn such loyalty…?”

“I believe it impossible to become powerful when weakened by starvation. Shall we return?”

“Were you not listening? I’m not going there. Find some food and bring it back,” she said.

“How are you so certain I will return?”

“What?”

“I am under no obligation to fetch your food for you. Escorting a lady is one thing, but this is another. Is it not possible for me to abandon you here and acquire food merely for myself? After all, as you claim, it is eat or be eaten, is it not?”

“You…!” she gasped, flabbergasted, “You’re right… What was I thinking trusting you? We’re not friends. We’re supposed to be enemies.”

“Was this how you treat friends, Lady Arche?”

“I know! If you get me food, I’ll give you this in exchange,” she said confidently, hopping back to her feet and holding out her palms. There, where Nils had expected the wetness of tears, were tiny glimmering pebbles.

“I have no need for dirt,” he replied dismissively, baffled at this gesture.

“This is mnemos! My mnemos!” she yelled, pulling her hand back, “Dirt? Dirt?!” she nearly laughed, “This is a precious part of my very soul! I shouldn’t even be trading this to you, but I did it as a show of good will.”

“If this is of worth, why not offer this to the merchants for food instead?”

“I could never trade my mnemos with mere merchants. The fact that I was willing to give you some at all is an honor, Lord Nils. I’ll give you one last chance since you’re a Cybelean, and you may not have understood the extent of my generosity.” She held out her hand.

Her embarrassed expression drilled holes into Nils’s eyes. He mulled the idea over in his head before he finally responded, “Can I trust you? Rania told me something of great interest. She claimed that you were a liar. That I should not heed your words at face value.”

“So? You trust her then? She lies all the time, too.”

“We are all liars. Myself included,” he could not meet her eyes as he continued, “I am uncertain as to how to proceed. If only my lord were here to guide me. In truth, I have never been as alone as I am now, and so despite everything, I would rather not stay alone.”

“For a liar, you’re stupidly honest,” she sighed, taking in his words as if they were a breath of air. “That kind of behavior can get you killed. I suppose I was almost the one to do it.” Stepping forward, she pushed the single small crystal that had conglomerated from the glittering pebbles to his face. Softly, yet incandescent with a youthful awkwardness, she muttered, “I apologize for that.”

Nils took her hand with his own and shook it, the crystal clasped between hers and his. “I accept. My lord would approve of peacemaking over conflict. That is the kind of man he is.”

“Enough about your lord already. What do we do about dinner then? I have no intention of going there and doing as they demand. They have no such authority over someone like me.”

“I do not believe it is necessary to do anything that you do not wish to do. We have already acquired two pots of pickles, in any case. It would be best, however, if we could be in their good graces so as to find some common ground.”

“We could trade those for different food with someone else,” she mulled, her hand to her chin, ignoring everything that he had been saying.

“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” came the voice of the old merchant now approaching the two, “Truthfully, you overpaid for those. I’ll find a way to get you some food with the silver you already paid with.”

“See?” Arche glared, hands on her hips, “That is how things should have been done in the first place.”

“Well, no,” the old man added, “I’m being generous because you’re children, but the world is a cruel place even to young, little nobles like yourselves. Do you think we follow the army because we want to, miss?”

“Aren’t you? Aren’t there plenty of ways to earn money in the Empire?”

“For most of us here, we have to. This is a group of exiles, criminals, and displaced. Orphans too frightened to sell their bodies. The hungry seeking opportunity. The spoils of the wars they wage make their way to us. Soldiers seeking the comforts of food, drink, and women and we purveyors of such things don’t have a lot to offer children. You should leave while you still can.”

Nils responded, “I thank you for your kindness, but there is no leaving so long as my lord rests here. I must find a way to wake him from his slumber, and if I cannot, to bury him. There is a mage lord here who is inspired to unravel the secrets of my lord’s immortality.”

Arche stared in disbelief, “Why did you tell him all of that? Have you no sense of privacy?” She hadn’t known what Nils had been promised by her mentor, but she had to wonder if he had been deceived. There was no possible way that Lord Hadler would allow an enemy lord to be revived in the middle of their camp.”

“I was taught to use dialogue to find consensus. Deception has no place in diplomacy.”

“Diplomacy is to turn information into daggers, Lord Nils. Keep it to yourself until it’s necessary.”

“Kids like you shouldn’t be touching knives or diplomacy,” the old man muttered, his hoarse voice steeped in lament, “The world’s cruel enough as it is. The least I can do is deal fairly with children.”

“Fairly… Yes, your sister would have Lady Arche work for her food,” Nils added, “But peeling vegetables is something that disagrees with her sense of smell. I believe compromise is possible and other work can be done.”

“He already said that he’ll give us dinner, Lord Nils. The matter is settled.”

“I shall not dishonor my lord by dishonoring our hosts. When visiting another clan, we are to abide by their rules. Accepting exceptions would be no different from admitting we are incapable of becoming peers.”

“Merchants are not our peers. We do not do things here the way that they are done where you are from. They are lessers.”

“Their customs are no less worthy of honoring.”

“I don’t understand you. Why are you making things difficult for me? I thought we’re friends now.”

“This is what is best for both of us.”

“Enough, enough,” the old man waved, interrupting the children, “The boy’s right. The girl’s right. Chirping in circles like call birds. Listen, I’m telling the two of you to come with us when we leave first thing tomorrow. I don’t think this is any place for children to stay.”

The two glanced at each other and back at the old man, almost simultaneously replying. “That cannot be done,” the boy said. “Absolutely, no,” said the girl.

“What’s possessed the two of you to stay on a battlefield…?”

“The same thing that made me come in the first place,” Arche scoffed, “I plan on becoming the most powerful mage to have ever and will ever live. No one will be able to defeat me in matters physical, intellectual, or social.”

Nils stared at her in disbelief, his mind unable to complete its next thought. What she had said was as absurd as confidently declaring that she would one day become a tree. “For in truth, what has possessed you to say such a mad thing?”

“As if your reason is any better!” she shouted, “You want to revive someone who is already turning into food for worms! What you say doesn’t make sense to me, either!”

“Is of food all you can think?” Nils slung back, “We could have already been eating if you had cooperated.”

“Silence! As my friend, you have to be on my side!”

“That is not how I have perceived it.”

As the two bickered, the old woman approached, balancing three bowls of a fragrant stew on her arms.

Intermagia — Part 3

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Fifty years before the invasion of Cybele, there was a youth dressed in Helikan Academy garbs, warming his hands by a kettle. The rustle and noise of life happening all around the capital city of Helix entered through the open windows of the small studio office situated on the second floor. The whistle of the kettle seemed to indicate the start of his autumn work day. He fetched it from the stovetop and began to pour. He grunted like an old man and complained to nobody, “These menial chores could have been done already…”

“With magic?” interrupted the other man in the room, a small smirk lining his thin, symmetrical face. He was bundled in a fuzzy blanket and peering down his sharp nose as he flipped through a book. He leaned in his chair, balancing with his feet up against his desk.

“Yes,” the boy sighed, “I’m preparing your tea, just the way you indicated.”

“Be sure to give it time to rest a little or you’ll burn the leaves, Alam,” the man warned, his eyes still focused on the pages of the book. His voice was deep and full of authority, but still gentle enough to not be intimidating. It was a nearly grandfatherly tone coming from a man who must be no older than thirty.

“It wouldn’t be a problem if you would consider at least using one of those magic stoves rather than one that must rely on wood. A sprinkle of mnemos and the temperature is set perfectly.”

At this, the man closed the book and returned to a proper sitting position, pointing the spine of the book at the boy, “Ah, but consider if I did. You would never have learned even the basics of brewing tea. You would never have imagined the subtle flavors that can arise from imperfection. Tea would no longer have been a mystery, but something you take for granted. You would sacrifice discovery for the sake of convenience.”

Alam was quiet. This was the reason why he chose to work in this office after all. The man’s philosophy on magic was unlike any of the stuffy, career-minded professors at the Academy. “I just didn’t think my job would be cleaning and cooking… I thought becoming your assistant would be a bit more glamorous.”

“I’m afraid if you are to apprentice under me, you must become like me,” the man said almost apologetically, “Magic is a phenomenon that yet still exists winking from behind a veil, thus it does not fully sit well with me. There is a process to all things, and magic eschews that necessary process for immediacy. I have learned over the course of my scant few years in this world that patience is indeed a virtue.”

To the boy, it seemed the man was always like this — eager to soliloquy but difficult to follow and wished he would never grow up to become an adult like him. Alam responded, “I understand to an extent, but isn’t there wisdom in spending less time on chores and more time on important things like researching intermagia?”

“My chief work is not as such,” the man laughed in baritone, “My work is to teach others to be quick to deny the magic presented to them to witness the magic hidden from them. It is a quirk of circumstance that this should manifest as researching magic. On my morning walk, however, I did take notice of something which I might ask you to refrain from.”

The man stood, shuffling through a cabinet in his desk, “Please do not litter around town.” He gently placed a stack of dirty paper on the desk, all of them printed with a picture of himself emblazoned with “Private Investigator Hadler, Mundane Specialist.” The profile view of his face stared boldly ahead as the man stared down at it.

Alam started to pour the hot water into the tea cup and noted, “I thought you might like that I went through the trouble of using mundane paper. Is it the title? Should I have had it say ‘Specialist of the Mundane’?”

“I merely do not see the need to advertise, Alam.”

“I disagree, Lord Hadler. There are people out there who need the expertise of someone who does not resort to magic immediately and can think in the mundane. Do you remember the Serpent’s Curse incident? Who else but you would have figured out that this so-called curse was actually a murder by strangling and poison? And were it not for your reputation, they would never have thought to recruit your services to discover the truth.”

“Such is the nature of magic,” Hadler waxed poetically, “Ignorance traded for power, but a tax is always collected. If only one could use magic to discover truth, one might find that magic itself offers less than what it costs.”

Alam placed a small tea cup in front of the man, using a sheet of advertising poster as a coaster. “I have much to learn from you, but you certainly do not make it easy.”

“If I were to simplify it, magic and truth are antithetical to one another. Seeking the truth is like illuminating a room. Magic is inert sand formed into a crystal glass lens. It alone can do nothing, but it can manipulate external light into the room. Yet the more one uses it, the more the lens warps until the light begins to play tricks on your mind. The appearance of the room no longer reflects the truth of the room.”

Alam froze in place before he asked, “How does that simplify it?”

At that time, two knocks came from the door downstairs.

“Alam, would you kindly?”

“You mean go downstairs and open the door with my own hands?”

“Thank you.”

Alam sighed and made his way down, but emanating from outside he could hear the muffled complaints of a young girl. He peered outside from the door hole and indeed saw a diminutive, well-dressed figure.

He opened the door, but before he could speak, she barged her way in, “It’s absurd how backwards and unsophisticated this all is. For someone to live in Helix and still resort to such vulgar means.” She pointed a wand at Alam, “This must surely be the correct place.”

The assistant realized what had happened. She was obviously flustered. “Were you attempting to communicate with us through-“

She tossed her long blonde hair behind her shoulder with a gloved hand, her blue eyes like crackling lightning, “Obviously! How can he still not have a listener? I was standing outside your door speaking to myself like a lunatic for minutes with no reply. Such a waste of my time.”

“Well, do you have an appointment, miss? This is the office of Lord Hans Hadler.”

“No, and I would like to speak with him at once. It is of the utmost urgency,” she declared as she placed a her hand gingerly on the railing of the stairs, “The most dangerous man in Helix shouldn’t need appointments like a common physician.” The two locked eyes for a brief instant. That instant lengthened into a few seconds before she sighed, gripped the railing, and started to trudge upwards with a growl, “Of course, I should have expected this.”

“You never quite get used to it, I’m afraid,” Alam laughed politely.

She arrived upstairs only to find the man she was looking for waiting at the top. The investigator bowed, sweeping his blanket across his body like a majestic cape, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She huffed, deeply wishing not to show her physical discomfort, “So you recognize me even like this?”

Alam noticed the air shimmer around her as the once young blonde girl evaporated, leaving behind a small, middle-aged woman with silver hair. The expression she had on her face remained the same — unhappy and impatient.

The researcher nodded, “I fear time has done little to eliminate you from the mind. Alam, this is Lady Concordie. She was a client of mine from before you joined. It was the case about the fraudulent psychic,” he directed an open hand to his assistant, “And this is Alam, my apprentice and… distantly related nephew?”

“My grandfather was Lord Hadler’s mother’s brother,” he said proudly.

The woman remained unreactive. “And I am a client before you had this accursed office of yours.” She pointed her wand like a dagger, “I should have paid you less, Lord Hadler. Or perhaps more so you could afford somewhere less… regressive.”

“Regardless, you sought me out. Come into my office, I’ll have Alam prepare tea.”

As Alam turned to leave, her other hand shot out like a viper and snatched his wrist without even turning to face him. She turned to Hadler, “You do not need to trouble the poor boy. This is precisely why we have magic. Why harm his dignity with such trivial tasks?”

Alam was stunned, glancing between the woman and his master, who seemed to be considering something quietly to himself. Before he could say anything, Hadler spoke, “I believe humans are dignified when we face the unknown. For instance, could it be that you simply do not trust that Alam can brew a finer tea than you could produce with your magic? Perhaps you’d prefer to keep that a mystery.”

“What nonsense is this?” she scoffed, releasing Alam’s now tender wrist with the same ferocity. “I came here in need of help, not to compete with your baffling philosophy. Have him prepare whatever if it will make you listen.”

“Come then, to my office,” the investigator said, welcoming the annoyed woman with a flourish of his blanket cape. “Alam, you can eschew the tea in favor of some of the butter biscuits we have.”

The noblewoman noted, “If you are so cold as to need a blanket, why is your window open, Hadler?”

“My roommate prefers it as such,” he responded airily, sitting himself down and placing the blanket over his lap in a heap.

“The boy?” the woman said, cocking an eyebrow over a concerned look.

“Heavens, no,” Hadler rebuffed, mirroring her concern. “She is much like myself, preferring to do things the old way.”

As if summoned on command, the supposed roommate appeared from the windowsill, a tussle of long, curly, white fur and two perfectly black marbles for eyes, meowing with her entrance as if to announce herself. With a weightless leap, she perfectly snuggled itself within the blanket on Hadler’s legs.

“That’s one mystery solved. How about you try this next one?” she said with a frown that spread to her cheeks.

“By all means,” he said with a small sip of his now cool tea.

The woman leaned in, “Do you remember my foolish son?”

“Foolish is hardly the word I would use to describe the male scion of House Concordie. He is an accomplished mage.”

“Houses and magic are of no concern when it comes to children. Truly, I do not know who he takes after, but my son has caused my lord husband and I no small amount of trouble. His studies were subpar, his etiquette leaves much to be desired, and his rebelliousness has not waned with age. The boy is nearly thirty and he still-“

“Is referred to as a boy,” Hadler interrupted, tenting his hands, “Our time is precious both, so if you’re done ranting?”

She rolled her eyes, “I had forgotten you two were acquainted. Well, there is a supposed murder. My son is the suspect, and he claims to not have done it, and for all of his many faults, I do not believe he is capable of killing somebody, especially his wife.”

“Where is he now?”

“Detained, and speedily. That is why I have come here as soon as possible before he says something else to incriminate himself.”

“More specifically, where is he held? We shall go to him at once. Alam! Cancel the butter biscuits! There is work to be done!”

He was ready for this moment, speeding out of the pantry and nearly leaping down the stairs, the incandescent glow of magic softening his fall. His mentor seemed to take his time however, finishing his conversation with the Lady of Concordie and fishing for his house keys at a leisurely pace.

Intermagia — Part 2

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The squire hoisted both halves of the lifeless body of his fallen lord onto the back of an unfamiliar, saddled horse. He could not help but notice how different this creature looked to the horses of Cybele, an elegant nobleman’s breed as opposed to the stocky workhorses of his father’s fields. He wondered if this would be carrying him to an encampment filled with foreign things he had never seen before. All he knew were wheat and the barracks of the Knights he had served, and even then, he felt as if he knew very little of much at all. What could he offer the scholar-cavalryman?

A wave of heat buffeted his back. More towering blasts of flame appeared far in the distance behind him; the front must have advanced further than he realized. The land that his family had worked for generations would likely not be spared from the devastation. The smell of new smoke penetrated his nostrils and involuntary tears welled in his eyes fixed on the horizon.

The scholar finished writing in a small pocket-sized notebook and glanced back at the boy. “Let us be off to see the end of swords and the beginning of plowshares,” he said.

“There may not be fields to plow when I return,” Nils replied in low tones, “It is fine so long as I am able to bring honor to Sir Glenn.”

“Your commitment to duty is astonishing, and to the point that you were willing to cast your young life aside. What manner of obligation do you owe your master?”

He was quiet for a moment. He never had to think about what manner it was, simply that it was. After all, he was his rightful liege, but there was more to it. “He was the lord of my family’s land, and I believe he was a good man. During the Great Famine, none in his territory suffered, unlike the many who died under greedier men. When my sister was ill with pox, our family could not then afford medicine, but he paid for her care from his own coffers. She was a mere peasant girl without so much as a family name. A man such as that should be honored.” The tears rolled down his cheeks at last.

The man mounted his horse and extended a hand for the squire, who took it and sat atop the slender horse behind the mage. “Your love for your master is evident. I promise that with your help we’ll uncover what the nature of Cybele’s resurrection truly is.”

“Do you think I might be able to see him again? Alive?”

The horse began moving away from the battle front towards the Imperial forward camp. The man pondered the question before answering, “I should hope not, not to bring offense. I have not studied the culture of Cybele before my recruitment, but I recognize that perhaps permanent death exists only for the low caste of Cybele. It is not my intention to say that your master deserves death, but rather that all things must eventually die. It is our obligation as the living to eventually cease living, and none should be exempt from it.”

“He said much the same,” the boy said, recounting the distant look in his eyes whenever they spoke, almost as if he had been speaking to someone besides himself. “But he’s once said many odd things I scarcely understood.”

“For one who supposes himself a mere peasant, you certainly have picked up a knight’s manner of speaking. I imagine I myself would have enjoyed speaking with Sir Labroaig. From your description, I believe despite our vast cultural rifts, he and I shared similar beliefs.”

“He was not one for conversation,” he said, holding fast to the saddle with his legs alone, one hand on his lord’s corpse, one hand on Sir Glenn’s sword, cloudy with dust, dull from the wear of battle. He turned it once over with his fingers, a dexterous motion tempered from years of practice. The ancient blade was forged from an unknown iron alloy, never to rust and never to break, a symbol of a man’s oath taken long before the foundations of Cybele were laid. Nils was quiet as he inspected the blade.

“I think conversation to be a delight. In my youth, I was known among the students of my class as something of an information broker, revealing hidden knowledge for a cost. And, ah, perhaps in my immaturity there was a time when I did do that, but did I do it for the money? That couldn’t be farther from the truth. What possible value can one ascribe to knowledge? Can it even be paid in something as crude as money?”

“It sounds as if you were no more than a gossip.”

“And you sound exactly like my ward,” he said with an unseen smile, “She’s said the very same thing. How old are you, my boy? Perhaps twelve years of age?”

“I do not know my precise age.”

“She is twelve herself. A mere child but precocious in her insight, sure to be a mage of great renown in her future, but alas, the grooves of her soul run deep. Her father was the scion of a wealthy family that fell to ruin, and unable to pay his debts, offered his youngest daughter as a sort of collateral to his creditors. Fortunately, she came under my care before any harm could come to her, but such a heinous betrayal has affected her gravely. When you meet her, be gentle with her.”

“I see,” Nils replied, his attention wandering. He had heard of such things happening in Imperial lands, but it was unimaginable to him. The Cybeleans considered family bonds forged through women, and to sell one’s daughter to repay a monetary debt would have been as likely as selling one’s own mother. “Do all Imperials find it acceptable to do such a thing?”

“You will find that opinions in the Empire are as vast and myriad as the number of stars in the sky, and smooth runs the water where the brook is deep,” the man said, surprising even himself, and more slowly finished by saying, “And in his simple show he harbors treason.” The man felt a pinprick against his back, right below his lowest rib. “I did always think that precognitive poetry ill suits me.”

Nils had his master’s sword pointed against the man, a look of grim determination on his young face. This moment had been on his mind since he dropped the knife, and if he didn’t act now, it would soon be too late. As powerful as intermagia may have been, it could not deflect a strike this close. He had to act before the man took notice. He felt the dampness of sweat from within his gloves.

“Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends,” his target declared, “I am caught unaware and unarmed, and you would have the honor of slaying an enemy mage, yet you hesitate.”

Nils closed his eyes tight. His breath quickened, as did his very soul, as it seemed to beat in his chest and in his ears. Somehow, the mage must have known, but Nils imagined far worse retribution. They all had strange, unfathomable powers after all. “Seeking honor as a lowborn is as absurd as a dog seeking gold,” he said softly, his sword-arm now dangling to his side. He had planned on stabbing the mage in the back and seizing control of the horse to return to Sir Glenn’s manor to complete the burial. This was for his master’s honor, never his own. His mind wandered to the girl under his care. He would be slaying someone else’s master, someone who needed him. “I do not know how the lords of Cybele come back to life, but he tasked me with burying his body should he die in battle. I am bound to obey his final command, no matter what it takes. That is the oath of a squire to his liege. I had thought my only options were to kill you or die in the attempt, but my master’s words ring clear to me even now. His true final command was to cherish my life.”

“Is that so?”

“Do you cherish your own life?”

“Only in so much that I may seek the knowledge I desire,” the scholar laughed, relieved, “I make for a poor soldier in that regard.”

“And what will you do with the knowledge you obtain?”

“I will pass it on to whoever desires it. Without price. Even you, an enemy of the Empire.” The horse came to a stop. “Stay silent, young knight.”

As Nils peered past the mage, he noticed another mounted soldier approaching, regaled in an armor that indicated high rank. “Lord Hadler!” the male soldier bellowed from a distance in a refined tone befitting aristocracy, “You return defying orders? Is there a reason for this?”

“I have captured an enemy combatant for interrogation and a body for study.”

“That is precisely what I mean when I said defying orders. We are to burn thoroughly the bodies of all Cybeleans encountered, or were you intending to join them?”

“Your words, Guard Captain, mean nothing to me. We have been pressed into serving the Empire not to serve as mobile funeral pyres, but to understand the Cybelean esoteric. The mission supersedes the order.”

The captain interrupted him, “That is to be done once the threat of reprisal is eradicated. The order is not to be disobeyed on a whim according to your personal estimation of this mission. How can you alone take responsibility if your actions threaten the success of our operation?” He aimed an enormous metal lance at the mage, but Nils could feel the point trained on his head, “Kill the prisoner, burn the bodies, and return to the front at once.”

“Can you not see how that would undermine the mission?”

“This is why magicians and illusionists have no place in the Emperor’s employ. There is no bargaining. This is a command, Principal Option Hadler.”

Nils clenched tightly the sword in his hand. It wouldn’t be too late to take control of the horse and ride into battle against the armored cavalryman, or flee. The scholar looked back over his shoulder and gave the squire a knowing look. “We are mere minutes from camp. It would be easier to be detained and speak with the Commander about this situation. Do not let panic hasten your hands.”

“Detained?” Nils responded, “It would be more expedient to use your magic to influence his mind or cast a spell of sleep — or just kill him with fire. Are you even a mage?”

“I shall use magic far older, and far more effective than intermagia,” he replied, alighting from the horse altogether, approaching the soldier. Nils watched intently, his eyes focusing as hard as they could on the small glass object the scholar pulled from a pocket within his inner tunic. His mind spiraled with the possibilities in that brief instance. What display of ancient magic was he to witness? He braced himself for anything.

Seconds passed — then minutes. Nils heard only the rush of wind as the two men spoke. Nothing seemed to be happening. Before too long, the captain took the reins once more and bade them, “Very well, I shall escort you to camp myself. Speak of this to no one.”

“Of course, Captain.”

The scholar returned with a smile, “It is done. Let us continue.” He mounted the horse as easily as he dismounted and resumed the journey.

“What happened? How did you get him to comply? Did you use magic at all?”

“Well, yes, but perhaps not what you imagine. Magic is paradox with a result. To give a short lesson, intermagia is well-understood as the redefinition of context. Something, anything, must first be converted into pure and imaginary value, and then redefined. Most people instinctively understand this to be unnatural, and yet we see it in nature all the time.”

“How so?”

“It is simply violence. Mages in the Empire were once socially meager in the way an executioner or a slave trader is today, and yet no one questions the need for executions or slaves. Everyone benefits from it, yet those close to violence are considered crude or unclean.”

“Everyone benefits save for the enslaved. It is outlawed in Cybele.”

“And yet, I imagine there exists slaves in all but name even in Cybele, those who have no relations but to someone they are forced to call a master. Indeed, one can see magic as a form of metaphysical slavery. We are stripping something of its context in order to manipulate it according to our whims. Humans have the context of relationships, roles, ancestries, and to excise them of such vital things is the same as killing them. Magic is a sort of brutality in the same way.”

“No one thinks so lowly of woodcutters and carpenters, and they do much the same thing. What is it then that is so violent about your magic?”

“You are correct. Intermagia is not fueled by the burning of wood. It is human memory that is burned — and rarely ever ours. It would do a mage no good to forget how to cast the spell after all,” he paused to drink from a flask at his hip before continuing, “The citizens of the Empire are drawn into a contract from birth to offer the memories they naturally forget, crystallized. Mnemos crystals are more precious than any natural resource in the world. It is like your very soul given form. Young men will offer mnemos to the bride’s family. Elders will pay for their own funerals with it, in order to lift that burden from their children. And of course, those who study intermagia will purchase it at high value to cast our magic. Some say that it was the first form of currency, and that the word shares etymological roots with the word ‘money,’ but it often isn’t possible to purchase mnemos with base gold or silver.”

“And so to use such valuable objects to burn bodies on a battlefield…”

“Or to use unnecessary magic on a whim would be a flagrant abuse of something irreplaceable.”

The obvious dawned on Nils. It took a while, but the scholar’s explanation made it more than clear. In horror, he asked, “Is that it then? That is what you offered the captain of the guard?”

“Yes, my entire cache of memories,” the scholar said, his gaze unflinchingly set on the horizon where the tents of the Imperial camp had started to come into view. “You see, the guard captain has a son. That son is courting a nobleman’s daughter, and the captain is personally very invested in their union. I have overheard as much while eavesdropping during a communal dinner. In order to prove his son, his family, and his own worth to that nobleman, he would need to bring a substantial amount of mnemos as a bride-dowry. Information is the greatest sword, and the greatest and most ancient magic in the world that only humans are capable of is exchange.”

“Yet does that not mean you are incapable of using magic at all now? That is far too high a price!”

“When you offered your trust to me, I had nothing to offer in return. You even chose to spare my life when you had every opportunity not to. Consider this debt repaid.”

“That does not make any sense. I did not hold you in any such debt. Even if I had, how could you think to make such an imbalanced offer?”

“That is one such paradox that you will find that magic deals in. Debts must be repaid, and yet the price is never well-defined.”

Intermagia – Part 1

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Ringing filled the ears of the squire, every muscle in his body beating like a drum. His eyes flashed open as panic seized his lungs. The words of his knight Sir Labroaig commanded him: breathe.

He forced himself to sit upright, the din of screaming men and brandished metal overwhelming his senses. He felt himself for injuries and felt fresh blood splatter against his tunic. The gritty sensation in his left hand of blood pooling in the dirt caught his attention. Sir Labroaig was dead. His body was split neatly in half as if it were a fruit cut by a master’s knife.

The squire could not help but let out a desperate whimper as he scrambled to his knees, wiping the blood onto his tunic more intently and heaving himself onto Sir Labroaig’s chest. What now remained of his duty as his squire was the collection of his remains. He started to undo the armor, a task he was more than familiar with made harder by the fact that he had never had to attempt this on someone not upright. Never on the still bleeding corpse of his mentor and friend. His words echoed in his mind: “Cherish life. Protect it above all else.”

What was it that killed him? Sir Labroaig was a warrior of unparalleled skill and expertise. He had trained many squires into knights themselves and given everything to defend the small kingdom of Cybele against invasion. He was even protected by a witch’s talisman that is said to prevent curses from affecting him so long as he did not flee battle. No man alive could possibly have inflicted such a vicious, clean strike against him.

As he wrapped the arm of his knight around his neck to hoist his upper body up, he witnessed a distant flash of fire billow into the sky like a blooming flower. He felt the heat even from where he was, and soon after, the stench of smoke and burning. An explosion just like this one was what knocked him out in the first place. The hairs on his neck stood upright as he saw the figure on horseback emerge from the flame.

This was the empire’s ultimate weapon of conquest. These were the forces that Sir Labroaig had warned him of — to avoid at all costs — the Intermagia Riders. They were men on horseback able to wield magic as a weapon on the field of battle. Killing one would earn any knight of Cybele the highest of honors, but if even Sir Labroaig fell before them, then what hope could he stand? Vengeance will have to wait until he could get Sir Labroaig’s body back to camp.

There was no sign of his horse or the horse of his mentor. It must have run off from the attack. No matter, the squire decided, if he had to carry his body back himself, he would. He took a deep breath, and began to walk away from the battlefield when he felt his knees give way. He collapsed onto the ground, cursing himself, when he felt a second tremor. That was no fault of his. The earth itself was shaking.

It was stronger than even the thudding hoofbeats of a cavalry charge. His entire body was pressed against the ground, and it felt as if the entire world was cracking apart.

“Have you eliminated the cavalry captains?” came a feminine voice, stoic and sharp. The squire closed his eyes and slowed his breathing to appear dead. “We are to burn even the bodies.”

A small man with a scholarly build patted the dust from his shoulders, replying, “Burn the bodies? Why go through the trouble? This one is already a mere torso.”

The stoic woman responded, clear now that she was speaking from atop a horse herself, “The Cybeleans practice esoterics utterly unlike our own. They revive the dead and press them into service. Should you ever tour Cybele, you’ll not find a single graveyard. Despite their small, insular society, they remain pernicious.”

The scholarly man scoffed, “What madness has possessed them to defile the resting dead? Rarely have I thought our work any more than a well-paying vanity project of His Highness, but perhaps this is my first true act of altruism. Excuse me while I relish the irony.”

“Enough. You speak in roundabouts. Do not take prisoners. Burn the bodies. That is all.” She rode away without another word.

He began to mutter, “Then again, what difference is there between pressing the dead to fight and forcing an academic such as myself to serve as a walking crematory. It is both equally barbaric.” The scholar knelt down and peered at Sir Labroaig’s upper body. “This one does appear to have been modified somewhat… For a fresh corpse, this man’s organs are in a state of unexpected putrefaction. I would be more interested in taking a specimen to study than reducing it to ash.”

As his hand reached out to touch the corpse, a hand grabbed his wrist. The thin man could not stop himself from jerking back with a cry of terror. “It lives?!”

The squire however did not let go, his eyes and words pleading, “Do not burn his body. I beg of you.”

“A boy?!”

“I am here to retrieve my liege lord’s remains. I do not wish to see him fight any longer. I wish merely to bury him.”

The scholar sighed, “I would fain believe you, boy, truly, but-“

“This is Sir Glenn of House Labroaig. I am his squire, Nils. He has fought countless battles, but he has confided in me himself that he wishes no longer to fight. It is my duty to retrieve his body so that he may be laid to rest at last. Please… allow me to bury him in tact with honor. Please!”

The scholar stood, his hands at his hips with a thinker’s frown, “I am at a loss. I have been told that your people do not believe in burials — that you raise the dead to fight wars.”

After a pause, the squire’s head drooped, his shoulder slumping as if his marionette strings were cut. “Will you not let us go?”

“I do not wish to kill a noncombatant, no less a child. You can go, but I must do as I am instructed and burn this body.”

“Then I must fight you for it.” He unsheathed a small dagger from his side. “I am prepared to die for my lord.”

“My boy, do not leap to such folly. You may go so long as you leave the body with me.”

“I cannot leave without my lord liege’s remains.” His two hands trembled as he spoke, tightly gripping the blade.

“A man of letters though I may be, I am still versed in combat intermagia. Do not do this. You will not succeed.”

“I was told by my lord to know the name of the man I challenge. What is your name, sir?”

“I shall not tell you my name for I do not accept your challenge!” the scholar dismissed with a quiet anger, shocking even the squire into silence, “I do not believe in glory, but I do believe that the sooner this war ends, the sooner everyone can return to living their lives in peace. Do not throw your life away for the dead. In fact, I should say, do not throw your life away even for the living. Have you no idea how precious the very thing called living is, boy? Have you lost sight of it believing you would be brought back with that profane magic?”

The boy barked back, “I am no one worth reviving. They will not revive me, and I will ensure that they do not revive Sir Labroaig.”

The scholar responded, “Will you do anything to bury your liege lord? Even die?”

“Yes,” the squire said with grim resolution.

“Then betray your kingdom and join the Imperial forces. If you swear allegiance to me, then I will take you in as my prisoner and Sir Glenn’s body as my trophy.”

“Betray…?”

“We can bury him once the war has ended wherever you please. Then I will release you from your bonds.”

“I don’t understand. How do you benefit from this?”

The scholar held his hand out as if requesting the dagger the boy had since lowered, “I will have done my duty, saved a life, and have an opportunity to inspect this body closer to understand what they have done to it.”

“You seek to study Sir Labroaig’s remains?”

“I may have called it profane magic, but this sort of esoteric might be unlike anything else in the world. Countless men and women have given their life to the cause of unlocking the secrets to cheating death. I have long suspected that there is no such thing as reanimation magic at all, and that it was a legend spread in order to preserve the kingdom sovereignty of Cybele.”

“A legend?”

“That’s right. Your warriors fight bravely to the death with the knowledge that they will return to life. This makes them particularly vicious and difficult to kill. What if this was all a story in order to drive them to be willing to offer their very lives in battle?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“The alternative is that reanimation magic does not exist and that they have been replacing their fallen warriors with duplicates. The reason why we have been told to burn the bodies is to demoralize your soldiers from fighting. On the other hand, if reanimation magic exists, then we eliminate our enemies forthright. I am telling you this because this may well not be the body of the man you serve.”

The squire dropped his knife, “It cannot be. I cannot believe it.”

“If this man is so renown a warrior, and if this alternative is correct, then even if his remains are not returned, he himself will return to the battlefield. That is why I would like to add you to our number: to see whether or not you can verify this for us. And afterwards, as thanks for your service, I promise you will be free to return to your family and bury this body as you please.”

Another billow of raging flames erupted from around them as Nils stared at the body of the knight. Had he truly almost sacrificed his life to save the body of someone that wasn’t him? Or perhaps, he had many bodies after all? More than anything, he wanted to know, and he wanted to live to see it.

The words of Sir Labroaig returned to him. “Cherish life. Protect it above all else. Above king and country, and above even family. Life itself — your life — must be cherished and protected. If you do not cherish your life, you will end up making the same mistakes that I have.”

He gave a small nod.

The scholar dropped his own head in relief, “Good, good. Now toss that knife away. I shall help you with carrying this body back to our camp.”

Metaphysica Magica

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As man crawled out from the forests and stood upright among the plains, their shivering hands rough and scarred from the struggle to survive, their growing minds churning with complex thoughts and connections, their eyes painfully adjusting to a dawning consciousness, they glimpsed reality, and collectively rebelled against it. They created first structures to shelter themselves, a rudimentary form of manipulating their environment and the weather itself to suit their physical needs. They augmented their own bodies with tools and clothing. Shortly thereafter, they even began the process of taming life itself, unlocking an understanding of animal husbandry and agriculture that gave them control over the acquisition of food.

The astute reader would no longer call this magic, but science; however, science is merely the process by which knowledge is attained. Slowly and methodically, and sometimes even accidentally, science has given mankind a greater understanding of the nature of objective reality. Thus, we must first define what magic is. It is a term in this text used to describe the inexplicable imposition of man’s will over reality. The nature of inexplicability is absolutely essential to the proper definition of magic. If it is well understood the cause by which the effect has occurred, then no longer can it be called magic, for reasons that will be discussed further on in the text.

The predominant school of thought when it comes to the metaphysics of magic is that it can broadly be subdivided into three major kingdoms: objective, subjective, and the intersubjective. The most familiar form of traditional magic to the astute reader is the subjective, the means by which the internal reality of the user is able to override the perceived reality of the user. The intersubjective is the magic that exists due to the beliefs of two or more users, otherwise known as faith. This is distinct from personal faith, which typically only affects perceived reality. The most powerful form of intersubjective magic is the construction of intersubjective constructs, which exist only so long as there is belief in them. Finally, there is the most powerful form of magic, the objective. To date, there is no known understanding of how to perform the objective magic — the undeniable overwriting of reality. Much speculation exists on the nature of the objective, which will be covered in the final chapters of this text.

Without delving into the topic of cosmology, it can be said that the universe operates according to a set of laws. However, perhaps the point of interest is that it is not well defined whether all possible occurrences must function under every established law, or whether the universe merely improvises when there are occurrences that function outside of its laws, thereby establishing a precedent that it can then refer back to, much in the way modern jurisprudence might work in human courts of law. The metaphorical surface has been peeled back exposing some of the laws that the universe operates by, but there have been three that pertain specifically to the kinds of magic that are allowed to exist within the confines of this universe.

The first is the principle of the requisition of sacrifice: nothing can be gained without some loss. The second law of thermodynamics is a physical manifestation of this order, in which the entropy of a system over time can never decrease. In other words, there must be something given up in exchange for the performing of any magic, and due to its nature, it is not ever possible to know what will be exchanged in conducting this magic. This can result in anecdotes of all kinds, and all studies have shown statistically that it is impossible to predict or find patterns in the exchange performed unless certain conditions are met. The reason why this is the very first is because this is what separates magic from science.

The second is the semi-agnostic principle: the universe operates in part according to unknowable, untestable rules. It is not possible to know all things, nor is it possible for all things to be known. A physical manifestation of this order might be seen in analogues such as the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, in which there is a natural barrier of accuracy with regards to measuring certainty properties of subatomic particles. In fact, the entire realm of quantum mechanics and the “fuzziness” of particles lend credence to this universal principle. However, an important distinction must be made with this principle. The universe is not chaotic — the rules by which it operates are simply unaccessible.

The third is the principle of the invocation of the soul — the engine of magic, the storehouse of the self. One of the strange laws of the universe that we have only begun to scratch the surface of is the soul, and it is well known that we do not have a full understanding of what the soul is or how it functions, simply that the self is the beginning of all magic, and what we call the sum total of all that a person is can be called a soul. All experience, all knowledge, all fears, all desires, and all wealth of potential past, present, future is what it takes to describe the soul, which has both an effect on the material and the material on it. To pull the soul into a material phase is how any feat of magic is performed, but with it comes corruption, for the soul, much like the universe itself, thrives off of its unknowability. Once a soul is exposed and known, it becomes fixed and unchanging, or “locked” into a state of certainty. The effects of a locked soul are well documented. Obsessive-compulsion, mania, depression, dissociation, and far more extreme disorders can become manifest. A fully locked soul results in irreversible death.

The conclusion of these three principles is that magic requires a sturdy external conduit through which it can act in drawing out the inner world of the soul into the material, and thus all modern forms of magic can be called a form of theurgy — or the invocation of the divine. Spiritual persons, in the past otherwise understood to be spirits, daemons, or deities, become excellent conduits through which more effective magic can take shape without instantaneously locking the soul of the practitioner. This practice has been the norm since the early ages of mankind, but other branches of magic have existed and died out due to their lack of efficacy in ages past, such as alchemy and astrology. The word “esotericism” once once used to describe these early forms of magic, which were proven to be largely inadequate or incomplete in understanding the universe, an attempt by mankind to grasp the ungraspable. Nonetheless, the groundwork laid by our predecessors gave us now a more complete picture of how our world came to be, where the incorporeal and the material intermingle.

~~~

The clarion chirps of songbirds gently prodded at the girl fast asleep at her desk. Without waking, her cold hands felt her warm forehead, the sensation soothing in ways she did not have the faculties to adequately describe. It felt nice — like someone else’s hand — for a moment, and she could trick herself into believing it. Her eyes opened slowly to let in the light of the mid-day sun as she glanced at the time on her open computer.

It was exactly 11:11 AM.

With a groan, she stretched in her seat, reaching her hands towards the sky. How many days had she been forced to stay at home now? The government had shut down everything in September, which meant it had been almost a month. There were so many opinions online about the situation, ranging from the optimists coming up with fun Halloween ideas for the kids to do indoors, to the pessimists declaring that the lockdown wouldn’t end for another three more months, to the pragmatists finding all of the reasons why it wouldn’t. The opinion she found the most interesting to look at were the conspiracy theorists, declaring that this was all a hoax. That is to say, they were interesting up until a point, and now none of these opinions were all that interesting.

She broke her gaze away from the screen and closed the laptop with another unsatisfied noise. In her boredom, she had been doing some reading on the internet about one topic or another and landed on a strange treatise on magic she had found on a reputable academic journal. Of course, the fact that something like that could get published at all was incredible, her attention instantly captured by the odd Latinized title, Metaphysica Magica. It reminded her of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, but only superficially. Isaac Newton was a genius. There was no author for this paper.

As she read it though, it didn’t seem to be a rigorous treatise on metaphysics or ontology at all, and she could barely get through the first chapter of the ten chapter volume before falling asleep. Perhaps science and philosophy was never her strong suit, despite what her diploma said, but she knew just enough to know crackpot ideas when she saw one. Still, the ideas laid out in the first chapter were fun enough to think about on their own.

She summoned the will to lift herself off the chair as her bones protested, resolving never again to sleep like that again. It was time for breakfast.

Everything had shut down. Offices, gas stations, shops of all kinds… and that included grocery stores. When the announcement was first made, people did not believe it, but the ones who did panicked and bought as much as they could. It was practically ripped from a low-budget, post-apocalyptic movie, but there it was happening in reality. And no one had any idea why. There was no credible information whatsoever, but all kinds of theories floating around online. She just wanted to know why.

Why was it only her city that was placed in such a strict lockdown? Nothing moved in or out of the entire metro area except for what the government allowed, and a daily ration of food was delivered every morning at the doorstep of all residents.

She checked outside her front door and saw nothing out of the ordinary. The box of rations was there. She scanned the doors of her neighbors along the hall and saw that theirs had already been picked up. Surely she wasn’t the very last one to do so… yet the evidence was hard to ignore. With a shrug she shuffled back into her apartment with her goodies.

It was then that her phone had started to buzz in her pocket. It was a unique vibration sequence she set specifically for this one person so she could mentally prepare herself before checking the phone. It was her older sister.

“Hey, what’s up?” she answered nonchalantly with her phone straddled against her shoulder, setting down the heavy box on the kitchen counter.

“Hey, Natalie,” her sister’s voice was urgent, alarmed, “Did you check the news this morning?”

“This morning?” She pulled her phone away from her ear and glanced at the front screen. It was almost noon. “Not this morning. Why? Something happen?”

“Ugh, did you wake up late again? I keep telling you to keep to a normal sleep schedule so you can take your meds on time. Wait, sorry, I know I did that thing again.”

“Yeah,” Natalie said showing as much grace as possible to her sister. Hers was the only real human voice she ever heard nowadays since she started to live alone. She half-wondered whether anybody was real anymore, “It’s fine.”

“Okay, well, check the headlines and call me back. I’d rather you just see it for yourself as soon as you can. Alright, I’m hanging up.”

“Sure,” and with her phone beeped again to celebrate the end of the call. That was about as normal as a conversation could go with her sister.

Natalie looted around inside the insulated box, shoving aside microwaveable meals that smelled of freezer burn to find a banana and a bottle of water, which were always a part of the daily ration. She took a swig of water, rinsed her mouth and drank the contents, heading back to her bedroom where her laptop was.

As the screen welcomed her back, the information page of that bizarre treatise was the first thing to greet her, except she couldn’t help but notice something odd. Almost overnight, it had gotten tens of thousands of new views. That kind of exposure was definitely unusual, but without a second thought, she flipped to a new tab and mindlessly typed in “news” into the URL bar.

The headlines for the day appeared.

As her eyes scanned the page, one of them certainly stood out.

“Four more cities worldwide undergo total quarantine by UN.”

She clicked, double checking the reputability of the news site. They wouldn’t report something so outrageous unless it were true. It’s not hard to verify, and from everything it read, it sounded just like what they had done already here. What was going on…?

Natalie thought about giving her sister a call, but she didn’t really have the energy to deal with her anymore for the day. It was time to gather more information.

“Outbreak of transmissible catatonic dysphasia in four new cities.”

She wasn’t sure if what she was reading was real, but multiple sources all corroborated the same thing. They must finally have decided to let people know what’s going on. Transmissible catatonic dysphasia? She took it apart word for word. So it can pass from one person to another… causes dysphasia… the inability to speak normally. The middle part she looked up just to be certain. Inability to move properly. She kept reading.

Acute Viral Kaulbaum’s syndrome resulting in… echolalia — or babbling — and total loss of motor control, coma, then eventually death. Transmission occurs by exposure to the babbling…? There were a lot of terms she had no familiarity with whatsoever, but she knew what that meant. Just hearing the babble means you run the risk of being infected by it?

She pushed herself away from her laptop at her desk, slamming down the screen far harder than she had meant to. Her breathing grew shallow as her heart beat sent waves of a cold sweat all over her exposed skin. She wanted to believe it was a hoax, but every reputable news agency was reporting it the same way.

There was a fiction story she had heard about that was just like this. It was about an image that was engineered to be so indecipherable to the human mind that just seeing it could make people go insane and die. This must have been an auditory version of that, except hearing the babble makes you repeat the babble, making it transfer between person to person.

It was a memetic virus with a fatality. What was the neurological mechanism behind this and was there a way to stop it? How did it spread? Where did it come from?

Gingerly, she opened the laptop screen again praying that she hadn’t cracked it, promising to never do that again. She kept searching online for answers. Any answers. She was deep in the rabbit hole now, forgetting even to eat the banana she had picked up and left on her desk. It was then that she scrolled across a video capturing an infected person in the throes of it. Curiosity practically gripped her throat, and she forgot how to breathe for a moment. There was no way this should be allowed on the internet. In case it would ever be taken down, she decided to download it just in case.

An unsteady hand reached for the phone.

“Did you read it?” her sister asked on the other end, “What does it all mean?”

“Hi, uh,” Natalie started, trying to form complete thoughts but failing, “I’m still struggling to believe it, but it sounds like there’s a sickness that spreads through speech.”

“That’s what the news was saying. You were always into that linguistics stuff. What should we do?”

“Firstly, don’t talk to anyone. Don’t look at any videos online or expose yourself to any kind of media. They didn’t make it clear how widespread this is or why it started here of all places…”

“Do you think it’s a weapon? Like something some lab made?”

“I don’t know how it could be. There’s no biological component whatsoever. They said you can be infected just by hearing a recording of it. That’s…” she stopped, recalling something she had read earlier. “It’s practically magic. It sounds like an old school witches-and-wizards curse.”

“You’re kidding. I know you’re kidding.”

“Well, the alternative is that none of it is real. That it’s a cover up for something bigger. Or we’re only scratching the surface of what’s really happening.”

“There’s just so little that we know… all we can do is imagine the worst. Have you been eating okay, ‘Lee? The rations getting any better?”

“Yeah, it’s not as bad as the first week, which reminds me, I still need to have breakfast.”

“It’s like 2 PM, how ar-”

Natalie hung up. She said the last bit to bring some levity to her worried sister. And maybe to annoy her, but it didn’t make her feel any better about what was going on. She leaned forward in to her computer and clicked back on the tab with the strange treatise on magic.

It was gone.

She searched the publisher’s site and found nothing. It was removed altogether overnight. Maybe it was some kind of prank that got reported and deleted, but she actually had been interested in reading a little more of it. She then noticed another interesting title: “Breaking Potentiality with the Babbling Plague” Potentiality was something Aristotle had posited, and the basis of modern scientific notions of potential energy and dynamic motion. A really old idea that people thought about for a long, long time.

With a shrug, she clicked it and scrolled up and down to see the structure of the paper. Just then she stopped. She couldn’t help but see it. Right there in the citations it stuck out to her like an elbow bending the wrong way: Metaphysica Magica.

She started reading. It was far too cerebral even for her. However, at the very end, in the conclusions, she spied this:

“The presumption that there is a technical solution to resolving the Babbling Plague is one predicated on an undue empirical worldview of nature. There remains the probability that not all extant phenomenon can be tested and verified, and there is no logical reason to assume as such save for our hubris leading us to believe it. Our mind will seek to wrap itself around inexplicable things and become obsessed with it, and perhaps that is what drives the the plague. It is a basilisk that feeds on our desire to understand, and as we fail to understand these strange sounds, it causes an innate, involuntary response, as if our minds are eternally circling a drain. Only the terminally incurious would be immune should this be true. The irony is that if the potentiality of this conclusion is true, the illness may well change its very nature such that it no longer remains true. Thus far, no known method of inquiry has yielded any tangible results whatsoever regarding this illness. Of those afflicted, all neurological activity appears normal. All other physical examinations have been fruitless. This is perhaps the introduction of the first postmodern illness.”

She cross-referenced the author. He was an epidemiologist from Johns Hopkins, not some crackpot on the internet. It’s a magical disease? Then is any institution equipped to handle this?

The day came and went. She awoke again the same way she had been waking for the past month, but this time, as she leaned up from her desk and tapped the refresh button on her internet browser, nothing appeared. She tapped again sleepily, eyeing the small circle that indicated something was being processed. The sleep had started to over take her again as she stared through half-closed crescents without having to blink.

She checked her phone as well. No connection. No Wi-fi, no signal, nothing.

All of her bills were up to date and paid for, so she didn’t understand. Her sister was always diligent about this kind of thing, so there’s no way she would have cut her off. Natalie had no remaining options but to give her a call.

Emergency calls only.

“This is it,” she thought, “It’s the end of the world.”

For the first time since she moved out of her parent’s home, she felt well and truly completely isolated.

She could feel her hands getting clammy and her head becoming light. “This can’t be happening.” She was supposed to call her doctor soon to renew her prescription of antipsychotics. There were maybe only a week’s supply left. Hurriedly she left her room and went to the front door to make sure today’s food rations were at least there.

Thankfully, they were.

She brought it in as if retrieving a baby orphaned at her doorstep, replacing the empty box from yesterday with the new one.

“You’re imprisoned in your apartment with no connection to the outside world except for this stupid ration box,” she said aloud to no one, “But you can do this Natalie. You’ve gotten through worse. You got away from mom and dad, didn’t you? Got a job and a place even though you’re messed up in the head? Yeah, c’mon, happy thoughts.”

She opened the box and found her daily banana, nearly moved to the point of tears. In this dark and uncaring world, there was at least the relative constancy of this banana.

Bananas are going extinct due to a fungus. The intrusiveness of her own mind.

Natalie chowed down on her banana and uncapped a medicine bottle with a graceful, practiced motion. With the water bottle she received, she downed a pill and checked the time on her now useless phone. It was almost noon.

“Happy thoughts, happy thoughts,” she chanted like a spell, “A tower probably went down somewhere, or there was some mistake. Once ‘Tash realizes my phone is dead, she’ll investigate and solve this.”

In the meanwhile, she decided, she would do some offline activities that she used to enjoy. However, there was neither paint nor a piano in her tiny apartment. No DVDs or books either since all of those were at her sister Natasha’s house, and she never imagined that the entire city would go on lockdown.

She went back to her computer. Maybe there were some built in games on there she could really master. But she was never one for games. Logically, she knew how to play Minesweeper, but she never had the patience for it. Solitaire was an exercise in luck. And the rules surrounding Hearts never made sense to her, nor did she have any desire to learn them.

“Happy… thoughts…” she muttered, when she thought of something. Maybe the last few articles she had been reading were saved somewhere on her computer. She opened a window and started to rummage through the temporary files, a trick she learned from her sister when they were snooping around on their mom and dad’s computer back in the day. She was always the more technologically savvy one, eventually getting a job as a software engineer and eventually marrying another computer nerd she met at a nerdy work conference. Not that she was one to talk. “I mean, I got a degree in linguistics.” Ever since the lockdown had closed down everything, she couldn’t go to work at the cafe anymore, but she had enough saved up to last a few months at least.

Then, she found it. Hidden deep in the crevices of some random assortment of folders was a PDF.

Metaphysica Magica.

She continued to read it.

Two more weeks passed like this. The lockdown had yet to lift. Her phone remained charged but dead. Her medication had run dry the week prior.

This treatise on magic had become Natalie’s bible. She pored through it day and night trying to understand what it was trying to say, until that morning, she woke up, and understood exactly what it was trying to say.

The noises in her apartment at night were getting worse as people were starting to agitate stuck inside. Within those two weeks it was clear that she was not the only one who no longer had phone or internet service, and she had realized also that this was a deliberate measure to ensure that the Plague would not spread by any means necessary.

How many more cities were under quarantine? Who knows? Knowledge, she learned, was a translation of truth into an untruth to be stored within the mind. Chaos that was turned into the convenient and useful illusion of order. Grasping impossibility was only attainable by storing truth within the more powerful soul.

She knew her condition was growing worse each day without the antipsychotics to calm her down, but she hardly cared. What did it matter anymore unless something could be done about the Babbling Plague? Just hearing it can cause it to spread, and contracting it will cause you to repeat it?

This was magic, pure and simple, and a natural byproduct of the utilization of magic. Whoever had tried to cast the spell failed, and created this magical virus instead, and the fact that the government reacted so quickly and efficiently to it instead of denying it due to its sheer impossibility meant that the government was behind it too.

But if the government was dabbling in magic, then they might already be aware that she knew, and if that was true, she wasn’t sure if she could trust the food they were sending her anymore. One drop of poison anywhere and that would be all it took. Even the banana that she had grown to rely on for spiritual comfort had betrayed her.

Suddenly, there was a knock on her door.

Her heart started to pound in her ears.

Impossible, had the lockdown been lifted? She had covered her window in paper and tape to prevent anybody from peering in, but these were extraordinary circumstances. She peered outside onto the street and saw no one.

She wanted to answer the door but her legs were frozen to the seat as her mouth hung open.

“Natalie! Open the door!” It was her sister’s voice. There was something strange about it.

No, that was definitely impossible. She wouldn’t be allowed inside the city for no reason. Unless the lockdown actually had been lifted? Were things calming down outside? Or it wasn’t her sister at all.

She stepped outside her room and yelled from across the hallway at the front door, “Who is it?!”

“Who do you think?! Open the door, Natalie! I’m serious!”

“How are you here?!”

“I can tell you once you let me in, alright?”

She approached the peephole on her door and looked through only to find that it had been blocked. There was no way of knowing what was on the other side of that door.

“You’re not there. There’s no one here. I’m just hearing things.”

“Happy thoughts, Natalie, I’m right here.”

“No, no, no, you can’t be here. If I open that door and you’re not standing in front of me, I’m going to lose it.”

“Open the door.”

“You better be right there!”

“Open the door.”

She felt the shiver running down her spine. Tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t bring herself to even touch that door knob, no less turn it. Her stomach turned as she screamed at the top of her lungs, but she wanted so badly for it to be real.

Then she woke up.

A dream? A nightmare?

“Wait, that really did happen…” she started to remember, “I opened the door.”

And no one was there. She had broken down sobbing. She remembered the taste and smell of vomit. That day, she holed herself up in her room and cried until it was night.  That was a month ago. It had been nearly three months since she’s last seen or heard from another human being. It was getting to be too much. Her mouth felt dry.

Every day she had started to keep a digital journal to make sure she wasn’t losing track of the days. Around Day 44 it had all started to say the same thing, so she stopped and just started keeping track of the days in the text file. Today would be Day 62, give or take a few days.

Natalie went to the door and pulled in the rations like a ritual. She unboxed it and pulled out the usual banana. She walked back to her room peeling it mindlessly, biting into the inner flesh when you discovered something strange. A sharp, sour sensation in her mouth.

Did she bite her cheek? It wasn’t quite that feeling. It was more like… She spat out the chewed up remains of the banana. Worms. Or maggots. Horrible, fat, white larvae squirming and writhing on the ground before her. She could practically still taste the sour, pungent rot that pervaded her mouth, sliding down her throat. With a gag, she rushed to the bathroom and began to throw up everything in her stomach, which didn’t consist of much. She ended up just dry heaving at the toilet bowl.

Her mind was racing. Was someone sabotaging her meals? Poison? That shouldn’t be possible. It wasn’t, she decided. Her mind had to have been playing tricks on her again. She picked herself up off the floor with a wipe of her chin and marched back to her room to clean up the mess. With a gulp, she dropped down to one knee and carefully inspected the mushy banana on the ground and found that it was devoid of any life.

Was this all in her head? It felt so real. She turned her hand over and saw a worm wriggling on the back of her palm. With a shriek, she swatted it away, but it remained. It wasn’t on her palm at all — it seemed to be under her skin.

She wanted to throw up again. “Happy thoughts, Natalie. You’re seeing things,” she closed her eyes and tried to erase the sensation of it crawling and making its way through her insides. Burrowing and tunneling through her flesh. She opened her eyes again and saw that it was gone.

Day 91.

Every so often, she heard her mother speaking. Usually they pointed out small insecurities from her youth. Nagging to clean her bathroom, or pick up the clothes from her room. Even in her isolation, she hated to hear her voice. It was like nails on a chalkboard. What she hated more was that it sounded just like her own, aged a few dozen years.

But what made it worse was that in the corner of her eyes she thought she saw her. And when she would turn her head to make sure, it would disappear.

“Natalie, may I come in?” her mother’s voice seemed to call out from a distance as Natalie laid in bed supine.

Just then, she saw her mother sitting at the foot of her bed. She was much younger than she should have been, like the young mom that she remembered from her childhood. A little more carefree. A little less stressed out from advancing her career. Pleasant.

“Are you doing okay?” she asked, “Can I get you anything?”

“You’re not real,” Natalie muttered, curling up into a ball.

“I know, but I could be. Just let me in and let me make it all better.”

“Mom was never like this.”

She sighed, looking away as if into the distance, “But I could be. I can be right here with you, the perfect version. The one you’ve always wanted. The one you’ve fantasized about ever since you were a little girl. I’ll support you and encourage you and tell you everything you wanted to hear.”

“Stop, stop, stop, stop…” Natalie growled, “I can’t play pretend anymore. You’re something I used to indulge in as a child. Every time I did, my mom would freak out and tell me not to trust my own imagination. Of course, she would. If someone made up some ‘real version’ of me and pretended that the real version was fake, I would be scared too.”

“But your mom isn’t here right now. It’s just you. What’s the harm?”

Natalie grew silent. What was the harm? But she knew already, she merely did not wish to vocalize it and make it real. “Mom…?”

The vision of her mother smiled, “That’s right, baby, come here. Give me a hug.”

Her hand reached out and swiped at the air. The vision disappeared.

She let it happen again. Every time she did, it brought more pain than the comfort that was promised to her. And yet, she still let it happen. She collapsed forward onto her bed, her arm hanging lifelessly over the side of her bed.

“The principle of the requisition of sacrifice…” Natalie recounted, as if in a trance. She dragged herself to the kitchen, barely lucid. Something of worth must be sacrificed for magic to take place. What did she have that was worth anything to her? She drew a knife from a wooden block on the counter. In ancient times, blood was used as the medium by which all magic was performed. The anguish and suffering of blood sacrifice made covenants between men and spirits. She raised the knife over her arm.

“Do it,” she heard her mother. This was a memory from a long time ago. “Go ahead, kill yourself. Make everything that your father and I sacrificed for you and your sister go to waste. You ungrateful child! What did we do wrong raising you?”

Tears streamed down her cheeks, hot enough that it felt like boiling blood. She did not want to see her mother.

It was now day 98.

“Natalie, it’s alright,” a voice said, “Happy thoughts.”

“Thanks,” she replied, “I’ll be okay.”

“Good, we wouldn’t want you to have another episode like that.”

Who was the voice? She didn’t care anymore. Even if it was just to herself, it was someone to talk to that she knew wasn’t infected by a Babbling Plague. She decided to accept the company.

“What shall you be doing today, Natalie?”

“I don’t know,” she said out loud, “Anything I want except leaving.”

“What do you want to do except leave?”

“Kill myself.”

“Now, now, that’s no way to speak. Why don’t you try something different today, Natalie?”

“Like what?”

“Remember how you used to draw?”

“I don’t have anything to draw with.”

“Try drawing on the computer. There’s a program that lets you do just that.”

“It’s awful and inaccurate.”

“Try anyway.”

She forced herself over to the computer to do as the voice commanded. She wasn’t lucid anymore to understand why. That left her mind and body days ago. Everything had become routine. Too scared to venture out. Too scared to let anyone in. It was just her and the voice that she was too afraid to give a name to. And it even warned her not to.

“As soon as you give me a name, I’m real. Don’t do that to yourself, Natalie.”

But her relationship with the voice was weird, and she knew it, she just accepted the weird. It wasn’t like the other voices she used to hear as a child that would whisper the most awful, evil things. Her parents were convinced she was possessed by demons and tried to have her exorcised on more than one occasion, a memory she had painfully repressed until she went to therapy in high school. Now she had gotten to a place where she acknowledged that her parents didn’t know how to help, but clearly did their best to, no matter how ill-concocted their plans were. That didn’t mean it was easy to talk to them, but now she would do anything to hear their voices again. Even her mom.

She opened up an application that let her doodle on the screen with her mouse. She started to draw a little face. It wasn’t half bad, but she wished more than anything that she was using her hand and a pencil.

“That’s you,” she said to herself.

“Nice, but I would stop there. Any more detail and you’re going to visualize me, and that is not a direction you want to go.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am a part of you that exists in the subjective space. Draw me out into reality and tether me into reality and I’ll become something that might exist in the intersubjective. That’s a scary place to be for something like me.”

“And what exactly is something like you? You’re saying you’re not just a figment of my deranged imagination?”

“I am, and you should keep it that way. Once something is real, it doesn’t just go away whenever you want.”

“Right,” she said quietly, lazily drawing the rest of the voice’s features.

“Oh, I’m a woman?” the voice asked, “I wasn’t aware.”

“I always heard you as a woman’s voice.”

“Did you now?”

“You speak the same way my therapist does. Same weird little mannerisms like saying ‘shall’ a lot.”

“Have you ever thought that you’re conjuring me with a comforting voice as a self-soothing mechanism? You have schizophrenia, not dissociative identity disorder.”

“That’s something she would say.”

“Is that what she looked like?” the voice asked referring to the now complete drawing. It was fairly accurate representation of a young woman dressed in a pastel blue polo and had short black hair in a bob.

“No, my therapist was an older lady with a tight perm. It’s how I imagine you looking though.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You don’t like my drawing? Or the way you look?”

“No, I don’t like what you’re doing. This isn’t a good thing for you to do.”

“Relax, what’s the harm? If no one else ever finds this, it’s like you never existed at all. That’s how intersubjective magic works. It requires more than one person, and as far as I’m concerned I’m the only one here.”

“I can’t stop you, but have you thought about what might be going on in the outside?”

“As far as I’m concerned, the outside doesn’t exist anymore. I’m the only thing that exists. Every so often a magic box appears at my doorstep. When I try to see who it is that drops it off, I get yelled at and hit and forced back inside. It’s just a part of the rules of this universe.”

“Observable reality isn’t something you can just ignore, Natalie. And solipsism isn’t a way to live either.”

“As soon as I do, everything about this situation becomes a lot easier. Once everything is back to normal, I’ll go back to normal. Whatever that means. I’ve never known what normal was like.”

“You don’t know that. But what you do know is that eventually, objective truth will win out over subjective lies. How many times have you been disappointed because you couldn’t make your internal musings an external reality?”

“That’s not true. Enough people believing in something can make it come to life. That’s the intersubjective magic.”

“But only you can interact with me.”

“And only I exist in this universe; therefore, you are as real as I am.”

“This logic is twisted.”

“Pray I don’t twist it further.”

The screen itself seemed to speak to her. It was as if she could trick the face to move. Or maybe it really was moving. “Don’t do this. You’re gonna completely lose your grip on what’s real and what’s not”

The smiling face looked just like her sister during her days in high school. She always wore her straight, black hair in a short bob. It would have looked so much better long, but she hated to maintain it. It was now a frown.

“Hi, so you’ve brought me out.”

“Hey, Natasha.”

She muttered something under her breath in Arabic. “You’ve really done something stupid, Natalie.”

“Why is everyone saying that?”

The vision of her sister reappeared sitting at her bed, now with a full body and all, “You’ve gone completely delusional, and even while you’re seeing and hearing things, you’re acting like it’s real. But I don’t blame you. You’ve been isolated for so long in this dusty apartment. Seriously, you need to open the windows and clean a little.”

“This is how I imagine you. Always telling me what to do. Gently, but it was so rare to have a genuine conversation with you when we were kids.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to be the firstborn. I had to take care of you, because you didn’t know how to take care of yourself. I could argue that you still kind of don’t.” She sat up a little in her sitting position, pleased, “You really miss me, huh?”

“I do. I’m going mad in here, ‘Tash. I think it’d be easier to just starve myself and end it all, but I’m too scared of the pain that comes with dying.”

“You still have it on your computer.”

“It?”

“The video you downloaded. You were curious what would happen if you heard it, right? Curious whether it was real? Curious whether you were one of the few immune ones? If you were, you could watch the video, build up an immunity, and leave the quarantine.”

“No, no, no,” she shook her head. “I’m losing it. I’m losing it.”

“Don’t take comfort in your hallucinations, Natalie,” the voice said, just like her therapist. The same warm, grandmotherly tone, despite the fact that she was maybe in her late forties, “You need to keep yourself grounded, and you cannot control them. If you become emotionally invested in them, you will be disappointed every time.”

“Go ahead,” the vision of her sister goaded, “Watch the video. Expose yourself to the Babbling Plague.”

The sensation that Natalie felt at that time was like the walls of her room had started to spin in one direction, and yet never actually move. She closed her eyes and turned into a little ball, her limbs shaking as adrenaline coursed through her entire body. Please go away, she thought, to herself. Please leave me alone now. I’m sorry for everything, just please go away.

That night, when the tremors stopped, the apartment was quiet, and she could hear the soothing sounds of fall crickets outside, she untangled herself from her bedsheets and stumbled into the kitchen for a bottle of water.

What if, she thought to herself, I did watch that video? But only a little bit at a time?

What if, she said aloud this time, I could vaccinate myself against it?

“Don’t do it,” the voice said again, as if eavesdropping and interrupting.

“Now you tell me not to watch it?”

“I never told you to watch it. I even warned you not to visualize me or you’d regret it.”

“Okay, who are you this time? Are you going to appear as my sister and try to kill me again?”

“I can’t say for sure I know who I am, but that’s hardly the question to ask. Call me your sense of self-preservation, or whatever.”

Suddenly, a different voice, although she couldn’t hear it in the same way audibly, but it seemed to be a different person, started to speak, “In the era before this one, when we were believed in as spirits, demons, jinns, or gods, your ancestors heard us and spoke to us.”

A third voice, “We whisper to you the secrets of this world. The origin of the Plague. Mastery over self and spirit.”

A fourth, “We are summoned by desperate souls who have given up on merely what they see and smell.”

“Crap, I’ve totally lost it.”

The voices started to blend together until she could not tell who or what was speaking, “All will be revealed. Seek the Truth. Give up on the World You See and reach into the World Unseen.”

“The World Unseen…”

“In order to see it, you must hear the incantation that frees the mind. Liberate your soul to unlock your inner eye, and bear witness to what lies beyond physical existence. The video is the key.”

“The video.”

“Watch the video.”

“If I watch it, I’ll be free?”

“To roam the stars.” They said in unison. “To witness the beginning and end of the universe. To become a god, with everything at your disposal. You will be free from all illnesses physical and mental. All bonds of earthly need like food and water. You will become your True Self and experience metaphysical completion, and then you will create the universe as you deem fit.” They said in unison. “You will have achieved the objective magic.”

“I… I’m scared.”

“Do it!” The voice of her mother.

“Why are you like this?!” The voice of her father.

“We sacrifice so much for you, and you can’t do this for us?!” The voice of her mother.

“Stop wasting your time with these childish things and just listen!”

“No,” Natalie whimpered, a child, “They aren’t imaginary, they are real…”

“You’re too old to still have imaginary friends,” the voice of a classmate who she thought was her friend, “Stop talking about them.”

“Hey, freak,” the same friend, years later in middle school, “Why are you so quiet, huh? Not gonna answer me? Think you’re too good for us?”

“You will be free from these memories, too.” They said in unison. “All pain will vanish. All suffering will cease. All conflict and all hypocrisies, gone. Communicate with your soul. Become one with the nothing and watch the nothing shine.”

“Watch the video?” she muttered back, “But… I don’t want to…”

Her sister started to speak now, “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” This was a distant memory. From when she had her first serious mental break in junior year of high school. Her sister had come to pick her up from the counselor’s office since her parents were both busy working during the day.

“I’m sorry?” the junior Natalie said.

“I know I made things hard for you. It’s my fault for pushing you like this, but it’s all I ever knew growing up with mom and dad, too.”

“It’s fine.”

“So if there’s anything you don’t want to do, you don’t have to do it. I’ll cover for you. I’ll get yelled at by mom, so from now on, at least talk to me because I’m on your side. You… you can yell at me if you want, too.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine!” Natasha said, not taking her eyes off the road, her bangs pulled back in a high ponytail. That’s how she wore her hair in college, Natalie remembered. Her perfume was just deodorant back then. Details started flooding back in like the way the her sister’s car would screech at every intersection stop and rock to a halt. “You tried to kill yourself at school!”

“You’re exaggerating. It was just a prank.”

“You’re a smart, creative, crazy little genius who could change the entire world if she felt like it, but you just never push yourself to do try… And then you go and pull this stunt trying to throw away all that talent down the drain, traumatizing all those people… How did it not cross your mind how messed up that is?! Do you think your own family wouldn’t miss you? Your friends? You would be leaving behind countless people whose lives would be made worse by your suicide. It’s so… ignorant! A-And selfish…”

Natalie remembered wanting to hit her as she was being lectured, but then, she heard the shift in her tone.

“You must have been so lonely. All this time, you never once told us how you felt because you couldn’t. We never gave you the space. We never asked, maybe because we never cared.” She was openly weeping.

“Hey, ‘Tash, keep your eyes on the road…”

“I never listened.”

“You’re still not listening, you know…”

“But I’m listening now. So tell me what you want to do, really?”

“I want to get out of this car and be alone.”

“We can go somewhere together, but I can’t let you be alone.”

“I want to be alone.”

“I can’t let you be alone.”

“You said you would let me do whatever I wanted.”

“Please, I know I’m being selfish right now, too, but I don’t want you to disappear. I care about you too much to let you do that. I don’t know how to express it sometimes, but I need you to know that I love you.”

“It’s too late to change anything.”

“It’s not too late.”

Natalie awoke. Day 127. Her bed was the safest place in the world.

Four months since the quarantine.

The blue birds were still chirping, as they did every morning. She checked her phone in case service was restored.

Almost like magic, it was. Her heart skipped a beat. She could almost not believe it. Tears involuntarily came to her eyes as she saw how many messages she had missed in that time. Nearly two hundred. More than half were from her sister. There were a few messages of encouragement from old friends who had moved away, wishing her the best, and a few even from her mother and father. It was almost too good to be true.

Her fingers shivered as she dialed her sister’s number. It was the only phone number she had memorized by heart besides her own. She had tried so many times before during the lockdown. Please be okay, she begged to no one in particular. Maybe she begged God.

The phone rang and the world was still. Even the birds seemed to stop chirping. Please don’t be a dream, she begged again.

“Oh my goodness, Natalie! You got service again! Are you okay?!”

Natalie couldn’t help herself. She laughed as hard as she could.

Natasha started to weep, “Don’t cry, it’s gonna make me cry, too!”

Natalie kept laughing, nearly wheezing, “I’m alive!”

“Good, we’re all okay, too… Ever since your phone went dead, things got worse before they got better. A lot of people died out there.”

“Hey, Natasha,” Natalie said through labored pants, “Are you real? Please, be real. I don’t know what’s real or not anymore.”

“I’m real, I promise.”

“Tell me something I could not possibly know, but that I could verify after you tell me.”

“What… would that be?” her sister was hesitant. “Natalie, it must have been so hard for you all alone…”

Natalie thought for a moment but couldn’t come up with anything. She could be trapped in a delusion so powerful that reality itself could be conformed to whatever it is she wished. She couldn’t trust her own senses anymore.

“I don’t know if I’m really talking to you right now.”

“Natalie, the lockdowns will be lifted in just a week. I’ll come see you then.”

“How do I know that though?! What if you’re just all in my head… and then even a week will pass and I think I’m talking to you but I’m not, I’m still alone in this apartment by myself talking to a wall!”

“Natalie, calm down, I know you’ve had it rough, but you survived! It won’t be much longer, I swear on my life.”

She hung up again.

How could she know what she was experiencing was real? Did it truly matter whether it was or not? Of course, it did. It did matter to her, but it was becoming impossible to differentiate between what she saw and what other’s saw to now… she wasn’t sure if she could trust what she heard from the account of others. They were all in her mind, for all she knew.

“I warned you about solipsism, didn’t I?”

A vision of her sister reappeared at her desk, sitting in the chair.

“Did that just happen? Please, tell me. I’ll trust anything you say right now, so please tell me the truth.”

“What if I told you it didn’t?”

Natalie tugged at her hair and groaned, “Then I’m going to kill myself right now.”

“What if I told you it did?”

“Then I’ll kill myself later.”

“So what difference does it make?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I’m so broken.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to know things with certainty. I want to be able to build on top of something I can trust in for sure, but there’s nothing. I can’t rely on my own senses, how am I supposed to trust anything then?”

“What a dilemma,” the vision of her sister had the voice of her therapist. At some point it morphed into her, “You should think hard about what you’ll choose to trust. Everyone chooses at some point, whether they realize it or not. So I’ll change my question. What do you want to believe in?”

“The truth…”

“You can’t anymore. You’ve unlocked the subjective magic. Truth might exist, but you’ll never be able to know it when you see it. Too much of your own fluff around it,” she made hand motions as if drawing a cloud. “It’s like your own soul has been untethered and unlocked.”

“If I just wait a week,” Natalie whispered, “Just one week.”

“If you do and your sister does not come, what then?”

Natalie cried out in agony. “What do you want from me?!”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“I want to leave!”

“Then leave.”

She hobbled over to the door, her legs having gotten weaker from the months of lack of movement. She put on her shoes for the first time in four months and opened the door, brushing past the rations box that was left there from this morning. She started to walk down the hall towards the stairs of her apartment building. She exited the complex.

Was she even outside, or was she still inside her room?

She started to walk down the street. She thought she would enjoy the sensation of being outside, but she was in a complete daze, hardly noticing the bracing wind buffeting and billowing her messy clothes.

There was no one on the streets at all. It was as if she was the only person left in an abandoned city. The entire world. The universe. Barren.

No cars, and yet the traffic lights kept blinking on as they always did.

As she entered a major intersection, her legs growing weary, she spotted another person. It was someone dressed in military gear from head to toe with a helmet over his head that covered his entire face. Soundproof.

Without a word, he used hand signals to stop her, but she did not heed them. Two more armored men appeared, doing the same thing, approaching her silently. One of them trained his pistol on her.

One of them motioned to the other, pointing to her, pointing to their mouth, and then patting the air, adding a question mark with his finger at the end. It was a hand signal for babble. The other made a signal with two fingers towards his eyes, and then away, adding a circle around his mouth. They nodded.

She knew sign language when she saw it, but she didn’t care. She just continued to walk.

They held up a written sign in front of her, demanding that she return home.

And she walked right past them. The one with the gun holstered it away and grabbed her by the shoulder, moving to detain her.

Something in her jiggled awake. Jolted as if from a dream, but the man before her no longer was merely wearing a helmet. It seemed to her like she was facing an automaton — a soulless robot that was programmed in a certain way. She struggled away from him, falling to the ground from the effort.

For some reason, she came to the conclusion that they were going to capture her and experiment on her. Expose her to the Plague to see how she’ll progress. And so she scrambled to her feet and began running in the opposite direction. They made chase after her, but she was unencumbered while they had all manners of equipment on them. If she had looked behind her, she would have noticed that they split up and encircled her, and it wasn’t too much longer before she was trapped between them again. Before she could do anything more, she was tackled and hit the ground.

The pain, she realized, was very real. That was hard to trick herself to believe it wasn’t.

As things stood, they had to assume she was infected. One of the early symptoms was entering a dissociative fugue state, which they weren’t trained to diagnose, but they could guess to a fairly high accuracy whether or not someone was in their right state of mind. And so they arrested her and prepared to transfer her to a special holding facility for the infected.

As they arrived, she noticed that all personnel were equipped with silencing helmets. The severity of the sight sparked her imagination. She expected the detainment area to be a pit of unwell people, all babbling and mad, infecting each other again and again, desperately communicating in a language none of them understood. She imagined their tortured expressions, clawing for freedom, the smell of feces and body odor, the heat emanating from their bodies. She had imagined Hell. As much as she suffered to avoid this fate, she had run right into it.

Or perhaps she didn’t. She’ll wake up again any moment now inside her room.

“You can. Disconnect yourself from this world. Dive deep into your own and you’ll be free of all of this. This will all fade, and you will bend all things to suit your needs. Simply let go of what is holding you back.” The spirits chanted in unison. “Become your own god. Unlock true magic.”

“What’s holding me back?”

Her sister. If only she had just waited in her room for her sister, but it’s too late.

“It’s not,” she heard her sister say. “It’s not too late.”

The guards lead her to a soundproof room. It wasn’t quite the Hell pit that she had been imagining. They brought her there and confiscated her belongings, presumably to investigate who she is.

Fully isolated in a room with padded walls save for a small camera, a toilet, and a bed, she wondered what to do now. Whether or not she would die in this room. She had gone from one point of isolation to another, and so in the grand scheme of things, nothing’s changed.

Maybe this was where she belonged. Or maybe this was her mind punishing itself, and she would still wake up back in her own apartment moments later. Regardless, she remained quiet. There was nothing to say. The voices had gone silent as soon as she entered her cell.

Her entire life she had been plagued by the babble of voices of people she knew and did not know. She appreciated the quiet.

It was then that she noticed a small touch screen at the door. She had thought it was a window. No, it might be just a window. She couldn’t trust what she saw anymore. Still, her finger reached out and touched it, and it changed, responding to her touch.

There’s no possible reason for there to be a touch screen here. If they saw her absent-mindedly poking a glass window, they would know for sure she was crazy. She went to the far corner where her bed was and lied down.

But what if it was? What if they had set this up so that people could communicate back and forth without having to use verbal sounds? But it wouldn’t make sense for a touchscreen to be built into the door, would it? Unless renovating an entire wall for such a thing would be too difficult, so they fit it into a door.

Her head had started to hurt thinking about it all. She wanted… above all else… just to see her sister in the flesh one more time and to know it was her.

“If you let go of that, you can see me.”

No, she denied, it wasn’t real. She can’t be tempted by what’s just in her mind anymore. If her sister saw her in the state that she was in, she would be utterly heartbroken.

“It’s too late for that now, just accept it.”

“It’s not too late,” Natalie declared defiantly, “Once they hold me here for long enough to see that I’m okay, they’ll let me go.”

“They’ll kill you. They’ll inject you with poisons. They’ll fill you up with gas.”

Nonsense. All nonsense. It’s paranoia. It’s my brain trying to keep itself alive like it’s supposed to but it’s overreacting. Like an immune system that’s eating itself. My own mind is eating itself in order to protect itself.

“They want to harvest your organs and use your flesh to feed the quarantined.”

Enough is enough. Can you please just give it a rest?

She appeared opposite of her. That is to say, she appeared to be looking at a mirror on the door.

“I’m just trying to keep us safe!”

“That’s nonsense. This is all nonsense,” Natalie said to herself.

“I don’t have to make sense in order for me to exist. The nonsensical is merely on the other side of a boundary defined by the limitations of the human mind. What you define as reality isn’t what is reality, it’s merely what you are capable of grasping. All of the fine grains of sand that trickle pass the sieve of your intelligence still exist. This plague that’s halted human progress still exists, even if it doesn’t make sense. It’s how you interact with that reality that you have any control over.”

“That’s right. Everything you’re saying is something I already know, but that doesn’t mean…”

“I’ll tell you what it means! It means you don’t control the truth! You only control your perception of it! And right now, you’re doing an awful job of perceiving the truth, so I have had no choice but to panic!”

Natalie grew silent as she berated herself from the mirror.

“You thought this was a touchscreen computer for a second, didn’t you?! Wake up! You’re staring at your reflection in a window! Of course, I had to intervene by this point because you’ve long since lost your mind. You ignored everything I was saying and indulged in your delusions, and then you ignored reality and just left your room now to be locked up like this! Now, who knows what will happen to you!”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to think properly! No more magic and flights of fancy! If you’re going to live, you need to live in this world, not the one in your head. Ignore the other voices in your head!”

“I’ve been trying so hard to do that.”

“If I’m here, that means you’re not trying hard enough. Do something to make them know you’re not insane or else I’m gonna keep going ballistic!”

How? All she had was a camera pointed down at her, and there’s no way they were going to record her voice given the nature of the plague. She stepped back and started to scheme, but nothing seemed to occur to her. Could she write something down?

It was then that her vision seemed to blur. For a moment she saw the interior of her apartment.

It couldn’t be. “Am I still in the apartment?” All of this… even the feeling of gravel against her forehead as she was forced to the ground, the burning of her lungs as she ran out of breath.

“Am I not real?”

None of it was real. Her entire life was a fabrication that existed within nothing. Her struggles and her torment meant nothing outside of her, and the universe did not care. She did not exist to the universe. She was in a bubble of fiction suspended in the air by a buoyancy that was destined to fail. Reality was rejecting her.

The walls exploded outward around her, revealing everything. Diegesis. The word flashed into her mind. All things are narrated and observed. Her life is a story written and played back endlessly, and she is a character in it. The earth fell away below her and the sky itself receded into a dot. The stars twinkled as she entered an eternal free-fall.  And it was there that she met herself again. A brilliant, resplendent, more perfect version of herself.

“Am I dead?”

“You’re very, very close.”

“What do you mean?”

“How best to explain…? Do you know what caused the Babbling Plague?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you mind if I reveal it to you? If you accept my answer, and in return accept me, then you’ll have tasted a truth you’ve never heard before in reality. You know what that means, right?”

“I know.” She didn’t know why she knew, but she knew.

She cleared her throat, “Metaphysica Magica is a text that was written by someone a long time ago in 9th century Al-Andalus. It reveals certain things that denizens of this universe aren’t meant to know. Once you know it and accept it, you start losing your grip on this reality in order to enter your own. To the observer of this reality, you appear to go crazy, babbling about something until you die. There was a Moorish philosopher that discovered these ‘principles of magic’ and wrote them down, eventually going mad in the process. Those who heard his ramblings went mad themselves and eventually spread it around until it was called the Taeun Altharthara, or Plague Babble. It was eventually contained by the sword of the Umayyad Caliphate and his work was presumed totally burned.”

“No way…”

“Yes, you read a copy of that text that someone in the modern day discovered and transcribed. Those who study it and become obsessed with it eventually develop their own strain of the Plague, pulling innocent people into their personal reality so that they won’t be alone in their madness. It’s quite sinister. Magic is something that can never mix with human beings who have desires, because it will inherently become corrupted by any desire whatsoever, including the desire to both isolate into your own world but remain connected with others. You might think of it as ironic, but it’s because you only understand magic as a means to acquire what you want. These principles guide the entirety of your universe; there’s no way it exists just to cater to human whims.”

“I understand. We’re so much smaller than we think. And yet we have the ability to become our own universe. It’s… the hubris that we have to say that we are the center of our universe, because it’s true… but it isn’t. Like a paradox. It’s all so vast.”

“Paradoxes are normal. It means there are truths that only appear contradictory to your level of understanding. There’s something deeper that you just haven’t grasped yet, and that is a healthy place to be — accepting what appears to be contradictions.”

“So how can I know what is true? How can I believe in anything? I can’t trust my own senses anymore.”

“You seek singular answers for questions to which there is no one answer. Fight to your heart’s content to discover the truth. It is what mankind has been attempting since the dawn of your collective awareness, but you weren’t given life to be miserable in trying to understand why you were given life, you know.”

“What do you mean by given life?”

“In the same sense you did not make your own body consciously, or you cannot beat your own heart, or you digest your own food. These are things done for you by a body that you have no control over, just as you have no control over when you enter this world and when you leave it.”

“Does that mean there is no hope for me? That I’ve contracted the Plague now?”

“You’re very, very close. You know what you must do.”

“I must choose.”

“Yes.”

“To accept a world of suffering or to abandon it.”

“Yes. Reality would reject you as quickly as you rejected reality. It is a two-way street. Either you live in the same world as everyone else or you isolate yourself in your own world.”

~~~

A few weeks passed. They had assessed that she was not infected with the plague, setting a court date for breaking quarantine. However, with the institutions of governance and law overwhelmed as it was, she was comparatively slapped on the wrist with a heavy fine and allowed to return home once the lockdown lifted. She chose instead to go to her sister’s house. Her mother would be there, too.

Natalie arrived at the doorstep, less than groomed, in a cheap shirt and jeans that she could borrow from the detention facility. It was hard to describe the smell that it had — something like a distant onion. She knocked against the door. “Come in!” In that moment, she became extremely aware of herself. The nerves in her hand tingled as her brain sent the orders, muscles contracting and lengthening as blood coursed through the arteries that supplied them. The sensation of door knob metal against her skin. Time passing. Zero into infinity. The present moment and the feelings she had.

Terror. Hope. Anticipation. Dread. Love. These were too real. Her mind did somersaults. They were reactions to external stimuli that she had no control over. If she did, she would not feel them the same way. Most of all, she is surprised, and it is this emotion that she relished. For the first time in a long time, she is joyfully, tearfully surprised to feel with perfect clarity.

And in that perfect moment, everything stopped. The birds hung in the air. The heart in her chest was quiet. The wind ceased to exist. And she exhaled, now one with the universe.

She opened the door and knew that she was no longer alone.