by V. St. Clair
I need to sleep on this, he decided after a long moment of consideration. This isn’t a decision to be made lightly.
Best that he calm down first from the jarring news of his friend and the Masters’ betrayal, before making any life-changing choices. With that settled, he picked up the fallen papers from the ground, put everything back in order, and returned to his room.
19
The Choice
Aleric slept poorly that night, in fits and spurts, mind roiling with thoughts. He had done everything he could to avoid Asher during the day, because he honestly had no idea what to say to him and would probably just end up punching him in the face and starting a fight. The only time they spoke to each other was when his roommate returned to their room that night. Aleric was already pretending to be asleep, but Asher still said, “Where the heck did you disappear to? You abandoned me with all your peers and I had to pretend to know what a canape was, because people kept trying to feed them to me.”
“Sorry,” Aleric had mumbled, trying to sound drowsy. “Had a headache and came back early.”
“Oh, right, well I hope you’re feeling better.”
“Not really,” he replied curtly.
“I’ll leave you alone then,” Asher conceded, and that was the last they had spoken to each other all night.
Now Aleric was back in his workroom with a clear prism in his eyepiece and another one held up in front of him. He had made his decision during the night, after hours upon hours of thinking about the Masters laughing at him behind his back, pitying him for his comparative weakness to his friend and his blissful ignorance about it. The thought of his friend and all of their instructors being in on the deception was too much to bear, like they were collectively mocking him.
It still made him furious to think about. He resolved to pretend that he knew nothing of the betrayal for the time being, to going back to the way things were. He would duel Asher today in Prisms, and he would either win or lose; if the latter, they would chalk it up to a lucky shot on Asher’s part and keep on pretending. But he would never ask Asher for help with his research again, would never bring him into the confidence of his work here. And so he had few options but to take this new path and prove to the world that there was nothing wrong with imperfect prisms with mild distortion being used by competent mages.
His next hurdle was in actually acquiring an imperfect prism. Due to the ban, it was illegal for anyone other than certified jewelers to craft prisms for magical use, and Aleric didn’t really care to go snooping around for a black-market prism trade. He had no idea how to go about finding such people, and his name and face were too well known by mages for word of it to stay quiet for long.
Which meant he would have to craft his own. He was no jeweler, but if he was going for very mild alterations, even he should be able to manage it with a simple Severing spell.
With that in mind, he looked through his clear prism at its partner, locating the alignments that looked most promising for his work, if only there was a white modifier beside them. Then, very carefully, with the utmost delicacy and precision, he cast Sever on the edge of the other prism.
It sliced almost cleanly in half, at an odd angle. Cursing, Aleric tossed it to the side and tried another. His second attempt was better than the first, but still too ragged and deep of a slice to be useful.
This is going to take longer than I thought…
He left his workroom to go to Pounds of Prisms and replenish his stock. He bought so many clear prisms that the owner gave him a suspicious look and said, “You can’t charge this much material to the school without approval from your mentor. Can you get Master Antwar to come and clear all this?”
That was the very last thing Aleric wanted to do, and so he said, “I’ll pay for it personally. This is for a research project I’m doing, and I suspect I’m going to go through a lot of prisms before I get it all ironed out. I just thought to keep them on hand rather than bothering you for more every day.”
The man looked more relaxed at that and said, “Certainly. I’ll send the bill to your House.”
Aleric thanked the man and hauled his prisms back to his workroom, hoping his parents didn’t balk at the bill they were about to get. Surely if he told them it was for his research they would understand.
It took him seven more tries to get the results he was hoping for, a prism that looked identical to the one he was currently using, missing such a thin layer off the right side that it was imperceptible to the naked eye.
Curious, Aleric swapped it out for the one that was in his eyepiece, looking through an imperfect prism for the first time in his life and wondering if all of the rumors of how horrible it was were true.
His first impression was that it was mildly unsettling to look through, as though his depth perception was slightly off, with the result that it made him a bit queasy. The sensation wasn’t unmanageable, and he assumed it would get better with time and practice. It certainly didn’t feel as jarring and wrong as the texts depicted it, which only convinced him that the accounts from hundreds of years ago were overinflated.
And there…there it was.
Holy arcana…there are dozens of them!
Aleric’s mouth dropped open at the sight of it. The difference that that one little sliver of prism had made was astronomical; it was like looking into an entirely different object. The band diffusion was tighter between all the colors in his immediate sight, the Trifectas and Quarteries crisper and positioned more favorably…and all throughout, little flecks of white modifiers.
This would change everything as we know it. The entire field of Prisms could be rewritten…
It was more than a chapter’s worth of knowledge; more than a hundred chapters in a hundred books. If this was what one microscopic sliver could do, the possibilities were endless for prisms of different skews.
By the time they’re done cataloguing everything I’ve discovered, there won’t even be room left in the book to mention Asher’s find.
He took grim satisfaction in that, which felt ugly, but his friend had colluded with the Masters behind his back to make a mockery of him so he deserved it.
After exploring the prism properly and getting used to the wonders that it promised, Aleric had to ask himself the real question, the critical question that he had been avoiding up until now.
Do I actually use it?
If so, he would officially be breaking one of their harshest laws, which bore a punishment he didn’t even want to contemplate. Nothing could be worse than being forced into lead Binders for the rest of his life and made to live as a commoner—or worse—since he would be an exile and everyone would know it upon meeting him. He would sooner die than face that fate.
But that was only if he got caught. The odds of that happening while he worked in here were slim, especially if he hid his work from Master Antwar during his visits. He started by destroying all of the prisms he had gone through on his failed attempts to convert them, erasing all evidence of his doings except for the prism that he now wore in his circlet. Not even Antwar would be able to tell it was fractionally different from a normal prism at a casual glance, not unless he looked through it himself.
What if the accounts in those old books weren’t totally wrong though? a niggling voice in the back of his head prodded him. They had to put those in there for a reason; surely no one would want to halt progress in the field of Prisms out of spite.
If he accepted the truth of those texts, that a few people had tried using imperfect prisms and had suffered from the effects of it, then what? The problem was that he had a lot of follow-up questions to the vague accountings he had been made to read during his first year, and there was no one alive who could answer them. What were the people like before using the imperfect prisms? Were they highly-skilled mages or poor at magic? How much did it change them—did they go insane or did they just suddenly become vegetarians? Who made the analysis on them and decided there was a problem? Was that person biased?
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br /> And on and on the list went. Since he knew, even as he thought of all these questions, that there would be no real answer to any of them, in the end it would come down to what he felt was right. He sat there, staring through the prism, considering all the information he had received up to this point.
The Magic came to me in the Forest and said I would become the strongest. My father said he has a recurring dream about me each year, in which he is told I must save the world from the darkness that is coming.
He was balanced on a knife’s edge, he could feel it. Everything hinged on this single decision, in this single moment, his success or failure…
Choose.
The voice was so close by that he thought someone was whispering in his ear, and Aleric startled and shouted as he looked around for the source of the noise, thinking he had already been caught.
What he found was even more alarming than the sight of one of his teachers in his workroom. His mother was leaning against the wall, staring hard at him with eyes the color of molten gold. Even more alarming, she was crying softly, tears trailing softly down her cheeks, though she didn’t acknowledge them or attempt to wipe them away.
Now he knew why the voice had sounded so close; it was speaking directly into his head.
“What are you doing here?” he blurted out, still shaken. “Are you going to tell me anything useful this time?”
Choose, it said again.
The presence of this…being, whatever it was, only confirmed his belief that this was absolutely the critical moment of his life, and whichever way he went, if he was wrong, everything would be lost to him.
“Yes, I know I have to choose. I was hoping you could point me in the right direction,” he responded. “Am I supposed to use this thing and prove to everyone that it’s safe in the hands of highly-skilled mages?”
Choose, the voice repeated. The apparition in front of him wasn’t giving anything away in her expression, other than the tears running down her face. She didn’t even really look sad, so he had no idea why this eerie parody of his mother was crying right now. He had never seen his mother cry before.
“Nothing but cryptic, useless advice from you,” he scowled. “Either you’re crying because you’re afraid I’ll do this and muck everything up, or because you’re afraid I won’t be brave enough to do this and that I’ll muck everything up.”
No answer.
Aleric sighed and considered the prism again, racking his brain for inspiration, for what felt right. The sight of Asher and the Masters laughing at him in his mind’s eye was the predominant image, and he was filled with anger once more.
He looked back at the magical being in front of him and saw that it had shifted forms. Now he was looking at the strange image of his father with molten gold eyes, still with tears tracking down his face. It was even weirder than the sight of his mother crying.
That, more than anything, convinced him. His father was counting on him to do what he had to do to become powerful, powerful enough to stop the darkness that was coming and skyrocket their family into even greater prominence in history.
No one will ever forget the Frost name, no matter how many years go by…
“I’m doing it,” he announced out loud, nodding and finding the alignment he wanted. With a deep breath, he channeled his will through it and tested the modifier for this first half of his spell.
It worked perfectly. Thrilled, Aleric jumped to his feet and vented a cheer. He felt fine, other than a slight lurch in his stomach right when he had cast, but that was gone now and there was absolutely nothing different about him other than how happy he felt for finally achieving something real and meaningful.
He was so busy mentally congratulating himself that he didn’t see the apparition of his father crying quietly into his hands behind him. By the time he turned around, it had vanished entirely.