Paragons of Ether

by Ryan Muree

  Peering into the ether had seemed to leech sight and color from her, but she didn’t look too hindered by it as she moved a watering can near the corner of her hut and poured its contents on some bright yellow bulbs.

  He swallowed. “I’m sorry, Yggrav. I was hoping to speak with you and ask you a few questions.”

  “In my solarium?”

  “No.” Grier looked at the door and then back at her. “I wasn’t sure where you’d be.”

  “Is it urgent?” She chuckled to herself. “Your brother get another cut on his arm? Tell him I’m not interested in repairing his sigils all the time.”

  His hand immediately went to his bracer. “No, just some questions.”

  She eyed him and his bracer, opened the solarium’s door, and waved him on to follow her.

  Inside, plants grew from floor to ceiling in long stretches of vines and fronds. Glass baubles, in every color and size, dangled between plants. They clinked together and glittered in the light.

  “Seastone,” she beamed. “I just love them.”

  “You can see them?”

  “I can hear them,” she said. “And once, yes, I could see them. Now it’s all blotches of ether.”

  Each globe was symmetrical and smooth as if they’d been perfectly constructed.

  “Who made them?”

  “The Goddess. Who else?”

  “They’re natural?”

  She laughed at him as she moved between the tables of plants overgrowing their pots. “They come from the sea just like everything else.”

  A scene—a feeling—danced before him. The plants hadn’t been normal vines or even trees, though they were tall enough to be. They looked like… sea grass? “All of these plants are from the ocean?”

  She headed deeper into the solarium.

  The stretching plants, the seastone ornaments, the frosted solarium panels… It gave the illusion they were under water.

  Yggrav opened a wooden door and waved him into her hut. Inside, a fire burned in a space in the corner. There were small wooden chairs, an equally-sized wooden table, and a few counters with food and knickknacks. There was a small hallway across the room that most likely led to a bedroom. Minimalist living arrangements for one of the most powerful ether-users in the world.

  “Let’s see if I remember,” she said. “Swordstaff. War hammer. Javelin. Chain dart.” She wiggled a finger at him.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  She sat at the table, gesturing for him to sit across from her.

  He did so, carefully, afraid he’d splinter the fragile wood with his weight. “So, my questions—”

  “Are they about the weather or that extra sigil you’ve somehow managed to create?”

  He reflexively dropped his focus to his finger and the scarred swirls Clove had put into it. “How did you—”

  “Your spirit sings, Grier. Everyone’s does. It tells the truth, the secrets we keep from ourselves and from others. If I were to guess, you’re here to ask how it was even possible, how it works, and why I lied to you?”

  He swallowed.

  “If it helps, it’s not a lie. Too many sigils will kill you. Spreads your spirit too thin. Too many connections to ether are too many for our bodies to handle.”

  “How many?”

  “Depends on the body and the spirit, I’d say. Why do you think Sigilists and Scribes go blind? Why do Ingineers and even some Casters eventually go insane?”

  He folded his hands together “And you were told the limit was seven?”

  She nodded. “It’s heavily documented.” She gestured to a bookshelf behind her. It was stuffed with tomes under a blanket of dust.

  “But it’s obviously possible to have more,” he said.

  “I guess it is.”

  “The books didn’t say anything about that?”

  She shrugged. “It mentions they tried. There are always exceptions. Sometimes we need someone to do it first.”

  “Why me, then? Why did I survive it?”

  She tapped her chin. “Strengthen the body to strengthen the mind, right? You Keepers forget spirit too often. Strengthen the body, strengthen the mind, strengthen the spirit. You are strong. I would guess that’s why it didn’t kill you.”

  He liked the sound of that. “So, only if we’re strong enough to handle another sigil could we have more weapons? More abilities?”

  She pushed off from the table and stood. “I suspect only you can tell me that. Does it work?”

  He’d tried everything he could think of for the last two months, and nothing had ever come of it. “I don’t think so.”

  “Who put it there?”

  “A Scribe,” he lied.

  She’d turned for a shelf of containers but stopped mid-reach.

  “An Ingineer,” he corrected.

  She smiled and grabbed a tin, emptying its contents into a mug.

  “I had her do it because I’ve witnessed some amazing things being done with ether—”

  “Some amazing. Some terrible.”

  “I can’t figure out how to use it, though. It doesn’t work like the others.”

  She scoffed. “Of course not.”

  “But it was similar to when you’d done the sigils on my arm.”

  She came back to the table with her mug and leaned in. “Similar. But not the same. And now, you want me to tell you how this one works?”

  “Can you?”

  She held out her hands, urging him to give his hand over.

  He pulled off his bracer and stretched his arm out.

  Her fingers traced the swirls of her previous work branded into his skin. “When I was a tiny child, I couldn’t scribe anything. I was a nobody from nowhere. I was taken from my home, kidnapped, and then left in the streets of Cilla. When I was found, my teacher told the Librarian at the time that I was from a small village outside Cilla that no one had heard of. I was a nobody destined to become something more than they’d expected of me. It was not easy to grow up with.”

  He nodded. “I know someone who feels the same.”

  “Emeryss, the Neerian Scribe.”

  He smiled, thinking of Emeryss’s gold eyes and shining grin. “She’s not a Scribe anymore.”

  Yggrav nodded. “She’s a Caster, right?”

  His breath hitched.

  “Otherwise, you’d be sad she’s not a Scribe. And it helped that I had seen her from time to time. We are not so different, she and I. When nothing seems likely, everything is possible.”

  He narrowed his eyebrows. “How so?”

  “If you’re told what to think, and you believe it, it’s almost impossible to think beyond that. Emeryss was told she’d never be anything more than a Neerian.” Her fingers held his hand. “But she knew something you don’t.”

  “What’s that?”

  “All of them were wrong.” She smiled. “You were told you could only have seven sigils, and you believed it. Now you have an eighth, and you still believe you can only have seven sigils—”

  “No—”

  “—or you would have gotten it to work.” She gave him his arm back.

  “Then what’s different? Why did my first sigils work so easily?”

  “Because I told you what the sigils would do, how they would work, what the rules were, and you followed them… blindly.” She laughed at herself.

  That truth stung. He’d follow the rules like the good Keeper he was, and had Emeryss not run away, he’d still be following them.

  “There are very few rules with ether, Grier. You’ll find only one, actually.”

  “And that is?”

  “It has a price. Like all things, it has a price. But you’ll keep finding yourself stuck in the same place if you don’t realize that the rest of the rules you’ve imagined don’t exist. Not for you. Not for anyone.”

  “But how?” he asked. “I thought I was believing before, but how do I believe that anything with ether is possible? That this is possible? Especially when it won’t work.” />
  She got up for a screaming kettle hanging over her fire and gently rotated the water inside before pouring it into her mug. She rested the kettle on the table and sat across from him again. “If I tell you this kettle is hot, you’ll believe me. You saw everything leading up to it that would make you think it was hot.”

  “Yes.”

  “But what if I told you this kettle is cold?”

  “I wouldn’t believe you.”

  “We’d argue back and forth, and you’d set out to touch it just to prove you are right.”

  He flexed his arm with the sigils and replaced his bracer. “You think I’m failing on purpose to prove it’s not possible?”

  She shrugged. “Not on purpose. If you never came into my house to see the kettle on the fire or the fire burning, if I brought it to you when we met outside and told you to hold this bitter, cold kettle, you’d believe me and take it in your hands.”

  “But then I’d be burned. What you said wouldn’t have changed that it had been on the fire—”

  “Does it? We don’t know.”

  “Yes, we do. If you put this thing on a hot fire and told me it’s cold, and I never saw the fire, I might take it from you believing you, but it would still burn me.”

  She grinned. “And that’s why your new sigil doesn’t work.”

  He went to form the loose words floating in his head, but they wouldn’t come. How was that possible? How could one unwrap their mind from what clearly was a fact?

  But she’d say it wasn’t a fact. She’d say the kettle is cold, he’d believe her, he’d take it… and it’d be cold.

  “Ether is ether, Grier. Everywhere and in everything. Do you think it cares whether you have five sigils or seven or fifteen?” She sipped the steaming liquid. “Ether does not care. Ether is neither good nor bad; it simply exists.”

  The kettle is cold.

  But it wasn’t cold. It clearly wasn’t cold with the steam. He sighed again.

  “Are you still fighting yourself on whether the kettle is cold or hot?”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “I can’t think it for you, Grier. I’ve already told you it’s possible. You have to do the rest.”

  He was trying. He’d wanted to use it in that fight back in Sufford to save more people. He’d wanted to use it a million times since arriving in Stadhold.

  Emeryss.

  Emeryss had tried every day for years to cast. With furrowed eyebrows and shaky fingers, she’d stood over those grimoires in her colorless suite for hours. She’d never lost hope in herself, and he’d lost hope in only a few weeks.

  “I’ll keep trying,” he mumbled.

  “I’ll give you one secret that I haven’t confirmed. Just a theory.” Her white gaze settled at his chest. “I think ether is here in the present, but also in the past and future. I think it exists in all times simultaneously.”

  “Time?”

  She smiled. “You cannot think of it as something you want to do. If that sigil is for a new dagger, you cannot think ‘Oh, I would like to have a dagger.’ You must think ‘I have the dagger.’ When I gave you your first sigil, I made it easy for you. I told you to connect with the sigil on your forearm and retrieve your swordstaff. You’d seen other Keepers do it, you believed me, and knowing that it’ll happen helped materialize the weapon.”

  “Because I didn’t know otherwise, like with the kettle.”

  She nodded. “Now, you know about ether. So, it’s harder. It’s not a specific motion or a specific action that makes a new sigil work. It’s however you connect it that matters, just like Emeryss finds connections to ether that her people have accepted can’t exist.”

  “But that means literally anything is possible, that anyone could do anything…”

  She grinned again and sipped her drink. “Now, you’re getting it.”

  “But, can we prove—”

  “You want proof?” She huffed. “Proof. What is proof? And would it be enough? You have proof everywhere around you. Emeryss is proof. I’m proof. You have proof right there on your finger. You have to create the proof for yourself. That’s all I can tell you.”

  He clenched his jaw. He’d have to keep working on it, finding a means to connect it and feel it, like Emeryss and Clove had done. Even Adalai had managed to learn the basics of casting without a grimoire from Emeryss.

  This had to come from within, from his connection to ether.

  “Thank you, Yggrav.” He rose for the door and opened it. The chilled wind blew through.

  “Grier.”

  He stopped and turned.

  She looked tiny and more wrinkled from the distance. Older. Ancient. A relic staring down the end of her time. “Ether does not control you or you it,” Yggrav said. “You are ether. We are all ether.”

  Whatever that meant, he’d better understand it soon. He had Avrist’s motives to deal with, another battle brewing…

  His hand froze on her door. “There’s a second Sigilist in training, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Where are they now?”

  “Hidden in plain sight.”

  “Hidden from what?”

  “From the world.”

  “Why?”

  “The Library is not perfect. No one place is, but it is safe. We don’t need Revel and Ingini getting their hands on the next Sigilist.”

  “You’ve hidden them to protect them?”

  She nodded. “Until I die. I suggest your Ingineer friend stay safe, too.”

  That was a good point, but he was thinking more along the lines of Avrist. He’d assumed Avrist already had a replacement, and he might have kept them hidden to protect them, as well. But what would a locator Caster need protection from?

  He’d work on his sigil later. For now, he had another stop to make.

  Crossing the stone path back into the main campus, he made for Avrist’s wing and entered the corridor.

  “In a hurry, Little G?”

  His older brother, Garrison, was leaning against the stone. Same height, same features, same size, and only a couple of years difference—some often mistook them for twins. Garrison had more scars from his own mishaps, though.

  “Why were you waiting for me?”

  Garrison shrugged.

  “I don’t have time for this right now—”

  Garrison raised his hands in surrender. He was in sparring clothes caked in mud and had come straight from the training grounds most likely. He was a commander for new Keepers and never left the facility.

  “I don’t have time for this, either.” Garrison screwed his face up tight and wiggled a finger into his right ear. “Except, I had to listen to the shrill voice of our mother demanding I confront you and try to bring you to your senses.”

  “No, thanks.” Grier went to move around him, but Garrison blocked him with his body.

  “You know I’m right there with you and against mom most of the time.”

  Grier tilted his head back. “Don’t do this, Garrison. Not now.”

  “I’m against the marriage matches being pushed up for you. Shit, I faked my own illness to delay mine. So, believe me when I say I understand how terrible our mother can be—”

  “She’s lying, Garrison. She’s hiding something—”

  “Or she’s trying to protect something.” He patted him on the shoulder. “I don’t give two shits about family lineage or heritage tablets, but I do care about you losing everything you’ve dreamed of.”

  “They didn’t know about Avrist and—”

  “About your little romance with the Neerian girl?” Garrison smiled. “They do.”

  Grier glared at him. How would they know?

  “I don’t care, Grier.” Garrison shrugged. “Fuck who you want to fuck, never get married, whatever. But don’t jeopardize your future over this.”

  “Over learning the truth?” Grier crossed his arms. “You’d rather believe the lies they’ve told us than know what we’re really doing here?”

  �
�No, but I don’t think it’s worth sacrificing your life over.”

  “My life? Are they going to kill me over it?”

  Garrison sucked in air between his teeth. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  Footsteps echoed down another hall.

  “Finding out if my life has been one giant lie is what matters to me,” Grier whispered. “And it should matter to you, too. I need to know where I stand.”

  Garrison rubbed his jaw with the back of his thumb. “It’s a warning, Little G. I don’t want to see you hurt or screwed out of anything you deserve. You’ve earned your spot on the High Council. It’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

  Was it? Maybe once, but was it still? Or was it something he’d decided wasn’t what he’d thought?

  “I’m not stopping,” Grier said.

  “Learn the truth, then. But there’s no coming back from going too far.” Garrison pulled out a stack of envelopes from his back pocket, handed it to him, and left through a different corridor.

  Grier flipped over the envelopes. They were his… Every letter he’d ever written to Emeryss…

  His mother’s handwriting had scribbled out Issolia’s name and Emeryss’s location and had replaced it with their address. Each one had been opened.

  Emeryss hadn’t written because she hadn’t seen the letters.

  He squeezed them in his fist, red-hot fury barreling through him, and yanked open the door to Avrist’s office. It creaked on its hinges and banged loudly against the wall.

  Too far? His brother had been afraid he’d be willing to go too far?

  He hadn’t gone far enough, and once he had his answers from Avrist, his mother would be next.

  Chapter 10

  Avrist’s office — Great Library — Stadhold

  Grier let the door creak shut behind him. His eyes went to the fireplace glowing orange and yellow with a freshly kept fire. Someone had been in here.

  “Dova?”

  When no one answered, he moved toward Avrist’s desk.