Coming to Power

by T J Marquis

  “I think something happened,” he said, looking at Bahabe. “Tell me I’m not crazy.”

  Jon moved his hand away, watching her in expectation as she placed her hand where his had been. She blinked her eyes wide.

  “Yeah that’s it - it’s warmer than the bark around it,” she confirmed, “and not just ‘skin warm’, maybe... sunlight warm. Well done, Jon, maybe you are a magician.”

  Jon grinned, “How about wizard?”

  “That implies you really know what you’re doing,” she teased. “Hey,” she rasped conspiratorially, “try to burn it.” A wide grin.

  Jon put his hand back in place, not thinking of failure, or the unlikeliness of all this in the cold reality of his homeworld. Why would his home be so grey in comparison? He ignored the thoughts in his head of needing gestures, or incantations, or special words. Clearly the universe was not what he’d thought it was, and so he made the effort to lay aside the preconceptions of magic, of supernatural power, that he’d learned in his former life.

  He closed his eyes, focused on his need, almost whispering to the Light, Let me see it, let me know what I can do. A long moment passed.

  “Jon!” Bahabe yelped. His eyes sprang open, and he saw it too, the smoke rising from under his hand. He felt the heat now, but only to a point. “Don’t set it on fire!” she yelled.

  “Oh!” He exclaimed, and pulled his hand off the tree, leaving an imprint perhaps a quarter-inch deep, black and sooty. He stared at Bahabe, “That was cool.”

  Jon backed away from the tree, contemplating his work, and then the fatigue hit his arm, a wave of weakness rolling up to his shoulder. It felt like he’d been curling a dumbbell until his muscles gave out.

  “Argh,” he groaned, shaking out the arm, “It’s tired.”

  “Really?” Bahabe mused. “Never had that happen to me.” She shrugged. “Of course I’ve never burnt anything with my hand!”

  Jon chuckled through his grimace. “That really did not feel good.”

  “Maybe it’s the aggression, maybe damaging magic takes a bigger toll,” she suggested. “My power is calm, and I don’t get worn out. Try to heal it?”

  Jon wondered about that. No harm in trying, he thought. He put his other hand up to the burnt spot on the tree trunk. Heat seeped into his skin. This time he watched the spot as he imagined its repair. The only reason he had to think that this might work was the Light’s words - nothing would be withheld. He put that confidence in a vise-grip, set it before his gaze, and tried to pulse healing light into the tree bark. The result was not long in coming. Jon felt the growth of the burnt cambium beneath his palm, its push as it generated new layers of bark, the scratch of the bark against his skin as it quickly matured. He removed his hand, and the surface of the tree was clean again. There was a shallow indentation where his hand had been.

  “Wow,” Bahabe said.

  “Huh. Yeah.” Jon said, and then his knees buckled, and he fell toward the ground, barely catching himself on one rubbery arm as the healing arm was shot through with a shock like electricity. “Gah!” he screamed.

  “There goes my theory,” Bahabe observed. “Hey, you okay?” Jon nodded. She stooped down to help him up.

  “It just hurt. Took a toll.” He settled down onto the ground to sit, groaning. “You think it’d get easier?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Jon had enough practice for now, and when he caught his breath, and his limbs felt usable again, Bahabe led him eastward, further along on their trek.

  When they’d gone another mile or so, Jon called up to Bahabe, ahead of him. “We never talked about… what I did.”

  “I know,” said Bahabe.

  “So, can we?” he asked. He felt lost, tired, hopeful, vaguely free. He missed his friend. He felt guilty. He needed to talk to someone.

  Bahabe stopped short, turned sharply, and said in the flattest tone Jon had yet heard from her, “Look, Jon. I understand you want me to be able to trust you, but it hasn’t even been a day, and I am not the one to forgive you for shedding that man’s blood.” She held his gaze a moment, then turned and started off again. “I’m not afraid of you, if that helps. Right now, I’m just pretending that nothing from before you came here exists, so you and I can do whatever we need to while you’re on this island.”

  Jon didn’t know how to reply, so they walked on in silence for a long while. Eventually, Bahabe continued to point out the various features of the island, and Jon was glad to hear her talking again.

  Several miles eastward the jungle gave way again to a rocky outcropping atop a high cliff. Bahabe led Jon out of the shade and to the edge of the precipice. They overlooked a long stretch of mostly virgin shoreline that curved out and away to the northeast, hemmed in by the high cliff all along the way. The only sign of human presence was a rugged old dock where the village’s fishermen had their boat slips, mostly empty at the moment. The sand was bright and white, uncountable facets glimmering in the mid-afternoon sun. There were coconut trees in among the stands of other palms, and a family of something like lemurs was foraging for their supper. Impossibly clear water lapped lazily at the shore, just begging for the touch of bare feet.

  “This is it, isn’t it Bahabe?” Jon asked. “What your Elder wants to sell.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I just wanted to share it with you before it’s gone.”

  So they stood, silent observers of this island’s treasure that seemed to mean so much to Bahabe. Jon wandered about the area, letting the girl take her time. It was a long while before she indicated she was ready to go.

  “Home’s not far,” she said, “we’ll be there in plenty of time for dinner.”

  “It’s been nice, Bahabe,” Jon said. “Thanks for the tour.”

  “You’re welcome,” she favored him with a pleasant look. “You know, you’re gonna have to actually meet people tonight. Nak-sak will have lifted the ban on bugging you.”

  Jon laughed. “I’m ready. I didn’t think I’d be off the hook for long. Let’s go.”

  Indeed, they were not long back in the village before Jon and Bahabe were swarmed with villagers wanting to know all about Bahabe’s new friend. The day’s work was winding down, the cook-fire was stoked. Jon’s arms were still tired from his first experiments with the Light, but he asked if he could help with dinner preparations, and the mess crew was delighted to put him to work. He noticed at that point that Bahabe mysteriously disappeared.

  Just in the hour before dinner, Jon met more people than he could remember, both young and old. He didn’t have to recount his story - everyone seemed to know it already. They all seemed more than willing to believe in some alternate reality, and were eager to hear all the details of a world so exotic. Jon, in turn, heard many tales of angels and spirits and visions, and it was hard to tell what was true and what was fancy. One older gentleman named Jappah was full of endless stories and myths himself. Among them were accounts of people crossing between world-planes en masse in ancient times. Jon tried to press him for specifics, as if he were some sort of scholar, but the man would just launch into another old story.

  When dinner was ready, Bahabe returned, and she and Jon dined at the table of Jappah’s family, whose sons and daughters rolled their eyes at the old man’s ramblings. His grandchildren listened with rapt attention. The social immersion really wasn’t as bad as Jon had expected, and he ate the night’s lightly fried fish and veggies with relish. As the meal wore on, he felt strength returning to his limbs.

  He noticed the Elder wasn’t around this evening, nor was the lovely Eleana. Jon thought of the ‘other guests’ Nak-sakaresh had mentioned this morning, and the long stretch of pristine beach Bahabe had shown him. He felt bad that no one here knew what was coming. He thought Bahabe should tell them - it wasn’t his place - but he wasn’t sure if she actually would.

  When the drinking hour came, Jon excused himself, and Bahabe followed. Marnha decided to stick around this time. Before they went into the hut,
Bahabe led Jon out into the village square and had him look up.

  “Look way out. It’s in shadow, but you should still be able to see it,” she instructed.

  “See what?”

  “Look for a mountain, but upside-down, and flying.” Jon scoffed unintentionally. “Your earth doesn’t have one? You’ve at least got the moons, right?”

  Jon scanned the skies, squinting, and eventually found it, a massive, rocky formation like a great, misshapen wedge pointed down at the sea. As he studied he saw more - glassy forms like jagged teeth all along the wide, flat upper surface of the formation, and beyond them, black. His eyes widened in recognition.

  “Bahabe!” He almost yelled, but glanced at the villagers and reined himself in, “That’s where I was! Before I came down to the beach.”

  “Well,” she said, “that’s what I was thinking when you described the place, but I couldn’t be sure - no one’s ever been up there except in the stories.”

  “The endless beam of light. I don’t see it right now...”

  “It’s not always lit,” she said. “We call it Mt. Iskeh. Some say HAEL lives there.”

  “Your god?” he asked.

  She shrugged, “Maybe - I do pray. But others say it feeds starlight to the heart of the earth. Romantic,” she smirked. “Or that it actually projects the stars onto the sky, even though the light isn’t always lit. It comes around every night.”

  Jon was watching the mountain with rapt attention, jaw agape, reliving his memories of having stood upon it. It was far enough out that it hardly seemed to move, like heavy clouds on a calm day.

  “Come on,” Bahabe grabbed him, “they’ll all think you’re weird. You can look again when nobody’s watching.” Indeed some of the people still eating and drinking seemed amused at Jon’s childlike awe. He followed Bahabe back to Marnha’s hut.

  Jon felt like he was imposing, sleeping in their house, taking Marnha’s bed, but when he and the girl went in, he saw that Marnha had rearranged their little space and squeezed a third bed into the room. The thatch panels over the windows were flipped up, letting the cool evening breeze flow through the little hut.

  Jon lay back on Marnha’s bed and let his aching muscles relax. He was in decent physical condition, but after the day’s long hike, even his calves and ankles felt a little worn out. Bahabe seemed no worse for wear. She kicked back on her bed and reached up for a book from the narrow shelf above her head.

  Jon propped himself up on his elbows and asked her about the modest book collection.

  “I traded some sailors jewelry for these a long time ago. He taught me to read while the ship wintered here, but I’m still kind of slow,” she said.

  “Here, can I see?” Jon said.

  “You can read?” she asked, tossing one book over.

  “Where I come from, pretty much everyone can. They don’t let you grow up without learning how.” Bahabe was surprised to hear this, commenting on how rich Jon’s people must be.

  Jon didn’t register the miracle at first - he could read the letters. He decided it must be another side-effect of his translation into this world. Or perhaps it was some passive blessing from the Light.

  The book was actually pretty heavy reading - someone’s treatise on the ethics of a civilization’s expansion into pristine lands. Jon perused it, set it down as his eyes began to grow heavy. Not long after, he faded away.

  Jon’s dreams were vivid, yet mostly random. Deep in the night, he awoke in a cold sweat with the image of Calvin burned into his eyes. His late friend, transitioning in alternation from life to death, death to life, his blood on Jon’s hands. But weariness asserted itself and Jon slumbered again after fanning himself dry.

  He awoke to golden morning light and his new Bahabe-alarm.

  Chapter 4

  Flight

  The days passed quickly and Jon fell into the villagers’ routine. It seemed only fitting that he should help out around the island, so he offered up his services and the people of Sem-bado were more than happy to put him to work. He spent most mornings doing shirtless, sweaty work with the men and a few of the women - cutting logs, gathering thatch, mending walls and roofs, or chopping down trees and hauling the timber back to the village.

  Two weeks in, Jon started getting used to being a little less clean, and his own sense of his odor began to diminish slightly. It was actually a little liberating, not worrying about the scruff growing around his goatee, or the frizzy spots in his hair, or how clean his hands were before he ate.

  All in all, the work was welcome - physically challenging and mentally distracting, for Cal’s death and Jon’s act of murder were ever in the back of his mind.

  Bahabe arranged for him to be on foraging duty in the afternoons, so they often ate a packed lunch together in the jungle, then trekked out to the southeast cove to do their own secret training. Bahabe was apparently in the habit of foraging consistently and had a trove of wild fruits, nuts, and herbs from which they could daily retrieve an acceptable tribute. Jon felt a little bad dodging work in the afternoons, but training with their powers had an importance of its own, so he was able to set the minor guilt aside.

  Every day they scattered some seed for a little chic-bul that seemed to hunt its lunch in a small clearing just past the village. Often the little bird would follow them a ways down the trail and Bahabe would whistle calls at it playfully.

  For several days, Jon and Bahabe practiced somewhat randomly with their abilities. Continuing to hold that message of ‘nothing being withheld’ as a kind of mantra, Jon tried to suspend his own disbelief and experimented with different ideas.

  It took him a number of days to escape the natural inclination to use the light to burn or cut things, but in that time he made rapid progress shaping the consuming luminescence into needles, spikes and blades. With each passing day, and with ever larger portions at meal time, his stamina using the power grew. There was a strange enjoyment in the ache of his muscles from both hard labor and magic fatigue, even if it made him wince and walk funny.

  One day he climbed the cliffs up to the treeline above Bahabe’s cove and put his latest blade of light to the test. He shaped it like a woodsman’s axe, purely for aesthetic purposes, and only just held it in existence long enough to chop down a young tree. It fell with a loud crash and Jon glanced around in embarrassment.

  “You hurt yourself?” Bahabe hollered from down below.

  “All good!” he replied, but the ensuing pain was reminiscent of a broken arm, and Jon had to take the long way back down to the beach and sit out the rest of the day’s training.

  After this Jon began to devise new uses for his budding ability. Thinking, ‘nothing withheld’, he paced the cove looking for large seashells, and finding a worthy target, he faintly whispered, “Lift.”

  He thought it rustled a bit, or maybe that was just a gust of wind stirring the grains of sand. So, after looking about self-consciously, he raised a palm to the shell and practically yelled, “Rise!”

  The shell exploded into a thousand tiny fragments - one stung his cheek - but indeed the shards rested in the air for a moment longer than they should have. He shrugged inwardly and returned to Bahabe.

  “Apparently our faith is the tinder for the fire, but skill matters too,” he commented as he hunkered down next to her.

  Her attention did not waver from the weaving of her current prism, but she said, “I could have told you that.”

  As Jon continued about his various explorations, Bahabe delved deeper into intentionality with her gift. She desired greatly to master her apparent ability to peek at places distant.

  Every facet of her constructions, every vertex had to be placed with the intention to see a certain thing or person. She began, somewhat mischievously, by attempting to spy on the Elder’s office. At first, she gained only glimpses of the dark wood of his desk or the very fibers of his richly upholstered chair, but after several days she was able to draw out an image of his entire desk, then the rest
of the room. At times the Elder would come and go, or meet with his business contacts or Eleana, and Bahabe began to wish she could also hear what she was seeing. To finally get real dirt on the Elder…

  But what really mattered was that Jon’s presence had given her a much needed push.

  Late in the nights, she noticed a deepening of her sense of empathy, and the more she worked during the day, the more sensitive she was as the evenings wore down and distractions ceased.

  She could feel, intensely, Marnha’s love and care for her, his worry over Eleana’s service of the Elder, his desire to be a great healer. She could sense in detail Jon’s overwhelming urge to ‘figure this all out’ or ‘get it right this time’. And through the walls of the little hut she even caught the whispers and echoes of her neighbors - their dreams, loves, and unfortunately their flaws. There is where her fear of the empathy really took hold.

  If she became so attuned to others’ feelings that she knew every lie, every hateful thought, or worst of all, every lascivious temptation, would she be able to return to innocence and ignorance? Bahabe really didn’t want to know everything about everyone, least of all who they wished they were in bed with...

  In those moments, beside her fear grew an envy of Jon and the aggressive, straightforward nature of his power. Burn this, heal that, pick up the other thing without touching it - and who wouldn’t be jealous of that one? What he was learning to do was so useful. Her gift could be too, surely, but his was less terrifying, to her eyes.

  Jon made quick friends with many of the workers he shared labors with from day to day. The others appreciated his quiet resolve to earn his keep, and respected him all the more for pushing past fatigue and learning to work as hard as they did. Jon even shared the occasional drink with some of the guys while they waited for dinner to be served. He continued to abstain, however, from the libations following the communal meal.