by John Bierce
He spent a couple minutes laying in his bunk, staring at the ceiling— or whatever Sabae would have called it. His spellbook nestled under his arm, dozing contentedly.
At least, until his pack began shrieking at him.
Hugh sat up too quickly and smacked his head against the ceiling, then clambered down to open up his pack. His spellbook began shifting awake irritably.
After some rummaging, he found the source of the sound— it was the little book Kanderon had given him.
The instant he opened the book, the horrid shrieking stopped.
Hugh. I did not give you a means of rapid communication for you to simply forget about it.
He looked at Kanderon’s distinct handwriting for a moment, so similar to the writing of the Index in the Great Library that was somehow an extension of her. It was livelier, more flawed, however, than the Index’s own neat, precise script. Then he sighed, got out a pen, and clambered back into his bunk, and began to write back to the sphinx.
Apologies, master, Hugh wrote.
You should have reported in much more quickly after a major incident like that, came the response. I expect prompt and detailed reports from my agents, which includes you. The instant you’re safe and secure after a combat situation, you report in. Try not to pick up Alustin’s bad habits about timely reporting.
Hugh’s spellbook slowly leaned upright against his side and began glaring at the communication book.
“Are you… are you being jealous?” Hugh asked his spellbook. “I’m allowed to read other books, you know.”
Hugh returned to writing.
Honestly, master, I entirely forgot I had this book in my possession. I was exhausted, tired, and confused.
The spellbook’s glaring had redoubled, and Hugh could swear its crystal had shifted to a slightly darker shade of green.
“Oh, is it me writing in other books you have a problem with?” he asked. “Because you’re going to have to get used to that.”
The spellbook shot him a wounded look, then drifted up off the bed and down into the room, probably to hide under the bottom bunk.
Understandable, but you need to train yourself to immediately report in the future, Kanderon wrote.
Kanderon spent the next few minutes interrogating Hugh on various details about the ambush. Hugh meant to stick to just the facts, but somehow, when it came to the death of the spotter, Hugh found himself confessing all his conflicting feelings to Kanderon. How he knew he’d done the right thing, and helped protect his friends, but somehow still felt ashamed, awful, and conflicted. And how he even felt ashamed for still missing Avah, which just seemed so petty alongside his new concerns and their mission.
Kanderon was silent for a time after that, but eventually resumed writing.
In all my centuries of life, Hugh, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that emotions cannot truly be controlled. They can’t be harnessed, and they will never obey your expectations. We can control our reactions to our emotions, and we can slowly wrestle them into the directions we desire, but we will always have to understand them and fight them on their own grounds. Which is to say, we have to understand ourselves. As much as some fools crave it, all attempts to become beings of unalloyed logic and reason fail. There is no shame to being emotional any more than there is to breathing air, Hugh. This is true of humans, it is true of sphinxes, and it is true of dragons. To live is to feel. Not even liches escape that fact.
And you can’t expect to simply solve your turmoil, as wonderful as that would be. You’ll have to work it out over time. We all hold vast reservoirs of emotion, but you can only channel those reservoirs so fast, Hugh. They’ll drain over time, but they’ll also refill continuously as you experience new things and encounter new pains. Little droplets of your emotions now will stay in there for a long time, and they’ll emerge years later when you least expect them to. They’ll grow diluted by new emotions, but they’ll never go away entirely. I have old griefs and regrets of my own, Hugh, ones older than nations. They still surprise me when I expect them least, and I still have to deal with them. And I wouldn’t have it any other way, Hugh. My pain is what keeps me connected to those weaker to me, what keeps me from simply considering myself a god to humans.
It hurts, but the only way past the hurt is through it. Pain is never shameful. And while I may not understand every emotion you feel, for the emotions of sphinxes are in many ways far different than those of humans, I am always willing to listen.
Kanderon stopped writing, and Hugh just stared at the page. He… he didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been that. He’d expected some callous remarks about human frailty, some curmudgeonly orders to distract himself with ridiculous amounts of study, or just an utter dismissal of the importance of the spotter’s death.
Not…
Hugh wiped the corners of his eyes. It must have been a second since this cabin had been cleaned. It was too dusty in here.
Kanderon resumed writing.
Anyhow, when you’re keeping humans as pets, you need to tend to their emotional health as well as their physical. It’s just good sense. And what you need right now is a distraction. Do you have On the Nature and Growth of Crystalline Solids with you?
An image of the sphinx getting embarrassed at being sentimental and changing the subject abruptly popped into Hugh’s mind, and despite himself, a faint smile crept across his face. Kanderon was many things, but comfortable with sharing her emotions was definitely not one of them.
“Hey, spellbook,” Hugh said. “On the Nature and Growth of Crystalline Solids.”
His spellbook took its time, but floated back up to him. It flipped its crystal pages open, and detailed writing and diagrams began forming on the pages.
Hugh wasn’t entirely sure how, but his spellbook had the ability to replicate the contents of any books or papers it consumed into its internal pocket dimension. He definitely didn’t mind, though— he’d long since fed it most of the books he owned, just for the convenience.
As Kanderon began to lecture him on water-soluble crystalline substances, his eyes couldn’t help drifting back to her advice every couple of minutes.
Hugh came out onto deck just as they began leaving the harbor.
Off to one side, he could see Ampioc lurking just below the water as he repaired the damage to the city. Hugh stared at the immense octopus thoughtfully, wondering what sorts of emotions it felt, considering how much farther from being human it was than a sphinx or a dragon.
“Hugh!” Sabae called.
Hugh turned to see his friends standing in the prow of the ship waving at him. He waved back, then wandered over to them, feeling somehow lighter than he had in a while. He still missed Avah, and he still felt torn and sick about the spotter, but it wasn’t quite as overwhelming as it had seemed before.
“I thought I was going to have to come drag you out of your cabin,” Sabae said.
He gave her a wry grin. It didn’t last long, but it felt good.
The four of them stood quietly in the prow as the crew bustled about behind them.
As they sailed out of the harbor, Hugh gazed at the massive columnar basalt seawall. Hundreds of seadrakes and seabirds basked in the sun or squabbled over fish atop it. He reached out with his affinity sense, and could feel the columnar basalt wall’s submerged section as they sailed over it, and all the ways in which Ampioc must have magically reinforced its structure over time. He stretched his senses even farther out, feeling the further retaining pools the city used to assist as stormbreaks.
“Ampioc seals the entrance to the harbor entirely during a storm or attack,” Alustin’s voice said, from just behind them. “Builds a huge wall to close it off entirely.”
The four of them jumped and turned around, to find, instead of Alustin, a hovering origami golem in the shape of an octopus. Unlike most origami golems, it didn’t seem to be flapping wings or anything to keep itself in the air.
“Look up,” the octopus sa
id in Alustin’s voice.
Hugh looked up to see Alustin waving at them from the drakes’s nest atop the mainmast, standing beside a tall sailor with a spyglass.
“What are yeh doin’ up there?” Godrick asked.
“I like having a good view,” Alustin said.
The tall sailor lowered the eyeglass and said something, but his words didn’t come through the origami octopus.
“I’m wounded you’d think my motives would be so base,” Alustin said, though he didn’t actually sound offended. “I’ll have you know—”
Sabae interrupted. “We can still hear you, Alustin.”
“Ah, right,” Alustin said. If Hugh didn’t know better, he’d say Alustin sounded embarrassed. “Well, uh, I meant to give you a bit of a history lesson, but for now, why don’t you just go ahead and enjoy the view? Of the ocean, that is.”
The octopus dissolved back into loose sheets of paper, which fluttered back up towards Alustin.
“I liked it better when he hid his flirtations from us,” Sabae said, then turned back towards the ocean.
Hugh nodded in agreement as they all turned away.
It had been years since he’d last been out on the ocean. Before his family had died in the fire, his parents had once taken him to one of Emblin’s fishing villages, high up on the green-grey cliffs of ancient welded ash. They’d hired a fishing boat to take them out for the day. Hugh remembered clinging to his parents as they walked down the steep cliff-paths to the floating docks, which went up and down twenty feet or more with each tide. They’d spent hours sailing along the coast and back.
He hadn’t thought about that day in years.
Hugh turned his thoughts away from Emblin, before they could move forwards to darker times. He sent his affinity senses back down into the water, where he could feel the columnar basalt below. This far out, much of it was covered in sand and seaweed.
He paused, and then formed a spellform and began channeling mana into it. A few moments later, a trickle of sand began rising from the waves, congealing into a ball in front of him. Or, rather, trickles of a specific type of sand grain.
“Hugh, what are you doing?” Sabae asked him, looking at the wet sand ball.
Hugh just shrugged, then envisioned and activated a second spellform. The ball of sand began to writhe visibly as it shrunk.
Within a couple of minutes, a fist-sized transparent crystal hovered in the air. It was a hexagonal column, with the characteristic pyramid shaped spike at the top and bottom. It was just quartz, but compared to his cloudy, lumpy, misshapen old lump of quartz, it might as well be a different type of crystal entirely. The shape of this crystal was perfectly matched to the underlying pattern of the quartz, meaning his control over it with his magic would be far more precise.
He hesitated briefly before the next step, making sure he remembered the spellform correctly— it had been almost a year since he’d used it. His memory was pretty good, though, and it wasn’t nearly the hardest spellform he’d ever used.
He took a deep breath, then assembled the proprioceptive link spellform in his mind’s eye, casting it on his new quartz crystal. When it gently floated over to him and began slowly orbiting his head, he exhaled softly. He let go of all his active spellforms, but the quartz simply kept orbiting his head without him needing to pay attention to it. In addition, it used so little mana that his reservoirs could easily refill from the aether around him faster than it could drain away.
“Hey, Hugh?” Talia said.
Hugh turned to her, startled. He’d almost forgotten she was there— she was usually the loudest of his friends by far.
“I, uh, wanted to apologize for pushing you into the water earlier,” she said. “Or trying to, I guess, since you didn’t get wet. Not that it makes that better. I was nervous about getting on the ship and… some other stuff, and I just… I dunno, tend to get a little aggressive when I’m nervous? ”
“I’ve noticed,” Hugh said. “I tend to accumulate bruises a lot more quickly when you’re stressed about things.”
“Likewise,” Godrick said.
Sabae just glanced back with a wry look, but Talia had always been a lot more cautious about jabbing, elbowing, or hitting the taller girl. Hugh highly doubted Sabae would be nearly as tolerant about it as Godrick or himself.
Talia turned red— or, redder— and looked down at her feet. “I’m sorry.”
Hugh sighed. “It’s annoying, but if it was really that big of a deal, we would have told you to stop.”
The others all shot Hugh skeptical glances at that, even Talia.
Hugh sighed. “Fine, I would have just suffered in silence, but Godrick or Sabae would have done something about it.”
“It might not be a big deal to you guys, but it is to me,” Talia said. “I want to stop being so ridiculous about hiding my emotions behind being a belligerent jerk, and actually talk with you guys about them. And I don’t want to hit my friends anymore like some spoiled child.”
Hugh almost said something snarky, then stopped. Talia might be tougher than him, but he knew how hard it was to confess difficult things even to friends.
Instead, he stepped over to her and gave her a hug. He felt Talia tense up for a moment before she relaxed and hugged him back. He let go after a little longer and stepped back.
“I really appreciate that,” Hugh said. “But don’t beat yourself up if it takes time to get better at being more open. Stuff like that takes time.”
It wasn’t nearly as eloquently phrased as Kanderon’s advice to him, but Talia smiled at him.
“Thanks, Hugh. I—” Talia started to say, before she was interrupted.
Not by a person, but by Hugh’s new crystal running into the side of her head. It slowly rolled across her cheek and then tumbled off her nose at glacial speeds.
Everyone just stared at the slowly orbiting crystal.
“Maybe I should just have it float over my shoulder,” Hugh said.
“Ah think that might be fer the best,” Godrick said, visibly struggling to contain his laughter.
Sabae just nodded, shaking with suppressed laughter of her own.
Hugh blushed a bit at that, embarrassed at ruining the moment.
“Sorry about that, Talia,” he said.
“It’s fine,” Talia said, fixing a strand of hair.
Godrick leaned over and wrapped Talia in a hug of his own. “Ah really appreciate yeh bein’ open with us. Trust me, ah know it’s not easy.”
Sabae joined in the hug as well. “It means a lot. I also really, uh… appreciate the facial expression you made when that crystal hit you in the face.”
Both she and Godrick burst out into laughter again, and even Hugh’s lips turned up at the corners, despite his embarrassment over the crystal.
“Hugh,” Talia said, “is it alright if I wait a few seconds to start keeping my promise to hit you guys less?”
Hugh nodded as somberly as he could, trying not to start laughing. “That seems perfectly fine to me,” he said.
Talia smiled at him, then punched Sabae in the shoulder and Godrick in the thigh.
“Ow! Hugh, you traitor!” Sabae said between laughs.
Hugh did burst out laughing then.
CHAPTER NINE
Old Philosophies
Alustin finally came down to join them about an hour later.
“Lesson time!” he said cheerfully.
“Don’t you have more flirting to do?” Talia said.
“Don’t you have more seasickness to deal with?” Alustin said.
Talia blinked in surprise. “I… I don’t feel seasick!”
She grabbed Hugh and shook him. “I don’t feel seasick!”
Hugh gently extricated himself, eying his floating crystal over his shoulder. He’d only just managed to get it to hover in place where he wanted it to, and he wasn’t entirely sure it was stable. He’d have to double-check the spellforms when he went back to his cabin.
“Wave-going and dune-
going ships have very different motions,” Alustin said. “Getting seasick on one and not the other isn’t uncommon.”
“How did you not get yelled at by Captain Grepha?” Sabae asked. “Most ship’s captains hate their lookouts getting distracted.”
Alustin tapped his glasses. “Farseer, remember? I’ve volunteered my services for the trip, so the captain will be happy to give me more leeway. Anyhow, as I said, it’s lesson time. We’re doing double duty on this one— I have a training exercise for each of you to perform while I lecture you.”
Sabae’s exercise involved maintaining wind armor on one arm and water armor on the other— something she complained was like trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time. Talia had to channel her magic into a tiny fragment of bone, and keep it from igniting for as long as possible while holding it. Godrick had to use his scent affinity to keep the smell of sea-salt from the group. When he complained that he didn’t have a spell that could do that, Alustin smiled and presented him with a spellform for that very task.
Hugh didn’t understand why there was a scent spellform for something so specific, but then, he didn’t really understand scent affinities at all. They were, to say the least, really weird.
Alustin had apparently been communicating with Kanderon as well, because he assigned Hugh a practical exercise in growing salt crystals in seawater. It was surprisingly more challenging than Hugh expected. While he was just using the same pattern linking spellform he used to grow quartz crystals out of sand or feldspar crystals inside a boulder, there were several unique challenges here. The big one, obviously, was the fact that the salt was actively dissolved in the water. It wanted to stay dissolved, too, so Hugh had to use much more mana to cause the salt seed crystal to start growing, rather than dissolving. On top of that, there was the fact that there were quite a few different salts dissolved in the water, not just normal table salt, so he had to focus to make sure the salt crystal he was growing wasn’t filled with impurities.