A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts
Page 25
“It’s not just running around loose,” I muttered. “It’s acting out your instincts.”
Nathan looked up, his expression miserable. “Possession.”
“But not of your body,” I said slowly. I had been paying attention in anatomy class after all, it seemed. “You were in the Abyss. There’s no physicality there, no time and space so the only things available are the non-physical bodies. It possessed your… identity, maybe? Or your astral body. That would explain the incoherence in your consciousness when it lashes out. That’s it—that’s the reference point we use, then, and we just have to… to separate them…”
He nodded, and looked out the window, his face carefully neutral.
“Good,” Hunter said. “That’s good, right? We needed to know how it worked and now we do, so we just fix up a new circle—”
I bit my lip as Nathan turned to face us, knowing what he would say. “A new circle,” he confirmed. “But for the effects of the entities manifestation to be this pronounced, I suspect it is thoroughly invested in the structure of my astral body. I can’t even manifest my own astral projection with that degree of physical interaction. It will have to be loosened considerably to fully separate.”
“And each of the six energy bodies is anchored in the physical,” I added.
The boys shared looked that said they were certainly concerned—they just weren’t clear about what.
I hated to enlighten them, but Nathan’s lips were pressed tight.
“To separate them without shredding Nathan’s energy bodies,” I said quietly, “we need to get him somewhere that his physical body doesn’t hold them all together.”
Hunter understood right away. “No…”
“Yes,” Nathan said softly, resigned as he stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I will… have to return, at least briefly, to the Abyss.”
Nathan
I had spent the summer in the cell, and as I was escorted back to it now, I imagined I might have some kind of nostalgia about it. The small, focused space, the hours upon hours of talks with Master Larson as he probed my mind, helped me re-order my thoughts. We’d had several stimulating discussions during those months.
Instead, walking down the hall toward the door to that room gave me a quiet sense of dread. All of this felt like things I should have been able to predict. If not from the twenty timelines I had kept to aide me, then just from working it all out logically. I’d considered possession early on, when I first started my sessions. Larson had assured me, however, that there was no separate psychic force present in my mind. And, he was right. It had secreted itself away in my body after it had taken hold while I languished in that awful place.
Master Larson wore the same kind, infinitely patient expression he always did when he greeted me. “Nathan. Namaste. I’m sorry to hear you’re unwell.”
“Yes,” I muttered. “Seems we didn’t explore every nook and cranny thoroughly enough.”
I turned inside the door and faced Amelia and the others. Emira stood some distance behind them. She and Gershwin would be rotated out to stand watch over me. “I’ll need the journals and books I was working with,” I told them. “And… I’ll need my original research. It’s in my room, in the desk and… under the floorboards beneath the bed. Old habits. We’ll need a workroom prepared. Amelia and I will work out the wards to contain any… issues that arise. If we’re careful, it can all be done safely.”
Hunter shifted, as if he wanted to reach out to me. But maybe I was wrong about that too. “Nathan, maybe that’s premature, there could be another—”
“There isn’t,” I said. “If I could put an end to this by killing myself, even, I would, but the astral body survives physical death for several days. There is no telling what it might do, totally unrestrained. I’ll work on the separation process, then Amelia and I will work out the details of the ritual itself.”
They peered past me, into the small, windowless room. Lucas shook his head. “You shouldn’t have to be stuck in here, though.”
“The room is meant to contain aberrant psychic disturbances,” was all I said.
“We can modify the protections to contain astral emanations as well,” Master Larson added. “This is the safest place Nathan can be.”
“It should mitigate the attacks,” I explained. “At least, on everyone else. I imagine my passenger may not be quite happy with me. But it seems also to act on my knee-jerk, instinctive intentions. This place will be quiet and calming. Peace at last.”
Apparently, my efforts at humor went to waste. Not one of them seemed inclined to move. I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t need a housewarming party, boys. Go; please. Time is of the essence.”
The four of them started to leave. It tugged at something foolish in me to do it, but I reached out and plucked Amelia’s jacket sleeve. “Just the boys,” I told her. “If you wouldn’t mind staying, I have some… possible solutions to discuss?”
She frowned, nodded, and turned to the boys. “You three go. I’ll be okay.”
One by one they exchanged kisses with her, and gentle squeezes of her arm before glancing at me with what I imagined was a degree of mixed sympathy and warning. The sting of Lucas and Isaac showing their affection was distant. Seeing Hunter’s eyes briefly drift closed as he so clearly savored that moment of connection… I didn’t have the luxury to indulge the hurt, however briefly, so I brushed it aside as I waited for the procession to conclude.
“We monitor emotional states,” Master Larson said, “but not thoughts inside the room. If you need me, I’ll know.”
He was speaking to Amelia, more so than me, though he did spare me a look as if to include me in the instruction. She thanked him quietly before entering the room with me. Master Larson closed the door behind her.
Amelia looked around at the simple room. It was hardly a cell, per say—the bed was bolted to the wall, but only because a particularly powerful telekinetic might have trouble sleeping on a bed that wasn’t nailed down to something. The floor was carpeted rather than tiled, and although there was padding on the walls, it was hidden behind a façade of wood paneling. None of the etching for the wards was visible; they were laid into the depths of the walls, to prevent removal by unstable patients. All in all, it was about a ten-foot by ten-foot space. Respectable, but hardly spacious.
“You were here for three months straight?” she asked.
I nodded. “It was necessary. I never had much psychic talent, but with my mind in that state… you don’t need much, if you’ve got a particular affinity for magic. It also prevented outside emanations from affecting the rather delicate lattice work we built together.” I tapped my skull.
She sighed, and folded her arms as she turned to me, clearly uncomfortable in the limited space, though I wasn’t certain whether she was actually uneasy for herself or for me. “I guess this explains why the first manifestation wasn’t until class started.”
“It does,” I admitted. “I suspect… you already know what you’ll have to do?”
Amelia shifted from one foot to the other, looked around the place, and then sank onto the edge of the bed, eyes downcast. “You can’t open a portal to the Abyss and self-exorcise and get yourself back out all at the same time.” She licked her lips and shivered. “You’ll need me to open the passage, I’m guessing. And summon you back across.”
“You brought me into this world,” I reminded her. Another attempt to be glib. It didn’t take either.
“I want to help,” she said, looking up at me, “I really do, Nathan, but I… doing that again, when last time I barely managed—”
“Stop,” I breathed. I supposed, given that I couldn’t accomplish the task without her, that now was as good a time as any to make an attempt to bolster her confidence, since she seemed in need. There was nowhere else to sit—Master Larson provided his own chair when he came in for treatment—so I took the edge of the bed a little distance from her. It was easier that way. I didn’t have to meet her eyes.
She gave a short huff. “Well, I’m no prodigy, but… thank you.”
The word made me chuckle. “Prodigy… yes, that’s what they call me, isn’t it? And I’ve let them, because I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the degree of prestige that seems to come with it. But the truth is, I’ve lived and breathed magic since I was a child.”
“You were adopted by magicians, right?” she asked.
I suppose I should have imagined a world in which Hunter revealed my past to her. At least in part. “So, you know that much, at least.”
“I was adopted, too,” she said. “By my godmother, Laura. She, however, was not a magician.”
“The Crowleys are…” I laughed softly. “I hesitate to say ‘famous’, but in academic circles they are well known. They hardly pushed me at all, when I was young. I wanted to fit in with my older brothers and sisters. Four of them, all brilliant, all trained from childhood… there, but for the grace of God, so the saying goes, I suppose.”
Amelia’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
I weighed the potential consequences of what I wanted to say. The timelines in my head offered no guidance—we were well and truly off the path now, it seemed. Hubris… I had accused Amelia of it. Perhaps that was the pot calling the kettle, a bit.
All I knew for certain was that I wanted someone to know.
“Did you know we’re the same age, you and I?” I asked.
Amelia cocked her head to one side, in thought. “But… you would have been a junior this year.”
“I don’t know about ‘prodigy’,” I admitted, “but I can at least claim to be exceptional. That, along with my last name got me early entrance. We were born within days of one another, in fact.”
“How do you know when I was born?” Her voice quavered slightly as she asked. Perhaps she knew what I was about to tell her. Not the content, but the context, at least.
I leaned to rest my elbows on my knees, my fingers laced together. “Which one of us was born as the Harbinger of Az-Harad was perhaps partially a matter of chance,” I told her. “For a long time… I believed it was me, and not you. You see… I was adopted because my parents suffered a terrible, and freak, accident. Just like yours. They were classmates. For some time, I believed that I was the child of Jakob and Rosalind Cresswin. The timing was accurate, the region was close enough. The Crowleys refused to tell me about my parents, so I had to do some digging to find out, you see. And I discovered that the Cresswins had a child, and that the child was given to someone when they passed. The records were all sealed by the Magicians’ Court.”
I risked a glance at her and found her face impassive as she stared at her hands.
“I wasn’t, of course,” I went on. “No… my parents were Allison and William Cartwright.”
That got a reaction. She looked at me, comprehension dawning. “They were survivors. Hunter had a list—”
“I had a list,” I corrected. “I hunted down the names of every member of the class of 1999. The Cartwrights were among them. I even found a picture—one of the only ones to survive, and from a previous year. I’m the spitting image of my father, it turns out. And the more I researched, and dug into the past, and tried to understand what had happened that would kill off all of those survivors—all but Augustus Sinclaire, which I realized too late—the more I came to understand that our parents were… misguided.”
Amelia’s voice was barely a whisper. “Do you know what happened?”
“I thought I did,” I said. “It wasn’t until I was over there that I was able to see the whole picture. Az-Harad has a peculiar relationship with our world, you see. As such, while there have been many cults to glorify the Outsiders, none have been so eager to breach the Abyss as her cult. She’s a kind of… anti-creation goddess, as it were, which isn’t to say a goddess of destruction. She’s… like the negative image of creation.”
Amelia gave me a blank, lost sort of look. “Is that not destruction?”
I shook my head. “You recall Wardwell’s lecture on the laws of transmutation?”
“That all magic requires the transmutation of like forces,” she answered. “Sure.”
“And what I told you?”
She considered it a moment, before she recalled. “That Abyssal magic doesn’t require that exchange,” she muttered. “So… that’s what you mean by ‘negative image’?”
“Yes.” I sat up and shifted to rest my back against the wall, one legged pulled partially onto the mattress. “You see, our parents wanted that. Magic without cost, though not without consequence. Unlimited power, in effect. That is what Az-Harad offers to her faithful. I believe they operated from a manuscript that Sinclaire provided. They should have been more cautious, but… well, they were teenagers, and that is a very tempting proposition, is it not? Think of what a person could do with limitless power to create without destroying, without changing or transmuting forces. That kind of power could shape the world, mint new stars in the sky… Anything imaginable, really.”
Amelia paled. “They had to make a deal for it.”
Hunter had told me that Amelia knew some of her past. And that she hated it, hated what her parents had done. What she was, or potentially was. I could see it in her eyes, now, more clearly than before. Perhaps I had truly misjudged her.
“Yes,” I said. “Each of them was required to carry out a task. The birth of the Harbinger has long been a part of the Az-Harad mythos, if you will. References crop up across extant texts, though there aren’t many of those. A few magicians throughout the ages who have tried to commune with the Dreadmother have gone mad and babbled about ‘The Harbinger of Az-Harad’ for days on end before dying of starvation or thirst, or even killing themselves to escape the agony of insanity. I managed to piece together just enough to begin to believe… that I was that child. But, where you seem to believe you can change your fate, I… came to a different conclusion.”
“So you…” She stared at me, mouth partially open, eyes slowly widening. “You threw yourself into the Abyss. You did it on purpose.”
I couldn’t hold her gaze very long. I looked at the door to the room, wondering what Hunter would say if I told him the truth. He would never forgive me. Not a betrayal like that. “I reasoned that there was a one in two chance it was me. And I’d always felt a certain call to the darkness, though… I can’t say it was ever quite that dark. Still, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t me. I took a chance.”
“But, Lucas and Isaac, they thought you—”
I cleared my throat to head off the lump trying to form. “I’d appreciate it, I think, if you… didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell them before because I didn’t want their memory of me to be… tainted. I didn’t expect to return. Now… well, I believe you’re quite well aware of the risks of this endeavor. The real risks, I mean.”
She was quiet for a long moment, before she hesitantly extended a hand and rested it on my knee. Just that—just a small gesture of comfort. It didn’t help a great deal, but I accepted it without comment. “I won’t tell them,” she said. “But Nathan… after all this is over, I think you should.”
I gave her a sad smile. “Perhaps I overestimated your intelligence after all. The likelihood that I return—”
“I’m not stupid,” she said, a slow smile spreading over her lips, “I’m just optimistic. We’re going to get you through this. We’re going to send this offspring of the Dreadmother or whatever it is back where it belongs. And then you’re going to tell the boys everything. There’s a rift there, and it’s painful for all of you. I can see it plain as day. You have to heal it, Nathan, or you haven’t really come back from the Abyss at all. You’ll still be there.”
There were no windows in the room, so I knew rationally that the light didn’t change. But somehow, her face
seemed slightly brighter. I found myself smiling. “I may have misjudged you, Amelia.”
She withdrew her hand, fighting a grin. “Well. Miracles do happen. That happens to me a lot. I am, after all, The Harbinger of Az-Harad, the Dreadmother, She With The Thousand Hungering Offspring. It’s an easy mistake to make.”
“There is a danger, though,” I went on, sobering us both quickly, “that Az-Harad will corrupt you, if she can. She’ll never stop trying. You are her endgame, Amelia. You have to accept that, or you won’t stand a chance.”
“If that is the case,” she said as she stood from the bed, “I think our only option, then, is to finish this, and kick Az-Harad right in her abyssal ass. What do you say we do that?”
I can see what they see in you, I thought, though I didn’t dare say it out loud. Not now—not yet, certainly. Not until it was done, and we could see how the chips fell. Instead, I stood as well, and surveyed the carpet. “Perhaps we will. But… we’ll need to pull up this carpet first. I believe we’re going to make an absolute mess of this room.”
Amelia
If what we had to accomplish was just opening a passage to the Abyss, we would have been all set. Of course, it wasn’t that easy—not if Nathan was going to survive the attempt. There were six separate elements of the ritual that had to be worked out and even the process of safely opening and containing a portal to the Abyss wasn’t necessarily easy, even though we had a template to work from in both Nathan’s research and Sinclaire’s journals—which Headmistress Hayes only unsealed reluctantly.
“Supervised study only,” she said the first day that Nathan and I got to look at them. Emira was in the room with us, and she stayed until we had worked out part of the revised ritual.