by Rain Oxford
They didn’t answer my question and I hadn’t expected them to. The chalice had some decorative texture to it, including a sun on one side and a pyramid on the other. I watched my blood drain into the chalice. I had bled more when the Painter’s dog bit me.
Actually, I probably need a rabies shot while I’m at it.
“That is enough,” the woman said. The goblet vanished and I wrapped my finger in the hem of my tunic.
“I am the seer of what has come to pass,” the one on the left said.
“I am the seer of what is transpiring now,” the one in the middle said.
“I am the seer of what is to come,” the one on the right said.
“You are the son of Talot,” Past said.
“You have discovered who your mother is and come seeking answers,” Present said.
“But the answers you seek will not make you happy,” Future said.
“My mother was a vessel, then?”
“Yes. She was the vessel of Isis and guardian of the Book of Names,” Past said.
“She was innocent and taken advantage of?”
“She was.”
“Who did it?”
“We do not know. Isis often took Talot out of the pyramid to see the gardens. We do not know who your father is, only what happened after your conception.”
“We foresaw your destiny,” Future said.
“We foresaw two destinies,” Present corrected. “When your mother became pregnant, we saw that you would be a savior. You will end wars before they ever begin, bring the outsiders home, and give peace to our world for a thousand years.”
“We also saw that you would devastate our world,” Future added. “Blood will flood the streets and children will scream in terror at the sight of you. Your efforts to inflict justice will result in the death of every innocent person here. Your friends will become enemies, but by then, it will be too late to stop you.”
“I’m not here to kill anyone.”
“If we set your father before you, would you kill him?” Past asked.
“He’s not innocent.”
“If you decide who is innocent and who is not, you are already following the path of the destroyer,” Present said.
“Did any priests know about my mother?”
“Every priest knew about your mother,” Past said. “They brought her before us and asked us to tell them what would become of her child. They did not like the answer.”
That sounded ominous.
“For fear of you being a destroyer, the priests decided Talot had to die to prevent you from being born,” Past continued.
“They thought they could decide who was innocent and who was not,” Present said.
“How did my mother survive?”
“She was stolen from them before they could carry out their plan. She was found and killed, but by then, it was too late,” Past said.
“You were sent to another world, where the priests could not find you,” Present finished.
“Who saved me? Who tried to save my mother?”
“You will not like the answer,” Future said.
“Who?”
“The one you know as the Painter.”
* * *
Luca was waiting for me outside. The moment he saw my face, his demeanor changed from somber to enthusiastic. “Did they read your palm? Are you going to marry a handsome prince someday and have three children?” he asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“No, but I will sell you to a farm, where you’ll spend the rest of your life shoveling dung.”
He frowned. “I don’t know if that’s a shitty joke or a crappy threat.” He followed me down the hall. “What happened in there? Didn’t they have answers?”
“They did. I just didn’t like the answers.” I explained everything they had told me and he didn’t even try to cheer me up with humor. By the time we made it back to our room, I was shaking with fury. They had tried to kill a woman who was the victim.
And my anger wasn’t making matters any better. I had hurt a lot of people unintentionally with magic. Maybe there was another secret I didn’t know that was so horrible it could cause me to become the destroyer they predicted I would be.
“This is what they call a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Luca said. “By trying to stop you from turning evil, they’ve created the very scenario that could turn you to the dark side. You can’t let them control you. You choose the path you want to walk, not them.”
I didn’t say anything. The whole concept of good and evil was suddenly confusing. The Painter, who killed children and priests, saved me and tried to save my mother, who was killed by the priests. The priests only tried to kill her to stop me from possibly destroying their world, yet one of them was the one who got her pregnant in the first place. Who was to say who was right?
Then I narrowed in on the one thing I was certain of; children were innocent. The priests were exiling them, but the Painter was doing worse. “I won’t go dark. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll defeat the Painter. I don’t trust the priests, but the Painter is hurting kids.”
“That wasn’t really my point,” Luca said.
Something occurred to me then. “Does Isis sleep with men?”
“It has been known to happen that gods sleep with mortals or take them as spouses. The Painter is half mortal, after all.”
“Maybe Isis was in her vessel and slept with one of the priests and it got my mother pregnant. That would mean no one intentionally raped my mother. She still got the shitty end of the deal.”
“But she was screwed already by being a vessel. What’s the plan now?”
“I’ll keep practicing magic, you figure out if these priests are really as righteous as everyone thinks.”
I spent the rest of the night studying the domatago book while Luca translated getatago into the second book.
Chapter 12
I didn’t think the priests knew who I was and I didn’t plan on telling them. Instead, I went to breakfast as usual and met Keeper outside for training when the bells rang. The stone bench had been replaced with a marble one, but the courtyard looked deplorable. “Maybe we should go somewhere else, where no one expects us to be.”
“I cannot leave the pyramid unguarded. A botanist will come today and fix the garden,” Keeper said, as if that was the problem.
“Are you sure anyone should come here with whatever’s going on?”
“We must maintain order for the apprentices.”
Luca will take care of that just fine. “I want to learn to cast a trap like the one that the Painter used. I know I can’t magically make it appear like he had, but I think it’ll still be useful.”
“You have a lot more domatago to learn before you’re ready for something like that.”
“It doesn’t matter what I’m ready for because the Painter isn’t going to wait for me to catch up.” Also, it’s not just the Painter that’s trying to kill me, so I need more than a dagger.
“The Painter was impatient, too. Pushing your limits and breaking down walls is how you learn– running head first into a wall will kill you.”
“The wall is closing in and I’m running out of options.”
After a moment of thought, he nodded. “Very well. The base of the trap is extremely common and diverse. It is used in portals as well as a number of traps. First, create a pentagram and enclose it with a circle.” Keeper sent an apprentice for some chalk and I asked him why he didn’t magically make it appear. “Magic is not meant to make your life easier. It’s not a shortcut to getting what you want. Using it as such is how you become like the Painter.”
I didn’t argue. When the apprentice returned with pen-shaped sticks of white chalk, I drew the pentagram and circle. He pointed out my mistakes and made me start over. Each time, he would make me redo the entire thing once I was finished rather than stop me as soon as I made the mistake. What should have been a half hour spell took me five hours to master the pentagram and circle.
Finally, when
I was covered in sweat and my knees were scraped bloody through my thin pants, he said, “That will do for now. You’re certainly not an artistic man.”
“My art comes in word-form. What is the rest?”
“There are five sigils you need to memorize and draw inside the points of the star.”
“Show me.”
“You should eat first.”
“I’m not here to eat. I need to learn a lot of magic in a short amount of time.”
Reluctantly, Keeper wrote the sigils and I paid close attention to every line. They weren’t particularly complicated, but it was a lot to remember.
“Make sure you put them in the right order or it won’t work.” Then he made a motion with his hand and I was propelled forward, into the circle. My feet froze.
“The hell?”
“If you want to survive a fight with the Painter, you must be always vigilant. I’m sure you can figure out a way to escape the circle. I hope you do while there’s still food in the kitchen.” With that, he left.
I sighed with frustration, and pulled out my knife. It made sense that scratching or even rubbing the chalk away would work to break the spell. I bent over and tried to scrape the chalk off, but it wouldn’t smudge. Of course; that would have been too easy.
“You can’t undo magic with brute force,” a too-familiar voice said from behind me. I twisted around to see the Painter, but since my feet were stuck, I tripped and fell with my legs crossed. He laughed. “Aren’t you a little clumsy to be a caster?”
Instinctively, I dropped my dagger, reached out my hand towards Keeper’s staff, and said, “Sjokve.” It shot into my hand.
The Painter stopped laughing. “Nice staff. I never needed one, but I always thought they were cool.”
“Leave,” I said, aiming Keeper’s staff at him like a sword. It would have been a lot more effective if I had managed to get up.
“Now, that’s not very nice. Are you going to shoot an unarmed man?” he asked, putting out his hands to show that he didn’t have his book or paintbrush.
“You’ve got two very capable arms there.”
He laughed again. “English is such a funny language.”
“How do you speak it?”
“I speak anything I want. It’s one of the perks of being a god.”
“Half a god.”
“I look at the man as half god, you look at him as half mortal.”
“Well, the man has a serious crack.”
He laughed harder. “That may be, but I can kill you with a snap of my fingers, even without a paintbrush.”
“Why don’t you then?”
He motioned with his hands and the chalk stick levitated into the circle. In the center of the pentagram, the chalk drew a sixth sigil. My feet were released. “Because that would be a waste of talent and time, and I hate waste. Now, that’s not your staff, and playing with toys that don’t belong to you can get you killed, so I’m going to put it away.”
The staff vanished from my hand and reappeared against the door of the pyramid. I gaped. “You didn’t say a word.”
“No, I didn’t. Gods don’t need to speak the words to use such magic.” Not worried about me, he surveyed the courtyard with a look of disgust. “I remember this place being a lot nicer.”
I picked up my dagger and pointed it at him.
He rolled his eyes. “Do you really think that’s a threat to me?”
“I can hope it is.” After a moment, though, I stuck it back into my boot. He had let me go, whether it was to fuck with my mind or not. “Were the seers telling the truth that you helped my mother?”
“The seers always tell the truth.” Without giving me a chance to respond, he pulled his book from the inside pocket of his jacket, opened it to a page, and pressed his hand to it. A glowing red portal formed under him. “Come with me.”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“We both want the same thing.”
“What’s that?”
“We both want to go home,” he said. I tried to see his angle, but the lines of the portal started to fade. “You want to know about your mother, don’t you?”
I ran my index finger over the gold ring that would send me back here if he tried anything and stepped over the glowing lines. The world grew dark.
* * *
Unfortunately, I wasn’t back in my apartment when light returned. We were standing in a garden with a jungle of colorful flowers and fruit trees in every direction. To my left was a koi pond with a rock waterfall in the middle. “Where are we?” I asked.
“My home world. I thought it was the most comfortable place to discuss a tense situation. That courtyard was nasty. You might want to get onto the priests about it, because that’s no place to study.”
“You live in a flower garden?”
“What? Oh. No. I had a cabin where I lived with my… but, anyway, I moved to a different world.”
“I thought you were from Syndrial.”
“My father is a god of Syndrial. I grew up here, on Duran.”
“That’s an interesting name for a world.”
He laughed. “You’re not the first human to say so. Anyway, there are some places here full of monsters and other places full of people. I chose this spot because I’m not trying to scare you or intimidate you.”
“If this is your home world, then how are you trying to get home?”
“The fact that I grew up here doesn’t make it my home. I belong in the god lands.”
“Is Isis keeping you from getting there?”
“No. My father is to blame.”
“Then have it out with him. I don’t know why you had to bring me into this.”
“Because you are useful to me, but only if you’re not fighting me. You have no reason to fight me. The priests are self-centered bastards and they can’t teach you anything worth knowing. Follow me and you will be able to rule.”
“I have no interest in ruling.”
“No. I already figured that out. There are only two things you want; you want to go home and you want to save your friends. Magic can give you the ability to do both. I will teach you everything, and I’ll do it better than they could.”
“In exchange for what?”
“In exchange for you staying out of my way.”
“What do you plan to do with the book?”
“I’m going to rule the god lands.”
“I can’t condone that. No one should have that much power.”
“That’s not for you to decide. My father brought this on himself. I will kill him and anyone who stands in my way. If that means killing every priest of Syndrial, so be it. You don’t have to stand in my way. I can teach you enough magic that no one ever has to get hurt around you.”
With great effort, I kept my mouth shut and let that percolate. Trusting the priests was looking like a worse idea by the day and the Painter was the only one who seemed to be telling me the truth. His immediate goal was to defeat his father, but the puzzle pieces weren’t matching up. He had a hidden motive, and the only way to gain the advantage was to figure out that motive.
It also wasn’t lost on me that the Painter was asking me to join the dark side. If I rejected him and Luca ended up hurt, I couldn’t forgive myself. On the other hand, if I joined him and everyone on Syndrial died, then I really was the destroyer the seers were so afraid of.
“Does Duran believe in the gods?” I asked.
“Not Syndrial’s gods, no. Duran has only one god, but they know of eleven other gods in that ‘family.’ Set mentioned them once. They’re called the Iadnah. He isn’t fan of them, especially because they seem to think they’re the only gods left.”
“Left?”
“Yes. Apparently, there have been quite a lot of wars between gods.”
“That’s a good reason why you can’t kill a god.”
“I have to.”
“There would be a war.”
“Good. War weeds out the weak.”
“If you have the book, why haven’t you killed your father?”
“You clearly haven’t figured out why I’ve been killing the priests. I had expected more from you, to be honest. Nevertheless, to prove that I’m not your enemy, I’ll give you some advice. Tell your sand friends to head north. It’s a dangerous trek, but those who survive it will find lush forests and plenty of water. It’s also free of sand predators due to rocky mountains.”
“Can’t you transport them there?”
“Of course I can, but what good does that do me? I don’t care if everyone on Syndrial dies. You do, though, which is why I’m telling you.”
“What about my mother? Tell me about her.”
“When you decide to join me, I’ll tell you everything. Call my name three times when you change your mind.” With that, he pressed his finger to something in his book and a portal formed beneath me.
* * *
I was back in the courtyard as if nothing had happened, so I grabbed the chalk and went straight to the study. When I knocked, there was no answer, but I opened the door anyway. Luca was studying three different books at once while writing in another journal. “Have you eaten?”
He shrugged without looking at me. “I have eaten before, yes.”
I rolled my eyes. “Have you eaten today?”
“Nope.”
“Then come and eat.”
“I don’t wanna!” he whined dramatically.
“Get your skinny ass up and go eat before I call Mom and…”
He looked up at me and we shared a moment of silence. Afterwards he said, “I still grab my phone and start to call her sometimes before I remember.”
I joined him at the table, took out my book, and started studying the domatago spells. After a while, I recreated the magic trap and was surprised when it actually worked. Then I drew the sigil I had seen Painter use and it released my feet.
“Why would he teach you magic if you’re going to use it to fight him?” Luca asked after I told him what the Painter had done.