Her daughter tugged her hand, and Sybil opened it to cup her daughter’s. She felt the residues forming and then saw the strings – not strings really, they were more complex than that, infinitely repeating and self-similar, much like the complete gasket they had inspired her to create – stretch from Iri’s fingers to a little stone on the ground. The strings tugged and the rock flew to her hand. Iri caught it and smiled.
“What if we stand on a stone and then make the stone fly?” Iri asked.
Flight, like time measurement, was something Sybil was not interested in, so she had never considered the problem. Whether good or not, Iri had found a solution almost instantly; it was amazing what interest could do for thought, how it could find a problem another mind would never notice, and then a solution just as quickly.
“A good idea, daughter, but how would you control it? How would you stay on the stone?”
Iri hummed, lifting the stone with the strings, and making it whirl in the air. “I would use a blanket,” Iri said. “And I would sit in the center and move the edges like I did this stone.” She pulled the stone back and held it up to show Sybil.
Sybil nodded, her own mind working on the problem. If she could move the stone, why not herself? Skipping was a trait of mysticism, but all mysticism was based in the scientific. To move that quickly must require movement of the self, so flying must be equally as simple. The birthright did not move through the air like normal substances. It did not create drag, or push back like all forces should… but there must be ways to make it work. Thinking of the possibilities, Sybil decided that she would try these ideas herself before encouraging her daughter to any decisions.
“A good idea, but do not try any of these things without me present, Iri.”
“I know, Mother,” Iri sighed.
It was a warning Sybil had voiced a thousand times, but her daughters had a habit of ignoring her. “Do not test my resolve on th-”
A tearing shock forced Sybil to her knees, pounding at her mind, breaking through, violating and horrific. She could hear Iri’s screams beside her, crying for mercy and salvation, but she could not see her daughter. A wave of… something stole Sybil’s vision. A wave of something wrong. Something beyond wrong. It felt as if the world itself were dying; she could feel its power slipping. Slipping away like sand through fingers. It felt as though the very threads of existence had snapped. Sybil wanted nothing more than to comfort her daughter, but Sybil could not help, she could not even help herself. The screams were too much, she could not take it. A solution. She needed a solution.
With all her strength, Sybil drove herself onto her feet. Iri lay on the ground beside her, her whole body shaking in seizure, but her cries reduced to murmurs.
“Iri!” Sybil shouted. Though all was silent, the world’s screams tore at every fiber, poking like needles at every blood node in Sybil’s flesh. Desperation took her, and as Sybil bent to lift her daughter, she fought to thrust the world’s death from her mind. She touched Iri’s brow, and as she did so, another wave buffeted her, buckling her knees a second time, and Sybil feared that she would not be able to resist any longer.
And then it was gone. Thirty seconds, maybe less. That was all the time that had passed, but she had been so very certain that it had been the end. Iri sobbed into the dirt, her hands pounding at the earth, begging for comfort.
“It is gone, daughter,” Sybil said, but Iri’s sobbing continued.
Sybil lifted her daughter and held the girl against her breast, Iri’s head lilting against her shoulder, as her entire body shook. Pinching her lid, Sybil opened Iri’s eye. The pupil was gone, rolled away, and the whites dull and vacuous. Whatever force had assaulted Sybil, still held her daughter.
“Iri,” she screamed. “You must fight this!” She slapped her daughter’s face, desperate for anything to work. It didn’t.
Iri’s brow was warm with fever. Sweat trickled down her body, dislodged with every shiver. Sybil tried to heal her daughter, but that too failed. There was nothing broken within her daughter; the wound was to existence itself. It was a thing of the birthright.
As Sybil opened her mouth to shout through her daughter’s delirium, her voice was lost to a boom; deeper, louder, and more violent than thunder. Her gaze shot to the source, or where she thought the sound must have come, and then she saw it; a pillar of red, blazing across the sky. At this distance, the clouds were too thick for her to see the pillar’s source, but whatever it was produced enough heat to be seen as a swirling mass of orange, yellow, red, and even the colors beyond. And it was spreading like a firestorm. Too big to be an animal. Lightning? No. Not here.
“Maaaaama!” another voice called; Tin’s, crying from somewhere within the swamp.
Without question, Sybil knew her daughter’s location. She could skip, but she wouldn’t leave Iri alone. Clenching her daughter, Sybil charged into the swamp, dodging hanging vines and blackgum trees, and headed for the bulltoad’s bog. With every step, she dreaded what she’d find, if Tin had been affected the same as Sybil and Iri, she may have fallen into the water. Her daughter could not drown, but there were many creatures living in those ponds.
Sybil burst into the clearing, the bank and the blackgum falling away to be replaced by bald-cypress, trunk-deep in the bog’s waters. Tin was curled on the water’s edge, dripping wet with her arms curled around her legs. Mud coated her arms and a wad of green algae draped her shoulder. She turned her head at Sybil’s footsteps then stood, the tears starting fresh as Sybil approached.
“Mother,” she wailed, her arms thrusting toward Sybil’s waist. “I touched it. I touched it and the world died. I killed it, Mother, I killed it!”
“Are you all right, Tin?” Sybil asked. Her daughter looked fine, wet but unhurt and unaffected by whatever held Iri.
Tin nodded then gripped Sybil’s dress, pressing her face against the fabric to hide her eyes.
“You touched what?” Sybil demanded.
“I touched the bulltoad, I poked it with my finger and then I killed the world. I felt it die.” Tin pulled her face away from Sybil’s dress and pointed to the bulltoad’s perch. The animal was gone, finally gone. I killed the world, Sybil repeated. Her daughter had had the same revelation, the same feeling.
Sybil shivered, and in her urge to embrace Tin, almost dropped Iri. She wished she had some way to comfort her daughter, something substantive, some proof that she would be safe, but had to settle for words alone. “Nonsense, Tin, it wasn’t your fault. You did nothing.”
“But I poked it!” Tin argued. “I poked it and then it was gone.”
“Hush, Tin, it was just a coincidence. I have touched the animal in the past, and nothing happened.” It wasn’t true, she had been too unnerved by the creature’s stares to do such a thing, but she needed to calm her daughter. Whatever caused Iri’s convulsions had caused the heat on the horizon. She needed to get her daughters to safety before she went to find the cause.
Checking that Iri was well, Sybil shifted her to one arm, using the birthright to lighten her. With her free hand, she put a hand to Tin’s brow. “It will be okay, daughter, but we have to go.” She offered the hand to Tin, and her daughter took it without hesitation. I need to take them home. The heat is over the forest. With the chilling thought of her initial experiments of putting plants on this world brimming in her mind, Sybil began to run.
Exiting the swamp, she glanced into the skies. The red pillar was expanding, growing larger, and getting closer. And the way it dances… Sybil swallowed. It would need a vent. Gods, how could there be so much?
“Mother?” Tin asked, tugging at Sybil’s dress. “What is wrong with Iri?”
“We… we all felt it, Tin, whatever it was. But quiet please. I need to think.”
A volcano. It has to be. As much as she wanted it to be true, her assertions could not make it so. The bar of red did not come from the earth, but was parallel to it. A trick of the eye, please let it be so. The explainable was always preferable to the unknown,
what she could explain, she could prevent or protect against. Not a volcano, she knew. Both Tin and I felt the world dying. This is not a natural thing, this is the birthright.
Sybil heard a gasp and then a choking cough. Sybil pulled Iri from her shoulder; the girl was awake and coughing up water. “What happened?” Iri asked at the same time that Tin cheered, “It worked!”
“What did you do?” Sybil asked as Iri’s questions fell away in another fit of coughing.
“I put water in her lungs,” Tin said innocently. “That’s what woke me up.”
Sybil shrugged. The girls didn’t breathe in a normal way, but she hadn’t bothered to remove the gag reflex. The fight to live must have woken them both. Because of the way they breathed there was no harm in what Tin had done, but still, better that they acted safely. “Don’t do that again,” Sybil said, then turning to Iri, “Are you all right, girl?”
Iri nodded, still coughing, and then finally, she turned her head and vomited into the dirt. The rest of the water exited, sparkling with the birthright’s residue.
“What’s that?” Tin asked, pointing to the sky. Iri’s eyes followed, but Sybil ignored them both.
“Can you stand, love?” Sybil asked.
Again, Iri nodded, so Sybil set her down.
“Good. You two run to the house, and for any love you have for me, stay there!”
“Where are you going, Mother?”
“I must find out what that is, and what has caused it.”
“Can we-” Tin started.
“No. Go home and stay there. I will be back soon.”
As Sybil started to turn away, Tin huffed and opened her mouth, but Iri grabbed her hand and dragged her toward their home before the girl could argue. Sybil estimated the distance then cut it in half before skipping. When the light faded, she stood somewhere in the forest, a hodgepodge of alders, pines, elms, and every other type of tree she had wanted. Finding the tallest tree, she chose a sturdy branch and skipped again.
From the top of the tree, she could see the pillar without obstruction. It was not a pillar, but a tunnel, or a jet of heat, resting on its side. It hovered in the air half way up the hillside beyond the forest, but the source was difficult to make out, shrouded by light refracting off the clouds, creating an even larger haze of flickering yellows which centered about the even darker colors of heat.
It was certainly fire, there was nothing else she knew that moved in such a way, or could put off that amount of heat and light. The initial wave that had drawn her eyes, it must have been the result of an explosion, but there had not been another blast in the time since, which meant this was the result of a sustained burn. Fire was the only explanation, but it was difficult to fathom how. Whatever the source, it emptied flame parallel to the earth, not perpendicular. It would need to begin at a source of some oxidant, but an oxygen vent pouring out of the sky rather than the earth?
Sybil found a safe spot on the eastern edge of the vent, and skipped closer.
With so much light, it took several moments for her eyes to adjust. What lay before her was perplexing, the fire seemed to come from nowhere, from a hole that floated in midair, independent of any earthly source.
It almost looks like… But no, that didn’t make sense either. Not even the wind had moved through Mother’s portal, and it had been silver-lined, instead of red. But there are a million ways to do a thing, Sybil reminded herself. This is the wrong way. This is the dangerous way.
She had to close it somehow. She was certain now, someone – some god – had cut a portal to her world, adding oxygen to an otherwise stable balance. But who would do that? It had been so long since she’d lived in Trel, it could be anyone. The world she knew might not even exist anymore.
Why did you leave me here, Mother? She wanted to go home. She wanted to get out of this place. If she could put out the fire, if she could modify this portal, to make it more like the one Mother had made to bring her here… her daughters could have the life they deserved, an apprenticeship, a world with people, friendships, love. She couldn’t stay here any longer. She couldn’t keep them here any longer. This was her chance.
But there could be anything on the other end of that portal. A changed world, or maybe a completely different world. In the years she had lived here, Sybil had progressed her science, but she was only a single mind. What if the world had progressed past her? Could she face that world? A world where she was ignorant; nothing more than a fool in a world of the enlightened?
Of course I can. Compared to this, it sounds a paradise. And she had to do it. For her daughters and for herself. Mother had broken her promise, she hadn’t come back and Sybil could not stay here forever. Waiting forever. She had to try.
Her mother’s creation had not been strong enough to resist Sybil’s entrance, but had held back the atmosphere. She had to do the same with this one here, but to change another’s spell without knowing how it worked could end in disaster.
Sybil walked to the portal’s edge and examined her subject; a black semi-circle ten feet in diameter, curbed where it brushed the soil, and red-rimmed at the edges. The black was beyond color, it was the color’s heart and definition, a complete absorption of light and a complete lack of it. She knew the other side would be different, see-through, much like glass, or the surface of a pond in Trel. The red lining was clearly the birthright, curling and repeating like the residue’s strings and hearts. In order to fix this, she needed to understand it, which meant using the birthright.
I want to go home. The thought crept in like a rat beneath the library doors. Sybil squashed it. She would worry about such things later, when her safety did not depend on a clear mind.
Harnessing the birthright, Sybil sent the magic to brush against the portal, an unobtrusive probe. The residues sparked and forced her intrusion away, splitting and refolding like stirred cream, to reform the same solid piece. Sybil added strength to her probe and drove it forward, wrapping its path to drive the portal’s edge first one way and then the other, before her probe and the edge finally touched. The sickness within the flows drove her back a step. This portal was the source of the world’s pain. This was the cause of the tremors that had taken Iri.
Sybil cringed and pulled back the strings, but the portal fought her, grasping to claim her thread of birthright as its own. The residues reached for her and Sybil let the birthright fade. As she did so, the edge tore, causing more air to pour through, and the gash to grow wider, and the creeping tendrils to squirm. The wound she had caused grew rapidly, violently.
Desperate to fix it, Sybil reclaimed the birthright, and that only made things worse. The moment she embraced her gift, the portal’s tendrils rushed toward her, as if seeking to join her energies with its own. In panic, she skipped.
Sybil landed outside the swamp, near her home, and immediately cursed herself. She released the birthright, but it was already too late. A blast of light dazed her, and then a blast of sound knocked her to the ground. With the distance widened, the portal’s residues had increased their need, following the birthright across half a dozen miles. Like a fish hook snagged in torn fabric, she had ripped the portal wider, dragging the opening from the hillsides and into the forest. When her eyes adjusted, the flames had spread, the center even colder, and the fires weaker, slower burning, but spreading now in every direction, even curling behind the portal to that black emptiness.
Within minutes, the flames would reach the edge of the swamp, and from there, it would only be a short time before it threatened her home. I have to stop it. But there was nothing she could do. Without the birthright she could not alter the portal’s design, and it would continue to spread, growing faster the larger it became, until it had devoured the entire world.
Sybil ran for her home – she couldn’t risk skipping, not again. She could not risk making things worse.
All of those creatures, all that I made. I have killed them. All because I was desperate to escape. But was there anything else she could
have done?
No. She was being as silly as Tin, thinking that she had destroyed the world. The portal had reacted to the birthright, she hadn’t done anything but try to study it, and it had reacted. She could not have known that it would respond that way, she could not have predicted that the magic would try to claim her for itself, and even had she done so, she would not have known how to prevent it. The thing had already been growing, at a slower rate perhaps, but still growing. It would have devoured the world eventually. But I’ve taken their time. I’ve turned what could have been months, maybe years, and turned it into days. What if the portal had burned itself out? The system would have had to normalize eventually. Eventually, the heat will push the other way. Right?
But even if it did, how long would that be? It could still swallow the world before the currents shift. Sybil needed to find a place of safety for herself and her daughters, a place where they could outwait this firestorm. Why did I not prepare a shelter? I am a damned fool.
“Mother!” Tin and Iri stood on the wooden deck, Iri waving and Tin pointing to the burning forest. Sybil glanced over her shoulder to the sight of a wall of flame. It was advancing faster than she’d expected. It grows so big, there must be a pocket of safety within it, a pocket of air where the methane has already burned away. But she had designed her daughters to resist cold, not heat. Without the birthright she could not get them through the flames and into safety. And what would happen if that portal caught her? What would happen if its magic devoured her?
I will do it. I do not know what will happen if the residue reaches me, but I will do it. Anything to save them.
No, fool! she told herself. Do not be so hasty. Don’t throw away your life before you’ve considered every option. The portal’s edge hadn’t passed through the soil. If she could get her daughters underground, they might be safe. Sybil reached the deck – both daughters shouting questions over the other – and grabbed her daughters.
“We must leave,” she yelled, yanking Iri by the hand and Tin by the collar. She’d meant to grab arms, but had missed terribly.
Death's Merchant: Common Among Gods - Book One Page 52