by Peri Akman
This made more sense, although Quinn could not imagine ever not using his name. He was Quinn and always had been. Wouldn’t that mess with a person’s instincts? Like if he changed his name to… George… he would never look up when “George” was called.
When he wasn’t looking up obscure facts or asking the empaths, Quinn would stay in the main hall and ogle the beautiful fountain. Like everything else in the temple, it was crafted stone, with not a single inch lost to detail. He amused himself by idly tracing the symbols when he thought no one was looking. When no one scolded him, he became a bit more bold and started paying close attention to the symbols. Similar to the house that he resided in currently, there were dozens of them, and amongst many, was the Sigil of Magic. He had asked about it, but the answers were slightly contradictory. The empaths said it was but one of many important signs to the Prismatic Parables, due to the symbols representing entire verses. The Sigil of Magic was the first one, and thus the most emblematic. Kole took a more pessimistic approach, saying it was already taken by others and used as a defamatory sign, until a bunch of bureaucrats got drunk a century ago and decided it would be a great idea to put on skin as a weighted compromise.
The empaths seemed to like him enough, and after a few weeks they delighted in telling him tales of religion and philosophy. When it became clear that Ser Hero could handle most of the demons themself, Quinn began spending more and more time at the temple, just to hear the stories.
He would sit on one of the curves of the stone carving, perfectly molded to be sat on, and let his eyes blur over as the lights danced and the stories were woven.
At first, there was only the ancient lights, and the planet.
There was the Dark Queen, the being of extreme order, and the Light King, the being of extreme chaos. They opposed each other in mortal combat. At first the Dark Queen reigned supreme, casting all she ruled over into a blinding night, oppressing all, but the Light King rose up to defeat her.
For a while, all was good, but the Light King was too unpredictable, and he became just as bad as the Queen he overthrew. Light blinded the followers, and they suffered greatly, many dying from the blinding heat that was supposed to be their salvation—
The light of the King refracted off of the tears of his dying subjects, and from that, the ancient rainbow appeared.
It used to be that rainbows were huge, solid and brighter than anything, but the colors of this ancient rainbow chose to sacrifice this to save the poor dying humans.
The center of the rainbow was first to step down—The Violet.
The Violet led the way, fires curling and cracking at every step. Violet risked everything, which is why to this day it is hard to see it in the rainbow.
Then Violet’s lover, The Blue stepped down to defend Violet. Blue became heavily burnt and scarred in the process, violently splattered across the sky as a result.
The Yellow was next. Warm, inviting and kind, Yellow helped the humans with the Light King overthrown, as well as harnessing the last purely good drops of the Light King’s powers to create the Sun.
Then there was The Red. Red had stayed attached to the rainbow for as long as possible, but the Dark Queen and the Light King, even in deadly opposition with each other, acted in unison to bring new monstrous subjects into the world. The Red reached out and took a few chosen people, and together, Red and humanity defended against the uprising.
Those defenders were the common ancestors to the warlocks.
That was the origin story, and from there there were many other stories that spun off, all varying and diverse. In some stories, it was not the four colors, but seven. The way they explained it, not all temples accepted all colors. The one in Shorne accepted Green and Orange, but they had yet to fully accept Cyan. It was apparently a hot debate on whether they were there at the origin, or if they had recently sprung up. Green was characterized as life-giving and loving, Orange was Yellow’s companion, and Cyan was another lover of Blue, tugging them in varying love triangles. Often when Cyan was accepted, Blue was scattered across the sea, and Cyan took the sky.
Then of course, there were colors even more questioned: Pink and “Void” (the lack of color, such as hypothetically pure glass). Quinn didn’t even know what they represented, since all he was told was that such colors existing were definitely hearsay. He wasn’t entirely sure how, since he had seen the color pink before, but who was he to judge?
Regardless of the controversies, Quinn loved hearing the more mundane tales that happened after the creation. Violet and Blue’s rocky love, stories of times that Green would come up to interact with the humans, usually to yell at them for their bad manners and poor gardening, Yellow’s great and deadly puzzles…
Quinn had definitely learned most of these fables in his school, but it was different hearing them in a temple. The inclusion of more colors was new, for example. Regardless of Shorne’s stance on Cyan, they were way more relaxed than Haldon’s religious stance. For another, they were… oddly more vulgar. As it turned out, quite a few of the fables had been censored for his readings. For some reason there was an entire fable expunged that involved some drunken sot trying to find out if the Gods had genitalia. When the empaths told that one, Quinn just shifted awkwardly in his seat until it was over.
One thing that was different from his books was the fact that no one ever used pronouns. No he, no she, no it, no they. Always the name. The vague explanation was respect and devotion.
Normally, this would have no impact on Quinn’s life, but then he remembered what Ser Hero has said. Their insistence that they be referred to as Ser Hero, and only that.
It was just another one of those facts that Ser Hero seemed all too aware of, that Quinn had not.
Even more insidious—what if this was all the product of something divine? If not the prismatic gods, at least the Light King, who had historical proof of being referred to as the master of the monsters.
Then did that mean that Ser Hero had some sort of god complex? They were certainly egotistical enough.
No… that was too much. Quinn was reading far too much into what was most likely just some strange fluke of magic. Warlocks had been around for thousands upon thousands of years, why wouldn’t there be one person who had a one in a million chance?
It made far more sense that he had just been incredibly, insanely lucky, rather than this being the result of some sort of finagled conspiracy.
While his trips to the temple were informative, surreal, and almost magical in quality, the time spent with Kole was a tad different.
Kole never followed up on her “I will deal with your life-summoning skills later.” It was like she was either ignoring the problem or had utterly forgotten about it.
She didn’t react when Quinn summoned Ser Hero in the morning to kill demons, and she certainly made no effort to go off and kill demons or monsters herself.
That wasn’t to say she was moping; in fact, she was positively cheerful. She and Quinn hiked the mountains, slowly but surely, and found locations to sit and enjoy.
One particularly beautiful sight was a lake they had uncovered. It was completely monster-infested until they cleared it away, leaving a peaceful place behind.
There, Kole had embarked on a new life goal—teaching Quinn how to swim.
There was just one problem. Kole refused to set foot in the lake, due to not having waterproof or watertight bandages. So she couldn’t actually show Quinn anything.
Then there was the fact that the water was incredibly cold and seemed to be host to all sorts of fish and other life forms. Every time one of the creatures even so much as brushed against Quinn, he gave a shriek before promptly sinking like a rock from fear.
If he could see the darned fish he would be fine, but the water was murky and mysterious, full of evil little toe nippers that delighted in his thrashing. This was of course exacerbated by Kole’s delighted cackles every time he slipped on the mossy rocks.
After a few days he was finall
y able to feebly bob in the shallow end of the lake, which he took great pride in. However, he could only do this for a few moments, because eventually the water would rock ever so slightly into his nose, and then he’d start sneezing it out.
One time, Kole was so convulsed with laughter that Quinn climbed out of the lake, staggered over to her, and summoned a bucket of water above her.
Instead of dumping water, it dropped on her head and then fell on the ground, dumping the contents on the dirt.
Which was, of course, followed by more laughing.
“It’s not—not that funny!” Quinn stammered, a bit annoyed by being a source of constant hilarity to his teacher.
“It’s—” Kole began, but had to stop due to her laughing. She held up her hand, making a ‘wait’ sign.
Quinn rolled his eye, and went to go put his clothes back on.
“Wait—Quinn. The problem is you constantly seem to breathe in water. Gotta train your nose to repel it. Also you know you can like… open your eyes underwater, right?” Kole managed to speak out, although there was practically an undercurrent of laughter to her advice.
Quinn wrinkled his nose at her. “That seems stupid. Why would I do that? And how do I train my nose, exactly?”
“It’s freshwater. It doesn’t sting,” Kole said, somewhat more calmly, as the laughter subsided. “The nose thing is just instinctual, you just have to practice it with blowing bubbles with your nose and stuff. Breathing exercises, come on.”
“Sounds annoying. The breathing exercises, I mean. The eye-opening thing just seems like a giant sign for a fish to bite me in the eye.” Quinn sat on the grass and shook his head roughly, water droplets flying everywhere. He felt like a dog.
“Suit yourself. But if you ever end up on a boat, and that boat capsizes—well actually that doesn’t matter, if it capsizes you’ll probably die from the currents no matter what—but I assure you, the death will be far longer and more painful if you learn how to swim,” Kole said.
“That… that has not convinced me of anything. At all. Except to never go in the water again,” Quinn proclaimed with a morbid tone. He stared at her in confusion.
“Sorry, I got distracted from my initial point. Which was controlling your nose is good ’cause if there’s a wave that hits you, you won’t suddenly suffocate. But then I remembered it’s pointless since the force will probably just get you anyway.” Kole spoke with a sheepish tone.
Quinn pursed his lips into an unpleasant smile. “Wonderful. I’m doing this for no reason at all.”
“Eh, I’m sure you’ll find it useful one day. Plus you can summon stuff. Summon up some inflated rubber and a pair of goggles, and you might be able to live in that case. Also if you drop something to the bottom of a calm lake—wait no you would probably reach lung capacity before reaching the bottom of the lake.” Kole screwed her face in concentration, as if thinking of many more ways to die.
“What would goggles do?” Quinn asked, rubbing the dirt off his feet.
“You can see underwater with ’em,” Kole mentioned offhandedly, now suddenly incredibly focused on some imagined scenario she was muttering under her breath.
Quinn had never seen anyone use goggles in his life before. He knew they were some sort of plastic layer of protective eyewear, usually for warlocks who could fly. He didn’t know if that could help with water though. Wouldn’t the water just seep in?
“Goggles? Seriously? How?” Quinn asked, standing up.
This made Kole stop in her internal musings. “You don’t know? Summon up some and try it out, it’s not that hard.”
“Uh. I can only summon one thing at a time. And Ser Hero is out in the field somewhere killing monsters en masse. Why can’t you do it?” Quinn asked.
“Because I can’t summon things you can’t see yourself summoning. I could summon your axe for example, I could summon your axe with a blade on both sides, but I can’t use that train of logic to summon, say… a mace.” Kole explained.
“So neither of us can. There goes that idea.” Quinn smiled at Kole, rather amused.
Kole shrugged. “Eh, banish your creepy not-person. You have probably single-handedly wiped out at least a fourth of the monster population. An afternoon without that murderous creature isn’t going to bring their population back.”
Quinn shifted uncomfortably. Kole’s nonchalance slightly unnerved him. They were supposed to be taking on over-powered demons, but they had barely seen heads or tails of any demons after a while. Even Ser Hero reported mostly monster deaths, with only a smattering of demons. Kole suspected they were holed up somewhere, waiting for a strategy or some sort of opening to infect others.
So sure, it was essentially the waiting game and they both knew it, and sure, killing monsters didn’t really eliminate them, just made more smaller monsters, or the older monsters even bigger, but still, Kole was treating this like an elongated paperwork job.
Nonetheless, he briefly broke his concentration and one snapping sensation later, Ser Hero vacated the modern world. He then tried to picture a set of goggles. A pair of glasses dropped down, with plastic instead of glass, three inches thick and no frames.
Kole snorted. “That is nothing what goggles look like. But you know what? That’s pretty impressive for a random guess. Wait—hang on.” She wiggled her walking stick a bit.
A few hazy images appeared in front of it before a rubbery piece of eyewear fell to the ground.
“Aha!” she exclaimed, holding them up.
Quinn’s mouth quirked and he walked over to her, slightly limping on the rough ground with his bare feet.
He gingerly took the goggles from Kole. They were huge, and had a single thin sheet across a surface. It looked like a badly made shoe.
“So… you made me banish Ser Hero for… no reason,” Quinn said with a shrug.
“Sorry for having a bad memory! Plus they’re not exactly water tight. Got that last time I was in Estane. They’re supposed to stop acids from getting into your eyes.” Kole aimed a swat at Quinn with her staff for his quip, but it had no real energy behind it.
Quinn put the goggles on experimentally. They snapped and tightened around his head like a snake. Quinn yelped in pain.
“I have a smaller head, you can’t just—give me that!” Kole snapped, and Quinn practically ripped the goggles off, shaking his head to get the feeling back. Kole fiddled with the rubber strap, muttering to herself about his large head.
After a few moments, she handed it back to him. Quinn slowly put it back on his head, and this time, it did not constrict his head. It did, however, feel very wrong on his curly hair.
He stood awkwardly, looking around, squinting slightly against the goggles.
“So I just… go under water? And keep my eyes open? And… look at the water?” Quinn stated, scratching his head.
“That is indeed the process of events. You are most observant at life,” Kole gleefully cackled.
Quinn smirked, rolled his eyes, and went back to the lake. He carefully walked up to his waist before raising his arms up in a confused manner.
Kole dramatically gestured, beckoning Quinn to continue.
Quinn sighed. He was a warlock with the power to summon living beings, possibly in some warped universal conspiracy, and the big drama of his life right now was him in a battle against the lake water.
He placed his fingers against his nose, and pinched. Here went nothing—he forced himself underwater.
Despite the goggles, he kept his eyes closed at first, but when he realized they seemed to be staying dry, he slowly opened them a crack.
The goggles were by no means perfect. In the bottom of his peripherals there was a small pool of water bubbling up.
The lake itself was… brown. Very brown. And green too! Very green. It wasn’t exactly an aquarium. But he could see. He could see the fish, the plants, but mostly the rocks.
He lifted his head out of the water and gave a gasp of air. He gave a thumbs up to Kole, emptied the gog
gles of water, and went further into the lake.
He floated on top, awkwardly at best, but it was actually a bit easier when he didn’t have to worry about his face dipping below the waters. In fact, that was the point. He floated back side up for a bit, gripping his nose tightly, staring at the bottom of the lake.
It was… pretty. There were more fish than Quinn had realized. They were large, small, long, short, all with the weirdest eyes. Granted, they weren’t as odd as the dead fish that washed up on shore. Those eyes were just as unblinking, but now they were lifeless too, which made it a tad creepy.
Fish were strange. They couldn’t even be domesticated, due to being in the water. Maybe that was what Hogarth’s special skill was. Controlling armies of fish. That would be pretty cool, Quinn had to admit. It meant he would never drown.
Quinn went up for air again, thrashing violently for a moment, before managing to force himself back on standable ground.
“You all right, Quinn?” Kole shouted across the lake.
Quinn lifted his hand up awkwardly. “Yeah! Just uh… floated a bit further than I thought. I’m good now.”
Kole lifted her walking stick up in approval. “All right! You gonna come back?”
“No! No, I’m good! A few more times!” Quinn yelled back.
It was actually kind of fun. Quinn emptied the goggles and took a deep breath.
The novelty did wear off, but not for a while. After the sixth time underwater, with plenty of water in his ears and nose to show for it, Quinn resolved to be done for the day.
But then, as he rose up from the water—something flickered.
Well, that was weird. It was probably just the light, but it wouldn’t hurt to double check. Quinn took a few moments to compose himself, and went back underwater.
Quinn focused in on the direction the flicker came from. It had come from the center of the lake. Or at least, closer to the center than further away.
As Quinn floundered closer and closer to the source, he couldn’t help but feel… odd.