by Lisa Daniels
“Y-yes,” Seon stammered, heart twitching in fright. She didn’t know why this thing scared her. Maybe that touch would sap all the life from her as well, making her as cold as it. Maybe if she wasn’t careful enough, her soul would extinguish and her body crumble into dust.
I’m lonely, it said. Lonely and sad and cold.
The fear tangled with sorrow. No. The shadow’s sorrow. The thing’s loneliness. She detected the personality behind it, like inanimate objects before, except this thing felt stronger than a table. Not quite as strong as a living being.
What awful loneliness. It bit and scratched at her insides, slowly poisoning her own thoughts.
“Why are you sad?”
The shadow crept up her body. Reaching for her heart. Because no one can show me the way home. No one shows me the light.
Now Seon frowned. Ahead of her was a glimmering white door.
Maybe it’s that? She noticed that the shadow seemed to completely ignore the giant, gleaming door behind it. Actually, had that door been there before? “There’s a light over there. Can’t you see it?”
No, the shadow said. No, I can’t see.
Carrying it with her, it clung to her body, slowly freezing her insides. Seon led it to the door. It trembled like a frightened and abused animal. She stuck her hand through the light. “See? It’s here.”
The shadow shrank back from the light. Then, tentatively, it slithered along Seon’s arm and felt along the rays.
Home?
“Home,” Seon repeated, though she wasn’t really sure what home exactly was.
She did, however, feel the shadow leave her soul. It disappeared into the light, gurgling with unrelenting joy.
Home. Home. Home!
Along with that triumphant, keening cry, more shadows began to swarm, clamoring, screaming for her to show them the way home. Skies, these things were starving, grabbing at her as if to tear her flesh apart, and find the key to home inside her body.
Seon blinked and found herself in the office again, the lingering pain of the shadows’ fingers still upon her skin. That wasn’t real. Was it? Zannis had released her grip from Seon, and gaped at her with a dumbfounded expression. If this ancient woman gaped at her, what did that mean? Had those shadows cursed Seon? Artiz folded his arms, one eyebrow raised, eyes flicking between them.
“Oh, dear child,” she said. The older woman crouched before her, as if kneeling. “Oh, dear, beautiful child. We’ve been waiting for someone like you.”
Artiz raised an eyebrow. “Is my discovery turning out to have fangs?”
Seon noticed the way he claimed her, making her accomplishment his own. It irritated her. You just happened to smell my magic. Nothing more.
Zannis stroked the wisps of her white hair. “Child. What do you know of magic? Do you understand why it disappeared so long ago?”
“I know nothing, really,” Seon said, thoroughly embarrassed to see this ancient magician staring up at her with reverence. What exactly did the woman see in her vision? Did she not find it terrifying to see those shadows swarming, reaching out hands like beggars in the slums? Furthermore, surely the repeated phrase, show me the way home, didn’t make sense. The shadows practically lamented the words, and Seon just spotted that door and opened it like it was no big deal. Why didn’t they do the same?
“Not many do,” Zannis confirmed with a nod. “We have… books. A lot of information recorded, so not all of it got burnt by the wyrms during their takeover. We know a disease or affliction struck all magic users in the world at some point. The disease crippled the magic. Very few escaped it.”
“I don’t understand,” Seon said. “How can magic just… vanish like that? Like, surely, if people became corrupted or whatever, wouldn’t you just get more magic users being born in the end?”
Zannis puckered her lips together, forming dozens of deep, trench-like wrinkles over her face. “Good question. However, magic is limited. The maximum number of magic users in the world never exceeded a million. It’s referred to as the ‘million souls.’ And if one of these ‘million souls’ is corrupted, then it can’t return and infuse a new host. So the best way I can describe what happened is that magic is like a bag of marbles.”
Seon blinked. She’d just about been following the concept of the million souls. The idea that only one million living people could ever wield magic at any one time, as strange a concept as that was. But marbles? “What do you mean?”
“Let’s say there are fifty marbles in the bag. If someone has a marble, it lets them wield magic.” Zannis’ voice swayed like her body, as if frail and about to give out at any moment. She finally bent herself back into the chair, folding her hands in her lap. “When you die, the marble is placed back in the bag and then given to someone else. That’s how magic works. It’s recycled. Only a limited number of people can wield magic at once. We don’t know why. It’s just how it used to be. And we think it’s a million, but it could be more, could be less.”
Seon nodded. “Alright. I’m following.” So far.
“Good. The… disease, in this comparison, makes the marble invisible. So, when the person dies, the marble doesn’t return to the bag, because it can’t be found. It’s a little more complex than that, but essentially, we have so many invisible marbles in the world, that probably the number of actual magical users is less than a thousand. The rest have… lost their marbles, so to speak.”
Seon understood, but not in how it related to what the woman had seen when sifting through her skull. Or why both Zannis and Artiz had expressions verging on greed lighting up their faces. She shuffled her legs and played with her hands, uncomfortable.
“You, my child, can find the invisible marbles and make them visible again. You can help us restore magic. With that ability to listen to the soul of living and non-living creatures – you will be able to contribute marvellously!” Zannis beamed. Then she frowned. “Except, I have no idea how to teach that sort of power. No one does.”
Seon grimaced. Zannis wanted her to somehow find magic. Except Artiz was the one able to sniff out magic. And then, after she found it, she needed to restore it, somehow. Like it was a broken toy, and she could fix it to pass the toy along to someone else. The idea of a limited amount of magic disturbed her, in a way. How did magic get bestowed on people? Was something picking them out because of some redeeming quality, or was it all just shit, random luck?
If only she had some other magic power. She’d much rather be flinging fireballs or shooting lightning out of her hands, then telling things to go home. Or throwing massive boulders at those oversized wyrms.
Artiz grinned. “Well. Given the fact we don’t know how to use this magic, I suppose I can help her in this regard.”
Seon bit her lip. Why did he sound so ominous when saying that?
Really hope I don’t end up regretting this big time.
Chapter Three
Don’t worry, I’ll help you get better at your magic, Artiz had said. He must be the biggest liar on the planet right now. His “help” consisted of bludgeoning her on a daily basis while other students watched and whispered. He insisted that the cold would do her good, help clear her mind and strengthen her weak little human body.
He sure said a lot of nonsense like that.
Now forced to move into the school, Seon lived in a dormitory by herself. Instantly, this put her at a disadvantage to the other pupils, because they bunked in twos and threes, regardless of age or magic. It set her out from the rest, made her unique in a place where people’s livelihoods depended on their magic, and everyone was special, one way or another. And because she didn’t demonstrate any latent abilities, people wondered just what exactly she was doing in such a place at all. Especially as Seon was forbidden to reveal what magic she used.
Artiz, of course, chose to make things much more complicated by waking her up first thing in the morning. Before dawn, even. The banging of the door got her out of bed in a foul mood, and as soon as she opened the s
tupid thing, despite being in a nightgown, Artiz whisked her off outside. In the cold. In a nightgown.
“Since we have no idea how to prepare you for the magic,” he informed her helpfully as she shivered her way through a third push-up, “we’ll train you instead physically and hone your mental concentration. You will learn to endure the elements, the pain. You will become fitter, and your mind will become sharp, like a knife. As long as you stop whining. You humans, always so afraid of us dragons, always thinking you get the worst of it, but truthfully, you can’t even take the cold. Can you?”
“You realize it doesn’t take long for me to collapse with hypothermia, right? Do you want me to die?”
“Oh, don’t worry. That’s another little benefit magic gives you. You’re able to regenerate slightly faster than a normal person. And you certainly won’t be able to die from something as basic as this.”
Artiz grinned like a demon as Seon collapsed on her fourth push-up, arms trembling, body throbbing in pain. She’d never trained her muscles like this. Never trained, period. Her face squashed into snow, and it bit into her cheeks, freezing her from the inside out. She felt fairly certain that if she stayed out here for much longer, she’d become a statue.
“C-c-can we g-go inside, n-now?” She scowled at Artiz since he appeared smug at her suffering. Two students on the side laughed with each other – a man in his early thirties, a woman a few years younger than him, entwined in a way that suggested they were intimate with one another. And here was Seon, doing exercises in her nightgown.
“Two more push-ups. Then you may crawl inside.”
Seon snarled and got up anyway, and Artiz immediately appeared behind her, grabbing her by the hair and forcing her into the snow.
“Three more push-ups. I’m your trainer. You will not disobey me, or it’ll get worse.”
“Fuck you!” Seon spat.
“Four push-ups. Keep talking, we’ll stay out here until you actually do freeze to death. I mean, you shouldn’t, but let’s not test that theory, shall we?”
Seon shuddered, her teeth chattering, her arms trembling. Still clutching her hair, Artiz watched as she shivered her way through one push-up, while the couple openly laughed. The laughter came as needles into her skin, spreading a sense of humiliation.
Two. It hurt. She didn’t have the strength for this. Her lungs struggled with bursts of air, her bones felt like they were about to break…
Three. Her body shook violently. She barely managed to push herself up halfway, and Artiz corrected her posture, pushing down on her spine. He released her hair when she finished the fourth one, then left without a word.
Growling, Seon dragged herself indoors where she sat by a fire for about an hour afterwards, warming herself up. Part of her was surprised hypothermia didn’t set in. At these temperatures, she shouldn’t really be alive right now. Or she should be confined to bed while she shivered her way back to normal temperature.
Guess it’s true. We can resist more than we should.
Still, threatening to keep her in the cold infuriated her. She hated Artiz. How was she anything more than a slave in this scenario, subject to his training whims?
Eating inside the canteen proved an ordeal as well. She lined up to get her food alone, and the students were already grouped up, openly staring at her, about eighteen of them altogether. Not having any friends made Seon lonely and resentful.
She couldn’t do the writing studies at all. Her grammar was barely better than a child’s since she’d never been formally taught. Seon was an unknown. A whore’s daughter. Somehow, people had found out and she had no idea how. Zannis had mentioned nothing of this past, and Seon doubted the woman was prone to petty gossip like that. Artiz didn’t know anything about it. So how? Were there mind readers amongst the population? Did they skirt her thoughts as she passed them, and snicker behind her back?
Seon ate alone. Her mind brooded over the implications of that, and over Artiz’s heavy-handed treatment to empower her magic. She picked at her squashed vegetables, a tendril of dark green hanging from the fork. One girl approached her, and she discreetly examined the newcomer. She looked probably around twenty, so a couple of years younger than Seon. She walked with a confident bounce and slammed her tray down next to Seon.
“Hey, new girl.”
“Hey,” Seon said, surprised that none of the food had leaped out of the tray. The girl herself had dark blonde hair, fish-belly white skin, appearing out of place in her heavy gray robes, which seemed to dwarf the slender figure within. Not exactly pretty, not exactly ugly. A nose that pointed too sharply, a jaw that might have been too square at the wrong angle, and a sharp chin which gave her a witch-like profile from the side. However, her eyes shone a glorious blue, like twin oceans.
Seon also sensed the personality underneath with a quick probe. Harder to sense humans compared to non-living objects, but she caught a glimmer of hardness, of an ice that didn’t go away. It reminded her a little of Artiz, except his was protected by a mental fort, so she kept running into walls when trying to suss him out.
“I’m Isera,” the girl said, and they shook hands. More mutterings erupted from the others around them. Did they not approve of Isera doing this? Isera turned narrowed eyes on the nearest group of people. “You can ignore them. They’re mostly wondering what’s so special about you that you get a room to yourself. When you’ve shown no talent at all and can barely read the first sentence in a book.”
The insult slapped Seon, and she clenched her jaw.
Isera appeared not to care, however, about the people watching them, and gave a little smirk. “Me – I reckon you’ve got something special. Or you wouldn’t have Artiz working you to the bone right now. They want to get the magic out of you. They crave it.”
Those blue fixated on her, generating a sense of unease. Did Isera expect Seon to talk about the type of magic she had? “I’m under instructions to not tell you anything about what I can do.”
“Oh, I know. You’ll need to watch out for that one there,” Isera said, jabbing a finger at a dark-haired, brown-eyed man with a square jaw and dark gray robes. He picked at his soup and bread, chatting to a plump woman. “He’s got the same power as Zannis. He’ll likely want to get the juicy secrets out of your brain.”
Seon gulped. Could he be the one who found out about some of my past? “Why are you telling me this? You have no reason to.”
Isera shrugged. Her blue eyes darkened for a moment. “You could use a friend, I think. Whether that friend will be me is another matter. Though I suspect you’re important to know, one way or another.”
Seon furrowed her brow. Was Isera a spy? Someone who wanted to gauge the information out of her for another purpose?
Why would I even think that? What’s even the point in her being a spy?
Still, a part of Seon didn’t think that everyone in this school would get along with the cause. There must be some here considering selling out this entire school to the wyrms. Unless Zannis’ mind-reading dug deeper than she admitted.
Regardless of what Isera might be, Seon would be a fool to push her away now. Not when Isera braved sitting next to her, getting the stares and judgment of the others who looked down upon Seon. She was willing to rid herself of all ties to them, just for associating with Seon. That merited some kind of trust.
Let’s see how long it’ll be before she regrets this decision. Or if I will.
“What’s your magic, Isera?” Seon leaned on her elbow, figuring she wasn’t in a position to refuse any potential hands of friendship. May as well start off with Isera. Personal training with Artiz might take years, especially with the methods he employed – and with the fact that Seon’s access to her powers seemed erratic. What fun. Years and years upon a lonely mountain, freezing in robes as she went through gruelling exercises, all in a half-baked attempt to strengthen her mind and body for the magic it contained.
Not exactly an appealing thought.
“Oh, I’m a fire m
age,” Isera replied. She clicked her fingers, frowning, and a puff of flame appeared, before winnowing out. “I’m pretty good at kindling fires, and throwing tiny fireballs.” She then grimaced. “Though that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Still not good for fighting wyrms, who are immune to fire. Mostly.”
“Wait. Fighting wyrms?” Seon instantly became alert.
“Something most of us here will end up doing,” Isera said, her lips thin. “Someone needs to stamp that scum off the planet.”
Again, Seon caught a glimpse of that cold place and vengeance. It displayed in Isera’s eyes. It frosted over her heart.
For whatever reason, Isera hated the wyrms even more than Seon. It made Seon think for a moment. She didn’t normally sense others’ human essence. She sensed tables being proud of being tables, swords thirsting for blood, and shields worrying after their masters. Uncomplicated souls, fragments of something as complex as a human, always humming the same set of thoughts in their creation. Molded by the ones who made and observed them.
Yet, with Isera, if was as if all her thoughts and emotions were locked up in an icy fort. For protection? Or a disguise?
Probably best not to pry too deeply.
They continued chatting for longer, picking at their soup and bread. Seon gave a watered-down account of her life, talking about the whorehouse she grew up in.
“A whore’s daughter, knowing magic? How despicable,” one of the humans spat, finally interrupting the conversation. A blonde-haired girl, lighter than Isera, who had a pretty face, but a hard, ugly set to her expression. It marred what might have been impeccable beauty. Nothing beautiful about a woman who showed envy and spite upon her features. Her drake companion, a man fifteen years her senior, merely avoided eye contact, not wanting to get into any disputes. He didn’t seem particularly interested in helping his friend, either.
“That would be Edith,” Isera said, flashing a venomous smile at Edith. “Hey, pond scum. Got that broom out your ass yet? Because it’s been wedged in there the entire time you’ve been in this place.”