Luminosity

by Annabelle Jay

  “You okay?” I asked Egret, who had transformed back into her human form.

  “Yeah, I think so. He got a few feathers, but they’ll grow back. You?”

  “Other than being related to those horrible creatures? I’m fine.”

  “And I’m fine too,” a new voice chimed in.

  Egret and I rose to meet the person standing in the doorway of the cottage. Egret had warned me that Merlin was old, but no description could have prepared me for the man who emerged. Hunched did not even describe the state of his spine—warped looked more like it—and his arms were like scarecrow twigs sticking out from his robe. His weak eyes sent him gazing somewhere above our heads, and his hearing seemed to have deteriorated as well, because even when we walked right up to him, he continued to stare into the distance.

  “It’s Egret,” she said loudly, “daughter of Chova, and I’ve brought a friend with me.”

  “A friend, eh? Who is he?”

  “His name is Luke, and he’s an Artist, like yourself. He goes to my school. Last night we were attacked by an incubus trying to kill Luke, which is how we figured this all out.”

  “My sympathies,” Merlin said as he groped for my shoulder. “My own father has been trying to kill me for almost two decades.”

  Strangely, his words actually made me feel better. I might have developed weird powers and a father desperately trying to murder me, but at least I wasn’t alone.

  “Come in,” Merlin said to the empty air outside the door where we had been before we scooted past him to get inside. Egret and I feigned footsteps, and then Merlin closed the door behind us.

  “Tea, anyone?” he asked.

  “That would be great,” Egret said, “But I need to drink mine quickly; my father will be waiting up for my return.”

  “And the Artist?”

  “He’ll stay here, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Of course. He can stay on the couch, the same place that the great King Grian stayed before he broke into the EDPS.”

  Merlin paused for dramatic effect.

  “Oh, Merlin, Luke doesn’t understand any of those references. He only just joined us, and I haven’t had time to fill him in. Before I met him, he was a normal kid.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Merlin said with a chuckle, and I wondered how powerful the old man was. Could he read my mind or look into my memories?

  While Merlin went to make the tea, Egret explained her plan. She would leave me here with Merlin through the following day, then come back for me after school. In the meantime, she would send an excuse to the school’s office with my mother’s signature on it.

  “If you need more time to train, we’ll make alternate arrangements,” she said.

  “Alternate arrangements?”

  “You know, like ask the wizards to temporarily wipe your mom’s memory so she won’t look for you or turn your house into a safe haven. In fact, I think I’ll have the memories of you pulled anyway, just in case; we can always give them back.”

  Egret was discussing my mom’s memories like they were a cup of sugar to be borrowed by the neighbors on a whim.

  “It won’t hurt her, will it?”

  “Of course not. Don’t worry, she’ll never even know it happened.”

  Merlin returned with a tray carrying three cups, a teapot, and sugar. And I do mean the tray carried those things—since Merlin used a staff to walk, he had to use magic in order to get the supplies into the living room by making the tray float. The man himself kept tripping and bumping into the furniture, which he rapped angrily with his staff whenever a table leg caught his knee or a chairback tapped against his hip.

  “So tell me about your skills with Artistry,” Merlin said once we all had our properly sweetened tea, including two tablespoons into Merlin’s cup. His hands searched for his hot beverage and brought it cautiously to his lips. “What can you do? Draw objects? Erase them? What about world building?”

  “I took a pencil out of my pocket on command.” This feat sounded quite anticlimactic after Merlin’s list.

  “Oh. Right. Was it your pencil?”

  “No, I’d never seen it before in my life.”

  “I don’t mean ‘was it your pencil?’” Merlin leaned in so that I could smell the sweetness of his sugared breath. “I mean, ‘was it your pencil?’”

  I stared at Egret blankly.

  “Merlin, perhaps you can explain what you mean?”

  Merlin sighed. “Every Artist has his or her own pencil. This, in addition to their eraser, is their greatest tool. The pencil should be unique, and represent everything about the Artist in question—as much as a single object can.”

  I thought about the carved wood pencil I’d removed from my pocket.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Then you must keep trying.” Merlin looked at me expectantly.

  “Now?”

  “Of course now! I don’t know how much time I have left in this body, and you don’t know how much time you have until the incubi break through these walls.”

  Concentrating hard, I imagined pulling out the first pencil, and when I reached into my pocket, it was there. As soon as that pencil was removed, another pencil appeared, and then another. Mechanical pencil, quill pen, plain graphite, green lead—every style of pencil I had ever seen. These I piled on the table, until most of the wood surface was covered.

  “I need to get going,” Egret said finally. “My dad will be worried about me. But I’ll take care of your mom; you just worry about finding your pencil.”

  “You’re sure you can make the journey?” I asked. “You’ve flown a lot today.”

  “Trust me, flying I can handle. If I could transform into a bird for good, I would probably do it. It’s the incubi attacks that don’t quite work for me.”

  After she left, Merlin and I were quiet for a while. Finally, once we ran out of tea, Merlin told me to try again.

  “This time,” he said, “think about you. Not the man that you are, but the man that you want to be. Your best self. Think of a memory when you felt most creative, or most in control artistically. Hold on to that moment, and let it produce your next pencil.”

  In truth, I wasn’t creative often. I had few hobbies outside of astronomy, and getting straight As kept me busy when I wasn’t staring at the stars. The only time I’d even drawn something was in middle school, when my eighth grade Home Economics teacher had our class put on a fashion show with the clothes we’d sewn. The theme was Space, and the preferred colors were silver, chrome, black, and white. Each of us was assigned a partner, but luckily, Lacey and I were paired together.

  “So what do you think about our Home Ec project?” Lacey had asked me after school.

  We lay in the grass outside the science corner, sharing a fruit bar and staring at the blank notebooks in front of us. Our school, Riviera High School, was about the size of one of Eagle High’s quads, so we had corners instead of separate buildings. Though the school was small, our principal had led the United States School Lunch Initiative, a program that used nutritious food bars and smoothies instead of traditional lunches to test the effects of proper nutrition on learning. The fruit bars, reminiscent of vintage Fruit Roll-Ups, were actually quite tasty, while some of the protein bars or protein smoothies could be chalky or just plain unappetizing.

  “I think that class is making me question my gender identity.” I meant it as a joke, but neither of us laughed. To break the silence, I flipped open my notebook, where at least twenty designs I’d sketched during study hall waited for an audience.

  “Wow, these are actually really cool.” Lacey leaned on my shoulder, and I smelled the pomegranate on her breath. “What’s this one?”

  I followed her finger to a sketch of a body suit covered in glow-in-the-dark bones.

  “That’s a Bone Dragon—or at least my own interpretation. My mother is too scientific to believe the hype, but others in her community are convinced that dragons exist. These ones are reporte
d to live on Draman, a planet we’re still trying to see, let alone visit.”

  “You’re weird,” Lacey told me, “but at least we have a winner. Our fashion design is officially this Bone Dragon thing.”

  Once we’d decided on the materials, Lacey and I flipped on our backs and stared up at the sunny San Diego sky. After Los Angeles and San Francisco had gone through their sky scrubs, San Diego had returned to its beautiful blue self, and even without the stars to watch, the view was beautiful.

  I could have lain there for hours, or at least until my mom remembered me and called to find out where I was, but then Lacey did something unexpected: she rolled back onto her stomach so that one of her hands balanced her in a cobra pose and the other draped across my chest. Her face drew close to mine, and then she kissed me.

  Her lips tasted like the fruit bar and they were slightly sticky, but regardless, the kiss was everything I’d imagined it would be. The world seemed to spin, and I closed my eyes to blank out the swirling sky above me.

  Then my head bumped into my notepad, and like a hurricane turning off-course, the moment shifted. The touch of Lacey’s head reminded me of the time she’d taught me to french braid and I’d threaded a dozen flowers from her garden into her hair. The pressure of her hand brought back memories of painting her nails black or red or purple, learning how to angle the brush so that the color would hit the edge of the nail but not the cuticle. These were not activities I wanted to help Lacey with; these were activities I wanted to do to myself.

  “I can’t do this,” I said after I pulled away.

  “We’ll still be friends—”

  “It’s not that. You’re perfect, and I’ve been in love with you since I met you on the elementary school jungle gym.”

  “I love you too, Luke, but I don’t understand—”

  “It’s not you. It’s me. I’m not the person that I want to be when I’m with you, and until I change into that person, kissing will never feel right. Not even if I’m kissing the most beautiful, kindhearted girl in school.”

  She tried not to smile, the edges of her mouth fighting the upward curve and twitching, but eventually she gave in.

  “All right, all right. But when you are that person, will you let me know?”

  “I promise.”

  Lacey curled into the space between my ribs and arm, where I could hold her until her mom came to pick us up. I would never tell her, I realized then. Lacey was about as into women as I was to guys, and now that we’d revealed our feelings, a change like that would devastate both of us. Perhaps she would have remained my best friend, perhaps not, but I couldn’t take the chance. When we dressed up later in her mom’s wedding dress, Lacey would see it as a drunk prank; only my mom would know better.

  “NOW THAT’S unexpected.” Merlin’s voice reached into my memory and pulled me out by the ear.

  I opened my eyes to find a pencil lying on the table, but this monstrosity could not have belonged to me. Pink and sequined, the pencil also had a slew of feathers glued to the eraser side and the lead was rainbow instead of brown.

  “Did I create that?” I asked, appalled.

  “Indeed. Apparently, your true self resembles a gay flamingo. Is there anything you want to share with me, Luke?”

  I looked down at my hands, the traitors who had pulled such a flamboyant object from nowhere.

  “I’m not gay,” I said. “Or, I guess I am, but not the way you think.”

  “And the other way is…?”

  “It’s not something I like to talk about, and besides, you probably wouldn’t understand—”

  “You feel like you’re trapped in the wrong body? You’re attracted to your female friends, but you don’t want to get into a relationship with them until you’re your true self? Which you don’t want to pursue because your parents—no, parent—doesn’t approve?”

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

  “I’ve been around a long time, Luke. I’ve seen robots cover a planet like ants over a crumb; I’ve watched entire species be wiped out in an instant. I’ve met dragons, and giant feathered birds, and sorceresses, and demons, sometimes in the same day. You thought coming out was going to shock me?”

  “Well, when you put it that way, I guess I did. And wait, I thought you were blind. How did you see that pencil?”

  Merlin tried to pat my shoulder, though he missed and patted the air instead.

  “I’m an old man. Can you imagine the state of your eyes when you’ve seen centuries pass by? The sight comes and goes, but magic? That I can always see.”

  “Well, now that you’ve seen my creation, is there any chance I can try again? I’m not sure this pen represents my true self.”

  “Of course. You’re an Artist; creating is what you do. Try a different memory.”

  I moved back into my memories. The Bone Dragon designs Lacey and I presented had been selected as the theme for the entire fashion show, and for a while we were too busy sewing black jumpsuits with bones etched on the fabric or constructing metal structures that became dragon wings to even think about what had happened between us. Every day after school we spent hours in the sewing lab, classical music blasting while models dropped by to get their pieces fitted.

  My favorite of the outfits was a pair of fiery red wings I had constructed from two red kites. Each piece of polyester was covered in large red jewels that resembled scales, and when the lights went out and I shone a flashlight on the wings, they glittered.

  “You have to wear those,” Lacey had told me when I tried them on for the first time.

  “Me? But I’m the designer, remember? Aren’t I supposed to stand backstage in all black and make sure the models get in line in the right order?”

  “So? I’m perfectly capable of herding a bunch of underfed teens by myself. You go out there and show the school how much you sparkle.”

  And I did. I had walked out onto the catwalk in a plain red spandex suit, my wings cocooning my body so that all the audience saw was the plain polyester, until I reached the end. Then I flung my wings open as the theater kids shone as many lights on me as possible, and the audience clapped and roared and called out my name.

  “Good,” Merlin said. “Now it’s time.”

  I closed my eyes again and pictured the pencil I had in mind. The color was deep purple, and inlaid in the wood were white stars and planets. In place of an eraser, a tiny silver telescope graced the metal band. This instrument resembled the first pencil I had ever owned, packed into my NASA pencil case on my first day of kindergarten after it had been given to me by one of my mother’s colleagues. That pencil had been my favorite pencil of all time, and though I was careful not to use it too frequently, by third grade, I had worn the wood all the way down to the end.

  “That’s much better.”

  At Merlin’s words, I opened my eyes to find the exact pencil I’d imagined sitting on the table. In my hands the wood was warm, as newly born as a dragon from its egg, and at my touch, it glowed.

  “Now try this.” Merlin turned his hands into two Ls, then flipped one so that the space between became a picture. Then he pulled this picture down, and on the table lay a print of me and the cottage behind me. With his own pencil—blue with dragon scales—Merlin drew in a cuckoo clock.

  Sure enough, a cuckoo clock appeared.

  “But I thought you could summon magic with your hands?” I asked.

  “I can, because I’m a sorcerer in addition to being an Artist. But you will need the pencil if you hope to change anything about the world—and you will.”

  “So what should I do to become a better artist?”

  “Practice. Not now—we both need our rest—but tomorrow, when you’re feeling less shaken from your encounter with the incubi. Start small, with a spoon or a knife, and work your way up to… what was I saying?”

  Merlin looked around, confused.

  “You were saying you wanted to go to bed.”

  “Oh, that does sound pleasant.” M
erlin’s blind eyes darted around the room as though he had never been in it before, and I wondered how much he remembered of our talk. “Good night, um….”

  “Luke.”

  “Right, of course. Good night, Luke.”

  Merlin wandered out of the room. I didn’t want to bother him with a request for sheets or a futon, so I turned my new powers to the couch in Merlin’s living room. Taking a snapshot took a few tries, but eventually the image stuck like a sticky note to my fingers and followed them down to the table.

  “It might be chilly,” I muttered as I drew, “so let’s make the sheets flannel.”

  Sheets emerged on the couch, purple with constellations just like my pencil, and then a pillow. I climbed into bed, my pencil tucked behind my ear just in case I decided to change a detail before falling asleep. The flannel sheets were the warmest and softest I had ever felt, and immediately my mind drifted in that beautiful presleep blur.

  My mother came to mind, and I wondered how she had met my father. Had he come into her house during the night and attacked her, or had he masqueraded as a normal man first? Could incubi change their appearance, or were their red skins and telltale eyes always present? Did my mother remember what had happened, or had her memories been wiped?

  I can’t answer any of these questions, I reminded myself. Tomorrow I’ll ask Merlin, and then I’ll begin our plan for revenge. Sure, Merlin will have to do most of it, but I can help. These incubi must be stopped before they hurt anyone else. But Merlin will know how to defeat them; Merlin knows everything.

  Suddenly, a sound from Merlin’s bedroom startled me awake. It sounded like a heavy thump, as though someone had been crawling through the window and fell three feet on the other side.

  “Merlin?” I called out.

  No answer.

  I threw back the flannel covers and felt my way through the dark to his bedroom. At first I couldn’t find the light switch; then I remembered he probably didn’t need one. Using my hands I found my way across the empty floor to Merlin’s bed, but no one lay under the sheets.

  “Merlin?” I repeated, only this time, my voice was a scared whisper. “Are you okay?”