Life Beyond the Temple

by Nikolai Joslin

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “For what?” She sounded cynical.

  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly.

  It made sense to me why she had seemed to hate my magic yesterday. It wasn’t because I came from the Temple so much as it was because magic had destroyed her family.

  “It happened a long time ago,” she whispered. I had expected her to scoff and say something sarcastic, but instead it seemed like she was trying to comfort both of us.

  “That doesn’t make it any better.”

  “It makes it easier, though.”

  We didn’t talk for a while. We sat on the rooftop for what seemed like hours but was probably only forty-five minutes.

  Cinder started whining, and Cam stood up. She held her hand out to me to help me up, and I took it. It was different from Regan’s. I couldn’t really explain it.

  “We should get going. Won’t want to miss lunch with your girlfriend.” She gave me a weak smile.

  I shook my head and said, “We’re not dating. Everyone always thinks there’s something going on, but there’s not. She’s my friend and here to protect me.”

  Cam chuckled and said, “Well, then maybe I’ve got a chance.”

  I rolled my eyes at her again and said, “You wish. I’ve got more important things than dating in my mind. Plus, everyone keeps assuming I like girls. I may like guys for all you know. You never asked.”

  She stopped and pulled me close against her, a devilish look in her eyes. She brought her lips to my ear. She didn’t say anything at first, and I suppressed a shiver at the feeling of her warm breath against my ear. I could practically feel her lips turn up in a smirk as she whispered, “I can always tell when someone’s into girls.” And just like that, she pulled away and started walking down the stairs.

  I stood there and blinked a few times as Cinder rushed ahead of me and followed her down. How had she known? I didn’t think I was overly gay or anything, and my mind had been on so many other things that I didn’t really have the time to go and meet girls in romantic ways.

  I still felt her breath on my ear as I walked down to see Cinder running out of the door we had left ajar and Cam sauntering after him. She had her hands in her pockets and looked like she didn’t have a care in a world, but I knew better. She was just good at hiding all of the problems that plagued her.

  Chapter 7

  CINDER AND I were sitting on the bed watching TV when Regan opened the door.

  “Oh thank God you’re actually here,” she said as she set her bag on the chair and walked over to me.

  I smiled at her and said, “I’ve been here for an hour, just in case you got here early and had a panic attack.”

  She shook her head and gave me a half smile and said, “I worry about you.”

  I looked down and ignored that weird feeling that came up whenever she talked to me. “How did your thing with Meghan go?”

  She shrugged and said, “Like I thought it would go. We caught up, and she said she’d talk to some people about jobs. I missed her actually. She said she wants to get together for dinner, just the two of us. I won’t go if you don’t want me to.” She watched me carefully.

  I forced a smile and said, “It’s fine, really. I have to do training with Cam today anyways, so we can just eat after. You guys should have dinner. I’ll be okay. Cinder will be with me and everything. I’ll be back by eight, so I’ll see you then.”

  She nodded slowly, and I hoped she believed me. I don’t know why, but the idea of her having dinner with Meghan didn’t sit well with me, but she deserved to go out with other people. “Alright… if you’re sure…,” she said after a while.

  “Come on, let’s have lunch. I have to meet up with Cam soon, and you probably want to see more of Meghan too.” I hoped it looked like a genuine smile or that she at least didn’t look too closely at it.

  We didn’t talk a lot at lunch, and when we got back to the hotel we only had about half an hour before Cam knocked on the door.

  Regan looked over at me when I stood up to get it and said, “Be careful.”

  I smiled at her. “You always say that.”

  “I’m hoping that at some point you will be.” She stood up and stared down at me. She looked like she wanted to do or say something but couldn’t quite do it, so she just brushed some loose hair behind my ear and pulled away. “Be back by eight.” She was looking away from me and sighed heavily before saying, “You should get the door. Don’t want to keep Cam waiting.” She sounded sad. Probably because I was spending time with someone she hated.

  I opened the door to see Cam smiling at me with her hands behind her back. “What took you so long?” She peered around me and her smile grew less warm and more mischievous. “Hey, Regan, how’s it going?”

  “Fine,” she said as she pulled on her boots.

  “You coming with us?” Cam asked, her light blue eyes twinkling with whatever she was plotting.

  Regan mumbled something under her breath, and I pushed Cam back and said, “She’s going out with an old friend.”

  “Fine with me. I’d rather be alone anyways.” Cam shrugged and waited in the hallway for me to grab my jacket and gloves.

  “Be careful,” Regan called out as I was shutting the door.

  “Promise!” I said before it clicked shut.

  Why don’t they like each other? Cinder asked as he trotted behind us.

  Probably because Cam and Regan are so different. I don’t really know why actually.

  Maybe they both like you. Cinder seemed thoughtful, which was weird.

  God I hope not. I don’t think I can handle one liking me. You had the dreams too, Cinder. This isn’t the time for girls.

  It’s always the time for girls! Cinder barked, as if that would help me realize what he was saying.

  “What’s he barking about?” Cam cocked her head to the side while she watched me.

  “Nothing you want to hear,” I grumbled.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I don’t even want to hear it. Come on, we have to find somewhere where we won’t be bothered.”

  “The warehouse?”

  I thought about it for a while. It was abandoned, and it was a pretty empty part of the city actually, compared to the rest of it. It wasn’t the good part of town, but it wasn’t dangerous. It was just dirty and filled with a lot of warehouses and factories and things. It wasn’t the part people liked to be in, so it was probably as safe as we would get without leaving the city.

  “It’ll work.” I nodded and followed her back to the warehouse. On the way there, I noticed she had her hand stuck in her jacket pocket and looked like she was fiddling with something inside it. “What’s in your pocket?”

  She gave me a nervous laugh and rubbed the back of her neck. “Nothing!”

  I didn’t believe her, but I decided to let the conversation drop as she pushed open the door to the dark, dusty room.

  I pulled on a glove and snapped it shut before gathering a ball of light in the palm of my hand and letting it float beside me while I moved about. Cam followed close behind me and watched every move I made.

  I finally turned to look at her and pulled a hair band off my wrist to tie my hair back. “What do you know about how magic works?”

  “Not much. My dad didn’t really teach me how it works as much as how to use it. I know that Life Force has something to do with it, but I don’t really know what.”

  “The best way to learn how to use magic is to learn how it works. If you know how it works, you can find more efficient ways to use it, so we’ll start with that.” She groaned, and I glared at her. “Magic is delicate, and you have to fully understand it before you can go around setting fire to things.”

  She held her hands up in surrender and said, “Alright, alright. So, how does magic work?”

  “Life Force is in every living creature, from a blade of grass to a human to a dark elf. It is what gives people life. It is what some would call
a soul, but it’s not really that. It’s energy, but moves like blood. It starts at the heart, and moves out. There are thousands of pathways that run through the body. Think of them as roads. The highways are the heart, brain, spine, chest, arms, legs, and fingers. You also have back roads, lungs, face, toes, other various organs and things. And then you have neighborhood streets, which are nerves and things. You’ll usually use the highways, like with this light.” I pointed to the little glowing ball hanging beside me. I tugged off my glove and showed her the palm of my hand. “Everything starts at the heart, that’s where your Life Force begins. You then pull it down highways and back roads to where it needs to go. You never take it down neighborhood streets. People can’t control magic well enough to do that, and you’ll lose it.”

  “What do you mean lose it?” She was looking at her hand, the one with that ragged scar.

  “Magic is like the rest of nature. It is controllable with focus. If you hold the torch steady, the fire won’t get out of hand. If you drop it, the fire consumes. A dam holds the river until it cracks. If you lose focus or can’t hold it, you can let it get out of your control. You have to know your limits or you can cause more harm than good. Control isn’t built by practice. Practice just lets you find easier ways to use the spell and different ways to use it. You learn the spell better, but you don’t learn control better.”

  “So if not through practice, how do you learn control?”

  “My teacher taught me through tai chi. It is a physical meditation used at the Temple for balance and control. You have to constantly move, and it’s not broken or jagged movements, but movements that flow into each other, like Life Force flows through the body. The Temple has an adapted version to help the mages there. Cam?”

  She looked up from her hand. “Yeah?”

  “You need to be calm for this. You can’t let emotion get in the way when you use magic. It tears away focus and magic relies on focus. You can’t get angry, even if Regan walked in here right now.”

  She smirked. “I don’t get angry when I see Regan. I just want to see how far she’ll go.”

  I frowned. “How far she’ll go for what?”

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing. You’ll learn soon enough.”

  Cinder barked loudly, yanking my thoughts from Regan. “What is it?” He was scratching at the door to get out. I knew he didn’t like it here, but this was unusual. “What is it?” I asked again as I walked over to him.

  He looked up at me, and I saw the terror. I’d seen that terror before. This was like the dreams. But it couldn’t be. He wasn’t grown like he had been in the dreams. “Cam!” I shouted, pushing at the door until it opened. I stumbled back into her with a small scream, and Cinder was trembling at my side.

  “What is it?” Cam asked, holding my shoulders from behind.

  I didn’t answer; I watched green smoke rise up over the buildings. “We have to hurry,” I whispered hoarsely and tore away from Cam’s grasp. I ran toward the smoke, hoping it wasn’t what I knew it would be.

  Cinder raced beside me and soon pulled ahead, his ears lying flat against his head. I knew Cam was close behind, but I didn’t slow down to wait for her. I had to see. I had to know. We ran against the crowd as they ran away from the flames, screeching, children crying. A kid fell, and I watched as the people ran, running over him, kicking him, oblivious to the child in their stampede.

  “Cinder! The boy!” I commanded and watched him veer off to the side where he picked the boy up by the back of his shirt and tossed him on his back. Cinder raced past me, his red eyes flicking up to meet mine.

  I’ll take him somewhere safe. He sounded so grown-up then, less like a child and more like a man.

  “Keep him safe,” I yelled, not stopping to watch them race away. I had somewhere else to be.

  I was yanking on my gloves when I skidded around a corner to see the thing I dreaded most.

  Green flames.

  “What the fuck is that?” Cam shouted as she turned the corner.

  “I don’t know,” I said, gritting my teeth and snapping the buttons on my gloves, “but I’m going to find out.”

  I stretched my right hand out—my dominant hand and the strongest—and placed my left hand on the inside of my elbow to steady it. I closed my eyes and let the calm rush through me. I opened my eyes again and pulled at the Life Force around my heart, taking it down the “highway” that led to the palm of my hand.

  A steady stream of water came from my hand, powerful enough to push me back a few inches, but I didn’t stumble or move my arm. In fact, my feet never left the ground: the force of the water just pushed me back.

  I sent a pulse of Life Force down through the bottoms of my feet to feel out anything in the area. Cam’s heart rate was high, her breathing shallow, and her blood pressure insane. Might as well start learning now.

  “Take a few deep breaths, relax yourself,” I shouted over the sound of the water. The flames weren’t going down. Nothing was happening. The fire was obviously magic, which meant the creator had probably created another weakness for them. Everything had a weakness.

  Another pulse of energy showed her breathing slowed, and everything else lowered, but not enough. She wasn’t quite there yet. I let go of the water—it was useless anyways—and spun on my heel. In one fluid moment, I pulled Life Force to my hand and smacked her on the forehead, letting a calming burst of energy engulf her.

  She stumbled back a few steps, but I could tell she was calm now. I turned back to the green flames, which had grown bigger and seemed to be licking at the sky. Why was no one here to help?

  Because this had happened before. That’s why I came here in the first place. Ston told us about strange fires and people doing strange things. They knew water wouldn’t work, but they didn’t know what would, so they just ran as far away from it as they could until it stopped.

  “Fuck!” I shouted and forced myself to calm down again.

  And just like that, the flames stopped. They didn’t dwindle down. They just became nonexistent. Like they had never been in the first place. I stared at the crumbling building in complete shock for a few moments. I would’ve stood there a hell of a lot longer if it hadn’t been for a white paper airplane floating down and landing at my feet. I bent down to pick it up and unfolded it, not knowing what to expect.

  I stood there in shock, looking at the small, neat handwriting before looking up at the buildings around me, my eyes stopping at the roof of one about eight or nine stories up.

  At the edge stood a tall figure in a black jacket and loose-fitting dark jeans. The jacket was zipped up and the hood pulled over their head to hide themselves. The figure raised a hand high above its head in farewell, and just like that—vanished.

  My eyes grew wide, and I dropped my gaze back to the note he had left me. My hands let go of the paper, and it floated to the ground, but I didn’t really see it. I only repeated the words, again and again in my head.

  And so the game begins.

  Five words, and yet they seemed to strike fear deep in my gut. This was the necromancer, and not only was he the most powerful mage I’d ever seen, but he thought of this as a game. I was a game to him. This was simply level one to him, and he had won it with ease.

  Cam stepped forward and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s not done with us,” I whispered.

  She wrapped her arm around my shoulder and started walking me back down the road we had come from. “Let’s get you back to the room.”

  WE FOUND Cinder, who was in the process of being held in what looked like a suffocating hug by the boy’s mother. When he saw me, he pulled away from her and ran up to me, sniffing my leg, which smelled like the flames. It was an indescribable smell. No, that’s not true. It smelled like death.

  “Thank you, thank you.” The mother was in tears and pressed something into my hand, which I dropped into my pocket. “You saved my boy.”

  I looked
up at her with glazed eyes and nodded. “I wouldn’t leave a child there.” My voice sounded distant from me, like it wasn’t really mine.

  “I didn’t realize he was gone until I was here, and then I saw your wolf running with him. I knew he was yours. I had seen you earlier today. I’m so sorry.” She was crying. Why was she crying? “I shouldn’t have acted so horribly.”

  “It’s fine,” I mumbled, and Cam started to pull me away again.

  “Sorry, ma’am, she’s tired, and she needs some rest,” she said and started guiding me away again.

  By the time we got back to the room, I was almost back to a conscious state. I pulled the key from my pocket and opened the door and sat down on Regan’s bed. Cam sat at the desk chair and watched me carefully.

  “Are you alright?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But I can’t do anything about it. I can’t just sit here and fall apart. I have to… I have to kill him. I can’t let him get to me.” I was trying to convince myself more than anyone else.

  “You need a drink. Some alcohol and this will be a small problem, at least until tomorrow morning, and then you can talk about it with Regan.”

  “What time is it?” I asked, still slightly dazed.

  She glanced down at her watch and said, “Seven.”

  “One drink,” I said, forcing myself to stand up. “And we’ll drink here. Cinder, stay,” I told him, but he was already stretched out on the bed and didn’t look like he was going anywhere.

  We walked down the stairs and into the bar. Cam grabbed two beers and handed one to me when she got back from the bar and found me sitting in the lounge.

  We didn’t talk a lot; we just drank and made small talk. I did, however, drink a lot more than one drink. I was legal, though, for this at least. Wine, beer, ciders, that sort of thing were legal for sixteen-year-olds. You had to be eighteen for the harder stuff.

  “Look, Regan.” Cam hadn’t had nearly as much to drink as I had and still seemed pretty much sober.

  I turned around to see her and felt warm inside. She made me feel safe. Regan was safe. And warm. And beautiful. She was pretty great actually.