Kanin Fyre: Chapter 14 - Siqi

I stare at the goblin for a moment. “How did you do that?” I don’t see any void involved in his teleportations—no spell circles either.

Siqi blinks out of existence, but since I have my vision turned on in all directions, I can see when he instantaneously reappears behind us on a stool before a cabinet. He begins pulling out small plates and teacups, and again Zyneth spins to face him, a hand resting on the hilt of his blade.

“Sugar?” Siqi asks, oblivious to Zyneth’s plight as he vanishes once more to deposit the flatware. Zyneth tries to track the goblin as he seems to teleport about the room, but Siqi has already blinked over to a cupboard, sitting on the counter as he riffles through the shelves. For once, being able to simultaneously see in all directions is pretty useful. “I have honey too, and nectar. Cream and jam? Goes good with the biscuits.” 

“Er…” I’m not sure if he hasn’t gotten a good look at me, or if he’s ignoring my appearance. I don’t have my illusion going, so it's quite obvious I’m not human. “That won’t be necessary. I can’t eat.” 

“Ah,” he sighs sadly. “Just the tea, then?” 

“No–what?” I splutter. “I can’t drink either.”

“Only for the two of us,” Zyneth cuts in. He’s taken his hand away from his blade, but still appears tense and vigilant. “And thank you for the offer.” 

Siqi brightens. “Of course! Of course. So rare that I get guests. Most never come in!” 

“I imagine that might be due to the fact that the door is nailed shut?” If Siqi hears my remark, he gives no indication, instead beckoning us over to his table, where he’s once again seated. The furniture isn’t so small that we can’t fit on the chairs, but it’s definitely a tight fit. Zyneth’s knees bump up against the edge of the table, and he looks distinctly uncomfortable. I Sculpt some of the glass shorter in my legs to better fit. 

Zyneth narrows his eyes at me. “Cheater,” he mouths. 

The kettle starts to whistle and Siqi teleports to a counter near the stove to grab it. He hoists the pot off the stove, remaining seated and bending at an awkward angle, then blinks back over to the table. He sets the pot down with a sigh.

“Is that null magic?” I ask. “Teleportation?” 

 Siqi laughs. “Teleportation? No, no. Don’t use summoning magic here. I just took a shortcut, is all.” 

“What’s the difference?” I ask. 

The goblin goes about pouring tea into three different cups, despite Zyneth’s earlier objection, before happily laying out an array of cookies. “Telepads use summoning magic. Move marked tokens from one spell circle to another, right?”

I guess those passes we get when we use telepads would be the tokens he’s referencing. “Sure.”

Siqi adds cream and sugar to his tea. An excessive amount of cream and sugar. Wow, he’s still going. “My shortcut doesn’t summon. It pinches places together, see? So close, they might as well be the same place. A void between them. I step through, then I unpinch. Yes?” 

I’m not entirely sure I see the difference—except Siqi doesn’t seem to be using spell circles. “And that’s void magic?” I ask. “Just… removing the space between places?”

“Yes and no.” The goblin takes a long sip of his tea before letting out a content sigh. “You don’t know this? You use void magic.”

“I do,” I say, taken aback. “How do you know?”

He points at my chest. “There’s a null spell there. Binding. But it’s powered by void. Quite interesting!”

I instinctively place a hand over my core. “You can sense that?”

“Of course.” He waves off the question as if it’s obvious, then dunks a biscuit in his tea. “You used void to enter my house, yes?” 

“I did,” I admit. Noticing neither of us have touched our tea, Siqi enthusiastically pushes a plate of baked goods toward us. Zyneth politely picks up one of the cookies and takes a nibble. “But I don’t think the spells I know work the same way as yours.” 

“That so?” Siqi looks up at me, completely non-reactive to the fact that he’s talking to a faceless glass homunculus. “Show me.”

“Um.” Well this is all moving rather fast. He hasn’t even asked for our names. “I feel like I should explain some things first.” 

“Nonsense!” Siqi cries. “Actions speak louder than words. Demonstrate!”

Well, if he insists. He’s taken everything else in stride so far; surely, a bit of Attuned void won’t cause him to flinch. 

Surely. 

I carved a large chunk out of my mana by bringing Zyneth inside the tower, so I settle for a small demonstration. I summon two teacup-sized spheres of void and a piece of glass. Activating a Displace, the void spheres flatten into sheets. I send the glass into one of them, and the void collapses around it; it emerges from the second volume of void at the same instant. 

“Fascinating!” Siqi leans forward. “Attuned, is it?” 

“Yeah,” I say, surprised that he’d jump right to a (correct) conclusion that is supposed to be impossible.

“I suppose that’s how you lost your body?” he asks. 

I stare at him for a moment. The question was so casual, like remarking about someone’s eye color. Does he even understand what I am? Does he not care? I’m not even sure what I’m feeling right now. Baffled? Caught off guard? Overwhelmed?

Seen. That’s what it is. He looks at me like I’m a person—like how Zyneth and Noli look at me—and not like I'm an interesting object. Not how the Academy professor looked at me. Siqi is treating me like any other person. In fact, he seems a lot more interested in my magic than my nature. 

“Tangentially,” I finally reply. “Lost the body first, then Attuned some void. How do you know all this?”

“Directly accessing the Between is dangerous,” Siqi says. “Most mages who have tried vanished, died, or returned with lost limbs. Attunement shouldn’t be possible, as your void just clearly demonstrated. Void is the magic of space—condensing it, stretching it, binding it, rearranging it. Wild void magic, existing without intention, can do the same to any physical object that interacts with it.” 

That paints a vivid and disturbing picture in my mind. 

He holds out a finger. “May I?” 

Ink, who had previously been cautiously listening to my thoughts, draws back at Siqi’s question. It doesn’t like the idea of this mage touching our void. What if he tries to Attune some of it? 

He won’t do that. I think. 

Ink remembers when I first Attuned part of it—how I tore pieces of its essence away. That void has since mixed back into the rest Ink, but it was still not a pleasant experience, and if someone else tried to Attune our void, we might not be able to get it back. 

Ink raises some fair points. “You won’t Attune it, will you?”

Siqi raises an intrigued eyebrow. “That which is already Attuned to someone cannot be taken by another. At least, not while the original mage is alive.” 

“Well I’m…” not alive. But I wonder if I should even admit that. Does that mean Siqi or some other null mage could strip the void away from me?

Could they strip Ink away? 

The thought makes me pause, and Ink bristles in anger and offense. 

But I suspect the answer is no: Blair made it clear that any attempt to remove Ink’s connection to me would destroy my soul. Probably that’s the only reason I was able to Attune some in the first place: we were already connected. If someone else tried it, I suspect my soul would get caught in the process.

Isn’t that a lovely thought. 

“Alright,” I say, allowing some of the void to float over to Siqi’s outstretched hand. It’s not that I already implicitly trust this man, but he seems earnest and willing to explain more about void magic than I’ve read anywhere else before now.

Siqi prods the floating shadow, and it compresses beneath his finger. He cackles in delight. “Amazing! Well, what a marvelous afternoon. Guests, and new applications of void magic. Tell me your story.” 

I pause. “My story?” 

“Yes!” He enthusiastically dunks a biscuit in his tea, splashing some on the table. “You say you lost the body first, then Attuned void—there is certainly a story there! Tell me all about it. What spells you can do with Attuned void. How you learned to wield it.”

“That might take a while,” I say. 

“That’s alright,” Siqi happily assures me. “I’ve nowhere else to be.”

“You’re not expected back at the Academy?” Zyneth asks. 

Siqi frowns, his gaze going distant. “Oh, yes. Yes I might have missed a few days of class. Is the summer quarter over?”

Zyneth blinks. “It’s winter.”

“More immediately,” I say, “we need to figure out what we’ll be doing for the night. It’s a ways back to town. Will you be able to make it there before dark?”

“If I left within the next hour or two,” Zyneth says. “But I can make a flame to light my way.”

That doesn’t make me feel better. 

“Nonsense,” Siqi says. “You can both stay here. I’ve a spare bedroom! Might need to dust it off, though…”

I look around the lone room, lacking any sort of bedding, or any visible entrances into other floors of the tower. He probably just teleports—er, shortcuts—to the different levels.

Zyneth seems to have reached the same conclusion. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it up there. I possess no void abilities.” 

“Don’t worry, it’s easy,” Siqi assures a very baffled Zyneth. “Now, the story?”

I look at Zyneth, and he lifts a shoulder in an indifferent shrug. He knows I can get him out of here if I need to—and he can probably crash on the sofa if Siqi’s assurance is misguided. 

“Alright then,” I say, thinking over everything I’ve been through over the last year. How much should I tell him? I suppose there’s no risk if I leave Ink out of it—and my identity, of course. 

“You can call me Kay,” I say. “And all this started when I died…”

I talk for a long time. I explain how I ended up Between, how Noli and I got caught in Trenevalt’s spell, how we ended up in different bodies and all we went through to try to get them back. Well, not everything—I skip over Peakshadow and the predator. 

I explain how we figured out the spell to renew my Core Bond, and get Noli back in her body. I give an abridged account of our misadventure to Emrox, and the spell circle I activated, and my failed attempt to get home. Again, I leave the predator out of this part, and I handwave an explanation about my Inventory being shredded, vaguely blaming it on the Planar Linkage spell failing. 

I demonstrate the few void spells I know—Displace and Void Scythe—along with the hybrid glass/void spells—Chromatic Limb and Refraction. 

Siqi listens with unbridled interest, frequently interrupting to ask for clarification or make an excited exclamation. It results in the recap taking much longer than it should have. But it’s sort of nice to get it all out there. To tell someone other than my close friends. 

Hey. I’ve got close friends now. That’s… new.

Two pots of tea and dozens of biscuits later, I finally reach the end. “And that’s what brought me here,” I say. I leave out the additional motivation that I want to develop my abilities so I can hold my own against the gods, but he doesn’t need to know that. “I need help figuring out these abilities, and it sounds like you’re one of the best people to help with that. Maybe the best.”

“Well, any student of Caesius is a student of mine,” Siqi says. 

“Oh.” I thought I’d have to fight a little harder for it. “Well that’s great to hear! I appreciate it. When do we start?”

“Hmm.” Siqi abruptly vanishes. I need to figure out how I can Check or Inspect that spell. It’s always over by the time I think to try. He reappears a few seconds later, setting a notebook down on the table. He flips through the pages. “Let’s see… I think I can get you in… a week after the spring solstice. I won’t have any lectures then.” 

“You mean seven months from now?” Zyneth clarifies. 

“Indeed!” Siqi cheerfully replies. “Or… No, wait, that’s the year after. Nineteen months, then. But I’d quite enjoy your company if you’d like to visit before then!”

“A year and a half?” I repeat. “I need help today!” 

“Learning arcana takes time,” Siqi says. “Even if we started today, you can’t learn a new field of magic overnight. But I’m more than happy to give you some practice exercises. You could give them a try and check back, say, in a month or two?” 

It’s three weeks until I need to get to Blair’s meeting place. What if that will be my only opportunity to ‘peek behind the curtain?’ What if Blair changes her mind and decides to trap me or the other Traveler? “I can’t wait that long.” 

Siqi gives me a sad smile. “Then I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Perhaps try the Academy? I’m sure they’d love to study you in the meantime.” 

“I want to study, I don’t want to be studied,” I snap. I try to pull myself back, tamping down on my irritation—just as Ink can influence my mind, I can also influence it, and feeding it anger and frustration is never productive. 

I stand up. “Thank you for your time. I guess we won’t be spending the night after all.” 

“But it’s already late,” Siqi objects, gesturing to the window. Sure enough, it’s already grown dark out. “And I still haven’t taught you the exercises!” 

I try to wrangle my irritation under control. It’s already caused Ink to get a little restless. I’m not mad at Siqi; I’m mad at my circumstances. It’s not his fault that I’m on deadline. 

I look at Zyneth. “Did you want to stay here for the night?” 

“Only if you’re comfortable doing so,” he says. 

“It won’t make a difference to me.” Ink will be taking control soon anyway. But clearly Zyneth is ready to make the trek back to town if I ask him to. 

“No, Siqi’s right,” I decide, mostly for Zyneth’s benefit. “Staying the night is for the best. And I would appreciate learning whatever you have time to teach me.”

Siqi nods happily, apparently oblivious to my frustration. “Excellent. I’ll assemble my notes tonight and ensure you get them in the morning.”

“Thanks,” I say hollowly. 

“Now, let’s see what we can do about the guest room…”

Given Zyneth can’t, in fact, teleport up to different layers of the tower, Siqi instead brings blankets and pillows down for us. I guess it’s better than paying for an inn. 

After Siqi departs for the night, I help Zyneth set up his makeshift bed. 

“You’re going to be okay in here?” I ask him, nervous to leave him by himself in a strange mage’s house.

“I’ve checked the windows,” Zyneth says. “I can break them out if need be, though I doubt it will come to that. He’s certainly eccentric, but I don’t believe he’s malicious.”

That’s the vibe I’d gotten, too. 

“Alright. Well, have a good night, then.”

I start to turn toward the door, but Zyneth gently stops me to pull me back into a quick hug. “I’m sorry this isn’t turning out how you wanted.”

I sign something that’s the visual equivalent of a sigh, since I can’t actually perform the real action. “It was a long shot, anyway. I guess there’s always the Academy, once we’re done with Blair.”

He smiles sympathetically as he lets me go. I leave my clothes and belongings with Zyneth, then funnel some void out the slat in the door.

Outside, the woods are dark, and snowflakes drift silently to the ground. We immediately feel a little better out in the open. Being in that doorless room was becoming suffocating. 

Before striking out, we grab our giant sphere of Chained glass that we’d left outside earlier. It’s time to let off some steam.