4.111: Harmony

It took me a little while to be sure what I was looking at.

Not because the room was poorly lit or anything. The stone within the 2m space glowed as brightly as the stone outside it, although instead of a plain white, it shone in all kinds of colours, seeming to almost display recognisable images of forests or lakes or sunsets, but never quite resolve into actually recognisable shapes. Staring at the walls for too long was like looking into a mirror reflecting another mirror at infinitum, but the shape between them wasn’t my reflection, but… some unrecognisable landscape. It was difficult to know what I was seeing on the plinth, because it was covered in layers upon layers of dead water.

For the few centuries since Refujeyo had been built, water had been dripping on the heart from above. Water empowered by the magic bled from witches sacrificed in the Lake of Inquisition, and later, from the magical bleed of spells being walked through the runes of the school day by day. Water that had caused a stalactite to form high above, where the top of the hollow sculpture of Power in Layers of Pearl held up the base of the tentacled machine of the lake. Water that had caused a stalagmite to grow from the plinth, covering first the heart and then most of the plinth itself. The stalagmite and stalactite had grown over time into a single column, layer upon layer of dead water being added year after year, slowly crystallising around the heart and filling the cavity with calcium.

I looked at the top of the plinth, and although I couldn’t see the heart, buried as it was, I knew what Fionnrath’s Destiny had been telling me in our last moments together. I understood what it was that I understood.

The power was in the heart. The heart was a pearl. An artificial pearl, grown carefully, layer by layer. A pearl is just layers of secretion, mostly calcium carbonate, each layer a separate thing settling over the others. If one were very careful, and very skilled, and very selective of one’s spells, one could enchant a single layer of a pearl, imprisoning a spell in a fine shell of calcium. And then allow another layer to form. And then imprison a spell in that layer.

A pearl could grow quite large before it was big enough that future layers would become unstable.

No enchanter alive today could have done it. None would even attempt it. But a long time ago, someone had woven and sewn the tentacled monster in the lake above into existence, with stitches so small and thread so fine that it should have been impossible. And someone, a lot of someones, had built this place. And someone had mastered the technique of carefully locking power into layers of pearl, and had locked that pearl away here, in the centre of the school, the master control system for everything.

And a leak had developed over time, because leaks always do. And into this long-forgotten chamber, sealed away where nobody could access it, water had begun to drip.

That shouldn’t have been a problem. I knew, from what the Destiny had tried to communicate with me, that this school could be entirely flooded for a century and it would work just fine once the water receded, although the books in the library would of course be destroyed. The problem was that the system that had oh so delicately created the heart of Refujeyo was mostly mechanical – no human hand could achieve the precision needed – and the pearl had been created here, in its final resting place, and every machine had flaws. A great deal of care had gone into making sure that every part of the machine performed its function perfectly, enchanting each layer correctly with its carefully chosen spell. Rather less care had gone into making sure that every single part of the mechanism would be properly turned off.

The minerals in the dripping water were not the only thing that had calcified over the heart. So had magic. Unevenly, imperfectly, one at a time and not in every layer, spells had become trapped in this growing pillar, become part of the heart itself. Causing tiny overloads, minute errors in the system, ones that the system could mostly recover from… for now. And melding together. Risking becoming something more. Risking reaching critical mass and interacting to create a system beyond the physical constraints of their position, an amalgamation of human dreams beyond conception that would destroy humanity and the environment in which they lived.

Stopping this thing became harder every year, because every year the shell of dead water grew thicker. The spells unintentionally protecting the heart grew more numerous. For the first decade or two after the heart’s creation, anybody with the right knowledge and a sledgehammer could have come down here, broken through the wall, and stolen the heart; now, it sat in the centre of an unstable bomb. The moment I broke through that stalagmite, hundreds or thousands of unpredictable spells would be released into this quiet centre, a place that was designed to be clear of free magic (although the presence of the spellthing showed how well that was working out). Spells would be free of the labyrinth and dumped instead here. It was like taking someone’s stomach acid and injecting it into their brain. Except with a lot more violent explosions.

That was why a vessel was needed to safely transport the magic out. The heart was stable, but this accidental shell was not. Something needed to be brought, something designed by nature to be the best possible thing at attracting and carrying magic – a human. Its capacity to carry magic needed to be greatly increased by, say, having it slowly shoulder more of a very powerful spell in an unnaturally inefficient way, until it grew to handle vast quantities of power. There was no safe way to do that to a person, but if one could find a human with a naturally high tolerance for magic, and pair it through a familiarity link with a spell just smart enough to take the same care with its familiar’s physiology as most spells automatically did with their mage’s physiology, one might have a chance. And the vessel needed to be marked with runes to bind and direct magic, like one would mark an enchanted object. Marked so that the new spells would know where to go, would be kept small and dormant and as quiet and safe as possible, unable to escape. Something that the tentacled machine above was specifically designed to do, albeit for a very different reason.

And here I was. No attempt to make a vessel could make someone with a bigger capacity for magic than I had. And as time passed, the amount of magic the vessel would need couldn’t get any smaller.  I was the best chance we had.

I set my piton against the stalagmite. I raised the hammer. I tapped it, hard.

I expected the rush of spells into my body to feel unpleasant, but instead, I felt alive again. It wasn’t much; it was like a trickle of water down a parched throat, but it was something. It was energy. I tapped again.

It didn’t feel like being a familiar. The spells settling into my body didn’t feel like Fionnrath’s Destiny, flowing through my veins and infusing my bones. These were small, sleeping things, all tied up tight and small without a human host to settle in and really exist from. If it were one or two, I wouldn’t have noticed them at all, any more than I noticed the spell bound in my heart. But there were hundreds of them, jostling for position with each other. I tapped again, inviting in more.

By the time I was about a third of the way to the heart, the load stopped feeling invigorating and started feeling uncomfortable. The body has its limits and I was full of magic. But I had to keep going.

Halfway through, they became painful, grating on my nerves. One of my legs spasmed, almost dropping me to the floor. I gripped the plinth for stability and kept going.

They were going to kill me. They were going to tear me apart. They were going to flow through the runes drawn in my flesh for them and spill out and rupture my veins and my guts and my skin and leave me a bleeding mess of pulp on the floor, full of burned nerves and shattered bones. My teeth were clenched hard enough to hurt, and I didn’t know if it was me doing that or if the magic had locked up my jaw in the same way that it kept making random muscles twitch. A glowing haze crowded the edges of my vision, a shrill noise rang through my ears. The air was at once searing hot and biting cold on my skin. But I had to keep going. I had to. If I didn’t get the heart, there was no point to any of this.

Anyway, if I died here, the spells would be free in this place, causing the aforementioned Many Explosions Scenario. Which would spell bad news for the great number of people in the halls above me.

I set the piton to chisel a bit more of the dead water away, wishing fervently that I had an actual chisel in my bag. In my defence, who could have predicted that this mission would require a chisel?

My arm spasmed. The piton dropped to the floor. I dropped to the floor straight afterwards.

I focused on trying to breathe while the magic inside me confused both my senses and my movements. I closed my eyes and ignored the way the room seemed to rock. I was on a stable floor, I knew that. There was a plinth before me. I had to get up, and I had to free the pearl from the plinth, and I had to pick it up. I had to get it out of here, I had to climb… so.. many… steps… I couldn’t even get up. How the hell was I supposed to carry it to the top of Duniyasar? I couldn’t get up.

I was going to die here.

I could not let myself die here.

I have to get up. I had to climb, and. And sing. That’s what the prophecy said. Be the music. Climb, and sing.

I still had no idea what the fuck that was supposed to mean.

Be the music.

The humming in my ears wouldn’t let up. Breathing regularly was hard, with the chaos of magic inside me pulling me every which way. My heartbeat, though, was regular. Beat. Beat. Beat.

A rhythm. Beat. Beat. Beat.

The ringing in my ears was shrill. The haze in my vision was bright. The blind, bound spells rushed chaotically inside me, directionless and small, and I needed them to stop.

Beat. Beat. Beat.

Wait, no. I didn’t need them to stop. I could handle magic moving through me. I’d gotten used to magic moving through me. I needed harmony. Most human familiars are torn apart, burned out, by the chaos of a spell already bound to a human trying to get its hooks in them, but Fionnrath’s Destiny and I had been smart enough to move with each other, around each other. I’d learned to keep it in check as easily as I kept my balance, when it wasn’t being stirred up by other magic. These spells weren’t smart, weren’t even awake; they couldn’t move with me, but I didn’t need their help. I wasn’t some new guy wrestling with unfathomable magics. I had experience in this; a lot of it. I’d had practice. This was my body, and I knew how to regulate magic in it.

We needed harmony. Everyone moving in one direction, to one rhythm. Beat. Beat. Beat. I forced the energy within me to follow my pulse, flowing through the runes like they were veins. One way, in a cycle. The trembling of my muscles became manageable. I drew in a long, shaky breath.

I could do this. A steady, predictable force, I could work with. The spells moved to a rhythm, singing a harmony across my nerves, and I moved between their beats, like a dance. My vision and hearing cleared enough for me to find my makeshift chisel and drag myself up with minimal slipping. I set the pattern here. This was my tune, and the spells would dance to it. I hummed to myself as I set the piton, and gave it one last heavy tap.

More spells rushed up my arm, causing it to seize for a moment, but I wasn’t going to lose control again. I incorporated these new players into my orchestra with barely a thought. It was no problem. It was like moving the Destiny around a potion, or resettling it after walking through a portal. It was like calming the magic within me after one of Malas’ scans.

Of course, technically speaking, I currently had many hundreds of times more magic inside me than I ever had before. These spells were inactive, but if any of them woke up, properly stretched out…

That shouldn’t happen. I had to trust in the system that had filled me with runes to keep magic bound and trapped. It had successfully bound the magic of so many witches who were presumably struggling as hard as they could to cast for their lives; why would it fail for me now?

The magic moved through me. And the heart was free.

It was the biggest pearl I’d ever seen, in real life or on television. Bigger than an actual human heart. Under the bits of stalagmite that still clung to it, it looked to be perfectly smooth and round. It looked… boring. Dull. Inanimate. Like a big plastic ball that couldn’t possibly be worth this much trouble.

I picked it up. It was far heavier than I expected, although I probably shouldn’t have been surprised;  it was a solid ball of mostly calcium carbonate, after all. Using both hands, and being very, very careful not to drop it despite the spells inside me still making my muscles tremble, I moved it off the plinth.

And everything went dark.