Patreon bonus snippet -- Soul Offering

I’m surprised it took so long to learn that it would come to this.

I was arrogant, I suppose, to assume a happy ending. I’d been excited to know that I’d give my soul for this, that I’d be able to rid myself of the thing I’d allowed into my arm in an act of foolishness that I’d mistaken for bravery. A price that is no price at all, a spell to find the library.

I had miscalculated.

Could this have ended any other way? Of course. I could have refused to come to the school. I could have ignored the question of the corridors and the heart of the school to which they lead. I could have simply not gone down the well, or at least not gone alone. I could have paused, stopped to think, not barrelled on in eagerness to rid myself of my spell and gain knowledge forbidden to mages. I didn’t have to seek the library; I certainly didn’t have to seek it so quickly and unprepared, and I didn’t have to seek it alone.

But once I descended into the well? No. From that moment, I’d sealed my own fate. Of course they came after me; why wouldn’t they? They came to bring me home and now they look to me to bring them home as the water rises around us. In her, the prophet – the foreign prophet, not the true prophet – I see a bright soul and the true will to manage it, turned not inward for the moment but at me, worried for me. In him, the scars of bonds that he carries like badges of honour rather than burdens; the prophet’s ichor in his familiarity mark, my own blood staining his robes. And they are looking to me, to me, to my eye, because they can’t see the dead water.

Not yet. It’s too early.

I was always their mapmaker, their toolmaker, their navigator, and now they look to me to lead them out. And I can. I see the way out, I see the future; I see the one path that will lead them up out of the well and into the light and back to their school, I see what they can’t. I see the paths under the dead water etched in stone by events that have not yet transpired. And to save them I will steal from them. I will trade their navigator for their lives. That’s the deal. That’s the only way forward.

If I had the mental capacity to focus on much more than the path right now, I might be sadder about other things. But right now I am helping them. And all I can mourn is their loss of clarity, because from hereon, they will be blind, unless they learn to see. And they will, they will, I’m sure that they will; I see that faint thread of possibility too, buried under a hundred ‘ifs’ (IF they survive IF they find the door IF they trick the kuracar IF the true prophet opens her eye IF the vessel is poisoned IF IF IF). They will find the library that I was destined to never see again. (After all, I gave up those memories when I gave my mind; what kind of price would it be if they could be returned to me, re-experienced?)

I have given them almost everything that I have left. I have already told them the only three important truths left in the world. I’ve told them that they will be fine. I’ve told them that they will have Destiny on their side. I have told them that I love them both.

Now I have one last thing to give to open their paths forward, to give them and their world a future, and I do it without regret, without doubt, without hesitation.

I drive the awl into my arm and I consign my soul to death under all this stone.