4.38: Like Twilight

I let Kylie and Max deal with explaining our future absence to most people. I’d already talked down one exhaustively proactive legacy mage today and had no desire to repeat the experience with the Americans. And the coven would have to be told about the geas; there was simply no way it wasn’t ever going to come up. I couldn’t deal with Talbot’s righteous indignation or Hua’s calculated fury right then.

But there were, unfortunately, people for whom it was my responsibility, and my responsibility alone, to tell.

Saina and I lay on our backs on the warm, green grass, staring up at the streaks of white clouds skidding across the sky. Pit comp practice was in an hour, but she deserved a one-on-one explanation.

“Seven months,” she said, entwining her fingers in mine.

“Yeah.” I gave her fingers a little squeeze. I hadn’t told her about the geas. There was no need to.

“I thought we’d have a lot more time than that.”

“Yeah. Me too. At least we won’t grow to hate each other and have a big Hollywood-level romantic crash and burn. If this goes bad, a long-distance breakup is inherently less dramatic.”

“I take that as a challenge. I’m going to write you such insufferable letters. Soap opera worthy letters.”

“Glad to see you’re doing your part to keep the relationship interesting.”

“You have to do your part, too. Find a pretty Fionnrath girl and agonise about whether you like her more than me.”

I glanced sideways at her. I love you, I thought, out of nowhere, but I didn’t say it. I was certain of it, though. It was just a thing I knew now, as certain as I was about the binding runes etched into my skin by a magical tentacle robot, as certain as I was about the looming doom of humanity. I love you, and technically, I think you’re my enemy. How am I going to explain to you that my life’s mission is to destroy everything your family built; your inheritance, purpose and identity, everything you’ve ever known? How am I going to explain what I did, after I change your society so dramatically that I’ll essentially be destroying it and replacing it with another? How am I going to be able to apologise, to make amends, when your preplanned future is yanked away and you’re thrown into a world of chaos and political unrest that could very well kill you?

Stupid questions. Saina wasn’t an idiot. If it were her choice between a nice, priveleged life and the survival of humanity, she’d make the same decision. If anything, she was going to be pretty pissed that we didn’t involve her.

We weren’t going to involve her, though. Or I wasn’t going to tell her, at least. We’d spoken about Duniyasar and the school enough for me to know that she had no idea how any of it physically operated; she’d have no information about the ‘heart’ or how to prepare it in offering or any of that. Telling her would just mean there was one more person cursed with the knowledge, one more person who could accidentally slip up and say something, probably to people more important than Max or Kylie or I ever spoke to. More risk.

She reached up to brush a long strand of dark hair from her eyes, seeming to sparkle in the sun like a cartoon character.

Wait a minute. I looked closer.

“Um,” I said. “Are you wearing glitter or something?”

She flushed. “No.”

“You look kind of… sparkly.”

“It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.” She sparkled more, somehow.

“Well now I’m curious. Did you get some kind of glitzy body spray or something?”

She sat up, and a couple of the sparkles suddenly turned into tiny butterflies, before vanishing.

“Oh!” I said. “You’re externalising your spell!”

“I’m trying to,” she said. “It’s really hard. If I get distracted for just a second, the magic rushes back inside, and that’s not a comfortable feeling if you’re not expecting it.”

“Believe me, I know.” I’d been surprised by Kylie’s magic on more than one occasion. “Still. Sparkles?”

“I didn’t choose it! It’s just how the spell manifests!”

“I know, I know. It’s very cute, though.”

“Shut up!”

“You’re literally a sparkling princess.”

“I’m not a princess. High Crone is an elected position, my mum being the high Crone doesn’t make me a princess.”

“An elected position that gets held by someone in your family how often, exactly? Sparkle princess.”

“Hey, I refuse to be shamed about my spell manifestation by someone who hangs out with Talbot Ericson.”

“That externalisation is pretty useful for a blind guy,” I pointed out. “He uses it to help find the shape and position of stuff.”

“He grows his hair long and wears long coats specifically so they can whip dramatically in his spell and you know it.”

“To be fair, I would do exactly the same thing.”

“Yeah, see? You’re the dramatic one here. You don’t get to make fun of me for sparkling in the sunlight like a shitty vampire.”

“Aren’t vampires killed by sunlight?”

Saina stared at me. Her jaw dropped. “Kayden. Oh my god.”

“What?”

“Are you completely unfamiliar with Twilight?”

“With what?”

“You’re from a commonfolk family! You grew up in the commonfolk world! How can you not know about Twilight? Seriously, did you watch or read or even talk about any media at all before you came here?”

“I don’t like reading,” I shrugged.

“Oh my god.”

“So is this another thing we have to watch together?”

“No. No, I wouldn’t subject you to that. I am a kind and merciful girlfriend – ”

“You made me watch the Adventures of Tarada.”

“Tarada is a classic! That’s important for your cultural education! If you’re going to be a mage, in mage society – ”

She stopped talking. Remembering the reality of the situation, probably. I might still graduate from Refujeyo on some cobbled-together distance program, but this wasn’t going to be my society. I was going to Fionnrath.

Well, hopefully we’d help Max break the world before then, but she didn’t know that.

“Tarada is a terrible cartoon,” I pointed out.

“You have no taste. Anyway, we didn’t get to the season 1 finale, which is where it gets really good. That’s where he finds the treasure and goes in search of the greatest mages in the land to forge the Key.”

“Isn’t he the greatest mage in the land? He’s got like a thousand spells. The most spells any real person has had is six.”

“It’s a kid’s cartoon, it doesn’t have to make sense. Anyway, he gets the Power in Layers of Pearl, that’s the Key, right, it’s in the form of this little sculpture, he gets it made, and then they hit you – wham – with The Prophecy.”

“Oh, of course there’s a fucking prophecy. Why do they always have to put in a prophecy? It’s such a cheap storytelling tactic.”

“You room with a prophet.”

“Yeah, and if our lives were a story, it would totally suck! There’s no need to invent fictional prophecies.”

“Well, some people say that the prophecy is real. The one from the original story, obviously. Not the cartoon.”

“Like how some people say that Power in Layers of Pearl is an actual key to a real magical treasure, even though it’s been examined by tons of people and there’s nothing in there?”

“Yes. I didn’t say it was a good theory. People believe all kinds of dumb stuff.”

“We are absolutely not watching that episode.”

“You’re no fun.”

“Whereas you are the picture of fun, sparkle princess.”

“Shut up!”

When I told Peter and Hammond, I made the move to Fionnrath seem like more of a mutual decision than it really was. Everything just seemed easier that way. Peter eyed me with some concern.

“You’re sure about this?” he asked. “You’re going to be able to complete your education from Scotland?”

His concern surprised me. I’d always figured that Peter, inasmuch as he had any thoughts about me at all, thought of me as ‘guy to fill out the numbers requirement for a pit comp team’.

I shrugged. “The school says they can accommodate it.”

He nodded. “Right. Then we should start scouting a replacement right away. You’re here for long enough to participate in a few more comps, so hopefully we can get well known enough for some decent candidates.”

Ah. There it was.

There was something absurd about training for our upcoming treasure hunt pit comp while everything else was going on. I mean, we probably had seven months to save the world, we still had very little idea of how to actually do it, and here I was, doing sports training. It should have felt like a pointless waste of time. It didn’t, somehow. What else was I supposed to do? Sit in my room and brood for seven months?

Telling Terry and Mae that I would be leaving went about how I’d expected it would. Terry said she was sad to see me go and wished me the best, while Mae pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and theatrically wiped at pretend tears. “Our little Koala is all grown up,” she sobbed.

“I’m not that much younger than you, you know.”

“All grown up and leaving the nest. He’s escaping before either of us, Ter-pear. I feel so underaccomplished.”

“I’m not graduating. I’m just moving away.”

“And yet, it is still an escape, from these cramped, depressing caverns where you are abandoning the rest of us to languish. For shame, Koala.”

“See, this is why I don’t tell you stuff.”

“There are things you don’t tell me? Well now I’m offended.”

I turned to Terry. “Is there a way to make her stop? A passcode or something?”

“Unfortunately, no. I’ve been searching for a way for years, in vain.”

“Are you old enough for me to offer you a going away cigarette yet?” Mae asked.

“I’m not leaving for another seven months.”

“Great, plenty of time to organise the wake and funeral.”

“I’m not graduating!”

“Hmm. Good point.”

Anyway, I’d already resigned myself to a Magista-planned going away party. There was absolutely no way to avoid that.

And then I went to therapy.

I shouldn’t have gone to therapy. I already had the information I needed about memory potions, so I was just wasting my time and Dr Peterson’s. But, well, I’d kind of forgotten to cancel, and cancelling on short notice seemed rude. I could go, and then stop my sessions, and Dr Peterson wouldn’t have a weird gap in his schedule because of my lack of consideration.

“So,” Dr Peterson asked, “how have you been since we last saw each other?”

And I told him.

Not about the impending end of the world and Max’s plan to use his spell as a bomb and all that, obviously. But I told him about the Council, and leaving, and the geas, and I didn’t bother to stay calm – I didn’t have to. I couldn’t freak out about the geas anywhere that might get back to Max, or any of my other friends who might indignantly start shit on my behalf. I couldn’t freak out about leaving anywhere that might get back to Kylie, or she’d blame herself for dragging me along with her, and she had enough to be miserable about with her own impending ejection from the school. I had to look like I was keeping a cool head, look calm enough not to make anything worse. The last time I’d lost my cool, I had saddled myself with a geas, after all.

But nothing I said in therapy could get out and hurt anyone.

Dr Peterson nodded, and listened, and handed me tissues. For once, he didn’t offer any emotional advice; he just listened. The most he said, aside from occasional prompting sounds, was “I’m sorry that happened to you, Kayden.”

Turns out, crying can be really calming if you do it for long enough. Who knew?

Anyway, I was kind of in a daze as I left the appointment, so much so that I scheduled another one on autopilot and was halfway back to my room before I realised my mistake. It’s probably seem rude to go cancel it right away though, right? I should leave it a few days so it would look like something else came up. I went to write a reminder note for myself, then shrugged. I was sure I’d remember.