4.25: Not Quite Nightmares

With some finagling, I figured out how to set my alarm to go off at a random time somewhere between two and four hours in the future, and took a dose of Moonlily Dew, a fast-acting sleep potion that I happened to have a large supply of. (Not for myself. I don’t make a habit of taking magical sedatives; seems like a bad habit to get into. But it turns out that if you put a bunch of teenagers somewhere where everything is open 24 hours and the day/night cycle depends entirely on which outdoor portals are your favourite, you get a lot of people who can’t manage a stable sleep cycle without help. Moonlily Dew was my top selling potion, far outselling the memory recall potions which had turned out to be rather less popular than I’d hoped.)

Moonlily Dew is great because it’s fast acting; it’ll put you out within minutes, and stop working too fast to keep you asleep, so you can wake up normally in an emergency or to an alarm. I’d set my alarm to wake me unpredictably so that my mind couldn’t prepare for it because, while I had the vague sense that I dreamed about the spellthing quite a lot, I only seemed to remember the dream if it was interrupted. So hopefully the alarm would go off somewhere during my dream cycle. If not… well, I’d just have to try again later.

Moonlily Dew lingered on my tongue a moment like thick honey before seeming to melt back into my throat; a soft, spreading warmth that suffused down my spine and up into my skull.

I opened my eyes to the rough wood of a table and my own hands on it, clutching a familiar cup of tea. I looked up and there, sitting across from me, was the spellthing, identical cup in its long, thin fingers.

“You lied to me,” I said.

It blinked in apparent surprise, although it wasn’t easy to read emotions in those unnaturally symmetrical eyes. “Oh. Did I?”

“You said that you didn’t have any new information. You said that you only knew what I knew. But that’s not right, is it?”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. It isn’t. Because I had no idea what neutrophils were until today. Kylie asked Max a question about the ‘Child’ growing from the spells below us, and Max answered with a metaphor about neutrophils hunting prey in the bloodstream. He showed me a cool video of it and everything. I doubt very much that that information would slip my mind entirely; if I’d heard that story before, I would have remembered.” I leaned forward. “I had heard it before – from you. I asked a similar question and got the exact same metaphor. So if I didn’t know about neutrophils, and you only know what I know, then how did you use that metaphor before Max did?”

The spellthing tilted its head and grinned. “You think I’m actually real, and jut pretending to be your imagination?”

“No. You’re not weird enough. The real you is creepy and offputting and way harder to understand than you are. You act less like an alien pseudointelligence and more like an obnoxiously obtuse person. You act like me pretending to be that spellthing, not the spellthing itself, and I don’t think it’s good enough at deceiving humans to pull off something like that. It could do wordplay, at best. Being a bad copy of itself to convince me that it wasn’t real would be a bit beyond its abilities, I think. Anyway, I doubt very much that the real spellthing would use the exact same metaphor as Max. You know who I think would use the exact same metaphor as Max?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Max. Here’s my theory. When Max, Kylie and I took memory enhancing potions, Max and Kylie got no results, and no negative side effects. I got a few disjointed scraps of memory, a hell of a headache and an inability to think straight, the sorts of symptoms you get if a recall potion interacts badly with brain damage – or specifically, if it interacts badly with memory damage. It was tied up in bits of a prophecy I mostly don’t remember, so I think that whatever was used to wipe our memories wasn’t designed to work with… however my brain records Kylie’s prophecies. You and Fionnrath’s Destiny have both told me to pay attention to my scars.” I brushed the bite marks on my arm. “But you weren’t talking about physical scars, were you?”

The spellthing didn’t react. It watched me passively, waiting for the rest of my explanation. So I continued.

“Here’s what I think. I’ve been dreaming of you saying cryptic bullshit since the Initiation, but you’ve been more… directed, lately. I don’t know. The earlier stuff might have just been insecure nightmares, but since the Labyrinth of Dreams…” I put my tea down and leaned forward, not caring for once that I was voluntarily moving to within the spellthing’s reach. “I met you down there, the real you. I know that much. And I think that while we were down there, the real you told us what we were facing and what to do about it, and one of us raised speculation on the Child’s intelligence based on you, and Max used that metaphor. He doesn’t remember ever telling us that, our memories were erased, but a part of me that I can’t access does remember. A part of me that makes you. You parrotted that metaphor perfectly, meaning that you remember things that I don’t. You do have new information. Is that about right?”

“Possibly. It’s a strong theory, certainly.”

“Do you know how to destroy the Pit without bringing the cave system down?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“You don’t believe so?”

“I don’t know anything, Kayden. I don’t know what neutrophils are, either. I’m not real.”

“Well, you seem to answer me fine, so how about the prophecy? It says we have to ‘prepare its heart in offering, be the music, climb, and sing.’ Do you know what that means?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“You’re useless.”

“Quite possibly, yes. Or possibly, you’re asking the wrong person.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your theory is that you had the relevant information in your memories, and the records in your mind were incorrectly destroyed?”

“Yes.”

“And you think that playing twenty questions with me is the best way to get them back? If I wanted to repair something, I would start by assessing the damage.”

“We’re talking about memories I can’t access! If I could assess the damage, I wouldn’t need to, because I’d be accessing them!”

“Then I would estimate the damage based on the weapon.”

“I’m already working on getting that information.”

“Work faster. Or take the obvious route, and work with me.”

“What are you – ?”

“You’ve been nursing that cup of tea for months, Kayden.”

I stared down at the cup in my hands. And put it down. “You made this to trap me in the Pit to die.”

“No, I didn’t. That thing did. You should drink it.”

“Why? Nothing would happen.”

“Exactly my point. The fact that you won’t drink it betrays your lack of trust in yourself. You are holding onto illusions of me, of this cabin, of dangers long past. How do you expect to make headway with yourself if you are so afraid of nothing?”

“If nothing would happen, then there’s no reason I need to drink it.”

“If you don’t secretly fear that something will happen, then why are you so stubborn about drinking it?”

I glared at the spellthing. Picked up the cup. Raised it to my lips.

My alarm shrieked, jerking me out of the dream.

I blindly flailed for my tablet and managed to turn the alarm off, then lay back down, heart thundering. That had taken a weird turn. Hadn’t it? Or was that a totally logical sequence of events? Hard to tell in a dream. I’d woken up before drinking the tea – did that matter? It shouldn’t, it was just imaginary tea, but would drinking it be… psychologically symbolic in some important way? And would the result be good or bad? It was hard to credit the idea that it would matter at all. Brains were resilient things, it wasn’t like my ability to garner any information from my damaged memories would actually be destroyed or unlocked by some symbolic imaginary tea-drinking. That wasn’t how brains worked. But had the imaginary spellthing tried to get me to do it because it… was how this worked, for some reason, and it knew things I didn’t? Or was it just a weird dream born of my own fears that meant absolutely nothing?

I hated getting information from dreams. Why couldn’t I have something solid and unchanging, like Max’s books?

Lying there, breathing deeply, listening to my heartbeat hammer in my ears, I had the vague sense that something was wrong. What was…?

My heartbeat was hammering in my ears. It wasn’t slowing down.

I wasn’t calming down.

Was this a panic attack? Was this what a panic attack was? No; I’d definitely know by now if I were prone to those. Was this one of my little… issues, with the things that could upset me? No. No, I was just all freaked out from a dream, like five year old who hadn’t yet learned that nightmares couldn’t hurt him.

I took slower breaths, and ordered myself to calm down.

It didn’t work.

That was fine. I’d had a long history of excellent emotional control; I had other strategies for this. I pulled on some exercise clothes, gave Max a little wave (he’d come back to the room and was working on his wooden model thing), and headed for the rock climbing wall. And of course Magistus was out there at that specific moment.

He was waving goodbye to a friend who ducked around me and back into the gym. I went to give him a quick greeting and get on the wall, but Magistus took one look at my face and beelined straight for me.

“Kayden, are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” I’m just so shook up from one little weird-but-not-scary dream that apparently you can tell on sight, because I’m that pathetic. Had I drunk the tea in the dream? It shouldn’t matter, it didn’t matter, it was just a dream, but had I? The alarm had rung before the tea had touched my lips, right?

“You’re not,” he said, resting a hand gently on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

I opened my mouth to snap something at him, but I didn’t get that far. A wave of nausea rolled unevenly through my body, somehow felt as much in my limbs as my stomach, leaving little localised itches randomly in its wake. I’d call the feeling extremely odd, except that by now, it was very familiar. It was what I felt whenever Malas scanned my body.

Magistus was using magic on me.

Somehow, the thought didn’t enrage me like I expected it to. I wasn’t even afraid any more. It was just vaguely interesting. I opened my mouth again to answer his question, but the sickness made it hard to speak. I knocked his hand away, and the sensations settled down.

Oh, there was my rage! It flared up all at once, and I would’ve hit Magistus if I could bring myself to touch him. Instead, I stepped back, out of touching range, so he couldn’t do that to me again.

“What the fuck was that? Did you just use magic on me??”

“Uh, just to calm you down – ”

“Calm me down?! Do I look calm?!?”

“If you want, I can – ” he stepped forward, hand outstretched in offering. I stepped back.

“No! What the fuck? Keep your hands to yourself! You can’t just do that to people! What made you think that was okay??”

“You were in obvious distress! I was trying to help!”

“By controlling my emotions? Is that what your spell does? You can just force people to feel whatever you want?!”

“No! No, all it does is calm people down! I de-escalate bad situations, help people make reasonable and intelligent decisions. I don’t ‘control people’s emotions’.”

“Oh, so I imagined the part where you just decided to fuck with mine without asking, or even telling me.”

“Well, I didn’t expect you to freak out! You were fine with letting me do it last time.”

“There was a last time?!?”

“In the library! Don’t you remember?”

“Don’t I rememb – no I don’t remem – what the fuck is wrong with you?! Are you just going around fucking with people like this whenever you feel like it?!”

“It’s my spell, Kayden! Just because your spell doesn’t work doesn’t mean you can take your resentment out on the rest of us!”

“Resentment? What are you talk – is this real? Am I still dreaming? Are you some fucked-up manifestation of my fears or something? You can’t be real, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Me?! What are you talking about? No, actually, don’t tell me. I absolutely cannot have this conversation right now. Or ever, probably.” I turned around and marched straight back to my room, making sure I kept out of Magistus’ reach.

What the fuck?!

Well, at least I wasn’t afraid any more. I was too busy being more pissed off than I’d ever been in my entire life.

Progress.