4.15: Thought And Feeling

I couldn’t move. My arms and legs were sunk deep into the stone. I felt the magic pulse through me, crystallise around my core, become me. Fragments of the thoughts and dreams and hopes of the creatures who were building me, all coming together to make up the core of my being, building me to their unconscious, generations-long-determined specifications.

I struggled, but the rock held fast. They were still building me, and still bleeding me a little at a time, renting out pieces of my very being to each other for a lifetime at a time and giving them back changed. Taking, corrupting, replacing. Changing, shrinking and growing me in ways that I had no control over. Most of them giving no thought at all to the fact that I was even here.

“Huh,” the spellthing said, looking down at me. “This is quite pathetic, actually.”

After a moment of disorientation, I pulled my limbs out of the stone and got up. “What are you doing here?”

“Me? You’re the one who’s late. If you could keep hold of your own memories, we could have done this months ago.”

“So Kylie was right, then?” I asked. “About the Child being a conscious thing made of spells?”

“I don’t recall anybody specifying that anything will be conscious.”

“Well, you’re a smaller amalgamation of spells. You’ll be part of the Child, won’t you? The real you, I mean, no this dream you. And you’re pretty conscious.”

“Conscious, am I? What a baseless and extreme assumption.”

“Well… you behave intelligently, at least.”

“You know, sometimes I wonder if the greatest failing of the human mind is empathy. How arrogant, how baselessly anthrocentric, to assume that something decidedly nonhuman, something nonalive, must be alike enough to you to do anything that you would recognise as thinking or feeling, just because you can understand each other just well enough to communicate. You might as well assign consciousness to a tornado, or a government, or a blood vessel, or a song.”

“But you do behave intelligently,” I pointed out again, refusing to be dissuaded. “If this Child contains you, and thousand of other spells, some of them way more powerful – ”

“A neutrophil will chase down a pathogen in the blood and appear to hunt quite intelligently while doing so. But it would be a mistake to try to draw any conclusions on an animal’s intelligence based on how intelligent its neutrophils look while hunting.”

“So you’re telling me that this spell monster won’t be conscious or intelligent?”

“If it gets developed enough to be anything, you’ll all be dead already. But I am in fact telling you that the questions you have are fundamentally nonsensical. We are speaking of a being that, shall it be born, will be literally incomprehensible to humans. This – ” the spellthing indicated where I’d been lying in the stone – “is the fevered creations of woefully misguided empathy, and nothing more.”

“So we’re essentially preventing the summoning of an eldritch horror before it can be brought forth into our world. Good to know.”

“It won’t be possible to do it after.”

“Any ideas on how to actually do this?”

“I only know what you know, and you left all of your useful knowledge in the Labyrinth.”

I rubbed at the bite scars on my arm. Why had the spellthing given me this ‘kiss’ as a hint? Why was it helping? If it didn’t want the Child to be born, couldn’t it have laid everything out during my Initiation? Except, no, the Initiation was monitored; if it wanted to keep things secret then it couldn’t talk then, but it still could have –

I was overthinking this. Spells, like the dream-spellthing insisted on lecturing me about, didn’t ‘think’ or want anything in any comprehensible way. Prophecies gave information, and it was an amalgamation of prophecies.

I remembered Max’s list of humorously mistrained AIs. Bots that stayed alive in simulations the longest by pausing them, or sorted lists of numbers by deleting them so they weren’t out of order any more, or ‘beat’ an enemy in a game by forcing the computer to crash. Under the spellthing’s unblinking gaze, the marks of its teeth embedded forever in my arm, those examples didn’t seem so humourous any more.

My imagined version of the spellthing was, I had to admit, a lot more personable than the real thing. I was kind of glad I didn’t remember meeting the real thing a second time. I’d probably just have more nightmares to deal with if I had. I considered asking the dream version about the personality discrepency, but to be honest I didn’t want to dwell on it too much. With my luck, I’d talk myself into imagining a more realistic version, and if these dreams were going to continue then I didn’t want to make them even more disconcerting than they already were.

“If you don’t have anything helpful to tell me,” I said, “why are we here?”

“It’s your dream.” The spellthing shrugged in a way that suggested something very odd about the construction of its shoulders. “But if you want useful, then you should probably focus on – ”

I jolted awake to the sound of my alarm and glared at the ceiling for several seconds before I could summon the willpower to roll over and turn it off.

Why was I awake early again? Oh, right. Potion class today. And I had to talk to Saina beforehand, because having a class with her for an hour before we’d talked about the whole, the, the whole dating thing, just sitting there in a vague kind of relationship limbo, was the most excruciatingly awkward thing I could imagine.

Well, the second most awkward thing. The most awkward thing would be if the conversation went badly. Which it very, very easily could do. But there was no sense in putting that off any longer.

Saina liked to eat before class, so I hung around the cafeteria until she showed up and approached her while she was scooping rice onto her plate. “Can we talk?” I asked quietly.

She nodded, added a bit more rice to her plate, and followed me out. I wasted no time, ducking into a nearby empty room and stating, “I still want to give us a shot. If you want to.”

Relief flooded her expression. Then wariness. “I am going to get married after I graduate.”

“I know.”

“You won’t be able to change my mind.”

“Wasn’t planning to try.”

“And you’re really okay with that?”

I shrugged. “I thought about it, and it just doesn’t make any sense not to be. I mean, I dated Magistus. We broke up. But I’m still glad it happened. Tons of people here are dating people who, statistically, they’re probably not going to be with forever. They’ll probably leave school and never see each other again. Does that mean they shouldn’t date?” I took her hand in mine, waited for her to put down the plate, and took her other one as well. “I like you. I want to see where that goes. Even if there’s a time limit. Hey, if we’re really unlucky, maybe we’ll hate each other and break up in some messy, horrible fashion three months from now.”

“One can hope,” she said drily, and leaned in for a kiss.

I stepped back, letting her go. “Um. There is one thing. Not about you! There’s, um. There’s something you should probably know about me.” I cringed. Was I doing this right? I hadn’t had to come out to anyone since I was four, and I certainly didn’t want to start now. But I had to tell her, right? I mean, I had to tell her eventually, and this seemed like the fair time to do it. It was just also, disgustingly, a super dramatic time to do it. I didn’t want this to be a big thing.

I should probably also have rehearsed what I wanted to say. I took a deep breath, trying to put some words together before the slight worry on Saina’s features calcified into something more distressing.

“I have a… well, it’s not a secret.” Yeah, this wasn’t helping the whole ‘don’t make this a thing’ thing. “It’s just, something I kind of keep to myself.”

“Ah, yes, one of those not-secrets that you hide. Joking!” she added quickly, seeing my expression. “I get it.”

“You… do?” Unlikely.

“I do. It’s like my name, right? Like, I don’t go by Saina because I’m ashamed of who I am. It’s not like I want to hide myself or my family or anything. It’s the opposite; the problem is that when people hear about Parveen Surya, they make bad assumptions that I have no control over. I’d rather be judged on things that are true about me, and having to fight people’s biases and assumptions to do that is just… it’s an unnecessary complication. It’s more honest, a lot of the time, to hide it. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”

“Uh… yes, actually. That’s exactly what it’s like.” I took another deep breath, and just went for it. “I’m a trans man. Do you know what that is?”

Saina nodded, her expression not changing. “I know. Thank you for telling me, Kayden.”

Hang on. It was that easy?

That couldn’t possibly be right. I’d been expecting to have to explain what a trans man was, or at the very least clear up some misconceptions. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that Saina might immediately know what I was talking about. I wasn’t sure why I’d expected her to be ignorant – maybe because she was Pakistani? I’d just kind of figured that she wouldn’t be exposed to trans people or trans issues in Pakistan?

Wait, was I secretly super racist this whole time?

So maybe she did know, maybe she had trans friends or family or whatever, or was trans herself, or something. That didn’t explain why she wasn’t remotely confused or surprised or anything about me coming out. Sure, I wasn’t Chief Macho, King of the Dudebro Barbarians, but there should have been a little surprise. A bit of readjustment. Or at the very least, that overcompensating thing people do where they try to look extra calm and jaded on the whole topic because they’re Just So Accepting, You Know. Instead, Saina’s expression was carefully neutral, with a little edge of worry.

“You knew,” I accused her.

“Not on purpose! I wasn’t trying to invade your privacy or anything, I just…” she shrugged.

“How?” I asked. “How did you know?” I’d spent days in close proximity to her last semester; maybe I’d said or did something that had tipped her off? Or maybe she’d hugged me and felt the shape of my body under my robes and drawn some conclusions? If it was the second one, I definitely needed to know; quite a few people hugged me.

“Um.” She bit her lip, cheeks darkening. “You remember when we thought someone was going to assassinate me, so you guarded me on full moons?”

“Of course.” It had been something I’d done at that time then. That was alright; I could –

“I had some people look into your background. Not that I didn’t trust you! It was just, in the circumstances – ”

“No, I get it. You were specifically in danger from someone posing as a friend, and you only had Kylie’s word that it couldn’t be me. So you hired some kind of special investigator and they saw my birth certificate or something?”

“Nobody needed to dig that deep. You were the centrepiece of a really high profile magical assault case a couple of years ago.”

Oh. That. I turned away and pressed my forehead against the wall. “They swore me in under my legal name,” I groaned. “Anyone who watched the trial knows.”

“Oh, did they? I never saw the trial. Youtube took down the illegal footage.”

“Then how – ?”

“Kayden,” Saina said gently, “if you google your name, you get about three pages of in-depth exposes of your life written for shock value.”

I groaned again, louder.

Shit. Shit, fuck, and transcendent swears known only to the unknowable being whose creation we needed to prevent. I was so used to treating Refujeyo life and nemaganti life as separate that I kept forgetting that mages could, when not at Refujeyo, use google like anyone else. Anyone who googled me would know that I was trans.

Anyone here could know that I was trans. That had always been the case.

Who knew? I had to know. Not that it mattered, really, because it wasn’t a secret, it wasn’t something that I was ashamed of. I wasn’t ashamed of my body. I just… wanted to know that they knew. For no reason. That’s all.

Did Max know? Did Kylie? Had Magistus known?

Okay. Logically. Di Fiore definitely knew, because he’d had me looked into when I’d been trying to get him arrested for trying to kill Alania. Max… probably didn’t know, right? Max didn’t strike me as the type to randomly google his friends. It was unlikely he’d watched my trial or anything, because by the time he was home with internet access it was all over and he knew I was fine. Kylie might’ve watched it, though? She might know? She was the only one of my friends who I could imagine finding out, then just shrugging it off and never mentioning it. If I asked, and she knew, she’d probably just say it wasn’t any of her business.

Magistus, again, was unlikely to randomly google me or watch the trial. Magista, too, which meant I was… ah. Wait. Magista had been curious about Kylie and my familiarity link, right? She would have wanted to know why it was stable; she would’ve researched us both pretty thoroughly. Right? So she’d know. Would she tell Magistus? Did she know that this was the kind of thing you weren’t supposed to tell other people?

Wait. A lot of people had been really curious about the familiarity mark.

A lot of people would have had reason to look into me. Fuck.

Okay, no need to freak out – I could probably assume that not very many people had googled me, actually, because if they had, I’d know. Any large enough group is statistically going to contain some transphobic arseholes, and they would’ve made comments. I’d had no hint of any such thing; ergo, either Refujeyo was a utopia of perfect tolerance and universal awareness of polite behaviour when it came to trans issues (not likely), or the group of people who’d googled me was fairly small.

Yeah! The information must be pretty restricted, because I wasn’t getting harrassed! Wow. That was a downer.

“Are you alright?” Saina asked, and oh yeah, I was actually doing something else right now. Something way more important than random speculation about what people might know about me and whether I should care. Something more important than a lot of things.

“I’m absolutely fantastic,” I told her, laying my hands on her shoulders.

And then I leaned forward and kissed my girlfriend.