Storm's Apprentice

The students who’d been standing behind me left right after Master Sectus.

I couldn’t turn to see them, but I heard the side doors opening and closing, and the quiet shuffling of feet, and when they were gone I could sense that I was completely alone. It was a feeling so bitter I could taste it on my tongue.

I was forced to stare at the red wreckage of what I’d done.

I’d taken their lives with the carelessness of someone doing serious violence for the first time; without thought, without experience of the consequences, without even really believing it would do amything. I’d been weak all my life, too weak to believe my resistance was worth anything.

Now I had to face my own stupidity.

If I wasn’t stupid for acting when I didn’t know the consequences, then I was stupid for losing control of my magic, and if not for that then for wasting my chance in a single act of blind desperation.

If I was capable of this, then I was capable of doing something much smarter.

How much more effective could my actions have been with thought and planning?

But the failed students were gone. And my maja was gone. And it had been hours since they were taken, and I no longer had any hope they could be saved.

I got to stare at the evidence of my stupidity until the sun went down.

My feelings swung drunkenly between the greatest regret I’d ever felt in my life and a sensation of vindictive triumph.

The soldiers had been complicit in the capture and torment of innocents. Or, they were just ordinary soldiers who probably didn’t even know what was happening. Or they were the gears that made the Antorxian machine possible. Or they were perhaps less culpable than I was.

It was easier after it got dark, for a time. The shadows removed the gory details of the scene and reduced everything to monochrome silhouettes. I could pretend the bodies were piles of clothes, the jutting bones tree branches.

A few hours after dark I noticed a new silhouette. An oddly-shaped body stood by the door. It was the height of a young child, with sides that bulged outwards, a smooth hairless head, and haunches that rose six inches above its shoulders.

I didn’t realize what it was until it turned its head and I saw the outline of a human skull. The vulture spirit.

It clacked its teeth, making a dry noise that sounded intimate in the space.

It picked its way across the floor, talons tapping against the ground, until it reached the nearest mangled corpse.

Spreading its wings, it bowed low, and began to eat.

It consumed the first guard in small bites. Every sound of tearing flesh was loud and close in the dark room. I learned the sound that tendons made when they snapped. I learned to recognise the sound of bones being crunched between blunt teeth.

It ate everything. Flesh, sinew, and bone, eyes and teeth, tongues, toes, the soles of the feet, the hair, and nails, even the scabbing clothes. It ate the organs whole, swallowing them down like a gull with a fish. It lapped the blood. And when it was done with the first it moved on to the next.

Over the course of the night I heard, and smelled, and saw dimly the remains of every person I’d killed being consumed.

When it was done with the the bodies on the floor it turned to the walls and the ceiling, using its talons and teeth to pry scraps from the stones, hopping up to grab the bones in the ceiling, using its wings for leverage.

It never seemed to grow full. Its belly didn’t swell. Its enthusiasm never waned. It was impossible that it had eaten so much flesh, hundreds of pounds of human remains, without every getting any larger. But even though it was corporeal it was still a spirit and existed according to its own rules.

When it had eaten everything it could get to and worrying the stone stopped yielding even blood-soaked dust, it started picking its way over to me.

It was, impossibly, still hungry.

It stepped up to me, putting its infant’s skull of a head an inch from my face. I could smell the soldiers’ blood on it.

If it decided to bite me, there was nothing I could do about it. It would eat me alive as slowly and surely as if I were a corpse.

But it didn’t bite me.

It snapped its teeth and spoke.

“Soon.”

I couldn’t say anything back. I couldn’t ask why it was following me. I couldn’t even take a breath.

The spirit shuffled away.

I didn’t see the exact moment it left. It seemed to fade into the shadows. When the sun rose an hour later it was already gone. The doors had never opened, either to let it in or to let it out.

I was alone again, but the loneliness felt cleaner this time. Better alone than haunted.

I strained at my invisible restraints all through the night, but they didn’t show any signs of weakening.

The thought occurred to me that I’d been left here to die, not as a punishment for killing the soldiers, Sectus hadn’t seem to care about those, but as punishment for attacking him.

But the Stillness aspect could clearly stop me moving without killing me from lack of air. It was as if even dying would be too much movement. I wondered if even starvation would kill me.

What if I was just trapped here now? Stuck here forever. A strange statue that current and future students would learn to live with.

I didn’t doubt that a Reeve had the power to make that happen.

I didn’t even know how long this kind of spell lasted in theory. Would the Stillness maja fixing me in place fade over time, or would it have to be removed?

I strained at the Stillness again, hoping that I could wear it down by opposing it. It didn’t seem to be doing anything. It wasn’t like straining against ropes. My muscles weren’t even moving. Except for my ability to think, I really might as well have been a statue. Paint me gray and there’d have been no difference between my body and a piece of stone.

Next I tried magic of my own. I gathered together what little maja I had left, a thimble-full of power drawn from a core that felt uncomfortably hollow. I tainted it with the memory of being thrown by Korphus, and pushed it outwards.

Nothing. I couldn’t even move the dust on the ground around me.

Sectus had told me that Stillness was a counter to Force aspect, as if they opposed each other. If my use of Force maja wasn’t doing anything, it could only be that Sectus’s application of Stillness dwarfed any amount of Force I could create.

So, I needed more power. I had none, but I’d always had the ability to gather more.

Accumulation was the core ability of any mage, the ability to accumulate the energy of the strange world that ran parallel to our own. It was what made a mage a mage. I’d learned that it often first happened accidentally during childhood. Once trained, the ability would only get more efficient.

Accumulation normally needed the other senses to be dulled in order to feel the Fold and actively draw from it.

That would be a problem for me, now. I couldn’t close my eyes to shut out sight. And I doubted I’d ever be able to ignore the smell of so much blood.

I still needed to try.

I let my eyes glaze over, dropping my mental focus of what I was seeing. I’d been staring at the same point for so long that was easier than I expected. With nothing changing, not even the direction of my eyes, I found my eyes wanted the world to fade into indistinct grayness.

Hearing was easy. This early none of the other students were awake, and nobody was making noise. Even the sound of wind on the walls was quiet.

The smell was impossible to ignore, especially considering with what it meant and what it reminded me of. I skipped that step, and looked inwards.

I felt for the presence of my core. Normally it was a comforting ball of spinning energy. Now it yawned empty. All I could feel was a nagging hunger.

I tried to shut out my physical senses, focusing on the spiritual.

The first thing I sensed was the waxy cold of Master Sectus’s maja, still hanging around me.

Once I set that aside, I felt the Fold almost immediately.

It was stronger than it had ever been before. Normally touching the Fold felt like watching a distant storm over violently clashing waves, but now I was among those waves. Every swell and movement carried me with it. I felt shapes moving beneath me, enormous and oblivious; the latent spirits of the near Fold. Its energy splashed me like sea spray, much more than I was used to. I welcomed it.

Over the next few minutes I felt the energy of the other place trickling into my core. It wasn’t a deluge. Replacing what I’d spent would be a long road. But it was an order of magnitude more than I’d been able to accumulate before. I might be back to where I’d been in weeks, rather than a year.

A while after dawn I heard voices outside.

“Who gets their stuff?” a man asked. A woman answered, “Goes to the commander. He’ll auction what he doesn’t want.”

The Fold slipped out of my grasp as my physical senses reasserted themselves, the crashing energy vanishing like a receding flood.

The door rattled and swung open. Two soldiers stood outside, one with a bucket and a mop, the other pushing a wheelbarrow.

They stood outside peering through the open door, then pushed inside.

“Where are the bodies?” the woman asked herself.

They moved inside and started the work of cleaning up the blood. Most of the work had already been done for them.

The woman kept shooting me looks as she worked. There was fear in her eyes, hate in the man’s. I didn’t know what they saw in mine.

They finished as quickly as they could and left.

Left in silence, I was able to feel my way back to the Fold. Soon the flow of energy resumed and I continued to accumulate.

Outside, the sun kept climbing. Soldiers arrived to drop off the usual sack of oat cakes and left promptly afterwards, only briefly interrupting my motionless work.

It reached the time the other students would normally come to drink water and collect breakfast, but none of them arrived. They must not have wanted to eat breakfast in this place of slaughter.

It was another hour until I was proved wrong. One student was willing to come. Some time around mid-morning the door opened and Adrian crept in.

He didn’t see me at first. He closed the door quietly behind him before stalking towards the sack of oat cakes in one corner. He took four of them, stuffing them under his arms, then turned to go.

He saw me as he was turning. He yelped, dropping one of the cakes, then caught himself when he recognized me.

“Dorian?”

I couldn’t reply. I couldn’t even turn to face him.

He put all of his oat cakes down on top of the sack and came up to me.

“Dorian, are you alright?”

If I could speak, I’d have given a sharp response to that. If I’d mastered the Thought aspect already then I’d have been able to.

He waved a hand in front of my face.

“Dorian! Oh gods. Are you dead?”

He put his hands on my shoulders and tried to shake me, only to find I was completely stuck in place. Even a statue would have moved more.

He put his hand to my head.

“You’re still warm.”

His hand moved to my lips. “But you’re not breathing. What should I do?” He thought for a few seconds. “I should fetch someone from the infirmary.”

If I’d been able to I would have screamed my refusal of that suggestion.

“No, they won’t come. I’ll take you to them instead.”

He grabbed my shoulders and heaved, trying to move me as if I were a heavy piece of furnitre, instead of being locked in a field of magical Stillness.

I didn’t move, no matter how hard he pushed or pulled, but he didn’t give up, and after half a minute of trying, something changed.

He put his arms around my shoulders and pushed, then I felt the stirring of his maja. The sensation it gave off was warm and hard, like sun-baked stone, emanating directly from his chest.

I shouldn’t have been surprised he had any. Every student here had a maja store of some level. It was why we’d been chosen. I just hadn’t felt Adrian’s before.

Adrian pushed again, putting his entire weight into trying to move me. His face turned pink. I felt his maja surge and envelop me.

The air trembled. I felt my muscles respond for the first time in hours. Something around me snapped with a sound like a breaking beam and I was suddenly falling.

The back of my head hit the ground and I welcomed the pain. I opened my mouth and gasped, the first air I’d tasted since the previous night. I blinked. My eyes were as dry and rough as stone and closing them was agony, but I blinked until tears started to well up.

“You’re alive!” Adrian said.

“I’m alive,” I agreed.

I couldn’t begin to process how I felt. Regret, horror, relief, joy, and anger all played a part, the feelings jostling for supremacy, none willing to cohabitate with the others. Eventually they all fled before the overpowering might of numbness, and I sank into a blank gray state. I didn’t realise I was crying until Adrian wrapped his arms around me.

He patted my back awkwardly.

“There there. Buck up. You’re free from whatever it was, now.”

He thought I was only recovering from a spell. He hadn’t seen the bodies. He hadn’t seen the vulture. He didn’t know what I’d done. As I considered telling him, I realized he’d probably just congratulate me on getting a good hit in, if he knew, and the explanation died in my mouth.

Eventually the situation got too awkward and he let me go, climbing to his feet and stepping back.

“How did you get like that?” he asked.

I just shook my head.

“Do you still need me?”

“No,” I said, then sincerely, “Thank you.”

Adrian stood there for a minute, trying to decide if he agreed with that assessment.

“Well, you know where I am if you need me,” he said. He collected his short stack of oat cakes then turned to go. He paused at the door, saying, “Oh, I had an idea about your riddle.”

It took me a minute to work out what he was talking about. My mind was a hundred miles away from being concerned with a riddle. He meant Master Lectuous’s riddle, the key to the Thought aspect.

“What is it?” I forced myself to say.

“It’s something I have to show you. Come find me when you’re ready. You look like you need some rest.”

He stood there for a few seconds then left, closing the doors behind him.

I slumped back down to the floor. I did need some rest.

I wanted to go back to my cell. I wanted to sleep, but before I could get to my feet another group of soldiers arrived.

Two of them were carrying a dark wooden box between them.They were delivering this week’s assignments.

It wouldn’t stop. They’d already taken half of us, and it wouldn’t stop.

It would go on and on, week after week, year after year, until we’d either failed, or become like them.

I was walking that path, the Sovereign’s path, and I couldn’t see way to get off it.