Paul

He used his magic. Though he didn’t expend much power, concentration took significant mental effort. Paul closed his eyes. He stood alone in a clearing, holding a small candle. Picture something, and the candle’s flame would lean in its direction.

He’d dreaded this moment—his secret.

Paul couldn’t do this. It wasn’t much of a secret. They had to know with how often he failed. Yet, they expected him to succeed.

They needed him to succeed.

Worry stung like a splinter in his mind. He’d steer them wrong, and everyone would hate him.

Too late to argue or explain. Not worth the effort.

He imagined the Traveling Orphanage… a variable, shifting thing. Not a place, but a feeling. The meaning of the name had changed throughout his life. New members came in. Ziege and Persephone had died, and now the T.O. stood divided. The candle flame wavered in all directions.

Not good. He couldn’t get a fix on something so complicated and ill-defined. Paul needed an intimate comprehension of and genuine belief in a concept to find it. One might name ‘Truth’ the most elusive thing in the universe.

He focused on members instead. Finding people took skill. Lumière had told stories of Pathfinders who could find someone from a faded photograph; tales of legendary heroes who tracked their target across the galaxy with nothing more than a name.

Not Paul. He needed handicaps. Accurate, recent information on their appearance and personality helped.

People changed throughout their lives. Nes and Harumi were growing from children to adolescents, but his pictures of the adults were also three years past expiration. How had the loss of their wards emotionally affected Nyctea, Bufo, Gaja, John, and his uncle…?

So many things could throw him off the trail. A new scar, a different frame of mind, or even a mood swing might be more than he could handle.

In the face of difficulty, Paul gravitated to simple objects. Something easy to picture and unlikely to undergo large changes. He searched his memory for something distinctive and constant, something they’d never throw away. Then he had it.

The flag! Unique in all the universe, he envisioned a ring of colored squares and circles representing the members of the T.O. on a white field. Paul knew he’d recognize it no matter how many shapes were added or how ragged it had been worn.

His candle flame stretched towards some distant node. Yes! He had the trail.

Paul smiled, and relief thawed his fear-stiff limbs. That was the most direct path. Next, he needed to find the safest route, or at least a safer one. This tested his skills to the limit. The candle flame flickered in his hands, unsure.

Thankfully, his uncle had taught him basic techniques for applying simple conditions to a Path. He pictured the seven of them alive with the flag and the flame smoothed as it pointed the way. This time, the fastest and safest paths matched.

Course set, their journey began. Daniel rode in Wendi’s hand while Lea sat on a levitating beach-ball-sized carambole. Kenta floated on an endless stream of hair, fluid and quick. Rana skated along with casual ease, her slick-slimed feet eliminating friction over grass, gravel, or any terrain except dry sand and snow. The frog girl had assured them her trail would evaporate with no residue.

Cassie must have read Paul’s dread of lagging behind because she invited him along. She didn’t mind carrying him in his candlestick form while flying. The bat girl flapped to hover above the ground and extended a leg-hand for him to shake. Paul transformed, and their minds touched.

“Everyone has a ‘Little Me’ running around inside their head,” his uncle once said. “If you don’t believe it, picture yourself, and you’re looking at him. Your Little Me lives in the place you call Home. No matter how long it’s been or how far away, everyone has a little picture of Home inside their head.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

To turn one’s attention inward and awaken your inner self is called Nightwalking. Not that it was a bid deal; Paul wasn’t special. About half of all races could do it.

Two islands collided in a void.

Not a violent clash, though. Paul’s island, a cottage in a forest, slid in shoulder to shoulder with Cassie’s island, an abandoned barn. Paul had lived years in his cottage. She’d spent one night in that barn’s hayloft. Neither seemed more or less real.

Paul crossed the bottomless divide between the edge of his woods and the base of her hill with a single step.

Lumière once called being allowed into another’s Mindscape the highest of honors and the greatest of responsibilities. Elements of one’s being manifested in their inner world as objects: magic, lifeforce, and memory rendered incarnate and vulnerable.

Day-bright grass glistened with dew under a starless black void—a sensible contradiction in the logic of dreams. The barn door stood open. Paul entered and climbed the ladder. A thick blanket of soft, dry hay padded the loft’s floor. Perching on the windowsill, swinging her feet, Cassie stared at the empty sky.

Cassie’s ‘Little Me’ was human.

No wings, no conical ears, no leaf nose, no bat tail, nor leg-hands. That, in itself, didn’t bother Paul. He thought her pretty with or without them. In general, Shapeshifters fixated less on minor details like one’s number of appendages.

What concerned him was the disconnect between Cassie’s inner and outer selves.

He knew Nyctea adopted her young, and Paul worried Cassie hadn’t spent enough time with her own kind growing up. Maybe three years of human television distorted her sense of ‘normal,’ warping her self-perception and hence her inner self.

Did the bat girl feel trapped in her body?

He worried about these things. Hadn’t Lumière said one’s mental health and magic were interlinked?

Paul brushed a stream of wax from his face. His uncle raised him away from humans, so ‘being made of wax’ felt normal. His mental health would be downright excellent if he lost weight and had Kenta’s confidence.

Not that body-image issues compared to the real problem—they each bore scars on their hearts.

She glanced his way as Paul approached, eyes veiled by dark locks. No bat ears, no echolocation; Cassie wouldn’t have turned her head to see him in the real world. She returned her gaze to the sky and gave him an obligatory greeting. “What’s up?”

“Hay.” He chuckled as he plopped onto a pile of straw. She ignored the pun, and he said nothing else.

His awareness expanded to three bodies. Candlestick shape limited his physical mobility to the face in the flame. His mind lay with the Paul in the hayloft. However, there, in the periphery, he sensed Cassie’s body.

For boys and girls, joining minds was serious business. Gaining the Tool’s magic required the Wielder to exchange proportional control of their body. However, Paul never seized that opportunity whether Rana, Cassie, or Kenta wielded him. With a girl especially, that would cross the line.

Cassie invited Paul into her ‘room’ and tolerated him as long as he didn’t touch anything. Break that rule, and she’d kick him out, then not invite him back. These were unspoken rules… things nobody thought about except those paralyzingly self-conscious like him.

They didn’t need to talk, but the hours of traveling were boring if they didn’t. He didn’t know what conversation to start, though, or how.

“Sorry for how I acted yesterday,” she said without meeting his eyes.

Paul tried to disguise his surprise. “It doesn’t bother me.” It did bother him, but he’d forgive a lot for an apology.

She gave a subdued head shake. “I didn’t mean to bite your head off. I’ve just been really on edge lately.”

It bothered him, but he understood what she’d been through, separated from her foster mother, not being able to fly—her greatest escape—the nightmares, whatever the demon whispered to her… Paul shivered involuntarily at the mere thought of that Voice. Best not to ask.

“The visions,” he said aloud instead.

“I’m not seeing things, Paul; I’m hearing them. They’re Auditions.” He chuckled. “And I don’t care what else that word means; this is important!”

From brief glimpses he got through their mental connection—like seeing shadows on the cave wall with his ears—these echoes of the future were dire indeed.

Cassandra spoke, troubled and wan, “The future is hard to hear clearly. A few seconds ahead of ‘now,’ the echoes of millions of possibilities distort into white noise… but there are solid points too. Certainties. Inevitabilities. The buzz of interference makes telling how they happen and why impossible—which goes to show they can’t be avoided.”

Hearing her talk with such resignation troubled him, “Isn’t there any way you can change them?”

“NO!” She lashed him with her haunted gaze. Then she softened her tone and lowered her eyes until falling hair curtained them. “No. Clairaudience is a tricky business, Paul. The near-future is malleable, dependent on a billion little everchanging things. As for anything I hear far ahead of time… Try to stop a boulder rolling downhill, and you’ll be crushed.”

What happened to you, Cassie? What do you see ahead that’s so terrible?

He couldn’t ask that.

Because this—the judgment-free zone he wanted to project—she needed this more than she would admit. Cassie needed to talk to someone who understood how it felt to be a Clair without control.