December 13th, 2 AC
Sheridan knelt on the ground, staring at three pots. The first had a slender shoot of green growing from rich soil. The second was compost, half degraded bio matter mixed with any old dirt. The third might as well have been a trash bin. Filled with leftover greenery, bits of food and even partially decomposed sewage. It smelled wretched even from feet back, but at least his spell was holding and keeping the flies off.
The three states of waste recycling. Something he'd become uncomfortably familiar with over the past few months. The process of changing the last to the first was messy, nasty but safe. Teacher favorite kind of job.
He wondered sometimes, was it to motivate them to learn, or just the facts that unskilled, unmagical jobs were miserable affairs.
It wasn't a pointless job. The many compost piles needed regular turning if you wanted to keep the fertilizer supply steady. Manual turning at that.
Not that mana users couldn't do it. It just wasn't economical. Mana was limited while norms with nothing to do were not. Norms and students without permission to use magic on their own yet.
But that was only true if you tried to do it the same old way. He wasn't about to do that. Mana was precious. He practiced with it, summoned the water for washing with it, flushed with it and had to demonstrate mastery in class. That and many other small uses on the fly. Each day found him sitting in a corner actively harvesting mana to keep up with it. Around four hours of harvesting.
No, he wasn't going to spend any more time than he had to in meditation. And really, it was an obvious solution once you stepped out of old-world (and old people) think. He was surprised no one else had thought of it. It was a staple of nearly every fantasy game.
They needed slimes!
It was a task he'd spent the last month preparing for. Studying the process. Feeling the finished product, capturing the raw stuff in his aura and observing every step as it rotted and converted into usable soil.
He'd smelt, felt, observed and magically seen every step of the process. He didn't really understand it, but he'd experienced it. That was enough. There was too much out there to understand it all, no matter what Teacher said. Throwing yourself in and feeling the process was a nice stand-in.
And he was getting pretty damn close to that. Just another week or so, and a few prototypes, then he'd take it to Teacher for the final casting!
Then, finally, he'd have some real money to spend. Ingredients, clothes, and for Google's sake, no more turning over compost piles!
So with those thoughts firmly in mind, he extended his aura again to capture the three pots. Felt them, and ever so slowly compressing his observations, both today's and those of the past few weeks into a thought construct. A construct that wasn't just the pretty pictures. It was deeper than that and rougher. It was emotions, impressions and reactions he didn't have the words or understanding to describe. But he could see them. Feel them. And mold them into a ball of actionable thought.
He took his time, slowly, ever so slowly, letting it form. Feeling the trickle of mana it began to pull in that told him he was on the right track. Then, perhaps an hour later, the unstable mass was ripe with both mana and his directed intent, and it was time to make a few notes.
His way.
From a pocket he'd hand-sewn onto the ugly jungle cloth robe he pulled a fist-sized chunk of quartz and a narrow stone essence stylus. Between them, he's spent most of two months of wages. The tool was a great investment no matter what happened, but the quartz? Well, you had to pay to play.
Placing it onto a waist-high bolder and propping it in place with a few small stones, Sheridan set the construct drifting till it overlapped the quartz. They weren't combined, not yet. But they occupied the same place.
With a small shift, he began to carve the quartz to match the construct. With each piece removed, it fit the idea better, and the two drew closer, metaphysically. Piece by piece he strenuously carved it down. Not a rune, but a statue. A proto-nucleus just waiting for the final spells to make it a slime core.
He was growing tired... but just a bit more... He was almost there... Almost...
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A strangled groan slid its way through gritted teeth as Timothy stood above the boy, holding a glowing piece of quartz on a lanyard.
The unmoving boy.
The boy who would never move again.
It wasn't the first body he'd seen, nor even the 21st. But it was a kid, his kid for whatever it mattered. His responsibility. The day that didn't sting, then hopefully someone would have the decency to put him down.
He looked down and saw him as he'd been in class the day before. A bright and wonderful kid. Creative, enthusiastic and driven. Death might be the destination of life, but not now. Not when he had so much still to do!
Not this! Not this pallid form.
His mind rebelled. How was this stiff, pale empty vessel in any way the same child he knew? He couldn't see it. It was just a doll. No life, no spark.
It wasn't Sheridan.
A high-pitched grating sound penetrated his fugue and he looked up angrily, only to realize that it was coming from him. Like a kicked dog the pained whine grated, how could such a noise come from him?
Denying it didn't stop the repulsive sound. Just like how denying this was Sheridan wouldn't bring him back. With a pained, angry clench of his will, he strangled the sound. Forced himself to see. To ignore for a moment the emotions and pain. To understand, not merely react.
He had a job to do. His sight wavered and faded in and out behind a trickle of tears, but tears changed nothing. This was not a job requiring his eyes.
The strangled whine tried to make a comeback, but he forced it down. He took another few moments to send his mind through the glowing stone, seeing once more the no-longer-boy's last moments. His big dreams and brilliant desires.
Ah No. Not that way Sheridan. Just because you don't intend to cast it yet, doesn't mean it's not a spell.
Timothy clenched his will again. Forcing it away from the stone before his grief and self-hate colored the boy's final thoughts.
Destroy these last remnants of who he was.
Timothy couldn't do that. He wouldn't. He took several deep breaths, forcing himself to relax, to contain it. At least for now. He'd face it, accept it. Just not now.
He looked again into the stone, following the boy's thoughts, recognizing the construct and the mental twists that had made it work. He shook his head. Brilliant. Forcing understanding by observation. Chaining games, stories and an understanding of magic together to create a workable solution. And it was that. Workable. Better by far than the current method. Brilliant.
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And oh so stupid.
Creation was never cheap. You had to give something of yourself to make it work. And the boy didn't have the reserves to supply it, nor the will to limit it. Hell, he hadn't realized he even needed to.
Timothy'd warned him. He'd warned all of them about the dangers of playing with magic. He'd repeatedly asked them to check with him first. To practice anything new in front of him! At the very least, the first time where he could provide some warnings and a bit of protection.
He couldn't see anything else that he could have done to stop this.
And it didn't change how guilty he felt.
He took a deep breath, held it for a few moments, and let it out. It was a familiar refrain, but he couldn't always help how he felt. With time and effort, he could deal with the illogical thoughts. Deal with the guilt, acknowledge where his failures lay and forcefully severe faults that were not his to bear.
He would get past this. He had to. There were too many others depending on him. But it would take time. For the moment, he simply let himself feel it. Rage at the child for his stupidity, anger at himself for feeling that way, horror as he wondered how many more times he would have to do this.
And guilt, oh the guilt.
Guilt at the loss of a child, guilt for the loss of a child he was responsible for. Guilt that there was a difference between the two. A feedback shrill of illogical contradictory feelings. But that didn't make them less real.
The tears streamed down his cheeks, but his moment of swimming in the emotional mire was ending. His students were here and he had a job to do. To give them hope, and guide their fear in a useful direction.
He wiped his face and slowly turned around, walking backward towards the nearby hill, and the fifty-one children sitting on it.
Waiting.
Crouching or sitting in awkward little duos or trios. Huddled together in little knots against a pitiless fate. Friends and classmates trying to make sense of the insensible.
He gave a small gesture towards the two adult men crouching to the side in simple cloth kilts stood and walked over. A blood-red cloth band tied about their upper right arms marked them as the watch, and the vine stretcher sitting beside them told the rest of the story. With gentle hands and sad eyes, they lifted the no-longer-boy into place, covered him with a blanket and carried him away.
Not that covering up the body did much at this point, Timothy thought bitterly. Like plugging the tub after the water had all drained out. He forced himself to let it go. They'd acted as kindly as they'd been able. It wasn't their fault that this had happened. It wasn't Timothy's fault either, but that was a much harder pill to swallow.
It took them very little time to disappear behind a hill, leaving Timothy staring down at the innocuous necklace still dangling in his right hand. It was no longer the clear piece of translucent quartz it had started as. It glowed a mild black with gold highlights and had a metaphysical weight all out of proportion to its size.
Timothy touched the crystal lightly for a moment. Feeling the boy he'd known and cared for. His hopes, his dreams. His nobility and his knavery. All brightly displayed, without shame or artifice.
There was no hiding in this account. No line of strangers ready and willing to lie about how great a person the deceased was. Telling stories carefully picked and improved to flatter the dead, rather than to understand them.
A kindness to the family in a world bereft of threats.
It was not a kindness they could afford.
This was the boy he knew with all his warts displayed. With a pulse of will, an image appeared above the stone. It didn't look like Sherman, not exactly, but it felt like him. The essence of who he was, and how he saw himself.
“Sheridan is dead.” He felt like a fool stating the obvious. And yet it needed to be said. A period to his life. A definite stopping point. Not just the assumption of one.
“I will not lie to you. He's the first, but he will not be the last. He wasn't the best of you. But he wasn't the worst either. There is an old saying that I'll bastardize. There, but for the grace of god, go you.”
Timothy looked down at the pendent. Feeling again the reasoning. The chain of decisions that had left them all here. “Acting without thought. Without self-awareness can and will get you killed. Please, please come talk to me when you have a brilliant idea. It may indeed be brilliant, but brilliance is heavy. And you can't yet bear the weight.”
He breathed in and out a few times. Felt warmth on his cheeks and refused to wipe it away. It wasn't just his sorrow today. It was theirs, it was right to share. Hiding it felt like lying.
“Do you know what this is?” He raised the Crystal on its lanyard.
For a time, no one answered.
Timothy did not move. He waited. He wasn't in a rush, Sheridan was beyond the bounds of time now. If he could wait, so could Timothy. The silence lingered, grew and became oppressive till at last someone cracked.
“Ma'da calls-” sniffle “- calls em dog tags.” Willis barely managed to mumble out.
“Many do. But what do they do?”
The wait wasn't nearly so long this time, Count pushed himself up from a seat on the grass. Almost like an old man with how rough and jagged the motions were. Till at last he stood, stone-faced and without tears. A very stiff upper lip, Timothy reflected with a guilty internal sneer. “It lets you identify the-” he stumbled over his words, his stone face cracking for a moment as his Adam's apple bobbed up and down. Then the cracks sealed and he spoke in a firm voice.“-it identifies the dead.”
Timothy bobbed his head at the boy. Respecting the effort that forced calm took. Then he regretfully signaled a negative. “That is what a dog tag did. Part of it at least. And this crystal does that too as you can see.” He gestured to the hovering image. Even if it was different, it was still recognizable. “But that's just an extra. The real purpose lies in these two symbols.”
A charm on his belt lit up and two ravens back to back on a branch beneath an arch with two horizontal tails on its bottom expanded outward till everyone could see it.
He traced the arch first. “As Alpha is the beginning, Omega is the end. The finale. The ravens are Huginn and Muninn. In Norse mythology, they belong to the God Odin, and are called Thought and Memory.”
He waited, and could almost see the light bulbs ignite above their heads. “The final thoughts, becoming memory.”
“Do you believe in that god?” Willis blurted, somewhat confused.
“No, it's not about referencing a god, but rather the symbols and concepts. Ravens are symbols of wisdom, but also of death. Those two ravens in particular hold the significance to anchor the needed spell. So we use them. It's a matter of meaning, not faith. At least not for me.”
“Hunters wear these when they leave the Hold. Not for their own sake, but for those they leave behind. A way of giving their loved ones closure should the worst happen. It's also a gift to the rest of us. Showing us a mistake so we can avoid it."
"And that last bit is key. We honor the dead for what they leave us, a way to be better, to learn from their mistakes.”
“To do that, we must face those mistakes. Despite the grief, despite the all too human desire to sweep mistakes under the rug. To honor the fallen by not nit-picking their life."
"It's a false kindness. Only by seeing them as they truly were, good and bad, can we learn from them. Only by learning from them can we give their death meaning. Purpose.”
“I was remiss. It's not just hunters that are at risk. Each of you will wear a final memory from now on. To help the living if you fall and remind you that it's possible."
"But for the bitter, there is also better. It's not just a reminder of our mortality, it's also a spot of hope. Comfort for those you leave behind and help to keep them from walking the same path.”
“So here it is. It's time to see where Sheridan screwed up. And he did screw up. Don't patronize him, waste his final gift to you by pretending otherwise.” A jumble of half-complete words and sounds of protest rang out but Timothy continued over the top of them. “Failing to admit mistakes is not a path we can afford. See him for who he really was. Then honestly thank him. Honor him for helping you to survive.”
“He is now one of our honored dead. Those who have gone before us through the minefield of our new life and shown us where not to walk.”
Breathing deeply he took several steps forward and held out the quartz to Count, awkwardly still standing with his even more awkwardly blank face. “Here is the Omega Huginn. The last thoughts. See your friend and classmate and then say goodbye.”
Count's hands shook and his eyes were large and rounded with horror as he jerked his hands away. Timothy remained still, dangling the lanyard beneath his fist. He stared at Count for a moment. “Don't disrespect him, don't deny him a final chance to help.”
Count's spine stiffened, and with gritted teeth, he reached for the lanyard. His hands shook for a moment, but he managed to put his palm beneath the black and gold crystal.
Timothy slowly let go, coiling the lanyard respectfully about the gem. Something Count likely missed as he froze on contact, his eyes glazed and his mind gone as he lived the puzzle for a time.
Timothy quietly backed away. Fifteen seconds, or so passed and the boy's eyes cleared, only to spill over with tears. Timothy patted him gently on the shoulder, then indicated he should pass it clockwise to Zuchero whose similarly shaking hands almost dropped it. And from him to Mona, her characteristic smile missing today, and on.
And on.