22 - A rogue mage

“Our Purpose is holy. Our will, supreme. The song guides us, Holier than religion, truer than science. We recognize no morals, except for the Purpose. Those who stand with us shall be rewarded. Those who stand against us, annihilated.”

* Creed of the Holy Song Society

I don’t like thrift stores. The idea of wearing second-hand clothes is repulsive. But they’re very convenient for shoplifting - we can steal clothes here, sell them to an even sketchier thrift store, and buy proper clothes with the money.

Not that we actually need money anymore. But it’s hard to get used to it, and Iketek is busy setting up our fake identities, so we went out to do some crime, out of habit.

“I like that coat,” Daravoi says, pointing at a seriously trashy, dark red thermal coat. “I think I’ll take it. Can you help me?”

“The real crime here is your taste,” I say, “but I’ll always be here to help you make bad decisions. Give me a second.”

I Reach into the Else, careful not to make waves. The world starts splitting into a spiral of possibilities, but I’m getting good at picking the world I need, and it’s a very easy one: a possible future where nothing special happens, and the coat remains in its rack.

Of course it will stay there. It will probably stay there for decades, who would buy it?

I Summon that certainty Here, and with my finger, I draw two anchor glyphs to Bind it against. The first is the glyph of light, for an illusion which will work on human eyes and cameras alike. The second is the glyph of permanence - I found out it works well to bind a Lie like this, showing something that doesn’t change.

“Done,” I say, “your turn.”

It’s so easy, it’s barely even fun. Daravoi waits for a moment no-one is looking, then walks to the rack. He already bought and paid for a couple of t-shirts, so he just takes the ugly red thing and puts it in the bag. My illusion wavers a little as his fingers move through it, but after a moment, the real coat is safely in his care, and yet I still see it on the rack. Even if someone were watching, unless they were paying a lot of attention, they’d have seen Daravoi rifling through the coats, but taking nothing.

He walks back to me, and I realize I’m not even nervous anymore. At first, stealing made me terrified, then excited. Now… there’s no risk, no difficulty, and frankly no point, because the Prop Master gave us ten thousand credits each ‘to cover minor expenses’. It’s weirdly depressing - like playing a game you used to love as a child, and finding it boring.

“There’s an anti-shoplifting tag, but I disabled it,” Daravoi says. Then he looks at the illusory coat on the rack. “Abyss, you’re getting good. I know it’s a fake, and I still couldn’t tell.”

I shrug.

“It’s really easy, it’s a static image. We should try to steal something more interesting.”

We leave the shop, and he smiles at me.

“You’re getting bored, Kore?” He asks. “You’re such a rich kid slumming. Now that we can shoplift safely, you don’t like it anymore.”

“Well, we’re both rich-ish kids slumming, now,” I say, as we leave into the freezing outdoors. “We don’t need the money anymore.”

He shrugs. “You never know when the good times will end. The Prop Master may cut us off tomorrow. Or ThauCon might find a way to track our magic. But at least I’ll have a good coat.”

He already stole two coats, substantially less ugly than this one. Daravoi really likes having more clothes, food and stuff than he needs. Is it a poor people thing? Or maybe a caravaneer thing? Merchants must like having stuff. But if I ask, he gets defensive and tries to rationalize, so I let him be. It’s a harmless enough desire.

“Is it stupid - like, more than my usual stupid - that I feel nostalgic about shoplifting?” I ask. “I mean, I’ve been a thief for like… a month? But the times when we struggled to filch some phones without getting caught feel like the good old days.”

“Six weeks,” Daravoi says, some of his good mood gone. “Your sense of time is shit. That said, I kind of feel the same. It sounds stupid to say, but things were… simpler, before we met Iketek. I mean, we’d be in re-ed without her. But for a short time, I thought…”

He stops, looking away. I bound a Lie to make his complexion darker, but it’s a good enough Lie that it matches the behavior of his real skin, so I see him blush.

“You thought what?” I ask. “Come on. Can’t be more stupid than me complaining crime is too easy now! Back in my days, we had to run from ThauCon uphill! In the snow! To steal a pot of unseasoned rice!”

He gives a small laugh.

“I thought my life could be easy,” he says. “I thought we could go on like that. No bosses to keep happy. Enough money to get by. A friend at my side. I thought ThauCon would catch us at any time, but… I also knew it was a better life than I ever had.”

Woah, this got more emotional than I expected. I find the snarky answer already on my lips - wow, being poor must really suck, if living in a filthy hostel with me seems like a good life - but I stop myself. Iketek told me, again and again, to be careful with my casual bullshit. She’s worried about the way my power works, or about Else-madness, but I found that thinking for a moment before speaking is surprisingly useful.

The first answer that comes to me, usually, is silly and also mean. Why am I like that? Why is my instinct to keep people away, if they try to get close?

I don’t like that line of questioning, so I drop it. But I still try to give Daravoi a decent answer, one a friend would give, instead of empty snark.

“None of that has changed, you know. I’m still with you,” I say. “And Iketek isn’t your boss. We’ve got plenty of money. It will be fine. We can go steal more ugly coats on the weekends, if it makes you feel better.”

He smiles, and gives me a light punch on the shoulder. Why, by the Lost Stars, do people do that? That’s why I’m mean - if people like you, they start touching you.

“Well, I love the flat she got us, for sure,” he says. “It’s just that… things won’t be simple. I don’t know what Iketek wants, but it isn’t a peaceful life, I’m pretty sure. And you’re like that too, aren’t you? You wouldn’t be happy just using some magic to get by.”

“I…” I start to protest that I don’t have any grand ambition, that I’ll be happy to be a lazy, underachieving criminal like I was happy to be a lazy, underachieving rich kid.

But I shouldn’t lie to friends, nor to myself. I wasn’t happy at all, as a lazy, underachieving rich kid.

“I don’t want to conquer the world, or anything,” I say. “But… you should have touched the Art of the Veil, Dara! The things it can teach us! I want to learn magic. And I want to learn about the factions, and relics, and… ok, I don’t think I want a simple life. I’m sorry.”

I look at him, and realize something else that is true, but harder to say. I force my mouth to spell it aloud, because that’s the person I would like to be.

“But I still want to be a friend at your side. And I’ll try to be a good one,” I say. He looks at me, and nods, looking grateful.

Being serious and nice for so long was really stressful. Time to be horrible. “For example, you still haven’t tried the full range of Vorokan junk food!” I say. “Have you ever tried roasted scorpions on a stick? Come! Time for lunch! You’ll hate them!”

***

“You really must practice Binding your spells,” Iketek says, back at home. “You’re terrible at those. I blame your book - council mages don’t need to be subtle, so they’re taught to Channel all the time. But as a Liar, it’s absolutely crucial that you learn to work with magic without continuously drawing from the Else.”

“But it’s difficult,” I whine, “I mean, binding a magical light is easy. I Summon a piece of the Else and bring it Here, then I can control it. It’s just light - I can tell it to dim, to move, to disappear. But a Lie… it exists mostly in the Else. You see the illusion in the Here, but it’s only a small part of it. Lost Stars, I can’t even explain it.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Iketek sighs.

“I’m no great Liar,” she admits. “So I can help you only to a point. But remember that you don’t need to completely leave the Else, after a Binding. You can look into it without drawing power - Reach, without Summoning. As long as you don’t disturb the veil, magic is impossible to detect for ThauCon, and much harder even for other mages.”

She showed us that – when you Summon, there’s a very obvious burst of color in the Else, and something like a shockwave. If you keep Channeling magic, you keep bleeding color and making small waves. But bound magic, while its color still stands out in the Else, is much harder to spot, and it doesn’t make waves, so the Agency can’t spot it.

“I’ll try again,” I say.

I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and recite the stupid rhyme in my mind.

I claim the gift of magic,

I claim the Art of the Veil.

The darkness around me becomes a familiar, beautiful blue. I open my eyes, and as usual I’m greeted by both the physical world and the many worlds that could be.

Iketek is sitting cross-legged in front of me. Instead of looking like a statue of molten gold in the Else, as she always does when she uses magic, she appears like any regular human. A dim silhouette of a body, with a spark of bright, ever-changing light inside her head.

I focus on her face. In the Here, she sports her usual haughty, slightly bored expression, framed by elegant but generic tattoos and blond, meticulously braided hair. In the Else, her face splits into a branching spiral of possibilities – angry, disappointed, happy. She has different tattoos - criminal, judge, photographer, monster.

Most of her possible faces are broken in the middle, like shattered masks. Why? Daravoi isn’t like that. Should I ask? Would she even know the answer? She doesn’t see the Else like I do, after all.

Well, that’s a problem for another day. I’m here to practice Binding my Lies, but people are difficult, they cast too many possibilities. I must work with something simpler.

There’s an empty teacup by my side. It could still be full – it would be, if I hadn’t drunk from it yet. In the Else, I see the cup, full of cold, moldy tea. The cup, broken. The cup, steaming and smelling of cocoa.

I Summon that last image, but I don’t want to simply drag it in the Here – as soon as I stopped channeling magic, it would freeze like a photograph. I need to be able to control an illusion, without channeling power from the Else.

Carefully, I pull the whole branch of reality between my fingers. Not just the image of a cup steaming on the floor - all the places the cup could be, all the ways I could handle it, all the ways the light could shine on it. A specific illusion is a small facet of something deeper, I realize, like a blade of grass sprouting from a tangle of invisible roots.

I pull, careful not to break the green thread of causality, and finally it pulls free from the infinite snarl of all possible worlds. I find myself with a long thread of Essence between my fingers. It drips images, possible futures, smells - a cup, seen from above. A broken cup. Herbal tea.

I try to weave the possibility into something more cohesive. It’s like handling a living butterfly, it twists and changes in my hand, and I know it will break if I’m not delicate. But carefully, carefully, I shape it into something like a cup, and I carry it through the Veil, into the Here.

I wait for the Veil to settle, and find the thread is still between my fingers, squirming and changing – the cup is boiling, the cup is full, but it’s just hot water because I forgot the filter, again. I want it to be a cup, full of hot tea – a little different from the coca I was thinking about in the Else, but after all, why couldn’t I make myself cocoa instead of tea? I picked a full thread of reality where I didn’t drink the tea, after all.

With both hands, I stretch the Lie around the cup, quickly tracing two anchors with my index fingers. The glyph of light on the handle, to stabilize the illusion. The glyph of Permanence, so that the illusion will stick to the physical cup.

I close my connection to the Else. The cup next to me is steaming, full of cocoa. I pick it up, and the liquid sloshes realistically, even if the cup feels empty - there are ways to give mass to one’s Lies, but I haven’t managed those yet.

Now it’s time for the real test, though. I Reach into the Else, look at the Lie bound to the cup, and want it to change - maybe Daravoi didn’t bring me cocoa, maybe he gave me hot ginger, even if I hate it. I pull at the thread of Lies, changing it, but without Summoning more power from the Else.

I close my eyes for a moment. It’s easier to change a Lie, if no one is looking, even I. When I open them again, focusing on the Here, I find myself holding a cup of ginger. It even smells awful, like real ginger! Oh, I can play so many pranks with this!

“Yeah!” I say, “I did it! Look, I…”

Iketek hushes me with a gesture. She’s looking at her tablet, worried. I feel stupidly disappointed – I did a good job, can’t she at least look at it?

But I see her face and I drop it immediately. Iketek is hard to read, usually, she’s not very expressive. Right now, she looks scared. No, something worse – horrified.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“I…” She trails off. “You should look. Daravoi! Come here. Now.”

Dara comes from the kitchen – turns out he enjoys cooking, even if he’s shit at it. He looks annoyed, I know he doesn’t like it when Iketek bosses over him.

“Have a look,” she says, pushing her tablet toward me. Daravoi sits by my side, leaning against my shoulder to see the screen.

A video is playing - a news channel. It shows a city by the sea, and a huge pillar of smoke.

“What the fuck is happening?” Daravoi asks.

“Best case, a terror attack. Worst case, a new Mage War,” Iketek comments, and her tone is grim. “Either way, it’s a terrible time to be rogue mages. Now shut up and watch.”

We watch in silence, and what we’re seeing doesn’t look real.

A mage destroys a building, and all I can think is that the purple light is beautiful, even if the screen can’t render the true colors of the Else.

It must be a movie, it must be a dream, nothing like this has happened in my lifetime, it can’t be happening now, as we watch.

I’ve seen plenty of videos from the war in Zelenia, of course, and tons of movies about the Kalestran war. But they were things taught in history classes, or broadcasted as government propaganda, or ThauCon recruitment ads - these things are not supposed to happen in real life.

As I watch the disaster on the news, I have a sudden realization. It’s like one of those illusions with a hidden figure, which you can’t see at first, but then becomes impossible to unsee.

I hadn’t really understood, until now, that the magical terror groups, the wars of magic, the Exiled, are real things, they still exist, and the path I’ve chosen leads toward them. I watch people trample each other, running from a mage - a mage like me - and I feel sick.

“This is… concerning,” Iketek says.

“Concerning? Forgetting grandma’s birthday is concerning,” I exclaim, “that mage cut through a building like it was butter! There were people inside!”

Iketek expression doesn’t betray any emotion. “Lots of terrible things happen every day, and we can’t do anything about most of them. But this could be a problem for us, personally.”

“But mages are doing this!” I say.

“So what?” She asks. She sounds distracted, as if it didn’t matter to her. “Mages are no better and no worse than anyone else. You’re not responsible for what other mages do - no more than you are for what anyone else does. It’s ThauCon that tries to convince us we’re all guilty, since the Breaking of the Moon.”

“What’s the risk for us personally?” Daravoi says, looking around, slowly. Fuck, I thought he’d side with me - isn’t he the one with a moral compass here?

What Iketek said may be sensible. But I feel like I just understood something even more important than her magic lessons. Right now, Big Sis’ warnings finally sink into me. What she tried to tell me about the choices I’m making. And I know that if I let myself, I’ll just squash the thought away, and I don’t want to.

I must consider, for reals, where this path will lead me.

Except I hate thinking about the future, it makes me anxious and confused, and there are people running and screaming in the news, and I want to vomit.

“At the very least, ThauCon will be on high alert, which will make our lives harder,” Iketek says. “But it might be worse than that. Look, I need to talk to the Prop Master. He has contacts in the Factions, we need to know what’s happening. You two wait here, don’t use magic, don’t even touch the Else, for any reason. Korentis, by the Lost Stars, don’t do any bullshit until I’m back.”

“We don’t take orders from you,” Daravoi says, quietly.

She looks at him, and golden sparks dance in her eyes.

“I’m a mind mage of considerable power,” she says, flatly. “I could make you do whatever I want, and I could make you be happy about it.”

There’s a long, heavy pause, and my mind is spinning – what is even this argument about? Fuck, this was all a mistake. Maybe ThauCon has it right. Magic makes us wrong.

“Also,” Iketek goes on, “I’m probably the only person in the world who is both willing and able to protect you. So, take my orders, or walk away and be on your own.”

Daravoi goes rigid. I remember the gang in the metro, and his sudden anger at being pushed. Whatever is happening, I don’t want him and Iketek to fight. So I sweep away the confusion, and do what I’m best at.

“Sweet! I love taking orders!” I say, adding a suggestive wink. “Look, I’ll also sit on my hands until you’re back.”

I go sit cross-legged on my duvet, hands tucked under my thighs. Big Sis used to make me do that while she tried to get me out of trouble, to prevent me from causing further damage.

Daravoi looks exasperated, then he relaxes and cracks a smile. I knew it - he knows if he’s acting more irresponsible than me, something is wrong.

Iketek says nothing, then stalks out.

***

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