(July 17th, 1991, Atterberry Ranch, Ireland)
I was in one of the fields, an unused one, kinda.
Normally there would be some crop planted in the field, or the field would be growing grass for the chickens to forage in before the cattle mowed it down. This field's grass wasn't like that wild growth, it was trimmed and contained. Tall grass caused large fires, so this grass was up to my ankle at its highest.
I was still wand testing, I had been for the past… ten months? The testing was long and tedious, but I made sure to not get as tangled up in it as I had on that first day. Most days I spent a couple hours in this testing field, but some days I wouldn't come here at all. At some point Mom had offhandedly called it an obsession, which stung, but wasn't true. I had Watcher—
‘Hello!’ her cute little voice chirped in my head. Yes, hello Watcher, thank you for the cameo.
—and she would notice if I was obsessed. Heck, I was pretty sure that I would be able to spot if I had an obsession by myself. Just because I had Watcher, to ease my paranoia, didn't mean I couldn't do her job myself.
Heh, funny.
‘I am you, silly! So me keeping tabs on your mental state is you doing it yourself!’ Watcher said with a goofy grin on her imaginary face.
She was more of a cute face that I had strapped onto an alarm system than a real person, but it was slightly less annoying than what I had before. Even if I could feel in my mind how she was more skin than substance. A hollow shell fed words by my more minor subprocesses. It would be a lot more uncomfortable If I couldn't see and feel every step that went into her facade.
So, I definitely didn't have an obsession, just a hobby that was quite important to me. A month and a half before I no longer would have the time or privacy to test for new wands. No pressure.
I was in the testing field, sitting on my testing chair. I had made the chair because I didn't want to be out standing in my field for hours on end. I couldn't stand it, which was why I was sitting. Okay two jokes is enough. It was a nice comfy chair, with lots of padding, and big armrests. The chair was forest green, except for a big label on the back that read ‘testing chair’.
My current approach was much more methodical than before. In my wands was a wand made with a snapdragon squid tongue as a core, and snapdragon stem as the wood. It was carved with intricate patterns that flowed into each other in a brilliant display of greens and browns. Once the final touches were made, I detached the wand from my body. Pointing at the ground in front of me, I pushed a burst of uncontrolled magic into the wand.
A sapling sprouted and grew rapidly, its roots tore through the earth violently, and its trunk split and twisted like so many limbs before it was flushed with leaves. Within seconds a fully grown tree had formed.
It then burst in flames, as its entire canopy caught fire at once.
Breath in.
Breath out.
Don't break the chair.
The trees burned far too easily, too quickly for the amount of heat it was putting off. My guess was it was merely a blade of grass, with a medium tier projection over it, which caused it to seem like a tree.
I snapped the wand in half, before tossing both pieces into my waiting maw. Recycling was important!
I added another entry into my imaginary ‘wand testing journal’. Test number 2139, another failure for the pile.
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(July 24th, 1991, Fae Wilds, on the west rim of the old Irish coast from back in the days of Doggerland)
I decided to let off some steam today.
The Fae Wilds were weird. They were something like a funhouse mirror of the normal earth. Most of the contents kinda lined up, but from high up they looked… smudged? The coast lines were all funky and flowing. The place was also brimming with magic, and distance was more a suggestion when travelling.
That's how owls worked, actually. They would slide halfway through dimensions, gaining faster travel speed, and undetectability to anything fully on either side. It was fast and reliable, though it was perplexing that nothing evolved to hunt them. My guess was that they were too small of a population to hunt effectively. There were less than two and a half thousand of the magical birds out there, and they spent most of their time safe indoors. Hardly an easy niche to survive under.
I mentally blinked at myself a few times.
None of that had much to do with my current situation. I was inside a coral reef. As in a colourful cold water reef, surrounded by fishies. Apparently there were a bunch of those. Cold water reefs, not fishies. There were lots of fishies, and that was clearly apparent, but that's- urghh! Not the point, the point was that I didn't know that we had so many reefs nearby. Reefs were always shown to be a thing in places where the weather was less shit, and so people would actually be willing to touch the ocean. So I had never realised that there were reefs so close to home.
Merlin's bones, I was glad I wasn't bound by such feeble things as ‘cold water’ or ‘a lack of breathable air’. I pitied mortals, I really did. That thought sounded a lot more narcissistic when I put it into words. I didn't mean it in a hurtful way, I loved my own humanity, I just… pity them. Like how one would pity a cripple who still lives their life to its fullest. It's a knee-jerk emotional reaction.
It wasn't even a strong pity, because I could p—
‘No.’
So I was just relaxing underwater right now. Sitting on the ocean floor in my human form, and watching the fishies swim by. The sun shined down through the waves, creating the irregular lighting that is always associated with being under water. My hair was drifting weightlessly behind me, and my eyes were watching the blue tinted world around me. Some fish swam in schools, others alone. Some were cute and tiny tooth cleaners, and others were twice my own size, and likely more times my weight.
I watched them all, but not scientifically. I did not vivisect them with my eyes, measuring every flap of a fin or flow of watch through gills. That… that wasn't why I was here. Instead, I watched in a more simple way, the normal way.
I did not breathe, nor hold my breath. My lungs were filled with water, but I had built them strong enough to endure the strain. Oxygen was not needed if I simply forced everything to work.
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Water smelled funny, there was no air stopping it from going up my nose, and I had disabled the respiratory gag reflex so I wasn't bothered. Normally I would over analyse the how and why, but today it was just ‘smelled funny’, and that made me happy. I felt more at peace than any point in the past months. It almost felt like I was sleeping. This feeling of absolute peace had become rarer and rarer as my life had gone on. Every year I learned more and more, yet that only seemed to end with me having more worries. Ignorance might have been bliss, but I was programmed against bliss, so I refused to give up any of my enlightenments.
A small part of me knew that such a view was hypocritical, that my mere existence was a facade of ignorance, but I could not see that part. It was above me, and I was made to not look up. Metaphorically. Literally, I did not have the ‘never looks up’ flaw.
I spent hours down there. Mom had been warned that I wouldn't be home for lunch, and she was okay with it, happy even. She thought I needed to get out of the house more.
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(Summer?, 1991, London, England)
(This is a dream sequence.)
This was… a lot of people. Like, wow. I knew it numerically, but I now understood how books did not prepare me for this nearly as effectively as I would have hoped. Every bit of space was used, and every centimetre was filthy. Even the air— the air of all things— was filthy. It wasn't just gross, it was killing people! Supposedly, it used to be worse, but I had trouble believing that.
I took a deep breath.
It was fine. It was their decision to live like this. It would be rude to mess with anyone's affairs.
I was walking down the streets of London, wearing a white blouse, grey skirt, and a transparent black shawl. It was a little on the formal side for an eleven-year-old, but I was trying to look professional. It was before the afternoon commute, yet the streets still had plenty of traffic. Muggles absentmindedly side stepped me, never noticing the child wandering by herself.
The air here had a lot of magic in it, the currents in the ambiance acted as beacons for where the centres of magical activity were located. It was one of those beacons I was sniffing out now.
After some further walking I stood in front of a massive stone brick building that dwarfed all its neighbours twice over. It was surrounded by some especially potent wards. The first layer was repellent charms, and under that there was a second layer of… very strange anti-weathering charms. The building had a blueish grey tiled roof, and seemed to be built in an unfamiliar style. Its edifice was filled with arches of cobblestone, accented by tendrils of wood that almost looked like grasping hands if I squinted. Above its massive wooden doors, near the top of the building's front wall, was a slab of marble.
On the slab were the words ‘Library of Londinium’. The lettering was worn by wind and rain for hundreds of years, but even the lower case characters were at least as tall as I was, so I doubted all but the near sighted would have trouble reading them.
This was a public wizarding library, and from the smell— the metaphorical magic smell— of things, it was also the single oldest building in all of England.
I climbed the stairs leading up to the building, and telekinetically pushed open one of the doors a smidge so I could slip through. It was heavy enough that a normal little girl might have struggled if in my stead, and the door's minute tilt had it close behind me as soon as I stopped pushing. The inside of the building was even larger than its imposing exterior. A single hall was in front of me, each side of the hall had a maze of shelves fifty metres thick before the wall, and these book laden sections seemed to have three layers of height to them, with wooden bridges periodically crossing the gap between the left and right sides of the hallway.
Though calling it a hallway did not do it justice. It was a singular room 180 metres wide and 200 metres at the tallest point of sloped roof. And it went back for what seemed to be miles, not literally though. Literally, the hall was 860 metres long. It looked like someone had carved out the halls of Valhalla, and then lined the edges with books. Its size was only subdued by the mellow, almost romantic lighting.
Between the doors and the hall was a singular large ornately carved wooden desk, and at the desk slept an old lady. I walked up to the desk and knocked on the wood. I had to repeat doing so a few times, but eventually she brought her head up from between arms, before yawning with a big stretch. Only after finishing did she notice me, and when she did she blinked in confusion a few times.
She was thin and gaunt, but even hunched over in her chair as she was I could tell she would be very tall if she stood. Mom's height— 180cm(5ft,11in)— at least, if not more. Her hair was grey and wavy, just barely scraping her shoulders. Yet the most striking features of her appearance were her eyes. Her left eye was covered by a strapless eyepatch made of rugged black metal, which was odd, but not as odd as her other eye.
“Your iris is glowing!” I observed excitedly. It was glowing a hot pink colour, and was bright enough that it was noticeably around half as bright as the ambient lighting.
“So are yours,” she said before glancing at her watch. My eyes widened a little, and my breath hitched for a moment. I double checked that the glow wasn't malfunctioning and that my auras didn't somehow misalign without two dozen subsystems activating overrides.
Everything was still green… wait no… it was all just a wall of green, one uniform mass of green. I started to panic before I got a ping from Artemis. ‘Code blue,’ she reminded me. I relaxed, and she once again pulled out of my part of the head.
So how did the lady notice? Artemis already knew the answer, but I pushed it to the back of my mind. I wanted to feel the surprise when I found out.
The lady snapped her fingers twice, her gloves lighting up with orange embers both times, and I felt two pulses of magic echo into the hall and then back. She then held up her hand and caught a book that had zoomed towards her.
She flipped to a seemingly random page and read for a few seconds. She then looked into and then through my eyes. “Eldriena, you're late.” she said.
To which I tilted my head. “Um, hi? I'm Artemis Atterberry,” I held out my hand for her to shake. She grabbed my hand, but did not shake it.
“Why the cute face, normally you're so &<,%=_ )[[(>,%.” She was staring at me very intensely. I felt nauseous, and the library shook as the book in the lady's hand burned to ash in a moment. She was not a librarian, that much was always clear. She didn't have the soul for it.
The shaking did not stop, and the shadows grew darker. My body did not dim like the rest of my surroundings.
“Why are you so quiet, ( >n<)! There is so much you could let me say! Why can't you just let me read?!” she snarled at me, now noticeably displeased. She grabbed me by my shoulders. There was no longer a desk between us, as she then started shouting at me. I couldn't make out the words, but I wasn't really trying.
The library caught fire as the lady slowly turned more monstrous as she shouted. The air filled with smoke, and the lady's glowing pink eye continued to glare at me as she raged.
I signed— a thing I felt I was doing all too often recently— before smiling up at the glowing iris sadly. “I… I'm sorry,” I said.
In the next moment the lady and her library were all turned into ice, and the moment after that the whole scene dissipated like mist in the wind. I was left standing alone, surrounded by a black void on all sides.
I breathed out a tired breath that fogged up in the air. After a couple minutes, I sent a ping upwards, and I was pulled away from the dream before slotting in with the rest of my collective mind as Artemis Atterberry ‘woke up’.
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(July 24th, 1991, Fae Wilds, on the west rim of the old Irish coast from back in the days of Doggerland)
And isn't that a mouthful to say.
A mouthful to think?
No, a brainful to think? Yeah, okay, that may be silly, but that one's still going into normie storage.
Back to more relevant topics, I had fallen asleep. Thought that maybe I could get some insight into my nature, by using that little probe to scope out some of the bits I wouldn't normally poke at. Normally, I don't dream at all. My mind is too volatile and fragile for me to wreak havoc to my psyche every Night, but every once in a while it was worthwhile.
I spent another half hour relaxing underwater as I picked apart that probe piece by piece, making sure that I washed all the gunk off it, before I individually assimilated the components one at a time. It was late in the evening when I headed home, bursting out of the water and taking flight.
The sun was near setting when I made it home. Mom was sitting on the porch couch waiting for me. “So, how was your day out? Was it everything you hoped it would be?” she asked as she smothered me in a hug.
Alright, that hug settled it. I was definitely going to be tall when I grew up. Wizards were on average taller than muggles by a dozen centimetres, which was why Mom was a very tall 180cm(5ft,11in), but I definitely wanted to be taller than her when I grew up. Oh, right! I was supposed to say something! “Yes, it was fully satisfactory.” I blurted out on auto pilot.
She pulled out of the hug and gave me an unimpressed look. She could obviously tell that that was an automated response. “Well, dinner’s still baking, so… do you want to talk about it?” She had a hand on my shoulder, and we sat down on the couch together after I had nodded.
We talked until the sky in front of us was a dark blue, the sunset hitting the other side of the house. I basically went through my day in order, ending on something I had figured out on my flight back as I analysed the subsumed memories of the dream probe. “I think I'll be able to finish my wand project tomorrow.” I spoke. “The dream helped me pin it down to ivory with some sort of ice core.”
Her supportive smile turned a little wryer. The topic was something of a sore spot for her. She thought that the project was at best ‘a waste of time’, and at worst ‘actively detrimental to my mental health’. “Good, I'm glad that you're almost done with it… You know that I'll always love and support you, no matter what, right?” Mom said. She did always support me, even in this, even when she wanted me to fail.
She never said anything, but I knew her, I could tell. She loved me, but she had always wanted me to be more normal. It was always subtle pushes, and she was never purposeful, just tintsy little needles that added up to a clear image. I almost wished that I could say ‘I don't want to be a monster either, Mom’, but that would be a lie. I loved what I was, in moderation. Even if I confronted her, she would deny everything and try to reaffirm me of her support. But if I pointed out how much I could read her, how I— if I so desire— know her better than she knows herself, then she would freak out and worry that I was the exact worst case monster that she had hypothesised about accidentally making. And the worst part was that I almost am. And… and…
And I sighed heavily.
“Yes. I love you too Mom.” I said.
It was fine. By this time tomorrow I will have my wand project finished, and this whole anxiety-inducing mess of a minor conflict will blow over.
I stood up from the couch, and put a smile on my face. “All right, let's go get dinner out of the oven.” I said to Mom, holding out a hand to help her off the couch.
She grabbed my hand and let me pull her up. “But the timer hasn't r-” she started, but she was interrupted by the oven's bell going off. “You're a cheeky bugger, you know Bug.” she said.
“Yes, I am very much aware.” I said, with a grin on my face as she followed me inside.