“Abrial…please slow down. You will choke if you continue in this way.”
Just then, two people burst into the dining tent. Or rather, one person burst in extravagantly, waving a large white fan and dragging the second person behind her. It was Bi Gho and Bi Chanjuan — which one was dragging the other is self-explanatory.
“Everyone!” Bi Gho trilled, fluttering her fan in an arc. She was dressed in a light, silken robe today that hung nicely over her slender curves, a pale pink color. She looked more like a lovely goddess than ever.
Behind her, Bi Chanjuan was dressed in her usual satinous green robes, her bright cherry lips curled into a scowl. Bi Gho was dragging her by the wrist.
A wave of silence rippled over the tent, until everyone’s eyes were focused on the sisters at the tent entrance.
“Everyone!” Bi Gho repeated. She held up Bi Chanjuan’s pale wrist. “Listen here! As it is the day before this year’s Day of Shadows, my meimei Bi Chanjuan will be teaching the magical instruction today in the west clearing! So everyone who has an interest in trying their hand in shadow magic, go to the west clearing today at the eleventh morning hour! My meimei is an expert teacher, she will surely teach you well. Okay, that’s all! Continue eating! As you were!”
Bi Gho flourished her fan in a gesture for everyone to return to conversation. Slowly, the diners’ eyes peeled away from her lovely, almost glowing aura and returned to their bowls of spicy rice cake. Conversation rose again.
Abrial and Finley were sitting quite close to the entrance, so they got a full view of Bi Chanjuan’s rage.
“Jiejie! I told you, I hate teaching! All of your students are fucking idiots! I won’t do it!”
Bi Gho slapped her fan into her palm, her face suddenly stern.
“You are this camp’s most seasoned user of shadow magic. Jiejie is very proud of your skills, and you would make a great contribution by introducing our magicians to the art. Natural magic is not for everyone. How many more people can we encourage to fight if we gain more practitioners of shadow magic?”
Bi Chanjuan scowled deeply. The contempt of her face seemed to make her eyes drip with blood. What a terrifying sight!
Bi Gho was unphased. She twirled her fan, shifting her weight onto her other round hip.
“And besides, if you teach, jiejie will turn a blind eye to your katsura smoking for the time being so you can wean off it. I was going to tear your ears off if I saw you smoking that horrible plant one more time, but I will let you off easy for now if you teach. If not…” She flicked her fan open, eyes flashing. “Jiejie will not be so nice.”
Bi Chanjuan paled.
“You — you found out I’m smoking katsura still? I mean — ” she stammered, stepping back. “I’m not smoking. Or, maybe I did once or twice…or a little more…”
Bi Gho’s eyes flashed dangerously again.
“All right!” Bi Chanjuan caved, throwing her hands in the air. “I’ll teach! This once!”
“Next year, too. Annually.”
“Fine!”
With that, Bi Chanjuan hurried out of the tent like the end of her robes had caught fire, clearly wanting to get away from her sister as soon as possible. Abrial snorted. Who knew Bi Gho had known her sister was smoking all along?
Across the table, Finley spoke up quietly.
“Abrial, you should come to the lesson today.”
Abrial raised her eyebrows, surprised. “Why? You know I can’t do magic. Not anything besides basic healing, at least. I don’t wanna make a fool of myself!”
“You will not make a fool of yourself. There are others at this camp who also can only perform healing magic. Have you ever tried performing shadow magic before?”
Abrial shook her head, rubbing her knuckles together absently. “Of course not. You wouldn’t even show me how to do natural magic! How would I know how to do that crazy stuff?”
“Since you have never attempted shadow magic, it may be worth giving it a try. It may be that your mind is strongly inclined to more chaotic pathways, so shadow magic may be more within your abilities. Perhaps natural magic is simply not a strong technique for you.”
Abrial perked up, hope shining in her eyes suddenly. “You think so? But…why would I be able to do shadow magic, and not natural magic? Didn’t you say shadow magic takes even more spiritual energy?”
Finley nodded, stopping one of her chopsticks that had begun to roll away with a finger. “That is true. Most magicians practice natural magic, because shadow magic can consume twice or more the amount of spiritual energy for similar tasks. But it is the mechanism behind the techniques that differs. Do you remember how we meditated each time before practicing natural magic?”
“Right…Gross, that was awful. It didn’t work at all!”
“For you, maybe, but for others, it is easier to calm the mind and clear one’s thoughts. For someone like you, however, who might be inclined to having a mind in a more chaotic state with everything clamoring for your awareness, shadow magic might be the art that comes more naturally to you. It uses the chaos and liveliness of the mind to perform tasks. Rather than drawing from clearness and stillness in the mind, it draws from the chaos of the shadows of thoughts. Hence, it is referred to as shadow magic.”
Abrial nodded, processing this. As she thought it over, her nodding became more enthusiastic. A bright grin spread across her face.
“Hey, you’re right! If shadow magic is based on mental chaos, I should be great at it, shouldn’t I? My brain just never shuts up!”
Finley smiled a small smile, laughter in her hazel eyes. “That is correct.”
“All right, I’m in!”
----------------------------------------
At the eleventh hour, Finley and Abrial sat side by side at low desks near the front of the clearing. Abrial had insisted on sitting close up front, even though Bi Chanjuan shot her a thorny glare like sharpened daggers when she came close. She wanted to hear every instruction properly, and she planned to give this all of her strength. After all, she had been feeling extremely worthless after failing over and over again to perform a single quiver of natural magic. Today, she would try her best to perform some real magic, for once. Just like Finley had told her — she wasn’t a nonmagical person, that was for sure. She could heal. So, why should she be unable to do anything else? She refused to believe her own spiritual power was so low she couldn’t even shift the surface of a bowl of water!
And even if it was, what had she tried to do before that she’d failed at? She was a master blade fighter, ran like the wind, and could eat faster than shooting stars shot across the sky. If her spiritual power was that low, she would just try so hard she would produce results anyway!
By now, Abrial had psyched herself up so much she’d totally forgotten how devastated she felt after all those lessons where she hadn’t been able to do a drop of natural magic. Typical of her—she tended to forget difficult feelings after staggeringly short periods of time.
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As students streamed in for the instruction, filling up the desks so quickly that dozens more were called for, Bi Chanjuan sat lazily at the instructor’s table at the front of the clearing. She reclined on her side and examined her glittering golden nails. Abrial couldn’t help but notice that the slit of her dress had slid wide open as she reclined on her side, revealing a large swath of her upper thighs. Bi Chanjuan either didn’t notice, didn’t care, or was doing it on purpose. Abrial wasn’t sure if she felt that was attractive or irritating.
As soon as the sundial on the instructor’s table at the front of the clearing showed it was the eleventh hour, Bi Chanjuan cracked her finger joints, sat up, and snapped her fingers.
“Quiet.” Her voice snapped out over the clearing, seeming to be carried out in a cold breeze that rustled the grass and rippled out from the front rows to the back. She hadn’t spoken loudly, but everyone heard her voice by their ears in a low whisper. Shivers trembled down more than a few backs. The clearing went silent, half-terrified, all attention focused on Bi Chanjuan.
Bi Chanjuan’s cherry lips stretched into a sarcastic smile. She cracked her middle finger, then her ring finger, then her pinky.
Pop, pop, pop.
“Since my sister has decided that I am teaching today, I am here to instruct you on the most basic of basics in shadow magic. I am aware that very few of you have ever tried this difficult and complex art, so I don’t expect much. In fact, I expect everyone here to be completely terrible. But I don’t really have a choice except to be here, so we might as well try anyways, etcetera, etcetera, I suppose.”
As she spoke, there was a quiet rustling noise. Black, thorny vines had sprouted from the ground and were wrapping up her legs, the thorns pressing into her skin. People stared, some with awe and others with horror. Bi Chanjuan gave no notice. She continued:
“I raised these thorns with shadow magic. Now, before we begin, let’s try a little activity, shall we? Let’s have a little fun. Everyone, close your eyes. Now…imagine your very worst fear. I give you permission to feel as anxious and terrified as you possibly can. Visualize it happening to you, appearing in front of you, whatever it is. Allow the fear to seep into your bones, twist your heartbeat into a scream…”
Some people muttered skeptically at this strange command, but everyone closed their eyes and obeyed. It was well-known around the Wei camp that, although the second Bi daughter was a troublemaker and rather sadistic, she was an expert at shadow magic, having practiced it from her early youth.
Abrial closed her eyes.
She didn’t need to think long. What materialized in the darkness behind her eyelids was a familiar, terrifying scene.
In memory, she opened her eyes. There was the ceiling above her, framed by the canopy of her large, cold bed. Everything was colored blue and black with shadows, making strange shapes around the moonlight seeping through the windows.
She was utterly frozen. Her hands gripped the sheets till her knuckles turned white, unable to loosen; her dark eyes bulged, trying to blink. Her lungs choked, gasping for air, but her throat wouldn’t listen, her mouth, though frozen wide open, wouldn’t move to suck in air to live. Thoughts crashed in on her, bouncing like a horrible hail and scuttling around the heartbeat that boomed in her ears:
This house is the world; the world is this house.
Your parents are like gods; they will rule over you forever.
The garden walls are the edges of the earth.
You’ll never never see what the ocean looks like, or a mountain, or a lake, or a river.
You’ll probably die in this bed. You’ll grow old and you’ll die in this bed, in this house that’s only world you will ever know.
Trapped. Trapped. Trapped.
Abrial’s face blanched. She had suppressed these panicked memories for so long. They only came to her now in the occasional nightmare. As these vivid scenes raced through her mind, Abrial wasn’t aware of how her fists clenched tightly on her knees, how her eyes scrunched shut tighter, how her breathing became quick and labored. Her expression was nauseous.
Next to her, Finley looked paler than usual as well. She had begun to purse her lips, her eyebrows contorting slightly.
Seeing how much pain Abrial seemed to be in, Bi Chanjuan smirked from the instructor's table. It was unclear whether it was a smirk of glee or disdain.
“All right. That’s enough. I hope you’re all in a lot of turmoil, because you’ll need it for our exercise. If you’re not, try cutting your calves a couple times. That should do the trick for pain.”
Everyone had opened their eyes by now, many people looking pale and shaken, some looking around in confusion, like they weren’t feeling any turmoil at all. Nobody moved to cut themselves.
“Suit yourselves,” Bi Chanjuan said boredly. She snapped her fingers.
Immediately, gasps of shock and fear rippled through the clearing. Students young and old craned their necks back to stare at the sky.
The once-light sky was suddenly turning into an inky sky of night!
It rapidly darkened from a pale shade to a navy blue like in the time just after twilight. The sun faded to a small point, seeming to be the only star in an endless, peculiar night sky. Even the air smelled like the night.
Abrial stared around, amazed. It was like that time sparkling stars had begun to fall from the sky when Niklas returned with the raiding regiment — only this time, the sky had darkened much more quickly. All that with just a snap of Bi Chanjuan’s golden-nailed fingers!
Bi Chanjuan lifted two fingers casually. Gradually, the light returned. Many students squinted, the returning of bright sunlight hurting their eyes.
“First task,” Bi Chanjuan ordered, her voice carrying out over the clearing on a lazy, whispering breeze. “Use the visualization techniques used for natural magic to create darkness from a point, like you would use natural magic to create light from a point. Don’t try to clear your head. Be as fierce as you can in imagining the darkness around you. When you visualize…”
She went on to give further instructions about visualization, such as to strengthen your abdomen to put more force into it, and to imagine the darkness emitting from a pinpoint in front of the chest.
Abrial had already squeezed her eyes shut again. She was fiercely visualizing darkness erupting from a pinpoint in front of her, flashing out over the clearing and transforming the sky into a smoky black so dark that she couldn’t even see her own desk anymore. She allowed the remaining anxiousness from recalling her worst fears to course through her body like poison, visualizing, and visualizing. From the outside, her face was screwed up so tightly it looked like she was about to explode.
At last, she opened her eyes slowly, heart beating excitedly in her ears. What would the result be? Her mind was surely chaotic enough to produce something good, right?!
The smile wiped off her face. Her face fell.
There was no darkness in front of her. Not even a tiny pinprick of shadow hovered there.
Up at the instructor’s table, Bi Chanjuan smirked, caressing the thorns snaking up her thighs.
Finley had managed to produce a small, flickering ball of darkness, which hovered unsteadily above her own desk. She noticed Abrial’s slumping shoulders. Her own weak pinpoint of shadow that floated in the air dissipated. Before she could open her mouth to comfort Abrial, Abrial’s back straightened.
A determined spark had reappeared in her dark eyes.
“Maybe not this task. Maybe something else. I’ll be able to do something, for sure. Come on, Abrial. You can do this!”
Abrial looked so determined and serious, talking herself up. Finley smiled a small smile and returned to attempting to create a ball of shadow.
Gasps rippled through the clearing like a wind.
Abrial turned around, then her jaw dropped as though it was made of lead.
“What the heck?” she murmured in awe. “Who the heck did that?”
At the very back corner of the clearing, a column of pitch-black shadow had formed, rising from someone’s table. Its diameter was about the length of a sword. Not only was it dark enough that you couldn’t even see through it, it was shooting straight up into the sky, seeming to go on for miles and miles, only stopping until it hit a cloud!
Abrial craned her neck, searching for the person sitting at that desk. When she caught sight of them, her eyes sparkled and widened.
“No way!” she grinned. “It’s Shu Romy!”
Sitting hunched behind the desk and looking very much like they wanted everyone’s attention to divert elsewhere, was a young person clad in black and blue robes. Their hair was spiky and unkempt, covering one of their eyes, so that only their other, glaring black eye shone out. Their skin was pale as death, and with their mix of delicateness and harshness, it was impossible to place their gender. It was Romy Shu, that strange kid Abrial had rescued in the streets of Gananjag and who holed up on so many days in the scroll tent, reading in a secluded corner.
“Romy!” Abrial hollered brightly, her voice carrying across the clearing. She waved her hand exaggeratedly so that Romy could see. “Over here! That’s so cool! I knew you did shadow magic, but I didn’t know you were that good! Awesome!”
Romy looked mortified. Their shoulders hunched even more, so that they were curled up almost into the fetal position, and they avoided Abrial’s eyes deftly. The column of black shadow before the young magician seemed to thicken and grow with their discomfort, consuming their entire desk and continuing to expand.
Students seated near the column began to scramble backward, horrified.
“Stop making it grow!”
“It’s gonna eat us up!”
“What the heck, are you trying to kill us?”
“Everyone, calm down. Don’t act like bigger idiots than you already are.” Bi Chanjuan’s voice blew out over the clearing, flat and irritated. “It’s just a shadow. It won’t hurt you. You there with the messy hair, Shu Romy — take three deep breaths. Everyone, focus on your own desks. Don’t be shitty and stare.”
Abrial watched Shu Romy fix their crouched position slightly. Their face seemed even paler than usual, somehow — if that was even possible. They closed their eyes, seeming to take a few deep breaths. Their dark brow uncreased.
Gradually, the column of darkness thinned, until it was the diameter of a sword’s length again. Then it shrank down to the diameter of a cup, then thinner, and thinner, a skinny black rod reaching up to the heavens, until it was only a sliver. Finally, it disappeared altogether, leaving Romy’s desk bathed in sunlight just like before.
Murmurs of praise and skepticism rippled throughout the clearing:
“Wow, what a feat! So you use your mental chaos to create magical results, then use mental peace to control them! Amazing!”