His hand was still trembling as he let go of the door handle. Once again encased in his apartment like a hermit’s shell, the windows closed, relegating the outside to an incoherent murmur like concert-goers before the curtains rose. The curtains were about to rise, but Caynes had lost his footing at the last moment.
Death. No, something more final than death. A return to nothing: that was what awaited him on the ends of those sharp, sharp purple teeth. It had sunk its jaws into his magic, but any further, and he would have never existed at all. Never mind a fake identity; he would have disappeared in the truest sense of the word.
Destruction. Utter annihilation only a god could be capable of.
Or a Spirit imitating God.
He undid his black robe and let it haphazardly fall to the floor as he traversed his sun-kissed apartment, its insides immaculately furnished to suit his needs as the individual named Caynes. Albeit none was of his own design, but of his benefactor.
By the kitchen counter was a stout black telephone, one with Aether lines connecting directly to no more than three numbers. He dialled one with a single rotation and waited patiently for the receiver to return his call. He was a Spirit of Records, having to double-check his knowledge was something that went against his very being, but that only spoke to the direness of his theory.
“Hello,” Provenance’s soft, rolling voice said through the phone’s distortion. “Who is this.”
“Caynes.”
“Ah, yes. Your performance in Excala. It reached my ears before the news’s. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”
“No. Well, it is close. I need you to confirm with me the Spirit the Wishbearer is infused with once again.”
Provenance’s confusion vibrated through the wire. “Come again, old friend? I thought it very obvious.”
“Please, Provenance.”
“…the Wishbearer is infused with Darminjung, the Spirit of Wishes and Desire. Her power is a manifestation of her wish. Why?”
“It’s…no reason,” Caynes lied.
The purple armour. That was not Evalyn Hardridge. The answer seemed obvious but wildly unreasonable. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps he was the unreasonable one.
“I need to ask you one more thing, Provenance.”
“Many questions for a Spirit of Records. What is it?”
“The text you stole from my peoples’ Crystalline Library, whatever you call it now.”
“The Tetrica Resonances. That is their name.”
“Spirits of Records don’t need to give their texts names. Anyway, the first resonances, do you remember them?”
“Would you like me to recite them?”
The Resonances, passages of text written by his ancestors, and long since locked away deep in his peoples’ library. The texts he had glanced at once and never understood. Even after being stolen, even after meeting Provenance and having them explained, the texts had never unravelled themselves to him. Unclear stories and warnings pointing to the world at large being flawed, that its very existence was in jeopardy, and only some once great messiah could ever hope to save it.
“Yes. Recite them.”
“Okay. If you wish. The world was made. Aether swirled amongst the physical plane as both were moulded and forced through ice and fire. Stars took shape, constellations came to rest, and the world began to form. Two wisps of Aether granted the gift of consciousness, observed the cycle of creation and destruction, and copied it. One took up the mantle of creation, forging, moulding, and the other took up the mantle of destruction, obliterating, shattering.
“They played for eternities, watching as the world grew from nothing to something. As trees sprouted and grass grew, animals began to roam the Earth, while the powerful ancient Spirits observed and copied the symptom phenomena of the cycle itself.
“But destruction grew to see the world for what it was. A world without order, without compassion or justice, one where living constituted killing, taking, maiming, and fighting. No hatred or love, only a repulsive need to live. Destruction looked at creation and grew mad, for if they were equal in their game, the world would have stayed stagnant, yet it had grown corrupted, evil, irredeemable.
“Creation insisted the world did not deserve to be destroyed, and for the love of its friend, destruction decided to curate the world, play God and judge right and wrong. But as the world was corruptible, so was destruction.”
“Stop,” Caynes said. “That’s all I need to hear.”
“But that was only the beginning.”
“I don’t need more of your bedtime stories, Provenance. They aren’t going to solve anything.”
“Then why did you ask for them, old friend?”
A buzz in the wire leapt to his fingertips and arrested him. All his mind could muster from his body was a twitch in his finger. His joints weren’t disobeying him; they were just as helpless and confused as he was.
“Are you realising that what’s written in the Resonances aren’t as…unreasonable as you insisted they were?”
Caynes tried to hang up the phone, but he couldn’t even strain his voice, let alone his muscles.
“Your desire to change the world for the better is a testament to their warnings. The only difference is that your methods fell short of the root cause. You are not remedying a problem, but a symptom.”
The seed had been planted the moment those jaws destroyed his magic. Provenance could smell it; he could nurture the doubt.
“Is there anything you wanted to tell me?”
The scream building inside Caynes's head burst out of his voice box, and he slammed the receiver back into place, almost smashing apart the phone.
He had stumbled before the curtains rose. It was up to his recovery.
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Another batch of police were waiting for their arrival at Crestana’s aunt’s residence. A ‘small’ mansion, by Iris’s estimates. Uniformed officers formed a loose perimeter around the entire block, and in addition to the first Higher Order unit station at one end of the street, Iris could see the tip of another gargantuan bayonet rounding the corner at the far end.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Iris whispered, recalling Crestana mentioning her aunt’s desire to marry out of wealth. Perhaps it was a matter of status rather than the treasure in one’s vault.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Crestana asked. “Look, there she is now.”
A woman waddled down the paved stone pathway bridging the immaculately levelled lawn, looking as though running any faster would see her heels snap. An officer opened their door, and Iris exited first, giving a hand to Crestana while she scanned the street. A habit, but not an unwelcome one. It never hurt to check both ways and scrutinise the apartment windows from across the road.
Janice Mallorine brushed past Iris in a flurry of woven money made to look like clothing and violently grabbed Crestana by the cheeks underneath her mask.
“Oh goodness, you’re all right,” Janice panted, brushing loose strands of hair from Crestana’s mask. “I heard about it all. Oh, how awful.”
She pulled Crestana into her arms, ignoring every implication her niece was uncomfortable for the sake of fulfilling her own turbulent emotions. Caring had a way of bottling up feelings. Showing one cared was a release of such emotion.
Beaks felt emotion. Beaks were allowed to feel emotion. Her own family, however removed from the Mallorine way of life, so readily showed it when times were tough. The small skip in Crestana’s Aether told Iris that perhaps her client was coming to terms with that fact. Slowly.
Iris grinned, finding it ironic how easily she could read Crestana’s feelings. Even without her Aether, the way her arms awkwardly snaked around her aunt’s waist was evidence enough.
“Inside,” whispered the officer who had opened the car door, and the small, happy moment was put on hold. Janice turned to Iris, the shutters angling in such a way they practically spelt the word ‘sincerity’.
“Thank you,” Janice said, and Iris smiled, wishing that a thank you could make everything worthwhile.
With Iris trailing close behind, the three quickly travelled over the stone pathway that kept them half an inch above the snow cover. The second mansion she’d visited that day, and perhaps the noon sun had blessed Janice Mallorine’s home in a more welcoming light, but Iris felt none of the same dread as she had when visiting Crestana’s home. She still could not discern if her body and mind’s feverish rejection of the place was born from paranoia or not, but that phenomenon was no longer sinking its claws into her. Not yet anyway.
A final pair of officers manned the main entrance. No ornate door knocker stood to intimidate her, only a brass handle.
“Don’t bother with your shoes unless you prefer to take them off,” Janice clarified as she closed the door behind them and started down the hallway’s vivid red carpet. The two girls followed, Crestana as though it were nothing remarkable and Iris as though she were rudely speeding through a fine arts exhibition without reading the blurbs under the paintings. Not that there were any.
“How are you feeling, Crestana? What happened after today?”
“Iris's father took us to their home, and I cared for her. She was worse off than I was.”
“Oh dear,” Janice said. “Are you all right now?”
“Yes,” Iris stated, small talk still totally alien to her.
“That’s good. There is a lunch spread on the table if you’d like and a…Crestana? What’s wrong?”
Crestana has frozen still in the centre of the hallway, her body seizing like a deer in headlights.
“Crestana?” Iris asked, drawing nearer as the girl took a step back from the open door to her left.
“Not here.”
“What?” Janice asked again. “Is there something wrong with the prayer room?”
“Prayer room?” Iris asked, rounding the corner.
“Yes. I’m not as involved as my brother, but we were both raised in the temple. I keep a room in the house for the material aspects that come with it.”
Janice flicked the light switch by the doorframe, and a lightbulb buzzed above their heads.
The marking carved into the wood of the ritual cabinet struck Iris before anything else. In between the ornate statues akin to Crestana’s door knocker, the fern pots littering the inside of the wood, and the candles set along its base was a painfully familiar engraving.
Another Sigil.
“The marking in the middle. Why is that there? Why is that there?!”
Iris stormed forward and placed a hand on the Sigil. Instead of her hair, she disassembled the excess on her fingernails and felt the small beast protrude from her palm.
“It’s a symbol of our temple! That’s all! It’s in every ritual cabinet in Excala!”
“Since when? I don’t remember!”
“Since your father recommended it to me a month ago!”
She let her beast’s teeth search for the marking’s magic. It found a trace, one that Iris could barely feel, and tore it to shreds. Done it's job, it retreated, and Iris turned around. “Maybe Mr Mallorine was tricked. Maybe he was convinced that these were a real symbol.”
“Tricked?” Janice questioned. “My brother is the authority of the whole city! If someone was trying to fool him into putting…false markings into our cabinets, he’d be the first to realise!”
Iris’s heart sank, the statement unknowingly implicating the final suspect. She'd thought about it all wrong. Crestana had worked it out too.
“Then that would mean Mr Mallorine is complicit…no. He’s working with Caynes.”
“Why?” Crestana whispered. “Everyone…one after another….”
“What on earth is going on?!” Janice cried.
“Ma’am,” Iris started, adrenaline taking over her mind. “These Sigils are what cause the dome incidents. There's no magic in this one, but anyone who’s with the Temple, their house isn’t safe.”
The shock filtered into panic through Janice’s mask as she grabbed on Crestana’s shoulders. “What should we do?”
“Leave,” Iris said. “Leave now before something happens.”
Janice nodded, slowly at first, but her mind began to catch up to her body. “Let’s go,” she said, ushering Crestana back down the hall.
“No!” Crestana protested. “What about you? Why does it look like you’re staying behind?”
“Until you’re gone, I need to make sure you’re safe…”
“Stop it! You’re not some superhuman! I’m not leaving without you.”
Iris smiled. “I’ll be all right.”
Crestana's shoulders were shaking.
"How do you know that doesn't have magic in it?"
Red lines. Like a projector. They flashed across Janice’s body the instant she dropped to the floor. Crestana screamed, then screamed again when she turned her attention down the hallway. Iris rushed outside, skidding on the red carpet and putting her own body between her client and the threat.
The black-cloaked figure stood at the end of the red carpet, a mark of evil framed against the pure white walls.
“Caynes,” Iris whispered.
“Caynes!” Crestana screamed. “Caynes, you wretched monster!”
Crestana bellowed, her voice box straining as her anger oozed infectiously.
“How could you! You used my family! You ruined my life! You were even kind to me!”
On the verge of a breakdown, her mind had found a deadly catharsis. Months of a ruined life, like a pipe bursting from too much pressure too fast. It wasn’t just the hallway that led their eyes to him, Caynes was all she could see. Caynes was her life whether she liked it or not. Caynes had played God of her world. And she wanted to slay God.
“What was this for? What was this all for?!”
Caynes stayed silent.
“Answer me!”
Crestana sidestepped Iris’s barrier, pushing past and blindly rushing forward.
“No!”
A Sigil formed along the carpet and ran up the walls, encapsulating Crestana in its perimeter. In the next instant, Crestana was in Caynes’s arms, an arm around her neck, the other holding her unresponsive mask.
“Let her go!” Iris shouted, her hair disintegrating into a jet stream of purple liquid headed directly down the hallway. A Sigil blocked it, severing the hallway in two while Caynes held another small circle to Crestana’s temple, making sure it was visible.
“So it was you,” Caynes said, no longer bothering with the distorted voice. “The Witch who survived this morning’s performance.”
Iris caught Crestana’s face one final time. Shock, but no shutters to show it. The next moment, they were gone.
Iris was left with her breathing, the shock paralysing her while the ringing in her ears refused to leave her in silence. She clocked her heartbeat and finally realised how fast she was breathing. Iris looked around, gathering her bearings, and found Janice, still lying on the floor.
“Ma’am?” Iris cried, running over and crouching, putting a hand on her back. Still, the pulse of Aether was still alive. Weak…too weak.
“Help!” Iris screamed at the top of her lungs, looping her arms under Janice’s arms. “Help!”
The main doors swung open, and the two officers stationed by them stormed inside.
“What happened?” one asked as they took hold of Janice.
“Ambulance,” Iris said as she pressed on down the hallway, a senseless urgency once again piloting her brain in her stead. She exited the building and continued forward, picking up speed as she travelled the stone pathway, breaking into a sprint.
“The Excalan Academy’s under attack!” she overheard an officer shout as police radios blared inside their vehicles.
The Academy. His centrepiece.