The pressures of school and her budding relationship with Leopold were… paltry, at least compared to the threat of being thrown out of the Arcanum at a moment’s notice. Now she was a fully enrolled student only subject to grading and the normal examinations that went along with her classes. It was almost disappointing how easy things were when her new life wasn’t on the line.
One day after they got back from a solo training session at the Arcanum, Margaret gave her a letter that had come addressed for her at their address. Seeing the thin envelope stamped with wax sent a thrill of excitement through her heart. Who could it be? Could her parents have possibly found out where she was living and written to her?
But no, the wax seal at the front of the envelope held the Arcanum’s sigil of a sphere surrounded by a wall, and when she cracked it and opened the envelope she immediately searched for the signature at the bottom of the sheet.
“It’s from Daniel,” she said to Leopold, drained of excitement. What the metrology department could want with her now she had no idea. All she knew was that she didn’t have to do whatever they’d dreamed up, which filled her with at least a mote of happiness. She could refuse, she had that power now. It was fantastic.
“What do they want,” Leopold asked, and leaned over her shoulder to read the letter as well.
“It looks like… they want me to come back for another test. They’re requesting I come back. It’s nice, he acknowledges right here that I don’t have to, but that they’ve been preparing the last two weeks for the possibility that I might. Apparently they’ve got one final exam for me.”
“What sort of exam,” Leopold asked.
“Capacitance,” Willow said, and smiled. This was the one test she was looking forward to taking.
🜛
The metrology building looked the same as always, but things felt different now. It must be herself that had changed, Willow initially thought as she walked through the large room toward the door at the back. Nobody looked up at her entrance, nobody’s eyes followed her on her way back, which made it all the more conspicuous.
They were ignoring her on purpose.
Willow knocked softly on the door to the small room, but nobody answered. She raised her fist to knock again when Daniel spoke up.
“Willow,” he said, sticking his head out from another door along the back wall. He motioned her over and she left the first door his with not a little confusion. Were they in a different room now?
Daniel retreated into the room, and when Willow entered she found that it was much larger than the previous one. Along the back wall were four large tanks banded in silver and copper, capped with hemispheres of dark crystal. She had a feeling she knew what they were.
Steph was there, and she smiled when Willow walked in.
“It’s good to see you again,” Steph said, and shook Willow’s hand gently. Daniel shook next, with a wide smile on his face, and Willow looked around for the third.
“Where’s Burket,” she asked.
“Ah, well. He’s not coming. We’re sort of spearheading this on our own,” Daniel said nervously. “You’re going to be our capstone project, if you can believe it.”
“Your capstone? Really?”
“Oh yes, nobody’s ever done a capacitance reading like this before,” Steph said. “It could revolutionize the science.”
“How so,” Willow asked, and approached the four large cylinders. Sure enough, the bands running horizontal across their surfaces were so heavily inscribed it was almost impossible to pick out individual functions. Even this far away she could feel a strange pressure in the air, like thick jelly.
“Ah, please don’t get too close,” Daniel blurted. “They’re not— I’m not sure how they’ll react to your…”
“To my what,” Willow turned. Daniel had gone red, and he looked at Steph. She had her gaze locked on Willow, eye to eye.
“We figured it out, eventually,” Steph said. “Professor Brandeweiss didn’t tell us anything, wouldn’t tell us anything, but we figured it out. How we could never get a capacitance reading from you before. Your ridiculously high resistance. Monstrous push force.”
“It should have been obvious,” Daniel said, and Willow sensed embarrassment in his voice. “We should have seen it right from the start. We just weren’t… prepared.”
“Prepared for what,” Willow asked, unsure what they were trying to get at.
“You’re some kind of magical creature, right,” Steph asked, excitement raising her voice to a near-squeak. “Something that looks human. Maybe even half-human?”
“It’s the only explanation,” Daniel said. “The only thing that makes sense. Only magical creatures do the things you do.”
“Uh,” Willow said, taken completely off guard. They thought she was a creature? Or some kind of half-breed? She almost felt offended, but Carl’s prohibition on letting anyone else in on what she could do reasserted itself in her mind. Maybe this wasn’t the worst outcome after all.
“I can’t say much,” Willow said, and looked at the floor with guilt for lying to them in their excitement.
“No, of course not,” Steph said. “Hush hush of course. And we won’t mention you by name in our project. We’ve gotten the equipment by fibbing that we were going to test it on a salamander.”
“Well, we fibbed that for the first tank,” Daniel said. “A manticore for the second.”
“Griffon for the third,” Steph smiled.
“And what for the fourth,” Willow asked.
“An essence shadow,” Daniel said. “We thought that was the closest we could come to describing you. We wanted to make sure our professors thought the idea was sound.”
“Essence shadow? I thought those were just stories. You mean ghosts are real?”
Steph shook her head. “They’re not ghosts, not really. When a powerful enough mage dies, especially in active combat, their spell-forms can become self-sustaining. It’s not really the spirit of the person, it’s just an echo of their power. Like a shadow.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “We’ve got a new process. We think it should be able to clock your capacitance, but we’re not completely sure.”
“I’m up for anything,” Willow said, which elicited grins from both Steph and Daniel.
“Then go ahead and sit down in that chair right there,” Daniel said, motioning to a chair beside the four essence tanks. It was banded with copper strips and there were thick plates where her hands and feet would go. Something was on the floor as well, connected by a thick copper strip to the rest of the chair. It almost looked like a cap.
Willow leaned her cane against the wall and gingerly sat in the chair. The inch-thick copper plates felt warm against her hands, and when she removed her shoes, her feet as well. Daniel busied himself at her arms with a set of leather straps, which he snugged down.
“This is just to ensure you maintain contact with the plates,” he said, though the tightening straps did elicit a spike of claustrophobia. He tightened straps at her legs too, then picked up the thing from the floor.
“And this goes on your head, like so,” he said. Willow saw radial strips of copper on the inside of the cap as he brought it over, then snugged it down over her hair.
Steph had picked up Willow’s cane from against the wall and was weighing it in her hands.
“We got a hold of the report from the caravan you came in with,” she said. “The deathworm attack.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“My moment of glory,” Willow said sardonically.
“It makes sense,” Steph said. “Deathworms only ever attack other magical creatures. It was probably lured to attack the caravan by you.”
“Oh,” Willow said, then looked away. “What’s this all supposed to do,” she asked, nodding against the heavy cap.
“Well, we’ve got a full tank of essence here that we’re going to inject into you to top you up. That’s what the chair is for, to maximize exposed surface area. Then these three are going to act as a countersink to siphon the essence out of your body. It’s actually quite a new effect, just published last year, but when we found the paper we realized its implications. You won’t need to push your essence out, we’ll just extract it.”
“And at the end we just do some simple arithmetic and we’ll get your full capacitance,” Steph said. “Easy.”
Warning bells clanged in Willow’s head, but for what she couldn’t tell. It was essentially a souped-up version of the normal capacitance test, scaled to her level. What could be so dangerous about that?
“Okay, sounds good,” Willow said. Steph and Daniel moved to sit side-by-side behind a small desk which hosted crystal displays wired to the contraption with copper lines.
“We’re ready to start,” Steph said. “This may feel… a bit uncomfortable. I think it would kill a normal person.”
“What,” Willow blurted, then it was as if a horse had kicked her back into the chair. The essence barreled into her hands, feet, and head like a raging river, stopping her breathing and causing her to throw her head back and clench her teeth together. Her body convulsed and her limbs writhed against the straps completely out of her control. She realized then what the danger might be.
Willow grunted, hissing through her teeth at the full force of the essence pouring in. The pure pressure forced itself in through her linbs against her sluggish psychokinetic spells, disrupting them and causing her body to go haywire. Every time her psychokinetic spells were disrupted, another spurt of high-pressure essence would surge through, filling her up. It was as if she were being exhausted and replenished at the very same time.
“Less resistance than we thought,” Daniel muttered to Steph.
“The curve is rising,” Steph said back. “We’re almost topped out.”
“Looks like it,” Daniel said. “Let’s start the drain.”
Willow wanted to shout at them to stop, to wait, but her jaw wouldn’t unclench and her lungs were fluttering. She couldn’t catch her breath. Daniel touched something on his display plate and the sensation from the chair and cap changed instantly.
Where before it had been like a torrent crashing into her, as if she were embedded at the bottom of a waterfall, now it was as if she were at the center of a terrible whirlwind. The sensation of sucking, of vacuum—she’d only ever felt it in her life once before.
The deathworm.
“Holy shit,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “Look at these numbers.”
Willow’s lungs came under control, just for an instant, and she yelped before the bottom seemed to fall out from underneath them. She tried to breathe, but it was as if she had no control of her body at all. She tried to squirm against the restraints, but the only thing that moved was her neck and right hand.
Oh, she thought, and the warning bells suddenly came into focus. If she was drained of essence, she wouldn’t be able to control her body anymore. She’d suffocate, just like she should have as an infant.
Willow tried to move, tried to call out, but nothing happened. The chair was still taking from her, sucking her dry, and she couldn’t get a grip on any of the coursing essence. Her body was completely clear in her mind’s eye, absolutely devoid of psychokinetic spells. Absolutely devoid of resistance.
“Gods, can you believe it,” Daniel said, his eyes wide.
“Keep going, she’s still got more,” Steph said.
Willow had to stop this, somehow. She had to stop this, or she was going to die. She focused on her hands, on her feet, and put all her effort into moving them. Psychokinetic spells flickered to life for an instant in each, but the force of the rushing essence destabilized them instantly.
She couldn’t resist the torrent, she couldn’t resist the terrible sucking vacuum. There had to be another way, she had to find something, or they were going to kill her. And then what? Would Leopold find out? Did anyone besides Bryan and Margaret even know they were together? Who would tell her parents? What was the protocol for disposing of dead magical creatures?
Her body went clear again, but her awareness expanded at the same moment. Not of her body, but of the chair she sat on, of the tanks against the wall beside her. Of the wall itself. It was as if she had become that chair, those tanks, that wall. The snaking copper cords that drained her of every last ounce of power. She could feel her own essence in them, as if from outside her body.
She’d never felt anything like this before.
Willow needed to stop the process before it killed her, and now she was the process, or at least some of its equipment. She moved her cord—not the cord, but her cord. It was inextricably a part of her now—and it slithered along the floor, coming tight against the chair she was strapped to.
“What was that,” Steph asked.
“Eddy current,” Daniel murmured. “None of these cables are rated for this essence throughput.”
Willow snaked the cord again and it strained against the copper plate at her right hand. She felt the weld, was the weld, and peeled the metal apart like it was her own hands stuck fast with sap. The cord snapped and fell to the ground.
“We just lost contact with point two,” Steph shouted and looked up from her display plate toward Willow. Her eyes went to the cord on the ground, hissing with high-pressure essence.
“Shit,” she said.
Willow peeled the second cord off the copper plate to her left, and it dropped similarly to the ground.
“Point three gone,” Steph shouted.
“We’re almost done,” Daniel said. “Almost finished. The curve is flattening.”
Willow could feel it too—she was almost dry. There was barely enough energy left in her body to take a single hitching breath, but she tried nonetheless. That part of her body, the part made of meat, was so much smaller than her now. She was more than she’d ever been.
“We’re approaching zero,” Daniel called out, and Willow disassembled herself. No, not herself, but a part of herself. The chair came apart all at once, the joins and fastenings working out of contact instantly. Her body rose into the air trailing brass plates from her hands and feet and hovered over to the wall.
Toward the tanks of essence.
“Gods, be merciful,” Steph whispered, and in some far off place Willow heard her say it. She was vaguely aware that Steph and Daniel were cowering behind their desk, clutching each other as if afraid for their very lives. Willow moved the flesh part of her body over toward her first tank and laid her copper-plated palms on the contact bundles at the top.
“No,” Steph screamed, and essence flooded back into Willow’s flesh like a raging river. She lost control over the part of herself that was the chair, and the wood began twisting and splintering against the floor behind her. She was vaguely aware of a high-pitched screaming from somewhere in the room.
Dry. She needed more. Her second tank had more for her flesh body, and she slid the body from the top of one tank to the top of another. There was the smell of roasting meat.
A door opened and then she was alone in the room. She sucked greedily from the tank, filling her flesh up with the essence. Her body was clear, thrown over the contacts, and the essence flowed freely into her blood.
The third tank. She was beginning to feel full again, but she needed more. The world around her was swimming, coming in and out of focus as she probed it with the fringes of her awareness. She became walls and floor for an instant, combing their substance with her perception and then retreating back into herself. The essence was all that mattered.
She threw the flesh body across the contact points atop the tank and rejoiced in the feeling of filling up. She was almost full again, but the last tank still held a portion of herself within. She needed it back, though she couldn’t remember why.
Someone ran into the room and began shouting, but it was hard to concentrate on him. He seemed familiar, in that vague way that flesh bodies could sometimes be. Not familiar in the way the wall was, the splinters of chairs were. Not familiar like she knew the tanks to be. They were her body, they were her soul. Everything else… that was nothing.
She opened her flesh body’s mouth and slid it over one of the contact point on the final tank, pushing the body’s hand against the other. The final burst of essence slid through the body, filling it up the rest of the way. Now she was full again, now she was complete.
But the world was turning blurry. There was the smell of roasting meat again, and that man was trying to pull her flesh body off the tank. She let him, releasing control of the charred thing. He could have it if he wanted to. She was so much more than that now.
But her world pulled in again, her sphere of body inched inward and she lost control over the splinters of chair. They clattered to the ground, but she couldn’t hear the sound. Everything was silent and senseless. The man was bending over her flesh body, pushing down onto her chest, breathing into her smoking mouth.
Why did he bother? The flesh body was already dead.
Her awareness reduced to a small sphere, centered over the man’s body pushing mercilessly against the flesh body’s chest. She probed his body, slid the fringes of her consciousness along the fibers of his muscles. He stopped his compressions, shivered, and raised his hands quickly in a spell-form. What was he trying to do?
He said something she couldn’t hear and her feelers were immediately rejected from his skin as if pushed away by a mighty wind. She felt offended, attacked, and bent herself toward coming into contact with him again.
This time, she would take his body by force.
But the sphere of her awareness shrank even further and she was barely the size of an apple. The man was yelling something at the flesh body. She saw tears on his face. The flesh body stared up at the ceiling, senseless.
And then, her awareness snuffed out like a candle.