Once again, Willow wove magic in the thick air between her hands. The idea that she’d be consciously casting spells again so soon after her self-imposed ban was ridiculous, except for the circumstances she found herself in.
“Void,” she intoned, and the sphere of essence between her hands turned black like sackcloth. She added another layer on the spell, and another, spinning each in opposing directions and giving an ultimate destination.
Forward.
The essence surrounding her in the small chamber reacted to her spell; it swirled around and fell into the void core as it made contact. The air was thick with the stuff, almost like a heavy mist, and it glowed like fog in daylight. From what Andrew had told her in one of his little lectures, only an essence concentration of over a hundred em per cubic inch would glow.
So what was she saturated with now? What was she breathing every moment of every day?
Willow completed the spell and stepped back quickly to the opposing wall of her chamber. She was trapped in a five-sided cube, the sixth side made of a translucent gold barrier through which Andrew could inspect her progress. She’d woken in here minutes or hours after he’d given her the command to play dead, and found she was unable to break the collar around her neck.
The spell activated. The two outermost layers rotated at a speed which she couldn’t track with her eyes, and the sphere of void essence twisted with them into a thin stream. It hammered through the twin spinning cases and drilled into the golden barrier.
The entire spell lasted less than ten seconds before the core exhausted. Its spinning encasements dispelled as the pressure between the essence which surrounded it and the void disappeared. She knew it had failed. If it hadn’t, the whole room on the other side of the barrier would have been obliterated.
Slow clapping echoed from the spaced silver plates which made up the walls of her prison, and she peered through the thick essence to see that at some point in the process Andrew had appeared.
“Splendid work. Really, amazing stuff,” he said, his smile wide and eyes bright. She’d come to think of them like wolf’s eyes. She should have known when she met him—when he couldn’t drop that rictus grin—that there was something wrong.
“I’m reading over two thousand em from that latest attempt. You haven’t tired yourself out yet, have you?”
In response Willow roared and spread the two hundred plus limbs of psychokinetic power which surrounded her at all times. She focused on one silver panel in particular, tearing and ripping at the seams of her prison, but the metal wouldn’t budge. Whenever she came in contact with it something nullified her attacks. The golden barrier was the weak spot.
“Someone needs to control their temper,” Andrew lightly chided, and Willow crossed the twenty-foot span of the cell in a flash until she was tearing at the barrier itself. Whoever had cast it had pumped it full of an impossible amount of essence for it to survive everything she’d thrown at it. That, or it was being fed by the same essence source that constantly streamed into her cell.
“That’ll be quite enough,” Andrew said, but Willow wouldn’t obey. She scratched at the collar on her throat, once again overcome with the idea that if she could just get it off, she could break free. With Andrew right there it would be child’s play to tear him apart. She sliced a finger on the metal.
“I said, sit.”
The collar weighed a hundred pounds in an instant, but Willow was prepared for this cheap trick. She reinforced her legs with psychokinesis, adding her essential strength to her growing physical prowess. Her joints popped in protest, but they held.
“Stubborn today,” he said with a frozen smile. “Sit.”
The weight doubled, but she resisted. She straightened until she stood at her full height, eye to eye with the old man. She smiled back.
“Sit,” he said for a third time, and the weight became almost unbearable. She could feel her bones creaking dangerously, and knew that if her psychokinesis slipped for even a moment she would break every bone in her body. Her smile wavered.
“Good girl,” Andrew said, just as she exhausted the last dregs of essence in her body. She fell to a knee and began violently shaking, from fear more than anything. What if he hadn’t called it off at the end. Was she really committed to letting herself be crushed by a smiling psychopath in a laboratory?
She exhaled slowly, all the air in her lungs even as they screamed for more. There was little to do in the cell but attempt to break free and think, and in that thinking she’d devised a method to chart her non-consensual progress. She knew from her mother that an adult’s lungs took in about three hundred and fifty cubic inches of air. Given that the essence saturation in the cell was at least a hundred em per cubic inch, the single breath she took which barely brought her back to full capacity suggested that her capacity might now be somewhere around thirty five thousand em.
That was if Andrew was telling the truth about the em concentration in the air. That was if she was achieving perfect essence intake through her lungs. That was if the idea of thirty five thousand em wasn’t insane to begin with.
“Hmm,” Andrew said, tapping the plate beside her cell. She couldn’t see it, but she assumed there was one because the other cells on this level of the laboratory had one there. They were all empty, though. She supposed he hadn’t been lying before when he said he’d given up creating warbeasts.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“You’re proving to be much more expensive than I thought,” he said, then shook his head. “But no matter, you’ll be well worth it. Although I’m sure you’ll be the death of some of my aether vaults.”
He shook his head then kneeled down to her level, his strange suit bowing out at the chest. “Did you know that at first it wasn’t called essence? They called it aether. I’ve taken up the term, I prefer it, but the ancients thought they’d at long last discovered something they’d long dismissed: luminiferous aether.”
“I don’t care,” Willow breathed. She was exhausted physically, even though it was her psychokinesis that had taken the beating. The nearness of death had taken its toll on her yet again.
“Don’t shirk your lessons,” Andrew said with that rigid smile. “They called it luminiferous because, as I’m sure you’re aware, it glows when gathered in sufficient concentrations. It was years before I was able to see the effect myself. This was back when I was still dean of the Durum Arcanum.”
Willow jerked around to look at him, surprise apparently evident on her face.
“Oh yes. You wouldn’t know it though. I was given the boot, so to say. The trustees and governors found my more enlightened ideas… objectionable. No reason to develop something ourselves if nature would do the trick for us.”
“The warbeasts,” Willow said, finally propping herself into a sitting position. “You were trying to create warbeasts again in violation of the pact.”
“The pact? My dear, we never stopped growing warbeasts, and if you think Raly has either you’re fooling yourself. No, I daresay Durum, shining Durum, probably released a few of their own at the end. How I’d love to have seen it. The battles must have been extraordinary.”
Willow clenched her teeth, trying not to remember everyone she’d left behind. Margaret and Benny. Bryan. Leopold, who was a cold corpse by now. How many waves of warbeast attacks could they have withstood? She knew the answer.
“I… hate you,” she hissed with barely restrained rage. “I hate you.”
“Thus spake the man to his god,” Andrew said.
“You are no god.”
“Oh,” and Andrew laughed. Laughed. “Maybe not to the others, but to you? I’m your god, Willow Tremont. From my hand flew the disease that made you what you are.”
The swirling mist of essence in her cell froze, glowing particles suspended in midair. Andrew looked up at a panel and hummed to himself again.
“What did you say?”
“The Wasting. It’s an invention of my own creation—in fact, the very idea that got me booted from Durum. I came to Asche, climbed the political ladder, and finally gained access to the resources I’d need to complete my research. A disease which attacks the spinal column, rendering its infantile host paralyzed. The victim must gain superhuman magical abilities or die.”
“You made it,” Willow said, not quite believing what she was hearing. “With magic?”
“Magic? No, my dear girl. With science! The ancients have lost more than we could ever know, but within their preserved ruins in Asche I found laboratories and texts which taught me the forgotten art of genomic manipulation. It was easy, once I had the equipment and the samples. Polio… it was a miracle they didn’t destroy themselves sooner.”
Willow scooted away from the transparent barrier. “No,” she whispered, and the particles of essence began to swirl again. She shook her head. “No.”
“Very interesting,” Andrew said to the panel, trail of their conversation seemingly lost. “And good news! It appears you’re coming along right on schedule. I’d hate to see you be unprepared for your big reunion.”
“What,” Willow said, but couldn’t force herself to ask the rest of the question. Everything that came out of this man’s mouth was poison, whether it was true or not. She had to recover from what he’d just revealed, or she’d lose her mind.
“My old colleague Dean Weatherby is on his way here to see you. I daresay the reunion will be one for the ages.”
🜛
A door opened far away and footsteps approached. Willow barely looked up as Annabelle appeared in front of the barrier.
“Willow,” she said, her voice magnified by whatever inscription-work was present in the silver plates which contained her. Willow looked away.
“Willow, please,” she said. She sounded on the verge of tears. “I didn’t know. Please look at me.”
“You brought me to him,” she said. “You knew he was going to do something.”
“I thought he wanted… I thought he would make you some kind of soldier. Not this. Not a…”
Willow looked at her through the barrier. Annabelle seemed better now than she had on the road. She’d clearly had a shower and was being taken care of. Willow, on the other hand, received chunks of cooked meat portaled in from somewhere else which she had to eat with her hands. She hadn’t had a bath in weeks.
“A warbeast,” Willow said. “Tell me, did you know then? When that thing was attacking Durum, what it had been? Did you know it was once a person?”
Annabelle looked away. “I suspected,” she said. “But it’s been so long since I left Asche, and I never knew much about he was doing down here.”
“You knew enough though, didn’t you,” Willow said. “You suspected he’d done it, when you saw me for the first time.”
Annabelle sighed. “Yes,” she said. “That’s when I first put it together.”
Willow scoffed. “Lucky. I wish I’d known enough then to stay far away from you. If I hadn’t let you and Carl work me over…”
But wishes weren’t horses, and she was being forced to grow now beyond her control. How long in this essence womb before she would start to change? How long before she lost her humanity? How long before she lost her mind?
“You were right, though,” Willow said. “He did send that warbeast for me. I just didn’t know then that if I’d have stayed we could have fought them off. Maybe the cannons wouldn’t have done anything, but I could have. And I’d still have the city.”
Willow reached out, threading her fingers through the concentrated essence. “Did you know they’re coming for me? And what will he make me do, I wonder? Kill them?”
Annabelle shook her head. Willow lowered her arm, but the fog still curled and folded in on itself from the psychokinetic limb which stirred it in its place.
“You’re not here to get me out,” Willow said. “So what are you here for? To apologize?”
Annabelle shuffled back.
“Not accepted,” Willow said, and the other woman fled from the laboratory.