CHAPTER NINE
The Invisible Circle
II
Wilburn wasn’t paying close attention to Iddo and Alfajean’s discussion; he was busy looking for the colors that weren’t part of the rainbow. His eyes were closed. He could’ve sworn that he was looking with his mind… He couldn’t see doodly-squat. I can’t see a doodly-squat, he thought to Iddo, eventually.
With practice, my boy. Here—Iddo broadcast his own vision of the temple on their private mental channel, even as he continued to speak to Alfajean. Wilburn caught his breath. It was… it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his entire life. A vast sculpture of impossible colors surrounded them in metaphysical space. There were new colors! Wilburn couldn’t believe his mind’s eye. The whole thing was like a sunflower or the center of a daisy, a spiraling fractal-patterned dome knit from a bazillion hair-thin filaments of color. Like lasers, Wilburn would’ve thought, if he’d known what lasers were. And the more he looked the more saw: every detail collapsing into greater and still greater detail upon scrutiny. A feeling of awe rose up within his chest. Did people make this? he wondered.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
People? Certainly. What you really want to know is whether humans made it, and that’s much trickier to answer. If so, it is among the greatest achievements of your species, the work of many generations of magicians who devoted their lives to the project of their ancestors and passed it down unfinished to their descendants.
How can you tell?
The recursiveness of these meta-energy circuits, for one thing. They’re a bit like tree rings. We don’t have time to get into the theory of it now, but whenever you see spell patterns like this, you can be fairly certain you’re dealing with cyclic repetition, one of the the key elements of ritual magic. In this case, I estimate that dozens of different rituals were performed thousands of times over at precisely targeted intervals, determined by… I can’t say exactly, perhaps the cycle of the seasons and the orbits of the celestial spheres. Not, in any case, the sort of task at which mortals typically excel. It would require a continuity of culture unprecedented in the modern age. We’re talking about the combined magical output of a whole society of magicians, over the course of—
But the thought was cut short by Alfajean saying loudly, “What in world are you doing to my trousers, Wilburn?”
“Huh…?” Wilburn took inventory of himself. “Whoops—sorry!” The silky fabric of the angel’s pant leg felt so similar to Toukie’s wing that he’d unconsciously been rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger while thought-speaking with Iddo. As soon as Wilburn realized what he was doing, he jerked his hand away as if a snake had struck at it. He was mightily embarrassed.
**** Read the rest of Chapter Nine - The Invisible Circle now on yaklaughter.com. Just go to yaklaughter.com/sign-up, enter your name and email, and the link to the full chapter will pop up. Love you! ****