Chapter Four: Respite

“Do you ever think that someone used Magyk to create coffee?” Alda looks up from her steaming cup to see the two boys sitting across from her.

“Uh, no?”

“Your opinion doesn’t count.” Alda crinkles her nose at Tulm, who’s currently enjoying a steaming cup of chai. Somehow, he seems to think that coffee is horrid, as they’d discovered at the desk of the coffee shop.

“I’m still not sure how I never knew that before,” Sars throws an almost wounded look at Tulm, “Coffee is sacred.”

Alda chuckles to herself. How long has it been since I’ve been able to just sit with friends and engage in mindless chatter? For that matter, how long has it been since I’ve been able to enjoy a cup of coffee? It’s amazing how each day can seem a week, each week a month, and each month an eternity, when you’re locked away with no hope of salvation.

Not to mention the torture. She shudders a bit. She hadn’t mentioned it anyone yet, but it wasn’t just Magykal “experiments” that he’d done to her, some of his “experiments” had included many, many knives. Not, of course, that anyone could tell... not with Magyk. His partner in crime was a woman about a decade younger who obviously specialized in Life, and possibly something else, but if so Alda had been unable to tell. All she knew was that whenever her wounds had gotten too severe the woman was called in to Mend them, making it as though she’d never been touched. Of course, not even Magyk can Mend the wounds of the mind.

Her thoughts trails off as she realized the boys are staring at her worriedly.

“You okay, there, Alda?”

“Yes, thank you Sars. I was allowing myself to reminisce, is all.” She grimaces internally, something I need to stop doing.

Tulm speaks up, “Is there anything else you want to… Share?”

“No, but thank you.” She stands up, feeling a sudden need to be elsewhere. Anywhere but here, talking to people who think they know me. “I need to go, thank you for the coffee.”

~~\/~/\~~

Sars watches Alda stride out of the shop, then glancing over at Tulm, who appears quite concerned by this turn of events.

“Was it something I said? Something I did?”

“No, Tulm… I think she just needs time.” It’s been two weeks, but what else can we do?

Two weeks ago the three of them had arrived back at the Tower of the Gift, with Alda more silent and stone-faced than they’d seen her before. A few hours later she’d come back out of the Grand Magyker’s chamber and told them to go in. Once inside, they were extensively questioned, then released without comment. A few days later, they’d caught up with Alda in the hallways, where she was obviously avoiding people. A couple minutes later they’d gotten her to agree to coffee with them.

“She’s already had time!”

“I know.” Sars sighs, “But I’m fairly certain we don’t know half of what happened in that keep.” He stands up, “Come on, let’s head back to the Tower, we have class in a few hours.”

~~\/~/\~~

“Dismissed!” The Professor’s voice rang out above the slowly rising chatter of the classroom as the Apprentices packed their things, heads ringing with the various fundamentals of Magyk, rules and strictures about how to use it and how not to use it, and all sorts of other things that the commoner wouldn’t even dream of existing.

“Tulm.” Sars turns to his friend.

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever just want to go out there and explore? Screw the classroom, just explore?”

“Uhhh not really?” Tulm arches an eyebrow.

“Pah, you’re no fun.” Sars sticks his tongue out. “For all they teach us here, we never really learn that much about the world. I mean, sure they’ve taught us the names of the regions and the defining characteristics of each region, landmarks, a few interesting cultural traditions, and so on, but I want to know how it all works.”

Tulm picks up his bag, “Well I want to learn how to get food into my stomach. You coming?”

The Apprentice picks up his bag, “Well I can’t go exploring on an empty stomach, now can I?”

Tulm shakes his head and starts walking, “I hope you aren’t too serious about this. You know what happens to Apprentices who leave the Region without permission.”

“I do, but…” He shakes his head, “I dunno, it’d be fun is all. It’d be interesting.”

~~\/~/\~~

Alda blinks, the room fading in and out of focus. She’d been in the library for far too many hours, desperately looking for anything and everything she could find on the school of Death. Known Magykers, old Magyks and new ones, Magykal experiments, everything. Only thing is, she found people tend to be so repulsed by the very idea of Death Magyk that almost no one will actually reproduce the books and even fewer want them in their libraries. Even in the Tower, headquarters of everything Magykal, the books were few and hard to find.

She rests her forehead on the book in front of her as the words swim in front of her eyes. Somehow, the words start forming shapes, twisting and dancing this way and that, gaining colour and body, growing longer and fatter, melting and swirling into shapes they shouldn’t have. Suddenly, Alda finds herself standing in a field on the edge of a forest. The sun is shining down, beating upon her hair and shoulders, illuminating the verdant grass and casting shadows off the trees. She walks around the clearing, bending down to smell flowers. Something clinks off in the distance and she snaps her head up. A man strides across the waves of grass, brusquely making his way towards her.

His voice carries across the field, booming with power, “Bukh sends his greetings, Alda.”

She growls, instinctively flexing her hand, mindlessly extending her reach with a weightless blade of lightning. Ahead of her, she sees dark power gather around him, and reanimated corpses begin rising out of the ground between them as the grass wilts, blackening and dissolving into the dirt. Almost as a reflex, she Warps Space, Magyking herself to a location a short distance behind him, snapping her weapon out to connect with his back. Instantly, there’s a resounding pop and scorch marks go out from the spot she hit, smaller tendrils of electricity arcing from both her blade and her target to connect with each other and the ground. After a few seconds, she pulls the weapon back, breaking the connection. He drops to the ground, trembling and smoking. She releases the lightning for the moment, allowing it to dissipate as her adversary stands back up. Warily he looks back at her, a new respect in his eyes. A moment later he tenses and releases a black bolt from his fingertips. Predicting his attack, Alda releases another surge of energy and jumps, flying upward in her own bubble of lessened gravity. Glaring up at her, the envoy purses his lips before blowing out a large cone of fire. Right as the fire reaches her, she grimaces and flips her gravity, going from floating to dropping like a boulder. Gritting her teeth, she plummets through the blaze, feeling her fist connect with the man’s jaw. Concentrating, she gathers the energy again and sends tendrils of electricity into his skull. As she stands up, she looks at his prone form a little longer, before glancing off towards the horizon, wondering what else might be in this world. Her attention is drawn back to the man, however, when a tendril of black smoke snakes its way past her face. Looking down, she sees that his body is slowly dissolving, and seemingly condensing. A few moments a small fox bounds away from where the man just was, directly into the forest. She hesitates, then sighs and decides she has to follow it.

Off in the murky depths of the forest, she can see shadows shifting and branches swaying, seemingly beckoning her out of the light. Out of the safety. With a longing look back, she’s moving, somehow already a small way into the undergrowth, pushing branches away from her face. Ahead she can see the twitching of a fox’s tail, and ups her pace, trying to follow it. The tail weaves through the undergrowth, left and right, up and down, but she can never seem to see the rest of the creature. The trees fly by, branches flashing past on both sides. Eventually, she stumbles into a clearing, small trails of blood running down her arms and legs from the briars around it.

Looking around, she realizes that the warm sunlight from before has now been replaced by a cold, ghostly light, piercing down from the moon high above. The ground below her becomes less solid and more muddy, beginning to suck her downward. As the air in the clearing begins swirling, she desperately tries to create a gravity bubble to get out, but realizes she doesn’t know how. As the wind picks up she starts panicking, reaching out, trying to gather the Magyk she’d had before, to make a tool of lightning, but it eludes her as well. She starts to scream, thrashing about as the clearing slowly claims her body. She calls out for help, for anyone. A deep, evil, laugh echoes around the clearing. “No one will help you now, Alda.”

Alda… Alda!... “ALDA!”

“Wha- Huh?”

“Alda, are you okay? You were screaming and thrashing around!.”

She’d been able to do it. She could wield lightning, she Warped Space exactly how she wanted to, she even Manipulated Gravity! She was a fully-fledged Magyker…

“Alda?”

“Sorry, Tulm, I’m tired.” She stands up abruptly, picking her books up and starting to leave. “Thanks for waking me up. Good night.”

Tulm quietly watches her go, worried but wanting to believe her.

They can’t know. I can’t make them go through what I went through.