How had Ebi gained access? I hadn’t invited her—it followed that she had either brute-forced her way in, a classic ‘superintelligent AI’ trope that may or may not apply here…or the simpler explanation: she had already had access, a perpetual lurker. But in that case—invited by whom? Skychicken himself? He had implied Hina had been his contact, not her. Ebi was still a plausible enough connection between him and Todai—but if so, why was she hiding it?
starstar97: whoa
starstar97: new person
starstar97: who invited them
It wouldn’t do to let on that I really had no idea how she had gotten in—I wanted her to be here anyway, so I rolled with it.
ezzen: Me, they work for Todai.
ebi-furai: greetings!
DendriteSpinner: hey, ez making friends, nice
starstar97: NO WAY
Star was the first to put together the obvious.
starstar97: so they know youre you?
ezzen: Yeah.
ezzen: They seem chill about it so far?
ebi-furai: we’re trying to be
ebi-furai: some of the staff in the know are freaking out
She was using an all-lowercase style like Star and Moth, unlike the technically correct capitalisation and punctuation I generally preferred, a holdover from starting out on the forums.
starstar97: yo youre recognized
starstar97: thats a good thing isnt it
ezzen: Hope so!
ezzen: Not sure I can be more of a target really.
ezzen: Ok, I’d be remiss to not give ebi (capitalization?) the chance to ingratiate themself, but first:
ezzen: I’ve been disconnected from the news cycle for like
ezzen: 18 hours? Probably a personal record.
ezzen: So catch me up.
ezzen: Sapphire told me the Spire is at war again?
starstar97: npnp
starstar97: dermis got all ridgey again this morning so it sure looks like it
starstar97: did you hear about the other flamefalls
starstar97: its related
ezzen: nope
ezzen: Just that they happened. Short version?
DendriteSpinner: spire’s saying they’re the other shards that split from yours on heung’s intercept
starstar97: one inferno in poland. kat dealt with it
starstar97: one confirmed in america, ofc pctf got that one
starstar97: last was weird, went back to the trajectory from before it switched. actual splashdown is on one of the oil rigs in the gulf
ezzen: oh shit
Oh shit.
DendriteSpinner: yeah. and ofc spire caged the whole area, peacies didn’t like that, etc
DendriteSpinner: so stalemate, war
starstar97: dubai moment
ezzen: Dubai moment. ffs
ebi-furai: not as ugly as dubai yet, fwiw
ebi-furai: its firmly pctf territory and its just one flamefall
starstar97: oh yeah for sure. could be more of a clusterfuck in a lot of ways
starstar97: i think that just about covers it
starstar97: nobody has any fucking clue what was with your flamefall
starstar97: west-east? wtf
ezzen: Trust me it’s been on my mind
ezzen: Will post about it tonight probably.
ezzen: Ok, good enough for now, ty guys.
ezzen: Make Ebi feel welcome.
DendriteSpinner: welcome!
DendriteSpinner: do you feel welcome
ebi-furai: i think so!
starstar97: todai person huh
starstar97: fav radiance?
ebi-furai: emerald
starstar97: hell yeah
ebi-furai: i work with her though so im biased
DendriteSpinner: youre an engineer?
ebi-furai: medical, actually, amethyst stuff
ebi-furai: i do help with engineering stuff too though
ezzen: They’ve basically been my nurse.
It was better to be vague about her gender in the chat unless she volunteered that information.
starstar97: 灯台ファイト
ebi-furai: 日本人だから灯台好きなわけだわww
starstar97: whoa
starstar97: sorry my japanese isnt that good
skychicken: english only in the chat please
ebi-furai: sorry
ebi-furai: im japanese, so ofc im a lighthouse fan
starstar97: :DDDD
Her body returned with a tray of various dishes on a cart.
“Did I come off as a bit know-it-all with the Dubai comment?”
It took me a moment to associate the chatroom name with the robot in front of me. On top of the fact that she had joined of her own volition—via still-mysterious means—it did seem that she genuinely wanted to fit in. It warmed my heart.
“Uh, I think you’re fine.” Couldn’t be worse than Dendrite. “If you screw up some etiquette, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.”
She passed the tray over to my lap, adjusting my bed to help me sit up. A decidedly Japanese spread: rice, miso soup, tea, some anonymous fried bits, a small salad, something that seemed to be pickles, and…
“A milkshake?”
“Fortified. The sugar covers up some of the more…chemical flavors. It’s good for you, I promise.”
Huh. It had been a long time since I’d had a milkshake—or any of this, really. Japanese food was a Dalton-thing, not an Ezzen-thing, a relic of a time from when Dad had been al—around.
Those dark thoughts aside, I noted a problem with the provided utensils—rather, the conspicuous lack thereof.
“Um. Can I have a spoon?”
Ebi grinned. With a flourish, she drew something from nowhere, a sleight of hand that was definitely masking some kind of glyph activation, a pocketspace trick like Heung’s spear. She handed me a pair of chopsticks connected by a piece of plastic. The design bore some grooved extrusions to guide where my fingers were supposed to go. I sighed at the utensil; they were assuming I was a dumb foreigner who didn’t know how to use them. They were half-right.
“Oh, I—I know how, but never bothered to relearn with my…”
I indicated my burned hand. Dad had insisted I learn from a young age, but it was another thing that had been taken from me that day. It had taken me about a year to relearn how to hold a pen, and I had never had an incentive or desire to go back to chopsticks. Ebi shrugged.
“I could get you a spoon if you want. Humor us.”
I got the message—they wanted me to acclimate. I sighed inwardly and accepted the utensil, giving it a closer inspection. Even to my limited appreciation of mundane engineering, the chopsticks were impressive, printed as a single part. A compliant mechanism linked the sticks rather than some kind of hinge or bearing, stylized as Todai’s symbol, a triangle with lines radiating out from the tip—a rather unnecessary bit of design flair. The grooves fit my hand perfectly, comfortable as could be given the somewhat limited range of motion in my palm. The attention to detail was ornate, maybe excessive.
“Did Ai make this?”
“Just now.”
Dang. I snapped a photo of the training chopsticks.
ezzen: Check out what Emerald made for me.
starstar97: this is harassment!
skychicken: timezones say it’s lunchtime for you right?
ezzen: Yep.
I showed them the meal and began to eat. Even with the custom, ergonomic utensil, it took me a few tries to pick up one of the mysterious fried bits and maneuver it into my mouth. It was dense, surprisingly hard to bite through.
“I have no idea what this is.”
“Renkon. Lotus root.”
skychicken: hey that looks pretty good for hospital food
I fell into a rhythm as I began to realize how hungry I was. A bite of fried something, a sip of tea, some rice, a little soup, repeat. It was a rather simple arrangement, not many strong flavors other than salt and the oiliness of the breading, but that absence seemed to accentuate each element. The rice became a welcome respite from the saltiness instead of bland carbohydrate filler. The crunch of the breading balanced with the earthiness of the tea. The most intense flavor was the pickles, which had an acidic bite that fully reset the more rich flavors of the fried food. The milkshake felt out of place—I elected to save it for dessert.
ezzen: It’s okay.
I didn’t want to vocalize my commentary. Dad had taught me about this sort of arrangement, the balance of rice and soup and tea, fat and acid, and its return reminded me of his absence. One of the reasons I had hardly left my room in years was fear of this feeling, this awful nostalgia for a childhood that had been burned away, brought to the surface by so many little things. I wanted to go home—where? The house in Philadelphia? Ashes. My apartment? No going back. It was here or the Spire.
The chatroom scrolled on, not privy to the trauma.
starstar97: it should have been me
starstar97: it should have been me!
starstar97: you better go to all the fuckin restaurants
DendriteSpinner: tourism by proxy
I wasn’t particularly keen on that at the moment, given the bad vibes the meal had dredged up for me. I distracted myself with a question; I had stalled enough about this anyway.
“How did you join?”
“Wow, you really screwed that up. It’s pronounced gochisousama deshita.”
“What?”
“‘Thanks for the food’.”
I sighed. “Thanks for the food. How did you join the chatroom? I didn’t invite you.”
“Secret robot magic.”
I slurped my soup, unimpressed with the non-answer. “Is that magic magic, or do you mean you just hacked your way in?”
“Does it matter?”
“I…suppose not? Academic interest?”
“Not relevant to your recovery, and details about me are classified until you join up.”
Prickly.
ezzen: I’ll think about it.
ezzen: There’s a lot of uhhhh…culture shock going on right now.
ezzen: It’s sort of crazy I’m here, you know? I don’t even speak the language.
“You’ll learn if you stay. The Radiances are too busy to really teach you that part, but we keep in touch with a few schools. Lots of grad students and so on.”
I thought about Sapphire’s offer again, the words both she and Sky had used. I mattered, allegedly, and that meant Todai was willing to throw support at me. Divorced from the fear of being hunted, that was exciting—if undercut somewhat by my general bedridden-ness at the moment and the questionable status of my freedom. I sipped the milkshake. It was topped with a cherry and had swirls in it that tasted fruity, though I couldn’t quite place it. Melon?
“Ai said two weeks for my foot, right?”
Ai’s name and the pronoun ‘I’ were starting to get confusing. How did the honorifics work? Ai-san?
“Two weeks of design, and then probably another week of testing and iteration with your input. But she’s been working on a stopgap solution since midnight. That’ll be done in…a few more hours.”
I checked my phone. It was only about 1 PM, but that still meant—yeah, she didn’t get much sleep. Ebi caught the silent question.
“They’ve all got their vices.”
Another person might not call sleep deprivation a “vice”, but I understood—the passion, losing yourself in tinkering and math until suddenly you realized the sun was starting to come up and you hadn’t eaten in fourteen hours. There were worse vices to have; Ai and I were the same kind of person, and I’d be glad to see her actual design process.
“I’d love to see the diagram.”
“For the temporary one?”
“Yeah.”
“She’ll show you.”
We lapsed back into silence for a while as I finished the milkshake. I wanted to get back on my feet, move around a bit.
“Will I actually be allowed to leave the premises? Once I can walk.”
“Are you going to bolt straight for the Gate?”
I didn’t know. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? You’d catch me anyway.”
She rolled her eyes, a rather exaggerated motion on the digital display that was her face. “Please. The foot is a show of good faith. If you really wanted to go, we wouldn’t stop you.”
So was I a prisoner or not? I was picking up on some misalignment between Hina and the others, in terms of goals—but I wasn’t about to ask that to her face again. I decided to trust in Ai, for the time being, and pray that Sapphire didn’t show up again.
I finished my shake, quietly admiring Ebi as a work of engineering and magic in between watching the chatroom scroll and generally catching up. She was ostensibly naked, for one, covered only in mint-green paneling—carbon fiber? Hard to say—ensheathing a narrow and short frame. Aside from the face, her build was androgynous. She was no busty anime nurse, no curve to her chest or particular wideness of the hips—I averted my gaze nonetheless, reddening. She might not have any visible bits, but surely that qualified as ogling.
She sighed. “Oh, look all you want. I’d wear clothes if I cared.”
I shyly resumed my inspection. The paneling was segmented at joints and along the torso, a fairly standard arrangement of components for the humanoid robots of the day—but she didn’t move like a robot, even a magical one. I wondered again how she was made—but that was clearly a no-go topic, and I was entirely too shy to make a comment, even a neutral one. I settled for looking up one of the Japanese-made models that at least superficially resembled her chassis, angling my phone toward her.
“You’re so much more—fluid than anything I’ve seen before.”
“Thanks.”
She brought up her arm to demonstrate the range of motion. The paneling on her chest moved in an echo of her arm, implying a much more complex and organic arrangement than a simple set of servos embedded in her shoulder joint. There was something odd in the movement aside from that—she wasn’t adjusting the rest of her body to counterbalance, even with the arm fully extended. That weightlessness inspired fascination—and a pang of jealousy, a reminder of what had drawn me to the Vaetna outside of pure love for magic. If I pointed a ripple indicator at her, I bet she’d be a blue-green to match her carapace.
Eventually, I worked up the courage to ask to go further, despite some discomfort with the intimacy of the inspection. She was just so interesting.
“Can—may I see your back?”
I had gotten a glimpse earlier, but as she turned around—that was much more sophisticated. Some of her panels were layered over each other, and she had what were obviously shoulder blades. Her spine was visible as well, a chain of segments embedded into each slice of her midsection and back, a clear imitation of the human form. Now that she was facing away from me, my eyes dared to venture past her neck and inspect her head. It was simple and boxy, dark-grey and smaller than a human cranium, although the neck continued the complexity and flexibility of her spine. No ears or hair to speak of; the only real features aside from the curved front-panel of her face were various stickers and labels indicating cable connection points—and a mark on the back of her head that looked hand-painted. I leaned in for a closer look—she knew what I was looking at and took a few steps backward toward me.
“The characters for my name.”
海老. It was pretty, insofar as I had opinions on these things. I pulled out my phone to google ‘ebi’, confirming the word matched the characters.
“Shrimp?”
“Yep.”
“…Why?”
“Why ‘Ezzen’?”
I figured she knew why; I’d answered the question on the forums countless times. This was the first time I had done so out loud, though, and it took me a moment to order my thoughts.
“It’s the spinal—a super-shorthand of the spinal mesh for {MANIFEST}. E—fork, two Z-axis transitions, fork again, and N is sub-1 from the last Z.”
“Vaetna-phile.”
I didn’t blink at the label; it was accurate. {MANIFEST} was arguably the most important glyph in the entire lexicon to the Vaetna, being the fundamental bit of magic behind the Spire’s dermis and, by extension, their carapace. I supposed it applied to the Radiances just as much, although they had come later and were inherently lesser.
“And you?”
She pointed at the kanji on her cranium—CPU?—again before turning back to me. “That’s your hint.”
Hint? I went back to my phone, going down a small rabbit hole of kanji details for a minute. I didn’t get it—the characters meant ‘sea’ and ‘old’, and I wasn’t sure how either was relevant to her.
“Are the riddles really necessary?”
“It’s a hint, not a riddle.”
“We already established I don’t speak the language.”
She waved a hand lazily. “Eh. You’ll get it eventually.” With that vague foreshadowing, she came over and took the tray of food from my lap. “Going to put these away, and then I’ll be gone for a couple hours. Need anything before I go? Pain okay?”
“Foot’s fine…is it just you up here? Other nurses?”
“What, want to get rid of me already?”
“Er—no, I just meant—”
“Well, it is. Just me, I mean. I’m the doctor.”
I blinked. “You are?”
“I am.”
She hadn’t corrected my earlier misconception that she was my nurse. Maybe she didn’t want to give too much away to the chatroom—which might have been telling, were I inclined to tease apart the possible reasons for those subtleties. I had enough on my plate as it was.
“And you…take care of Amethyst? No support staff?”
That bothered me a bit, since what I knew of Amethyst’s injuries were quite a bit more extensive than even the third-degree burns my hand had suffered. For the duration of my last extended hospital stay, I had had no less than four nurses on rotation in addition to a pair of doctors, and I would have expected something equivalent and relatively full-time care for her. Then again, Ebi probably didn’t have to sleep.
“Well, it’s me and Ai’s tech. Been good enough so far.”
I didn’t pry further than that. I looked around the bed, checking to see if there was anything else I wanted or needed for the moment. “Er—I don’t suppose you’ve got my backpack?”
If it had been in the car with me, Sapphire had hopefully recovered it along with my person.
“Oh, we do, actually. It’s upstairs—what do you need?”
“Just my laptop. Maybe my notebooks, too—”
Oh, shit. I broke out in a sweat. They had almost certainly looked through my notebooks, and that was the exact kind of nightmare scenario behind putting a full-wipe protocol on my PC; there was some potentially sensitive and dangerous stuff in those that had gone unpublished. She saw my reaction both visually and in my vitals, shaking her head.
“We’re being respectful of your privacy, relax. Give me a few minutes.”
She left to get my bag, clicky footsteps reminiscent of high heels retreating down the hall. What a fascinating machine—and person, I supposed. At least she had an excuse for being mysterious—but I really ought to learn more about the Radiances themselves. I had a somewhat-embarrassing gap in my knowledge when it came to them and other second-tier VNT groups; until now, my focus had been almost exclusively on the Vaetna. I pulled out my phone.
My first stop was Wikipedia, for a brief history of the organization as a whole. They had an underground period before the donation of flame four years ago in 2018 that had propelled them to their current status; the building I was currently in was directly linked to that sequence of events, having been wrecked in their last major incident from that time. Amethyst and Heliotrope had joined the original three during that too. It was all rather interconnected, and after skimming their page for the broad timeline, I started to go through their individual pages, following links down the rabbit hole.
—
I was interrupted by Ebi’s return—half an hour later.
“Sorry. Amethyst had a thing.”
Well, I wasn’t going to hold that against her. She deposited the backpack on my bed and extracted the laptop, handing it to me gingerly. Shifting around to accept it and orient it on my lap aggravated my foot somewhat, and I winced.
“Ow. Painkillers up, please?”
For all my habitual shyness and being out of practice with talking to people in general, that at least was a familiar refrain from seven years ago. Ebi didn’t visibly do anything, but after a moment, sweet relief washed away the sting. A factoid I had discovered during my research sprang to mind.
“That’s probably something anchored on {NULL}, isn’t it. No opioids in Japan.”
“You catch on quick.”
I mulled that over. The glyph was stopping all sensation from about halfway down my shin; it would be even harder to walk with the prosthetic while it was active, as though I had lost my entire foot rather than just the toes. Poor Amethyst—although surely her prosthetics had much more nuanced senses and analgomancy.
“Thank you.”
“It’s what I’m for. Anything else?”
“I’m good—oh. What’s the wifi password?”
I should have asked sooner—my phone plan was probably charging an unholy amount for what I had already done on it today. It had slipped my mind until I had needed it for the laptop, since I was so unused to being out of the house.
“On Todai-Guest? ‘5ignition’, all lowercase, with the numeral.”
“Thanks. Er…that’s all, I think.”
She nodded. “Going back to Amethyst. Press the button if you need me—or message me, I suppose.”
“She alright?”
That was the sort of prying I had tried to avoid earlier—it had just slipped out. Ebi didn’t seem to mind, though. She actually grinned.
“As much as she ever is. She just wants to clean up a bit before meeting you.”
That was—flattering and unfamiliar. I was vaguely upset at the way it made me blush.
“Really?”
“She’s a big fan of yours, actually. Alright, back in…let’s say two hours.”
And she left me to chew on that. It made a fair amount of sense that I, an LM expert—albeit a theoretical one—would have a fan in the most prominent non-Vaetna LM user in the world. But I would have figured that she, as a flamebearer, would have been ahead of me on that; I only considered myself a hobbyist, someone interested in glyphcraft as an academic exercise and as a proxy for my interest in the Spire and the Vaetna. Perhaps I had misjudged that.
I greeted my friends again from my laptop and resumed my research. I was about ten minutes into an hour-long video of Todai’s overall timeline—at 2x speed, of course—when I thought I found a lead on one of the things that had been bugging me. I reached out to Star.
[Direct Message] ezzen: Hey
ezzen: So I’m watching https://youtu.be/S_XJYBx9WcL
ezzen: And something about Keisuke Akiyama is sticking out to me.
starstar97: hey i helped on that one
starstar97: shoot
ezzen: Uh. Can you keep a secret?
starstar97: ooh
starstar97: is the secret about you or lighthouse
ezzen: Lighthouse. And it’s a bit sensitive, apparently.
starstar97: i wont spill but i cant promise i wont have severe brainworms
Such was Star when it came to Todai.
ezzen: Okay so
ezzen: Sapphire told me Lighthouse used to have male members
starstar97: WHAT
starstar97: saj;lskdjfskl;da
starstar97: trans radiances… the theory lives… vindication…
starstar97: is what id LIKE to say, but say your bit first
ezzen: Yeah that’s where I’m going with it.
ezzen: Let me lay it out.
ezzen: So, from the video: Keisuke Akiyama gets flametouched. He gets in contact with Mr. Tanaka, and agrees to donate his flame to a good cause. The Lighthouse girls basically fall into their lap after they’ve recovered Amethyst and are an obvious choice to build a VNT group around. This leads to Todai’s official founding. Is that right so far?
starstar97: just about
starstar97: are you going to say akiyama is one of the radiances pre-transition
ezzen: My thunder, stolen!
ezzen: It’s just really convenient, isn’t it?
starstar97: 😛
starstar97: not a new theory
starstar97: but the consensus is that its probably a pseudonym for an actual person, not a deadname for one of them
starstar97: because if hes one of the five then where did the extra flame come from yknow
starstar97: and theres the magical complication
What she meant was that precise body modification magic was a bit of a white whale. Biomancy was a fledgeling field of magic compared to spatial or energy manipulation, because the Vaetna hadn’t seen fit to create many specifically applicable glyphs. They had always declined to comment on their rationale, but it was easy to see how extensive biological modification would be a difficult cat to put back in the bag, a slippery slope to eugenics in a world where the majority of magical access was already under the thumb of politicians and billionaires. Involuntary transformations did happen to some flamebearers, but those weren’t glyph magic; a complete roll of the dice when it came to ripple residuals, along the lines of super magic cancer or turning you into a crab or other such strange and incomprehensible tricks of the Flame. Not exactly gender-affirming care for most people.
That didn’t discourage me and several others from regularly returning to the problem, motivated by both the challenge and the feeling that if we figured something out, our findings could have some truly positive direct impact on people’s lives—not least for Star herself. But at this point, the problem was pretty much entirely academic; we had collectively concluded that changing one’s biological sex with magic to a degree superior to hormones and surgery was functionally impossible. We just didn’t have the right toolbox of glyphs.
The point was that Star and I both understood that it was extremely unlikely that Lighthouse had cracked that puzzle four years ago. If they had, surely they would have disseminated the glyph chains and procedures used. That was just the decent thing to do.
ezzen: Figured as much.
ezzen: So no trans Radiances :\
starstar97: well thats such a compelling nugget i dont want to just kill the theory
starstar97: can i ask what saph’s exact words were
ezzen: Uh
ezzen: I guess it was a bit roundabout?
ezzen: “You wouldn’t be the first [male Radiance]”, iirc
starstar97: yeah huh not a lot of ambiguity on that
starstar97: damn thats going to be my personal fuckin chew toy for a while
starstar97: i wish to gods they were trans but its totally just wishful thinking right
starstar97: bone structure n shit -.-
I agreed; Hina’s physique ruled her out. Opal and Heliotrope, too, if I was correctly remembering the pictures I had looked up earlier. The remaining two were maybe plausible—it felt wrong to theorize, both in the sense of imagining them naked and in that it was too personal now that I was coming face-to-face with them.
ezzen: Mhm
ezzen: So, other ideas?
starstar97: mm putting aside the trans thing for now
starstar97: i have two ideas
starstar97: first, its possible akiyama was originally going to just be part of the team and it didnt pan out
starstar97: dude did basically vanish after the donation (which supports the pseudonym thing)
ezzen: (notes)
ezzen: I could poke around about that.
starstar97: second: in december 2019 there were rumors that they were thinking about starting a second team, all male
starstar97: but that never went anywhere, partially because of concerns about popularity (classic idol group stuff)
I had just gotten to that part of the video, still playing picture-in-picture while we chatted.
ezzen: and because of blue spark right
starstar97: yeah it woulda killed the project in its infancy, if there was one, because of how todai messed up there
starstar97: imo it wasnt their fault
starstar97: but they need actual permits and stuff with the japanese government to be licensed flamebearers and there was no chance in hell that theyd actually get a whole new team in wake of that
starstar97: so yeah those are my ideas
starstar97: thats such a WEIRD thing for her to say
starstar97: sorta insensitive of her to say it that way if one of them IS trans though yknow
ezzen: I had the same thought.
She did seem to just be direct by nature.
starstar97: but ill dig a bit cause damn thats such ammo for the theory
starstar97: btw theres been a couple threads recently about what happened with you, you should take a look at those and maybe shoot down the really stupid stuff
We derailed into talking about those for a while, and unfortunately I never quite returned to fact-digging and timeline-checking after that. I wound up just watching Vaetna videos and chatting with my friends. I jumped when I realized Ebi was sort of looming behind my laptop screen.
“How—Jesus. How long have you been there?”
“Only about a minute.”
I needed a moment to catch my breath. Damn, I had wasted—almost two hours. It hadn’t been entirely fruitless, but ADHD had largely gotten the better of me once I had mentally categorized researching Todai as ‘work’. Nothing for it.
“Foot’s ready?”
“Yep. She actually already had it done, just obsessively tweaking it.” She harrumphed. “No point in that, really. She’s not going to be happy with it either way.”
That sounded familiar; I remembered countless hours drawing glyphs to solve logic puzzles and repeatedly finding better ways to optimize, sometimes until I had well undercut the ripple of the intended solution. Often I still ended the night—or morning, as was often the case—frustrated that I couldn’t find ways to push it further. Kindred spirits, although she was actually working in a lab instead of notation. Would she let me join her on those late-night projects, eventually? That sort of thing was a compelling reason to stay here, everything else notwithstanding. Like the karaoke fantasy from before, my imagination spun the image of the two of us bathed in monitor light, arguing about ripple management and the least-order principle over a GWalk diagram, applying our knowledge to real problems. We’d work into the night and we’d be aglow with pride in our work despite our exhaustion and at last I wouldn’t be alone—
I sighed. What an embarrassing tangent.
“Let’s—let’s go.”
To her credit, if Ebi saw what had just happened to my heart rate, she didn’t comment on it this time. She wheeled me out of the room and through the halls once more. First the emptiness of the 18th floor—I was glad to reach the elevator and return to the more populated halls of the basement, busier than before with the comings and goings of Ai’s underlings and other staff. I was recognized by an American, maybe a couple years my elder.
“Hey, you’re—uh, Dalton.”
That was delivered with a poorly executed wink. It seemed that my identity as Ezzen was a secret-in-name-only among Ai’s crew—but at least they didn’t seem to know I was that flametouched from Bristol, yet. They’d probably be treating me differently.
“Um. Yeah. Hello.”
In-person celebrity was not at all something I was experienced in, and it was horribly awkward. Ebi wasn’t about to bail me out, either, having adopted her android-persona, blandly smiling at the technician. It was deeply uncomfortable, maybe even creepy, to see her so docile and straight-backed, even after only a few hours of knowing her. She looked like she belonged in a maid uniform. I tried to treat the interaction as a warm-up for meeting Amethyst later.
“I’m on one of the teams working on your foot.” He stuck out a hand—glanced at the burns on my arm, thought better of it, switched hands. “Kyle.”
I shook it. “Thanks. For the foot. Anything interesting?”
Should I have introduced myself? He already knew it. Too late, either way.
“Not yet. Only so much you can do with half of a foot, y’know? We were sort of hoping you had ideas, actually.”
I had given it essentially zero thought, but I felt lame with nothing to offer—it was my foot, for Christ’s sake. I said the first thing that came to mind.
“Um—a booster?”
He stroked his stubble.
“What, like Peacie exos?”
“I guess?” I had actually been thinking of Heung’s carapace, but it was easier to just let him think whatever.
“Ah, gotcha.”
The technician—oh no, I had already forgotten his name—typed something into his phone.
“Tricky with one foot, but…we’ll see what we can do.” Then he looked around and lowered his voice. “Got a minute? The rest of the team would love to meet with you.”
“Mr. Colliot is being taken to the Prostheses Fitting Room for a meeting with Radiance Emerald.”
“Oh, fair, fair. I won’t keep you, then. Tell Ms. Matsumoto I said hi! See you around.”
He hurried past us down the hall. My phone buzzed.
[Direct Message] ebi-furai: (≧▽≦)
ebi-furai: a BOOSTER
I looked up at her. Her face remained impassive. Mine did not, invaded by a blush as I grumbled.
“I know, I know, IknowIknowIknow…”
ebi-furai: its fine
ebi-furai: you can talk over features with ai if you want
ebi-furai: but if you dont have ideas dont sweat it
As we proceeded down the corridor, an announcement came on the PA. A voice that was unmistakably Hina’s blared through the halls, husky and peppy, ending on a laugh that abruptly cut off. Ebi’s stride accelerated.
“Do I want to know?”
ebi-furai: its what it sounded like. shes on the prowl
Might as well reply in kind.
ezzen: For…me?
ebi-furai: afraid so
Oh, fantastic. I was being hunted. What had happened to Todai being safe? A new voice came on the PA, more apologetic.
ebi-furai: thats opal: ‘Terribly sorry for the ruckus, please forgive any inconvenience’
ebi-furai: shes going to take out some frustration on sapphire, if i had to guess
ezzen: Why?
ebi-furai: shes not very happy about the first impression sapphire made on you
That was—sort of a relief, actually. Hina had sort of primed me to expect nastiness from the remaining three Radiances, for all Ai seemed much more my speed. My—depressingly limited—research had somewhat restored my confidence in them, but it was nice to have some firsthand demonstration of their character.
ezzen: And they’re FIGHTING?
ebi-furai: its more like…tag
ebi-furai: theyre just roughhousing. you know the vaetna do this too
“The Vaetna keep it in the upper Spire.” I didn’t much fancy being caught in the crossfire.
This hallway was empty now, so she spoke out loud. “It’s also an exercise in minimizing collateral damage. You’re not in danger, just a convenient target for her.”
“Why’s she so…after me?” I resisted the urge to say ‘into me’; that was wishful thinking for sure.
“Beats me. Sorry for leaving you with her. Didn’t have much choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“She kicked me out.”
“Out of the room?”
Ebi waggled her virtual eyebrows, which I took to be a no. That meant—
“Out of…3-space? Are you 4-brane all the way through? I saw your hands, but—”
She’d have been chewed up like one of us three-dimensional meat-beings if she wasn’t built for that. Of course, all the Radiances were able to shunt their bodies out of 3-space when they transformed, but exactly how remained a secret known only to them. Part of me wanted to join just so they’d show me how—my animal fear of Hina put a stop to that.
“I am, but not all of it is modular.”
That was fascinating to me. I wondered again what she would look like in the eyes of a Vaetna, who could perceive her full form at once. Some kind of Vitruvian arrangement of all her configurations?
“And that’s all Ai’s weave?”
“Sure is.” Oddly, she didn’t sound very pleased about that, almost sighing in her synthetic voice.
I itched to pursue the topic further, but I knew I wouldn’t get a straight answer about how exactly she had been made or how that related to Ai’s broader philosophy on her flame. I had gotten some clarity from my research about how exactly Ai had wound up with her specialty in robotics and prosthetics, but the organization had seemingly remained quite tight-lipped about the details of their magic, and of course Ebi seemed to not exist at all in the public eye. I put it aside for now, thinking over my conversation with Star, potential secrets.
“What did Hina mean that there were male Radiances?”
“Did—she said that?” There was genuine surprise in the robot’s voice.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
Her poker face was impeccable.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Um—huh.”
I hadn’t been expecting that. Of course, she could just be lying to me, which did sort of seem like something she’d do if any of the theories held water—but she had sounded truly surprised.
“Well, she did. I’m trying to figure out what she meant.”
“It might have been before my time. I don’t have perfect access to records, you know.”
“You’re their doctor.”
At least that was soft-confirmation that she had been made post-founding, not that that came as much of a surprise.
“A lot of the stuff around the founding is classified, even to me. You know how idol groups take protecting their members fairly seriously?”
“I don’t, really, but go on.”
“It’s that, multiplied by the fact that Lighthouse is paramilitary. Infosec against VNT groups is hard with the ripple in play, so their time underground before the official founding is pretty locked down, although of course there’s only so much that can be done. It’s digital and magical—I know of at least two spots in the database where they tell you in big bold letters that ‘UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO THIS DOCUMENT WILL TRIGGER:’ and then a long list of stuff that scrambles the hell out of your device and your brain.”
Yikes.
“So…anything about hypothetical male members would be behind that same level of security.”
Especially if something had gone wrong.
“Mhm. Above both of our paygrades. It’d be easier to ask Ai directly.”
Good timing; we had arrived once again at the doorway to Ai’s workshop. Actually, we were across the hall. She met us at the door, giving Ebi another big hug, speaking to me with her face smushed against the carbon fiber plates. The robot hugged her back.
“I have something for you to try.”
No greeting, again. “Lead the way.”
This was a custom medical bay, one I recognized from a few videos. There was some fairly standard medical equipment scattered around, scanners and an IV unit and such—and some things that were more obviously custom-designed for Amethyst’s physical condition. Most prominently, from the ceiling hung a number of tentacular soft-robotics appendages, to help maneuver her into place inside the intricate circle of glyphs on the floor below it. This was one of the few places in the facility she couldn’t mantle without disrupting the existing glyphs and weave.
“This is where Amethyst gets her prosthetics fitted, right?”
In hindsight, if the 18th floor was ostensibly the medical zone, it was odd that this particular room was down here. Maybe proximity to Ai’s workshop was valuable.
“Yes. Into the field, please, Ebi-tan.”
Oh no, tentacles?
Ebi just pushed my bed into the circle, the air within glowing a faint green. My at-a-glance reading and context told me that this was a mix of more specialized analgesics—analgomancy, technically—and some corrective forces to help the subject balance. She didn’t enter it herself, though—she actually used a long stick to get me partway in before some motive glyphs kicked in to guide me the rest of the way. I guessed that, like Amethyst, somehow the circle would disrupt her weave or vice-versa. I wondered if a Vaetna would just shred the circle by entering. It didn’t occur to me until much later to wonder why my or Ai’s tattoo bindings weren’t an issue.
“It’ll take a moment to kick in. Sorry.” Ebi didn’t sound very apologetic—
Pain, blinding. I made a choking, moaning sound, my head retreating into my hunched shoulders. There was no sensation but the pain slamming upward from the stump at the end of my leg. I instinctively began to curl up—
Then blessed, total relief. As basic cognition returned, I understood that that had been the momentary switchover from the bed’s local, imprecise painkiller glyphs to the circle’s more calibrated ones. My foot didn’t hurt—thank fuck, that had been horrible—but the overall numbness had gone. I was really not looking forward to later stages of physical therapy where we’d forego the analgomancy.
“Fuck you, Ebi,” I coughed. She chuckled.
Ai’s voice was more genuinely sorry. “It hurts more if you’re braced for it.”
I nodded, still somewhat trying to recover my breath. From my supine position, I hadn’t seen the temporary prosthetic on the desk. Ai collected it and brought it over to me, face twitching incrementally as she stepped into the circle. Her ponytail had come a bit loose, I noticed, stray hairs lending her an even more harried and exhausted appearance further at odds with how she looked during photo ops. How comprehensive was her makeup routine to hide the bags under her eyes? Not that I had any frame of reference for that stuff.
I inspected the prosthetic. Printed resin, seemingly, in simple dark-grey, the same color as Ebi’s chassis. It had a few moving parts, but nothing obviously motorized. The toes came in two segments—the big toe and a single block representing the other four. She flipped it over, and I saw that the sole and pads of the toes had a strange foam—oh. That was the same resin, a section of each part printed at lower density for padding. I didn’t have much appreciation for non-magical engineering, but even I had to admit that was a nice trick. Little things like that were why she was considered one of the world’s experts in cutting-edge magical prosthesis design, a result of her time helping Amethyst.
“Since I hear my teammate is being…herself, I want to make this quick. The prosthetic attaches with {AFFIX}, no physical socket or suspension. Your blood price being such a clean cut made that easy. My weave, of course—the final version will need that to be yours, although now that I’ve browsed your file I don’t think that will be a problem. The final version will have some socketing for a seal so nothing gets in, and some more liner at the connection point or a more complex connection spell to make it more comfortable. Small-scale analgesoid glyph that should stop most of the pain without killing your sensation, more or less how the circle is making it feel now.”
“What’s the analgesoid?”
“{AFFIX}-{DEFLECT} sub 2.”
“Sub 2” was a diagramming shorthand describing a second-order—that was, three-dimensional—glyph being offset down on the Z-axis from its anchor. I nodded, picturing the diagram in my head, although I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the lattices proper without the glyphs in front of me to reference.
“Pink link?”
The link of the chain wasn’t literally pink; the color-coding was shorthand for different channels of ripple, a standard established by the Spire’s lattice displays. She nodded.
“You really are the Ezzen. Some of my students would have said blue.”
I blushed and avoided her eyes.
“What else…the resin is lightweight, but I’ve added a few nodules of osmoid LM to get the mass and weight distribution equal to your other foot. Not perfect, but…well. The toes have torsion springs to assist your step…that’s about it. No sensation or direct control of the toes, so your gait will be a little shaky.”
She obviously knew her stuff. She bent over my foot, using some precise cuts of magic to remove the gauze from my amputation, and inspected the site momentarily. She seemed satisfied and reached over to some cabinet inside the bedframe to extract a surprisingly mundane antiseptic spray bottle and cloth.
“Looks alright. Cleaning now. This will tickle, I apologize.”
“Why regular cleaning? Didn’t you just use magic to take off the gauze?”
“Why do you think?”
Excitement—this was going to become a lesson. “Um—I think you used {SEVER} on the gauze?”
Obviously, she hadn’t scribed the literal glyph that represented {SEVER}; rather, she had simply cast the first-order spell so fluently she hadn’t even needed to gather a real spool. But she had said she wasn’t as good at snapweaving—oh. I looked over at the circle and found the glyph in the perimeter. She nodded in the corner of my eye. I went on, trying to keep my voice level. It did tickle a bit.
“By contrast, the chain you’d need to clean the wound is, uh, {DIFFERENTIATE}-{ASH}? I think? To tell apart the pus and the scar tissue.”
The sequence there mattered—scribed as glyphs, the first spell was the anchor and the second extended from it. There were complicated rules about which glyphs could connect to which depending on which was the anchor, as well as what order—that was, dimensionality—the glyph was, and so on.
She nodded approvingly as she carefully scrubbed at my wound. The magitech had already pushed the healing process maybe a week ahead of where it’d be naturally, although it was nowhere near fully healed. It oozed pus, and I was grateful again that I couldn’t feel what was going on down there beyond some faint pressure. Burns healed ugly.
“Good. So why didn’t I do that?”
“Risk assessment. Already too high on the complexity curve given that severing more of my foot would be, uh, bad. Obviously.”
She grinned, and for a moment, I understood why they were called Radiances. It practically lit up the room. Hina’s smile was impish at best or predatory at worst, paralytic in its promise—Ai’s was a lantern, someone worthy of standing with the Vaetna, of wielding the Frozen Flame for the betterment of the world. It scoured away her exhaustion, and beneath it, her passion for magic called to me, imploring me to join her, to follow whatever path she had found. She was pretty, which was also part of it, but the feeling inside me wasn’t carnal attraction. I was a moth faced with a flame that promised to illuminate the world.
Ebi made a decidedly mechanical clicking noise. I looked at her, the spell broken.
“Did you just take a photo?”
“You can prove nothing.”
I gawked at the robot. In my peripheral vision, Ai rolled her eyes.
“Four out of five—minus one for having the wrong second spell on the chain. Noun exclusion. Give me a first-order that would work and how you’d mitigate the risk.”
I shook myself a bit, returning to the practical problem, an eager student for once. {SEVER}? No, it’d Zeno. {SEVER} cut in flat planes; chained off of {DIFFERENTIATE}, it would continuously cut along the rough geometry of my partially healed injury more and more precisely, but would never actually reach the end of the operation within a finite time. Akin to Zeno’s Paradox, thus the rule. I kept thinking. I was embarrassing myself a bit, here. I was more comfortable with LM projection lattices, like Spire dermis or Radiance mantles, than stuff that interfaced directly with organics—oh. Thinking about it from that angle—
“{OFFSET}.”
She blinked. “Defend your reasoning.”
“Green link would loop the ripple away from degradation. It’d pigeonhole into a clean pop.”
Ebi broke in. “Would you bet your foot on that?”
I shrugged. “I’m right. Run it in GWalk.”
Ai nodded. “It works, although that’s a fairly static approach. Hard to snapweave through green. I would use {EXTRACT}.”
Oh. That made sense. I had been thinking too spatially—simply extracting the pus was an approach that avoided the spatial complexities of working around organic matter. That was a good example of how, with the tools available, biomancy was more about doing as little actual biomancy as possible.
Ai affixed the prosthetic to the flat plane of my injury. I actually felt the lattice sort of “stitch” it to my foot. It was neither painful nor itchy, some other sensation that came from magic which my basic senses didn’t really have an equivalent for, more like a twisting, kneading force. She offered me her hand to help me sit up on the bed, and pulled me upright with a momentary display of that VNT effortlessness, bringing in her other arm to steady me.
“Time for you to try to stand. Let me just—”
I felt it as she engaged some of the spatial and motive components. The active parts of the spell circle were now a dizzyingly complex weave in my burgeoning magical senses, the flame inside me roiling and twitching as it investigated the delicate weave surrounding us; I had to shut it out to focus on the act of balance as she helped me off the bed. She helped me balance on my good foot with both magic and her arms as I gingerly lowered my stump. Despite my conscious knowledge of the analgomancy blocking my pain, some primal part of me was tense as the prosthetic’s toes made contact with the floor. But none came as I put more pressure on it, feeling the springs provide some counter-force, and at last my heel touched the ground. Then I tried to put some weight on it—
I stumbled. The magic caught me immediately, not helping me stand but just catching me as I fell. Ai helped me back upright. How many hours had she spent helping Amethyst like this, in this room? She had a hand on my back.
“Breathe out.”
I had been holding my breath? Oh. So I was. A long exhale—then I tried again, more gingerly this time, right leg shaking a bit with the unfamiliarity of the lack of sensation in my toes. My muscle memory was thrown off despite the foot itself being a perfect fit. Still, it went better this time. I stood on my own two feet—foot and a half, maybe, but still. Ai let go of me and I just stood there, relishing the…uprightness. I resisted the urge to attempt to take a step, even knowing that I wouldn’t fall.
Ai gave a satisfied nod. “Good! Try to just stand up and sit down a few times, like you normally would.”
I did so. I felt like I was getting the hang of it fast. Maybe I could try to take a step?
I didn’t get the chance. Something zipped past the closed door to the room, a yell dopplering down the hall. Then there was a crash. Ebi shrugged as if to say “called it.” Emerald sighed, long-suffering, and strode to the door. Ebi provided interpretation—not in her own voice, an imitation of her creator’s.
“LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE. No, I don’t care if she deserved it, out of my wing. OUT. Ishikawa-chan, why didn’t you stop them?”
Ebi broke from the impression to make her own comment. “She can’t stay mad at Amethyst.”
Then she resumed. “No. No! You tell her—oh. She said—oh, seriously? Okay, yes, she deserved it. Still. Mhm. Huh? No, I was in the middle of—”
Another crash. Someone was yelling. Then it became a roar—which meant it was Opal. I put my face in my hands. Ebi leaned out the doorway to peer at whatever was happening. That seemed gratuitous; she was probably wired into the security cameras.
“Heliotrope is going to be so mad she missed this.”
Author’s Note:
Definitely-cis magical girls and sassy robots, that’s Sunspot.
Thanks to Cassiopeia, Zak, and Maria for proofreading; this chapter got so much stronger after their feedback.
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
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It didn’t take long for Ebi to show up and break me out of my reverie, staring at the blood drying on the bedsheets.
“I apologize for Sapphire’s behavior.”
I looked up at her, somehow unsurprised that she had simply reappeared. A trick like Heung’s spear, maybe—that wasn’t some kind of flamebearer intuition for whatever lattice animated her, it was an educated guess. There were only so many ways to shunt that much matter in or out of our three-dimensional reality, and many of them had visual tells that she lacked. I looked at the robot—didn’t quite make it to her eyes. I wound up directing my gaze at her neck.
“Apology accepted? If I’m not a prisoner. Am I?”
“Not in those words. This is one of the safest places in the world for you.”
“But you won’t let me leave.”
“Opal thinks it won’t come to that.”
Well, it sounded like I didn’t have much control over that at the moment, so no point in pursuing it. I had other curiosities, ones more rooted in my passion for magic than my new circumstances.
“What’s your deal?”
“You mean the state of my intelligence?”
“Sure.”
She wasn’t visibly doing anything as she stood there, but I got the sense she was reading my chart, or my file. It was a safe bet that she knew who I was, even though she had been out of the room when Hina had said it out loud.
“I am sapient, but not sentient.”
That was vaguely insulting to my intelligence. She came over and gestured toward my arm. I looked at her. Her fingers twitched in a ‘come here’ motion. After a long, long moment of incredulous glaring—I gave her my arm.
“Bullshit.”
She had the audacity to wink at me even as her voice remained level.
“Blood pressure and O2 are good, and your foot looks stable. Are there any parts of your body that hurt?”
“Foot aches a bit. Don’t dodge the question.” I felt like it should be hurting more; maybe it was just that I hadn’t moved it.
“I am animated by Emerald’s magic. I’m not at liberty to say more, like I said. Are you feeling well enough to see her now?”
I had guessed that much—Radiance Emerald was the team’s technical magic expert, the ‘guy in the chair’ of their classical five-man-band. All five were veteran flamebearers, and therefore specialists at magic in one way or another; her field bridged the gap between conventional engineering and weaving. She was the one Hina had said to go see.
“For my foot?”
“And more general greetings. You’ve gotten off on the wrong foot by meeting Sapphire first.”
The wrong foot. The robot’s digital expression didn’t give anything away, but she practically radiated smugness at the joke. I looked down at the mound under the blanket created by the stump and sighed.
“Sure. Can’t exactly walk like this, though.”
“I’ll take you down. The bed moves.”
That harkened back to my last extended time in a hospital, although I had been more ambulatory then, with a ruined hand rather than foot. Still, being carted through the halls in a bed sounded humiliating—especially if the average employee here also knew my other identity.
“No wheelchair?”
“Just stay where you are for now. The bed’s doing a whole lot.”
Right, the painkiller magic—analgomancy, if you wanted to be technical. I decided to trust her judgment that the bed was the right call for now, although getting some control over my own mobility was rapidly becoming a priority, with how threatened I had felt by Hina.
Not just threatened. She had been so close to me; I hadn’t been that close to another person my age in—ever? It prodded at a kind of buried loneliness, a part of youth I had missed out on, spending all those years cooped up alone in that room. The intimate contact her posture had suggested was totally alien to me—yet desirable, confusingly so, in spite of how terrifying she had been. I couldn’t get her out of my head, replaying those few moments over and over.
Ebi snorted. “Attractive, isn’t she?”
I jerked my arm out of her grip, positive she had read my vitals for that bit of insight. “Right freaky’s what she was. They’re not all like that, I hope?”
“In their own ways. If you mean whether any of the others will climb up on your bed—doubtful. Don’t look so disappointed.”
I glared at her, resenting how I was blushing from something more than embarrassment. Ebi showed me some mercy and didn’t pursue the topic.
“Let me take you to Emerald—to Ai. Sapphire will stop pestering you about it.”
She waved her hand, and my entire bed began to move. Not floating, I thought, but probably magically assisted suspension for the wheels. I wiggled my ankle experimentally.
“This is beyond regen, right?”
I hadn’t really made my peace with the loss so much as I had assumed that Lighthouse or the Spire could offer me a prosthetic at least as good as the original.
“It is. How much do you know about Amethyst’s prostheses?”
I thought. The Vaetna and glyph magic itself were my areas of real expertise; I had a decent amount of knowledge about magitech, but not much focus on specific flamebearers unless it hit on one of my passions. For example, I knew more about Amethyst’s transformation than her prosthetics.
“Only the basics. Left arm, left foot…something about her lungs?”
“Internals are a mess. But the relevant thing is that they’re self-animated, like her mantle or Vaetna carapace.”
That made me wince. I was starting to see the problem.
“So in addition to the physical therapy, I’d need—”
“Months of magical training. Maybe years. She’s still not fully comfortable with her leg—but then, she hardly ever uses it, and you’re starting from an expert level of theory from what I hear, so maybe you’ll go faster. Either way, since it’s just the foot, we’ll have you on crutches or in a wheelchair within the day, I think. We had you on eightfold healing.”
We arrived at an elevator without encountering any other staff. Ebi called it without hitting the button.
“Where is everybody?”
“Oh, medical’s mostly just me when we don’t have anybody in. This is my crib.”
“Just you for the whole floor?”
“All of eighteen, yep.”
Perhaps I had underestimated her qualifications. She carted me into the elevator and sent us downward, destination: B1F. It was a big building by my standards for these things, twenty stories top to bottom, plus three basement levels. The organization was so young that the building was actually a hospital that had been bought for some obscene sum of money and converted—but that was about the extent of my knowledge, off-the-cuff. I couldn’t recall exactly where in the city we were, and my phone was getting no reception in the elevator.
“Where in Tokyo are we?”
“Akasaka. That’s—”
She projected a holographic map of the city. It took me a moment to orient myself. If the Imperial Palace was the center, we were just to the southwest. I noted that we were close to the Diet and some other major landmarks—including the local Gate. If I were to make a run for it—that was the destination.
The elevator dinged, and we exited into a small corridor, a little more industrial, with a concrete floor and lit by full-spectrum LEDs rather than the warmer light of the elevator and higher corridors. Ebi took me down the hall, and we arrived at a pair of double doors. They slid open, and I recognized the room from videos, one of Todai’s main assets that set them apart from other groups.
Emerald’s workshop was enormous, an ex-garage. Half-disassembled jetbikes lay surrounded by parts and toolkits, patients abandoned mid-surgery. Workstations featuring holographic displays shared space with entirely manual machine shop tools from the previous century. More modern 21st-century machines also abounded, and rarely just one of any. I didn’t have the technical knowledge to label most of what I was looking at, beyond the obvious things like the lathes or the enormous metal printers—the bottom line was that this shop was built for ideation more than mass production, and had the breadth of tooling to look the part.
However, I only had eyes for what dominated the far wall: a huge array of glyphs spanning two to four dimensions, intricately connected, all mounted and ready to be powered at a moment’s notice. They corresponded to various effects and operations to be done within a large cubic space, maybe three meters to a side, which hovered on that side of the room, clearly demarcated by a variety of holographic barriers and “CAUTION: THIS MACHINE IS CARNIVOROUS”-type signage; I knew those weren’t facetious. Above it hung a candelabra of tooling, the maw of some great beast of hardened steel and carbide, itself using magic to enable tool swaps and precision at speeds far higher than the mundane equivalent.
The array enabled otherwise prohibitively expensive or outright impossible fabrication conditions like zero-gravity, hard vacuum for cold welding, spatial affix work-holding, and the ability to symmetrically and radially mirror operations around an axis, among others. Most notably, it could operate in four dimensions, making it invaluable for the manufacture of third-order lattice substrate, an essential element of the chain of production that allowed developed and magic-available countries to bootstrap themselves further up the tech tree in this new era. I was in awe—none of the arrays like this anywhere in the world were open to the public, and I had sort of resigned myself to never getting the chance to see them in person. There were only four outside the Spire.
The shop was also shockingly quiet in spite of the maybe three dozen people scattered around, clustered around various parts and machines. Magical soundproofing was both energetically cheap and easy to install, a fact leveraged here in abundance where the Radiances could be depended on to keep them running. We passed the threshold and made our way toward where Emerald was sitting at a desk with four monitors. She had one of those funky split keyboards and was currently neck-deep in modeling…something. Third-order glyph substrate embedded in something else, maybe. She saw us coming in a convex mirror mounted on the desk and spun in her chair to face us. The entire thing was on what looked to be a motorized base.
“Ebi-tan! This is him?”
Unlike Hina, who sounded straight-up American, Ai Matsumoto had a noticeable—if minor—Japanese accent and a bright and clear voice. This clashed somewhat with an otherwise rather gruff look: jeans, closed-toed shoes, and the scar that ran down the right of her chin to her throat. Her hair was black and long, held back in a simple ponytail. Her arms were bare—and muscular. I figured that was just a hobby; if she ever needed serious physical strength, she could always just mantle.
She also looked—exhausted, frankly. The bags under her brown eyes made her seem like she was in her thirties rather than the twenty-something she actually was. Like Hina’s predator teeth, that was never something I had seen in promotional material for them. Unlike Hina, though, this felt like a sign of her mortality; she had clearly been missing nights of sleep on some project. It was the good kind of fatigue, a familiar kind born of great joy and perhaps obsession in something. Hina and Ebi had had a sort of weightlessness I associated with the Vaetna as well; Ai was much more grounded and human.
Ebi shot off a stiff-sounding greeting in Japanese and managed half a bow before nearly teleporting over to Ai to wrap her in a hug. The Radiance made an adorable squealing sound and nuzzled into the machine-woman’s carbon fiber chest for a moment before seeming to remember herself and refocusing on me.
“Hina-san says you bound something to yourself. She also said you did a bad job of it. Show me.”
My bed floated closer, and she hopped out of her chair, jogging over to meet me and inspect my arm. I noted the total lack of greeting—I assumed that meant she either didn’t know or didn’t care that I was Ezzen. Later, with more knowledge of Japanese honorifics, I would also come to understand the strangeness of the appellation she used for Hina. She prodded at the burned image of the spear, as well as kind of waving her fingers in the air around it, getting a feel for the lattice. It tickled, sort of.
“Mm. Vaetna-style for sure. Weave is—very sloppy, but you’re new. Would you take it out?”
I was grateful again for the painkillers as I obliged, motivated by her visible interest in the magic rather than the fear from before. Ai walked along the side of the bed, eyeing the cut that had reopened on my arm, muttering something in Japanese to Ebi. Then she went to inspect the spear itself.
“Just a regular wooden—oh.” She had spotted what Hina had called ripple warping on the blade. “I haven’t looked at the report yet. You did this?”
“Um, yes. To, er—” I scrambled for one of the only bits of Japanese I knew. “Ah—hikari wo osaeru?”
To contain the light, when I had averted the inferno at first. This was a cultural difference—the East conceptualized the Frozen Flame as light rather than fire. That was the basis for Lighthouse’s theming. She nodded approvingly.
“You’re saying it wrong, but I get the meaning. Hikari wo osaeru, like that.”
I couldn’t really hear a difference, other than the fact that her voice was outright melodic in her native tongue. I recalled that she was a fairly popular singer in her free time—for a moment I had a wild, ridiculous fantasy of going to a karaoke bar together, before remembering I couldn’t sing and would die of embarrassment in a setting like that. She said something to Ebi, and my arm stopped bleeding, although the gash didn’t close, and the sting remained.
“Why do you have this?”
“Um…I like Heung. He saved me once.” It was embarrassing to say out loud.
“Mm. It’s nice. You made it yourself?”
“Er—yes. Can’t get them legally in the UK.”
She grinned. “I use one too. May I?”
Oh, right, she did—so why not. Maybe I’d learn something. I offered it, but as she pulled the spear from my grip—no. No, she couldn’t, I needed that—I was still in danger. I had to be able to hurt it or else there was no—
I reflexively tried to put it back in my arm, reaching for the lattice on pure panicked instinct. The spear tried to fold into my arm, to mesh with the cut, and tugged Ai back toward me with it. She whirled, confusion on her face. Then she seemed to understand what was happening and planted her feet. Something shifted, and for a moment she stood like a Vaetna, that impression that physics was optional. Suddenly, I was the one being tugged, yanked out of the bed by the magic—
I would have slammed into the concrete floor. As it was, Ebi mostly caught me, but only mostly—the impact still broke my grip on the spear, and I lay there, dazed. My first thought was that my jaw hurt. My second was that I hoped I hadn’t just bitten off my tongue. Noticing the commotion, some of the other people in the workshop began to hurry over. I felt arms lift me and deposit me back in the bed.
“No fractures…I just gave you an anticoncussive. You got very lucky regarding your tongue.”
“I know,” I groaned. My head throbbed even through the painkillers.
Ai appeared on my other side, seeming genuinely distressed. “Sorry, so sorry. Ebi-tan?”
They conversed in Japanese for a few moments, and the woman visibly relaxed. I heard her mutter something to herself that sounded an awful lot like “bakabakabaka.” She refocused on me.
“So, so sorry. I didn’t mean to—aaa, korosarecchau—I just wanted to try the spear.”
Ebi said something softly to her, and Ai shook her head, ponytail wagging.
“It is my fault. I realized what you were doing and wanted to see what would happen to your lattice if I put tension on it. I wasn’t thinking. Please forgive me.”
She looked dejected for a moment, then something in her shifted. She retrieved the spear and brought it to me, her motions once again those of mortals. I clutched it pathetically, humiliated by my own reaction but unable to bring myself to let go. As I breathed slowly and calmed down, I managed a chuckle as I reflected on it. Not the best first impression, but—
“It’s fine. I would have done the same thing.”
She looked at me thoughtfully. Then she bowed, shook her head again, and paced down toward my feet, inspecting my gauze-wrapped leg. How much it had already healed, if it had effectively been something like a week, thanks to the magic?
“We’re going to do something about this. I was going to anyway, but now…”
She turned and raised her voice. It took me a moment to understand she was yelling names—and still speaking in English. Her voice had taken on an authoritative edge; it fit her surprisingly well. The exhaustion seemed to drop from her face for the moment, overridden by willpower. A crowd gathered around us, a mix of students around my or her age, but some of the engineers and machinists had to be at least twice that—and they were all subordinate to her.
“—Two weeks. You’ll all get the same dimensions and scans. Basic design goals comply with LIPS-2 like what we made for Amethyst last year, bonus credit for anything beyond if you can justify it or if he likes it. Give me something I would be proud to wear.”
Not a single one complained about the sudden project. Some of them looked outright excited and were already pointing at me and muttering. Did they already know who I was? She hadn’t said it out loud, at least. More to the point—did I want to be her charity case? Part of me wanted to research a way to magic my way out of the disability entirely, some kind of LM construct for my foot. Ebi poked me, and I jumped—I had forgotten she was there.
“Take it. Ai does her best work when she feels guilty.”
I sighed internally—then externally. I had suffered enough in these past 24 hours. My stupid ego could swallow some kindness, especially if it lacked an ulterior motive like Sapphire’s had.
The engineers dispersed, hurrying off toward their desks. Ai turned back to me. Her voice had lost that entire hard facade, now timid.
“I’m sorry, again. Would you allow me to fix your binding?”
I hesitated. There was a sort of sentimentality in it, my first ever real bit of lasting, woven magic. But Sapphire had been right, it was impractically sloppy now that I was out of immediate danger. And I understood that this was still her way of trying to get off on the right foot.
“Yes, please. Hina said a tattoo binding?”
“Yes. Ink or LM?”
LM stood for lattice-manifest, the general term for matter directly generated by magic. Lighthouse were experts in it, overshadowed by only the Spire—like everyone else with a magical specialization; along with my personal connection to Heung, that was why I had primarily focused on the Vaetna over the other prominent VNT groups. They were simply a cut above in everything, but especially magic. They had introduced weaving, come up with the core lexicon of glyphs, and still remained far ahead of the curve.
I did want to do LM, but unfortunately, some things were just beyond my abilities for now.
“I don’t think I can do LM, not straight onto my skin. The most complicated thing I’ve cast is {COMPOSE}.”
“Oh. Yes, that would…that makes sense. Ink, then. Ebi-tan?”
I was a bit surprised that the machine-woman was the tattoo artist of choice. Then I thought about it a moment and—of course she was. Ebi’s hand disappeared in the same way a piece of paper did when turned parallel to one’s view, the three-dimensional object rotated in the fourth dimension such that it disappeared completely. After a moment, the process reversed, revealing a tattoo gun. I guessed that much of her body was 4-brane to enable swaps like this; it made sense for a medical robot. How would she look to a Vaetna?
“Color?”
I hadn’t thought this far ahead; I had never gotten a tattoo. “Um. What are the options?”
“Anything you want. We have the full spectrum in opaques, metallics, and iridescents.”
This felt like an important decision, but one I had no frame of reference for. “What would you think would look good?”
Ebi grinned at that. “We can temp it.”
In response, Ai retrieved something from a drawer in her desk, extracting it from a plastic bag. It was a translucent gossamer sheet.
“Arm, please.”
I offered my arm, and she wrapped the membrane around. It vacuum-sealed to my skin. A little uncomfortable, but not really squeezing. It flickered, and after a moment, the burn scar representing my spear vanished. I jerked—then realized the lattice of my binding was still there.
“Just a visual trick, don’t worry.”
Ebi—maybe Ai?—manipulated the membrane to project a design onto my arm in the same shape as my scar. Ebi withdrew a touchscreen tablet from somewhere within the bed, fiddled with it for a moment, and handed it to me. It showed a number of sliders and settings. “Take your time.”
I experimented for a few minutes. My pale skin was a good canvas for simple black or blue ink, but that felt a little mundane. On the flip side, a bright color and a fancy type of ink that caught the light came off as overly gaudy. As was so often the case, the best answer lay somewhere in the middle. Ai commented when I came to an iridescent dark blue-green.
“I like that. Ebi-tan?”
“Looks alright. The magenta was good too.”
I couldn’t decide. Choice paralysis was often a struggle for me, and this was no different. Eventually, I gave up and asked if they had a coin. Ai produced a 500-yen, a fat, two-tone thing, gold on silver. I flipped—heads. Dark iridescence it was. The template dissolved, the burn scar reappearing.
“Are you going to have to fully unmake the lattice?”
“I can reweave it in-place. I’m not very good at Vaetna-style, but…”
We sat in awkward silence for a moment. Then my magic-knowledge kicked in, dissatisfactions from the first time. I muttered, oddly embarrassed about the specificity.
“Ventral rethread with a finer spool. Leave the spinal mesh, it’s good enough. I messed up layers 3 and 23 on the first axis, and my passthrough between axes was sloppy.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Oh. Your theory is far better than your execution…” She trailed off as she caught the backhanded compliment. “Of course it is. I’m sorry. Yes, I can do that.”
This whole affair had been rather awkward so far, and neither of us could meet the other’s eyes. She was looking down at my arm, and I was casting my gaze around the room to avoid looking at her. Ebi cleared her throat. Well, she didn’t have a throat, but it was a good imitation. Ai jerked and blinked a few times, eyes flicking to the robot before refocusing on me. Had…had she fallen asleep, for a moment? It didn’t show in her voice, at least.
“Would you gather your thread for me? I’ll spin it and weave it for you.”
“Um…sure. Are you just going to tattoo straight over the scar?”
“We’ll have to reopen the wound. Please bring it out?”
I did, feeling the sting for what would probably be the last time. Ebi’s hands blurred, and she grabbed my wrist. Before I even reacted, she had injected local anesthesia and was stitching the gash. I reflexively jerked away despite the lack of pain—her grip was iron. When the sutures were done, she sprayed it with some kind of foam, which dissolved the stitches and left a patch of blank flesh. The whole process had taken maybe a minute.
“Christ.”
Ebi replied with a wink, proud of her work. Then she set about affixing my arm to the bedframe; evidently, the tattoo required more precision than the suture job had.
Time for magic. I hesitated, staring at my arm, my magic-sense running along the lattice. I tried to reach for the Flame—jerked back before I made contact. Ai looked at me. “It has to be your thread.”
I knew that, but—a fear lay within me. That horrible animal perspective I had found in those moments of pain…I hated it. It was—frustrating, wrong. The voices—whatever they were—had agreed that it wasn’t how it should be; weaving was supposed to be better than the cruelty of pure blood magic. And yet I had been causing harm in just the same way, angry at my Flame. Were all of us? Even the Vaetna, those paragons I and so many others all but worshiped?
I had to give it voice, explain what I was feeling, and she felt like the right person—better than Sapphire, at least. I almost whispered.
“They made it look so easy.”
Her eyes searched my face. Did she get it? I went on hesitantly. This felt profane. “It hurts. Both ways.”
Her voice was as quiet as mine. “You’re like Hina-san.”
“I’m—what?”
“She hurts her Flame.”
I resented the comparison, having seen the hyena.
“It—I guess? But I don’t want to. I was desperate. I—don’t know any other way.” That horrible thought struck me again. “There…there is another way, right?”
That seemed to physically hit Ai. She struggled with something. Her lips squirmed, and she gave the impression that she was digging up bad memories. That was half an answer in itself; maybe I had misjudged why she was losing sleep. Eventually, she spoke.
“There is.”
“How?”
“Sacrifice,” Ebi broke in, now configuring the tattoo gun.
I looked at the machine-woman, some dark comprehension growing. “Sanguimancy?”
Ebi glanced at the Radiance for a long moment, then shook her head. Ai muttered darkly, almost angrily. Some of the exhaustion on her face came into her voice. “We’re not all Yuuka-chan, or Hina-san. There’s other choices.”
“What…are they?”
The question was difficult to force out. It implied a huge gap in my knowledge of magic, an aspect outside of the glyphcraft I knew so well—but just as essential.
“I’ll show you. Draw the thread, please.”
I was quiet for a long, long moment, dreading it. Then I took a deep breath—and pulled it from myself. My burn scars ignited as they had last time, and I winced, less at the discomfort I was feeling and more at the pain I now understood I was inflicting on the shard embedded in my soul. I hadn’t even realized how violent the act of pulling it out of me was. It was a stabbing, scratching sensation, flowing out from my chest and into my arm. I kept going, silently apologizing, resolving to find a better way now that I knew one existed. It said nothing this time.
This was still just raw flame, not thread. I clenched my fist and told it to tauten and extend. Each individual tongue of flame began to wrap around my arm, thinning out, merging together until it was a shaggy tangle of magic, chaotic but workable. It might have even been called fluffy, if it weren’t so sharp and almost thrashing. The blazing light danced in Ai’s eyes as she watched the form change.
“Good enough. Now watch carefully, please.”
Her hands began to gather the mass and spin it into fine thread that, before now, I had only ever seen through a camera. Her skein wasn’t so much bundled around her forearm as it was…already woven, a sort of glove, or maybe a gauntlet—an artful preparatory step that I had no idea how to even begin. I flashed back to yesterday’s stream, how Bri had prepared her own thread, and then to that moment in the car, my arm wreathed with flame. There was a connection there, but I had hardly even thought to examine that part of the process, nor had any of my resources covered it. My perspective had been so limited, so focused on the glyphs themselves. She brought her hand to my arm and tugged. I made a sound, a coughing gasp. It felt like she had pulled on my collarbones hard enough to bend them, a sharp ache of protesting bone. That pain passed quickly, and the sensation afterward wasn’t nearly as scorching as last time, more of a suffusing warmth.
Ai locked eyes with Ebi for a moment. Then they both began at once, the tattoo gun injecting glimmering ink into my skin as she unthreaded the old weave. As she did, she brought the new one into its place. With literal thread, this procedure was either difficult or impossible—but this was all sort of a metaphor for a magical and somewhat abstract process to begin with.
The process was patient and methodical, instead of the frenzied, bare seconds I had taken to throw together my own version. That time, the fraying twine had been actively burning me as it came apart in my hands, so speed had been of the essence. This time, with proper thread, there was no need to rush, and there was time to appreciate the moment and take in the details. I noticed her nails were painted—had Hina’s been? I couldn’t remember. Each nail was a different color—I realized it corresponded to her team. Pearly white, azure, verdant green, violet, dark green with red flecks. Cute.
There was also a small tattoo running along her right index finger and down the back of her hand, regularly demarcated. A ruler—a bit redundant and imprecise for a machinist who had access to real metrology equipment of mechanical, electronic, and magical varieties. Maybe it was symbolic—then I saw the lattice it bound. Rather, I didn’t quite see the lattice, but I knew it was there. That was some kind of measuring tool, maybe a caliper, bound to her body for easy access like she was binding my spear to mine. Her eyes followed mine.
“Bindings are easier for me than snapweaving.”
The rest of the world and the throbbing in my head fell away as I watched them work, Ai’s hands twisting and tugging and refining as she pulled. She was clearly in the zone herself, both the timid apologeticism and tough leadership forgotten. I wondered how long it would take me to be able to work the thread as she could. Was this how she had made Ebi, sitting next to a vacant chassis, losing hours weaving life into being that stretched into weeks, maybe months, until one day some last thread of the lattice was pulled into place and flame had crystallized into consciousness? To what extent were they linked? Ebi herself was precise as one would expect, imitating the shape of my old scar with the ink—it didn’t hurt, thanks to the anesthetic.
Ai was almost as close to me as Hina had been, but the energy was different. Where my encounter with Hina had been alien and unfamiliar, heart-poundingly intense, this procedure was a familiar setting. I had plenty of experience with this kind of contact from equally attractive surgeons and nurses in the months it had taken to recover function in my other arm, and had long since gotten over embarrassment in that context, by necessity. That’s not to say I didn’t find Ai attractive, but it was the kind of idle aesthetic appreciation I could compartmentalize as that of a caretaker, almost motherly; somebody I wanted to be friends with. And we had a connection in the form of our shared nature as flamebearers. Unfortunately—
“I can’t see what you’re doing differently. Um—something in how you’re pulling it?”
Was it something in the motion of her hand? The way she had prepared the spool? She was certainly more skilled than me—but it felt like she was looking for a deeper answer than that.
“Close. Do you know why it came from your hand?”
This was taking on the air of a lesson.
“Because—those are my burns from last time?”
That stopped her short, and she frowned at me.
“Last time?”
Ebi said something to her in Japanese, and her eyes widened. “You’re second contact. So it can happen. That—I’m sorry. Let’s start over. Why does hurting it work?”
“Because…it’s alive.”
That was fairly well-understood about the Flame. It wasn’t a being per se, but it was alive in some way, and living creatures tended to avoid pain—but she shook her head. “That’s the misconception. Why does blood magic work?”
“Sacrifice. Because—” my stomach dropped. “The magic seeks pain. So when we hurt it—”
It was so horribly obvious, framed like that. The conversation until now had felt profane; this was outright blasphemous, unholy. She nodded in a small way, looking down at the spool on her arm. “Pain is…food. Motivation. It loves to feel, and pain is strong—its own, or the bearer’s. It doesn’t actually care which, as far as I can tell.”
Blood magic wasn’t my area of expertise, but I understood the principle well enough. It had taken more of my foot than I had intended because the Flame—or some other force related to it—had decided that what I was asking the magic to do required more pain for equilibrium to be maintained.
“But—so there’s another option? You said you didn’t use sanguimancy.”
“The Flame likes pain because it’s—powerful. Red ripple is…yoku tsukaeru. Very usable.”
That it was. Pain was overwhelming, all-consuming. Nothing else mattered; it eclipsed all, and so in terms of ripple—how much something ‘matters’, magically speaking—it was powerful. Ai twisted one of her hands around her thumb, working a loop into the thread. She teased it until the tension was right, then went on.
“It doesn’t only like pain. What it really wants is ripple, and there’s more colors than red, and other kinds of red ripple anyway. We’re mahou shoujo, so we feed ours with good emotions. Trust, hope. Kindness. The desire to do good.”
I didn’t need translation to know she had said ‘magical girls’. I was seeing the downside, cynical as it was. “Weaker than pain.”
I had been saved once—twice now, actually, so I was a pretty decent case study there. The first time, my gratitude had been utterly drowned in the pain of my charred hand. The second time, the pain had prevented me from being able to experience gratitude in the moment, because I had literally passed out. She sighed.
“That’s the trade-off.”
Ebi cut in, looking bored with the conversation. “They’re supposed to only use good emotions.”
“Meaning?”
“Sometimes they make compromises to do what they have to. That’s what I meant by sacrifice.”
The robot let that hang. It wasn’t delivered with any acid, but Ai still seemed stung by the remark. I looked between the two, and while I was sure there was drama and history there, my thoughts were going further afield, grander in scale, to the basis of my obsession.
“But the Vaetna are so powerful. They can’t be—”
“I don’t know. It’s either pain, or whatever they do—doesn’t follow the rules. I’d like to think it’s the second one.”
Nightmarish. If they were performing blood magic, they sure didn’t show it—which meant they were instead hurting their flame, which was inconceivable, too horrible, a violation of what the Spire stood for, what I believed in. So I had to agree with Ai—but they had all but made the rules for how I understood magic, between glyphs and modern understanding of ripple. So if they were operating on different rules…she saw my turmoil.
“You’re second contact. You might also be breaking the rules. So—let’s go back to why it came from your hand. These are…inferno scars?”
“The very first day of the firestorms.”
“That would—your memories of that pain are probably a…lens, a focus. You already associate them with the Flame, so it’s drawn to manifest there. That’s just a guess, but…the Vaetna might be like that too, in some way.”
Elation rose in me. It was just a blind guess, because of how little we knew of them, but—“Are you saying I’m more powerful?”
It felt too good to be true. After all these years, I was actually special? Destined for more, somehow twice-flametouched or otherwise able to transcend the system Ai had laid out?
“Impossible to say, yet. We’ll benchmark you when you’re more recovered. But after that…maybe you should go to the Spire to learn from them, not stay at Toudai.”
“I want to. I always have. But the way Hina put it—I’m a prisoner.”
She sighed. “The others don’t think so. I think this is all going to become a mess. You’re safe here, but…Hina-san and Takehara-san want to recruit you. For different reasons, I think.”
She saw the naked worry on my face. “But…don’t they both…”
“Yes. They do. Hina-san is selfish, like I said. So is Takehara-san—Opal—in her own way. But they’re good people. They’re still mahou shoujo. Takehara-san more than any of us. You can trust her.”
We lapsed back into silence until they were done. I couldn’t bring up the fact that my Flame had spoken to me, or the implications thereof. I would, in time, but I was still reeling from it all. I was ashamed of how little I knew of what had come up in this conversation; for all my understanding of glyphcraft, of ripple, this aspect had hardly ever come up. The various VNT groups out there in the world seemed to play it close to their chest, which made me feel a little better for not knowing, but I felt I had been so blind.
In my flame-sense, I could feel the new portions of the lattice, crisp and taut, and where my old work remained, deemed good enough and perhaps kept in as a matter of sentimentality. Visually, the anchor had changed as well. The burn scar had been replaced by a shimmering tattoo, like a foil card. It was darker than my pale skin around it, making it stand out far more, brilliant as it caught the light. The word ‘ripple’ rose to mind—I supposed that was appropriate. It stung, but it was mundane pain, and it faded as soon as Ebi applied some kind of cream. I imagined how much better my burns could have healed if that kind of medical technology was available seven years ago—then again, my foot was apparently beyond repair, and by all accounts it was basically the same kind of burn.
Despite not doing any of the work, I was exhausted, and both of them could see it. She still insisted I give it a try. I focused, pressed on the lattice—no pain, no gash, just the spear in my hand. I could feel the improved weave. I retracted the spear, the motion feeling more natural than ever. Was this how it felt for Heung?
I called and put it away a few more times. It was so much more responsive and elegant, and I was almost giddy with the lack of pain—it occurred to me that I should thank her. I looked up at Ai sheepishly, trying to hold the eye contact.
“Thank you.”
That was for the binding, and my foot, and the insight. I felt I didn’t deserve any of it.
“It’s good?”
“It is.”
She lit up. It was almost a transformation. She hadn’t literally mantled—but she looked so much better than before as she inspected her work. Despite the darkness of the conversation, she seemed lighter, healthier in some abstract way. In some way, she was being nourished by the act of helping me—is that what she had meant by using positive emotions to power her magic? Behind her eyes was a passion and a joy in magic that affirmed the sense of kinship I had felt with her.
She saw me off with thanks of her own, more apologies for the near-chin-floor incident, and a promise.
“If you want to stay—I still don’t think you should, but if you do—I’ll try to teach you how we do it. It doesn’t have to hurt.”
What did you say to that? I mumbled another thank-you, starting to be a little overwhelmed by the slightly unfamiliar social rituals.
“Um. Okay. Thanks. And thanks for the—foot, too? When that happens.”
She smiled. “No problem.”
Evidently satisfied with the end of the interaction, Ebi provided escape for me, carting me away. The journey back to my room was still mildly humiliating on principle, but we once again encountered nobody as we reached the elevator ride back to Ebi’s domain on the 18th floor. Besides, I was focused entirely inward, thinking about what had passed between us and the thing attached to my soul.
I knew for a fact Ai wasn’t a pacifist and was having trouble reconciling the experience I just had with the violence I knew Lighthouse traded in. That dissonance now loomed even larger in my mind when it came to the Vaetna. It had never bothered me before; they were just so much more, and very open about the way their violence intersected with their humanitarianism…but now I wasn’t so sure. If the greatest power lay in pain, and they were the undisputed most powerful magic-users in the world…I didn’t like the implications of that. At least it was gated behind several ‘if’s. If they even operated on the same rules the rest of us flamebearers did, if the sheer scale of their humanitarianism didn’t factor into their magic somehow…and so on.
With Lighthouse, on the other hand, I was certain that this leveraging of pain was part of how they operated, from Ai’s own mouth. It felt a little like their sunny public image was a mask—or at least, more aspirational than genuine, chasing the image of magical girls while trafficking in cruelty, not that I had much basis for knowing what the ‘true nature of magical girls’ should instead be. The impression was amplified by the physical features I kept noticing, absent in promotional material. But Ai seemed alright, on my wavelength. By the time the elevator came to a stop, I had recovered enough social energy to ask.
“About, uh, positive emotions, and what you said about compromises. Are they…real?”
“They’re trying.”
A rather enigmatic answer—but enough so that it felt honest, so perhaps it was the best she could have given. I was still uncertain, rattled by the encounter with Sapphire, mentally contrasting her with Ai again, danger against safety. I returned to those moments with the hyena once more, and a pattern dawned on me. She had told me three times in the space of five minutes that I should let Ai work on my binding. Had that been her way of showing she cared, knowing that this was what Ai needed? What I needed, even? Had she been expecting me to broach that topic, see the other perspective? I quietly readjusted my evaluation of the Sapphire Radiance. Perhaps I ought to trust Ai’s confidence in her character, such as it was.
I was tired, thoughts aswirl with doubts and uncertainties, but I always had energy for my friends. The chatroom was generally a zone where I could recharge and recover my social battery. I was also chattier here, among my longtime friends.
ezzen: Guess who just met Emerald. Sapphire, too.
starstar97: FUCK OFF
starstar97: im literally this close to buying tickets to tokyo
starstar97: i know where you live.
That threw me, just a bit. Did I live here now? Ebi chuckled, reading over my shoulder. I reflexively hid my phone for a moment before remembering that they evidently already knew about my online identity.
ezzen: Huh. I guess you do.
ezzen: Come visit!
starstar97: how dare you call my bluff
starstar97: no moneys oTL
starstar97: what are they like
“How much am I allowed to say?”
“Oh, everyone important already knows what Sapphire is like. Go nuts.”
“It won’t reach the tabloids?”
“Won’t it?” There was a smile in her voice.
ezzen: Sapphire scares me. She’s like Sahan levels of intense, but she moves like Hueng.
DendriteSpinner: Saph? Scary? Shes the cuddly one right
starstar97: you barely keep up with this stuff dendrite
starstar97: yeah shes the cuddly one
starstar97: but also famously the crazy one
ezzen: ty for confirming lol
ezzen: Emerald…
ezzen: Gets it? Hard to explain but
ezzen: She reminds me of Mayari maybe?
ezzen: She gave me a tattoo.
I looked at Ebi, the one who had actually wielded the tattoo gun. A robot of decidedly mysterious origins, supposedly Ai’s creation—indubitably a person, but outside of what science had understood to be possible. How had she come about? Actually, that was too…clinical, too focused on what she was rather than who she was. I ought to have some empathy, repay that which she and Ai had shown me. So—what was her life even like?
“Do you ever get out?”
She shrugged. “Legally, I don’t exist.”
I looked down at the chatroom on my phone, the social lifeline I had had for six and a half years of otherwise near-total isolation. I would have gone insane without it, probably. I raised my gaze to the empty halls and rooms of the 18th floor. Her situation, this barren domain devoid of companionship, was oddly nostalgic in a way that was more than a little painful. I felt obligated to offer it to her in turn, showing her the screen.
“Do you want to—join?”
She seemed genuinely confused by the question. “What, your chatroom?”
“Yeah. You’re sort of secret, right? You’ve got ‘forbidden secret project’ written all over you, and I’ve never seen you in any videos or anything.”
I gestured around the liminal space of the hallway for emphasis. She crossed her arms, mint-green chassis illuminated from above by the bluer light of her digital face frowning at me.
“You think I don’t have friends. This is pity. You’re pitying me.”
I blushed, having been mostly-correctly called out—empathy, not pity, though the difference could be pretty immaterial—but soldiered on. “Well…do you?”
“I have the Radiances.”
“And all the other staff? They’d figure out what’s up with you if you talked with them too much.”
“I am not permitted to address this line of questioning. Please consult with Radiance Emerald for further inquiries. Have a nice day.”
Her customer-service smile was sunny—no, solar, blinding. I was rather unmoved.
“Nice impression.”
“Thanks. No, I suppose I don’t really get out much. I mean, I’ve poked around on the forums, just like everybody else who works for Todai. But no.”
“So what do you do in your free time?”
That was an unusual question for someone like me to ask—but I was trying to figure out if she was an internet-creature like myself. That digital face made a smug smile.
“Online classes at the other Todai. Want to know how many degrees I have?”
“Humor me.”
“Working on my sixth.”
As someone who had effectively vanished from formal education after year nine and coasted through the remainder of secondary school with barely passing grades and minimum attendance—I couldn’t imagine that. I was a rather hard worker when it came to my own study of magic, but school simply hadn’t worked for me. I did some mental math in my head. Even with the most generous estimate of her age—
“Multiple, simultaneously?”
“Yep. Fake names, all that. So I keep busy enough.”
Too busy for friends, is what it sounded like to me. Maybe that was a little hypocritical, but even I had more social connections, if only online. She seemed content with what she had. That was disappointing, in a weird way, and we fell silent as we returned to the room I had woken up in. Attempt failed.
She deposited me, gave my IV and vitals a once over, and walked—almost a glide—back toward the door.
“Going to get you lunch and do my rounds. See that spray bottle?”
“Yeah. Disinfectant?”
My wound was probably due for a cleaning, if it was healing anything like my arm’s burns had. Ebi shook her head.
“Water. Spritz Hina if she shows up while I’m gone.”
“That works?”
“Well enough.”
She turned to leave the room, and I wanted to call out, to make one last push for connection with someone who I could almost consider a friend in this new place—but the words didn’t make it to my lips. I just lay there as she left, ashamed at the failed invitation. I had never been good at making friends, and it seemed I wasn’t about to start now, for all I felt I had forged some small connection with Ai earlier.
Alone, in that desolate room on that desolate floor. Maybe Ebi could bear it, but for me, it called forth the loneliness unearthed by my encounter with Sapphire. I had thought I had made peace with my lifestyle—but one crumb of interaction, a handful of face-to-face conversations with pretty girls and mysterious robots, and suddenly I hated being alone again. If Hina had shown up then, I might have just let her do what she wanted, if only for someone to talk to and feel close against my body, damn the spray bottle or the danger. But she didn’t, which was equal parts relieving and disappointing. What complicated emotions she inspired in me.
Thanks to her and Ai and Ebi, maybe things would be different from now on, however long I stayed here. But for now, at this moment? More of the same, just me and an empty room. I sighed. Well, even if ‘Dalton’ was perennially secluded—today’s events excepted—‘Ezzen’ never was. I sighed, reaching for my social lifeline once again. It really was a shame Ebi didn’t want to join. I rather felt she’d belong.
So imagine my surprise when the first thing I saw upon opening the chatroom was:
ebi-furai: o/
Author’s Note:
Thanks to Softies, Zak, Maria, and Cassiopeia for beta reading.
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What kinds of organizations had the means, motive, and opportunity to abduct a freshly-minted flamebearer directly off the eastbound M4 Motorway in broad daylight?
The list was depressingly long. The Vaetna could, in theory, although that went against their modus operandi. At the other end of the spectrum—at least in the public perception—were the shadowy paramilitary groups and cults oriented around the reappropriation of Frozen Flame shards, to use for themselves or to sell to the highest bidder. However, between the two and often conspicuously overlooked by the media lay the NATO Paranatural Control Task Force. Ostensibly, the PCTF’s main job was to crack down on unauthorized magic and help handle rogue infernos from flamefall gone sour, from a more established “world police” geopolitical position than the young rogue nation that was the Spire. They were actually pretty competent at that, too. They were styled as the peacekeepers for this era of magic; their nickname had gone from “PCs” to “PeeCees” and at last to “Peacies.”
But they were also the American hegemony’s apparatus for hunting and harvesting the flame which fed magical research in the West. An ugly, ugly thing, not only responsible for extralegal black-baggings of flamebearers but also known to have fingers in the pie of basically any Western research in magic outside the Spire. In the UK, they could and did operate with near-impunity, being largely above the law “as a matter of international security” and other familiar buzzwords about counterterrorism and so on, the signs of a broader slide toward fascism that the Spire’s emergence had only blunted. They were also, arguably, more well-resourced than the Spire in terms of manpower and funding, if less gifted in magic by an order of magnitude—and critically, more physically local around here than any Spire assets. They actually had a base right next to Heathrow as part of a five-year-long Mexican standoff with the Vaetna—but also to intercept people doing exactly what I was: fleeing for the haven that was the Gate.
All this was not to say the PCTF was particularly evil; their bones came from the then-young initiatives that had helped me recover from the inferno that had taken my dad, and that was still a core part of their role, an international response to an indiscriminate natural disaster. But the rumors persisted, half-verified accounts of facilities where uncooperative flamebearers had their flame extracted and used. The positive spin on it was that research needed resources, and not all research was strictly for weapons; advances in medical magitech had been revolutionary even in only six years. Advances mostly limited to the rich, though.
The important part was that at the moment, they were a mortal threat to my freedom and probably my life.
To their credit, the way they got me was remarkably non-disruptive to the various travelers and commuters sharing the motorway with us. No car chase or helicopters appearing overhead, no bullet splattering the cabbie’s grey matter against the dashboard. He simply pulled off the freeway and killed the engine. I protested, but I already knew what was happening, and couldn’t really blame him despite the spike of adrenaline entering my blood. It wasn’t proper mind control—that didn’t exist—just a telepathic broadcast of orders backed up by the implicit threat of violence. After a moment, they targeted me too.
“FLAMEBEARER.” THIS IS A PCTF RESCUE MESSAGE. EXIT THE VEHICLE AND LAY ON THE GRASS. COOPERATE AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.
Rescue. I would have laughed if I wasn’t busy trying to not hyperventilate. “Cooperate and you will not be harmed” was gallows humor on the forums regarding the treatment of flamebearers. It was terrifying to have those words now directed at me. All of these organizations, sans the Spire and a handful of equally esoteric outliers, intended to harm us; it was just a matter of when and how. Maybe they’d directly take the flame from my soul, maybe they’d just lock me up and use me as a battery for blood mages to wield their craft. Maybe they’d be civil, offer me tea and a chance to work for them—but I would be party to those first two options. I liked to think of magic as amoral, a tool to be used for good or ill—even flamefalls were just natural disasters, as random as being hit by a meteor—but even I had to admit the breadth of evidence that the externalities were measured in the suffering of people with whom I now shared a label.
I stayed in the car, not so much an act of defiance as simply being overwhelmed by panic. What could I do? I hadn’t been idle while riding in the backseat of the cab; I had scrawled some more glyphs that might plausibly aid my escape, but I had close to zero confidence in using them in an actual life-and-death combat situation. Even if I could control the magic well enough in the moment, could I—would I—kill somebody?
REPEAT: EXIT THE VEHICLE AND LAY ON THE GRASS. COOPERATE AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.
I knew I wouldn’t really get the chance to find out whether I was up to the task of murder, face-to-face. If I didn’t comply, they’d probably hit me with some combination of subsonics and magic to make me pass out—more likely comatose—and then just grab me anyway, standard crowd control stuff. That they hadn’t already done so was probably more of an indication that they weren’t quite in position yet, rather than of unwillingness or mercy. That meant that I had a currently closing window to try to make a break for it on foot, or maybe even hijack the cab. The former would lead to a foot chase through the woods flanking this stretch of road, and led us down the rest of the flowchart anyway. The latter was objectively insane.
So—other options. Could I hide? They already had a lock on me in some way, and any additional use of magic would just make more ripple by which to track me, so no. Negotiation? Probably not. This tended to only end one way, barring a fight or interference—
My phone buzzed. I scrambled to get it out, hands shaking.
skychicken: stall 3 min
I stared at the message, seriously lost for words. I looked around, out the car’s windows, as though expecting to see someone relaying my situation. Stall for what? Had he managed to call the goddamned Vaetna? My mental machinery restarted after a very long moment—precious time lost—and jumped into top gear. How could I stall? I was above using the poor cabbie as a hostage—again, not that I was really sure I could bring myself to do that in the first place. In fact—
“You should probably get out.”
I was a little surprised that he hadn’t yet, actually, if only because in his position I would have also been thinking along the lines of hostages. It had happened before. He twisted in his seat and looked at me, a gravelly face for an equally gravelly voice.
“That’s what I ought to tell you.”
I blinked at him. A strange exasperation rose in me, separate from the life-and-death panic. “Fuck no. What’s it to you?”
“You’ll steal my car.”
He was visibly uncomfortable at the prospect of having a walking inferno in his car. I decided to press on that. “Do you want me to take you hostage?”
He flinched. “The Peacies would save me.”
Ridiculous, to be honest—how much faith did he have in them? They weren’t even here yet. I could kill him right now, in theory, not that I would. I could, however, go for intimidation. I held up my arm—not the one with the spear-mark. My right, the one with the old burn scars wrapping around it like a leathery glove, almost to the elbow. I showed it to him and did my best snarl. “How do you think I got this?”
The intended effect was to make myself appear as some kind of hardened veteran flamebearer who had been doing this for years, rather than the terrified, somewhat overwhelmed kid, flametouched not an hour ago. It was pretty much this or attempt to pull out the spear in the confined space of the car—patently ridiculous—or spend precious mental energy on weaving a simple spell just for intimidation.
It did the trick. He scrambled out of the car, and I locked the doors behind him and refocused on the plan, pulling out my notebook and scrawling another glyph. Another first-order fully representable in 2D, another game-changer application of magic that laughed at the laws of physics. The lattice was a square inlaid with dots that concentrated toward the corners, surrounded by some parabolic swoops. I tore out the page and sat on it, then yanked the fire from my chest like I was starting a lawnmower.
Fuck me, that hurt. I was reasonably sure I had actually pulled a muscle or something. I made an ugly groaning noise as the flame twisted into the rough twine of lattice-able magic, and I pushed it into the glyph. I hoped that eventually the pain would become more manageable with practice—but at least the actual weaving was almost trivial when I had an actual glyph upon which to structure the lattice. As it was, the spell went off fine. What had I cast?
{AFFIX}
In essence, I had essentially glued my arse to the car. Stupid, low-tech, but a pretty potent metaphysical anchoring. It wasn’t like sewing my jeans to the car seat, it was a more fundamental attachment of ‘me’ to ‘the car’. They would have to either break the magic or physically cut apart the car to extract me; making me pass out wouldn’t undo it. Or they could torture me until I gave in and undid the magic on my own. I shoved aside the unpleasant thought; there was no time.
REPEAT: EXIT THE VEHICLE AND LAY ON THE GRASS. COOPERATE AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.
Fuck off. I didn’t know telepathy, but spite cost me nothing…though I probably wouldn’t be brave enough to say that in person if it came to that. How long had it been? A minute?
Back to the magic. That had been the easy part. Next, defense. Arguably, if this worked, the butt-gluing was mostly redundant, but this one was going to hurt and I felt better having something already in place for if I passed out.
To put my spear into my arm, I had {COMPOSED} the concept of ‘the spear’ onto the concept of ‘the (blood-space) on my arm’. Very abstract, very useful, very flexible—very difficult and dangerous to do on objects you’re currently sitting inside. Folding matter and space like that is the kind of thing it’s hilariously easy to kill yourself with if you make a mistake, telefragging some object directly inside you or shifting a slice of the space your body was occupying. I had needed blood magic to help stabilize the process the first time, creating a gap in my body for the spear to fill.
I glimpsed motion in the rearview mirror and glanced up to see an SUV pulling off the road behind me, black and white with unmistakable Peacies yellow accents. Fuck. I had no time to draw another glyph, and I didn’t trust myself to do this blind with the Frozen Flame alone; blood magic would again have to make up the difference. I could live without a few toes, maybe. Easy enough for the Spire to replace. That was a grim thought, but I was in full panic mode at this point, and the adrenaline would hopefully blunt the worst of the pain. There were better ways to do this with a more complex series of glyphs or more refined control of the thread, but I had the capacity for neither and no more time.
I pictured the lattice and started to weave my fraying twine, in my clumsy and unfamiliar way, sloppy and inefficient, working blind, remembering hundreds of times I had seen Vaetna and VNTs do this with elegance and trivial ease in luminous silk. I heard a car door slam shut behind me—forced it out of my mind. Keep weaving, imagine the funnel. Wrap it, pull it around. A tap on the window.
“Please step out of the car, sir.”
I looked at the PCTF operative, more military in appearance than police. Actually, it was more like an exoskeletal bomb suit, two and a half meters tall, aglow with magical enhancement and reinforcement. Something designed to withstand the full force of what I could throw at him, a stripped-down version of what had once been used to fight Vaetna. The precaution was reasonable, too; to him, I must have looked like a wild animal, hunted, cornered, face aglow in the white light of the thread I wove, some crazed spell surely intended to burn us all to ash. A manic grin spread across my face as the power of the Frozen Flame surged through me. Decidedly uncharacteristic, but in that moment, I held the cards.
“Make me.”
And I buried the car. Down, down—not that far down. Four meters from where it had been? Enough to be well and truly buried, but not into the bedrock or anything, nor deep enough that the soil would cause the windows or roof to collapse—I hoped. For a moment, my connection to the lattice made me aware that a dirt copy of the car sat where the real one just had. Then the magic broke, and it crumbled.
As did I. Screaming pain. I howled in the claustrophobic darkness, completely blind. Hot tears ran down my cheeks, burning compared to the icy aftershock of the magic pulsing through my head, one of the many chaotic side effects of magic cast with no regard for ripple. If that had been all, it would have been fine, compared to the alternative. But that had not been all—I had paid a far higher blood price than I had expected. I had sort of ‘offered’ three toes on my right foot, prioritizing them to be severed as a more abstract price than the direct mechanical function that the cut on my arm had served. I had miscalculated the price.
The magic had taken fully half of my right foot. All five toes and the ball of the foot, gone, blood pouring into the sock already. Some hazy part of my mind, drowning under the pain, observed that I would go into shock and bleed out if I didn’t deal with it right now. Once, seven years ago, I had been faced with a similar do-or-die in the face of pain so severe it obliterated all else—and I had failed.
Not this time. I refused. Despite the agony and the moaning sobs of incoherent suffering, I yanked the shoe off, and then the sock, slick blood coating my hands. I couldn’t bring myself to feel at the wound to determine the nature of the damage; I might pass out if I touched it, and then I was dead.
The bleeding had to stop. I called upon the Frozen Flame once more to perform its most basic nature. I focused through the pain, on the pain, demanding fire, so fundamental it had no glyph, no word in magic. I blubbered anyway.
“Fire. Give me fire.”
Nothing but my ichor trickling into the darkness. Had I just killed myself? All that to bleed out down here in the dark before any rescue could arrive?
“Flame. Please. Make it—go—away.”
It had killed my father, marred my body with its passage. It had been so beautiful in spite of that, transcendent, the spark of obsession. All those years holed up in my room, learning, idolizing, hoping—and now it had returned to me, fulfilled my dream. The flame had come to lift me up from the dark, after all I studied and proved that I would be able to wield it like nobody else. I was worthy.
But now, in this moment, when I needed it most—no fire came. This box was the same as things had always been. There was only me, begging for flame in the darkness. This had always been my destiny, an ignominious death as my flesh failed beneath me, true magic taunting me from beyond my grasp, unfettered by glyphs to bind it. At least let it end in fire, like how it had taken Dad.
“You can’t leave me like this. You—can’t. You chose me.”
The Frozen Flame didn’t respond. It didn’t care, of course.
Something animal inside me turned to seething rage, fueled by the torment and my looming mortality—and a sense of betrayal. How could it turn its back on me now? I flailed for the only thing that had allowed me to escape the pain before, when I had been flametouched—it brought more pain as the flesh was torn from my arm. But what was one more match in the inferno? I raised the spear as I had before. The darkness was claustrophobic, but also made the space around me seem vast and endless. Perhaps I wasn’t holding the real spear at all, and this was within my mind once again.
It all made a horrific, twisted kind of sense, the same awful perspective from before. The Frozen Flame was not an ally, barely even a weapon. It was an animal to be tormented, corralled, put to work. It struck people at random, and it was kill or be killed, control or be controlled. Except it did not fear death as we did—it would find a new Flamefall, a new host. It feared only pain. In that, it was like me. No wonder the PCTF treated us how it did.
My thoughts at the time weren’t nearly so rational or organized; I only made these connections after. I just wanted the pain to stop, and the most primitive part of me understood that inflicting pain—revenge—in turn upon this thing inside me would make that happen. So I seized my fate and stabbed.
Then, and only then, did I hear them again.
Doesn’t know any better—pain begets pain—why won’t you trust us?
Trust?
Flame burst from me, lighting up the interior of the car, the pooled blood reflecting an unearthly white above the crimson, casting flickering shadows impossibly dark. It had not ignited from my chest—the scars on my right arm were the source, a gauntlet of fire, a surefire sign that our first encounter seven years ago was somehow related to now. In that bleaching light, I saw the source of the agony: the front of my foot had been perfectly severed, as though sliced in a singular stroke by the blade of some chthonic arbiter. I hesitated for one eternal second, the animal part of me now cowering and cringing at the prospect of even more suffering. Then I grabbed the stump, and every sensation was overwhelmed by burning. I’m sure I screamed; the Peacies up above might have even heard it through meters of earth. Then everything went dark—well, even darker—and unconsciousness took me.
I would have died of oxygen deprivation, down there in the pitch blackness of the metal tomb I had made for myself, had Sky’s promised aid not come. I was obviously not aware of what had happened up above, nor how I was extracted from the dirt. But I was indeed rescued.
Just not by the Spire.
—
I stand at the edge of a vast body of water. The surface is frozen; there is movement below, brief sparks of light shooting across the depths. The shore I stand on is sandy—I turn and see a forest, trees impossibly tall, continuing out toward the mist shrouding either horizon, held back only by the narrow stretch of beach that matches it all the way across. The mist penetrates the trees as well, a gloom to confound all who enter.
The forest has no name, but I know the sea, so I walk off the beach and onto the ice. I look down through it. It is clear, and shiny, and I see my reflection staring back up at me. We lock eyes for a moment, and I wonder how thick the ice is, how hard I would have to strike it to break the barrier between us. A flicker illuminates him from below, another light from the depths that vanishes as quickly as it appeared. I return to scanning the horizon for something, anything. But there is only the sea, the beach, and the forest. Even the sky is empty, no sun or clouds.
Something thumps below my feet. I look down again and realize half of my foot is missing, bleeding onto the ice. It is a distant, abstract realization, not one of pain or even concern. The blood dyes the ice red, seeping down and through and into the water. The lights below come closer, circling, inspecting, snapping at one another. Not all are the same. Some are coils of luminous silk, others more like schools of pinpoints swarming together. A few are not creatures of their own at all, but merely appendages of something else, sent up from the inky depths to investigate.
Another thump, and the ice cracks.
—
I awoke in a bed, as I usually did. Not my bed, though, a hospital bed. A nice hospital bed, the kind of high-tech ICU that had benefited the most from magic’s arrival in the world. IVs and monitoring equipment shared room with bandages inscribed with complex interlinked glyphs, a few I recognized as second- or third-order as the fogginess of sleep retreated, things like {SUSTAIN} and {REVITALISE}. So whoever had me also had access to Frozen Flame magic. That boded somewhat poorly; I would have rather woken up in an entirely mundane hospital—or a ditch. I didn’t have the energy to be afraid.
Nothing hurt, which was testament to both the magic and the morphine. I gingerly began to move my limbs, which were being somewhat stubborn, asserting that they preferred to remain where they were. I eventually managed to extract my left arm and checked my forearm—my spear was there, which led me to a few observations.
First, I wasn’t cuffed or anything. I guessed they either trusted me to not cause a mess or trusted the magic to keep me from causing a mess. Fortunately for everyone, I wasn’t feeling very inclined to cause a mess until I knew who had me.
Second, they hadn’t siphoned the Frozen Flame from me, which filled me with…a modicum of relief. There had been a real chance that they could have just torn the magic from my soul and then released me back into the wild like a shark being hunted solely for its fin, forever crippled. Maybe that would have been better for the both of us. I hadn’t forgotten, this time.
Third—why was the IV drip labeled in Japanese? Some pieces began to come together in my brain, analytical and historical mind taking the stage while the emotional centers were exhausted.
When the Frozen Flame had first made its presence known, the immediate cultural comparison had been to superpowers. The Vaetna’s appearance and general disposition had compounded this, until they had made it quite, quite clear that for all their benevolence and general goodwill they were not classic paragon superheroes. They were associated with the Spire as a political entity in a way that the idealized superhero wasn’t—plus the armor and focus on bladed weaponry, it might be more accurate to call them knights. Of course, that didn’t stop people like me from being rabid fans, especially if we deeply identified with the Spire’s cause.
For other groups that harnessed the Frozen Flame, the zeitgeist had shifted somewhat. Cults cropping up around or otherwise worshiping Flamebearers were relatively common, but stranger groups also existed, especially outside of the Western metaculture. In this case, Japan had its own reference points for superhuman abilities and magic, and that had had very direct consequences on the way the Frozen Flame was both viewed and harnessed in east Asia.
Four years ago, a flamebearer and an anonymous Japanese billionaire had come to an agreement…or at least, it was assumed to be an agreement. Who knew what really had gone on behind closed doors. Regardless, they had given up their flame, distributed it, and in doing so had created—
A team of magical girls.
It hadn’t really been creation ex nihilo; the girls had been doing it since more or less the start of the age of magic, during the chaotic period of the firestorms, when there were few central organizations equipped to deal with flamefall. This had just made it official, given them resources and real notoriety. The Vaetna had generally been supportive and congratulatory, as had the world at large. It had all the elements of good PR—a willing sacrifice of personal power toward a greater goal, a collective ideal that was pretty unilaterally positive and emphasized doing good in the world, and a generally cleaner image than the Spire’s complicated and at times bloodsoaked humanitarianism-by-the-sword stance.
They were called Lighthouse, or Todai. Confusingly, ‘Todai’ was also a name for Tokyo University, but that had been part of the pun they had been founded on—all five members had been Tokyo U students at the time.
What was I doing in their medical ward? I felt it was a fairly safe bet that these had been Sky’s contact, which raised its own questions about how well-connected he was. Speaking of which, I fumbled for my phone, and was further relieved that it hadn’t been confiscated. I had…a lot of unread messages. I opened up the chatroom.
ezzen: I live, apparently.
starstar97: thank fuck
starstar97: its been a mess out there
starstar97: prove its you! whats the peak ripple ever recorded from one of heungs dives?
skychicken: lay off star, it’s them
ezzen: 96-orange over 3-silver. Do I need to also recount the pulse?
starstar97: yep its them lol :DDDDDD
starstar97: sky said you didnt make it to the spire
starstar97: but hes been very cagey about where you DID end up
ezzen: Can I share?
skychicken: youre as safe as youre gonna get other than the spire. so its your call
skychicken: not to overly show my hand but sapphire owes me a favor or two 😛
starstar97: :ooooo you literally never get less mysterious
starstar97: you doin ok e?
ezzen: Mostly…Hold on. I need to check something.
I slowly, gingerly, tried to move my toes, confirming what I had felt and seen in that momentary firelight.
ezzen: Let’s say I could be doing better.
ezzen: I am now the proud owner of only 15 digits.
starstar97: O.O
moth30: oh cool ez is alive lemme backscroll
moth30: what the fuck
starstar97: e what does that mean
moth30: WHAT THE FUCK
ezzen: Ok so to summarize
ezzen: I got caught by the PCTF
ezzen: Escaped, but had to do a liiiiiiiittle sanguimancy.
ezzen: And lost the front half of my right foot.
ezzen: Not entirely sure how I got here, actually.
moth30: feels like you should be more fucked up about this
ezzen: Pretty sure that’s the drugs. We’ll see o.O
starstar97: DDDDDD:
ezzen: Hold on, nurse is here.
At least, I assumed that the short, slender robot was the nurse. I wondered which Radiance’s magic was animating this one.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Colliot.”
Great, they knew my last name. And presumably everything else about me.
“Dalton is, uh, fine.”
I was more than a little thrown off by its appearance. In a mercifully non-anime way, its design was sleek and sexless, and its movements had a grace and deft touch that I usually associated with the Vaetna. The smooth, curved panel on the front of its head displayed a distinctly feminine and Japanese face.
“Please call me Ebi. How are you feeling?”
The question felt a little moot; Ebi was surely linked directly into my various vital monitors. I supposed the question was more of a qualitative one.
“Not in much pain. Two out of ten? A bit miffed about my foot. How long have I been here?”
“Seventeen hours, plus two hours in transit from where you were recovered.”
Two hours was a weird number, too long for a single teleport but too short for most conventional transport. It meant either a hypersonic airlift—something Todai probably did have access to—or more likely some kind of series of telehops, given how quickly they had gotten to me in the first place. Britain to Tokyo was not a trivial journey either way. I frowned. That was a lot of resources to spend on one flamebearer, especially now that I had come down from that pain-induced sense of importance and feeling that I was chosen. How much influence did skychicken wield? For a moment I entertained the idea that he was the secret billionaire who had started Lighthouse, but I really felt like we would have seen more hints of that in the years of knowing one another. I stowed that line of suspicion for now.
“And how was I recovered? Or, I guess—why was I taken here and not the Spire?”
“Politics.”
It—she—had said it with such bite that I was absolutely certain she was fully sentient. Had the singularity happened and nobody had noticed?
“You’re—a real AI.”
“Maybe!”
Great, she was screwing with me. A new voice came from outside the room. “I’m here too!”
A woman bounded into the room. I identified her instantly—Hina Suzuki, Radiance Sapphire. Not in uniform or transformation, but still stylishly dressed in a blouse and skirt, hair done up in a way that kept most of it out of the way but still framed her face with soft brown hair. Gorgeous, unsurprisingly; all of the Radiances were distractingly attractive. It was part of their brand. The biggest giveaway of her identity was the impossibly brilliant azure of her eyes, so intense it made the blue sky outside the window grey by comparison. The mark of white ripple, maybe, like the sense of instability Sahan projected onto everything around him by contrast.
She engulfed Ebi in a huge hug and then practically zipped around the room, inspecting everything, before crouching at the foot of my bed, a puppy ready to play. The voice didn’t quite match the face—there was a layer of huskiness, like she was speaking in a lower register than she was used to.
“How’s your foot?”
“It’s…not?”
The vibrant energy vanished from her for a moment, and she gave a single, solemn nod. Then she returned to practically bouncing around the room.
“We’ll work on that. So, so, so soso—you want to know what happened, right? Here’s how it went. We all saw the Flamefall, right? The ripple was so weird, probably ‘cause it went through the camera to hit you, and then the second one a little later was probably that binding on your arm—that’s cool, by the way, you should show Ai when she’s around so she can do it right—and right after I got a message from J—from our friend to come pick you up. I had to dig you out, y’know!”
She paused, tilting her head. The moment dragged on, my habitual inability to maintain eye contact warring with the way my gaze was drawn toward those sapphire irises. She was standing next to my bed, now, seeming entirely disinterested in continuing to speak. It was so awkward—I had to say something.
“Uh, sorry. Didn’t have other ideas.”
She immediately began speaking again. Apparently it had been my turn?
“It was neat! I mean, you would have been screwed without me, but—anyway I was going to take you to the Spire, but then the ripple went all BOOM! and then there were Vaetna and then a Peacie gunship showed up and they almost started shooting at each other but then Sani showed up and started yelling about more flamefalls and—”
She stopped. Squinted at me. “I’m going too fast.”
I rubbed my face. The Vaetna had shown up after all? “Please back up.”
I meant it both in terms of the events and the fact that she had been progressively inching toward me as she talked until she had just been a couple inches away. I was too drugged and rattled from the day’s events—yesterday’s, rather—and some of the other things she had just said to really be embarrassed by the closeness, but she was…a lot.
“Okay, from the beginning. How did you get to where I was so fast?”
She waved her hand. “I was in Dublin for a thing. Wait—you’re not supposed to know that. I didn’t say anything.” She grinned. Ebi facepalmed, a soft clunk. “You’re here because the Spire is kind of a little bit at war now. Maybe.”
I chewed on this for a bit. Still not quite getting an emotional response. Maybe I had broken something inside me when I had used the Flame again, when I had realized the cruelty of what I was doing.
“As in…Dubai levels of ‘at war’? Raising levels?”
“Kinda? Ripple has been going crazy all day. Sani basically said to take you back here until it blows over.”
I nodded slowly at that. This was the second-best outcome, really. “Other flamefalls?”
She bounced, nervous. “Three, right after yours.”
“Where?”
She shook her head, reddish-brown hair going everywhere, not unlike a dog shaking itself dry. “Doesn’t matter. You do.”
I rubbed my face again. She looked expectantly at me—I realized she was prompting me. “How do you mean?”
“You’re unprecedented! Through the camera? Crazy stuff. The Vaetna want to know, too. Everyone does. But that’s for later. For now, get better! We’ll give you a real checkup, for your Light—uh, Flame. We’ll figure out something for your foot, too.”
I processed this. “Alright…the Flame stuff I understand, and I’m grateful, but…even the foot? Taking me across the world? Why?”
Flamebearers were important, valuable, but not that important. She tapped her chin theatrically. Something glinted in her eyes.
“Hmmmm. Why do you think, Ezzen?”
I froze. My mouth went dry. In some ways, I had always hoped for this moment, to be recognized face-to-face for my knowledge and passion for magic and the Vaetna. But the thing leaning over my bed was not a Vaetna, for all the similarities. She had suddenly changed completely, from the excitable puppy to something else. She grinned and leaned in real close. Too close. Her breath tickled my lips. There was something coiled and vicious behind her eyes. Terror gripped me.
“Because we know who you are, and that makes you interesting.”
I shivered, the sudden fear having jarred my emotions back into operation. Her smile was more like bared teeth, fangs for tearing into flesh and crushing bone. I had never seen those in any video or photo of her. Something at the back of my brain recategorized her as a hyena, not a dog. Where had Ebi gone? How could she leave me alone with this…thing? She went on.
“You’ve got magical knowledge on the same level as any of us, and newly come into your Light. And you’ve already passed the two hardest tests that any of us face: you’re still human and still free.”
I wasn’t even sure she was human, for all she wore a woman’s shape. Too many things were just a little off, this close. Aside from the teeth, her eyes were a bit too big; the edges of those blue irises looked almost stitched.
“And you’ve already had close contact with the Flame once. Sorry about your dad, I guess.” There was some real pity in her voice, there, but then the predatory mania returned. “And the way you did it! Stabbing yourself to master the inferno? The blood magic! Cauterizing yourself—controlling your Light directly! Do you have any idea how good at this you could be, with time, with training?”
She practically purred that last word, advancing further on me, sensual and nightmarish despite having never lost that playful edge to her voice. I was paralyzed, prey before something full of teeth. I had felt safer bleeding in the dark. The way I had hurt my Flame to control it, the grand and horrible revelation that this was what magic was for us—this side of her seemed a natural fit for that. She advanced on me even further to whisper in my ear, her body heat a silent temptation—of what? She could kill me in an instant, if she wanted.
“You matter now. The ripple says so, and everyone will know by the time you’re out of here. The war isn’t about you, not yet—but it will be, eventually, once they figure out who you are. You’re a bunch of special things in one package. It’s so exciting.”
Something clicked inside my brain. Why would the Vaetna not have simply taken me back to the Spire? They had a standing policy of asylum for Flamebearers, and it had been obvious I was headed there. And with the way she was acting, this chilling demeanor beneath her peppy veneer—the war? Was I really worth so much? Taken together—the fear sublimated into action, a need to defend myself. My spear was in my hand, the point at her throat, blood dripping from my trembling arm onto the sheets.
“Get away from me.”
It was an empty threat, realistically speaking, but she shed the predatory energy in an instant. She leaned back, cocking her head at the speartip, a friendly dog with too much energy once more.
“Ooh, look at that! Actual…” she snapped her fingers, searching for the word, the first time she had seemed anything but completely fluent. “Ripple warping? That sounds right.” Her eyes ran down the haft to look at the gash on my arm. For a moment, the monster was back again, looking at the wound downright amorously. “Seriously, ask Ai to fix that for you. We can get a proper tat binding for that in like half an hour.”
“You abducted me.” I practically choked the words out.
She shrugged. “What? Nah. It was a rescue!”
“Then why not the Spire?” Sani wouldn’t have told her to take me here.
“I told you. You’re Ezzen! You have so much more potential than some random office worker. Even if you weren’t the guy who wrote all those papers, or if you weren’t the first case of a second-contact flametouched—I’d still want to get ahead of the game. We could train you up, make a Radiance out of you.”
What?
Seriously, what?
I had always wanted to wield magic; formal training of any kind would be a dream come true. But the fantasy had always been to do so with the Spire, as a Vaetna. Joining another group, even one with a good reputation like Lighthouse, had hardly even entered my mind. I wanted smooth carapace and the dance of blades, not ribbons and heart-shaped explosions. That was Star’s fantasy. And besides, Radiances—that was, the members of Lighthouse—were magical girls. Was this all a hilarious misunderstanding? I certainly didn’t look particularly masculine. I half-lowered the spear.
“You. Um. You did do your reading on me, right?”
“Dalton Colliot, 20 years old. Born to Samantha and Carpenter Colliot in Bristol, UK. Lived in Philadelphia between the ages of 8 and 13, then went back to Bristol after father died by inferno. Goes by ‘Ezzen’ online, Vaetna superfan and magical expert. What did I miss?”
“Male.”
She let out a sigh, breezy, as though this fact of my identity was an inconvenience of circumstance. Like a traffic jam, or finding that you were out of milk. “So?”
“I figured that’d matter.”
“Not as much as you’d think. You wouldn’t be the first.”
It wasn’t much of an offer—they essentially had me hostage. Did the Vaetna know? They must—maybe that was what she had meant about the war, or maybe that was purely a function of my existing level of magical knowledge. I had to get out of here. But at the same time…the Vaetna weren’t taking new members; it was unclear if that was a ‘couldn’t’ or ‘wouldn’t’. Lighthouse apparently was, the gender thing notwithstanding. This was an opportunity to live a version of my dream, if a slightly altered one.
She trotted toward the door, stopping to turn those too-blue eyes on me again. “Also, seriously, if absolutely nothing else, please tell me you’ll get Ai to look at that. Blood’s a great look on you, but that just comes off as amateurish. You were in a hurry, I guess. Later!”
And she was gone, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the spreading patch of crimson on the sheets. I put away the spear, chewing on the conversation, grateful at the painkillers still in my system.
All in all, I was safe…ish. Safer than being out on the road, at least. But Hina had been terrifying for those few moments. What was she? Was that what using the Flame turned you into, if it was really as cruel and basal of a process as it had felt? That was followed by a moment of terrible suspicion—what if the Vaetna were like that too, hidden beneath it all?
That thought was too unpleasant to stomach, so I resisted the urge to derail into it, returning to contemplating the cause-and-effect. It could be the other way around—a filtering effect where only the ones with the capacity to be…like that…achieved real power and notoriety. Both? I didn’t want to be that. Did I have a choice? The voice—voices? more than one?—had implied I was doing it wrong. Trust? There was some hope in that, maybe, but that raised the further question of who or what the hell that had been. The Frozen Flame didn’t talk.
Also—“you wouldn’t be the first.” What did that mean?
I would find out soon enough.
Author’s Note:
Thanks to the beta readers: Softies, Zak, Maria, Cassiopeia. You guys rock.
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
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7 AM. I refreshed the page. Shouldn’t it be starting now? The stream chat to the right of the video player was already rushing by too fast to pick out more than a few individual messages, meaningless blurbs to the tune of “GET HYPE GET HYPE” and “SPAM THIS 🌳 TO HELP BRI,” the simulated roaring chants of a crowd a hundred and twenty thousand strong rather than any actual discussion. I refreshed the page again, and the video buffered for a moment—then it was live.
“Hello hello, everybody!”
The video feed was drone footage from a few meters overhead of two figures on a platform extruded from a milky white cliff face. The downward angle revealed that there was nothing below the platform. No ground, no sea, just mist and darkness. Even through the screen, the scene gripped me with vertigo and a sense of roiling dread in my stomach. It was a long, long way down to the water. Neither figure wore safety harnesses of any sort, but they didn’t need it, instead ensheathed in carapace of the same color as the cliff. The speaker was standing, waving energetically up at the camera. Heung the Heron, my favorite of the ten Vaetna.
More proper commentary from my friends, the inner circle of ‘serious’ fans and the forums’ minor internet celebrities, scrolled along my second monitor, a private chatroom for more civilized and in-the-know discourse than the crowd of randoms in the stream’s public chat.
starstar97: hey its e’s boyfriend
ezzen: oi
ezzen: I’m more normal about him than you are about Heliotrope.
starstar97: oTL
moth30: it’s true. hes more like ezzens dad :3
ezzen: oTL
starstar97: moth! >:(
moth30: oh right
moth30: sorry ez
Well. For a given value of ‘more civilized’. It was lighthearted teasing, safe enough with them, but the inadvertent reference to Dad’s death still stung.
On the stream, Heung was pacing.
“I’m here with Bri way up at 14000 feet—that’s 4300 meters—on the Spire’s south face. It’s a balmy thirteen degrees F, minus nine C, and we’re here today to splice in some new spool. This section,” he gestured at the cliff face, “is pretty much straight through the skin from the arboretum, which is why we’re doing this outside today, because Reggy would kill us for doing it next to his magnolias. Bri, want to walk them through how this is going to work?”
“Sure thing! So, like most every flamebearer, we Vaetna use magic by turning our Flame into thread and weaving it into glyphs for ripple control. Today, though, we’re going to be making some structural upgrades to the Spire by feeding that thread directly into the spools for more programmatic changes to the lattice. Today, that’s going to be spool sixteen, and the best access point is—”
I zoned out of Brianna’s explanation. It was intended for the average person who knew little to nothing about magic, whereas we on the forums already knew all this and had worked out what today’s stream would consist of when the announcement had gone up a week ago. I glanced over at my second monitor again.
starstar97: told ya. high throughput splice, direct v link. spool 16
starstar97: ds, whats on that spool right now?
ezzen: I mean, when they said it would be Bri, it was going to be this or a rain step demo 😛
ezzen: She’s lowest % latticed rn.
DendriteSpinner: @starstar97 lower habitation and some of the manufacturing, so it makes sense they’re putting more of the same for this round of expansions
ezzen: But yeah. Check out how she’s moving the dermis.
ezzen: That’s not even glyph-based!
ezzen: This shit is so rad.
On the one hand, this was routine, and not even the construction proper; more like mixing concrete. But I was very interested in what she was actually doing, pulling away layers of the cliff face—the Spire’s skin—to reveal raw lattice circuitry. She put her hand toward the surface, and the shell-like material would flow outward and away, like water below a helicopter. Eventually, she fell silent, and Heung picked up.
“I’m seeing a lot of you guys wondering how safe we are up here. Well—”
He stepped over to the ledge of the platform they had grown from the Spire’s skin and peered over dramatically. He made a show of ‘tripping’ and falling halfway off, arms windmilling, before regaining his balance and sitting with his legs dangling over the ledge. He beckoned the camera down, to a sidelong view of him facing out toward the void above the pre-dawn Atlantic. He pulled his iconic spear from nowhere and slung it over his shoulders, talking to the camera idly while Bri worked.
“Short answer, it’s fine. Even if one of us did somehow fall, terminal velocity isn’t terminal for us. Me and Bri could probably survive it even without our carapaces. Most of us could.”
“Except Mayari,” Bri muttered.
Heung ignored that. “Of course, most of you aren’t really asking about the altitude, more about the odds we’ll get company, with some of the dermis opened up like this. That’s the main reason I’m out here even though Bri could totally do this herself. Buddy system.”
I sipped some hot chocolate and curled up in my seat, the warmth of the drink providing respite from the frigid winter air that always leaked in through the poor seal of my windows. No coffee for me; it had never done much, and I preferred sweet to bitter this early in the morning. My monitors’ light bathed the otherwise-dark room, glinting off the mug’s rim and the Spire’s symbol printed on its exterior: a simplified design of its silhouette crisscrossed with cutouts representing the thread from which it was woven. My own spear, propped against the desk, cast a long shadow across the room, shrouding Heung and Mayari in the poster of the ten’s helmets that was affixed over my bed. I shifted it slightly so that the shadow fell instead on a blank patch of wall.
Other posters adorned the walls: diagrams of the Spire, stylized lexicons of the first-order glyphs, and that era-defining shot of Sani facing the White House, sword in hand. A bookshelf next to my desk was stuffed to the brim with the burgeoning body of literature on magical theory, the short history of the Vaetna, and my own notebooks. I thought figurines were a bit tacky, but I did have bits of scattered memorabilia from the local Gate’s merch shop the only time I had gone. A t-shirt with a stylized image of a heron lay at the top of the laundry pile on the floor.
Heung’s comment about them getting company was just for the cameras, probably. I couldn’t imagine anybody would be stupid enough to try something today, not with Heung himself out here…although part of me was hoping we’d get some action. Obviously, I’d be horrified at a serious attack, but Heung was…so cool, and part of me itched to see him move.
He sat comfortably over the hazy abyss, his spear now in his lap. He always seemed light as a feather in his movements, as if gravity were more of a game than a law. My own motions were ugly, jerking things compared to the singular striking grace of the Heron, a gap in natures that no amount of training could overcome, mirrored in my own spear’s wooden frame—painstakingly hand-carved from a cheap two-by-four—versus the elegant, onyx-tipped manifested lattice of the Spire’s most iconic vaet.
There was an envy there beyond the aesthetic; some basic part of me looked at him and wept that I would never be able to move like that. When it came to the Vaetna, Heung especially, resigned envy was an emotion so familiar as to be nostalgic. Still, it was good to have role models.
starstar97: e, stop eyefucking your spear
DendriteSpinner: lol
DendriteSpinner: are you?
ezzen: Aaaaaa. Fuck you, star.
She knew me too well.
Bri had gotten the prep work done, and Heung directed the camera over her shoulder to show what she was doing. The internal lattices that made up the Spire’s structure, raw threads of magic woven into lattice, were dizzying to look at directly. Four-dimensional, rhythmically shifting crosshatches and organic shapes that made your head hurt, forms of exotic matter like time crystals woven through more conventional solids with superfluids flowing between, almost flaunting how advanced the Spire’s construction was compared to conventional, mundane engineering. It was entrancingly beautiful, and mysterious even to me—I had practically written the book on modern LM theory, and I could still barely make sense of what I was seeing. Bri’s commentary was welcome, now.
“That’s a backflow modulator—redundant, actually—that’s piping which jumps to here, and then comes up through some of these projectors and this {RHYTHM} chunk, these are the primary and secondary {MANIFEST} branes, and we go back and back to,” her finger stopped tracing at a black orb so dark it was like a void in reality, “the spool interface. I’m going to thread into it now.”
I watched, rapt, as her entire arm jerked and blurred before igniting with blinding white sparks, which flickered chaotically for a moment before aligning in spiky patterns like ferrofluid clinging to a magnet. The glob of magic twisted and twisted and twisted, growing thinner and denser, until it was a single thread of magic coming off a spool on her arm. The thread lashed for a moment before launching itself into the black orb. I clipped the last 20 seconds of footage and dropped it in the chatroom.
ezzen: Putting this here for later.
moth30: hm
moth30: 0:11 thats a type 1 display. no wonder theyre renovating
moth30: 0:14 oh and that’s why she called the modulator redundant lol
moth30: no way for it to go back upstream with this flow
ezzen: Redundant but not useless I think
ezzen: Sudden tug on the lattice from spool overdraw could definitely get enough upstream ripple for it to hit the mod
ezzen: Given how first-gen that display is. Orange third lol
The public chat was far faster-moving and less technically-minded, mostly spamming about the pretty colors. My eyes picked a random message from the flow, a hate comment saying “JUSTICE FOR DUBAI,” but it was swept away instantly.
The Vaetna sat back on her haunches as the luminous thread fed into the orb of nothingness. “And now we wait. Time for that Q&A, H?”
“Yeah! First up…”
The stream overlay shifted, a question running along the bottom. I sat up in my chair. Last night, I had gotten a notification from skychicken—the owner of the forum I spent most of my time on and our private chatroom—that some of my own discussions and theories had been viewed by an upper Spire IP address.
DendriteSpinner: fingers crossed, ez
“This one comes from Twitter. Bri, what’s your favorite animal?”
Damn. Not mine, and trite to boot. Starting with a softball, probably. The others agreed.
moth30: boring
moth30: shes just gonna say mantis shrimp. or bees or something
“I’ve always really loved mantis shrimp. But that’s on my Wikipedia, I think—so for the sake of a more interesting answer, let’s say…the leafcutter ant, Atta cephalotes. They cultivate fungus! Hm. Is it boring for a Vaetna to say my favorite animal is a eusocial insect? It feels boring. ‘Wow, they work together to build stuff, no wonder they like them.’ I stand by it, though.”
starstar97: thats bri, lol
starstar97: but at least its better than
starstar97: (watch this)
Heung laughed. “You don’t gotta be self-conscious about it, better answer than mine. I would have just said—”
“Herons. Shocker, that.”
I rolled my eyes too. The chatroom tittered at star’s prediction, so obvious she hadn’t even needed to say it. He had a brand. His fingers played in the air, working some invisible-to-us readout.
“Alright, next up, from Reddit this time—Who’s got your favorite rain step?”
“This is harassment,” she sighed.
Of the ten Vaetna, Bri was one of only two who couldn’t perform the maneuver.
“What? Naaah. I would never—” He danced out of the way of Bri’s free fist, laughing, twisting over the edge of the platform in a way which should have sent him tumbling down. “Seriously, I’m not the one who picked these. Go beat up Sani.”
She sighed. “Well, it’s not him. Hm.”
I was quite partial to Heung’s rain step for its directness; couldn’t get hit by the raindrops—or bullets—if your entire being was momentarily concentrated to a single thrust of the spear. But I was a fanboy like that. Could do with the imagery there being a little less phallic, but if that were a dealbreaker for me, I wouldn’t be obsessed with the five-mile-tall shaft sticking out of the North Atlantic.
“I guess…well, the type I want to do is like Kat’s, how she splits. But in terms of elegance, it’s gotta be Sahan.”
She put some footage on the stream overlay to illustrate her point. In a shaky cell phone video, Katya splintered into a thousand shards which floated in the rough approximation of a person as they darted around like a school of hyperactive fish. She walked through a stream of bullets at an almost leisurely pace in contrast to the frenzied dance of her constituent particles. In the other clip, Sahan simply moved through a stream of energy, implacable. Something about him was more vivid, more real, than anything else on the screen—including the two Vaetna in the live feed.
Heung chuckled. “I still have no idea how he does that.”
I rolled my eyes.
ezzen: Lying through his goddamn teeth.
ezzen: We SAW him do the same kind of {NULL}-{GRASP} last year.
ezzen: Although ig he probably can’t snapweave it.
_twilitt: thats still just your theory ez
starstar97: a vaetna theory!
starstar97: but if anybody outside the vaetna would know itd be e
ezzen: >/////~/////<
ezzen: anybody can learn about this stuff
Bri shrugged, adjusting how she sat. The spool was thinning out as it vanished into the orb, joining with the Spire’s own lattice. “It’s, uh, force-of-will bullshit. I can’t do it either, obviously, but the ripple speaks for itself.”
That, at least, was undeniable; calculating out the exact values was wholly unnecessary when even witnessing a recording of the technique made the reality of the room around me feel fragile and uncertain by comparison. White ripple made manifest; the reality of unreality. Heung nodded appreciatively.
“That it does. Didn’t he try to teach you?”
That was rhetorical; “vaetna gets hit in the face by a tennis ball for six minutes” had like 170 million views on YouTube. Brianna’s pout was visible despite the fact that her expression was completely concealed in her carapace. Heung leaned back to pat her head; she swatted his hand away, in good spirits.
“Alright, alright. Next up…”
My heart stopped as I saw the words on the screen. My own. A nerd question, the kind of thing that wasn’t a crowd-pleaser, meaning that someone—Sani, apparently—had thought it was genuinely worth answering on its own technical merits, or maybe for a funny anecdote.
“From ‘Ezzen’ on the forums: What was the rationale for switching from pink-green-blue to silver-blue-pink schemas on current-gen lattice displays?”
starstar97: LETS FUCKIN GO E
_twilitt: no way ezzen you made it
DendriteSpinner: hell yeah
DendriteSpinner: hopefully this will put an end to that fucking thread
ezzen: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
_twilitt: ‘breaking: “why is little magic light pink and not blue?” thread locked after 1394 pages of heated debate, death threats; turns out it was just a typo’
ezzen: Ugh don’t even joke.
skychicken: told you they were looking, ez
starstar97: hi sky!
Bri made a clicking noise. “Been a while since we had one of their questions on.”
One year, five months, and two days, in fact; they had shouted out one of my papers where I had mathed out some third-order chains by hand and proven that GWalk wasn’t calculating blue ripple correctly under some circumstances. That had been entirely theoretical, though. By contrast, this question concerned the way a core component of the Spire’s circuitry functioned. While this was cause for me and my friends to celebrate, the public chat was starting to fill with sleep emojis and other indications of boredom. The average viewer had no appreciation for the fine art of ripple management, despite the fact that it underpinned all magical technology.
“Okay, so: I was overruled on this when we were working out the schemas initially. The resonances we use to turn ripple measurements into colored light for the displays were picked a little bit at random the first time, since we didn’t yet understand how they affected throughput across channels, and my opinion had—” She stopped talking, helm flicking in a blur to the right, then up. “Incoming.”
Heung made a burst of chatter, in the high-density language the Vaetna used to communicate in the span of milliseconds. The stream’s audio was a garbled mess for half a second as they argued. It can’t have been that serious or sensitive, since he threw up a translated transcription onscreen after the fact.
H: I didn’t hear anything.
B: Big ripple, two klicks up. Sounded like the Dubai splash.
H: I’d have heard that. I’ll check anyway, but…
B: Not sure it’s an attack. Flamefall, maybe? We’re due.
H: Not in its shadow. Sit tight.
Then he vanished from the frame. The camera panned up after a moment to show the hole he had punched in the clouds. Then it adjusted back down to Bri. The spool on her arm had lost much of its volume now, probably two-thirds of the way done with the process. Her dagger had appeared in her free hand, a long, killing thing that would more resemble a shortsword if not for the way she held it like a knife fighter. She really put the vaet in Vaetna.
ezzen: Someone clip that? Check the TL?
DendriteSpinner: im on it
starstar97: ooh, “not in its shadow” is a fun translation
starstar97: a little poetic
DendriteSpinner: looks accurate.
Dendrite was the lead maintainer of Ungarble, the software people used to translate Vaetna chatter. “People” included major organizations like the PCTF, so he was arguably a bigger deal than me when it came to practical Vaetna-related stuff. I just liked glyphs.
skychicken: if it IS like the dubai inferno we’re in for a show
moth30: hey maybe we dont joke about dubai?
ezzen: Yeah, I feel sorta bad for being excited.
skychicken: fair enough, sorry
starstar97: meh, action is action 😀
Bri looked at the camera, unworried despite her blade being bared. “Well, looks like you guys are getting some action. Not that we’ll see anything from here, probably.”
The public chat was now going crazy, of course, far more excited for this than for the technical details she’d been explaining. Lots of people wanted her to send the camera after Heung, to follow the action, but she shrugged. No point. He was faster than it.
Silence on the screen for a few seconds. Then—
“He sees something. Confirming—it is flamefall…second confirmation from Mayari. The fuck? Check this out.”
She tossed some diagrams on screen, marking a trajectory over a map of the waters surrounding the Spire. After a moment, ghostly trails of other historical flamefalls were superimposed onto it. For the most part, they moved north-south, but this one was going east-west.
DendriteSpinner: not dubai
starstar97: lol it got lost
“Sadly, it’s high enough up that I’m not expecting fireworks. So…where was I? Right, so the initial colors were pink-green-orange, and we eventually went with pink-green-blue after the first expansion because orange third was a hassle if the free ripple was too high—”
I had a notetaking document on my second monitor, fingers blazing across the keyboard as I copied down what she was saying, and was also recording this part of the stream locally so I could review it later. This kind of historical knowledge of the Spire’s internal systems was my passion, my specialty, and not usually the kind of thing that got covered in what little formal literature yet existed. I was so engrossed that I missed the moment that the little readout tracking the flamefall’s progress reversed direction, coming back east toward the Spire from where it had been blazing west toward the Gulf of Mexico.
It all happened fast. Bri blurred, and the air distorted. Later, I’d realize that that was when she had thrown her knife, and the subsequent static noise and way the frame wobbled had been the sonic boom and shockwave. “Okay, maybe it is an attack.” She made another screech of Vaetna-speak, and after a moment—
A bolt of lightning punched down through the clouds. But it wasn’t lightning, it was the Heron diving toward the rogue Flame. He lanced through it—
A light like the dawn, an aurora on fast-forward as two shards of the Frozen Flame met in a ripple of splintering fate—
One remaining spark screaming toward the camera—
Voices.
Ashes—Did we—Ten becomes—Thread—Across the weft, not just the—Oh, of course it’d be—Bind it—It will hurt. Tell them we’re sorry.
Something hit me in the chest. I floated for a moment that seemed to last minutes. Then I hit something and fell to the floor. I was dazed, the breath knocked from my lungs.
Then I realized I was on fire.
I became a writhing animal. I couldn’t think, couldn’t even muster the coherence to stop, drop, and roll. I was so cold. I had to escape it, had to get it off, had to GET IT OFF GET IT OFF—I scrambled for my water bottle and poured it over my face to drown the pain. Nothing happened. I just got colder. It was all like before, like seven years ago, fire upon my flesh—but this time, it was also inside me.
I couldn’t get the flame off my skin, so it had to go. Anything to escape the pain. I clawed at my face, and the skin peeled away. But I was still burning underneath it, so I kept going, flensing away muscle and fat, ripping off my nose in a desperate craze to escape. The fire was all over me, inside me, in my bones. I tore out my eye and tossed it aside to dig into my brain to smother the flames. Everything hurt and I was still burning and it was never going to end, a moment of agony frozen to extend forever. I was desperately scrabbling at the ruined, blackened flesh of my face. Pain and pain and pain and why wouldn’t it stop hurting me—
A moment of bizarre clarity. My remaining eye locked onto my spear. I grabbed it, angled it toward me. I hesitated, some rational, cowering part of my mind blossoming into understanding as my perspective of what was happening to me shifted. Bri’s words. Maybe it is an attack. The memory of something lancing through what had been my father.
I plunged the spear up, into my empty eye socket, to kill the fire that had taken root inside my soul—
I woke up crumpled on the far side of my room, gasping. I couldn’t move for a few seconds, still reeling from whatever had just happened to me. My hand sluggishly roamed across my body. Whole. Unburnt, other than the old scars. Everything hurt, though. And I was still holding my spear in my other hand. What had happened?
I tried to collect myself. I had been on fire. Flamefall—the Frozen Flame. The essence of magic. It had gone through the camera and hit me. If I hadn’t stopped it—it would have been an inferno, like Dad, like so many others.
Had I stopped it? I felt like I was forgetting something.
More pressing question—me only? The stream was still going, the monitor showing Heung crouched in front of the camera and poking at it. I stumbled across the room to slide my headphones back on. I was greeted by more bursts of static as the Vaetna spoke to one another, no on-screen transcription this time, a jump in security. Dendrite was providing translation soon after, though, so apparently no encryption or anything.
DendriteSpinner: “—no clue what that was.”
DendriteSpinner: “Huge ripple. Why’d […] go for the camera?”
DendriteSpinner: “The audience? But the chat’s still going, so it wasn’t distributed.”
The Vaetna were reaching the same conclusion I had. Flamefalls struck people, not machinery, and they had correctly assumed that it had gone after one of the viewers. Why me? Because it had been my question? Or, more likely yet more unbelievably—the embers of my old dream had come true: I had somehow been marked the first time, seven years ago, and now the Frozen Flame had come to collect. Both?
The public stream chat was already filling up with people saying ‘IT WAS ME’. Vultures. With shaking hands, I began to write.
ezzen: it hit me
_twilitt: wtf
_twilitt: no bullshit?
ezzen: i was
ezzen: on fire
starstar97: holy shit. u ok? did you just get flametouched?
ezzen: idk
ezzen: I’m fine I think?
ezzen: Sorry, still coming down.
DendriteSpinner: proof? i believe you but
starstar97: ds they just got fuckin FLAMETOUCHED, lay off
DendriteSpinner: sorry
DendriteSpinner: gonna look for similar cases
ezzen: Dw, no harm done I think.
moth30: you should really post on the forum
moth30: THE ezzen just got flametouched
moth30: what are the fuckin odds
Quite low; roughly one in two hundred million given the average number of flamefalls per year, and the essentially random distribution. I looked around, did another once-over of my body. I was untouched, but—
ezzen: I think I stopped ignition by stabbing myself with my spear.
On top of that first number, one in five flamefalls became infernos.
ezzen: It didn’t actually do anything to me, but look.
I sent a photo of the wooden tip of my spear, cast in stark shadow by the light of the monitors. It had been warped, blackened by heat, almost charred, but more than that, it had taken on a strange, lumpy texture along the surface, like an icicle half-melted and refrozen a dozen times through winter. It…fuzzed, a bit, at the edges, like my eyes couldn’t decide where it ended and the air around it began.
ezzen: Ripple warping, right? Am I going crazy?
_twilitt: holy shit
starstar97: damn, frozen AND flame
moth30: yeah that’s legit
DendriteSpinner: confirming, that looks a hell of a lot like the rebar from the st louis ff in 2018
DendriteSpinner: no damage to your room though?
ezzen: No. All in my head I guess?
ezzen: I’ll go make that post.
starstar97: e
starstar97: THINK
starstar97: if youre a flamebearer now you gotta fucking move
starstar97: you gotta get the fuck over to a gate unless you want the peacies or zeroday or whoever to fist your entire ass
She was right. Bad things happened to Flamebearers in the open. They—we?—were too valuable, as ammunition or batteries or ingredients, consumable resources for the novel and terrible war machines of a world newly come into magic. And that was the good scenario, one where I wasn’t devoured by the flame and became a rampaging thing of magic and fire that had to be put down. I had to assume I had already gotten past that point by stabbing myself.
I had fantasized for years about what would happen if I were flametouched, chosen by whatever idiot divinity governed these things, going to the Spire and becoming a Vaetna. All of us had; this group self-selected for that kind of person. But now that it was actually happening, the depth of danger and my own unpreparedness were coming into stark clarity. Outside the swaddling comfort of an idealized dream, the sharp edges of danger were pressing into my psyche, making me jumpy, panicky, uncertain. I had defaulted to making a forum post. Some of the others had given it more serious thought, though.
skychicken: agreed with star, that ship might have already sailed
skychicken: this has just gotten big and dangerous and beyond our paygrade
skychicken: assuming of course you ARE flametouched which might not actually be the case
moth30: CHECK THE STREAM
“—again, we have a hotline for reporting magic events, including flamefall. So if you know anything about what just happened or who was involved, number and link are onscreen…now.”
starstar97: no point
starstar97: itll just get flooded by false reports
moth30: man what the fuck is happening
starstar97: ikr
starstar97: this is some movie shit
My conscious, rational mind was catching up with the panic. Of course, the Vaetna knew that direct reporting mechanisms would get inundated to the point of uselessness, but there wasn’t much else to do until they could backtrace the ripple toward me. And other groups would be doing the same—ones who I really didn’t want to catch me, according to the rumors. The PCTF already had me on record somewhere, even if they weren’t necessarily watching me closely anymore. Meaning…
ezzen: So I should just go to the Gate?
starstar97: yeah
moth30: every second you delay increases the chance you’re gonna get found
DendriteSpinner: christ this sounds scary
DendriteSpinner: let us know if we can help
skychicken: ez, don’t answer that. stop talking.
skychicken: don’t even say which gate or how far away you are
skychicken: i can’t guarantee this room is leak-proof against a three-letter agency, even if i trust you all individually
skychicken: (nothing personal, DS)
ezzen: Wasn’t gonna. Signing off for now.
DendriteSpinner: (no prob, sky. just worried)
starstar97: stay safe.
starstar97: send pics once youre in!
_twilitt: let us know when you’re good
Skychicken went above and beyond, direct-messaging me.
[Direct Message] skychicken: you need to figure out whether youre an actual VNT now or if that was just weird residue
He was right—the last time a flamefall had been intercepted, the fragments hadn’t actually made their way to a recipient in any shape for them to really be called a Flamebearer. Sometimes, it was just residuals. I could be the same, and there was an easy enough way to test. I grabbed a bit of scrap paper and scribbled the most basic glyph in the lexicon from memory, so simple that it could be fully captured in only two dimensions, a round and gradiented thing: {ASH}.
ezzen: youre right
ezzen: trying a cast
The actual act of casting, on the other hand, was unintuitive. I thought there was something inside me, the flame’s presence, but how to tug at it, weave it into the glyph? There was sort of a conventional wisdom in it, popularized by a video about casting somatically, from during the firestorms, when there had been no official word on anything about magic. Heel of my hand over my breastbone, thump upward, dislodge it. Cough at the same time, as if you were trying to spark a fire with your diaphragm. Done correctly, you wouldn’t literally breathe fire, but you’d know it when it happened. I had done this before, when I was younger, hoping that the Flame would somehow manifest in me despite not having been touched, a near-miss. It never had, of course.
This time was different.
Thump.
A sputtering cough. It felt like I was jumpstarting a car. A burst of energy, a definite kind of ‘sparking’, but no ignition. A thrill ran through me. This was real.
Thump.
More that time? But not at the tipping point. I tried to visualize the flame inside me igniting, taking shape. Not burning me uncontrollably this time, hopefully. I had spent seven years hoping for this—preparing for it, in a sense, although the fantasies had bowed to mundane reality as my teen years went on. But now—
Thump.
Pain. Heat—too much to bear. Flooded with energy, I stood, trying to will it to obey me. No flame, no flame, just magic. I stared at the glyph. I put my other hand over the one on my chest and kind of tugged, and something sizzling and sparking came forth, drawing a thread. Well, ‘thread’ was entirely too fine of a word, evoking the clean singularity of energy I had seen Brianna pull. It was more of a tangle. In my peripheral vision, the shadows of the room went insane. It was magic, and I pushed it into the glyph, along the lines, back and forth down the gradient. It was a clumsy imitation of what I had seen in countless videos, but I had no frame of reference, no muscle memory, so I did the best I could. The glyph did most of the work, really.
No points for guessing what {ASH} did. The Frozen Flame was, in part, the magical equivalent of an oxidizer, and this glyph focused on that aspect of it, turning matter into lower energy matter. Highly destructive, one of the most basic weapons in a Flamebearer’s arsenal. I flinched at the pulse of heat and light, even knowing it was coming. Cameras didn’t capture how bright the flare was.
I should have considered where I put the glyph. It scooped out a sphere of the desk’s matter and turned it into a pile of something else, something every instinct in my body said was unclean, of no value whatsoever, pure waste. Even actual ash had lots of valid uses—this stuff was just worthless and deleterious, an offense to other matter more worthy of the title. I gingerly shoved it into the trash can, automatic domesticity taking over before I processed what had just happened.
“Holy shit.”
I had just woven magic. My heart leapt, buoyed by the giddying realization that my abandoned dream had come true, that I could wield the Flame, not just scribble glyphs and calculate ripple. I was a flamebearer, a VNT: Vaetna-type. Even thinking of the word being applied to me sent me into a giggle fit.
ezzen: holy shit. it worked
ezzen: sky it fucking worked what the fuck
skychicken: congratulations. and also you are now in SO much more danger, jfc
Sky’s words were a bucket of cold water on my enthusiasm, because he was right—even if you disregarded the darkest rumors of what happened to people who vanished shortly after being flametouched, the fact was that flamebearers were valuable beyond compare, the living keys to magic, and that made me a target. And if you did believe the rumors…
skychicken: going to put up some dummy posts similar to your experience to hopefully cover your trail a bit
ezzen: That sounds really dangerous.
ezzen: For you, I mean.
skychicken: not nearly as much danger as you’re in
skychicken: you matter now, ez
skychicken: well, you specifically already mattered imo
skychicken: but i mean ripple wise
skychicken: im sure i dont need to tell you of all people this but you have to try to minimize your magic use
skychicken: for now, run.
There was only one place he could mean.
ezzen: To the Spire?
skychicken: the gate, yeah
skychicken: ill be in touch. stay safe
My mind was racing a mile a minute. Was I seriously about to drop everything and run away to the Spire? That was my dream, but—it was so sudden.
I was fortunate to live relatively close to a Gate, hardly fifty miles from the one attached to Heathrow that serviced the British Isles, but I’d have to go by bus or taxi, in the open. There was a very real and terrifying risk that some black-ops group dropped a spell on my head and just scooped me straight to some fucking underground holding cell, in public or not. It had happened before, and people didn’t come back from that. Not as people, anyway, according to the rumors. I had long held the stance that they were mostly true, because it made the Vaetna seem that much more heroic by contrast—but now that I was being torn out of the metaphorical armchair, I really hoped they were exaggerating.
The journey I was now facing had always been a dream of mine, since the moment the Spire had punctured the world. It represented an impossible twist of the future away from the slow decline into widening class divide and spiraling climate disaster, and a blazing beacon of hope after the dark days following the coming of magic to the world. Machina ex deus, the work of momentary gods, for it dwarfed all other works of magical engineering by an order of magnitude.
The only reason I hadn’t gone before was because the Vaetna’s benevolent humanitarianism had logistical limits, and despite being unemployed, I was still in a fairly low-priority group for resettlement compared to actual refugees and the other poor and huddled masses—and also flamebearers. Which meant that now they were obligated to offer me sanctuary…
And which meant that, if a hundred other things went right, I could become a Vaetna. If they ever decided to recruit more, if I had any actual aptitude to back up my theoretical expertise—if I even made it. There was a rush of years-buried childlike giddiness and excitement at the prospect, and terror—suppressed by analysis. Why had it changed directions? It had never done that before, nor gone through a device. What was the significance of the fact that this was my second encounter with the Flame?
No time for questioning the why. Keep moving. I grabbed a bag and started putting stuff in. As I packed up the essentials of my life, in a daze—toothbrush, my good kitchen knife wrapped in a towel, laptop, underwear, my stash of emergency cash, cream for my scars—there was a sort of twisted gratitude that at least I wasn’t leaving anybody behind. My immediate family were either dead or dead to me. All my friends were coming with me on my laptop and phone, years of reclusion and isolation paying for themselves now.
Then there was a knock at the door. I froze, drew the kitchen knife, made to hold it like I remembered Bri with her dagger. Then I thought better of it and grabbed my charred spear instead. Maybe not the best weapon in this confined space—but it had saved me once, and I was certainly better with it…in theory. My heart thudded.
I padded to the door as quietly as I could and stood off to the side, pointing the speartip toward the doorway in case someone came barging through. The insulation on the doorframe was poor as well, and the wisps of winter air felt like an embodiment of the danger lurking on the other side. A voice came through the door.
“Hey, Dalton? It’s Rina from 303 downstairs. Heard a big thump. You okay?”
I suppressed a sigh of relief, although I didn’t let my spear down. She must have heard me being thrown across the room when I had been struck. My voice came out a bit raspy from disuse as I raised it.
“I’m fine. Just tripped getting out of bed.”
“Ah. Did you see what happened on the Vaetna stream a little bit ago?”
“Uh—no.”
“Oh. Figured you’d have been up for it. Flamefall, weird one.”
Feign interested ignorance. “Huh. Where?”
“They’re not sure yet. It went right for the Spire and hit the camera, and they think it got one of the viewers somehow.”
“Jeez.” I struggled for another comment to mask my relief that I evidently hadn’t already been triangulated. “They must be having a bad day.”
“No shit. ‘Kay, glad you’re fine, just wanted to check.”
The random act of neighborly kindness was appreciated, it really was. Even though we had hardly spoken, and I might not ever see her again…so maybe I was leaving some stuff behind. I exhaled as I heard her steps retreat from my door back toward the stairwell, forcing myself to stop white-knuckling the spear, to stop feeling like prey. Satisfied she had gone, I made to go back to packing—but now that I had picked up my spear again, I found I couldn’t part with it.
As the reality of my situation dawned further on me, I felt the signs of an oncoming panic attack. My grip on my spear was just about the only thing keeping me from collapsing into a pile of hyperventilating terror, but it was too visible, too identifying. I couldn’t make the trek with it, but I couldn’t let it go, either. To leave it behind now was to be fully naked against the vast and shadowy things I had every reason to believe were now waking up to hunt me—wasn’t that a thought. Not that it would really make a difference against a group of trained kidnappers with magical support, but I couldn’t convince the cornered animal at the back of my skull that it was a good idea to part with it. I needed it as a security blanket.
Then I remembered I could now use magic, and realized there was an intermediary solution. Hueng always carried his spear, but it wasn’t always physically in his hand. It was shunted off into higher-dimensional space, and then extracted back into his grip by essentially tugging on a single thread of magic. It was ridiculously intimidating and cool to see the effect in action—and more to the point, convenient. Beyond my new abilities, probably…but I didn’t necessarily have to kick it entirely out of this plane of reality, just get it to a state where I could fit it into my bag. Or…what if I could keep it within arm’s reach?
The seed of an idea began to form. I went over to the bookcase, paging through notebooks. I flipped to an empty page and started drawing a glyph. The ‘real’ version of this particular lattice was a complex brane, impossible to fully represent in two dimensions the way {ASH} could be, but I was really just making a sketch, something for my mind to latch onto and twist the Frozen Flame around. I had never had the money to buy a nice sculpture of the full 3D shape, but it was a spiraling, compressing thing, sort of like a funnel. It was also a word or, more accurately, the shadow of one. I tried to picture it, mentally tracing from one end to the other and around, as though I were scanning it in slices like an MRI machine. Fundamentally, that was the wrong way to go about it, but I was doing the best I could with my lack of practical experience.
I was trying to extrapolate a three-dimensional glyph from a two-dimensional representation; infamously difficult even with training, and I had none. But I did have a near-unrivaled understanding of magical theory. Where snapweaving or creating a proper second-order representation of the glyph were out of the picture, math and blood could fill the gaps. I knew the set of the warp for this lattice, the shape of each transition, the tension that had to intensify down the weft for it to function as intended. As much as it required intuition I lacked, it was also a matter of geometries that I had exhaustively modeled. I probably knew this lattice better than my own face.
Now that I had called the Flame once, I didn’t have to do the chest-thumping thing, but I still didn’t know how to weave with any sort of grace. I imagined reaching for the Flame inside me, something in my spine, at the bottom of my throat, and tugged crudely. Sparks came forth, and I willed it to thin out, to become the thread I needed. I could feel it becoming sort of strand-like, but it wasn’t a flowing ribbon of magic, more a hatched, sketchy, hairy thing of a thousand smaller lines chicken-scratched into approximation; no precision. It was the best I’d get, though, so I gave it my best shot, attempting to pull it around the lattice in my head.
Unlike before, doing it without the guidance of a proper, physical glyph was agonizing. It was so rough, and it chafed and scorched something inside me with the barbed imperfections. I could feel my brain heating up, like a barely-too-hot pan seeping heat into my hand, soon to become unbearable if I held it for much longer. A gasping sound was dragged from my throat as my face contorted from pain and discomfort, the overwork of freshly formed mental muscles as I tugged the magic into shape. I growled, twisted, struggled. This had become something of a literal trial by fire; if I couldn’t do this, something told me there was no way I was making it to the Gate in one piece.
One of the axis transitions wound up being loose; I scorched my hand on the thread, and putting real tension on the thread as I wove was painful to the point that I was groaning. My work was, in a word, sloppy, not at all like the clean precision of the Vaetna—and that was frustrating, even embarrassing. I knew I could do better, but there was no time for perfectionism. I just kept weaving, my muscles burning—that was my brain not knowing how else to interpret the sensation, but it would become literal if I delayed too long. In actuality, the whole process took under ten seconds, but pain has a way of stretching both space and time.
At last, it was good enough. I’d woven a sort of funnel of magic, held barely together by guesswork and terror of the alternative. I had seconds. I grabbed a box cutter from my desk with my free hand, my right, and carved a line down my left forearm, wincing, gasping, white-knuckling the haft of the spear. This part wasn’t Vaetna magic. It was blood magic, crude and rudimentary, the last resort of those who used Flame without the control of glyphs. It filled the gaps left by the fraying cord of magic in lieu of finer thread, a structure in flesh to complement that of the glyph.
It was at this point that I realized my mistake, remembered what Sky had told me, a basic miscalculation: magic does not exist in a vacuum. It makes ripples beyond its direct effects, and monsters watch the water. I hadn’t even attempted to lower the ripple of the spell as I wove, so focused as I was on making it function at all, desperate for some security in my new abilities. And in doing so, I had just given away my position, if perhaps only in some abstract, soothsayer way rather than literal coordinates. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Too late now. I tossed down the pencil and yanked the funnel I’d woven over the spear with my right hand. It wasn’t really there, but I could see it, feel it. The old scars on my hand screamed with familiar pain—the fingers went stiff and numb with cold, barely shy of frostbitten. Every hair on my neck went on end, and my vision flickered. The spear vanished, and I half-collapsed, caked in sweat. I felt something leave me, some of the Frozen Flame crystallized out of my soul and into the lattice.
Everything hurt. Someone had scrubbed my spinal cord with steel wool. My head was too hot, my hands too cold. My eyes found the sketch I had been imitating; the lines of graphite had seared straight through the page, and the rest of the sketchbook, scorching themselves onto the desk below. I couldn’t intuitively read the glyph in this two-dimensional version of its proper three-dimensional form, but I knew what I had written: {COMPOSE}.
So where had the spear gone?
I’d put it literally in arm’s reach. Instead of a bleeding wound where I’d sliced my forearm open, there was an image, a straight line with a strange, dark, warped tip. The magic had transmuted the spear into a burn scar to cauterize the cut, a mirror to the ones covering my right hand from my first encounter with the Flame seven years ago. With a simpler glyph, this would have been a one-time trick, or cost me far more in blood. But the beauty of the Flame was that it was frozen. It held its shape in lattice, in weave, instead of consumptive one-time use, if you knew how. And I did.
So I tugged on the lattice with my mind and shook my arm—
And the spear was in my hand. I grinned, despite everything, despite the lingering pain and numbness and the throbbing in my head, the insane escalation of stakes in my life from a mere hour prior and the fact that I had likely just broadcasted myself with ripple. This was real magic, reality restructured along the weft of flame, something more elegant and lasting than the simple destruction of {ASH} despite my crude execution. Power, potential of which I had always dreamed, a beauty that had enraptured me in spite of what it had taken from me. Kin to the Vaetna and a scant few hundred more in this era of magic.
However, since the process had required blood magic, calling my spear also brought a screaming sting from the freshly reopened gash on my arm. I hastily put the spear back, willing it to return into my flesh, a practically instantaneous vanishing and a closing of the wound and heady relief from the pain. That side effect was worth it, I reasoned. This was only for emergencies—if I really needed to wield my spear, a cut on my arm would be the least of my worries. Arguably the frigid stiffness in my hand would be more of an impediment, so I rubbed my hands together and breathed on them in an attempt to return some life to the scarred limb.
After a precious minute of recovery from the ordeal, I felt better about my situation. It was still just a wooden spear, hardly a match for whatever was coming—but it was a part of me now, a new limb with which to interact with an uglier, more dangerous world than the one I had lived in since my first scorching introduction to magic all those years ago. This time, I was ready to fight back—whatever that meant. I was still holding out hope it wouldn’t actually come to that.
Despite this ordeal, leaving behind my PC setup sucked almost as much for other reasons. Financially, it represented a lot of money scrounged together from part-time jobs. Emotionally, it was more of a signifier of ‘home’ than any of the merch. It was where my friends were. I wondered if I should wipe it—surely someone would eventually break in to track me. I shuddered and browsed through my files, making notes of any autosaved passwords that didn’t also exist on my laptop. After a long, painful moment, I navigated to the option to remove everything, a panic-button full-wipe program I had installed years ago. At the time, fifteen-year-old Dalton had been hoping he’d need it, that I’d need to drop everything to go on the run and would need a way to keep my knowledge from falling into the wrong hands. Now? It hurt.
I pressed ‘confirm’, and the room ceased to be my home. I wasn’t cut off from all my friends online, since I still had my phone, but there was a heavy finality as I looked around. How much did I even really use the rest of my apartment? I’d miss my bed, I supposed—but that was pretty much it.
There wasn’t much to do after that. The total contents of my bookshelf were worth a lot, by my meager standards, but none of them were rare volumes or anything, so I didn’t feel too bad about leaving them. Only my personal notes were of real value, work-in-progress theories that hadn’t yet been introduced to the body of literature on magic. I took the four most prized of my notebooks: my very first and the three most recent.
I threw on appropriate clothes for the brisk and wet English February, checked myself in the mirror for appropriate inconspicuousness. Perfect: all dark clothes without coming off as goth, figure obscured by the heavy black coat and jeans, dark-blue backpack free of any identifying charms. I couldn’t quite part with the little acrylic keychain of the Spire that usually adorned the outside of the bag, so it found a home in one of the internal sub-pockets where it wouldn’t be seen. Satisfied with my appearance and preparations, I surveyed the room one last time—remembered my passport. The Gate technically didn’t need it, but you never knew.
If I hadn’t been on a timer before the trick with my spear—I definitely was now. Having already said my goodbyes to the room itself when I had wiped my PC, I grabbed my bag and fled the apartment, walking as fast as I dared without drawing undue attention. I turned the corner away from my life, from the venerable black, brick building and the grocery store, saying a silent goodbye to the smell of cigarette ash and that obnoxiously slow elevator.
I found a taxi, forked over some cash upfront. I didn’t care that it was far, or that I was overpaying. Once I got to the Gate, I wouldn’t need money. Even getting there in one piece was basically optional; I just had to get within the aegis of the Spire’s awareness and protection.
“Heathrow.”
I made it six miles before they caught me.
Author’s Note:
This chapter originally didn’t have an author’s note on it when I first posted it to Scribblehub, but since it’s here on its own site now, I figured I’d celebrate! (The timestamp reflects the original posting date)
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