Chapter 9 — First Lessons

Alden watched apprehensively as Rika dug through her bag. He was excited, sure, but he still felt a deep nested fear of the unknown dangers that could be lying in wait. Rika didn't seem to have any clue where this power came from. If he understood his physics, there was some blatant violation of the laws of nature already going on, conservation of energy or some such.

So where is the energy coming from?

"How does this work?" he asked nervously.

"Hang on a sec," Rika mumbled, as she fiddled through the various rows of pouches. "Got it."

From the depths of her bag she pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Not parchment—like the mysterious Scrap he'd seen at the meeting—but plain white paper, as ordinary as could be. It was as if it had just slid out from a printer, though the lower third of it was torn away.

"I thought—"

Rika shook her head. "I'm going to try to say this as nicely as I can, but asking for the actual Scrap is insanely personal. I mean, you saw how intense the council meeting got. Only one other person in the world's ever seen mine. I just don't know you well enough, okay?"

Rika looked apologetic, but her voice was firm. Alden nodded, a touch disappointed.

"So I'm just going to give you the basics. The only complete page anyone ever found. Rachel left me a copy. It got torn up but yeah."

Alden raised his eyebrows. "You can just… copy them?" It seemed so mundane.

"Well, not exactly," Rika shrugged. "Throw it in a normal copy machine, scan it onto a computer, whatever, it becomes worthless. Can't read a word of it. I think they used carbon paper to make real copies. Something like that. You'd have to ask Alpha, wherever he is. He gave them to Rachel." She passed it over to Alden.

His eyes slid across the words. He couldn't bring himself to properly focus on any of them. In the gaps he could see flecks and scratches, though he couldn't tell if they were imperfections from the copy or part of the original sheet. The letters, from what he could see of the edges, were normal Roman letters, but he couldn't make out the language they might be in. Not that Alden knew any other languages.

He looked back up at Rika, confused.

"Just try to read it aloud," Rika prompted, watching him like a hawk. She was perched on the chair, her legs pulled up in front. Her blue eyes glittered in excitement. For a moment he could have sworn he saw a brief flicker of electricity run through her hair, causing the blue streak to snap out straight, then relax—like a snake uncoiling for a strike.

He hesitated. Did he trust this occasionally violent and hostile young woman who was a pariah in the town he'd come to search? Who made bold claims about magic and destiny, who offered him an impossible gift with no real answers or apparent consequences? Was he about to make a horrible mistake he could never recover from?

"What's wrong?" Rika asked.

He shook his head. It was time to commit. This had to be the beginning of the answers he needed. If nothing else, he thought with a twinge of excitement, it's still magic.

Alden looked at the beginning of the paragraph and tried to read it aloud. "Abrec tes minn-" He stopped, his head light. He felt nauseous. He glanced up at Rika, afraid he'd said something wrong.

"Don't worry, no one manages to finish the first sentence on their first try." Rika tried to give him a comforting smile, but it just came off as impatient. "You're doing fine."

He looked down and began again. "Abrec tes minneard desve selnir tuala tan…" As he spoke, he suddenly felt the meaning come to him. He couldn't express it clearly, but he understood the emotion and the utter truth behind the words, as if they were opening a gate that had been locked away in his mind for eons untold.

Alden continued reading, the words flowing out of him even as he began to comprehend the depths of the world he was uncovering, an ancient secret that was pouring through his mind. The page taught itself to him, and though he would never understand the language in which it spoke, he knew its intention all too well.

He began to speak faster. The foreign tongue slid more easily through his teeth, until entire paragraphs were flying by in mere seconds.

A sensation of moving rushed through him. He felt the world spinning underneath his feet. Alden could sense himself falling, but it was a pleasant fall. The wind rushed past his cheeks.

He was in control. Innumerable objects were falling with him, shapeless things that he could sense but not describe. They spun in shapes around him and moved at his will.

The book. He understood the book, that dark leather-bound tome that held the secrets of an entire world akin to their own, only a step removed from reality. The text would teach him everything he ever needed to know, show him the path to achieving his goals, perfecting himself, becoming whomever he wanted to be. All paths would be open to him, all doors unlocked, and the universe itself would bend—

He reached the end of the paragraph and everything disappeared.

The world slipped away. Darkness flooded into his eyes. He could feel himself falling again, but this time it felt like he was out of control and tumbling—as if in slow motion—through an endless void.

A voice was calling out, and he struggled to bring himself to answer. He was so exhausted, he couldn't lift his arms or legs. He needed to keep reading, but there was nothing more to speak aloud. He'd lost sight of the page entirely. The words had ended, but the flow remained, and he was trapped between.

He felt himself choking on the air, his lungs desperately sucking in oxygen that was killing him. He couldn't speak, couldn't cry out. He was going to die, because the page was incomplete. His world was incomplete.

A palm grasped his own.

He struggled to raise his head, as if thousands of hands were dragging him back. It wasn't the warm dancing skin of Rika. Through a heavy veil of black fog he could see Rika hadn't moved, stock still in the chair and eyes wide as she sat transfixed.

No, it was a small cold hand, with a grip like iron, and a hushed voice that was muttering to him. The voice was soft and fast, repeating words in a nervous rush, but encouraging and comforting.

"It's okay, you're okay. Stay with me, all right? All right? You're okay, just keep going. Everything's going to be okay. It's all okay. Repeat after me…" and she spoke the next words in the book. He repeated them, and he felt the pressure on his chest releasing. She spoke another sentence, and he repeated it, and so they continued, until he felt his lungs expand gratefully with life-giving air as they completed the final few paragraphs.

The fog began to fade away. The first thing Alden saw was her eyes. They were a remarkable, intricate silver-grey—calm eyes that seemed to have a candle gently flickering deep within. The world returned around those two orbs, fading back into color and life. He could see her kneeling next to the couch, staring at his chest, at the couch cushions beside him, anywhere that wasn't his face. She brushed long, thick brown hair away from her face with her free hand, never letting go of his own as he found his way back to the world.

As Alden's body and mind settled, he sensed she was about to retreat. She would vanish into the air just as she had disappeared from the closet with Hector.

"Wait, please," Alden cried out desperately.

She raised her head. Her silvery eyes flashed. The girl's mouth opened, as if she were in shock. She backed away—straight into a chair, stumbling over it and almost falling. It was so… human.

Despite how powerful he knew the girl must be, Alden didn't feel threatened or afraid in the slightest. He felt like she were his friend, but—as Rika had told him—that she was immensely capable and would be a terrible enemy to behold.

"I don't… I'm sorry, I didn't know—"

"Thank you," he gasped.

"Holy shit," Rika breathed from the other end of the room.

"Look, I shouldn't be here. I'm not supposed to be here. I think. I should be going. You're okay?" The girl was stumbling over her own words.

"Can we just talk for a second? Please?" Alden asked. She looked around nervously, and gave a little jump at spotting the awed Rika perched at the other corner.

"Rika? With Alden? Really?" the girl mumbled.

"What do you mean?" Rika asked carefully. Alden was taken aback at Rika's tone. He'd expected something far more crass and hostile, not cautious and measured.

"I don't know. Forget I said that, okay? I can't be here," she said nervously. For someone who could teleport and seemed to always know exactly when someone was awakening from the book, the grey-eyed girl seemed weirdly distraught.

"Are you okay?" Alden asked, pulling himself up to a sitting position, fighting desperately against his aching limbs. The girl's head snapped back around to face him.

"I'm sorry," she said, with such melancholy that tears began to well up in his own eyes.

"What for?"

She didn't answer. Instead, she rose and walked across the room to the mantle above the television, where sat a stack of books Alden hadn't noticed before. Rika was watching her curiously, but uncharacteristically silent. Alden wondered if she was afraid of this gray-eyed mystery. To his own eyes, she was only perhaps a couple years older than him, albeit shorter and smaller.

"Who are you?" he asked, trying to break the tension somehow. Once again she evaded their questions, instead reading the titles aloud as her finger traced the covers.

"Index Librorum Prohibitorum, The Sworn Book of Honorius, Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm in the latest translation, The Grimoire of Turiel—you know this is a fake right?" the girl asked Rika, holding it up.

"Huh?"

"Written in the 60's, outright plagiarizes multiple other books of spells or other texts from much older. Not that any of them are real," she added, setting the book back carefully on the stack. "The Index was just the Church getting scared of something it didn't understand, and Picatrix is really only useful as a historical record of the scientific method in the eleventh century. There's only one real Grimoire." As with the Scraps, something about the weight she gave the word capitalized it in Alden's mind.

"How do you know all that?" Rika asked.

The girl ignored her. "Are you feeling okay, Alden?"

"Yeah. Thank you, err..." he paused, hoping to prompted a name from her. She only shook her head, her long brown hair flying wildly. An instant later, he saw her eyes flash, becoming bright silver. She looked so sad.

A faint breeze brushed past his cheek, flowing toward the center of the room to fill the void where she had stood only a moment earlier. He saw Rika's hair flutter in the same direction, as the air currents shifted around the suddenly vacant space in the room. The girl was gone, in the faintest whisper of a sound, which seemed somehow distinctly lonely.