Micah

Micah’s eyes fluttered shut, unable to keep open after the day’s arduous business. In his hand, threatening to fall from his fingers, was his sigil booklet.

The cot was about as comfortable as a stone slab, but there was not one single night since his arrival that he had not slept soundly on it.

His eyes closed against his will and the booklet slipped from his limp fingers.

How strange.

His eyes opened a little. The words had been out of sync with his dream-thoughts and pushed him back to wakefulness. He looked around the cavern, but it was empty except for his meager possessions. He was about to dismiss it and drift back to sleep when the same voice reached him again.

You heard me.

He scanned the nooks and crannies of the cavern more carefully, visually interrogating every shadow for the owner of the voice.

“Hello?” he questioned the empty space, and immediately regretted it.

Hello, it answered.

Micah sat straight up on the cot, fully awake now. The room was empty; he was sure of it.

Empty but for you and me.

“Where are you?”

Over here, in your pocket.

Micah rose from the cot, his eyes locked on the black trousers he had been wearing that day, covered in white dust and lying in a crumpled heap in the corner. The only thing that would have been in his pocket was…

He slid his hand into the pocket and felt for the marble from the forgotten city. He pulled it free of the linen and held it up to the flickering candlelight by which he had been reading. The blue depths seemed to be pulsating with its own dim light, and its surface was bone-cold to the touch.

Here I am.

"How are -- what are you?” Micah asked, turning the sphere over in his palm. In the unstable light he almost fooled himself into thinking the intricate designs on the metal bands were moving subtly, though it was no illusion that the shadows within the orb itself were swirling. When it spoke, a tiny light seemed to issue from its core.

I am Asmodai, it said — or placed the words inside his head, perhaps, as there was no audible speech from the sphere, only a slightly discomforting rustling, like a snake’s loose skin about to shed. Instead, the voice was inside of him, speaking only to him.

I am only what you see.

At a loss for proper questions, Micah sat back on his cot, placing the sphere on the thin coverlet beside him.

He stared at it.

So strange that after so many eons, one of your kind would find me, one not native to these lands. You can even understand me. I had come to accept that my tongue would have died out ages ago.

“And what is that exactly — Asmodai?” Micah asked, carefully considering his phrasing.

Asmodai is me. I simply am. I have been for ages without end. I am a being of power, with much time and little to do.

Curiosity flared in his chest, accompanied by a flutter of unease. Asmodai seemed to sense his apprehensiveness.

Do not fret. I am not here to harm anyone.

“I’m just supposed to trust that?” Micah asked sharply, recoiling from its attempt at soothing him.

Ask someone who knows, if you can find one. I have nothing to hide.

Micah considered it. If he was honest with himself, he hadn’t wanted Gaillard to look at the orb. He also wouldn’t be getting much sleep if he sought out Gaillard (the most knowledgeable person he knew), but if it turned out Asmodai was dangerous, then it seemed best not to wait.

“Fine,” he consented, and stood. He began pulling the dirty trousers back on, and then a pair of thick socks before his leather boots, also coated in white dust.

At all hours of the night, there was activity within the compound. It seemed many Sidheans needed less sleep than humans, or slept at strange hours, or both.

He walked to Gaillard’s clandestine lab, which was empty of its usual studious occupants. However, in a corner, reading a heavy book with equally heavy intensity, was Gaillard. Micah had not actually expected to find him so soon or so easily.

He cleared his throat to let the mage know he was there. Gaillard blinked and turned his head toward Micah, his eyes not quite focusing for a second, as if he had forgotten there was a world outside the book.

“Micah,” he said finally, leaning back in his wooden chair. “Aren’t you usually asleep at this time?”

“I have a question.”

The mage chuckled, running a hand through his short, dark beard. “I should have expected that.”

“Do you know anything about Asmodai?” Micah asked. He felt the conspicuous weight of the sphere in his pocket, stone cold against his thigh even through the fabric.

“Hmmm,” Gaillard murmured, face becoming serious. “Where did you hear about that?”

“Overheard it somewhere,” the other lied, acting on instinct and regretting it.

“Asmodai… that’s a very old word,” Gaillard said, his eyes watching Micah carefully, though his posture was still deliberately nonchalant within his chair. “I don’t remember its full story, myself. Asmodai was a demigod, one of the many bastard children of the old Rodullian gods.”

Micah shifted from one foot to the other, moving the weight of the sphere away from his skin. He said nothing further.

“You should probably sleep, Micah. You’ve a lot of training over the next few days if you’re to go with the infiltration group during the Hunt.”

Micah’s eyebrows raised.

“They want me to go?”

He hadn’t heard anything else about it since Allie had mentioned it weeks prior. Whispers of the plan had been drifting among the soldiers, wild rumors about stampeding the palace and assassinating the people responsible for the city’s suffering.

“Yes, if you want. Allie indicated she wanted you there,” the mage replied. “You will need to be especially careful, though. Your skills are still developing, and if you get caught by the Guard on your own…” He trailed off.

“I thought I was doing well.”

“You are. You’re doing very well. But a few weeks’ training is not enough to pit you against skilled soldiers.”

Then why the hell am I going? he thought sullenly.

Micah would have never admitted it, but he wanted to hear the mage say that he was proud of him, that he had come far and he was a worthy student.

Gaillard seemed to pick up on this.

“Were you close to your father?” he asked, his eyes soft with sympathy.

Micah’s face went blank immediately, devoid of warmth.

“He was a strict man.” Micah wanted to say more, but no words came to his mouth to describe the memory reel that began turning in his head. He remembered nights where he overheard his mother sobbing and apologizing to his father for things over which she had little control. Once he had caught her murmuring to herself, without even realizing, “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you,” after Liam had stormed out. He remembered waiting for her to take him to school, watching her apply pancakey concealer to yellowing bruises so she could leave the house. He remembered the familiar sight of a vase of yellow daisies, her favorite flower, the daisies always fresh after a bad night. He remembered furious shouting that made him feel small, so helplessly small, cowering in his room as Rex distracted their father.

“My mother took my brother and me away from him when I was seven,” he ventured further, testing whether the words would conjure further memories.

He didn’t mention how they had only been gone three days before she cracked. Liam didn’t even have to lift a finger to shatter her resolution. The silence of the phone and the weight of her guilt did the trick just fine.

She told the boys that they were all going back to see him, and Rex, already sixteen, refused, unwilling to let an opportunity to leave pass him by and equally unwilling to leave Micah behind. Their mother went back to Liam alone, and Rex absconded with Micah and proceeded to take care of him as best he could, with the help of a few orbital family members who also hated Liam.

Years later, Micah went to college to become a doctor, the furthest thing from Liam that he could imagine, and Rex fell to drinking to disguise the fact that he was slowly becoming the person he hated most.

“My brother wanted to protect me,” Micah said.

“Protect you from…?”

“My father. He beat my mother mercilessly,” Micah said flatly, “and to an extent, my brother. My mother had always been under his thumb, so even when she got the chance to leave, she couldn’t stay away. I -- we -- lost her… to him.”

Gaillard let the silence between them linger, and then he said, his eyes fixed carefully on the ceiling, “I understand. I'm sorry. My son was taken from me, as well. He was only three when one of the Guard crushed his skull against the wall of my home.”

Micah started to say something, but closed his mouth, realizing nothing he could say would mean anything, nothing would comfort the mage, nothing would make up for it. He wasn’t sure if the mage was trying to reciprocate vulnerability, or if these words had festered inside of him, clawing for release.

“My wife also suffered at their hands,” he continued, and lowered his face to look at Micah, but his eyes didn’t really seem to see him. “My punishment for refusing to be Drexel’s tool.”

There came an odd, disfigured smile to his lips as he spoke, but Micah saw the deep, desperate anguish in his eyes.

“She was a phytobotanist,” he continued, seeming unable to stop now that he had begun his confession, “and the gardens had been an idea of hers before...before it all. She would have loved to have seen them built, would have loved to be a part of this revolution for the city. She was always fiery, couldn’t stand for injustice… the things happening here… She would have given every last ounce of her being to fight.”

His shoulders slumped and he buried his face in his hands.

Micah left the silence intact, feeling a wrenching empathy for the mage. He stepped closer, putting his hand on Gaillard’s shoulder.

He retracted his hand quickly, as it seemed to sink into the other’s shoulder in a way that it shouldn’t have, and he realized the edges of Gaillard’s form were no longer clear and distinct, as if he were wearing an intangible shell of camouflage that was losing cohesion. He remembered what Fizz had said about mages, and he backed away a little. Gaillard seemed to be losing control of his illusive exterior in his emotional tumult.

The mage straightened in the chair and looked down at his hands in his lap, which looked as if they had been painted on by a sloppy, amateur watercolor painter. His jaw tensed and his form solidified once more.

The mage looked up at the human. His gaze was neutral, but the kind of neutral that had to be forcibly held in place like a dam over a roiling river. There was no sign that anything had happened, except that the lines in his face were more pronounced, as if his burden had settled deeply into the wrinkles.

“You should go to bed,” Gaillard said. “There is much to be done tomorrow.”

Micah nodded, sensing that the other wanted to be left alone with his grief. He left the clandestine labs and found a cavern empty of people to lean against the wall and slide down to sit on the cave floor.

I can help you, you know.

“How, exactly?” Micah snapped at Asmodai, not particularly caring how the sphere answered. He felt angry and alone, and, worse, helpless. The idea that he wasn’t strong enough to help anyone here made his throat feel tight.

I told you; I am a being of power. I can give that to you. You can use it to protect these people, to be the difference in this world that you want so badly to be. You can use it to make sure no one else has to suffer like that mage has.

Ignoring the initial surge of temptation, Micah shook his head.

“Whatever the catch is behind that offer, I don’t want it.”

Really? At the price of your companions’ lives? At the cost of the people for which you all fight? I can give it to you for almost nothing.

“Almost?” Micah repeated, healthy skepticism saturating the word.

You have human energy, a rare thing here. I want a little of it, and I will trade you the energy of this world, more than you’d know what to do with. You can become powerful, so powerful that you could single-handedly turn this revolution around.

“I’m fine, thanks,” Micah replied, closing his eyes in exhaustion.

You could--

“Be quiet,” he commanded, and the orb went silent.

“Micah?” came a voice.

He turned his head to see Danica looking at him curiously from the entrance of the cavern.

“Were you talking to someone?” she asked, sincere concern on her face causing her scar to wrinkle.

“I was reciting some stuff I’m supposed to be learning,” he lied.

She walked to him and sat down next to him on the stone floor.

“You’re doing good work,” she said after a few seconds, somewhat awkwardly, her face venturing into a hesitant, crooked smile, as if her features weren’t quite sure how to compose themselves. “I see how hard you’re working.”

“Thank you,” he replied, unsure if there was something more behind her words.

Her gaze broke from him, and she took a deep breath, looking at her worn boots.

“Are you and she…?” she asked finally.

Micah was too attuned to the frequencies of flirtation to ignore his gut feeling, but still he felt mild, bewildered surprise as he realized her words, delivered by a less-than-silver tongue, were a clumsy attempt at deducing his feelings.

No. Nope. No, I’m not bringing my issues of the Overworld here with me, he decided, the thought unwavering, unreluctant.

“No. She and I are just friends, as close as we can get.” He paused, recalling some of the hormonally-charged feelings of his adolescence. “God, there was a time once… When I was younger I thought I was in love with her. I guess I was, as much as a kid understands love.”

Not that you understand it really now, came a quiet thought.

“What happened?” Dani asked softly, her voice sympathetic.

“I never told her. I realized she’s just not like that.”

“Not like what?”

Micah thought for a second, articulating the idea he had felt about his best friend but had never voiced.

“Allie couldn’t return my feelings for her because her love is different.” He clenched his jaw, not sure his words were capturing the concept suitably. “At first I was kind of bitter, wanting her to love me back and not realizing why she couldn’t. But over time I realized that the highest form of her love isn’t romantic or sexual; it’s the love for her friends. I learned to be okay with that, and the feelings faded eventually.”

Dani’s eyes were pools of dark gold, achingly empathetic as she gave him another small smile. It was not shy or romantic, only tinged with pity. He realized he might have misinterpreted her initial approach.

“You’re a good person, Micah. Truly,” she said, trying to cheer him up.

He looked away. Her words had the opposite effect of her intention. He felt worse.

“I don’t think things are that simple.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think people are truly good or bad,” he answered. “There’s both in everyone.”

Dani didn’t reply for a moment. Her steady gaze had become fixed on something in front of her that was not physically there. He wasn’t sure if she was thinking about what he had said, or what she hadn’t.

“Dani?”

She shook her head reflexively, her eyes coming back into focus. She looked at him, eyes lucid and bright.

“Sorry. I think I’m just really tired.” She didn't seem tired at all. She stood. “I’m going to go get some sleep. Thank you for the talk. I’ll see you around, Micah,” she said, and turned to leave. At the cavern entrance, she paused.

“I hope you’re right, that there is still good even in the worst of us,” she said, just loud enough that her voice reached him. Then she was gone.

Micah stood and patted the dirt from his pants, feeling empty. For once, his driving motivation had fled him.

Instead he went to the cavern with the bridge, trying not to think about the collapsed gardens a hop and a skip away. The cave was empty, only the sounds of his boots on the stone and the steady fall of water reaching his ears. He had no idea where Allie was, and his anger that had been distracted during the conversation with Dani came rushing back. He had abandoned Rex and his old life to be here, and he had thought he would have Allie here in Sidhe as a pillar of support. But instead he was alone.

He sat on the edge of the bridge, wallowing in his sense of aloneliness and his own ill temper.

The rational side of him told him he was selfish and maybe an asshole for thinking this way, but the other side, the selfish asshole, the side that was louder and wielded his emotions, drowned out argument.

Nothing would fundamentally change. He wouldn’t examine the feelings. He wouldn’t consider the irony that Firenze had already given him the nesturmaz mind as a tool to free him from his emotions, and here he wallowed anyway. He would simply wait until the feelings went away, or he would drown them in work in retaliation.

Micah got up from the bridge and went to his cot, his thoughts on himself.