Felun

There was just enough life left in the veilment for its last task. Suria’s work rippled like silk in the wind and ribboned to nothing as Yuying stepped into the safety of Jiahao’s hold. Stamped crates were stacked wall to wall, arranged to fill nine tenths of the space. The air smelled oddly familiar: a mixture of sawdust, dried herbs, and medicinal teas bitter enough to make his tongue curl.

“Over here,” Shirin said. She knelt by the far wall and murmured a spell. Felun sensed an illusion unraveling, and an enchantment clicking open beneath the boards as the outline of a trapdoor shimmered into view. “It’s unlikely the Magicians will be allowed to search us, but you’d better sit in this compartment until we’re airborne.”

Felun eyed the trapdoor warily. “That locks, doesn’t it?”

“It can be unlocked from the inside in an emergency.”

“Air circulation?”

“It’s well-tested. More than adequate.” The words were terse but confident.

Father’s secret illusionist? he wondered. They could have arrived on this very ship, or any of the other dozen just like it: small, quick-sailing craft scattered throughout the fleet.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” Yuying grinned as she crouched into the darkness, and Felun tried to convince himself that her optimism was truth. He heard a muffled thunk. “Ouch.”

“Yes, it’s not very spacious in there.” Shirin gave a faintly apologetic smile. “There should be a few alchemical lanterns toward the back. The compartment is shielded from light, but best make sure it isn’t on if you hear people walking overhead.”

“Okay. Found them, I think.” A pause. “Ooh, very green. I feel like I’m inside a lily pond.”

“There are one-way enchantments suppressing noise from your side,” Shirin added. “They’ll activate when I close the door, but we’ll be back for you in a few hours. Can you see the emergency latch?”

“Yes, it’s right next to the lanterns. I’ve got it.”

“We’ll see you soon,” Shirin promised.

Felun cleared his throat. “Take care of her.”

“Take care yourself,” Yuying piped up.

Shirin lowered the trapdoor. Its outline melted into the surrounding boards as soon as she let go.

They’d stay until morning and be gone by noon, Felun realised. He quashed down a twinge of nameless regret as he departed, other thoughts already whirling into his head: ideas, guesses, plans, strategy.

Above all, strategy. Being around Iolite had demonstrated the finer points of what not to do.

The first thing was to retrieve the Magician’s cloak from his trunk and squash it into the biggest bucket he was able to find. A barrel would’ve been better, but this was the best he could do on short notice. The dye he’d bought came in a powder, and he tipped all of it in, plus as much water as he could fit. The mixture swirled inky black.

He checked the window and saw the night was a clear one. Well, why not? The faster he moved, the faster he’d be done with it.

He set up the mooncatch nets on a spare corner of deck to the bemused glances of nearby sailors, promising he’d only need the space until dawn. They gleamed like dew-dipped cobwebs, funneling down into half a dozen glass jars.

Ishaan’s new wooden legs were locked safely in his trunk. He set another two layers of wards for good measure. A few new runes from the dead Breaker’s journal had ticked away at the back of his thoughts since he first saw them, and on experimentation they worked as she’d written they would. By the time he was through with it all, the moon had passed its apex.

Sleep came tentatively, more of a doze than any real rest. He roused himself to a grey sky and retrieved the mooncatch nets before the first dregs of sunlight could contaminate his harvest. A quick stasis cast before he could seal the jars without the silvery wisps leaking out, and he was satisfied. He drew the curtains and tied them shut.

Busy, he wrote on a spare scrap of paper. Do not knock unless ship is on fire. He wrote it again in the trade language, just in case Ishaan came looking for him. He stuck the note onto his door and locked it twice—once with the normal lock and then again with a spell of his own.

Distilling the six jars of moonlight into one took about an hour. It wasn’t hard work—just keeping an eye on the distilling kit, watching silvery globules condense and drain through a twist of glass tubing—so he reread the ritual instructions as he waited.

Once that was done, he cleared a space in the middle of his room, hefting the trunks onto the bed. The diagram was intricately detailed and exquisitely painful to copy in the right proportions. It took three sticks of chalk and a grueling amount of stasis spells before he was done.

His head hurt, and his fingers shook. This was hardly a state to be doing more spellwork in, so he crawled under the covers and slept for some time. When he woke, he peered outside and guessed it was almost noon. Yuying would be departing or maybe even well away by now, but there was no point worrying over something he couldn’t control. He only needed to worry about the spell circle.

The circle was what the dead Breaker had called it, which was like calling the imperial palace a building. Almost six feet across and layered like a three-headed onion, blocky tessellations mixed with strings of runes in visual illusions which tested his patience. It was like a particularly vicious trick picture, with just enough space in the center for a person to stand in. Might explode if I get a line wrong, the dead Breaker had written, and he was only mostly sure she’d been joking.

He gathered up his ingredients and walked carefully into the empty space, kneeling as he went to close the design behind him. The air cooled as he sketched the last stroke, frosted with waiting magic. He poured the moonlight onto the channel he’d drawn; it was thicker now that it’d been distilled, bright enough to light up the room. By the time the last of it fed into the chalk circle, it was shimmering with hard-edged radiance. The iron powder was last, mixed with water and brushed carefully over the innermost boundary.

He painted it twice, careful to not leave any gaps. At last, he couldn’t put it off any longer. He slipped into the current of his Breaker-sense and looked at the circle.

The sections aligned differently now, interlocking like well-engineered teeth. He turned slowly, drinking the light in, observing each quadrant and looking for disparities. There were none. He’d done a thorough job on the one thing he excelled at. The thought made him more weary than triumphant. He reached down, a thread of magic in hand, and linked himself to the circle.

The light folded over him like lotus petals closing. There was no pain, just a faint sense of vertigo as the room melted away in whorls of light.

Salt air flooded his nostrils. Felun squinted his eyes open against a sudden breeze and heard pebbles crunching as he shifted his stance. A vista sprawled before him: dozens of rivers cut through pale sands, running into the sea. The sea had no horizon.

When he looked up, he saw the sky, and then the world. It was the world, if the world were refracted through strange prisms. Walled castle and Glister spires and Cathayan countryside, gleaming steel jumbled into green hillocks, ugly and monstrous and dazzling all at once. A golden pavilion bisected city streets at right angles, where tiny dots marched like ants. People, he realised. The tops of their heads, each smaller than the point of a runequill. His balance tipped. Vertigo assaulted him, the screaming insistence that he was upside down, balanced on a ceiling and about to fall. He flicked his gaze away.

Looking at the rivers was almost worse. Where the water rippled and let through patched of clarity, he saw bulging creatures beneath the calm skin of surface tension. Flaking skin. A huge, rolling eye. He fixed his gaze away and ahead, at the lack-of-a-horizon. That, at least, only confused him. There was some trick to it, where the water blended into sky, and he couldn’t solve it with his brain or his eyes.

View the source, she’d written. Only the source matters. But first find the tower.

Felun turned in a slow circle, careful not to fall. Every movement he made felt minutely wrong, as if it were all out of step with his body. There was a tower behind him, some distance away. A mile away. Maybe two. He blinked. Three? Her notes had alluded to some problems of a dimensional nature, but they hadn’t described the specifics. He squinted harder. A dark spike like a lone thorn. The more he looked at it, the further away it seemed to get. So he stopped looking, just fixed his eyes to the smallest grains of sand at his feet and started walking with a hand outstretched in front of him.

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He walked long enough for the swaying unfamiliarity of his steps to make him fully nauseous before his palm hit a wall of black stone. The blood trembled in his veins at the contact. He snatched his hand away, moments before a doorway dribbled into existence before him. Steps spiraled upward into a blueish gloom.

Felun entered the tower and began to climb. The inside was featureless, too smooth, not built by human hands and probably not by faery ones either. There was a sick precision to every step, a presence which jabbed at his Breaker-sense and seemed to boast that it could not have been hewn or carved or moulded. Going in circles didn’t help his vertigo, but he kept his hand off the wall. It didn’t want to be touched.

Trying to count the steps seemed to make time thicken around him, glossing over his skin like an ash glaze. He felt like a shard of clay being hardened in fire. The ascent was just this side of bearable. Perhaps a moment before it crossed over into merely tortuous, another exit flowed open. The breeze flew in like the exhalation of a mountain god, as cold as morning mist. He steadied himself a few steps before the threshold; there was no terrace, no railing, nothing beyond but a very long drop. He suspected the only reason he wasn’t touching low clouds was because there weren’t any in this place.

When he looked down, he expected to see the rivers and was momentarily shaken when they weren’t there. Instead, the awful jumble of architectural reflections loomed below him. Teeming cities. Human Hives. And now the rivers were above him, their bellies full of daemons and oceans. He looked at the horizon again, peering and squinting, trying to resolve the limit.

Only the source matters, she’d written, and underlined it too.

“If the other sides are useless here…” he murmured to himself.

His Breaker-sense was already with him, but he needed to do more than see. He needed to understand the demarcation. The sea and sky were not the same thing. How they braided together was some structure, some clue, and if only he could resolve the measure of it then he might understand a fragment of a principle of the rules governing magic.

Pushing the Breaker-sense as far as it’d go only gave him a headache. A prickling itch sifted across his eyes, as if he’d exposed them to sand, or smoke. The walls around him felt like they were moving when he wasn’t looking at them, sounded as if they were on the verge of whispering a warning into his ear. He shut his eyes, and opened them—

And then it happened without him needing to think about it, like flexing a muscle he hadn’t realised had existed until now. He opened his eyes, then opened them again, and again, and again. Phantom eyelids peeled apart, the scene crystallising, raw information flooding into his mind.

The half-existent horizon moved like a breathing lung, shifting and expanding in subtle shades of green and blue and largely in…waves…that he shouldn’t be able to see. Seabirds drifted beneath water, and sharks swarmed the sky. His eyes watered, perceiving the shapes holding the world together. They were like gentle talons, anchoring this in-between place to everything else. They clasped the world of solid things below—or perhaps above—him, and touched the realm of pure, violent magic above—or perhaps below—him.

He knew, then, where Libraries and Archives sprouted from. Similar things given different names. The labyrinth he’d traversed had been more like a living lattice than anything human-built, though you could already suspect by looking at it. Here was the naked horizon, the pulsating aquifer beneath his reality. Shapes twitched and slithered, sharp and beautiful. One moment, they resembled translucent gears; the next, they were the ghosts of carnivorous vine forests, their tendrils coated with sugary dew. He wasn’t sure how long he stood and watched. The air grew thick. Blood beaded in his tear ducts, overflowing his eyes and leaking out through his nose.

Time seemed to beckon. Stay a moment longer, it crooned. Unlock a secret. Perhaps even half a secret will do.

He could drown here, he thought. It might be simpler to. No need to return to that dizzying chaos below-above-below him. He could stay here and learn. He could wait. He could go back when he was strong enough to fear nothing.

A strange, fierce want assailed him. Stay here. Look at it—the way the light catches the water; the shoals darting between the mechanisms, lovely short-lived creatures they are; the shadows like spinning gears; how beautiful. You can still leave, whenever you like.

Felun stood there a moment longer, savouring the sight. When he wiped the blood from his eyes, his whole palm smeared red. There was no pain. His body might dissolve, but he probably wouldn’t die. Not in a way that mattered. Felun-Haoyu-Felun could rebuild himself again, if he worked hard enough at learning how. He could do it properly, this time. Or perhaps he could join the creatures in the flock and the flying shoal. Join his mind to the currents. The slow tick of infinity knocked against his temples, steady and calming.

Anything you’d ever want to know. Just pick one and begin. Hurry, before your flesh turns to mud.

He almost reached for the horizon. A luminous cloud promised shields that would never break; another beckoned with a thousand arms to do a mage’s bidding; and over there was a tangle of moonlight suggesting he could learn a spell to resurrect the dead, if only he grasped with his faltering hand.

But beneath it all, the memory of his predecessor flickered like a dying candle: her book, her notes, the instructions so meticulously detailed. He’d already gotten what he came for, hadn’t he? He’d opened his eyes. Where before his Breaker-sense had been like a chalk circle, flat and unmoving, it now moved in writhing worms of light.

But—weakness, he thought with a shudder of disgust. He was still so weak. And the thought of that dead Breaker ate at him. Hadn’t she died because this hadn’t been enough?

It can’t end like this, someone said. The voice—or the idea of a voice—chimed behind him. He turned, startled, but there was no one.

“Hello?” he said. His voice echoed down the tower. “Who is it?”

No reply.

“Were you her? A Breaker too?”

Only the wind, the shapes fringing the boundary. Only the threshold. The fall. He shook his head. He was imagining things.

Like this, the voice murmured without inflection.

He startled again. “You’re not real.”

Can’t it, said the fragment.

“Are you a ghost?” he demanded. “Or just an echo?” Perhaps this place was pulling thoughts out of his head, constructing an illusion. Or maybe it was real. Maybe this place took pieces of its visitors, kept mouthfuls of their voices to drift through the in-between. Would he leave an echo of his own, once he was gone? Would he feel the missing fragment, be able to tongue over the loss like a fleshy socket emptied of its tooth? Perhaps it would be better to not leave at all.

Can’t it end, the echo said. End this.

He blinked, turning away.

Can’t end, the echo said. End it. End this. End.

The horizon bloomed rich with information: visual ciphers, fragments like the sliver-spaces between inwardly-spiraling rose petals. It could be a garden run wild, anchored with roots of marbled flesh. It would take years of diligence to coax just one of its buds to fruit.

End.

After that, he would need to rake the leaves and prune the branches to harvest more. By the time he learned anything of use, Ishaan and Yuying and all the rest of them would be gone, dust on the wind.

End.

“I could try to unravel you,” he said slowly. “Is that what you’re asking?”

End…

There was nothing to see; no errant wave indicating her presence. He reached out a hand, grasping nothing.

“Maybe not, then.”

Can’t end. Can’t. This. Is the end.

Blood ran down his chin. He’d been here long enough. Shivering, he closed his eyes and knelt, feeling for the ring of powdered iron. Spell-soaked wood. Fingernails scraping. Contact. The dimension fooled him with the glassy recoil of tower stone, but he pushed past until he found wooden planks, iron dust.

He hesitated. “Thank you,” he said. “Whoever you were, I’m sorry. I couldn’t find your name. Thank you. I have to go now.”

End like this, the echo said, almost sighing.

He broke the circle with the swipe of a finger. All the magic he’d stored in it bled back into him like water falling in reverse. Light seared the air, burning white and cold even through closed eyelids.

Then it was over. He opened his eyes for what felt like the hundredth time, blinking through the afterimages. The world had changed. Every wall thrummed with spellwork, clear as plain runelight before him. The chalk diagram was practically gone: every line warped and smudged, iron powder scattered like ashes.

===

“Sungrazer Felun,” Silverwater said from behind a new illusion.

His new spell-sight made the illusion almost laughably translucent. It encased Silverwater in a pitiful, see-through shell of a human form. There were two other faeries behind him, similarly cloaked. Felun squinted. If he really tried, he could push the spell-sight to fade the illusions out entirely. But from the unbothered reactions of the guards and sailors who’d let them onto the ship, their veilments were plenty passable.

“Are we going to the Hive already?” he asked, not really caring about the answer.

There was more to it than illusions not working on him anymore. Each of the faeries were lit up like a column of fire, the lines bisecting the insides of their bodies. There was a sort of cord twisted around that pyre-like glow, and he knew intuitively that breaking or unwinding that cord would kill them. They’d drop dead, just like that.

A hidden shortcut, his mind supplied. A keystone. He could do it in less than a second, if he put all of his strength into it. They’d always been skittish around his magic, but he could actually accomplish what they were afraid of now. Fast enough they couldn’t fight back. It was a strange feeling. Was this what being a fleshcrafter felt like?

“We’ve prepared a vessel,” Silverwater answered, gesturing. It was another of the usual cocoons they carried him around in, wrapped in the illusion of a giant skyfish. “You may collect your required belongings. Note we do not have an abundance of space.”

His satchel was already here, full of the usual stuff: chalk, book, runequill. Taking the cloak was tempting, but it was still soaking in dye and he didn’t know a fabric-drying spell. He knew Ishaan did, but he was probably asleep at this time of night. The note he’d left explained the situation, in coded language and as best as he could. More or less. He’d referred to Silverwater and the schismatists as ‘contractors’, but it was hardly inaccurate.

Please don’t try to escape, he’d added. That much, he could say plainly. He hoped that Ishaan could infer the yet from the next sentence: I’ll be back soon—within a week.

“I’m ready,” he said, averting his eyes from the trio of breakable cords.

Killing faeries wasn’t the aim here. That would make trouble, when he only needed to be strong enough to escape and to fend for himself. Orhan’s drunken teachings hadn’t been enough, and this was probably also not enough. He’d gotten too complacent, adventuring. Then he’d bowed his head in obedience to his family and to the schismatists, fed and served them with his mediocrity.

He wasn’t going to murder them in cold blood, but he wouldn’t make that same mistake again.

The cocoon had been crafted with more magic than physical material. His awakened eyes allowed him peer through the many gaps in its weave. The sky was clear as they dragged him up onto the deck. He watched with interest as the faeries shucked off their human-illusions and dragged new veilments on: skyfish, to match the cocoon. Crescent-shaped scales glittered in the moonlight. If the spell-sight hadn’t brushed the details away, he might’ve thought it beautiful.