Aberrance
by Thea Cooke
“What is the essence of nothing?”
This was the first question Master Gregoire had asked Luta when she came to apprentice under him at the age of seven. Such an odd query stumped her young mind at the time, and nearly ten years and thousands of hours of study later, she’d never come up with a satisfactory answer. She had come to think of it as “the first question,” and the only one so far she’d been unable to answer.
Now, standing in the woods near the Master’s keep, wiping sweat from her forehead with the sleeve of her riding coat, she stood in front of an anomaly that was the closest approximation of “nothing” she had ever discovered.
No larger than her fist, a black, spherical void floated among sun-drenched motes of dust. It levitated in the middle of a copse of birch trees at about the height of her heart, in perfect communion with the rotation of the world. Nothing existed within it. Air, magic, light, even time were all prevented from piercing the small bubble of pure nothingness. She knew this because the flowing currents that connected all things, gently pushing on her consciousness like wind on skin, did not extend beyond its borders—or rather, they disappeared beyond its borders.
Luta wouldn’t have even noticed the void if she hadn’t directed Sunchaser to take a shortcut through the Western Wood. When they galloped by she had felt the disturbance, like a stone breaking the surface of a river, and traced it to its source. Now she stood and stared, unsure what to make of it, while Sunchaser grazed on grass nearby. She had seen dead zones where the currents of magic couldn’t move, but even in those spaces the rest of reality still existed—air and sunlight and stardust. This was an absence of existence she had never witnessed before.
Luta needed to get back to Master Gregoire; he would want the Duke’s correspondence as soon as possible, and the looming war couldn’t wait for her curiosity. Yet, this was a puzzle that was too abnormal to be dismissed. What if the invaders from the East had penetrated the Master’s meagre defenses and planted something sinister in his domain?
She tentatively reached a hand toward the void, palm outward, and opened her senses. There was no change in temperature near the thing, no resistance to her proximity. The only indication that it existed at all was a subtle and persistent desire of the currents of the natural world to fill it, a desire that couldn’t be satiated. Luta felt an urge to probe it with her finger, but one of the first lessons the Master had emphasized was to never touch an anomaly without knowing exactly what will happen.
As she stood pondering what to do, a butterfly crossed her vision, then flitted into the void and disappeared. Luta caught her breath. She could sense the strands that connected the life of the butterfly and could feel them melt away as quickly as snowflakes on a flushed cheek, as if they had never existed.
Luta picked up a branch that had recently fallen from one of the birch trees overhead, still pliable with green leaves on the end. She focused on the energy of the branch, the fullness of its length, and tentatively poked the void. It slid easily into the sphere with no resistance, but as soon as it passed into darkness, the tip melted from view. She thought she saw the surface of the void ripple slightly.
Luta pulled out the branch and examined the end, now shorter than before. It hadn’t been severed, but was tapered and tipped with leaves at the point where it had touched the void. She felt the same living energy, but in a smaller body now. The rest of the branch simply no longer existed—or rather, had never existed—as if it had stopped growing at the point where it met the void.
“Curious,” she said aloud.
Sunchaser lifted his head at her voice, his mouth busy grinding grass. She showed the branch to the horse. “Look! Not only are living things altered when they touch this void, they appear to have always been that way!”
Sunchaser took a couple of steps forward and sniffed the branch. He took an experimental nibble.
“If such a thing can be true,” Luta mused aloud, “does their original state cease to be in the memory of the world as well? I remember the branch was longer, so perhaps not. But does the branch know it was once longer, or is it ignorant of its former existence?”
Sunchaser decided the branch was not as appealing as the grass nearby, and lost interest. She guided him away from the void, suddenly very glad that she hadn’t poked a finger into it.
“We must inform Master Gregoire at once!” She began to stuff the branch into Sunchaser’s saddlebag, then stopped and shook her head at her own foolishness. It both felt and appeared ordinary. It would prove nothing.
She dropped the branch, mounted Sunchaser, and spurred him back to the keep.
Master Gregoire was as haggard upon Luta’s return as he was when she had left the day before. He still hadn’t slept. How long had it been now, nine days? This was a new record.
He waved her over as soon as she entered the study, holding out his hand for the duke’s letter, which she placed in his aged fingers. Luta waited patiently while he read the reply. When his face fell, she knew it wasn’t the news he had hoped for.
“Master?” she probed tentatively. “Are you well?”
Master Gregoire slumped in his chair, his head in his hands, his bristly silver eyebrows pushed low over his eyes. “No, Luta. The situation at the front is worse than we feared. I’m afraid that the invaders will be on our doorstep within the month, so we must expedite our preparation for the duchy’s defenses.” He pressed his long knobby fingers to the sockets of his eyes, as if he could rub away the dark circles there. “In one hundred years, I have never seen such a threat as the sorcery so recently employed by our enemies. It is reckless in its application, like a child waving a sharp stick. The invaders have grown stronger, bolder, faster…and for the first time, I doubt my ability to ensure victory for our people.”
Luta wrung her hands, unsure what to do. The Master needed rest, not compounding concerns, yet she was quite sure she wasn’t skilled enough to handle the void on her own. “Master, I know that this is terrible timing, but I found an anomaly in the Western Wood—”
“—Not now!” he groaned. Then he took a deep breath and sighed. “I apologize, my temper is as short as my nights are long. Still, I cannot worry about a mere anomaly right now. We have much larger concerns.”
“I understand that, Master. It’s just that—”
“—You are perfectly capable of resolving it, I am sure. I must sleep if I am to be of any use to the duchy.” Master Gregoire attempted to stand, but fell back into his chair. Luta rushed to his side to help him, and he leaned on her gratefully. “I have trained you well,” he said as she eased him away from the desk and toward the study door. “You lack belief in yourself. You must learn to operate without my influence if you are to help defend our countrymen. In an ideal world your apprenticeship would be my sole concern right now, and I would happily oversee this challenge. However, the affairs of mortals in wartime are rarely ideal.”
They entered his chamber, and Luta helped him lie upon the unkempt bed, straightening the blankets as best she could. The Master gripped her hand, his skin cool and papery against hers. “This is a good test for you.” His eyelids closed heavily. “Wake me in forty-four and one-half hours, once you have taken care of it…” his voice trailed off.
She gripped his hand, unwilling to let go just yet. “It’s a void, Master! One that changes the history of anything it swallows.”
He nodded slightly and pulled his hand away, laying it over his chest like someone at their final rest. “Reference Seneca’s Compendium then,” he advised as he drifted into a deep sleep.
Luta left the Master to rest and sped to the library. After a few hours of searching, she finally found Seneca’s Compendium misfiled in the zoology section. This wasn’t a surprise given the state of the Master’s library, which he had been compiling for a century and never quite gotten into order. Luta had made a great deal of progress over the past few years in her quest to help him organize it properly, but in the process of going alphabetically, the zoology section had thus far been neglected.
She expected a compendium to be much thicker, but Master Seneca’s was a slim, teal volume embossed in gold. She blew a sheet of dust off the spine and the air filled with the scent of yellowed parchment and ink. The subtitle said Voids of the World.
Luta paged through the book, skimming over illustrations of various voids, their causes, and their cures. They were all combatted through similar means—a concentrated injection of opposing information, such as a burst of light for voids that absorb darkness, or a burst of icy cold for those that absorb warmth. She found no mention of any void that swallowed pure existence, though, and she struggled to imagine what kind of concentration would combat such an anomaly.
To be sure, she started on page one again and read more slowly and carefully. By the time she finished the body of the text a second time, it was late into the evening, and the self-lighting candles had already burned down by half.
At last, out of desperation, she read through the glossary in the back of the book. One term caught her eye, but the entry was disappointingly short. Master Seneca cited the case of a traveler who had encountered a void which seemed to metamorphose due to unknown stimuli. It had created not only a vacuum of magic, but one of light and time as well. There was no mention of how to seal such a void, and Master Seneca himself doubted the validity of the claim, noting he merely included it as an anecdotal curiosity, and named it an aberrance.
“A void of that extent is not likely to exist,” Seneca wrote, “for to remove all presence of reality would break down the laws of nature to such a degree as to manifest a conjurer’s worst nightmare; the absence of possibility. Even within a pure vacuum, potential must still exist, or everything we know to be true about the world is thrown into question.”
Unsure what exactly that meant, Luta closed the book in frustration and rubbed her eyes just as the Master had done, pressing her fingertips against them until bursts of light exploded behind her eyelids and turned the darkness a fiery red. As the color played across her vision, a plan blossomed in her mind.
Luta woke early the next morning and checked on Master Gregoire. He still slept peacefully in the same position she had left him, absorbing the clean energy of the world and filtering out the toxic energy that sapped his powers. Aside from the gentle rise and fall of the long, silver beard on his chest, he was corpse-like in his rest.
She left him sleeping and attended to her chores. As she tidied the study, she reviewed the Master’s notes on preparations for traps to set against the advancing horde. They were meticulously detailed, including all materials and energy costs. She made note of what to scavenge while she was out in the Western Wood. She had about thirty-five hours left to seal the void, collect the materials, and prepare the reagents they would need for the duchy’s defenses.
Sunchaser greeted her with a nuzzle, eagerly accepting the apple she offered as consolation for another day of work. “Sorry to force you out again so soon, boy,” Luta said as she hefted the saddle onto his back with effort. “Once the war is over, we can all rest properly again.”
They found the void with no difficulty, and Luta tied Sunchaser to a nearby tree to be sure he stayed clear of her experiments. Having grown noticeably in the night, the void was now the size of her grasped hands. Perhaps more insects had unwittingly flown into it, or dust had drifted in. Or perhaps it simply grew under its own power, drinking in the very air and light that crossed its path. Regardless, this was a hole in the world that could not go unmended. If it grew too large, she doubted her ability to seal it.
“Stage one, documentation,” she said aloud to organize her thoughts. “If Master Seneca doubted the validity of an aberrance, then we’ll get proof, won’t we?” She looked to Sunchaser for approval, but he merely dozed in the shade. The only sign he wasn’t a statue was the occasional quiver of his hide and flick of his tail.
Luta set to work. She took measurements, did sketches from multiple angles, notated the time and temperature and weather and season. She meditated for an hour, opening all of her senses. She wrote down as much detail as she could relate, including the feel of the magical currents and their density, energy, position, and momentum.
She used a brass device that resembled a pocket sextant—one of the Master’s latest inventions—to record the positions of the energy currents around the void, though it could only capture the absence of magic within it, not the shape of the void itself. She quickly realized that it was impossible to capture proof of nothing. The best she could do was to capture the absence of anything, and use her words and illustrations to express her intuitions about it.
The work was time-consuming and tedious, but Luta was good at it. She had learned years ago that the glamour of sorcery, the flashy showmanship most people saw on the battlefield or at wizard’s duels, was a mere fraction of the real work it took to conjure nothing into something. This was why so many other apprentices had come and gone, losing their patience with Master Gregoire’s slow and methodical methods, while Luta endured. She enjoyed the minutiae of magical discipline. The planning, the preparation, the documentation, the predictable consistency of failure, and all the little choices made day by day that eventually led to success had all been a comfort to her, not a hindrance. She had grown fond of the study, and especially of having Master Gregoire’s gentle guidance at every step as her knowledge grew.
Her thoughts hung on Master Gregoire. He’d been distant, lately. Certainly he was preoccupied with the war to the East, and with the emergence of newer and darker magic by an unknown sorcerer…but it wasn’t just that. He’d been different ever since her first advanced test a few weeks ago, which she had spectacularly failed. Luta knew that failure was a part of learning, but this time it felt different. It was as if this particular test mattered more than most, and her inability to perform even the most basic results had redefined his perception of her. She feared that he no longer saw potential in her. In truth, she could no longer see potential in herself.
It had been a deceptively simple test: to transport a lit candle from one side of a table to the other. From a layperson’s perspective this was a simple magic parlor trick, an illusion often seen at lordly parties by apprentice sorcerers. But her task wasn’t to give the appearance of the candle being somewhere else, it was to genuinely transport it, using only the power found within herself. She was not allowed to tap into the currents of magic all around them, as she so often had before, which felt like breathing using only the air in her lungs.
Such skill involved a deep understanding of the nature of mass and energy, how it exists in both space and time, its multi-dimensional presence, and most importantly, belief in the possibility of it all. Luta had studied all of these at length. She was confident that she held the knowledge required, but not that she held the power.
“You must believe in yourself, Luta! You must be assured that this task is not only possible, but inevitable, regardless of what you think you know,” Master Gregoire had instructed. “Abandon your lessons. Instead, feel it deep in your soul. Are you a conjurer? The power within you will not respond to anything less than full conviction.”
This had confused her. She’d spent the last decade learning directly from the Master, devouring the books he gave her, dutifully practicing the exercises he assigned, building her skills and knowledge step by agonizing step. All that study was the foundation upon which conjurers built their skill, wasn’t it? She couldn’t understand the purpose of abandoning those lessons now, not when she needed them most.
After hours of trying, Luta had felt exasperated. She did believe it was possible, because she had seen the Master do it. She was confident in her skill, after so much studying. She had done the practice exercises, many times. Why wasn’t all of that together enough to produce even the barest hint of progress?
In the end, Master Gregoire had sighed and snuffed out the candle, which by then had burned down to a nub. “We shall approach this task again in the future,” he said before retiring.
Luta had never heard him sigh at her efforts before. The soft breath of it had been as devastating to her as a hurricane.
In the sunny copse of birch trees, Luta shook her head clear of the recent memories and forced herself back to the present. Her concentration was at risk of drowning in such negative thoughts. Master Gregoire would not have entrusted this important task to her if he didn’t believe she was capable of achieving success, surely. His distance must be an indication of his faith in her abilities, not a judgement of her potential. She hoped this was true.
Putting her mind to the task at hand, at last she finished documenting all she could and carefully compiled her notes. It was nearly midday, so she walked Sunchaser to the brook to drink and took her lunch. Then she gathered as many materials as she could find to help aid the preparations for the duchy’s defenses: a branch with three twigs, each with a single leaf; a flat hagstone with a hole worn through the middle; willow whips, acorns, and sage.
After she led Sunchaser back to the copse of trees, she prepared for stage two of her experiments. “Next, we test the limits of the aberrance. Can it be filled? Can it be contained? Can it be moved?” Sunchaser was a poor listener, but Luta persisted in using him as a sounding board. Explaining things aloud to someone else forced her to be deliberate in her methodology and think through logical fallacies.
The void had grown even larger and continued to expand as slowly as the sun moved across the sky. As she looked closely, she was sure she could see small ripples in the dark surface as motes of dust collided with the sphere. She even thought she could hear a soft sound with each collision, like feathers falling on feathers, so quiet it was barely perceptible.
Luta took a deep breath and concentrated. She focused intently on the point at the center of the void, and maneuvered her fingers to focus her intention. She imagined a flame blossoming there, an explosion of fiery light created from pure nothing. She commanded it to be so. For a moment, she even thought she saw it come into being—a spark within the complete darkness of the sphere—but it was gone in less than a blink, and she couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t imagined it.
Luta released her concentration and sighed. Of course, it wouldn’t be easy.
She faced the void again, this time concentrating on the area immediately surrounding it. She raised her hands and, bending her fingers in another elaborate gesture, created a glasslike orb around the void. Its walls were thick and knobby, blue-green but translucent. It was not elegant by any means, but as containment orbs went, it was one of her better ones.
She placed a hand under the orb and gave it an experimental tug. The void stayed in place, as if the orb had no pull on it. She hesitated, then continued to pull. The edge of the orb crackled as it touched the sphere, then Luta heard a loud whoomph! and she dropped it in fright. The orb bounced off the ground once, then shattered. The void stayed in its place in the air, noticeably larger.
Luta huffed in exasperation, more at her own reaction than the failure itself, and picked up one of the shattered pieces of orb to examine it. Two edges of the shard were sharp, but one was smooth and disfigured, as if she had simply failed to produce a fully-closed orb where it had touched the void. Having manifested it herself, she could sense the essence of both versions of the sphere—the successful one, and the failed. This multistability stumped her, so she tucked the shard into her sleeve’s pocket to study it later.
She dismissed the rest of the orb, which dissolved into sparkling dust on the breeze. She watched the void closely to see if it would lose volume when her manifestation was dispelled, but curiously, it stayed the same size. She took out her notes again and wrote down her observations.
Over the next few hours, Luta tried multiple different ways of moving the aberrance, penetrating its barrier, or creating something inside it. She was very careful to only use spells and objects that would produce little to no mass, so it would not grow and feed off her efforts. Yet none of her experiments produced verifiable results, and despite her best efforts, the void almost doubled in volume.
By the time the sun began to sink low in the sky, transforming the mountains into hunks of glowing amber, Luta was exhausted. She had used up most of her mental and physical stores of energy. She was young, yes, but hadn’t nearly the stamina that decades of practice had given Master Gregoire. She required sleep. “Perhaps we should come back tomorrow?” she asked Sunchaser. The horse nickered and shook his mane. He was restless to get home again.
Luta knew she had less than a day left to fix the problem, but all she had managed to do was exhaust her ideas. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, recalling her lessons and calming her anxiety. “You haven’t failed yet, Luta,” she told herself. “What you’ve accomplished so far is to find a hundred methods that do not work. There are other ways.”
“Indeed, there is always another way.”
Luta spun around. A cloaked figure stood behind her, shadowed in darkness, a staff in one hand. A hood was pulled low over their face.
“Who are you?” Luta demanded with as much authority as she could muster, though her voice squeaked in surprise.
The figure lowered the hood to reveal a woman with cold, hawkish features. “I am the new mistress of these lands.” She waved a hand, and a dozen soldiers dressed in the colors of the invaders melted into view, their magical camouflage dispelled in an instant. Sunchaser startled, bucking in surprise at the scent and sight of unexpected threats.
Luta was grabbed roughly from behind and thrown to the ground. Her notes flew from her grip and scattered in the dirt. Shocked, she offered no resistance as rough hands bound hers tightly. Once secured, she was pulled to her knees. The soldiers busied themselves with rummaging through her things, then left to set up a perimeter, leaving Luta and the enemy sorceress alone. They seemed eager to get as far away from their magic-wielding companion as possible.
The sorceress pulled Luta’s hair back so she could gaze into her eyes. “Tell me your name and purpose, girl. I will know if you lie.”
Luta didn’t doubt it. Nasty things happened when falsehoods were exchanged between sorcerers—it was not something she would dare risk. “Luta, sole apprentice and assistant to Gregoire, Master of these lands and their currents.”
The sorceress’s eyes narrowed slightly. “He is ‘Master’ no longer. Where is he now?”
Luta looked unwillingly toward the tower. She could slow them down if she implied Gregoire was awake and at full power instead of completely vulnerable. She wondered how much she could reveal without lying. “He is at his keep, preparing.”
“Is he in a deep sleep?”
Luta stared at her captor. How could she possibly know that?
“Answer me.”
Luta hung her head, unwilling to give the confirmation that would doom the Master, but unable to lie.
The sorceress didn’t seem to care, as if she already knew the answer and was just testing Luta’s willingness to cooperate. “I knew it. He always waits too long to recharge his powers.” She turned toward the aberrance and circled it slowly. “Did you create this void?” she asked doubtfully.
Luta shook her head.
“Sealing it, then?”
Before Luta could answer, a young captain arrived. He appeared so suddenly and so skillfully, Luta hadn’t even noticed his entrance. She wondered if his stealth was still being aided by magic that she was too unskilled to sense. “Mistress Yamina,” he said with a low bow. “There is a tower to the West, unguarded. It must be the sorcerer’s keep.”
“Of course it is,” Yamina snapped with mild contempt. “What is your given name?”
The captain seemed confused by this sudden interest, but obedience helped him answer without hesitation. “Edward, Mistress.”
Yamina gave him a disconcerting smile. “That ring around your neck. Is it special to you?”
Edward pulled a chain out from under his shirt, and grasped a silver ring that hung from it. Luta wondered how Yamina had known it was there. “Very. It’s the ring I gave my wife to earn her hand in marriage. I’m not one for jewelry, but she insisted I take it when I enlisted—”
“—Give it to me.”
Edward hesitated only a moment, then pulled the delicate chain over his head and placed the ring into Yamina’s outstretched palm. He watched her anxiously as the sorceress dangled it over the void.
Luta gasped, but she could only watch as the ring fell into the void and disappeared. She felt the threads connecting its fate to Edward’s melt away. Her eyes darted to the captain, but he simply stood there, a confused and obedient look on his face.
Yamina turned back to him. “Thank you for your report. Inform the others we will advance on the tower immediately. I do not anticipate any resistance.”
He nodded, and turned to go.
“One more thing,” Yamina said. “Did you lose a ring recently?”
Edward cocked his head. “Mistress?”
“A ring.” She waggled her finger to illustrate. “Did you lose one?”
He shook his head. “No, Mistress. I’m not one for jewelry.”
“Are you married, Edward?” she asked with a strange smile.
He seemed taken aback, and quite uncomfortable with the question. “No, Mistress. I’ve never had the means—”
“—Thank you, that is all.” Yamina waved him away, then turned back to the aberrance with curious delight. “Interesting. You could be very useful.”
Luta stared at her. “How could you do such a thing?”
“He is in no anguish over losing something he never had,” she said with a dismissive flourish. “The only reason you and I remember a different version of his past even existed is because our consciousness extends beyond this singular dimension.”
Luta felt her cheeks flush. She wasn’t sure which horrified her more; that this woman could be callous enough to sacrifice a human being’s destiny for the sake of an experiment, or that she had gotten more data from the aberrance in a minute than Luta had retrieved after a full day of study.
“Can you restore his history to what it was?”
Yamina scoffed. “All the power in the world couldn’t do that now. That version of reality is gone.” She flicked a finger and a delicate containment orb surrounded the void. Its walls were smooth and clear as crystal, a perfect manifestation.
“That won’t work,” Luta warned.
Yamina ignored her and plucked the orb out of the air. The aberrance came with it, suspended within the center of the glasslike sphere.
Luta’s jaw slackened. “How?”
Yamina stowed the orb within the folds of her cloak. “Multidimensional thinking. For an apprentice of the great Gregoire, you are grossly ignorant. It must be quite a disappointment to him.”
Luta clenched her teeth in shame. That explained the multistability. Of course the aberrance would exist in multiple dimensions, it was outside the laws of physics. She would have to move it in all of them to move it in any one of them. Why hadn’t she thought of that? No wonder Master Gregoire was disappointed in her.
Edward returned. “The men are ready, Mistress.”
Yamina nodded and gestured to Luta. “Bring her. If she resists, kill her.”
Luta was hauled to her feet and shoved into position in the middle of the column of soldiers, Sunchaser pulled along behind, as they snaked through the woods toward the keep.
Yamina stopped the group every once in a while to check for traps, but there were none, because Master Gregoire had not set them yet. He would not wake for another twelve and one quarter hours, no matter how hard Luta might try to wake him. And being bound as she was, losing the ability to use her hands as a focus, she was useless to defend him. She calmed her mind and tried to think.
She counted a mere eighteen soldiers in the group. Not a full detachment, and she hadn’t seen them send any messengers back, which meant they likely had no contact with the rest of the enemy army. An infiltration operation, then. Perhaps they intended to remove Master Gregoire so the city would fall more easily. It would explain why they were here now, weeks ahead of the full army and at only minor strength, save for the sorceress.
At last they arrived at the keep. Once Yamina was satisfied it was completely defenseless, she ordered the captain to secure the area, then confidently strode inside as if she called it home. One of the guards dragged Luta behind. He kept a knife at the ready despite her lack of resistance.
Yamina seemed to know her way around as well as Luta herself, and went directly to Gregoire’s chambers. When she saw him laid peacefully on the bed, a wide grin split her lips. She paced around him slowly, taking in every angle.
“It’s been too long, old man.”
Luta’s suspicion was now confirmed. “You know Master Gregoire.”
“I once called him ‘Master’ myself,” Yamina said bitterly. “I was a fool.” She leaned over and examined his sunken cheeks, his grizzled beard, his chest slowly rising and falling. “Do you hear me, old man? I discovered my true potential, all on my own. I didn’t need you!”
Master Gregoire didn’t stir. Yamina pulled out a long knife. It flashed wickedly in the light of the setting sun.
“No!” Luta instinctively lunged forward. The guard held her fast, his grip like iron bands.
The knife flashed. There was a ripping sound. Yamina triumphantly held up Gregoire’s long, silver beard.
The Master still slept peacefully, his throat intact and clearly visible beneath the shorn whiskers. Yamina tucked the beard into a pocket of her cloak and grinned. “I have wanted to do that for a very long time.”
Luta was brought to the study and bound to Gregoire’s old oak desk, Seneca’s Compendium still resting upon it. She slumped to the ground and sat, her hands uncomfortably tied behind one of the huge wooden legs, as thick and solid as a tree trunk. She picked at the knots tied around her wrists, but the angle made her muscles twinge with pain and she soon gave up.
Yamina started a blaze in the fireplace with a wave of her hand and lazed across the plush lounge chair in which Master Gregoire often napped. She idly pulled out her containment orb, the aberrance still dark and foreboding within, and began rolling it around her fingers. The glasslike sphere was as large as her head, but she lifted it as lightly as a feather.
I suppose nothingness would have no weight, Luta thought as she observed Yamina’s play. She was deeply terrified of what might happen if the orb dropped and shattered. Would the aberrance immediately absorb everything it touched, including the keep and everyone within? Would it grow until it consumed the whole world?
“Strange,” Yamina said, her eyes half lidded in either boredom or concentration. “To think Gregoire would trust someone like you to handle an anomaly as important as this.” She looked to Luta. A malicious grin tugged at the corner of her lips.
Luta pretended to ignore her.
Yamina began to toss the orb from hand to hand, making bigger and bigger arcs as it flew precariously through the air. “How long have you been under his tutelage? About ten years, I would guess.”
Luta hung her head, betraying that Yamina had guessed right.
“And he still hasn’t taught you how to access true power.”
Luta recalled another of Master Gregoire’s lessons. She recited: “Advanced magic does not flow from the mastery of power, but the—
“—Mastery of self,” Yamina finished. “I know the lie. He told it to me often.”
Luta had never suspected the lesson could be a lie. In fact, it was one of her favorites. It reminded her that the illusion of power was just the careful application of fundamental skills and could only be achieved through years of self-discipline.
“But I knew that the power he kept me from was more than he claimed,” Yamina continued. “Every time I studied the currents, I knew the ocean of energy around us has limitless potential. You’ve felt it, too.” She leaned forward in the chair, her voice conspiratorial.
Luta wanted to dismiss Yamina’s words, but she couldn’t, not when there was so much truth to them. She had felt such potential, but never before tried to access it. Master Gregoire had been adamant about using only the energy within herself for her advanced lessons, uninfluenced by outside forces, and she had trusted him implicitly. “The energy of the outside world is fickle, and not for the serious conjurer,” he had said. “It is sufficient for trickery, illusion, and impermanent manifestations, but only by relying on the power from within will you effect lasting change.”
Luta hadn’t quite understood what the Master meant by this, but based on her observations of Yamina’s abilities, there was apparently much to gain from tapping directly into that outside power. Luta wondered for the first time if perhaps the Master was misguided about this rule.
“I spent my entire youth trying to please him so that he would show me how to use that energy to its full potential,” Yamina continued bitterly. The orb in her hands flew faster, almost a blur now. “I wanted so much to earn his confidence. I was patient. I was dutiful. But nothing I did convinced him I was worthy of such a lesson. He withdrew from me, further and further. For a time I convinced myself that his rejection was approval, as if his lack of interest was a strange kind of confidence.”
Luta’s heart twisted in her chest.
“One day I confronted him. I asked him why he refused to allow me to progress into the next phase of my development. I even deferred to him, admitted that he held power over my destiny, that I was nothing without his teachings. Do you know what he said? That if I truly felt that way, perhaps he could teach me nothing of value anymore,” Yamina said venomously, the memory still poison in her mind. “As if my search for understanding was anathema to him. That was when I realized that he was right. I didn’t need him, and there was much more to learn. So, I left.” She leaned again toward Luta, the orb clutched tightly in her hands. “It was in my freedom from Gregoire’s shackles—from his tedium and insistence on self-reliance—that I discovered what he sought to keep from me. I found collaborators, benefactors who supported my studies and gave me the resources to access real power.”
“Amongst the invaders,” Luta spat. Her own boldness surprised her, but if she was to die anyway, she may as well speak the truth aloud.
“Yes,” Yamina nodded with no shame or regret. “Do you know why we’re so successful? Why we’ve won every battle and repelled every counterattack? It’s because I’ve allowed myself to become one with the beyond, to collaborate with nature rather than ignore it. Gregoire would call that a risk, he would have you shackled to only the energy within yourself, but I can tap into the energy of all the world.”
Luta was not a fan of risk. She’d spent years learning how to be meticulous and careful in her work. She’d built in precautions and contingency plans every step of the way. The result was years of minimal and painful progress, but it was progress, nonetheless. At least, until recently.
“I could teach you,” Yamina said, her eyes bright.
Despite her lingering doubt, Luta knew the correct answer and didn’t hesitate. “No, thank you.”
“I’m offering you what Gregoire never will. It’s not just the power—it’s the feeling of becoming part of something greater than yourself!”
“I would rather die.”
“Fool!” Yamina stood and left the orb upon the seat of the chair, momentarily forgotten as she paced around the room.
“Why do you delay your victory?” Luta asked. “You could have easily killed us already.”
Yamina barked a painfully bitter laugh. “Killing Gregoire now would not be a victory. No, I will wait until he is at full strength, and then show him just how strong I’ve become despite his lessons.”
“Fool,” Luta echoed.
Yamina sneered. “You will see. Everyone will see.”
Luta then saw a vision of a little girl within Yamina’s eyes. It was only a glimpse, but she recognized it instantly. A young girl with abilities not easily explained, unkempt and feared by people eager to be rid of her, brought to the stone keep of an impossibly old man, eager to prove herself yet constantly thwarted by a fear that she was, in fact, worthless. It felt like looking in a mirror.
Yamina turned away, embarrassed, as if Luta had just glimpsed a piece of her soul.
The soldiers were elsewhere, putting as much distance between themselves and the sorceress as possible. Perhaps Yamina didn’t feel at home among the enemy, either.
“It’s not too late,” Luta intoned quietly. “There’s still time to reconcile with Master Gregoire, to align with your own people again.”
“It was too late many years ago.”
“Whatever it is you seek, he won’t be swayed. He won’t respond to force, to power, or to prowess. He won’t be impressed by how far you’ve come, or whether you’ve surpassed him. You might defeat him in a duel, but if what you truly seek is validation, you’ll never get it. You know how he is.”
Yamina stared at her with cold eyes.
Luta continued, “You don’t need his approval…or his downfall…to exist.”
Yamina was silent for a long moment. She pulled the wad of silver beard out of her cloak pocket and stared at it, as if examining a dead rat. At last she said, “You’re right.”
Luta dared to breathe a sigh of relief.
Yamina continued, “He will never acknowledge my abilities, because they were not obtained through his means. For so many years, I wished to be a part of this place. Then I wished to destroy it.” She strode back to the chair and picked up the orb, turning it in the firelight, transfixed. “Now…I wish it had never existed. I wish he had never existed.”
Luta stood. The binding rope fell from her hands, shredded with the shard of containment orb hidden in her sleeve. She positioned her aching fingers and muttered a spell.
Yamina whipped around, her eyes wide, before she was thrown off her feet by a blast of conjured wind shot from Luta’s outstretched hands. She twisted in the air and landed before the fire.
Luta leapt forward and barely caught the orb before it smashed onto the wooden floor.
Yamina came up with teeth bared. Her hand shot out, her fingers twisted with intention.
Luta felt her face prickle with heat. She dove back behind the old oak desk as a blast of fire nearly took the hair off her head. The curtains behind her smoldered. Books and papers flew off the desk and fluttered around the room.
“How dare you!” Yamina growled as she regained her footing.
Luta prepared another wind spell and whipped around the side of the desk. She let it loose toward Yamina, but the sorceress wasn’t there. The blast hit the fireplace, and the room went dark with a furious gasp.
Luta glanced around before she ducked back into her hiding spot, but Yamina was invisible. She had forgotten the sorceress’s concealment spells. Stupid! She chided herself.
An invisible hand grabbed Luta’s collar and ripped her out of hiding, then threw her to the floor. Luta gasped as the wind was knocked out of her lungs.
Yamina knelt heavily on her chest, her face twisted in rage. “You won’t take this moment away from me,” she snarled. Moonlight fell through the window and glinted off of the blade Yamina had used to cut the Master’s beard, which she now held to Luta’s neck. “I will kill you, I will erase Gregoire. Our army will destroy the keep, the duchy, and everyone within it…and you’re too weak to stop me. Compared to me, you…are…nothing!“
Luta swallowed. She felt her throat brush the blade. She raised her hand to reveal the orb, still in her grasp. It, too, glinted in the moonlight, the aberrance inside still inky black and menacing.
Yamina’s eyes widened as she realized Luta’s intention. She reached for the orb, but Luta hurled it toward the fireplace. It shattered with an ominous crackle.
A whooshing sound filled the room as the void touched solid mass and expanded rapidly. The fireplace became full black as light plunged into it. Stone crumbled. The walls began to tear apart. Pieces of masonry evaporated into the lightless sphere, slowly at first, and then faster as the volume of darkness grew. The floor shuddered beneath them. The wooden beams creaked and began to crack as they bent toward the void.
Yamina scrambled off Luta and reached for the desk, but the large oak monstrosity began a shuddering slide toward the void. Luta rolled out of the way as it skidded past her and was swallowed whole.
“No!” Yamina cried as she scrambled for the bookshelves. “What have you done?!” She slammed the knife into the floor and used it to anchor herself.
Luta crawled up behind Yamina and grabbed her legs. The floor fell at an even steeper angle. Books fell off the shelves and hit the void with a rain of whoomph sounds. The room filled with the roar of eradication.
Yamina kicked at Luta, trying to dislodge her, but Luta scrambled up her body. The two women vied for hold of the knife handle, and to her surprise, Luta held her own against the intimidating sorceress. Yamina held her free hand aloft and began to mutter another fire spell, but Luta punched her in the face so hard that Yamina lost focus.
“Maybe you’re right!” Luta yelled over the howl within the room. “Maybe I am nothing, but I belong here, and you don’t!” She hefted a kick at Yamina’s abdomen. The distracted sorceress lost her grip on the knife. She flailed against the smooth wooden floorboards for a moment, then slid screaming toward the void. She disappeared into it with a foom!
Breathing heavily, Luta waited for everything to go back to normal—for the void to return to the Western Wood, before Yamina had arrived—for history to right itself along a different timeline. As the seconds dragged on, and the keep shuddered around her, moaning with the pain of being dismembered from the inside out, her heart fell. The floor tilted even more dangerously toward the void. Her grip on the knife shook with effort.
More ephemera flew past her to be swallowed. A flash of teal fluttered in her vision, then smacked her in the face. It was Seneca’s Compendium, open to the last page she had read. The words: “potential must still exist” hung suspended before her eyes.
Suddenly, she understood. She stared at the void. It stared back, one huge, impossibly black eye.
She took a deep breath, forced herself to believe, and leapt into the void.
Luta awoke with her cheek pressed against cool stone. She was fully naked, sprawled face-down in a concave bowl of masonry beneath the remains of the keep. She pushed herself to her elbows and tried to clear her vision. She could not be dead—her head ached too much.
Overhead, the incomplete walls hung over her like a canopy of crown-shy trees. How large had the aberrance grown before she had nullified it? Large enough to reach down to the ground and up through the ceiling, creating a mad architect’s skylight. She could remember another version of the keep, one with the library overhead…but this one, with its open-air balconies, felt strangely familiar as well.
She crawled out of the bowl and wandered outside. It was already mid-morning, and the day was calm and bright. No enemy soldiers greeted her with shouts of aggression. Either they had run off when the keep began to crumble before their eyes, or they had never come at all. She hoped it was the latter, though it would take more energy than she currently had to sift through the memories of this manifestation of reality and know for sure.
She picked her way carefully over the rocky ground to the stable, where Sunchaser dozed in his stall, his coat brushed and his trough full. He lifted his head in curiosity when Luta stole one of his blankets and wrapped it around herself, then resumed his doze when she left.
She had to pick her way carefully around the half-finished staircase in the upstairs hallway, but finally made it to Master Gregoire’s chamber. It was just about time for him to wake up.
During last night’s commotion, the room shifted and the old man had rolled out of bed, but he slept soundly through the ordeal. Now he lay on the floor, face-down, drool spilling from his mouth. His beard was still haphazardly shorn. She recalled as if from a dream a memory in which his beard had been maliciously cut, but then another memory replaced it, in which he had chopped it off after accidentally singeing his whiskers in an experiment gone awry.
Luta picked up the Duke’s letter, still on the nightstand. It mentioned troop movements and enemy sightings, but there was no mention of an impending attack. The invaders in the East, it seemed, were no longer on their doorstep.
Master Gregoire stirred and blinked awake. If he was surprised to find himself on the floor, or to find Luta in her disheveled state, he didn’t show it. Instead, he cautiously pushed himself to his feet and looked about the room, smacking his lips and stretching his stiff limbs.
“Ah, Luta! All went well with our preparations, I suspect?”
“As well as can be expected, Master. I’m afraid I encountered some…difficulties.”
“No matter,” he said as he did some squats. He was always quite limber after one of his resting sessions, even for an impossibly old man. “We will persevere. Oh, that anomaly that you mentioned—I assume you took care of it?”
“Yes, Master. Though I’m afraid it made some…alterations…to the keep.”
Master Gregoire looked through the open door across the giant gap in the building to the far side of what would have been the library in another reality. “Ah, yes. I see. As long as the privy has been spared, we’ll make do.” He stroked his chin in contemplation, then drew his hand back in surprise. “I…had a longer beard, didn’t I? Or, no?”
“Yes and no, Master.”
He nodded, as if recalling a dream. “How did you do it?”
“Do what, Master?”
“Seal the void.” His head tilted toward her in an almost imperceptible way, and there was a twinkle in his eye.
“I found an answer to the first question, sir. The essence of nothing is potential.”
He smiled and gestured for her to continue.
Luta struggled to put her revelation into words, but as usual, she was emboldened by his enthusiasm for her insights. “Emptiness cannot exist unless it is to enable creation, and so to counteract the emptiness, what is potential must be made real. By defining myself in spite of the anomaly’s nature, I removed the power that it had over me. An erasive force can be nullified, as long I believe in my right to exist.”
He smiled and nodded. “Conviction. The only way to occupy any space that seeks to eradicate us, eh? Well done, Luta. I knew you could do it.”
“It was a test, wasn’t it, sir?”
Gregoire hesitated for the barest moment, then smiled softly. “I knew you were capable of performing more advanced magic under your own power, but I could tell that you weren’t yet convinced. The candle test…what held you back was merely a lack of assurance, not ability.” His gaze drifted to the gigantic hole in his home, at once both familiar and new. “However, it appears you had more complications with this test than I anticipated.”
Luta let escape a half-chuckle, half-sob. “Yes, Master.” She would explain later how the invaders’ unexpected visit in another reality threw a wrench in Gregoire’s mischievous methods.
“No matter,” he brightened. “Now that you have found your true power, we will begin your advanced training today.” He put a gentle hand on her blanketed shoulder. “Yesterday you had the potential to be a great sorceress, Luta, but today you are one. Perhaps even greater than myself.”
“That’s one thing I don’t understand,” she admitted. “I destroyed the anomaly by refusing to remove my existence. What does that make me? A part of the world, or someone who is here in spite of it?”
His lips stretched into the gentle smile of a sage who recognized the pain of knowing a deep truth. “You are who you choose to be. You always were.”
As Gregoire exited the room, Luta took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She had finally become herself, and knowing that experience for the first time, she found she enjoyed the feeling.
____________
Thea Cooke has previously published short fiction in Translunar Traveler’s Lounge and non-fiction in Peptalk Magazine. Her stories often involve science or sorcery, sometimes in cahoots with one another. She lives with her son as a grateful guest on the occupied lands of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho; otherwise known as Denver, Colorado. She can be reached via thearetical.com.