“You’ve chosen the Sylvans as your primary peoples? The plantlings?”
“They are not plants, but yes. Quite lovely aren’t they?”
“Weren’t you the one chidding me about picking beautiful people for my city?”
“I most certainly was not. You, I hasten to remind you, claimed to be selecting for beauty and then you picked all of the most hideous specimens put before you, one right after another. That is what I was chiding you for.”
“Trust me my Most Honorable Sisarai, the people I have selected are very much the most beautiful, though it is also true that beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder.”
“Perhaps, but even you must behold how splendid my Sylvans are?”
“Splendid dupes perhaps. Tell me, don’t you expect it will grow tiresome having them fawning all over you for eternity?”
“I can not imagine why it would? As the newly arisen gods of this world, fawning admires will be a cornerstone to continuing our ascension.”
“Right up until the turn on you.”
“Oh, my Sylvans shall never turn on me. After all they won’t be worshipping me directly. All their grace shall be directed towards the Holy Tree. I will merely remain a humble Accessor, though that title must fall away.”
“A false god makes for a clever receptacle I must admit. What if they should decide to burn it though?”
“If it comes to that then I of course will be the only leading the procession, torch in hand. Then we shall plant a new tree, a better tree, and the cycle will begin all over again.”
– High Accessors Dyrena and Sisarai comparing notes on the people they intended to save from the Sunfall.
I’d experienced mishaps with invoking Mazana’s gifts before. Pretty much everyone who ever sung for one had. Hit a flat note, sing at too little or too much volume, hesitate for a moment or rush one note into the next, there were so many methods of fumbling a gift and so many forms the backlash could take.
The good news was that the backlash from a first attempt at invoking a gift was rarely significant or long lasting. Annoying and embarrassing in almost all cases, but never deadly or permanent. With the magic that we called being almost entirely external to ourselves and our ability to draw it in being as weak as it ever would be, most first time invokers were simply incapable of getting themselves into much trouble.
The bad news, because there’s always bad news where I’m concerned, was that the darkness that swallowed my sight was not a backlash. Like I said, I knew backlashes and what happened to me when I called to be gifted with Holy Mazana’s True Sight was not a backlash or a mistake on my part. I knew that but in the instant my vision vanished I knew nothing else at all.
Apologies. That was me.
Why my demon would Take My EYES AWAY was worrisome. Worse than that though, the fact that she could take Mazana’s gift away was terrifying on an existential level.
That ‘gift’ wasn’t what it claimed to be. At all.
But it was from Holy Mazana! Darkness and evil can’t overcome the Divine Tree’s light!
I don’t know why I’d suddenly rediscovered my faith, or maybe I hadn’t ever really lost it. Maybe the little crisis I’d been hit by had just been fatigue-induced stupidity.
Except I wasn’t feeling fatigued anymore.
Thanks to a demonic blessing.
I should reject it. It had to be putting my soul in jeopardy to be benefitting from a demon’s gifts.
You should open your eyes. I’ve been saying that for years, but this time I mean it in a ‘right this second’ sense.
I did.
I shouldn’t have.
Listening to a demon? That was the definition of the corruption which led to eternal damnation.
But I had to. Because she was right. The whole class would have seen me fumble the invocation. The longer I suffered the backlash, the more they’d understand the depths of my failure. I could have been expelled for that one mishap alone.
I probably should have been tossed out.
I was listening to demons.
And dreaming about intruders.
And I was going to do something very foolish in regards to the latter of those, I could feel it building inside me already.
But I opened my eyes anyways, blinking out the darkness to find the world bathed in a golden light, every little mundane piece of it shining with a magic that I wanted.
“That was an excellent attempt Jilya,” the instructor said. “You all heard the answer to the notes of the invocation did you not? Had she known the second verse of the song, Holy Mazana’s gift would have settled within her and we would see a her eyes alight with the green glow of the divine.”
I nodded in agreement, as did the rest of the class. That was the response to anything our instructors told us, and came as a pure reflex despite the vast gulf between what he was saying and what I had experienced. Or what I was experiencing.
You can let the blessing go whenever you’re ready.
She was right.
I could.
I didn’t want to though.
The world was gorgeous.
My classmates were ethereal.
Our instructor…
A lifetime of practice kept me from recoiling visibly but it did disrupt my concentration enough that I lost my hold on whatever gift I’d called to myself.
“You may return to your seat Jilya.”
I didn’t want to.
I wanted to stay there and find that gift, damned or not.
But of course my feet carried me back at the properly decorous pace and I took my seat with an eager smile on my face to show the expected gratitude for having been called on to receive special attention.
Special and unwanted attention.
Attention designed to weed me out when what I wanted…
That wasn’t a safe line of thinking to follow. The instructor hadn’t been trying to weed me out. I was one of the better students in class at new invocation. Not the best, but definitely unlikely to fail badly enough to need any kind of severe correction.
I still didn’t want the attention though, what I wanted was the golden sight gift. The memory of how beautiful the world could be spoke to something in my obviously completely damned soul. How could I never have even caught a glimpse before of what the gift had shown me?
Was I refusing to think about what I’d seen when I looked at the instructor? Yes. Yes I was. Clearly that was a demon’s lie. That someone so blessed by Holy Mazaa could look…could look like that?
No.
I wanted the gift, but I didn’t want that.
Never that.
When you’re ready. And not in quite so much peril.
Demon promises. Doctrine says they’re lies. Always lies.
So why was I sure this one wasn’t?
You’re going to figure out the answer to that any day now. I’ve been telling myself that for years, but I still believe it.
Class had moved on to teaching the full formula for the invocation of Holy Mazana’s True Sight, but the details were complex enough that even my classmates, who hadn’t lost focus for a few minutes like I had, probably weren’t going to be able to keep it all straight.
“Let us see how well you all are following to this point,” the instructor said after several more confusing minutes. He started scanning classroom looking for another victim…no, I couldn’t think like that, ‘volunteer’ was the right term because we’d all chosen to be here. Anything that was asked of us we’d already agreed to when we chose this path.
Someday. Someday soon.
She sounded so tired. As though I was terribly wrong about something. Which was ridiculous. She was the demon. It was listening to her that was wrong!
“Pulia,” the instructor said, choosing a girl thankfully nowhere near me.
Pulia wasn’t going to have a problem with the exercise. Unlike me, she was as pure and dutiful as we were all supposed to be. We’d never talked much. We weren’t meant to talk since we were supposed to be listening, at least most of the time. On the few occasions where we’d studied together though, I’d been impressed with how peaceful she was, and how quick her grasp of the subject matter had been.
There’s wasn’t much sense of competition between my classmates and I largely because we were all perfectly capable of failing on our own. While the tests we were put to were often harsh and difficult, there was never a limit to the number of people who could pass them.
Or at least not an official one. Many tests over the years had seemed unequal in their application, with the students the instructors disliked being the primary ones to be tested to be their destruction.
Pulia had never been one of those students and if our instructor was calling on her, it was because he wanted to be sure the gift’s invocation was performed properly since no one else was likely to have followed his directions as closely or well as Pulia had.
She took her spot in the center of the Blessed Circle I’d stood in and raised her voice in much the same song I had.
For a too-fleeting instant, the memory of how she’d looked in the Golden Vision came back to me and my breath caught in my throat.
I’d been impressed with her talent for a while. How had I missed just how beautiful she was though?
I’m sorry.
My demon wasn’t apologizing for denying me the knowledge of Pulia’s beauty.
You are the only one I can protect.
I…I couldn’t make sense of that. Protect? Me?
Pulia’s scream cut right through my confusion though.
Flowers sprouted from her. Glowing with holy light.
They were followed by vines and then branches.
At all angles.
Angles a body should never have been twisted into.
But they didn’t kill her.
They weren’t that kind.
As the flowers bloomed open, each revealed a lidless, searching eye inside, and as each opened, Pulia’s scream rose, her song shattered and abandoned.
This was not a backlash either.
Not even for someone as talented as Pulia.
The instructor saw that.
But the flash of horror in his eyes bore no element of surprise.
He’d known.
I felt fire rising in my chest.
He’d known this could happen.
My skin began to sizzle.
We can’t…
Now was not the time to listen to a demon.
I didn’t growl.
Not audibly.
The instructor’s gaze nonetheless snapped to the rest of his class and then back to Pulia.
More branches stretched her out, pulling muscles and bones into agony.
And he fled.
Turned and ran from the classroom.
Without a word, without a sound.
For a moment the only thing I could hear was the sound of bone snapping.
“We need to help her.”
I wasn’t the one who said it. I’m not a good Sylvan. One of my classmates was though. Or all of them, since we all leapt from our seats to fly to Pulia’s side.
Reflexively, no one touched her.
All of us knew the price of breaking the Blessed Circle.
It was the only thing keeping us safe from the horror that was happening to Pulia.
“Healing. We can share a healing gift with her,” one of my other classmates suggested.
A glimpse of memory hit me again. She was as beautiful as Pulia was. They all were.
All of them so brave (I was always afraid).
All of them willing to sacrifice themselves (I only wanted to live).
All of them at peace with what was right (And I was so, so very wrong).
But so was this.
I held out my hand with the rest and called on our gifts.
Pulia wasn’t going to die.
We wouldn’t let her.
She was mine.
Flame roared and for an instant all I saw was red and gold.
And all I felt was power.
So long dormant.
So long unclaimed.
So long to the girl I’d once been.
But if this was damnation, then it was glorious.
