Tomorrow is to be my Harrowing. It's a rite of passage for mages, your proof that you've mastered – what? Your powers? Your self? Some other aspect?
I've lost three friends to the Harrowing. One survived, but ended killing herself shortly thereafter. The other two… I never saw again. And none of the senior mages talk about why someone may have failed. It doesn't stop the rumors, the sniping about dead boys and girls who lacked "willpower" or "wits" or just plain "power".
As if they lacked any of those things. As if they deserved to have their lives, their deaths, dissected after the fact, looking for some crumb of meaning like a soothsayer examining a liver to tell the future. They are someone's friends, someone's student, even some poor forgotten parents' children.
But… if they lacked none of those things, why did they fail? If they failed, could I fail?
There is an old saying – the only thing worse than failure is not to try. I'm sure it was intended as a reassuring homily on the nature of striving and becoming better as a result. In the tower of the magi, it's quite literal. Not trying means becoming Tranquil.
The Tranquil are cut off from the Fade. Think about what the Fade is – the Fade is the realm of dreams. The Tranquil are cut off from the ability to dream. Is that literal, or also metaphorical? Do they lack the ability to daydream, to imagine? They seem to. It is incidental that they are cut off from all emotion, but the connection between the two is… interesting.
They don't tell magi they will be made Tranquil. Who would agree to such a thing? Who would think they lack the will to make it through their Harrowing? Better to try, at least, and face death. We only know that we apprentices enter the Harrowing room. An unknown ordeal lies ahead.
Some emerge, pale and shaken. Others are carried, sobbing, but alive, or unconscious. Some headless bodies are quietly removed; they try to keep it hidden, but someone will see and we will talk. Some come out expressionless and calm, and never get better.
Tomorrow is my Harrowing. Maker, let me come out whole of heart, not just mind and body.