"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."
Norman Cousins
Mercury in Retrograde
Chapter 1:
The Girl on the Beach
He wakes in the early morning to cries for help.
At first they are thin sounds, far away and distant, but as they come nearer, disrupting the veil of his dreams, he stirs from sleep and listens. It is raining - another mid-October storm, it seems - and the winds are battering the window coverings and howling through the cracks beneath the door. His feet swing over the side the bed, searching the darkness of the floors for his slippers, which have somehow migrated in opposite directions. Finding them, he rises from his nest of blankets, stifling a yawn as one lazy hand stretches toward the banister and he begins to descend the stairs.
Halfway down, someone pounds at his door.
"Wizard!" cries a voice from the other side, slightly distorted by rain and wind. It is not his true name, but he tolerates it from the villagers.
He wrenches the door open, for it has stuck again as it has done so many times before, and lays eyes on one of the fishermen. Toby's shock of white hair and clothes are drenched, and there is panic written all over his face.
"Wizard," Toby says again, with something like strained relief. "Please, you have to help! There's been an accident-"
Wizard's gaze narrows; his grafted eye can see much more than his given one. Toby is radiating a sickening yellow aura ringed with maroon - dread. This is not an "emergency" better left to Cain, it seems. "Show me," he commands, interrupting Toby's flustered pleas.
"This way!" Toby cries, and bolts off through Harmonica Town, Wizard following down steps and across the cobblestone paths that lead to the beach.
When their feet touch sand, Toby shouts over the churning ocean to a few others clustered together on the beach, hunched over someone else. Approaching, Wizard can make out Pascal, the ferry captain; he's in a bad way, and there is lingering doom all around him like a curtain. He will not live long without aid.
The villagers are trying to talk to Wizard, babbling about boats and storms and lost radio connections - tiny details he doesn't need - but he lets them go on. Kneeling in the sand, he reaches out, hovers a hand over Pascal's chest and mutters the true name of water under his breath, calls it forward. A moment passes and Wizard removes his hand, studies the grey aura steadily returning to white that only he can see, while the villagers continue to express concern. Suddenly Pascal coughs up a mouthful of seawater, opens his eyes and blinks around in confusion.
"The girl! The girl-" he gasps between wheezy breaths, spittle shining on his lips. "You have to help her!"
Wizard frowns. There isn't any girl here, because the auras have all been the same panicked cluster of yellow-red, and the beach is empty save for this group of ragged wind-torn villagers, Pascal, and himself.
Perhaps it is habit, nagging at the back of his mind like an old dog nattering to be let out, that causes him to look up and comb the grey horizon with his eyes. He is almost ready to dismiss Pascal's words entirely when he sees the barest speck of aura at the far end of the shoreline, distinct in its smothering blackness, a body floating in the shallows.
Not much rattles Wizard anymore, but this does. The aura is pitch black, choked with impending death, and for the briefest of moments, shimmering beside that aura in the sea, is what looks like a man composed of purest shadow.
Wizard's legs are three steps ahead of him, striding across the sand. He moves with graceful fury, heedless of the sudden cries of the villagers, and wades into the waves as rain lashes at his face. The words of smite and purity upon his lips, he stalks forward, ready to force back a demon should the need present itself, a bitter sort of excitement thrumming through his ancient veins.
It is, indeed, a girl; she is floating in the water face down, a motionless ragdoll shuffled along in the waves. Up close there is no shadowy figure hunched over her, but the aura remains black and twisted. Wizard scoops her from the water, expecting the worst, but is surprised at the barest bit of gray left at her heart point. She is a breath from death, but she is still alive.
As he wades back to the beach, he murmurs the same spell for Pascal, and half a dozen others for air and life and hope. The girl's lips are blue, her eyes closed in a porcelain death mask when he lays her on the sand, her sodden clothes clinging to her skin. He traces the line of her jaw and gives it another minute, but she is unresponsive. Wizard closes his eyes, summons under his breath and leans down, his lips brushing hers delicately as he whispers the spell into her mouth, seals it in with a kiss.
He feels the tug of the spell, the little way it nips a mouthful of his life force, and hopes it will be enough. Pulling away, he sits back on his heels and watches her for signs that the transfer worked. It is old magic and not always reliable, but he is accomplished in the art and has seen it succeed far more times than fail.
He does not have long to wait.
The girl's eyes fly open and she turns to the side to heave seawater out of her lungs. It is quite a lot more than Pascal had, and she splutters and pants as the color returns to her face, lips and cheeks turning rosy from the cold and the damp. She sucks in breaths like a fish out of water, squinting into the rain, and when she is well enough to stop gasping, she looks at her savior and asks, "Did Pascal make it?"
Wizard nods, and gestures down the beach with one hand, the wind whipping the belled sleeves of his shirt dramatically. "The villagers woke me to ask for help. After, when he came to, he mentioned there was another." His hand drops to the side, and he turns his scrutiny completely on her with his odd, mismatched eyes. "If I had been but a minute late… but no matter. Can you stand?"
She nods and tries to get up, but her body is weaker than her mind, and she folds in on herself in the wet sand. She is about to ask Wizard for his help, but he is ahead of her, and has already moved to lift her in his arms. She gives a little noise of surprise, but he pretends not to notice it. "I have never seen you before," he says. "Are you visiting, or staying?"
"Staying." She leans her head against the broadness of his shoulder and sighs tiredly. "I needed a change, so I bought a plot of land here with intent to build on it. I didn't even wait for the house to be finished before I-" She breaks off suddenly, coughing into her hands. The sound is ugly, and Wizard makes a mental note to keep watch on her aura. "Sorry, still some water in there I guess. Anyway, I'm Molly. And my rescuer is…?"
"You may call me Wizard. All the villagers do." He does not elaborate on why, and Molly does not ask. She peers up at him and smiles, though it does not quite reach her eyes.
"Wizard, then. Thank you."
He says nothing, and soon enough they have rejoined the cluster of villagers. Pascal is standing now, leaning on one of them, and relief is palpable on his face when he sees that Molly is alive and awake. There are thank yous all around, as well as quite a few pious utterings to the harvest gods. Not for the first time, Wizard wonders how many of them even know the truth of who the villagers pray to.
"Pascal was going to stay with us until we can fix him up with a new boat. We have another bed if you'd like to stay too, Molly," says Toby.
Before she can get a word out, another wet cough racks her. Wizard frowns, shifting his gaze to her. "As kind an offer as it is, I should think she would be better off at the clinic, and soon."
"Normally I would agree with that, but Jin is away at a conference and Irene is visiting her sister off-island. They were supposed to have come back yesterday, but…" Toby trails off and looks at the sea, still furious and grey, worry evident. "I can only hope they were delayed, not caught up in that."
Wizard can feel Molly shivering in his arms. The rain has lessened a smidgeon, but the wind is still furious, and she will likely have caught a chill already. "I'll take her home. The rest of you should get out of the weather, as well. It isn't safe to linger."
Molly doesn't object, and the other villagers don't seem keen to hang around, so without more words they split apart.
When they reach home, Molly's shivers are practically tremors. Wizard realizes he has ruined his slippers and shuffles out of them disgustedly, leaving them by the door that slams shut with a hasty muttering of syllables. He carries the girl barefoot up the stairs, two at a time for his long legs, and deposits her in a chair. He takes her hands in his - so cold, so small, he thinks - and breathes a spell out over them, a warming charm. Molly's arms crawl with goosebumps at the sensation, and she perks up a bit, her chattering teeth silent now that she doesn't feel quite so soaking wet.
"Better?" he asks.
"Yes," she says, a little wonderstruck at the display. "How did you do that?"
He flashes her a look that might be are you daft, girl and says, "The same way I brought you back from death." Casually, he ignores her widened eyes and turns away from her to rummage through an ancient wooden armoire carved with odd symbols. "Do you prefer your tea with milk or honey?"
"Plain, actually," Molly murmurs. He turns back around, having wrested a ruby-red towel from the armoire, and hands it to her.
"Splendid."
When she does not take the towel, he nudges it gently into her hands and says, "For your hair."
She takes the towel, feeling rather surreal and detached from her surroundings when the fingers of her left hand reach up and touch sopping wet strands of hair. Wizard has already taken the stairs down again, and she can hear the sounds of rummaging through the kitchen as he puts the kettle on.
When her hair is mostly dry, Wizard returns with a piping hot ceramic mug of ginger tea for her, and she cradles it in her hands like it is the most precious thing she has. A few sips in, the warming takes effect and travels through her much like the spell had. She wonders if his tea is magic, too.
"Thank you for everything you've done for me. I promise I'll be out of your hair as soon as the inn opens and I can look into renting a room." Another smile that dies somewhere in the middle. It fades from her lips completely when she catches him studying her. "What is it?"
He sips his tea, winces once as he burns the tip of his tongue. Too hasty, young master, croons a memory from boyhood, when he was but an apprentice practicing how to shape fire. He banishes the scene and focuses on the girl in front of him. "Did you know that you are being followed?"
One of Molly's eyebrows raises. "No. I was the only one on the boat besides Pascal."
"That is not what I mean." Wizard sets his tea down on a side table and crosses one leg over the other, hands clasped in his lap. "When I saw you today, floating in the waves, you were near death… and something else was visible, hovering around you. For the briefest of moments, it looked like a man."
Her face, so composed and skeptical, immediately pales; the aura that floats around her is a dim and dusty purple, a deep-seated fear. "No," she breathes, so soft Wizard barely hears her.
"Yes." Molly's hands are starting to shake again, but this time it isn't the cold. Wizard reaches out to steady them, gently plucks the mug from her before it can be dropped, places it next to his own. "Molly, you must tell me what that was." When she does not respond, he leans forward, ash-platinum bangs obscuring his yellow eye. "Did you make a deal with an… entity? A demon, perhaps?"
She looks up sharply, anger and hurt flaring up iron-hot red, swallowing the purple and turning it maroon in violent bursts of color. He's never seen so much personality in one individual's aura before, and he draws back momentarily, as though bitten. "No," she says. "He isn't a demon."
"He?" asks Wizard.
Molly coils in on herself, wraps her arms around her shoulders, face twisting in pain, and the starbursts of red-purple fade back into a blue he has only seen once before, a blue that circled his own life-force for months after his master died, when all he could bring himself to do was choke on the guilt of it. His eyes widen a fraction, and whether it is because he knows this pain or because it is so unusual to see it in a mortal, he scoots his chair in close to her, grasps her hands in his, and gently pulls them to rest on his knees.
"Molly," he says, voice calming as he strokes the back of her hands with his thumbs, "Who is he?"
When she looks at him, there are silent, fat tears rolling down her cheeks.
"My husband," she manages to blurt out, before the sobs overtake further chance for discussion.