A/N:
And the story of Edge's parents continues ;)
It's amazing how much better I function with a full night's sleep…makes the writing process so much more bearable, lol.
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Asylum
Obtaining an audience with the king was difficult; but I managed, on occasion, to be present in the room while he was having his discussions with Nyah. Each afternoon as I watched the proceedings, I would see her kneeling on the floor with her hands in her lap—in the borrowed robes dyed a rich hue of blue tucked and folded around her slight form. Each day the king would inquire about politics, poetry, or language and they would engage in a certain amount of wordplay. My command of the common tongue, the tongue of politics, was good, but even I couldn't keep up to their level of sophistication. I hadn't seen the king smile in many years the way he did when he spoke to her—clearly something in her answers was pleasing to him.
One day, as I accompanied her from the king's study to her room, we took a detour into one of the compound's gardens. Once again, I couldn't help but inquire as to her motivations. It had been over a month now that she had been with us, but the king still had not decided her fate and her persistence had yet to falter.
When we were both alone, I watched her take stock of her surroundings as one gazes at a piece of art. She wasn't facing me, but I could imagine the small smile on her lips.
"You want something other than asylum," I ventured, taking a few slow steps toward her. "Something Mysidia couldn't offer you."
She crossed her arms, as if doing so would protect her from my words. "Shinobi have a magic different from that of mages," she said simply. "Magic that isn't understood by scholars on the subject. Magic like mine."
"And?"
She turned to look at me, studying me, and whatever smile might have been on her lips had now faded to a thin line of contemplation. "I don't want to live in fear of my magic," she said. "I want to learn how to use it, as you do."
"This is what you've been asking of the king?" I asked incredulously, feeling my brows rise. "You want to be trained as one of us? An outsider? It's absurd."
"Why is it that only those born here have the privilege of understanding this sort of magic? This confounding, unpredictable, intimate magic?" she asked, frowning.
"Intimate?" I asked, uncertain of her meaning. I had never seen my magic as anything but a tool, not an emotional bond.
Her gaze flicked away, staring at the walls around us as if this place and the entire world were her prison. "I didn't ask for this!" she cried, throwing up her hands. "I didn't ask to wake up one morning and find that none of my spells would do as I asked—that the slightest change in my thoughts could affect what I meant my spells to do. I couldn't even cast Fira without causing a firestorm beyond my control!"
"You did more than trim Mysidia's hedges, didn't you?" I asked, and I noticed her eyes meet mine again with a touch of dismay.
She hugged herself more tightly with her arms than before. "I—I almost killed a man," she forced out, and it was the first time I'd ever heard her voice falter.
"I had intended to cast a simple spell—thunder," she went on, as if telling the story to herself for the first time as well as myself. "It was an exercise in precision and control—and I couldn't concentrate. I tried again and again to strike a single target, to tailor my words to that specific task, but nothing I said made a difference. My tutor was growing increasingly frustrated with my lack of success, a weasel of a man, really. I imagined him being shocked out of his chair; that dour expression on his face wiped clear off. I hadn't meant to shock him literally, but my words and my thoughts were in two different directions and my magic took the shape of them both. Burnt his skin black, stopped his heart…" she swallowed hard and then carried on. "They blamed me for willfully harming him. Insubordination. A hateful act."
"What was your punishment?" I wanted to know.
"A month of confinement, a personal apology, and an explanation. But I had no explanation. I had never meant to harm him."
"And then what?" I ventured. "One thing after another?"
She sighed and started to pace in small agitated circles. "Spells that were only supposed to last minutes, lasted weeks. I lost my temper, and a wind kicked up a dust storm in the courtyard," she explained. "People would vanish unexpectedly and find themselves in the strangest of places—atop the tower of prayer, or halfway along the Serpent's Road."
"And then what?"
"I couldn't use any magic," she said sadly. "None of it. None of the spells I had learned throughout my childhood, none of the incantations. It's why none of your people cast a mage's magic, isn't it? The unpredictability and danger? That tang of wrongness to something that should have order?" she stopped in her pacing long enough to look at me pleadingly. "How can you stand it? That voice in your head whispering to you?" she asked.
"A voice? I hear no voice," I replied.
Her eyes bore deeper into mine; blue and bright and frightening. "If not a voice, then that deep and irresistible urge to summon power to your fingertips from within, to bend and shape things to your will."
At this, I felt I understood her. The magic in our blood was like a second hunger—the need to be used and fed and unleashed. It was a gift—and a curse for those whose magic was stronger than their restraint. We learned meditations at an early age, ascribing each magical inclination to an emotion and a memory, anchoring them. We did not use words, no, but we had found other ways over the centuries to keep our unwieldy magic in check. Recall the memory of a tree struck by lightning in a storm, at the power and terror of it, and the memory could unleash magic as powerful as the vision. Calm your thoughts and dwell on a moment of contentedness and peace, and you could stabilize magic into something malleable and sustainable. It took many years to master, but I had never known what would happen when a magic-born person tried to channel magic from within and without. From Nyah's description it seemed the two couldn't co-exist in any fashion without becoming doubly unpredictable. Magic beseeched from crystals and magic from within were two different beasts.
"You learn to live with it," I told her. "Or you go mad."
She walked close to me all of a sudden, and her regard startled me. Her fingers gripped my arm, making contact with bare skin just above my glove, and I found my throat constricting. I had never had the chance to spend this much time with her before, or to admire the exotic features she boasted. Her dark hair falling in cascades past her shoulders, her high cheekbones, and eyes as blue as the sea…
"Please," she begged. "You've taken about as much interest in me as the king—surely you could—"
I slipped my arm out of her grip, and she took a step back, her brows pinched together.
"To tell you would be treason," I told her, firmly, truthfully. No outsider had ever learned the secrets of our people, and I wouldn't be the first to break that law.
She exhaled sharply through her nose. "Then I shall go mad," she said, and took a few angry steps past me. "Please take me back to my room."
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Thanks for reading! I'm curious to see what people are thinking of this, honestly. It's kind of a new direction!
Until next update,
~Myth