RE: Monarch

I had a seed of an idea, but only the beginnings of it, with little to no concept of how it would take shape. Cephur was right that this wasn’t something I could enter into lightly. It was high-risk, and potentially catastrophic if it outright failed. And I wasn’t just talking about losing. Both Sera and I were highly capable magic users. If we went full bore, there was a good chance of serious casualties, and even if that didn’t happen, the chance of sour grapes were high.

After all, we’d both been lucky in our own way. Sera had been getting magic tutelage since she’d awakened. I’d been one of the few humans allowed into the sanctum.

It was safe to say most of my regiment didn’t have the same luxuries. So we needed a scenario. Something that heavily skewed the odds in the regiment’s favor, that would instill a sense of unity.

For that to happen, I needed to run it by someone with a better understanding of strategy. Someone who had, perhaps, been studying it for most of her life.

I passed through the training yard intending to check up on Sera on the way to my destination, and found her drilling at the lineup, covered in sweat. For a moment I nearly interrupted, but the fury with which she was hacking away with the training dummy gave me pause. From my experience, her venting on the training dummy rather than me, or Cephur, or anyone else, was a good sign. She hadn’t given up. She was just managing her emotions.

So, after going back and forth on it, I let her be. Better to come back with a solution than simply acknowledge the problem.

What followed was a lap of the castle. Annette wasn’t in any of her usual areas. Her room, the kitchens, or the war room. I started asking servants, anyone I could find, fighting an undercurrent of panic. What if something had happened to her? What if the source of her original trauma had reared its ugly head early, and I was too busy caught up in other things to realize?

A tan-skinned servant finally took pity on me and directed me towards the gardens. The one place I hadn’t checked, because, over the course of both lives, I’d never seen Annette go there willingly.

I stepped through the towering wrought-iron gates at the back of the castle. The vast botanical oasis spilled out before me, verdant, lined with perfectly manicured labyrinthine hedges and blossoming, temperamental flowers that required constant care.

Vines crept up white-latticed trellises that covered the light-graveled walkways.

The scent, as always, was saccharine, and almost overpowering.

It was simultaneously breathtaking and melancholy inspiring. The gardens were my mother’s project, and she loved them with all her heart. So much that my father paid a heavy price for dwarven technology that kept the gardens themselves humid and capable of sustaining life throughout the seasons.

He’d kept them maintained for nearly a year after she died, then eventually reassigned the dwarven cores to more practical uses. It was never fully abandoned. The gardeners still plied their trade in the summer months, sowed and replanted. But it became a shadow of its former self.

Now, here it was, bursting with life again. As I passed by the blooming beds of roses larger than a fist, adorned with full petals of the richest red imaginable, I half-expected to find the queen among them, as I had so many times before, marveling at the wonders of nature and technology.

I finally found Annette in a hidden grotto, entrenched in hedges beside a small stream. She wore a simple gray dress in stark contrast to the surroundings, and she was sitting cross-legged, arms held upward, parallel to her legs. Vogrin floated around her, rotating, arms clasped behind his back. “No. Stop tensing your shoulders. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Then pray tell, how does it work?” Annette asked. She was characteristically impassive, and her eyes remained closed, but there was a line of irritation on her forehead.

“I… do not know. But stop trying to squeeze it out.”

“Is your wording always so foul?”

My shoulder clipped the leaves of an overgrown hedge, the rustling noise that followed betraying my presence.

Vogrin turned, reacting immediately. Annette barely acknowledged my arrival as I sat on the grass a short distance from her.

“What are we doing?” I asked, glancing at Vogrin curiously. I’d sent him to watch over her a while ago, and from the sound of it, instead of reporting back he’d brought Annette here. “Meditating?”

Vogrin opened his mouth, but Annette was faster. “Your demon believes the voices I’m hearing are a product of a magical manifestation. While this was a relief, at least initially, other than assuaging my concerns of an illness of the mind he has accomplished little beyond that, and I am beginning to believe he may be broken.”

“I’m not broken—” Vogrin snapped, then reined himself in. “I cannot instruct that which I have never encountered.”

Annette opened a single eye. “Aren’t you centuries old?”

“Yes.”

There was a long pause. “Did you stay inside the whole time—”

“No, I did not stay inside the whole time. Now close your eyes and be at peace. If that’s a state you’re capable of.”

They were getting on about as well as I expected, though I was surprised Vogrin had interacted with Annette directly, rather than taking the information back to me. I trusted him to an extent. But not that much.

“Was Vogrin’s help… contingent on anything?” I whispered, just to be sure.

“No,” Annette said. “Wouldn’t have accepted if it was.”

The idea of Annette having access to magic thrilled me. This iteration of her seemed tougher by comparison, but she was still small, with none of Sera’s martial build or prowess. Even something as mundane as earth magic would be a tremendous step towards my little sister being capable of defending herself.

“No idea what it could be?” I asked Vogrin.

He frowned. “It feels a little like the light element. Similar pathways and structures, but decidedly different in terms of scale.”

“Why is it manifesting now?”

Vogrin took me aside, gesturing towards a hedged corner that contained a gazebo. I followed him. Once we reached it, he lowered his voice. “Her soul is worn, nearly as foraminous as yours. The sheer quantity of nascent mana piecing it together is not small.”

That was a lot to absorb. On the one hand, it meant that if Annette awakened, she would be powerful. But I knew from experience it also meant that Annette was at risk of soul damage, which was the sort of injury for which there was no simple fix.

“So why hasn’t she awakened?” I asked, watching as Annette tried to maintain her focus, batting away a bee.

“If what I’m seeing is accurate, her aura-center was suppressed until recently.”

“Is that something she could have done herself?”

“There have been cases of a magician subconsciously suppressing their own abilities. Frequently in cultures that abhor magic. But I do not believe that’s the case here. Her potential is simply too significant.”

So it was something external then. Something presumably strong, and capable of nullifying magic.

A cold possibility washed over me as I remembered the powerful void mage I’d sensed, when my father’s army was closing in and something suddenly quenched my flames.

“Could void magic do that?” I asked.

“Why… I believe it could. If the practitioner was strong enough. They wouldn’t even have to do so constantly. A couple times a week would be sufficient to prevent a child even of her potential from awakening.” Vogrin seemed surprised as he considered the idea. “You’re referring to the mage at the standoff. The one we couldn’t find.”

“If power is a prerequisite, it fits.”

“Void mages are somewhat rare, but not to the point where it couldn’t be more than one individual,” Vogrin said, his voice analytical. “It’s possible they could be the same individual, but hardly guaranteed.”

“And you have felt nothing to that scale since we’ve returned?”

“I haven’t.” Vogrin frowned. “But it is far easier to conceal void than practically any other element. Again, it is in many ways a directable absence of magic, rather than a variant of magic itself.”

“Should I be feeling something by now?” Annette said. “It seems like all this is accomplishing is wasting everyone’s time.” While she maintained the same position as before, her mouth was twitching.

I returned to Annette’s side, attempting a supportive smile. “It took me a while, too. How long have you been trying?”

“Hours,” Annette said. “Hours of listening to the stream, and the incessantly chirping birds, and hearing tidbits of conversation carried by the wind that take me out of the moment. I should not be this incompetent. I dislike being this incompetent.”

“Tell me about the voices,” I said, trying to broach the topic as gently as possible.

Annette turned her hair, and a dark curl spilled over her shoulder. “They come to me in the night. Whisper things. Sometimes it’s nonsense. They can also be echoes of thoughts I have had, or — inverted versions of those thoughts.”

“Like, if you think, ‘the gods were kind today,’ you’ll sometimes hear that, or ‘the gods were dicks?’”

Annette stared at me, unamused. “Not in so many words, but yes. The reversals—” She hesitated, plucked a blade of withered grass from the earth. “They are… frequently unkind.”

I pulled up my legs and crossed my knees, matching her posture. “How long have you been hearing them, Annette?”

“I don’t remember,” Annette whispered.

Between this life and this last, many things had changed. But it was possible this had remained the same. Annette had something and someone had repressed it. The typically overt early displays of magic—brief flares of spontaneous fires, a cup of water that never seemed to remain at the same level it was left at—had turned inward.

But there was one clear through-line. We both had the potential in this life. Perhaps our style of awakening could be similar. Vogrin had been instructing Annette in a similar manner to how the infernals taught spell-weaving. Emptiness of mind, peace of spirit.

I tried something different. “When you think of the times the voices are most pronounced, how do they make you feel?”

“It depends on the voices. My reaction varies with them. Fear, confusion, anger, amusement.” She swallowed. “The only one that’s consistent is… loneliness. This creeping sensation that I am the only one who can hear them, and were I to tell anyone, they would think me mad. My mind is all I have to offer, and the idea that something threatens it and I cannot tell anyone—it lingers, no matter what the voices say.”

I bit my tongue right before I comforted her. If it worked, as it had for me, she’d need to focus in on that emotion. And anything I said that conflicted with it would make this harder. “We’re gonna come back to that. But for now, I want you to focus on that emotion.”

Annette’s hands trembled. She’d likely spent the duration of this trying not to do exactly what I was telling her to do. Vogrin drifted over, curious, as Annette closed her eyes. The corner of her mouth parted in a grimace and she twitched. Her throat bobbed, as she fell deeper into focus, her face growing stricken and pale.

I nearly reached out and touched her shoulder, but Vogrin caught my arm.

POP

“—Drown alone in the bath—uh… oh.” The small, high-pitched voice cut-off. It appeared so quickly that for a moment, I wondered if it had always been there, perched on Annette’s knee. It had tiny dark buttons for eyes, no visible limbs and a small black mouth opened in a “o” shape that could have been a pinhead. Its head was round and distinguishable, but the cloth that extended beneath it was mostly formless.

I had the vague realization that it was a poppet, not unlike the small homemade dolls peasant children in Topside carried around. It even had the twine around its neck.

“What—” I started.

“That’s—” Vogrin said at the same time.

Annette’s eyes shot open. She reacted immediately, curling her middle finger behind her thumb, flicking the thing in its forehead. It did a full rotation before it landed face-first in the grass, then struggled to its feet, made an obscene gesture with a willowy transparent limb, and attempted to run away.

It was not very fast.

“Stop,” Annette said.

As if in response, tall blades of grass wove together, forming a miniature barricade that the poppet ran into full-tilt, knocking it from its invisible feet once more. It blearily looked up at her. From its perspective, she was a giant towering over it.

“It’s a terrible breach of manners to stop speaking mid-sentence.” Annette said, her voice ice. She leaned forward, and the shadow of her head encompassed the poppet’s entire body. “You were… saying something about a bathtub? I would love to hear the end of that thought.”

The poppet opened its mouth as if to speak, then broke to the right, attempting to run around the grass barricade. The grass barricade expanded, staying just ahead of the poppet’s path, corralling it in a circle until it was completely ensnared.

A chuckle escaped Vogrin’s throat. “How delightful.” Then, he raised his voice. “With that cloth body, it looks very flammable.”

“Vogrin—” I started to warn him off, still not entirely sure what to think. But before I could finish, the circle of grass within the barricade suddenly roared with fire, the sudden change in temperature bringing a bead of sweat to my forehead.

The poppet writhed, covered in flame, the light fabric that covered it turning dark at the edges, color change spreading inward. The fire itself didn’t seem to extend beyond the barricade—which, as it was also made of grass, made little sense.

Its small voice grew distorted, almost demonic. “YOU ARE AS SHORT AS YOU FEEL. YOUR EYEBROWS ARE TOO CLOSE TOGETHER. EVERYONE YOU CARE FOR ONLY TOLERATES YOU AS… A… MATTER… OF… COURSE.”

“That’s the voice,” I realized.

“One of them. Not in my head anymore.” Annette said, still entirely focused on the poppet. Her anger seemed to flag into self-consciousness. “Should I, um, stop?”

“YOUR… BROTHER… WILL LEAVE YOU AGAIN… THE MOMENT… HE HAS… THE OPPORTUNITY.” Its voice was growing more distorted.

“Hm. No.” I stared at the wretched thing, feeling significantly less pity than before. There was no question the poppet, the barricade, and lastly, the fire had all come from Annette. Yet as soon as Vogrin suggested the fire, it had appeared. “Should probably speed this up though. And you know what burns faster than normal fire?”

The reaction was instantaneous. Orange flames turned violet, emitting a rising wave of heat. Within seconds, the poppet burned to ash, leaving a perfect circle of scorched earth beneath the grassy barricade.

Annette breathed heavily. “What… just happened?”

Truthfully, I did not know. An earth mage focused on detail work could have pulled off the trick with the grass, though it wouldn’t last forever, and from what I understood it was far easier to manipulate large chunks of soil or stone with earth magic than small, specific flora. A fire mage could have easily set the inferno, but couldn’t have kept it from spreading the way she had. Most dantalion practitioners—of which there were few—rarely left the initial stage of ignis to reach the second stage of control. And the poppet itself looked vaguely like some sort of minor demonic summon common among red infernals in the enclave, as they required little mana to sustain—the small ones often took the shape of mundane objects. But even getting to that point required a contract.

And barring the improbability that I was about to banish Vogrin back to the hells for tempting my sister into a contract behind my back, right before she awakened to three elements simultaneously?

It really only left one possibility.

“Congratulations!” Vogrin clapped his hands and floated in front of Annette. “I was correct, of course.”

“It’s… light?” Annette asked, confused.

“Not just any light,” Vogrin crooned, far happier than I’d seen him in months. Potentially ever. “It is the light that blinds, the light that deceives, that bends and twists the fabric of the universe itself.”

Annette leaned towards me as Vogrin continued his overlong introduction, continuing to watch him as she whispered. “Why… is he so happy?”

“Demons collect rarities. You have something he’s fascinated by,” I whispered back.

“Am I in danger?”

“No. They have too much riding on our current deal to risk it.” I hesitated. “Probably. Don’t sign anything.”

“Got it.”

Vogrin was finally winding up. “…and bends reality itself to her desires.” He bowed deeply with a flourish. “Welcome to the arcanum, illusionist.”