Volume 1, Chapter 47: Inconvenient Revelations (Patreon)

It was Bri too who pulled me out of the thoughts about my past that her discovery had stirred up in me, flaring brightly in front of me. I hadn’t noticed when or how she had gotten out of the cage, but she was hovering above my sketchbook, talking to me, and I had absolutely no idea what she had been saying.

“…so maybe, well, yeah, like you said, I’m starting to think there’s more going on here than they told us too, only, um, I don’t know why…”

“How did you get out of the cage?” I asked, setting the stringpen aside. Her portrait was already finished.

“You weren’t listening to me, um, again?”

“At some point my brain wandered somewhere else, but I do remember that you said you can sense a different kind of magic coming off me.”

“Mhm, so, well, basically nothing.” She sighed, letting out black smoke, puffed out her lips, and sent a few sparks drifting into the air. “Everything I said really comes down to, um… when I turn off my hearing, or my sight, when you paint, I feel, well… like I’m stirred up, like I want to create something too. I hear the sound of a brush and pleasant music, and I see a rainbow being woven by a spider—that’s the kind of sensations my Aura gives me… I think it’s Aura, right?”

“I think so,” I replied, turning the page. I played on the stringpen. From the lowest note to the highest, bringing forth an almost black color, and started sketching the shape of another face. This time, I intended to paint Khufu the way I remembered him.

“That’s, um, all? You think that’s it? What about my discovery?”

“I already knew that painting with fire helps me gain Essence—maybe the fact that I had a predisposition toward choosing the artist’s Path has something to do with it,” I answered, focusing on capturing the shape of that proud man’s face. “Maybe it’s connected to my Path—I do have Pyrography as an ability, after all, and that’s painting with fire. My soul probably reads what I’m doing as the same thing.”

“No, um, I’m saying I don’t think so. The feeling is, well, completely different.”

“Maybe most people choose the Path they’re most compatible with, so they don’t experience side effects like I do. I guess until my soul gets used to the fire, I’m going to be a little magically weird.”

“What exactly were you doing before, um, they brought you here?” Bri surprised me with another question. She seemed more inquisitive than I had given her credit for before. I wondered whether she was treating this whole thing like some strange medical case, with me as patient zero.

“Running from people who wanted to catch me. Because of this.” I showed her the ring on my pinky.

“Because of, um, the ring?”

“Not just any ring.”

“It’s worth a lot of, well, money?”

“No... I mean, I don’t know. Generally speaking, it’s worth jack shit. The woman who wore it got it from a very bad man who took it from me a long time ago. It belonged to my mother, and it’s the only thing I have left of her. I don’t even remember what she looked like anymore, so to me, it’s priceless.” I answered her, setting the stringpen aside for a moment and twisting the ring around my finger. For the first time since I had found myself on this strange planet, I focused entirely on it. “It should’ve burned my hand.”

“Mhm. Sorry?” she replied, floating close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from her against the skin of my face.

“I’m saying that with how many times my hand has been exposed to fire, the ring should’ve gotten hot enough to burn my finger clean off. And yet…” I slid it a little higher. The skin underneath was untouched, unlike everywhere else, where it had turned pink from the burns and was beginning to peel away in patches. “Quite the opposite, actually. It looks like it protected the skin underneath.”

“Do you think, um, maybe it’s some kind of special metal or something?”

“I don’t know. Be quiet for a moment. I want to try something.” I looked at her as I said it.

She smiled and drifted a little farther away so the crackling of her flames wouldn’t distract me. As she moved away, she shrank as well.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and, touching the ring with my left hand, focused entirely on it. Instantly, my entire skin burst into living flame. It hissed and smelled like burning flesh, heating me without causing pain—quite the opposite. With every second the fire consumed my tissue, I felt more and more as though this was what I was supposed to be. As though this was the very essence of my existence. Along with the heat and sensation came colors—an all-consuming white bleeding into red. And somewhere far away, I could hear the constant hiss of some reptile. I felt an unpleasant fear of it drawing closer, stalking me as it slithered through blades of fiery grass.

My Daimon went mad along with my senses and began bombarding me with concepts, most of which I couldn’t understand. But among them were a few that my soul seemed able to grasp instinctively.

[Inspired item found: The Serpent of Avalon. Classification: Legendary Work; Named Artifact. Creator: Morgan le Fay. Former attuned wielder: Martha May. Current wielder: Alexander May. Authority Claim: A flame taken into one's keeping remembers its new master. Attunement status: Incomplete. Known properties: Steal the Flame: Fire may be claimed, extinguished, and preserved within the Work. Embers Remember: ~~~~. Serpentfire: ~~~~. Keeper of the Flame: ~~~~. Feed the Serpent: ~~~~. What Fire Has Taken: ~~~~.]

When my hand finally pulled away from the ring, I realized I was breathing fast and shallow, sweat pouring down my forehead so heavily that I couldn’t keep up with it. Every time I wiped it away with my hand, it immediately started running again.

“Did something, um, happen? Are you having a stroke? Do you need help?”

“No,” I replied, forcing my eyes away from the small ring on my pinky through sheer will. It looked so ordinary despite the decorations. I had no doubt it was made from some cheap steel alloy, forged on my own, supposedly nonmagical Earth. And yet what I had understood about my world had turned out to be just as much of a lie and fabrication as everything I had believed about the universe as a whole. “Turns out, Bri, there was already magic on our Earth long before the aliens showed up. Or at least magical items.”

“What, really? That ring?”

I hummed in confirmation. I didn’t tell her that Morgan le Fay—a figure I had learned about in school, someone from the Arthurian legends that had inspired the name I had chosen for myself—had been a real person. I also didn’t mention that my mother, Martha May, had apparently known how to use the artifact. For now, I kept those facts to myself.

“Legendary Work. Named artifact. The Serpent of Avalon, Bri. That’s what the Daimon told me. It also says I’m still unattuned to it, at least partially.”

“What does that, um, mean?”

“I can feel that it can do a lot more than the one ability I can supposedly use right now, but I don’t know exactly what. Other than that there are five more things.”

“And what can you do with it already?”

“It fits me perfectly, Bri—I can steal fire. Whatever that means.” I smiled at her, thinking about how appropriate that was for me, of all people, to have an ability like that.

Still, I couldn’t stop wondering who my mother had really been if she had carried a ring like this, and whether the reason it had always mattered so much to me was nothing more than nostalgia—or whether, somewhere deep down, I remembered what she had been able to do with it.

“Do you want to try it? Um, mhm, that ability?”

“Why not?” I answered with a question of my own. “Would you be so kind as to lend me a little of your flame?”

“Of course,” she replied, drifting closer.

Using Cinderhide on only two fingers, I reached them into Bri’s flaming hair and, with Pyrography, accompanied by the light of my Soma coalescing over my hand in scarlet, ember-orange, and molten gold, drew a simple line out of her and curled it into a spiral, something like a fiery spring.

“You can move,” I said, letting Bri pull away from the spiral. But it flew backward together with her. “Fuck, I forgot you’re the source, and whatever I draw onto you follows you around. I wanted it to separate from you.”

“Hmm,” Bri replied, and immediately shrank down, suppressing most of her flames. With that sudden change, the flame I had drawn hung in the air, separated from her, and my Psyche took over the burden of keeping it alive.

“Excellent work,” I replied, reaching my hand toward my creation again. As I did, I focused on the ring and demanded its obedience.

There was a faint resistance from the artifact, but I overcame it almost immediately. Then I felt it reach toward my Psyche like a serpent striking out from the flames and sinking its fangs into my soul.

There was no pain. At the same time, the flame hanging in the air was dragged into some magical space within the ring, like light being swallowed by a black hole. The part closest to me vanished first, pulled in with incredible speed, while each following fragment chased after it with the slightest delay until the air was completely empty again. There was no sensation of warmth accompanying it. No heat. No burning against my skin.

The fire stolen by the metal simply ceased to exist. I dismissed Cinderhide from my fingers and looked down at the smallest one—the pinky bearing the magical ring.

“It worked, um, right?” Bri asked.

[#~…..--..~]

“I think so. I can feel that the ring wants to tell me something about the fire it absorbed, but I can’t understand it. It’s like something completely shapeless, expressed in colors and sounds I don’t recognize, is trying to show me something. My head hurts from all those concepts I can’t make sense of.”

“Maybe, well, you just need more time before you can use the rest of what, um, the ring has to offer?” As she asked, I felt her Eye of the Physician trying to examine me.

I pushed aside my soul’s protests and allowed her to do it without resistance.

“Maybe. Did you find anything?”

“Exhaustion. You’re just really tired.”

“That’s pretty much how I feel after all this.” I looked toward the stringpen and sketchbook. “I’ll paint the rest of our companions some other time.” I reached for everything and packed it back into my backpack. “You want to nap first, or are you going to keep watch over me?”

“You lie down. I, um, honestly slept through most of the trip here. I only woke up because of that smell and when the necromancer appeared… so I’ll keep, um, an eye on you,” she replied, hovering in the air nearby.

I arranged my backpack so the softer things inside were on top and could serve as a pillow, then rested my head on it and curled the rest of my body onto one side.

“You still haven’t answered how you got out of the cage, you little smartass. You think I forgot?” I said, still looking at her while thinking about all the uncomfortable truths I had uncovered by focusing on something that had belonged to me for so long.

“I made myself smaller and flattened out enough, um, to fit between the bars. Lex… are you sure everything’s okay with you?”

“Yeah, Bri. Don’t worry about it. I’m glad I have something like this with me.” I lied. Glad was far from what I felt. Unease, confusion, surprise, anticipation—all of those were tearing at me. But there was also fear of what the people who had known about the Event beforehand might have brought with them. Before, I had assumed that, in the best-case scenario, they might have an AK-47 or maybe a full suit of armor. But magical items were apparently on the table too. And that definitely destabilized the balance between those taken from Earth—and probably from other worlds as well.

I also had to assume that if my mother had been magical to some degree, then among the people brought here there had to be others like her. People with far more experience with magic than me, Sophie, Nicky, or Peter. Even Khufu, with his shamanism, already had something of an advantage. I didn’t like that, but on the other hand, this was just another challenge to overcome.