The silence in Leo's quarters had become an entity presence, an extra wall which thrust in upon him, and smelled of his own panic and the ghostly ozone of the released power. For three days, he had been a ghost in the machine of the Academy, and a cage of gilt had been his prison. The four walls, that had seemed foreign at one time, now seemed like the only thing between him and the world that would have him listed and put away. And the new tab of the Codex, called SYSTEM LOCK: PHASE ONE BROKEN, was flashing a faint ill warning purple light at the edge of his vision, constant and aching as a wound, a reminder of the boundary he was on. Or more precisely the path that the Warden had dragged him along kicking and screaming.
He repeated and repeated the scene in the Proving Grounds in a torturous circle of infinity. The sensation of that cold, disarming power unravelling out of his heart was not a warmth, was not a stream, but a dismemberment. How Jax and his magic, his presence, such as it was, was grounded, had just been dropped. Never broken, never scattered, but wiped out. The congratulatory whisper, which had a deadly, paternal pride in it, of the Warden, reverberated in the vault of his memory. It sickened him. He had attempted to assert himself with the Warden, to force him to respond, to scream at the voice in his head, but it had shrunk into its usual, observation posture and left him completely alone in the world, with his own sin and fear that tasted like cold iron and electricity. The state which Jax had been in was a black tattoo on his soul, on his life/death that had no solution and hung like the executioners axe. The official bulletins, which he was allowed to view through a closely-monitored public terminal during his one, closely-supervised daily walk, were brief and in a coldly uninformative manner: "Initiate Jax in a magically-induced stasis coma to stabilize the core. Essence levels critical. Prognosis: Guarded."
He was an outcast, an object in a bottle. As he was led down the great echoing halls, students did not merely stare, they recoiled. They stretched themselves out against the warm, glowing walls, and they were hissing thee like a torrent of speech he could never clearly understand, but of which he made out well in their broad and terrified eyes. The word Null had been a bad word, a company of worthlessness. It was now altered to Soul-Eater, Void-Touched, and the name which made him shiver most of all: The Unmaker. The Academy, where things are carefully ordered and everything can be measured, did not even have a category of a boy who was capable of reaching into the weave of magic and ripping it open. He was a bug in their system, a fatal mistake, and they needed him to be quarantined as soon as possible as the architects decided what to do: debug or delete.
On fourth morning there was a different chime at his door. Neither was it the gentle, mechanical voice of the meal delivery servitor, a hovering disc of light, which left a tray of paste filled with nutrients. It was one and sharp and percussive, a, one, two, three, the knock of pure and uncompromising authority.
His heart was stuttering like an incarcerated bird that battered against the bars of his ribs. This was it. The judgment of the Council was guarded. He pictured a group of armored Wardens, with gleaming weapons, here to carry him away to whatever this place of wonders had to call an execution room.
And opening the door, his hand shaking on the cold, crystalline handle, he discovered that Professor Riven was standing alone in the corridor. The gentleman was a work of funeral intent and his black gray robes appeared to drink the light in the hallway. The expression on his face was his usual look of granite impassivity, but there was a new and disturbing vehemence in his stormy eyes. He said nothing, did not even greet them or threaten them. He simply swung his head in an abrupt motion of follow me, and swiveled on his heel and walked away, his feet making no sound on the radiant floor.
A strong mixture of mistrust and interest was raging in Leo, and he stood paralysed by it before a moment. Riven had been there in the Proving Grounds. He had observed the hole open out of the fingertip of Leo. He had referred to the Warden as a retired antique, a fragment of taboo trash. Was he now the executioner? The inquisitor? The mistrust was a cold, hard knot in the stomach of Leo, that told him to bang the door, to barricade himself. But the curiosity--a need, a desperate, clawing need, to know what he was becoming--was more. He made a tremulous sigh and followed.
There was such silence that they had to feel a physical force. Riven took him not to the administrative spires or the public halls, but along lanes which were more and more deserted, growing out of the busy, splendid core of the Academy, and into its less exuberant bones. The air had become colder and drier, the light dimmer, which now was furnished by old, iron sconces, which entrap captive, moaning will-o-the-wisps, rather than fire. The style was transformed into the use of black basalt harsh and functional lines as opposed to the graceful and fluid lines. They moved down a staircase, winding and winding, which had the appearance of drilling deep into the bedrock of the floating isle, the only noise made by the hollow cry of their footsteps and the mournful wailing of the wisps at a great distance. Leo was under the great burden of the Academy above him, and of a civilization of magic crowding him, and he was being drawn off into its lost roots.
Riven has at last halted in front of a door that appeared to have been hewn out of the living rock. It was old, dark oak, so fat it seemed to be able to resist a siege, and bound with cold iron runes, which glowed with a latent, protective force. What he touched with his palm was the middle of the wood, and the intricate pattern of the silver lines along the metal bands flashed a pattern which left Leo with wet eyes. The door swung open and there was no sound, and there was a darkness that was like consuming the light of the corridor.
The interior room was as grim a contrast with the sterile infirmary, or the spacious airy Athenaeum. It was the den of some scholar, the sanctum of some wizard, narrow and disorderly, but with this grand, even awe-inspiring aura of power and antiquity. Shelves cut out of solid stone walls creaked in the compressions of books bound in odd fats, used metals and others, and what seemed to be alive bark. There was a single wall of glass jars of different sizes which held the biological specimens twisting slowly in the preservative fluid-- an eye, with many lenses, a heart beating a low, phosphorescent light, some gyrating cloud of intelligent smoke, crystals vibrating with captured lightning, miniature, contained nebulae. The center, however, was a big, gouged and battered wooden worktable, the surface of which was a jumble of broken crystalline mechanisms, and quaint-looking astrolabes of brass, with cogs of starlight, and piles of parchment, scribbled in confusion with a kind of spidery handwriting that resembled mathematical formulae, rather than language. The scent of the air was a complicated fabric of odors ozone, recent spellwork, the dry, reassuring fragrance of old paper and leather, that sharp, coppery odor which Leo, at the core of his stomach, guessed was dried blood.
Riven shut the door and the world outside disappeared. The very hum of the Academy, and the voices of the other world, far away, were struck off at once, and in their place a complete, soundproofed silence, overpowering the heaviest noise, was established. he pointed to a battered, broken leather armchair, which stood opposite the worktable. "Sit."
Leo sat with his muscles tight enough. He was a rabbit in a lair of the wolf. The other chair was not taken by Riven. Rather, he sat up against the worktable, arms with a gesture of crossing his chest, his stormy eyes riveting Leo to the spot with the impact of a physical blow.
Jax will live, he said without preface, and the shattering sound of his voice cut the silence like the faintest slice of glass. His physical self is intact. His core being, however, was almost disintegrated in the most basic level. Months of hard, soul-making will be necessary to restructure, and even then, to restructure, it will be months, months of hard, soul-making. Riven's gaze never wavered. his Stone-Souled affinity is... mutilated. Permanently. He might never again direct earth magic.
The announcement was joy and reproach at the same time. He had not killed, but he had ruined something that might be no less important. He had betrayed half a soul in a boy. I didn't intend it, Leo thought and the words seemed hollow and pathetic in the thick silence of the chamber. The cosmic crime is explained by a child.
Intent, said Riven, is a luxury to one who realizes the instruments he is using, and this is worse still than anger, and it is flat and unemotional, and not judgmental. You take scalpels like a siege hammer. It does not matter whether or not the consequence is intentional. He put his hands down, and took one of the small, many-sided crystals of his desk, and rolled it between his long, slim fingers. It bounced back the faint light, and threw little, dashing rainbows upon the dark wood. And what you forced was no spell. Even it was not prohibited magic, in its conventional sense. It was an anti-spell. A conceptual negation. It is a force which was chosen out, sought out, and exterminated of the Arcane Veil in the past, which I should not say centuries ago, in vain. He gave a slight lean and the crystal in his hand was still. "The Warden. It is not just a guide or even an interface, is it? It is not a simple relic. It is the source. The conduit."
Leo made no comment and his jaw tightened so much it would have fused. The mistrust was a concrete, frozen wall about his mind. All instincts told her that this was a trap, and that this was an inquiry in the form of a conversation. The admission of anything meant to put the rope into their hands.
Riven did not even appear to expect an answer. With a gentle click he put down the crystal. The Academy Registry is not fallacious, but comprehensive. It is intricately woven into the Veil. An empty file is nothing by chance. It is an impossibility. A paradox." His eyes narrowed. Unless the causes of the subject are intentionally lost by some person higher than the Registry itself. Or…" He hesitated, and left the word suspended in the air. "...unless there is inherent in the subject something which is essentially incompatible with the parameters used in the System. It is as though attempting to put the ocean in a teacup; it is not experiencing the ocean, it is merely breaking. He took a step closer. "Your bloodline, Leo. Who were your parents?"
The inquiry struck Leo as a physical blow, and forced the air out of his lungs. It was too ordinary, too intimate, and yet seemed the most threatening question ever put to him. My... my mother passed away when I was too young. Sickness. My dad happens to be a structural engineer. He constructs bridges and high-rise buildings. The words were ridiculous, and seemed almost profane, in this room smelling of blood and of magic, and with jars of things which had never been on earth.
Riven smiled faintly and almost unperceived. The smile was not a cordial one. It was a smile of a man whose dark hypothesis had been proved. "I'm sure he does. And I know he is quite good at it. Nonetheless, blood, Leo, is not just biology. It is a stream of inheritance, of potential which has been inherited, and in most cases, of debt which has been inherited. He pointed about the room, at the jars and the books and the occult tools. That kind of power you were showing... it bears a mark. A… taste. One of the tastes of oblivion. I have witnessed its imitation only in two places, the forbidden books, with black borders, in the lead-lined vaults, and in another place. He stopped once more, and looked harder, as though he was riveting Leo to the chair. "The personal records of the Headmaster. It is by virtue of my proficiency in that subject of systemic anomalies that the archives allowed me to see what was there."
The twist added to it, wound round Leo like a snake, choking the air out of his chest. Riven was not simply a professor who had to dig at odd cases, but an intentional excavator of truths that the two centuries of the Academy had buried. He was a sanctioned heretic.
Riven called her, and it was impossible to refuse. To a high standing free standing mirror in a dark corner of the room, he walked. It was wrapped in a heavy black velvet, but interwoven with silver threads which made a seal of lock. He drew the cloth, with a sharp decisive tug, away.
The reflector was astonishing and frightening. It had a tarnished silver frame, and it was so old and scratched that it was nearly black, and its runes were so intricate and ancient that Leo found his head pined by attempting to read them, and his eyes sore and watering merely at the sight of the periphery of them. The glass was not transparent. It had had a smouldering, smoky blackness inside, as an amount of liquid obsidian, tossed about.
Oculus of Unbeing, said Riven his voice falling upon a reverent whisper. It does never reflect upon you. It shows your essence. Your ontological truth. Look."
His legs aching like water, Leo stood up very slowly out of the chair and walked to the mirror. He was in front of it, his own frightened and pale gaze was looking back on him out of the world of light and reason. That was all that he saw, in one, pitying moment. His figure then faded into the smoky darkness, and was illuminated by the emptiness inside the glass.
What replaced it was not a boy. It was a storm. A disaster was held in a vessel in the shape of man.
His mirror figure was a hideous visual manifestation of a civil war. Half of him, as far down as his crown and feet, was as white as a sunshine-yellow glow of pure golden light. It was a beauty that talked of absolute order, of creation, of life and reason and the formulated magic which the Academy adored. It was the light of the Lum Salvae, the light of promise which they hoped to develop in all the students. It was beautiful.
But the other half was a void. A black which was not a negation of light, a perfect blackness, but was an active, devouring, consuming negation. It was the lack of idea, the cease of opportunity. It was the same power he had applied to Jax. The two forces, rather than coming together in a straight, dull line, as it were, in the middle of his reflected chest, came together in a disorderly, crackling, everlasting maelstrom. The void was always eating tendrils of light, and the waves of brilliance were battling back the darkness. Both were unable to defeat each other. They were in a deadly cyclic, exonerating, torturous confrontation.
The revelation of the turn of the mirror was a gut-punch nauseating to his gut. This is not what he intended to be; this is what he was. No human being, but a paradox in flesh. An incongruity which is not supposed.
"Do you see?" The voice of Riven was low, and nearly worshipful with some horror-stricken fascination. The light is your inherent potential, the pure spark which the Academy tries to blow into fire. The emptiness, that is the legacy of the Warden. The debt you carry. You are not a solitary case, Leo. You are a Fractured Soul."
The word fell down with the finality of a sentence that is final. A small expose in the way of information, but one which made everything clear with scathing clarity. His blank file. His Null status. His unfinished Codex. The System Lock. He was not merely fractured, but was ontologically fractured. A soul that had been broken and cemented with the kind of stuff which was the opposite of soul.
"The Fractured are not born," Riven said, and looked at the horrifying picture in the mirror, a portrait of damnation. "They are made. They are the product of a cataclysm, a soul inflicted, as it were, to pieces by forces too great to be conceived, and then growing up again, with something... other. Something that should not be. During the olden days, prior to the Great Purge, they hunted them as rabid beasts. Feared above all else." He was about to leave the mirror, and, looking out of the mirror into the life of the world, he made eye contact with Leo, and the name he uttered was a drop of poison in the silence. "The Fracture of any considerable power was last known to have belonged to a creature by the name of Eryndor."
It was meaningless to Leo, and yet a tone with which Riven had spoken, a dread, a respect, a bitter memory, gave it meaning of the world. Foreshadowing was an elongated cold shadow on his future.
"Why?" Leo was able to ask, a hoarse croak of a voice, standing in awe, riveted by the sight of the warring thing in the glass. "Why are they so feared? Hunted?"
Riven then swiveled completely out of the mirror and looked at Leo in the real world and his face was grim. Since a soul that is fighting self cannot be reasoned with. It cannot know peace. It either can or can not eat. It is a wound in reality. And in its death throes…" He bent nearer and his voice lowered to a deadly murmur. The seventh one... ravaged kingdoms. Not one. Realms. Plural. he deconstructed whole layers of life before he was at last, and very expensively, laid down.
The words hung in the silent cloistered room sucking out the remaining crumbs of air and hope out of the lungs of Leo. He did not only pose a threat to one boy during a training activity. The potential apocalypse was he. An extinction event in the form of a walk and talk. It was oppressing, and he felt like cuddling into a ball on the cold stone floor, a physical pressure.
The protocol of the Academy is evident, and it was so when Eryndor was there, Riven said in his voice which reverted to a cold, clinical sound, the sound of a pathologist reading an autopsy report. A known Fractured is to be instantaneously and permanently held, their very nature to be stabilized by forceful runic suppression, and after that... decadently neutralized. Torn down, bit by bit, till the crack is sealed and the strange energy discharged. For the good of all realities."
Neutralized. Dismantled. they were clean, sterile words of what they talked about, a slow, careful, magic killing. It was the most natural option. The safe choice. The loyal choice.
This was the war brought out in its most savage way. The very purpose of the existence of the Academy, its scheme to keep order and secure the realms, required his extinction. His survival as a living being, the most fundamental instinct of any living being, required that he should struggle against it. The world he now lived in was by its very nature at war with him.
But, Riven said, and that one, conjunction, was as a lifeboat tossed into the tempest sea of the horror of Leo. He walked near and his presence obscured the hideous portrait in the glass. Men write protocol because they are afraid of what they have no power over. Men who will prefer to destroy a complicated tool than to know how. I have never thought of anything but utility. In capitalizing even of the most dangerous of storms, when it is the way of acquiring the power of driving the ship. His tone became conspiratorial, and a whisper, to the ears of Leo alone. The legal account will indicate that you are in my personal observation due to the assessment of extended anomaly and behavioral conditioning. As a matter of fact, we shall start this evening. I will train you. Not to shut up the vacuum, and not to stupidly welcome the light. But to maintain the position between them. To balance on the knife's edge. To wield the fracture."