Act II Scene VI #2
SIL: “Has anyone ever told you you’re angry, Alistaire?”
My brother’s warning returns the question. That anger will be the death of you.
RIVEN: “What is that to you?”
SIL: “I’m not going to ask you why.”
Disgust pulses beneath my skin as Sil pauses before me, raises his hands, and presses his thumbs over my eyelids, closing them.
SIL: “I want you to use that thing you are made of. Use that anger.” He removes his thumbs from my closed eyelids. “Methexis,” he prompts, and reluctantly, I follow suit.
I open my eyes as the marble washes away and find myself staring back into the glassy abyss of the stage.
RIVEN: “I still don’t see a bridge.” Just those roiling shadows below.
SIL: “Of course you don’t. You can’t see something that hasn’t been built. So tell me, what are you running from? What angers you?”
Craft. Players. The Playhouse, I think urgently. Jude.
Nothing happens, save for an odd twinge at my throat.
“So reluctant!” he clucks. “Tell me, Alistaire. Why do you so love your sorrow?”
I present a detached, ignorant smile, though ice has begun to grip me at my core. “What is that supposed to mean?”
SIL: “You aren’t just angry. That’s surface-level.” He gestures to the stage, where that raging sea crashes beneath the glass. “You’ll need to go a little deeper than that.”
Suddenly, I wish Jude was not here. I wish more that Sil wasn’t staring at me like he knows my mind inside and out.
My mask of indifference slips as Sil’s relaxes into a sort of aha! “You love it,” he concludes. “You don’t lack emotion. You’re obsessed with it. You let it fester.” He’s grinning like a fox now. “Someone has taught you to suppress quite well, I think.”
Galen’s voice passes through my mind. Too much, Riv.
SIL: “Your bridge is not made of pursuit, nor escape, but of both.” He walks another circle around me, faster now, heels clapping against the glass.
“The source of all you dwell on—it’s completely on this side, isn’t it?
Above the surface, in reality. Because reality is painful, and pain is familiar. ”
RIVEN: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I don’t owe him truth. Of course reality hurts. Of course it’s familiar.
Reality is unfair. If it weren’t, I never would have encountered that Player all those years ago.
SIL: “Then prove me wrong.”
JUDE: “Sil—”
The director cuts him off with a dismissive wave.
SIL: “Look below.” There’s a smile in his voice. “You can run from this anger you harbor. You can lock it away. Or you can use it. Leash it and make it do your bidding.”
RIVEN: “I’m not angry.” My voice shakes.
I am angry.
SIL: “All my Players are angry. But more importantly, they are all something. Often, not what you would expect. Titus, for instance. He lives and speaks and moves out of fear. My darling Parrish’s bones are racked with envy.
Arius, always seeking to mend the world around him because he cannot mend himself. And Jude here—”
JUDE: “Enough, Sil. She understands.”
I am angry. I am angry.
SIL: “Do you want to know a secret, Alistaire?” His voice rises, echoing. “That anger you feel. That bitter thing wrapped around your heart. It may not be directed at what you think.”
A dam I didn’t realize existed rumbles in my head. For a moment, I think I know what’s coursing on the other side of it. The thought vanishes.
But the anger doesn’t.
I am angry. I am angry. I am angry.
“Stop pushing back,” Sil roars, his voice now pounding in my ears. “You’re angry, Alistaire! Be angry!”
I am angry—
The thought ceases, and something else fills the space.
I am alone.
The dam in my head breaks. It floods my senses, washes over my skin until it feels like it’s on fire. The feeling spreads, sinks into my heels. But Sil was wrong—it’s too much to leash or contain. It fills me with the urge to run, to bolt from the stage.
But when I try to move, the weight in my heels is too much, and I fall. The palms of my hands crash into the glass stage, so violently that it cracks, and I brace my body to plummet into the watery sea of darkness below.
But the fall never comes.
Instead, my palms sense something warm. I crane my chin up, and the glass doesn’t look so dark anymore.
Instead, a multitude of golden tendrils crawls out from beneath the stage, like a sea beast with a thousand tentacles.
“Bind it, Alistaire.” Jude’s voice. “Now.”
I draw on the feeling, and the tendrils reach up, summoned, wrapping around me, weaving and locking together. Gold seeps into my hands, my clothes, my feet. Craft rises fiercely to the surface, everywhere, seeking a way in.
Before I can stop it, before I can think to, I let it.
Craft washes over the platform, brilliant and warm and gold, the gap of darkness closed. Every beat of fury locked away for years pulses through me, reaching up my wrists, my calves.
“Extraordinary,” Sil marvels from somewhere behind me.
For a moment, it feels like I’ve been traveling a thousand nights only to catch a sunrise.
“A bridge,” I hear myself utter, feeling those threads of gold pulse with power. A thread not just to me—those same tendrils connect to the place Jude stands. Elsewhere in the Playhouse, the same Craft must follow the other Players, a shared web that sews their cast together.
The Players. Right. This is a loan of power. This is something to not get used to.
A hand lowers into my vision as I try to pick myself up. I stare at it for a moment, follow the arm up to Jude, and then grasp it, my legs shaky as he pulls me to my feet. “On three, yes?” Jude says and counts down.
“Methexis,” I say with him.
The golden stage, the Craft below—it vanishes, disguised beneath reality once more.
I blink dazedly at the spotlight, feeling the hot press of Craft all over.
The world has changed in a short time. It’s brighter now. Every sound echoes and chimes, every step and movement holding new intention and meaning. Everything is amplified and beautiful, exposed. And color. There’s so much color.
Something has changed—something that feels like it can’t be undone.
Worse, I’m not sure I want it to be.
SIL: “How do you feel, Alistaire?”
Warm. The word comes to mind unsolicited, some of the coldness in my veins dissipating.
And something else, too. The frosty ache in my limbs eases, just slightly, like someone’s reached inside and spread a salve over the worst points.
“I don’t—” I still at the unfamiliar sound of my own voice in my ears. The pitch isn’t different. It’s just…more.
For a moment, the Player’s curse feels less like an impossible glacier and more like a sheet of ice that I’m holding a candle to.
I take a step forward, but my legs feel strange. Stronger. Things I never paid mind to, like where I pause for breath when speaking, how many steps I take in any given direction, feel oddly relevant now.
“I think that…” I struggle again to wrangle my voice. What is happening? Why am I so loud—
“Alistaire?” At the sound of Sil’s voice, I turn to face him. He looks surprised.
And Jude is no longer there.
I turn to see Jude’s hurried steps toward the wings, his back to us.
SIL: “Well, would you look at that. You were right, Jude!”
At Sil’s words, Jude makes a brief look back and—
He’s…crying.
Then, as fast as he left, Jude is gone. Sil claps a hand on my shoulder, and I catch my reflection in his eyes. My heart stutters at the image.
SIL: “You’re a natural, Alistaire.”