134. Seb
SEB
He stared at the cursor flashing on the blank page for a few more seconds before closing his laptop with a sigh and gazing absently out the window of his flat to watch the sun set over the domes and steeples of Oxford.
Already the moon had risen, a perfect waning crescent.
He’d been doing this for months now—failing to put what he felt into words.
He’d always been best with paper and pen, but now words were elusive.
It was impossible for him to describe what it was like to not be in love with someone you could see very objectively that you had been in love with; what it was like to not know someone that you knew you knew—intimately, biblically, even.
It was like trying to describe a hole. How did one describe nothingness?
You couldn’t; you could only describe around it, that which it punched a hole through, that which it consumed.
He had woken up in a stranger’s arms, but she had not held him like a stranger.
“Seb? It’s me—Lily,” she’d said, her face a mask of bewilderment beneath the grief, sweat, and stage makeup. One of the downlights cast a perfect halo around her head. She looked like a saint in agony.
She’d sat there, crumpled and crying like a discarded tissue, while he scrambled away from her, found his feet, and scanned the stage.
A stage? All at once, it came back to him—the immediate past, dancing with this girl—Lily—who looked at him like her heart was breaking.
He remembered the dance, but nothing else.
Not the why, or how, or clutching her hand in the darkness (he’d been informed of that part later).
This girl was a hole in his memory, he realized quickly, as Chant had guided him to the health center where he’d been proclaimed “fine.” His magic was fine.
That had been his first thought, as he’d woken up—well, after who the fuck are you?
He had been terrified, as he stared into the lights, that he’d lost it again, but it was there, welling inside of him like a spring that would never dry.
“Do you remember what you sacrificed?” Chant had asked him later that night—or the next morning—as they drank bourbon in his nearly dark living room. Normally Seb hated whisky straight up, but the burn, the bitterness of it was exactly what he needed. It anchored him to the moment.
Seb sifted through the memories. His mind felt like a very particular sieve.
It caught everything except for her. He remembered the act of breaking the curse, remembered standing in the basement of Paracelsus with Chant, around this time of night, but he’d been thinking of her, and so there were swathes of gray hanging in his mind like one of Shelley’s veils.
“You said ‘If you love something, let it go.’ That death wouldn’t be the worst agony.” He looked at Seb in a very peculiar way.
Seb waded through the mist. He found that if he tried very, very hard, used his Magic to push up against the boundaries of the curse, hold it back, he could get snatches of light, as long as it didn’t shine on her directly.
It was exhausting. When he came up, opened his eyes, he was clammy and shaking.
Chant went to the kitchen to get brownies and set the entire plate in Seb’s lap. He ate them automatically, not tasting.
“I remember. A little.” It was hard, because he’d clearly been thinking about her very deeply at the time, and there was so much fog.
In that memory, she flared out like a flashlight aimed directly into his eyes.
“I was willing to give it up. Magic. I think I thought the worst thing next to losing her would be to lose all of this.” He ate another brownie, feeling very stupid, and washed it down with whisky.
“I didn’t realize it would be so literal. That I would still lose her after all.”
“How could you?” Chant said. “To the best of anyone’s knowledge, no one’s ever broken a curse before.”
The next weeks were the most agonizing of his life. He’d thought the previous summer was torture, but this was something new and exquisite in the way it eviscerated him, and the ways he couldn’t talk about it. He tried, with Dr. Metcalf.
Everyone thought he would just remember.
They showed him photos and videos, told him stories, proving just how much he had loved this stranger.
It only made things worse. He tried kissing her once, just in case it sparked something, but it didn’t.
She kissed him tenderly, but the whole thing was alien.
He didn’t know how to put it into words.
Seb wasn’t sure he’d ever felt worse in his life than the afternoon he’d broken up with her, sitting on his bed in the brownstone in the City.
The afternoon light washed her in gauzy yellow, and she’d sat there, her cheeks puffy, lip tugged into her teeth, as he tried to explain.
But he couldn’t. He just sat on his bed, watching her clutch his duvet for dear life, feeling and looking like an asshole.
The very worst part had been how she’d just nodded, taking it, and understanding as much as she could try to understand an impossible thing that he couldn’t explain at all. The only thing she’d asked was that he keep in touch, and how could he deny her something so reasonable?
He’d agreed, but he was terrified that he was just leading her on.
Was it even possible for them to fall in love under any circumstances other than those in which they already had?
He knew so many couples who said they were so glad they didn’t know each other in high school, that they’d met each other at the right time.
That meant there were wrong times. What chance did they even have without alchemy, the Elumnara?
Everything was complicated, too, by the fact that his friends were now her friends. Neither of them really had any others. Even her friend Daphne was now Asher’s girlfriend, spending the summer in the City too, at an internship.
He texted more and more regularly with Adriana.
He hadn’t seen her since the finals, but now she was a lifeline—the only friend that belonged to him alone.
She kept trying to get him to join the Oxford team, but Cantrèa was different now that he was different.
He practiced sometimes: alone, late at night.
Adriana was spending the fall climbing in the Dolomites, and they had plans to meet in Rome over winter break.
It was all a mess, and so he’d run. Well, not run exactly, but walked swiftly to the International Departures terminal.
He paid an exorbitant amount to start the lease on his flat a month early, while Tori and Asher were traipsing around Europe, sending him selfies from Chamonix and calling him an idiot for not coming with.
Every now and then, he caught glimpses of what loving her would look like out of the corner of his eye, and it was a stabbing ache in his breast so intense he couldn’t breathe.
It would happen sometimes when she laughed, her face pixilated in their occasional video calls, or when she said something witty that cut Tori down to size in their group chats.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like her—she was smart, pretty—but something was missing inside him, and he wasn’t sure if he would ever find it again.
When they talked, there was a hole at the center.
She rarely talked about herself, what she was doing, preferring instead to listen to him describe Oxford—the city and the school—and tell her about his studies.
It was impossible, knowing that you were loved by someone you didn’t love back.
Her love had history, and he had nothing.
He threw himself into school with singular viciousness.
He presented a paper at the start-of-term symposium and went regularly for drinks with the others in the AEtheric program.
He talked, late into the night, over wine, with his advisor, who had been Chant’s advisor, and sometimes with Chant himself on the phone, before Chant went for his early morning jogs.
They talked about AEtheric theory, and curses, and alchemy, and sometimes Cantrèa, and it was almost enough.
Chant rarely brought her up, and when he did, it was only ever in the context of what was happening at Windermere, in his classes, in things that Seb would find interesting.
She had switched her major to alchemy, the first student in years, and Chant was her advisor.
He told Seb about her independent studies, told him about how she was TA-ing his alchemy class, the program now expanding thanks to her.
Chant told him about how she’d cleared out an old storage cottage on the grounds and moved in there with Daphne, about how she’d turned the room at the top of the library tower into a study lounge, how she was teaching a dance class.
All of this information sat strangely in his stomach.
Even though he didn’t remember much of the library tower since he had almost always been there with her, thinking about it sent flutters of something coursing through him.
When he imagined her coasting to class on her ancient bike, a pang of homesickness speared his stomach.
He was in limbo. He wasn’t hers, but he wasn’t anyone’s.
People were interested in him, in the air he gave off with his glasses and leather satchel, his fountain pens and silence.
He’d tried going on dates, had gone on two with the guy he kept running into at the bookstore, one with a former ballerina in the dance class he was taking off campus, but as much as there was something missing with her, everything was missing with the others.
He would see her next week. They had a long weekend, and he was taking a few extra days off to return to New York for Conrad’s trial.
Two others had come forth with accusations of assault, and Seb was set to testify.
There might have been a time when the thought of testifying against Conrad would have consumed his every waking thought, but now he was just glad to shut the door on it.
There was a book he’d gotten for her—Alchemy Illuminated, a heavy hardback that smelled like fresh ink, filled with sumptuous color plates—already lying on his suitcase.
He’d seen it in the bookstore and found himself at the checkout before he realized what he was doing.
Already he could imagine the shape of her surprise, her quiet delight, as she unwrapped the brown paper.
He wasn’t sure where the image came from, since he couldn’t remember giving her anything ever before.
He was looking forward to it—driving up to campus in the dawning fall.
He was interested in seeing the cottage, anxiously awaiting dinner with Chant, where they could talk in person.
Lily had asked if he could block out one day for her, for some activity she had planned, and he’d agreed with only a little hesitation after she’d promised it wasn’t a date, that it wouldn’t retrace the steps of some old significance.
Some nights, when he couldn’t sleep—though that was still most of them—he tried to imagine what it was she had planned, tried to think like her, which was impossible, because already he knew that no one thought like her.
There was a package—no return address—on the stoop of his flat when he dragged himself home after classes.
He turned it over in his hands as he trod up the five flights of stairs.
He shouldered open the sticky door and made straight for the kitchen table, peeling open the padded mailer.
Inside was yet more padding and then what appeared to be a large book wrapped in navy paper stamped with golden constellations.
He slit the tape on the wrapping carefully and gazed down at the volume before him:
Twin Opposites
An Accounting of the Elumnara and Related Alchemical Happenings in the Hermetic Year of 477 Sol Ascendant
Sebastian Allsaires
He ran his fingers over the golden debossing on the cover, remembering suddenly how ridiculous he’d felt at the printers when he’d gone to get it bound in hardback, telling them it was the first draft of a novel to avoid triggering his AEtheric mark.
It had been absurdly expensive, and the sudden memory of that moment crashed over him—how he’d imagined, grinning, the ribbing Lily would inevitably give him for it.
Lily. That was who had sent the package; he was certain now. It was as if the book were a key, unlocking that which photographs, videos, and voices could not. Was it the physicality of it? Or was it because this was his—his words, his heart?
Trembling, he poured himself a glass of wine and settled himself with the book in his wingback reading chair in the corner of the tiny living room area.
The light of golden hour filtered through the windows, washing everything in AEtheric tones.
Without getting up once, he read pages and pages—hundreds of them—that he himself had written about love and alchemy, and the moon, and her.
That night after lying awake for hours thinking about Windermere and her—the memories pouring over him—he dreamed of the moon.
In the dream, he lay with his head over the dam, watching a reflection of himself drown in Orchard Lake.
Overhead, she sat on a throne of stars, bathed in the silver light that radiated from her core.
Smiling cryptically, she offered him the Chalice of Windermere.
When his fingers closed around it, she drew him out of death and into the sky.