98. Seb
SEB
Seb closed his eyes.
His hands shook as he sheathed his foil. As he did it, a tiny part of him wondered if it was legal to do that in a match. If it wasn’t, it didn’t matter.
He pulled his Words around him like a blanket, like impenetrable armor.
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—
Like memory of music fled,—
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
“You think you’ve lost your magic,” Biret had said. “That is so like your kind, to think that Magic is something that can be owned. To think that it is something finite that can be parceled out.”
In that clearing, he’d been too exhausted, too much the husk of his former self to protest. Instead, he’d crouched, his chest bare and dripping with sweat, hunched into himself, winding his fingers into the moss below his knees.
He’d watched a bead of sweat drip off his hair and land in it, slipping down into its roots.
“Your ‘AEther’ is in everything, Sebastian. It is in this air, this dirt, your sweat. Magic is not a pond. It is a current, and it is everywhere.”
“It’s not!” he’d screamed at her then, pulling hanks of green out of the ground, sending dirt flying across the clearing.
“It’s not everywhere! If it’s everywhere, then why isn’t it in me?
Why can’t I feel it!” He’d broken down then, one of many that summer, pressing his forehead and his nose into the moss, his whole body shaking until there was nothing left of him.
Magic is not a pond.
Magic is a current, and it is everywhere.
He’d never tried to find the limit of his power before. He knew other people sometimes thought of Magic as a well, as if it were something that could run dry. He’d felt the exhaustion himself—but was that him exhausting Magic, or was it something else?
Seb cracked himself open. He’d been too scared before, too desperate to hold onto the idea of what he was, to relinquish control.
But he’d taken all of his darkness already and hurled it into the light.
Hawthorn Bellarius was going to tell his parents about Lily?
So be it. He had nothing to hide from anymore.
He felt it—Magic—rising in him as he breathed.
It filled his nostrils as he inhaled, until it clogged his senses, until it was his senses.
When he opened his eyes, the world shimmered with streaks of light and motes of gold, flowing, flowing, all around.
He reached out for it, and it came willingly.
He knew, with some deep and secret sense, that it loved him the way he loved it.
He began to cast.