Chapter 19 Kelda #2
“Lady Morvain,” he said, mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief. “It’s chaos down there. A delivery dragon burned down a stall in the market. Two barn cats mauled a child. The people are saying—“
“I know, Aldric. I know.” I gestured for him to sit, and offered him a sad smile. I touched his shoulder as he passed, letting a thread of suggestive calm seep into his jacket. “We feel the tremors here, too.”
Pembroke sank into the chair, gripping his hat. “They say it’s the Emberlin girl. That her gift... that it’s doing something to the balance.”
“It pains me to speak ill of anyone trying to help,” I said, my voice dripping with regret. “But you know the First Law of Arcane Medicine, Aldric. Magic cannot be destroyed, only transformed.”
I paced slowly around his chair, letting my voice weave through his air.
“The Stormgardes have always been our filtration system,” I continued, lecturing him as one might a slow council member. “They absorb the town’s waste magic, the entropy produced by our comforts, and filter it safely into the earth. It is a dynamic flow, a river.”
I paused at the window, turning back to him with grave eyes.
“But Miss Emberlin’s gift is... static. She doesn’t filter. She Quiets. She stops the flow. Think of the plumbing in your own estate, Councilman. If you plug the drain, what happens to the pressure?”
Pembroke’s eyes went round. The metaphor landed beautifully on his simplistic worldview. “The pipes burst,” he said. “The waste backs up.”
“Exactly,” I shook my head with sadness. “By suppressing the magic in the manor, specifically in Lord Stormgarde, she is creating a blockage. The waste magic has nowhere to go. It is spilling out into the valley, saturating the minds of our poor beasts, driving them mad with arcane entropy.”
It was complete gibberish, of course. Lysa’s transmutational ability actually healed the entropy, making filtration unnecessary. But theoretical magic was beyond Pembroke. He understood clogged pipes though.
“We cannot let her destroy us,” Pembroke said, his fear hardening into the weapon I required. “She must be stopped.”
“We must be gentle,” I cautioned, though my heart leaped with the thrill of the game. “We must merely... ensure she can no longer tamper with forces she doesn’t understand. For the safety of the town. And for poor Fenrik’s sake.”
I looked out the window again, watching a plume of smoke rise from the village below. My little whisper was already working.
“Leave the girl to me, Aldric. Just ensure the Council understands the science of the threat.”
He nodded vigorously, the poor fellow. I smiled at my reflection in the darkened glass.
It was too easy to be the hero when you were the one writing the story.
I waited until the door clicked shut behind Pembroke before I turned back to the true problem in the room.
Fenrik remained where I had left him, sprawled in the high-backed chair, his breathing hitching every few seconds as his subconscious fought my leash.
“Such a noisy sleeper,” I said, gliding across the Persian rug.
I placed my fingers against his temples. His skin burned, and it was sleek with sweat, but my hands were delightfully cold. The contrast made him flinch in his sleep, a subtle jerk of the head that I stilled with a tightening of my grip.
I closed my eyes and sank into the swirling currents of the Veil.
Entering Fenrik’s mind was like stepping into a house during a hurricane, windows rattling, foundations groaning, the roar of the entropy-dragon tearing through the hallways.
Thankfully I knew the layout. I had built half of it, after all.
I found the edge of a fresh memory. It was the moment in the study, right before the storm broke, when he had looked at the Emberlin girl and felt hope.
Disgusting. The sheer brightness of the memory threatened to burn through my carefully constructed fog.
“We can’t have that.” With a mental pinch, I snagged the memory and twisted.
It didn’t break though; these kind of memories were often resilient.
Instead, I poured sludge over it. I took the image of Lysa’s flushed face and I warped the lines of her mouth, I sharpened her eyes, then I painted over the warmth until it became revulsion.
Now, in his recollection, she was looking at a monster she feared.
I felt his mind recoil from the fabricated image, burying it deep in the dark to protect himself.
Good. Shame was a much better anchor than hope.
I moved deeper, weaving a new thread of story into the gaps I’d created.
I constructed a scene from whole cloth: the Town Council standing in this room, shaking their heads, their voices echoing with finality.
Too far gone, they said in my voice’s mimicry.
The manor is lost. And there, standing between him and their judgment, was I.
This was such delicate work, clearer and sharper than anything I had produced in my youth.
I remembered the dusty, sun-drenched lecture hall at the Academy, the smell of chalk choking the air. Master Elandor had been a brilliant theorist but a coward in practice. He had stood at the podium, tapping a diagram of the human mind with a willow wand, lecturing us on the ethics of Veilcraft.
We observe, he had said, his voice trembling with self-righteousness. We mask. We soothe. But we never rewrite. To alter the perception of self is the highest crime against nature.
I had sat in the back row, tracing the silver band of my family ring, bored to tears.
Elandor saw the mind as a sacred temple.
I saw it for what it was: a draft. A manuscript filled with errors, misinterpretations, and messy emotions that served no purpose.
I remembered the first time I tested my theory, months later.
Elandor had marked me down for “aggressive application” of a simple glamour.
After class, I had walked him to his office, chatting pleasantly, my hand resting lightly on his forearm.
By the time we reached his door, he was convinced he had given me top marks.
He remembered writing the grade. He remembered praising my technique.
The reality of the failing grade ceased to exist because he no longer believed in it.
The rush of power I’d felt in that corridor, watching the confusion smooth out of his old, watery eyes, had been intoxicating.
Reality was simple and it relied on the consensus of the senses.
If I controlled the senses, I commanded the reality.
I smiled at the memory, my fingers tightening on Fenrik’s skull. Elandor would be horrified by what I was doing now. He would call it a violation. Well he would call it all that if he were still alive.
“I am the only one who stays,” I whispered into the mental architecture I was building. “Everyone else leaves. Everyone else fears you, only Kelda remains.”
I smoothed the edges of the new memories, blending them with the old ones.
Doing that seamlessly was a true art. Too bad there was no crowd to impress.
The dragon in his chest purred, sensing the despair I was feeding it.
It curled tighter around his heart, a blanket I had knitted myself.
I withdrew my hands, shaking off the residual static of his chaotic thoughts.
Fenrik let out a long, shuddering sigh and slumped deeper into the chair, his face drawn. He looked defeated. Perfect.
I smoothed the lapels of my coat, ensuring the silver threading caught the dim light just so. Appearance was the first layer of any good spell. I turned to leave, when a splash of crude color on the side table snagged my attention.
It was a small, pathetic thing made of fired clay: a dragon, painted in garish blues and golds, with a chip in one wing.
One of the Emberlin girl’s trinkets. She scattered them like breadcrumbs, trying to make this mausoleum feel like a nursery.
I picked it up. It felt warm, suffused with the nauseating stickiness of hope.
It vibrated with the intent of its maker: comfort, safety, whimsy.
“Disgusting.” I closed my fist. It didn’t take much strength, sentiment is surprisingly brittle. The clay shattered with a crunch, like the snapping of a small bird’s neck. I opened my hand and let the blue dust sift through my fingers.
“She’ll learn soon enough,” I murmured to the silent room. “Sentiment is just a handle for someone else to grab.”
The air in the hallway shivered as I stepped out. I didn’t walk alone. I never did. My illusions, the phantoms of my memory and will, detached themselves from the shadows of the corridor, drifting alongside me.
“Show me,” I said.
The shadows in the corridor eagerly obeyed, twisting and knitting together until they formed a viewing pane of smoky glass hovering at eye level.
There she was, the little miracle worker.
Lysa trudged down the winding cliff path, her figure small and insignificant against the backdrop of the storm I’d made.
She huddled into her coat, clutching her bag like a shield.
I leaned closer, savoring the slump of her shoulders.
I needed to see the break. It wasn’t enough to know she was gone; I required the visual confirmation that her spirit had fractured. That hopeful, vibrant na?veté that had so disruptively soothed my monster, I had to watch it curdle into despair.
Below, the lights of Abberwyn flickered. I could taste the town’s anxiety from here. Every frightened glance, every hushed rumor about the “unnatural healer” was a thread I had spun, and now the tapestry was complete.
“Run along, little girl,” I said, dispersing the image with a wave of my hand. “Go back to your potions and leave the tragedies to the professionals.”
The air warped. The stone walls dissolved into a flickering overlay of the past, my past. No, not the anomalies again.
“You show me what I ask you to!” I told the shadows.