Sci Fi & Fantasy / Majitsu/Mechanica (7)

The tree that should not exist in this world.

The garden that was forbidden.

That clear moon that should never appear.

Beyond those things, among the concepts that exist outside of human understanding, somewhere in the darkness beyond heaven and earth, that final path can be seen yet not seen. While in her vision, it escapes her perception. Should she view it completely, the image would be enough to dissolve her individuality. Just as a man can’t perceive the earth, she cannot perceive this gate. Not because of physical limitations, but, like a man is smaller than the earth, the very concept of perception is too small to encompass the existence of this path that contains all that is. She’s afraid. To open her mind that far is to change the perspective of her own being. Her knowledge would not be something that exists individually in this world, but the universe would, instead, exist within her mind.

Everything, everything that’s happened, everything that hurts her, all of it has origins outside of her knowledge. But, A mage’s power only goes as far as they can understand. What hypocrisy, to take up that burden to gain power, to gain power to save, to save what should live. Nothing has changed, nothing was saved. All that she gained was the ability to perceive her own inadequacies, to understand just how powerless any power really is, to know for certain that her goals, desires, and dreams could never be achieved. What is magecraft, but a useless triviality? It cannot accomplish anything.

The only power that is meaningful exists beyond that gate.
***********

Elise is damp with sweat despite the frigid night air that swirls in through her open window. Along with that air, the light of the largest full moon casts the shadows of her billowing curtains along the hard wood floor. There’s no time for locating tools; there are no papers, no utensils. Those wouldn’t be suitable anyway. With no hesitation, she gouges her raw, burned hand against a rusty nail in the bed frame, taking no pause to observe the chunk of flesh left behind.

Lines, lines, lines, lines. This gruesome symbol is drawn in her own crimson life. In the darkest hour of night, the moon shines with purpose, as if to grant her light for this task. In the distance, the sound of police sirens are carried through the city by the dense, chill air. Pain, panic, or sense; none of these things affect her. Vision blurs, breath gets short, her hands get cold, yet nothing can distract from her concentration. The only emotion is urgency.

Every second that image stays in her mind, it scorches her psyche.

It’s something exists in all dimensions, something that cannot be recorded in the human brain. Everything has appropriate containers, and a mind perceiving this gate is like holding acid in a paper cup. Her internal leylines are shorting, overloading, and breaking as her magic current runs wild, scarring her in dark burns that trace the lines of her soul across her skin.

Then, like a doll come unwound, or a toy with no batteries, she faints mid stroke. Her wound still bleeds freely, marring the abnormally flawless symbol, still only half finished, with her pooling blood.
***********
The billowing shadows have settled down, and the moon has long since set. With a jolt, shivering, and trembling from the icy breeze, Elise comes back to consciousness. The windowsill is damp with frost and, and her sweaty shirt clings to her body tightly, forcing it’s cold into her There are clocks in the room, but they’re not digital, and in her groggy state she can’t think enough to understand the hands of the analog timepieces. Judging by the height of the sun, the time doesn’t matter at this point, since she’s already very late for school.

Her Dad goes to work very early, so it’s her responsibility to take care of herself in the morning. Still, this is a first for her since, normally, she’d never consider sleeping in.The fact that morning practice is much more bearable than a hot afternoon on the track is enough of a motivation.

As an athlete, she’s found herself in the hell that is middle distance running. If a 400m race is run at 100% speed, then the half-mile is twice that distance, run at 95% all the way through. It’s probably one of the worst things one can voluntarily put themselves subject themselves to, so anything that can make it easier is a welcome salvation--even if it means waking up at 5:00 AM.

With weak knees, and sore arms, she barely gets up to a sitting position before her mind defrosts enough to comprehend her surroundings. It’s completely clean; there are no lines, no symbols, no blood markings anywhere. The lack of evidence is the confirmation of her first assumption: the whole thing had just been a dream. A freakishly realistic and vivid dream. That much should be obvious, she’s not so maladjusted that she’d cut herself like that, and she certainly wouldn’t do such a childish thing like drawing all over the floor. Perhaps that’s what’s called an out of body experience; it felt like she had been watching herself, awake but not awake, drawing some stupid looking symbol--

When she tries to recall it’s form, her head splits with a thundering migraine. Splitting is the perfect word, it feels as if something small is being widened, something sensitive is being stretched.

“Hnnnng…ah…huah…”

It’s sharpness is what an older woman would compare this pain to that of having her hymen torn. And the resulting throbbing ache is what a man would liken to an impact in the testicles. She can’t make either comparison, so for her, this is the most intense pain she’s ever encountered. The ability to perceive that symbol is beyond her, and to look at it, even through memory, is to stretch her mind to it’s tearing point.

After a few long seconds of thrashing, crying and moaning, the expansion stops, and Elise lies still. Though most people believe that it's impossible to consciously not think about something, Elise is living proof that suficent motivation can bring even the rouge memory under control. Apparently, negative reinforcement at the threshold of pain makes a lot of things possible.

But, even that amount of suffering is pushed from her mind by the surprise of her next sight.

“W…what?”

Her hand, the one that she foolishly burned due to her own incompetence, no longer holds the raw, red blisters, or throbs with a dull ache. It’s completely restored, her soft palm unmarred by the peeling skin that she went to bed with. As she gapes in amazement at her miraculous healing, her head throbs again, much more mildly this time.
************

This morning is a repeat of the last; the snow still falls, traffic is still locked up, and Elise is skipping school again. Instead of diligently taking notes in class like a good girl, she’s once again in that shabby, abandoned park, marking out lines and measuring distances in the snow. This place has become a sort of firing range for her to practice; the surrounding fortress of abandoned skyscrapers provide shielding from the eyes of the public, and the mid-winter snow acts as a fire retardant. Icicles hang from the frozen skeleton of rusted jungle gyms and swing sets like stalactites; and overhanging evergreens barely hold their loads of piled snow, dropping slightly from the weight.

“There.”

Perhaps it’s because she’s never rebelled, or done anything that really went against the conventional norms for a dignified lady, that she takes to this task with vigor and excitement. She‘s still pure enough that something as minor as taking an unexcused absence is an adrenaline rush. Not only that, but the inherent danger of her task is enough to fan the flames of nervous anticipation.

Her hand healed overnight for a moderate burn. No sane person would just accept that. And Elise, from her experience in the world of magecraft, knows that anything suspicious is dangerous until proven otherwise. Taking a deep breath, setting her feet, and bracing her internal leylines for the worst, she concentrates on a particularly large mound of snow. The arm to be tested is extended, and her finger points at the small target, approximately twelve meters away.

Ten wraith-like, snaking ripples in space extend instantly, like the acceleration of a jellyfish’s nematocyst. The zigzagging circuits are only visible through absence; seen only through the path where the air becomes slightly clearer due to the movement.

Path set.

Like a computer searching for a file, in her mind’s eye, she traces the path to the spell written within her. It fails. If the result is to be likened to anything, Elise has essentially gotten a “blue screen of death”, a fatal error that cannot be recovered from by normal means.

Right away, her heart rate quickens, along with the speed of her breathing. Failing to draw magic when attempting to do so is something that doesn’t happen. This isn’t the same as having no reserves of magic left; she’s not reaching into an empty tank, she can’t reach the tank at all. The severity of the problem is on par with someone forgetting how to walk, or no longer remembering how to move their own body.

Check disk.

Her minds eye turns inward, looking within her own soul and heart. The image of the soul, it is assumed, is different for everyone, written or drawn in the most intuitive form for the owner. For Elise, it’s a switchboard, almost as complex and incomprehensible as an urban city’s subterranean schematic. But that labyrinth of lines that should exist here, undecipherable to all but herself, is no more. It’s been replaced. Where her internal leylines should be mapped out in a familiar way, they are instead configured in a new form. A form that is both frightening and shocking, because it is more familiar than that which she’s known all of her life.

That symbol.

Like her dream, she cannot see the whole thing, but the portion that she can perceive is both minuscule and infinite at the same time. That is the path to the gate of all things, a concept that she cannot even view with her human mind. Yet…

“Execute.”

Had any unfortunate homeless person nested in this park, seeking the shielding from the bitter wind that the high buildings provided, they would have instantly been killed. The scale is unbelievable. It’s more reasonable for a strategic bomber to drop it’s payload in a paintball shooting range, than it is for this tiny park to contain the magnitude of flame that gushes forth like an omnidirectional tsunami breaking against the fortress of rotting buildings on all sides.

This power…

A dam can hold back a lake. It’s a barrier on an enormous scale, restraining millions of tons of water that sit endlessly press against it’s structure, just waiting for one chink, one crack to burst forth and destroy everything downstream. In comparison to the entire structure, the emergency spillways are miniscule; yet, when opened, even that minor fraction of the reservoir is only small in the relative sense, that small flow is still far more than enough to completely overwhelm a man.

This gate within her, this path, this connection; it’s like a single strand of a thread, like a door barely opened, yet even the seeping trickle, no more than a drip from a leaking facet, is far more power than Elise has ever wielded. The scale of what leaks out is on par with a the stored potential energy of two fully loaded oil tanker trucks.

As the swirls of flame rage forth, a clear voice descends from the rooftops. A giggle. The volume, and pitch are nothing in comparison to the roar of the rising flames, yet, almost as if Elise’s ears are tuned to the sound, she hears it distinctly, and her eyes lock with the vibrant blue irises of the woman who should not exist.

“…Cecile.”

Elise hardens her tone to reflect the steely cold of her heart. That woman is dead, completely erased from this universe. A fact so absolute cannot be doubted, especially after the suffering of those days long past. In order to survive, Elise had to harden her heart against that infinite sorrow. To have even a speck of hope that Cecile had lived…that is not allowed. Not even a foolish wish can be permitted. Any rejection of that horrific day will create a fatal chink in the dam that restrained a reservoir of emotion.

Her eyes hold no welcome for her long lost friend. She’s already killed that part of her heart.

“No, I shouldn’t call you that. Cecile is gone. You have a lot of nerve imitating the dead, but to have the audacity to take her form--!” Elise’s rage builds, gaining infinite momentum, until--

“You shouldn’t make that face, big sis. You’ll get wrinkles.”

Crack. Elise drops her gaze from the impact of those words. The armor is penetrated, the wall is demolished, the dam crumbles. That section of her heart that Elise had quarantined for her own safety, for her own survival, now consumes her like an explosively malignant cancer. Those words are the most venomous, the most fatal poison for her heart. The last words of her sister, the farewell from a girl too pure to exist in this world, that reservoir, held back for so long, pounds against Elise’s soul; threatening to erode it completely.

With a splash, the flooded ground, damp with melted snow, sloshes up under the force of Elise’s defiant stomp, and she looks up, the fire in her eyes even more intense than the inferno that burst forth earlier.

“No! You are not--” What begins as a forceful declaration ends in a wavering breath. The object of Elise’s attention, that woman twenty stories above her, is, once again, gone, leaving no trace of her presence.

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