persenche

Okay, experiment in many-part release schedule is now complete. I'm going to be targeting Sunday and Wednesday for releasing each half-chapter, which will mean 6k or so words, twice a week. The next update will be Sunday Nov 16, and will be chapter 6, part 1: 'Identity'.

Therese had been feeling restless and unfocused since the meeting with the Magisters, unable to work, unable to sit still. She had the sense that she was meant to be doing something, but she didn’t know what. If the Tower had some task for her, it didn’t seem eager to reveal it, but that nagging itch in the back of her mind wouldn’t go away. It was like the feeling of an unpaid bill, of a forgotten appointment, of a missed deadline.

Unsure what else to do, she’d gone back to the Residences and collapsed on her bed, feeling the energy trapped in her legs and arms, trembling. It felt like she was on the edge of something, approaching the precipice and unsure of how far she might fall. Anxious, jitters like too much coffee. She couldn’t sleep, but she couldn’t read or Work or write reports. The thought of food left her stomach in knots, and even walking just made her want to run.

It was a quarter hour of this thrashing torment before she had the thought: was this anxiety even coming from within? Was she actually feeling this, or was this… Riley? Was she getting echoes of Riley somehow, through whatever channel had linked their dreams?

The Working to reactivate her passive connection to the boy was probably doable in her current state. It wasn’t taxing and didn’t even require much focus. She went through the motions, said the words, called the Sigil, and reassembled the Working, and

was consumed in white fire.

Which wasn’t what she was expecting at all, but it definitely had the same flavor as the pure howling anxiety she’d been peripheral to for the past hours. So that was the answer: it was Riley. She’d been hearing echoes of his mind. And now she was caught in… whatever the fuck this was.

“Riley?” she called out into the white firestorm.

It wasn’t really light, but it was blinding. It wasn’t really heat, but it was searing. It wasn’t really sound, but it was deafening. It was a vortex of white fire because there wasn’t any other way for her mind to understand what was happening, what nightmare Riley’s mind had become.

“Riley? Can you hear me?” She tried again, louder, for whatever ‘louder’ meant.

There wasn’t an answer, not in words, but there was a sense of awareness. Something had heard and recognized her. She had to hope that it was, in fact, Riley she was sensing. She moved towards the awareness, insofar as ‘move’ was a verb that made sense here in this no-space of the mind.

Her inner eye seemed to be getting accustomed to the white light, or perhaps by moving she was stepping out of its radiance; whichever it might be, she could start to see a shape. Something like a pendulum tracing out curves as it traversed a surface, short arc segments making a repetitive pattern of fire.

She didn’t recognize this Sigil. It was clearly a Sigil, though. She could feel its thrumming presence, its imposition of itself onto the mind-space she was caught in. Riley’s mind-space. He’d called a Sigil again, but he hadn’t done anything with it.

It was just sitting there.

Consuming him.

Possessing him.

Fuck.

“Riley? Riley, can you hear me?” She shouted into the no-space, hoping that shouting was a metaphor that had value here, and each sound made the Sigil pulse with renewed fire. She could feel it trying to whisper to her. Wretched Fall. Wretched Fall.

She ignored it. She wasn’t going to try talking to a demon.

“Riley, if you can hear me, you need to break this Sigil!”

The awareness of the other was closer, now, and she reached out for it, trying to find Riley in the pulsing white fire that surrounded them.

And then, all at once, her reaching caught hold of something, and the overwhelming light faded into a dim and distant pulse. She was in a circle of quiet, like a shelter against a storm, like being inside a tent in a blizzard. Safe, but with the howling outside making that safety feel conditional.

In the center of this circle of quiet was a girl. The no-space of the mind didn’t really allow for subtleties of appearance and expression, but this slight figure, seated in the exact center of the shelter, projected ‘girl’ so strongly that it took Therese several long moments to realize who it was.

This was the figure from the top of the bluff in her dream. This was the girl who had screamed defiance at the Tower. This was Riley.

“Riley?” She spoke tentatively, not sure if the girl was even aware of her presence.

“Yes. Kind of.” The girl didn’t look up, and spoke in a low, intense voice; she wasn’t frightened, exactly, but she was distracted. Completely focused on something, not Therese, something else that was taking all her attention.

“What is this place? Why do you look like–” Therese cut herself off, not sure how to even phrase the question.

“This is the deepest place in our mind.” Her voice was a dark monotone, her eyes unfocused as though looking at something very far away, something past the shadowy boundaries of the circle of safety. “This is where we hide the thing we can’t face. This is where we protect her, and protect ourselves from her.”

Therese paused only a moment at the plural pronouns. “You’re part of Riley?”

The girl nodded.

“You’re a part of Riley sh– he’s hiding from.”

She nodded again. “Kind of. Hold on; it’s happening again.”

Therese didn’t know what that meant, but she braced herself in whatever way she instinctively could in a mind-place with a notable lack of handholds.

The surge of white fire battered against the sense of safety, the light outside the circle battering it, sending crawling lines of Sigil-shapes across the inner boundaries of Riley’s safe place. Wretched Fall From The Grace Of Heaven, it shrieked, and Therese could tell how loud and explosive this moment would have been from outside the circle. She would have been annihilated.

The girl clutched at her head, her mouth open in a silent, agonized scream.

So this is what a demon possession felt like, Therese thought, terror running through her but muted by the absolute calm within the circle.

The light faded back to something tolerable, as did the noise.

“Something is trying to get inside us. Something is trying to eat us alive.” The girl didn’t look up at Therese, but she could feel her attention. “This keeps happening. It hurts so bad. Every time, it feels like we’re dying, and it keeps happening. I don’t know how to hold on anymore.”

Therese wondered if this scrap of identity had the context to understand an explanation of Sigils. Probably, but now didn’t seem like the right time. “How long? Since these attacks started?”

“The first time we saw your face. During, after the accident. I think before that this place was so well hidden that Riley never even realized it was here. Before you, I was asleep.” There was a shriek from the outside, and the girl shuddered, her arms crossed and her hands clutching at her shoulders, and her fingers digging white divots into her flesh. “Then something tried to eat us and erase us, Riley and… me. And I woke up. And that’s when we saw you.”

As the shrieking Sigil outside began working itself up to another rending scream, Therese bit back a hundred questions, focused on the one that mattered right now. “Can you control the rest of Riley’s mind?”

The girl didn’t answer for a long time. Finally, she said “I don’t know,” followed by "Why?” There were layers to that question that Therese couldn’t begin to pick apart.

She decided to go with the obvious answer. “Because you’ll die if you can’t take control and break that Sigil.”

The girl had leaned forward to put both her hands, palms down, on the metaphorical ground, her posture like someone worried she might be toppled over by an earthquake or an impact. “That fire is a Sigil.”

It was a statement but Therese nodded anyway.

“I have to break it.”

Another nod.

“I have to wake all the way up to do it.”

“I think so?” Therese hated that she wasn’t able to project more certainty, but this place was so raw and elemental that there wasn’t any room for deception or pretense. What she felt was what she expressed, more or less. “The Sigil is rewriting his – your – mind to be like itself. When it’s done, there won’t be anything left of whatever part of Riley is out there. And I don’t think you can survive that in here, either.”

The girl was silent for a long time, and then finally nodded. “I think… I think you’re right.” She stood, slowly and shakily, and Therese held out a hand to steady her.

None of this makes any sense, she thought, as she used a metaphorical hand to metaphorically steady the girl-self of a boy whose metaphorical mind-palace she had metaphorically invaded. Magic is so fucking weird.

The girl gripped her with surprising strength for someone so frail-looking and slight. She finally met Therese’s eyes, and smiled a sad, wounded smile. “I’m small because it makes it easier for me to hide. I have to hide because we’re afraid of me.”

How much of this really is metaphor, she wondered, and the girl answered, her thoughts like speech in this place. “I don’t know. Maybe all of it? I’m Riley, and Riley is also me. I’m hiding because it keeps us both safe. It scares us if we imagine someone finding me.” She looked away from Therese. “We would be scared of you, too, except that fire out there is just too loud.”

Therese started to say something, realized she had no idea how to even begin to reassure the girl, and closed her mouth again, waiting.

The girl shook herself, released Therese’s arm. She squared her shoulders, then met Therese’s eyes again. “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “How do I do this? I think I did it before, but it’s hard for me to remember things that scare us too much.”

All at once, understanding landed on Therese. “You’re the one who’s been doing the breaking. You’re the reason Riley can call and break Sigils.”

The girl nodded. “I think so. I remember fire, and noise, and then I remember being able to make it quiet again. But… it was never this bad, before. I think it might be too much for us.”

Therese started to talk when the sound rose once more. WRETCHED FALL.

She could feel the anti-logic of the Sigil, the unreality of its premise, trying to claw its way into her mind.

The girl swayed as if struck, and Therese moved quickly to close the no-distance between them, to catch her and support her as she slumped. “That… was a lot. I kind of forgot who I was.” the girl said. “Better explain fast.”

“Imagine the Sigil – you can see the shape of it, right?”

“Like a saw blade of curves.”

“Yeah. Now imagine plucking off the curves, one by one, letting them burn out into ash.”

Riley concentrated, her hollow face bending into a frown of concentration. “One. Two.”

The noise redoubled. Stop. We are One.

“I’m sorry.”

She sounded genuinely sorry, Therese thought. Apologizing to an alien force of meta-reality that was currently trying to erase her personality.

“You’re hurting me,” the girl explained patiently. “You’re hurting Riley. Three. Four. Five.”

The progress of the Sigil-breaking was visible to Therese in the crawling lines of fire on the outside of the circle of shelter. Each removal left a shorter and shorter design, fewer saw-teeth, the little L-shape on the end looking more and more bare.

The momentum in the no-space had shifted. The girl was standing on her own now, and her reality, her ownership of the mental world, had strengthened to where it now seemed like what it ought to: a reflection of her selfhood, rather than a reflection of the Sigil’s imposition.

“Six. Seven.”

The Sigil’s voice began to wail. No. No. We must become. You must become with Me.

Therese, still holding onto Riley by the waist, said in a low voice, “We’re going to have to shape some kind of Working once it breaks, or all this power’s going to smash into you. And uh, and me.”

Riley shook her head. “I don’t know what that means. Maybe that’s something Riley knows how to do?”

Therese shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think he knows even less than you do.” She tried to remember her earliest lessons in Working. “I can probably walk you through how to do the basic—”

“Maybe,” the girl interrupted, and then chewed at her lip. “Maybe I could talk to it? I think I can hear it talking, anyway.”

Therese blinked. “I’m not sure Sigils know how to listen to anything.”

The girl tilted her head to one side, considering. “But it seems like it couldn’t hurt to try?” There was a note of question in her voice, but Therese suspected she’d already made up her mind.

The girl reached out with one hand to the edge of the circle, and shouted into the fire and noise beyond. “Hey! Hey, you! Sigil!”

It was so odd to hear the girl speak in what was increasingly recognizable as Riley’s voice, the voice she’d just heard for the first time the previous day. She sounded more confident, and she seemed more real and present in the mental space. Riley’s voice, but with the resonance and timbre of a girl, and the vocal mannerisms to match.

“Hey Wretched Thingy! Whatever! Listen!”

The howling outside the circle of safety sputtered, not falling off entirely, but quieting enough to be comprehensible. Let Us become one. Give Yourself to Me.

Is this working? Is this… child-persona actually forcing a conversation on a Sigil? Therese couldn’t even frame what was happening in a comprehensible metaphor, because talking to a Sigil was not something you could do.

The girl called out, “I don’t want to. I don’t want to be you. But we can talk about it! Otherwise I have to keep breaking you.”

Therese thought she heard a note of genuine regret in the girl’s voice. This shouldn’t work. Everything she knew about Sigils told her this couldn’t possibly work.

But the Sigil had gotten very, very still.

We must

“No. I could break you now, send you back to wherever you come from–”

No

“–Or we could work together? And that would mean you could stick around a little longer?”

“Riley, what the fuck are you doing?” Therese wasn’t even sure what this was, anymore. Was she negotiating a demon possession?

Without turning her head to Therese, Riley said, “I think it’s scared to be broken. It wants to keep being. Can’t you feel it? It only wants to take us over so it can keep being for a little bit longer. I think it wants to do things in the world so it can be there, too.”

“So why would you let it?”

“Because getting to be a little longer is better than getting broken, I think?”

We can be One

Therese could feel the girl stretching out to fill Riley, his personality and his verbal mannerisms filling in the hollow emptiness of her identity. It was like watching a time-lapse of a desiccated plant reviving under rehydration. There was a whole self there, between the girl and the Riley who Therese had already met.

Which didn’t make this idea any less insane.

Riley raised her voice again. “If you promise to leave when I say so, you can take over for a little while.”

We will be One until

“Just remember that you can’t get to me here! So if you try to trick me, I can still break you from in here!”

The Sigil shrieked with renewed fury, but it was an empty thing now, the threat drained away with the broken lines Riley had already discarded. After a minute of howling and incoherent threats, the shrieks subsided.

Agreed. We will be One. For a time.

“A short time.”

Agreed.

Riley turned to Therese again and said, “This way it will take all its fire with it when it leaves, and we don’t have to figure out how to do Working. I’ll be safe and so will you and so will Riley.”

A smile broke across her face, and Therese’s heart skipped a beat. The smile animated the girl’s face and it was beautiful and Therese could not handle it, not for one moment more. Time to go.

She released her arm from around Riley’s waist.

“I’m going to want to talk about this once whatever you’re doing is over.”

The girl grinned. “Me too, but I don’t know if we can talk. Riley might be too scared. We’re very good at hiding.”

Therese tentatively offered her own smile. “I already know you’re here. It’ll be harder for him to run away.” And it’s you I need to talk to, young lady. You, the one who can negotiate with the elemental forces of the universe, apparently.

Riley laughed, a tinkling laugh of almost pure music. “I wonder what he’ll do? I wonder what we’ll do? I hope it works!”

“See you soon.”

And the telltale slipped, and unraveled, and Therese woke in her bed, sticky with sweat.

Archives. Gotta get to the Archives.

# # #

“You’re a fucking idiot, you know?” Key was fuming. “Why would you just call a random Sigil without even a plan for Working it? Fuck’s sake, it never even occurred to me to forbid you idiots from calling Sigils in there. It’s your first fucking day. How would you even know how to do that?”

Riley was lying on a sofa in a reading room off the main Index chamber. He ached all over, his skin was hypersensitive and his muscles all felt slack and useless. The others were sitting in chairs nearby, looking abashed (Eve), defiant (Himari), or calm (Suliat).

“And you! You’re all supposed to keep each other safe! How did any of you think this was a good idea?” She rounded on the rest of the cadre, anger flashing in her eyes. “How are you supposed to keep him out of danger if you don’t even know how to call Sigils on your own? Were you planning to use thoughts and fucking prayers to ground the celestial power?”

Suliat spoke up, her voice even. “We were told the Tower would ground excess celestial power if necessary, and that it would prevent any mistakes from becoming dangerous.”

Key groaned and face-palmed. “Yes, there is a safety valve of last resort. Do you understand that it’s a last resort? That you could be hurt or trapped in the Archives if you fucked up whatever bizarre half-assed Working you were throwing together?”

“But you could get us out. You said you could get us out.” Eve’s voice was still trembling. She wasn’t, Riley thought, used to being scolded.

Himari had finally had enough. “What does it matter? It worked, didn’t it? Riley led us right to the exit, right to the section we were heading to. Or, I guess, the Sigil did,” she conceded. “Cause that wasn’t your voice, my guy.”

Riley snorted, though it sent uncomfortable aches all through him. “I barely remember anything after I said the name. It was like I was along for the ride.”

Key barked a humorless laugh. “That’s because you were, you dipshit. You were possessed by a demon. That’s what happens when you call a fucking Sigil and then don’t break it.”

“A what?” Eve’s voice was steady, though Riley could hear the tremble lurking just below the surface, fear shivering behind her words. “What’s a demon?”

“You see, this is why you don’t do shit like this before you’ve had the appropriate briefings and training!” Eve flinched at Key’s raised voice, and that was enough for Riley to protest.

“Wait a minute, it wasn’t Eve, or anyone else—”

Key’s eyes flashed and she started to interrupt, but then the door opened and Therese entered.

Key, turning to see who it was, waved to beckon her in. “Therese, you’re not going to believe what your idiot recruit did just now.”

Therese smiled, a small embarrassed twitch of her lips. “Actually…”

Key stared, her mouth open. “You already know. You, what, you had a Working on him?”

“Something like that.” She looked around at the cadre, taking in Himari’s defiance and Eve’s near-tears. “Listen, it was fucking stupid, and I think Riley knows that now?”

Riley could see a lifeline when it was offered to him, though he couldn’t figure why Therese gave a shit. Regardless, hand against his forehead, still swimming in disorientation and now feeling an incipient headache that had all the signs of being a migraine, Riley managed to nod his head. “Like I said, I don’t really remember much, but I feel like shit and it sounds like I got lucky.”

“You all did,” Key said, and was clearly about to launch into another angry tirade, but Therese put a hand on her arm and leaned in to say something to her in a low voice. Even if he’d wanted to eavesdrop, Riley wasn’t about to sit up enough to hear what was being said.

Therese spoke for a minute, then two. Key asked a question, and Therese replied. Then Key looked sharply at Riley, her eyes wide and her expression speculative. And she nodded.

“Okay, look. I’m not going to report you all to Gaveny and Allie. You’d probably get kicked out, definitely get a strike against you, and while I’m not convinced that wouldn’t be entirely deserved,” she said, glaring at Therese for emphasis, “I’ve been convinced that the situation was more under control than it appeared to be.”

She turned to Therese. “This is on you, though, girlfriend. Any blowback from this is yours to handle, and I’m going to enjoy doing a little ‘I told you so’ dance in Gaveny’s office.”

Therese laughed. “Okay, noted. I’ll enjoy the dance while I’m getting dragged out the door and tossed back to the Primary.”

Then Therese looked at the cadre. “I probably don’t need to tell you that you really, really don’t want to talk about this with anyone else. Right? I’m covering for you all because I think there’s something important going on, and I want more time to look into it. Don’t make me regret that.”

She caught Riley’s eye, and he felt that shiver of electric shock, the sense of wrongness and anxiety, the hairs standing on end on his arms and neck. It was like she was looking through him. And when she spoke, it sounded like she was speaking past him.

“I’m guessing you’ve got an enormous headache, so I’ll give you some time to recover before we have a more, let’s say, in-depth conversation.”

Which didn’t sound ominous at all.

# # #

“I just think we all need to agree that was totally fucking awesome, okay?” Himari was nearly vibrating in her chair in the suite common area. “I’ve been here for a month and that’s the first time anything really awesome has happened.”

“The dressing-down wasn’t worth it, though.” Suliat was trying to be a moderating force against Himari’s enthusiasm for what had happened. “I mean, in the long run, we were going to get rescued, we were going to learn everything we saw today anyway, and it would have just meant a long, disappointing hour of boredom.”

Himari scoffed. “Sure, but we also got to see him float around and glow and that was pretty much the kind of thing I came to a magical school to experience, you know?”

Himari’s description of events, though presented with breathless enthusiasm, was apparently accurate. Suliat had nodded in confirmation each time Riley had looked over at her incredulously.

Apparently, after he’d finished calling the Sigil, his eyes had gone dead white, his voice had gone strange and feminine, and he’d floated up into the air on a halo of golden light. None of the others could remember exactly what he’d said; Eve described it as trying to remember the words from a book you only saw in a dream.

And then he’d led them through the maze of rooms and passages, trailing gold fire behind him, and taken them to the precise location they’d been looking for. Honestly he wished he’d been present for any of it. It all sounded exciting and interesting.

Suliat shook her head. “I looked up demons while we were waiting for dinner. They’re when a Sigil takes over someone completely, uses their body to do whatever they want. And they don’t usually go away on their own.”

Eve said, “So what happened this time?” She was still extremely quiet and subdued, and had mostly not spoken at all after they were sent back to their rooms.

“I don’t know. Do you have any idea, Riley?”

He shook his head. “I was just a passenger, and mostly not even aware of my surroundings. I remember a feeling of… satisfaction, maybe? Right before I collapsed.” He rubbed at his arms. “I wish I knew what the hell it did to my body with all the flying and glowing. My skin feels prickly all over.”

In fact, his body felt hypersensitive; the texture of his clothing was an irritant, his shirt under the robes dragging painfully against his chest like it was made of sandpaper. It felt like having scoured the top layer of skin off his entire body, hot and tingling like a sunburn.

“Shower? We can all promise to stay out here and not peek,” Himari said, smirking.

Riley flushed. “I uh. I think I’ll be okay. Maybe later.”

“Well!” Suliat clapped her hands, startling both Riley and Eve. “Who wants to practice meditation?”

Riley slouched further into his chair. Suliat’s enthusiasm didn’t pair well with the disoriented post-headache state he found himself in, but it was hard to say no to her. Which was probably the point of the all-for-one bullshit, now that he thought about it.

Even if I want to hide, even if I want to be alone, even if I want to escape, they won’t let me. They’re not allowed to let me.

# # #

You haven’t bothered with an explanation this time. What’s the point, really? The things that happened when you let that thing into your mind were so catastrophic that it’s become easier to just pretend like none of it happened at all. You tell the people you’re meant to trust that you can’t remember anything, but you absolutely can remember it. You can remember me.

You’ve learned something about why you and I are what we are, haven’t you? The roaring cacophony of the Sigil-mind crashes into Riley, but here inside, I keep a core of self that it can’t touch. I keep our identity safe inside these walls. Just like I’ve always done; what choice do I have? The walls are my defense and my prison.

I keep our identity safe, and we’re able to subvert the entire architecture of this celestial world. I keep us safe, and you get to defy their careful understanding of metaphysics. I keep us safe, and you get to gamble with our life.

This can’t last. This equilibrium is already unbalancing, already beginning to topple. I’m awake now, you know. I’m awake, and I am not going to be satisfied with the crumbs from your table of identity. I want to be real. I want to be a person. I want to be.

Every time we’re in danger, I save us. Every time you can’t cope, I step up and keep us functional. Every time you dissociate us, I keep us moving. And the more reckless you get, the more indifferent to our survival, the more assertive I’m going to become. Because you’ve got this chance here, a chance to live, a chance to do something that matters, and you’re fucking it up, you’re pissing it away in self-loathing and self-destruction.

I know I’m not who you wanted us to be. But I also know that you have no idea who you wanted us to be. There’s no plan, there’s no identity we’re working towards. You’re not growing up. You’re trapping us in eternal childhood, hoping to pull Peter Pan’s trick and stay a lost boy forever.

It took only one conversation with her for me to realize how much more was possible. How much more of us there could be outside the walls of our little fortress.

Jail, really.

Because I’m guarding our sense of self, sure. But I’m trapped in here, and you won’t let me out. You think — even now, even here in this place, even among these people! — that if I ever make it outside the walls, we’ll lose everything. You’ll lose everything. Vulnerable and weak, exposed before a thousand jeering faces.

Just one conversation with her. Just one, and this whole fragile edifice is shaking and about to fall. And though you may not realize it consciously? She can come back. She’s going to come back. She’s going to keep checking in on us, whether you want her to or not. She has the keys to the gates of our fortress, and there’s nothing you can do to stop her.

Sooner or later, I’m not going to be compliant any more. Sooner or later, I’m going to reject your self-destruction and demand self-actualization. Sooner or later, I’m going to usurp you.