“Knowledge and wisdom?” repeated Taoc. “Do you mean you can think about something and do it magically?”
“Sort of,” I said. “At first, I thought knowledge was one’s understanding of something. If you could picture fire, understand how fire was formed and what it took to keep the fire burning, perhaps that would be all the knowledge you needed. Wisdom, I believed, was the experience that let you transform your knowledge into magic. But I realized, after a short discussion with my friend Noel, who is now the Ikon of the Immortal of Madness—”
“Was she the elf you were fighting outside at our capital?” asked Taoc.
“Yes,” I said. “She was my first friend in this world. The two of us learned about the fundamentals of magic, or knowledge and wisdom, from the Immortal of Desire. But it seems something strange happened after the Immortal told us about those fundamentals.”
“Something strange?” asked Kol when I stopped speaking for a while.
I thought about how to phrase what I wanted to say without giving too much away. “The magic should not have worked. No, I mean I should not have been able to come up with magic on my own. If you think about what I just said, the system of knowledge and wisdom that I described, I am sure you will find something that doesn’t make sense.”
Again, a pause. Eventually, Kelser opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again to speak, “You said that wisdom is the experience that let you transform knowledge into magic. But if you never had that experience to begin with, how could you have the wisdom to turn knowledge into a spell?”
I nodded. “Exactly! In my world, we would call that a catch 22. You need experience to gain wisdom, but you need wisdom to gain experience. This meant there had to be another way to gain experience. Somebody, let’s say a powerful immortal being, would have to share some of their experience with you to help you cast spells.”
“So the Immortal of Desire,” said Kelser as he leaned forward, “taught you about knowledge and wisdom, but never gave you the experience that you needed to use to make your own spells?”
“Which means the Immortal must have wanted something from you,” said Kol. “I may not know much about Immortals and magic, but I do know about politics and manipulation. The Immortal gave you half of what you needed, and you would get the rest after doing something for the Immortal.”
“That is what Noel told me too,” I said, thinking back to what she had said after our fight. “The Simurgh wanted me to become its Ikon. In exchange, I would learn some spells, just like the powerful spells that Noel and your brother Alek were using.”
Kol frowned. “I have already heard about Alek becoming the Immortal of Evil’s Ikon. But I haven’t had the chance to apologize to you yet. I am sorry you had to fight a member of my family. I wish I had taken care of him before he could’ve troubled you.”
I waved a hand at her. “It’s okay. Honestly, I don’t think Alek is smart enough to be blamed for any of this. He’s a desperate, opportunistic man, and your old god, the Evil Eye, seems to love using those sorts of people.” I sighed. “But now that you’ve said all that, I should also apologize for Noel’s actions. Not just for what she did to your countries, but also for creating the mess that led all of you here. If she hadn’t stolen the Book of Annihilation, the Simurgh would not have manipulated all of you to gather your armies and march over here.”
“No, please don’t apologize for that,” said Kol.
“Yes, great elf—er, Cas,” said Taoc quickly but with a stammer. “And now that you bring it up, are we really going to war over an object?”
“Strange isn’t it?” I said. “And now that you’re here in the clouds, on the front line where the Simurgh’s magic isn’t as effective, you can finally see that this war is pointless. Well, it isn’t completely pointless, but none of you could justify spilling oceans of blood for an object that you will not even use.”
Kol and Taoc nodded and looked at each other. These two were leaders of large countries, with thousands of people depending on their judgment. They could recognize the absurdity of going to war over a book.
“So the Immortal of Desire, the one you call Simurgh, wanted you to be its Ikon, and also manipulated the rest of us so we would go to war over this Book of Annihilation?” said Kelser.
“In a nutshell, yes,” I said. “But there is more to it.”
“Of course there is,” said Kelser. “After all, you said you were not supposed to come up with magic on your own. But you can use your own magic right now, clearly, since we are sitting in the clouds right now.”
“Yes, because I did not have the wisdom or experience necessary to turn knowledge into magic, I should not have been able to make my own spells,” I said, “but something went wrong. Or from my perspective, something went right. I figured out a way to turn my knowledge into spells without receiving wisdom from the Immortal.”
“So you aren’t a follower of the Immortal of Desire?” asked Kol. “I think all of us thought you were working for the Immortal.”
“I don’t know what my relationship with the Immortal is like,” I said, “the Simurgh hasn’t exactly been chatting with me or telling me every little thing that I needed to know. Although, I am not sure if that is because it only views me as a pawn or because directly intervening in this world seems to carry some sort of penalty for the Immortals.”
“That would explain why they don’t just come down here and blow us all away,” said Kelser.
“Yes, I suspect it works kinda like this place we are in. You can resist the Simurgh’s magic here because it is between the heavens and the earth. Up there is the moon and the red star, and down there, we have the birds,” I said. “If the Immortals are concepts in physical form, which is what Noel seemed to suggest they were, then all of them must be covering different concepts. But there have to be places where these concepts overlap or at least meet. Up here in the skies is probably one of those places.”
“But what does that have to do with why the Immortals don’t come down here all the time?” asked Taoc.
“Because,” I said, “thinking, sentient beings like us. We are complicated. We are many concepts rolled up into one. Full of contradictions, of paradox, of the kinds of things that cannot be neatly tied up and given over to an Immortal to rule or represent. This place up here might be a battlefield, but there is no greater battlefield of concepts than us.
“Evil? If only morality was that simple. Inflicting pain on others to protect your own. Making mistakes that hurt others, but making amends later. The worst humans can be redeemed. The greatest elf can fall to vice. Self sacrificing demons might make things worse with their ineptitude. A brutish fairy might never trample a fly. And selfish spirits might help many others by creating abundance. How could the Immortal of Evil ever rule over us completely?
“Madness? Is it mad to love one another so much we lose sight of our rationality? Perhaps it is. Or perhaps it is pure, irrational love, and is that not a beautiful thing? When your mind goes blank because you met her gaze. When your heart beats louder and faster, with a thump thump thump, and a quiet voice whispers in your ear, go to him. Is it mad to hear that voice? To hear those heartbeats? Of course it is. Or is it? On my world, we identified disorders or conditions that we said were surely madness, but were they? Different people dealt with them differently. Choices, circumstances, all manner of things that muddy the waters, blur the boundaries, and make it hard to say what is madness, what is sanity, and what is rationality.
“And of desire, there is so much to say. Desire for what? Wealth, power, love, or something else? For tiny tangible things, like good food, a warm embrace, or for large, abstract ideas and ideals, happiness, purpose, or a sense of belonging. And what about when desire leads to evil? Or when desire leads to madness? Or perhaps the evil, the madness, comes before desire? Perhaps we were destined, by our very nature, to be evil, to be mad, to be covetous. Or perhaps it was circumstance, chance, or choice, that led us there.
“We are many of these at the same time. We may be drawn to evil, infected with madness, and consumed by desire, all at once. Or we may be none of these. Or perhaps we are some of them for a little while, and empty shells after we breathe out. Tell me, if you were a being who could only know absolute concepts, for whom things were never vague, never obscured by the limited lenses of our tiny lives, then would knots like us be worth untangling?
“No. The Immortals will not, they cannot, control us through their concepts alone. The only thing that they can do is force us to surrender our complexity. To become pale imitations of ourselves, tied to their absolutes, and serving them unquestioningly. The Immortals cannot face us on our terms. They cannot come down to us and have their way with us, not without surrendering some of their absolute power, their rule over singular concepts, to the other Immortals.
“If I am right, we may be less powerful than the Immortals, but we are, and always have been, their greatest weakness.”
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