Chapter 3: Ruminations of a Homing Pigeon 

Turns out looking for a metal needle in a haystack isn’t all that hard if you’re able to get your hands on a metal detector.

Human duct tape now human compass slash homing pigeon.

Ok, let me take a step back here. 

Y’know how I mentioned they suspected that the damage to reality leading to the cyst forming was likely related to the earlier damage that spawned me? Well if that damage was still around and it had to be given I was still around, well I was linked to it and it might be possible to use that link to find the physical location that overlapped with the tear.

So here I am, about to let a pair of witches cast spells on me tied to my very nature.

Now I might have been a bit squeamish about being used as a guinea pig for what sounded like improvised magic, but… Well, umm… Ok before you ask, believing they are witches and that magic exists isn’t that much of a leap of imagination when the entire town is frozen in place like statues and well seeing is believing, especially when you’ve had a trio of witch-lights dancing around you.

Now where was I?

Ok, so magic guinea pig… In the end I allowed them to cast it on me because they explained it to me first, asked permission, there’s a whole town at stake, and well… I kinda like these two. Ester is the very image of the grandmother who bakes cookies and Blythe… Well Blythe, she seems pretty nice and caring under her prickly attitude. I mean I’ve always been a loner and I’ve barely held a prolonged conversation even prior to the pause and pandemic. 

I didn’t really recognise it till today, but being alone is lonely, especially when you’re around others that know and are friends with each other. I mean I understood it in abstract. I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t feeling much else either and well I didn’t have much to personally compare it with. 

Which is why this is so funny, I’ve known these two for what? An hour maybe two and once they got past the whole hollow thing and started treating me like a person, it was better than any other social interaction I’ve ever had. Like I know I have grown since my highschool and university days, but also these two get it, they seem to understand some of my difficulties and they made adjustments for it.

Also there is the fact I am extremely attention starved and now aware of it.

So the spell. Well, it turns out as they explain it, a lot of the magic witches use involves rituals and reagents for anything beyond the simple. If they want complex on the go they create tools, protective spells woven into clothes, flight magic imbued into brooms, healing magic into potions and so on.

What is magic?

“Yes, even magic is a part of it in its own way. Magic is just another ordered system that was spawned within reality as a side effect of the interactions of reality and that ocean of potential,” Ester had explained earlier during her lecture on the nature of reality. 

Basically it's reality’s attempts to handle the small amount of raw potential that naturally leaks through it’s weft and weave. That potential has to go somewhere and it is superfluous to reality’s requirements so an additional system of order layered on top of and woven into the existing system was needed to account for and constrain it. 

Magic is literally supernatural or superreal and it has its own laws or rules such as those of similarity, contagion and symmetry.

“Do I really need to dry swallow this?”

“Of course you do,” Ester replied, answering my question as if I was a child trying to get out of taking their medicine. “That little bundle of herbs is carrying the spells we need to prime you for the rest. It should provide a small charge to light up, so to speak, the weave and weft of torn threads of reality and wild magic shaped by reality’s intent for our mage-sight to see.”

I recognised the tightness in my brow as frowning and a few seconds later I managed to track down the emotion I was feeling. Annoyance. Glancing off to the side, I caught Blythe shooting me a sympathetic smile. I guess she had similar experiences with her teacher.

“Teacher, I think Alex is actually asking if they can’t swallow it with water. I mean it is big enough they are going to have to chew it up first and try to swallow it down in several tries.”

“Oh. Well, ah… I don’t have any ritual safe water on me and both tap and bottled water have adulterants that may affect the spells,” explained the teacher, before apologising.  “Sorry, Alex dearie. Once we have the rest of the spellwork and the tracking is up and working we can get you a drink.

“I guess I better get chewing then,” I groaned, before I downed my mid morning snack of leaf wrapped leaves.

The dried leaves immediately soaked out all of my saliva drying out my mouth, leaving gag-inducing bitterness with a side of mint in its wake. Next came the chewing which only ensured that the flavor was evenly spread out across every taste bud. I was probably chewing for around five minutes trying to grind it down to a more swallowable mush and to generate more saliva to lubricate its journey down my throat. It then took five swallows to get it all down, each accompanied by the need to suppress my shuddering gag reflex and the desire to throw up between each.

I couldn’t tell if it was just acid reflux, but once I had it all down I could feel a building sensation of heat in my core and a sensation across my skin that felt somewhere between goosebumps, static charge from a balloon across your arm hair and the sensation of warm sunlight.

“Interesting,” murmured the crone as the young witch looked on with awe-filled rapt fascination in my direction.

The spell must have progressed to the next stage because my face and cheeks were starting to feel hot and the heat at my core was now accompanied by butterflies.

Rest of the spellwork was less painful for my tastebuds, especially thankfully because they got to sit out now that their part was over. After giving me a good looking over and muttering to themselves, it was time for finger painting and the canvas was me.

The paint was umm… Well, paint or at least it looked and felt like oil paint. Which I doubted even if I didn’t ask. A few ticklish minutes and I had symbols and lines painted on the backs of my hands, up my arms, the nap of my neck and on my face.

Next came the verbal part of the spellwork, done entirely by Ester. Which wasn’t in any language I recognised, but I couldn’t be sure as the words seemed to twist in my mind and escape my memory moments after hearing them. But when the spell was finished, I knew it. 

“I can feel it,” I stated and I could! I could feel a vague pull in my mind leading off in one direction, towards the center of town. Towards a sensation of wrongness. 

The wrongness had tendrils or tears reaching out across the entire town, but there was a heart or origin point where it was denser and could be clearly felt, or at least clearly felt by me. 

It was time for another walk. 

This time I had a purpose and a destination. Leading Ester and Blythe to the heart of the wrongness. I walked in silence with the pair following me, occasionally quietly murmuring to each other. 

The walking soon led to thinking. 

I quickly found myself contemplating everything I’d learned today. Contemplating how my being a hollow explained almost everything.

Almost everything, my lack of memories from earlier than eight years ago, my problems with emotions, my problems with initiative and spontaneity, difficulties with social interaction, the sense of disconnection with others and the world around me, most of my unease with my life and existence.

Almost everything.

With so much explained and ruled out, it was easier to separate out and identify what remained. Easier, not easy. I still couldn’t be entirely sure if and what was unrelated. My newfound desire to interact with and be around others that had grown today with my exposure to the witches was probably related to my growth from my start as a hollow and tempered by the realisation of my long loneliness. The unease and disconnection with my body or form could just be part and parcel of being a hollow who has lived long enough to gain awareness of their fakeness, but it felt different.

How? I couldn’t say?

It's hard tracing back how long I’ve been avoiding mirrors, how I don’t like or recognise what I see reflected in the windows of the shops we’re passing as me. It feels different because as much as I feel unease with my form, I can also feel in my gut that there is a form I desire. I just can’t see it. 

Maybe I’ll be able to try and solve this riddle after we’ve fixed the tear. 

No… 

I probably won’t. A new sort of empty feeling hollowed me out. I’d remembered what Ester had said about hollows dying soon after reality healed and they were no longer needed. By helping them track down and repair the tears in reality I was likely laying down the pathway to my own end.

My pace must have faltered because suddenly Blythe was next to me, holding my hand. Did she know what I was thinking? It’s warm… 

Real humans are pretty amazing.

Was my life, the life of a fake, the life of a hollow that had grown beyond its purpose worth even one of the lives of the people frozen by the pause? Could I really leave them all frozen, all the real humans, to be potentially cauterized from reality to preserve my own half-existence?

As much as I want to continue on and continue to experience things, grow and perhaps solve the problems that plague me, I can’t… I just can’t justify it.

On the bright side, I might achieve something meaningful with my life by helping save all those lives at the cost of my own. Find a greater meaning in my existence than human duct tape. Blythe and Ester would know I existed, they would remember me and what I did, maybe even tell others. Maybe I’d get lucky and my fate would miss me and I’d get to live on.

I knew my justifications for going through with this rang hollow, even to me they do, I wanted to live, but I was going to go through with this. 

The rest of the walk continued in silence.