Just a Bystander - Chapter 126

Caden was gone, and yet not quite gone.

For the very first time, he finally felt like he understood a little of what the augera meant whenever they talked about shadows being cast on walls. The world that he had been born in — the world that he moved through with every other living person, and which felt so full and rich to them — even though it seemed to be brilliant and vibrant, was really not all there was to experience. Reality, true reality, was so much more.

But for humans, it was too much more. Caden understood this the moment he fell off the proverbial wall. He was a little painting that had plucked himself off the canvas and stepped into the world, and there was no way he could make full sense of what was around him. It was just not possible.

And yet there he was, beginning to make sense of it.

His previous forays into oblivion had filled him with anguish because his mind was too anchored in human reality, too chained by conceptions of the flesh in a place where space didn’t seem to matter. But now, in his state of utter dissociation, he realised that it had been a mistake to think that space didn’t matter in oblivion. It mattered, but it just didn’t operate in the same way he was used to.

So he realised he was standing in the clearing with Kevan and Lynus, but he was also standing somewhere else. It was like he was inside the spaces between the air where they couldn’t reach him even though he was right there. They were the shadows on the wall, the figures painted on a canvas, and he was hovering an inch away from the surface.

‘Yes,’ the young augeric voice noted with delight. ‘Youwere always sighted, but with closed eyes, the light merely danced on your lids. Now they are open, and you see.’

‘I don’t… understand all of it,’ Caden said, trying to make sense of the space that was oblivion. Lynus and Kevan were moving, that much he could tell, but from this frame of reference, he could not really comprehend exactly what was happening in the physical space with the same level of clarity that he enjoyed when he was actually there. It was like looking at everything through a lens that fractured reality into a kaleidoscope. There were parts of it that were recognisable, and he understood that movement was happening, but that was all.

‘A child does not know the world they gaze upon from the moment of birth. In time, knowledge will come.’

‘Where is Emilia?’ he asked, looking around. It was no good — the world spun around him in a confusion of colours. What was even more disconcerting was how he thought he was doing more than just looking. It inexplicably felt like his eyes were actually tasting and smelling the world as well, while his ears and nose were engaged in similarly impossible sensory experiences. His only consolation was that he was so disentangled from his physical body that this confounding mess of sensations didn’t really affect him viscerally. He watched it all with detached fascination.

‘I’m right here.’

Caden felt a compulsion to turn. Since there was no reliable way for him to orientate himself, he obeyed the impulse and directed his attention towards the source of that call. Amazingly, the moment he did so, the chaos around him receded and he found himself staring at Emilia in the flesh. In that same instant, he realised he was in his own body too, and the world around the two of them was rapidly falling into place.

They were in the clearing, but it was empty except for the two of them. There was a different quality to the world, though — it looked like a dim picture of reality, but felt painfully bright. No matter where he looked, Caden had the urge to squint to keep himself from being blinded.

‘Emilia!’ He paused when he realised his lips were not moving.

‘Use this.’ Emilia’s lips weren’t moving either as she tapped a finger to the side of her head.

‘Are you alright?’ Caden approached her slowly, partly because it was actually hard to walk when he couldn’t look properly at where he was going in this strangely dim world that still felt too bright. But he was also afraid about moving too much since he wasn’t sure exactly where he was going in oblivion when he moved.

She considered the question for a moment with her trademark air of preoccupation, then favoured him with a bright smile. ‘I’m as good as I can expect to be, given the circumstances.’

Why was she being so cryptic? Couldn’t she tell that he was genuinely afraid for her, and that the situation demanded more clarity in her response and urgency in her manner? Caden felt a bite of impatience and was momentarily distracted by how it really wasn’t a figure of speech. He did feel like impatience itself had sunk its teeth into him somewhere in the region of his left ear. His hand came up reflexively, but he felt nothing there and when he drew his hand away there wasn’t any sign of blood. Still, he felt wounded.

‘You’ll want to control that,’ Emilia remarked seriously. The smile was gone and she was now looking at him worriedly. ‘We can accidentally tear ourselves apart here if we’re too… if our thoughts are… I don’t have the words for it.’

‘So we need to think softly,’ Caden muttered, recalling the vague words of the Geldor Spire when it had stitched his psyche back together.

Emilia’s eyebrows rose and she nodded. ‘Yes. That’s one way of putting it. We need to think softly.’

‘What happened to you? Jerric said you were supposed to wake him, but you never did. And by the time he woke up, you were gone.’

‘I was taken,’ she answered, folding her arms around herself and looking vulnerable. ‘I was sitting on the chair, looking towards the forest… and then I was here.’

‘But the trail?’

‘Yes, I left that.’

Caden frowned in confusion. In that instant, something huge and shadowy swooped down on him from above. He reflexively conjured a barrier and was about to send out a flurry of arcanic bolts, but there was nothing there.

‘Softly, Caden,’ Emilia admonished.

He stared at the empty space above him, then back at Emilia. In a sort of abstract way, he supposed what was happening made some sense. Somehow, here in oblivion, emotions could tear a person apart. He calmed himself and slipped back into his dissociative state.

‘If you were taken here instantly, how did you leave a trail?’ he asked.

‘I honestly don’t know. Where are we?’

‘We’re in the forest. Took us a couple of hours to get here using wings.’

Emilia’s eyebrows rose again as she looked at the space around them. ‘This place is real, then? The forest. I assumed it was just a conceptual space, a convenient anchor for consciousness.’

Caden tried to ‘think softly’ while piecing together what they knew so far. It was a challenge, even with his mental trick of dissociation, but he managed to get a vague picture of their situation.

A look of fascination crossed Emilia’s face and she interrupted him just as he was about to ask her a question. ‘Wait, you said it took you a few hours to get here?’

Caden nodded, then frowned. ‘You’re not about to tell me that you haven’t actually been gone for that long, are you?’

Her eyes widened, then, inexplicably, she absolutely beamed at him as she shook her head excitedly. ‘The opposite! For me, it’s been days!’

‘Days?’ Caden repeated, aghast. ‘A-are you sure?’

She considered it for a moment, frowning a little, then shrugged. ‘I don’t have a watch, and I will admit the passage of time is hard to track here, but I’m pretty sure that it hasn’t been only a few hours.’

‘How are you sure?’

‘Because of my period,’ she answered, with the faintest twitch of her lips.

Caden turned away and coughed. Embarrassment threatened to burn him where he stood, quite literally, but he quickly centred himself and allowed the emotion to pass.

‘Okay… why are you happy about the time difference?’

‘Well, it’s clear that the time I experience here is being elongated somehow. But if it’s only been a few hours, then maybe there’s hope for me after all.’

‘Hope?’ Caden had to work to make sure that he didn’t get hurt by a rush of fear or dread when he heard that. ‘The augera told me you were being transformed. What has been happening?’

In answer, she beckoned him over to the edge of the clearing. Seeing her move about the space without any worry, Caden felt a little more comfortable about treating the space as functionally real. He followed her and saw her pointed out a line of glyphs that ran around the perimeter of the clearing.

He stared at them, trying to really take them in. When he had first arrived in the physical clearing with Lynus and Kevan and dipped into the arcana, he had sensed the presence of glyphs somehow etched into the arcana itself. But now, in this oblivion version of the clearing, he could see them with a little more clarity. They weren’t the usual two-dimensional patterns he was familiar with. Instead, these glyphs were three-dimensional shapes hovering in mid-air, and he saw that they also extended into other facets of oblivion that he couldn’t yet understand even though he was looking right at them.

‘These glyphs lock a part of me here. While my consciousness is trapped here in this mental construct, I’ve found that a part of me can still venture out. That part of me is blind and unable to really understand the world in quite the same way, but it managed to find the rest of you and plant the trail. As for what these glyphs are doing to me besides keeping me here… well, I don’t know the details, but I think it’s altering my auric-ambient-flare.’

‘Help me,’ Caden said to the augeric shell. ‘Help me break this.’

‘We cannot,’ the lone augera’s voice replied mournfully. ‘It is of the symphony, and we are its melody.’

‘Then explain it to me and I’ll break it!’ Caden demanded.

‘We are sorry,’ it answered, echoing its earlier apology. This time, Caden was ready for the wave of sorrow and despair, and he floated above it until the augera finally reined themselves in once more. ‘If there is to be a counter-melody, {~?~}, you must be its composer.’

Emilia looked at him and smiled sadly.

‘You can hear them clearly?’ he asked, trying not to despair.

‘I think I caught the important parts. They can’t help, can they?’

‘No. But I didn’t expect them to be able to anyway. I mean, that’s why they’ve pushed me this far — they need me to free them. If I’m ever going to do that, I need to do things that they’re not capable of doing. This is just one of them.’

‘Very true. Do you think you can free me?’

Caden folded his arms, thinking hard.

His instinctive understanding of the mundane glyphs used by other arcanists was likely due to the fact that the augeric shell was woven into his auric-ambient-flare. But their understanding was only supplied to him if it didn’t contravene the Prophecy. That was why some glyphs remained inscrutable to him. That meant he couldn’t rely on somehow being able to instinctively decipher what these glyphs were. If he couldn’t understand them, then he couldn’t safely unravel them.

Was it possible to unsafely unravel them, like what he had done with the hostile sequence used by the enemy agents when they had fled Geldor? That was possible, but also potentially catastrophic. It would be his last resort.

Could he figure them out by himself, right now, somehow? That seemed like a long shot, but if time didn’t flow here in the same way it did in the outside world, perhaps it was worth trying.

‘Emilia, you said the sequence is altering your auric-ambient-flare. How do you know? Can you understand parts of it?’

She nodded. ‘I’ve been studying them. A few bits make sense to me.’

A little mote of hope blossomed in his heart. ‘Okay. Let’s start there. Tell me what you’ve managed to figure out.’