Embrace the Nothing (14)

Madness and paranoia rampaged across my mind.

Go back to the INDEX.

I struggled through the next days, madness and paranoia rampaging across my mind. 

Being alone is one thing, but then having a companion in your loneliness for a brief time, who is then taken away, makes the ensuing loneliness all the more bitter and insufferable.

Had the voice been some kind of delusion inspired by the solitude? My imagination's desire to interact with anything external?

Or were the Agalin guards poisoning the food, tainting it with hallucinogens like mangleroot or some kind of exotic local mushroom?

Or could it be a simple trick, just to test whether I was truly repentant of my sins against the state?

Avoiding the food for a couple days did nothing to improve my state of mind, and I grudgingly came to accept these mad theories as baseless, no matter how emotionally satisfying they were.

I couldn't escape the thought that Zhalghumi's personality was nothing like any of the Agalin I had met up to then. The guards and mages were all dour and serious folk. Not at all petulant or childish. Impersonation or entrapment seemed an unnecessary trick for an Agalin to stoop to. 

Which left me with one thought: Zhalghumi was truly a Faerie.

That raised many other questions, of course. If a Faerie was truly a creature of such innate power and intrinsic magic, how was it possible to imprison them at all?

What bait would sit at the heart of a trap to catch a Faerie? How many Agalin guard-mages would it take to forge an Interdiction strong enough to hold a Faerie? And even then, to what end?

I had more questions, many more, but no answers. 

All I really knew of the Faeries I had learned from Zhalghumi, if what he had said was indeed true. Every whisper of the Faeries from my childhood could not be trusted. If any truth remained in any of those folk tales, it would be well hidden. I knew new fields of study awaited me at home.

I felt a determination not to regret my failing, and to remember for the rest of my life how kernels of truth might lie in even the most outlandish stories. I'd been so sure of myself. So certain of the shape of the world, the workings of magic, the nature of reality. I was too much like my brother!

The Follies were the Dragons' dirty little secret, and I'd smugly assumed it was their only one. If the Faeries were indeed the secret teachers of the Dragons, it was a bigger secret than the Follies, and one the Dragons would certainly have kept from mere humans. Every mage knew something of the Follies. No one could be said to know anything of the Faeries. It was only natural for mages like me to completely overlook the Faeries. 

Every mage knew, for example, that magic simply could not work within a Folly. And yet Zhalghumi was mage enough to do it, despite the impossibility. 

My mind kept going in circles. I thought again of Will and Direction and Imagination. I tried again and again to reach into the wall and beyond, with every facet of my common arts that would normally work. Again, none of them would.

I was left with nothing.

All common magic was blocked by the mere existence of a Folly. What was left? Uncommon magic.

Humans learned a modicum of Order from the Dragons. But the Faeries were creatures of Chaos.

"The opposition to Order is Chaos."

Chaos magic must not be blocked by the Folly, or not completely.

I laughed, and the sound echoed in my cell. I had to find Chaos for myself. I had to discover it or uncover it, based only on what I knew Order was and Chaos was not. 

How could I converse with a stone that ignored my questions? 

I had to do nothing, stop talking, and start listening.

I didn't know how to embrace the nothing. I stared. My mind wandered. I fell asleep. I kept trying too hard and feeling the Folly pushing me back.

And then, by accident, I found the correct frame of mind. There was enough "nothing" within that I could finally start to feel ... something.

My awareness snapped to attention and whatever connection I had made was lost. 

Having had this small success, I tried to relive it, to remake my earlier state of mind. 

The delicate balance between pushing to examine and understand warred with my need to just let the events buffet me and flow over me. 

It went against every instinct I'd needed to listen to all the years prior. 

I retraced my path to the corner of my mind where it seemed the correct door lay. I just needed to open that door.

The correct state of mind wasn't Will, but an absence of Will, a kind of passivity. It wasn't Imagination but an absence of Imagination, a kind of openness. It wasn't Direction, but an absence of Direction, much like the trust I'd been forced to give the Lanstone when being farsending by it to Agali. It was a kind of faith, or a kind of cautious optimism. A willingness to be led.

That particular revelation infuriated me no end. I came back to the four walls of my cell with a sigh of exasperation. Passivity, openness, and faith? It sounded religious. And I seldom entertained a religious thought. 

And then came another revelation. Were religions so powerful in human culture because of some kind of subconscious connection to this other aspect of the Eternal Art? Not the Order of magic itself, but the Chaos of ... possibility?

Living creatures are alive with magic, and this must be true even within a Folly completely devoid of ambient magic. While alive, the mind has certain inherent abilities, and many aspects of the Art are receptive in nature, so why not hearing the distant thoughts from the mind of another?

But in any connection, any reception, there has to also be an emission. To be received in my mind, the Faerie's thoughts had to be sent out, following some kind of circuitous path through the external world, in order to reach me. And if two things, two minds, could connect over distances, then thoughts might pass in either direction.

"And yet they have carried some small part of me through themselves, to you."

The door in my mind opened. I thought the words, "I am here."

A moment later came the reply.

"I can hear you, mage. Well done."

Continue reading with Part 15.