Chương 21: Chapter 272 - Mirror, Mirror

Siobhan Month 5, Day 16, Friday 10: 30 p. m. The workshop's lead door swung open and someone entered, but Siobhan barely registered it, still breathless and heaving with raspy, broken cries. Claudio crouched down beside her—she had fallen, even though she could not recall doing so—and wiped her nose and upper lip with his thumb. He drew it away bloody. When had her nose started bleeding? Why was Claudio here? He looked at his thumb with morbid fascination, and then licked it clean.

His visible eye was no longer glowing unnaturally. Siobhan stopped screaming, though her throat was so raw that she couldn't help but cough a few times. Why was he here? He looked between Siobhan and the twisted, tortured form of her mother. They both remained silent and still for a moment. Siobhan had the vague thought that perhaps she should try to run away from him, but Claudio showed no overt signs of aggression. He never had.

"My mom is an Aberrant," Siobhan whispered with just the hint of a question, hoping against all reason, evidence, and logic that he would refute her. That night before her mother's death, when Siobhan had woken up…had the thing that jerked her out of sleep been Mom's Will breaking? Claudio gave her a very small, almost sad smile, though no emotion was reflected in his eye.

"Yes." He reached out and tugged on her ragged, debris-covered braid.

"This is why I like you." Siobhan ripped her braid away from him. Claudio smiled again, this time wider, rubbing his thumb and fingers together absentmindedly.

"I'm not sure if it's the same liking that humans do, or that the person who wore this body and carried this name used to, but I think it might be similar. You're such an entertaining little thing, too clever for your own good…but not quite clever enough." Siobhan was too exhausted to be afraid and felt almost too broken to care.

"If you're not human, what are you?"

"You wish to know my history? It's rather short." That wasn't what she had asked, but he seemed rather delighted, so she stayed silent. He tilted his head toward the ceiling and slowly stood up.

"I awoke surrounded by dead bodies. I had no idea where I was or what had come before, except for one memory." Claudio's face went lax with rapture, and his arms spread wide, as if accepting some heavenly blessing.

"I did not know what I was, but I had an instinct, an urge so strong it felt like a life's purpose. I knew how to call upon magic directly, to draw from wells of power beyond the ken of mortal man, to sing the song of the void and the veil, to build gardens of thought and rearrange the heart." He was mad. As if he could sense her thoughts, Claudio looked down at her.

"One might think this amazing, omnipotent, supreme, but even beyond that, I was special. For I had a memory that should not have remained. For I could think and reason. For I was not cursed to be ever-unchanging, twisted around myself and bound in the shape of a single moment." Siobhan looked back at the mirror, shuddering at the pain on Mom's frozen face. She wasn't stupid, and could put together such obvious hints. Claudio was an Aberrant, but some kind of deviant one that could pass as human.

Maybe a Nightmare-type.

"How long?" she asked.

"From the beginning?" He crouched down, leaned close, and whispered.

"From the beginning," he confirmed, as if it were some sort of exciting secret between the two of them. But what about Mom? Siobhan could only hope that her expression of agony was only a sign of what she experienced at the moment she broke, and that Mom was dead now, and no longer being tortured—that this strange frame to elsewhere was just an artistic corpse. But Siobhan had received those messages. And unless they had been sent by someone else, then wasn't some part of Mom still lucid?

Could Claudio have known all of those private things about Siobhan? Perhaps. Aberrant magic could do almost anything, after all. Siobhan turned her face back up to Claudio.

"So what can you do?" He stood and moved a few steps away, bending over to tear some of the warmly pulsing tendrils from the lines of a Circle surrounding the mirror. He tossed them aside, and they seemed to shudder like something alive and injured.

"The person I was before considered himself the preeminent expert in the known lands at spirit realm stabilization and anchoring—both of his own identity and of the spirit realm materials he used to build dreams." Claudio shot her a tiny grin, raising his eyebrows.

"Ironically, almost as if he was always meant to become me, he really did focus all of his passion and efforts into this one thing, disdaining to bend his Will to anything that did not fascinate him. He believed focus would make him great. And at this specific thing, he believed he was better even than Myrddin." Claudio's tone took on some nostalgia, with a hint of regret.

"His dreams could change people's lives, change people's minds, change people's selves. They were realer than real, a symphony exquisite and perfect in every detail, but never rigid or stale."" He was the Builder of Dreams," Siobhan said, half probingly, half vindictively.

"I woke with one memory," Claudio said, changing the topic without acknowledging her.

"It is short. Time in the spirit realm can be hard to define, but I would guess less than thirty seconds. In it, I walked as a being of thought along a path no other mortal's foot had ever touched, leading a group of explorers who only wanted to find treasure."

"Treasure?" Siobhan asked, remembering how Grandfather had dryly joked about that with her.

"The echo of treasure might be a more apt description," Claudio said.

"They thought he could find it, and he did. But it was nothing like what he had expected, even in his wildest dreams." His voice grew fervent.

"The one who called himself Claudio before I took the name stood in the presence of something greater, the first bit of real magic he had ever seen." Claudio turned to sneer at Siobhan.

"Because, let me tell you, everything you mortals do, from fledgling Apprentice to Archmage, is no better than a magician's party tricks." He turned and continued tearing the spreading tendrils away from the outer edge of the spell array.

"And then his Will broke, and he died. I awoke in his place." Claudio walked back to Siobhan and crouched down in front of her. He grabbed her by the face, hands on both cheeks, and raised her face to meet his single-eyed gaze. The patch covering the other eye seemed even more crusted than before, and perhaps a little damp.

"My predecessor tracked down The One Who Travels the Paths Beyond." She could hear the gravity of the words, that they were a title, and that they held power. Her palms and ears both itched horribly, and she clenched her fists, digging her short nails into her palms in defiance.

"He was a Titan, and we found the echo of his gravesite. He was so large…larger than my predecessor's mind could comprehend. Even from a distance, the Titan seemed to blot out the sky, to be the sky. I found his name after I woke. Hyperiodax," Claudio whispered reverently.

"He knelt in an almost fetal position, but his mouth, throat, and abdomen and had been torn open violently, as if something had forced its way out from the inside. Strewn about him were limbs and flesh, obviously gnawed and devoured, covered in blood and spittle and juices—the corpses of two other, smaller Titans. They were light and dark. The Shining One and The Bearer of Night." Claudio shuddered, drawing his face closer to hers. His eye was open wide but not glowing. Siobhan did not look away.

"Their pieces were scattered and mixed together, but their remains were fresh, almost alive still, while Hyperiodax's corpse was eroded, withered, and desiccated. Red veins grew where his blood had spilled. His skin was like cloth made of old spiderweb and twigs, with only a few patches that couldn't be seen right through. And his bones were dry and riddled with cracks. Hyperiodax's power was also his curse, for he was forced to always wander, and his hunger was inextinguishable.

But he was so great that even being at the far edges of his presence, perceiving him, was enough to break a mortal man's Will. In desperation, my predecessor tried to force the other members of the spirit realm expedition to act as anchors. It was not enough. He tried to create barriers and shields and mirrors of thought, but they crumbled. And so, on the edge of shattering, Claudio reached out to Hyperiodax himself, one last anchor. He still broke." If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen.

Report the violation. Siobhan remembered some of the crazed words from one of the curse-touched villagers.

"The All, the Undiminished, the Empyrean?" she whispered.

"The villagers are building themselves in his image? Absorb the energy, eat the being, digest the self-ness?" Claudio released her face with a little shove, rested his elbows on his knees while cupping his own cheeks, and laughed.

"Siobhan Naught, you keep managing to surprise me! Truly, you're so interesting. I wonder what kind of Aberrant you would make." The smile fell from his face.

"Aren't you afraid?" Siobhan knew she was, or at least that she should be, but she couldn't quite feel it. She sneered at him.

"Fear… So ephemeral, so hard to define. Does it really matter, in the end?" It was a perversion of one of the first things he had said to her. There had been so many hints at his strangeness, but she'd been blind to them. Claudio tilted his head to the side, and she wasn't sure whether he'd understood the reference, but he stood and returned to clearing the outer edge of the spell array around Mom's frame.

"When I woke, all memories except the one were gone, but a significant amount of basic knowledge remained intact. I was entirely lucid, and I had abilities that did not match what I knew of other Aberrants.

"I searched through the belongings of the corpses around me and read the notes and journals of the entire expedition to understand what had come before. I kept a—" He shook his head.

"The original Claudio kept a journal, which I found very useful. I was there three days, until the bodies began to stink and the urge to enact magic became too great. I looted the corpses and began a very long trek back to a home I had never seen. But I couldn't forget my lone memory of what had come before, including the original Claudio's thoughts at that time." Claudio had finished tearing up the red growth, but while he had been working, the view beyond the frame had been changing.

Siobhan hadn't noticed at first, because she'd been trying not to let her attention get sucked into it again. But when some of the red growth stretching out along the floor started to smolder, she noticed. The frame showed somewhere in the Plane of Fire. It was awash with flickering light of various colors and heat so intense that the air rippled constantly. In the distance, she saw what seemed to be elementals of some sort, playing with each other around a pool of something molten.

A flame sprang to life in the air behind Claudio, floating on nothing and sustaining itself without fuel. Siobhan tried not to stare too openly, lest he notice. Unfortunately, Claudio wasn't so oblivious as to miss the subtle crackling of quickly dehydrating tendrils or the smell of smoke that followed. He frowned, gave a peeved "tch!" and moved to the frame.

"Always struggling and making things difficult," he muttered, looking up at Mom's face. On the other side, some of the elementals seemed to have noticed the frame, which for some reason surprised Siobhan. They flickered and flowed toward the frame with sudden and enthusiastic curiosity. He turned, strode to Siobhan's side, and yanked her up by her wrist, dragging her forward. She resisted, but he had the size and strength of an adult man; she stood no chance.

From near the base of the frame, he picked up a small athame that Siobhan hadn't noticed earlier and used it to press a deep cut into the fleshy part near the ball of her thumb. She struggled harder and managed to rip herself away, but he'd already collected a small handful of blood.

Seemingly unconcerned with her escape, he crouched down and began to use her blood to refresh one of the larger glyphs within the Circle—the only glyph that was written in blood rather than carved into the stone or filled in with metal. He layered the blood several times as the power running through the spell array heated the stone and evaporated the water out of the liquid.

Such blatant blood magic might have at least surprised Siobhan at one point, but now she couldn't even be bothered to care, beyond the hope that it wouldn't harm her.

"I cannot perform mortal spells myself, but as long as I do not allow this one to run completely dry, I can still use it. After all, it is only an extremely complicated artifact. Forgive the use of your blood. I have none, myself. I'm unsure what I'm made of, on the inside, but it doesn't seem to be organs." He moved to the side of the room and picked up a few beast cores from a shelf attached to the wall, which he added to one of the component Circles where the current beast cores were growing dim.

"This Aberrant is a window to elsewhere—most notably the five Elemental Planes—but it can also be used to view the mundane plane, and with guidance from someone who is already familiar, the spirit realm." He crouched down and pressed his hand to the edge of the blood glyph with a frown of concentration. The scene beyond the frame began to shift again.

"Look away," he warned.

"I wouldn't want you to die from seeing what you shouldn't. What a waste that would be." Siobhan complied, but she could feel the starving suction of it even through her peripheral vision. It had to be Hyperiodax on the other end, though she did not dare to confirm that guess.

"As you saw, anywhere the frame looks on long enough begins to leak back through, just as some of this side begins to supplant what you see there. Equalization. We have protections in place to stop it from doing this, as well as to keep it from enthralling the viewer, but it is fickle and curious for new sights, and it keeps finding ways around our control. One might even think she still has a mind of her own…" He smiled ironically, and Siobhan almost choked on the cruelty of it.

There was no malice in his expression, but he also held not a single drop of compassion or empathy. Again, he paused and seemed to change topics randomly.

"The ability of an Aberrant—often called its anomalous effect—is always based somehow on the magic it was casting when it broke, with some variation and nuance. But there should only be one ability, even if it is versatile or has several facets. I cannot actually build gardens of hope and dream-stuff like my predecessor, but I am still capable of creating cruder concept spaces within the spirit realm.

I can still connect people to the spirit realm with a binding of power—tethering them to it with an intense and unnatural directness. My ability here is a cudgel where my predecessor wielded a scalpel, but I have learned that if the emotions are strong enough, and positive enough, people are just as happy. For those who did not experience my predecessor's magic, they cannot seem to tell the difference.

This is an unusual and versatile bit of magic, and incredibly valuable in the hands of an Aberrant lucid enough to direct it, but it still conceptually fits together." Claudio moved to sit in front of Siobhan again, crossing his legs and leaving his back facing Mom's frame.

"The mental barrier in dreams is quite porous, which allows me to create this binding. I think of it like a tether, from myself to them, and from them to the place I choose. The longer someone is bound to a place or construct in the spirit realm, the more their mental barrier wears thin, and the other end of the tether will begin to affect them… viscerally.

They act as both beacons and anchors for me, and I have found that, through very precise guidance, some of the nature—the idea —of the place they are tethered to flows back through them, to me. In this way, I can create new concepts for myself. Do you understand what that means?" Siobhan had no real understanding of the topic, but he had seeded enough hints into his rambling monologue for her to guess.

"You're able to use more than your one, single anomalous effect?" He clapped.

"Right! The dream-constructs—I will not call them gardens—may be filled with happiness, or triumph, or nostalgia, but at the back, I have laid a path leading elsewhere, which the dreamer cannot help but walk. And when they do…" He winked at her and continued, "Though the ability to induce trust, happiness, or peace seemingly by nature also comes in astonishingly handy." He laughed, and for a moment, seemed so much like a real person that Siobhan could hardly comprehend what he really was.

"I've spent a lot of energy manifesting those innocuous emotions through my dreamers. It's almost as good as an undetectable compulsion. Tell the truth. You didn't even suspect me, did you?"

"I did," she insisted with vehemence that surprised even her.

"But some of the people you cast magic on seemed totally fine, and some of the people who showed symptoms never had anything to do with you. And you even said you didn't give people nightmares!" He chuckled.

"I never said that. Only that I found value in the happy dreams, too. And as for the flawed results of your little investigation… I control my dreams." He shrugged artlessly.

"Those rather gruesome side effects you've seen on the villagers come from walking the path I created without protection. Some ideas are too grand for mortal flesh. Fill someone too fast, and they die. Too slow, and I'd be caught before I accomplish anything. But if, instead of drawing them down the path, I leave someone in the artificial dream-space, which I built to protect them against erosion and degradation, the progression will be much slowed.

Instead, they will be imbued with tiny bits of an artificially created concept.

"As for those unfortunate souls who you thought I never touched, the answer is simple. I forced them. I went to their homes in the night, leaving no trace upon this mortal realm. By morning, I controlled them.

"Because, you see, the abilities I have explained to you are not everything. I have one more. I am able to walk within the spirit realm using my physical form—to pass through the veil—and return through it somewhere entirely different, having traveled for as long as I wish. My body, this physical form, can walk where only beings of thought have ever trodden before and come back again."

"That's how you killed Edelbrook's shaman," she whispered. That was why the man's wards had still been set. Claudio had crawled out of the spirit realm directly into the shaman's house. Claudio's eyes widened, and he tilted his head to the side.

"You know about that? Did someone find the body? Did you find it? Is that where you went, trekking through the woods for so long?" He sounded strangely delighted. She ignored the question.

"Why not infect him? Why did he have to die?"

"He was too insightful, too much of a potential threat. I would have made him one of my own, but my abilities take time to replenish their power, and he was too stubborn and too experienced. Not as much as Raaz, of course, but I couldn't waste the energy. I was forced to handle things rather vulgarly, with my hands." Claudio pouted, looking down at his palms.

"I got blisters trying to bury that disgusting corpse in the very limited amount of time before Raaz got suspicious of my absence."

"But more importantly, this ability to walk through the spirit realm does not quite fit with the others, you see? At the moment my predecessor broke, he had tethered himself not only to his companions, but to Hyperiodax's remains." Claudio's eye burned with fervor.

"I gained it from the thought-corpse of a Titan."