Chương 25: Chapter 276 - The First Crack

Siobhan Month 5, Day 17, Saturday 2: 00 a. m. Siobhan's skin tingled and itched, as if her entire body was a limb that had fallen asleep from having the blood flow cut off for too long. This prickling, stinging feeling traveled inward, through her flesh, bones, and the soft organs inside, until it converged in a spot behind her belly button and expanded outward again. For a short moment, she saw Grandfather's worried face. Two of his fingers were inside her mouth, pressing on her tongue, and she tasted blood.

Chagrined, she tried to unclench her jaw but lost her grasp on her body before she knew if she had succeeded. A flower made of light and sound and sensation bloomed in her mind, a lotus floating in a still pool of darkness. A memory from when Siobhan was still so tiny she could be carried like a small package on Mom's hip rose up, so vivid she almost felt she was a toddler again.

They were on the roof of the house looking up at the night sky, and Mom was telling her a story drawn from interconnecting constellations. The story itself was still lost, but Siobhan clearly heard the last line as Mom looked down to meet Siobhan's gaze, tapping her on the nose with a forefinger.

"There are three rules to magic," Mom said.

"Never cast through your own flesh, never bargain with what you don't understand, and never borrow power you cannot repay." Another flower bloomed, every line of it made of crystalline patterns, as if it were snowflakes all the way down. Siobhan smelled burning sugar and wanted to tell Aimee to take the pot off of the stove, but her body didn't listen to her at all. That sometimes happened when she napped during the day. Except she couldn't feel herself breathing. Grandfather's voice came from somewhere nearby.

"Please, please," he said, gasping and on the edge of tears. This seemed very strange and out of character for him, and Siobhan deduced that she must still be dreaming. Again, light bloomed within her, unfurling complexities as large as the sky and as detailed as the veins on the back of a leaf. It felt like an entire world germinated inside her and then burst into dandelion fluff in the space between one second and the next. Siobhan opened her eyes. Grandfather was using a handkerchief to clean her face.

She was lying on the ground, and they were in his tower workshop, surrounded by bookshelves and workstations. A staircase inclined gently around one of the walls and up to the mezzanine above, which took up half the ceiling and left the other half open. She blinked slowly. Somehow, even that was somewhat painful. The handkerchief came away from her face soaked in a surprising amount of blood, and she realized then that her mouth was filled with the salty, metallic taste of it.

Grandfather's face was bloody, too, though it looked more like someone had taken a piece of coarse sandpaper and scraped away the top two layers of his skin. His eyes were bloodshot, and as he folded the handkerchief, she saw that some of his fingers were twisted and broken in addition to missing skin, and in places seemed to have been eaten away like a corpse left to the ants.

"Are you alright? How do you feel?" he asked. Siobhan had to swallow twice before she could talk.

"Not…good," she croaked.

"I hurt everywhere. What happened?"

"You started to seize."

"I don't know what that means," she admitted. Grandfather took a moment to think, idly wiping his own raw hands on the bloodied fabric.

"The body carries a charge, like millions of incredibly tiny bolts of lightning. These control your movements and your thoughts. Sometimes, something causes the brain's charge to malfunction, and the lightning can expand like a storm spreading over the land, or a fire eating through a forest." Siobhan focused on breathing slowly for a few seconds.

"Is that very bad? Am I…okay?" Grandfather didn't answer her, but his expression was grim.

"Tell me what happened. The Aberrant trapped me on Saturday very early in the morning. What did he do to you?" Siobhan flinched at the thought of it. She struggled to sit up, and Grandfather hurried to help her out of the spell array he'd drawn on the floor and over to one of the more comfortable chairs up in the mezzanine. He brought her water, and she drank it to soothe her raw throat.

After taking a while to collect her thoughts, she told him everything, including about her investigations and her trip to the shaman outside of Edelbrook. He interrupted her retelling several times to feed her some gentler, targeted healing potions, making sure not to overdose her small body after what she'd taken from the shaman's stores. As he listened, the lines around his mouth and eyes deepened bleakly. Finally, he said, "I understand. It explains some of what I found while trying to… heal you.

There seems to be a remnant of both Claudio and… Miakoda, in your mind. This is unnatural and likely what caused your seizure. If left alone, it will surely cause more problems." Siobhan could imagine the kinds of problems that a piece of Claudio in her mind might cause. He would make her into something like one of the villagers. He would kill her. Grandfather stood decisively and walked back down the staircase that ran along the wall.

Siobhan moved to the railing and watched him scour the workshop, take some fancy, glittering paint from a storage cabinet, and begin to draw out another spell array. He moved slowly, and every so often stopped working as a wave of shivers took him over.

"What happened to you?" she asked.

"The Aberrant—Claudio," he clarified.

"Though you should know it was no longer truly alive. They should not be called by their living names." A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Siobhan took a moment to get over the surreality that they'd had two Aberrants in their house. She wasn't sure she agreed with Grandfather on that point. Mom had helped her and communicated with her. Obviously, some part of her care for Siobhan still remained.

And Claudio had been indistinguishable from any other human—even if it was all an act. How well did you have to act before it was basically the real thing?

"It dragged me into the spirit realm, physically. I had no idea such a thing was even possible. The mechanics of it are still unclear to me. But that place eats away at you, and if you're not vigilant and well-prepared, you will begin to lose parts of yourself. It damages the mind in the same way, which is why shamans practice self-determination and stabilization. However, the Aberrant seemed unaffected by this danger, and I found that, as long as I was in contact with it, I too was protected.

And though its eye alone didn't seem to hold that same effect, as a component it managed to do the job of keeping me whole while I tried to think up a solution and searched for a way out. If not for you…" Siobhan smiled.

"I saved you," she announced softly, but with great pride. He paused and looked up at her.

"You did. I saw the portal back here appear, and hurried through as fast as I could."

"And then you brought me back, too. My mind, at least." Grandfather hesitated.

"I did not. In fact, I suspect Claudio did, though perhaps it was not intentional—instead an instinctive reaction to mortal danger, or perhaps a desire to use you as a bargaining chip."

"So can you get Claudio out of me? And that piece of Mom's mirror? It might be at the back of my eye socket." Grandfather returned to drawing his spell array and didn't speak for several minutes. Siobhan was on the verge of falling asleep when he said, "The traces of both Aberrants cannot be excised without killing you."

"But you can do something, right?" she asked softly, trying to keep the tension from her hoarse voice.

"Of course," he replied. And just like that, the world felt a little more settled, a little more right. Siobhan dozed off for a few minutes. When she woke, he was working out some calculations for the spell array on a piece of loose paper.

"Why didn't you tell me about Mom?" she asked. Grandfather didn't flinch, but he did tense with surprise.

"I was acting in your best interest. You've seen what became of her now, correct? A fate worse than death. And Miakoda would not have wanted you to carry that burden of knowledge. Even at the end…" He sighed and shook his head.

"I believe she may have had a break event while trying to search for a replacement familiar from the Plane of Fire. Perhaps she had some vain hope that this could save her."

"What were you doing with her Aberrant?" Siobhan asked.

"That is beyond your pay grade, young whelp." Siobhan felt a short surge of hot ire, but she was too exhausted, and too grateful that Grandfather was here with her, to really be angry with him. She dozed off again, and this time when she woke, much of the floor was covered in precise and elegant lines that sparkled platinum-gold with hints of rainbow.

"Is that celerium paint?" she asked, shocked. A mixture of several highly conductive metals and powdered celerium made a great material for high-powered spell arrays, but a single bucket was probably enough to pay for their entire house.

"Hoarding precious things when they could be put to good use is almost as bad as wasting them," he said, a tacit confirmation.

"Since Claudio's dead now—most of him, anyway—will the villagers be okay?"

"There is no hope of saving any of the villagers," Grandfather replied succinctly. Siobhan swallowed.

"What about Aimee? I haven't seen her for a while. And she was still normal before then." Grandfather tilted his head up to give Siobhan a long, silent look, which spoke volumes. Siobhan ducked her head and rubbed at her throat, which seemed to have grown a large lump of sadness inside. She had hoped, even knowing it was unlikely, that Aimee had run to another village before things got really bad. And that, before escaping, she had never let Claudio touch her.

"While I cannot extract the traces of Aberrant influence from your mind, I believe there is a way to bind them together and seal it all up. This will require the use of all memories involving Claudio. Are there any triggers that seem likely to lead you to remember what has happened, if you were to forget and then encounter them?"

"You're going to make me forget?" Siobhan didn't know how she felt about the idea. Obviously, it should have been a relief to lose the painful, traumatic ordeals she'd been through, but at the same time, it wasn't as if forgetting would change what had happened.

"Everything?" she added. Grandfather gave her a hard, silent stare, and Siobhan immediately conceded.

"My grimoire. I've written everything down within. And this bracelet and jacket. And the latest additions to my newspaper clippings and sky-kraken-riding plans. And…" She frowned.

"And Rory. He wasn't infected. If he remembers and I don't…" Grandfather didn't seem too worried about this, and Siobhan knew it was because he didn't believe Rory was still alive or had ever made it out of the village after Siobhan lost him.

"If we do this, I'll be okay?" she asked. Grandfather hesitated.

"It would be best to remove any Aberrant influence entirely. There is always a chance the seal will fail, but this is the best I can do. I am already pushing so far beyond…" He cleared his throat.

"When you someday really grow strong enough to tame and ride a sky kraken, you can try going beyond the known lands to find someone who can do more than I. Do not go to the Red Guard," he added in a hard, solemn tone.

"You'd better fix the treehouse, too," she told him.

"I'll notice how strange it looks otherwise." He let out a grunt of agreement and continued developing the spell array. It took him a few hours to finish and then check his work, after which he went through a checklist of preparations. He removed the pages from her journal cleanly, as if she had never written them at all, tended to her more obvious wounds, and even dressed her in fresh clothes.

"I will explain what has happened when you wake up again. And ideally, the seal will be perfect enough that there will be no loose threads to pull, even if you wanted to. These are just precautions." When he had settled everything that either of them could think of, he chose a ring with a blue stone and pressed it to her forehead. The spell sealed within gave a single pulse and slapped her into unconsciousness with aggressive finality.

Siobhan woke disoriented, catching short moments of time between long stretches of darkness. After a while, the stretches of consciousness grew longer and closer together, but her thoughts felt decidedly strange. Was this what being drunk felt like? She seemed to be in Grandfather's workshop, lying on the floor with him leaning over her. But why?

A field of lights that looked like stars connected by glowing strings hung in the air in front of her grandfather, and he worked it delicately, plucking and pinching with a look of extreme concentration on his face. His temples were covered with sweat, and remnants of dried blood coated the rim of his nostrils. Light came through the window behind him.

"Grandfather?" she said, then coughed as the word irritated her throat.

"You look horrible," she said.

"Are you okay?" The old man froze, then turned his head to meet her gaze very slowly. His glare held all the warmth of a slow-moving, inexorable glacier.

"Who are you?" Siobhan blinked slowly.

"What?" She tried to sit up, but instead only jerked her torso a little. She was so tired, her mind felt like a fluttering, weak thing with still-wet wings, and she was losing bits of time as it struggled to keep up.

"Are you Claudio?" Grandfather asked. Siobhan felt stupid.

"Who?" Was he playing some sort of game right now?

"Or…Miakoda?" his voice rose with wary hope.

"I'm Siobhan," she said, some alarm beginning to creep in.

"What's wrong with me? Have I injured my brain?" Grandfather sucked in a sharp breath, but his eyes quickly narrowed.

"Siobhan is asleep. I've got her mind pinned down and unfurled before me. So, I ask again. Who are you?"