Chương 145: Chapter 142. Metamorph

"So," Adom said.

"Why exactly are you on fire?"

"Oh!" Bennu's voice came from inside the brightness, delighted to be asked.

"I thought of something to turn into. And then it just… it just happened." He paused for a bit.

"Is that not how it works for everyone?"

"No," Adom said.

"That is not how it works for anyone."

"Hm. Then perhaps it's a phoenix thing." The fire pulsed brighter as he said it, climbing the way a held breath does, and Adom took a step back without quite meaning to. It wasn't the heat — there still wasn't any heat to speak of, which was its own small wrongness — it was the shape of the thing. He'd spent two lifetimes learning how mana behaved when you asked it to do work. There were rules. Mana cost something, went somewhere, and left a residue you could read like a footprint in snow. But this left nothing.

And Adom had read about this once, a long time ago, in the more obscure parts of Xerkes's library. The primordials — dragons, phoenixes, the old true things — hadn't used magic. Not the way mages did, reaching for it, shaping it, paying for it. They had simply been made of it, back when the world was younger and the line between a creature and the power it carried hadn't been drawn yet. They didn't weave magic, instead, they were magic themselves.

If a human mage moved water, a primordial was the river deciding to stand up and walk. He'd thought it was a poetic exaggeration when he read it, because mages liked their poetry, but watching the fire now, he wasn't so sure. The fire suddenly grew fiercer and climbed past the point where Adom could pick Bennu out of it at all, just fire, bright enough now that the dryads' clearing threw long moving shadows back into the trees.

But the grass underneath stayed green, and the little white flowers didn't so much as curl. A few more seconds passed, then it went out all at once, like a door closing, and the after-image swam green across Adom's vision for a moment before it cleared and he could see what was standing in the grass where the fire had been.

"Is that…" There was a little boy where Bennu had been. He had dark hair, longer than Adom kept his own, falling into a pair of irises that glowed like sunfire and then slowly dimmed, the glow draining out of them until they settled into a plain, natural amber. Caramel-like skin, and a plain shirt and trousers that Adom recognized with a strange lurch, because he'd worn the same, or something near enough, at this very moment. The boy stood in the soft light blinking up at him, looking small and entirely ordinary.

He looked about ten years old. He also looked like Adom, which, upon further investigation, was quite the understatement.

"You turned into me," Adom said. Bennu looked up at him. Then down at his own hands, turning them over, flexing the fingers as though he wasn't sure they'd answer. He patted his own chest once. Pushed a strand of the too-long hair out of his face, considered it, then looked back up. His face suddenly fell.

"It's not right," he said, and his voice had changed too; it was younger, still musical underneath, but smaller now, fitted to the body.

"I tried to make it exactly you. I had it the whole time I was burning, every part of it, the way you look and the way you stand and… everything." He looked down at himself again, and his shoulders dropped.

"But I'm short." Adom was at a loss for words.

"I wanted to be the same as you," Bennu went on, scuffing one bare foot in the grass.

"And I'm small and my eyes came out wrong and I don't think I got the nose, and—""... Hey," Adom finally said. It was Daphne who answered properly, before he could find the rest of it. She came forward out of the half-light of the tree, and crouched down to the boy's new height.

"Little one," she said.

"You opened your eyes less than a day ago, and you've already worn fire and feather and flesh between then and now. Do you know how long most things take to learn even one shape?" Bennu shook his head.

"Longer than you've been alive. Far longer." Her water-blue eyes crinkled.

"You reached for the hardest thing there is, and you came back carrying most of him on your very first try. The short will sort itself. The eyes will sort themselves. You'll wear a hundred shapes before you're grown, and each one a little truer than the last." Behind her, Clio was nodding along, and Thalia had started to hum again while Bennu looked up at the three of them, then back at Adom.

"... Is it good?" he asked. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Adom crouched down too, so they were eye to eye.

"It's very good," he said, and meant it.

"You got more of it than you think. The hair's wrong, and you're a head too short, and the eyes gave you away in a heartbeat." He reached out and ruffled the too-long hair, exactly the way he did to Ada.

"But yeah. That's me. Younger, and… frankly better looking, which I'm choosing not to think about too hard." Bennu's whole face changed — the disappointment burning off all at once — and he beamed up at Adom.

"I'll get better," Bennu announced, with total confidence now.

"Daphne says so. I'll be exactly your height. Maybe taller."

"Let's not get carried away."" Taller," Bennu repeated, delighted with the treason of it when suddenly, a branch cracked somewhere behind them. They all turned at once and there, a little way down the row with a basket on one hip, stood Cyrel.

"Adom?" The basket lowered a fraction.

"When did you get back?" He stood, brushing the grass off his knee.

"Oh. Hey. Hello, Cyrel." He cleared his throat.

"Yesterday. Yesterday morning." But she'd already stopped listening. Her eyes had gone to the small dark-haired boy in the grass, and stayed there. She set the basket down without quite looking at it.

"Hello!" Bennu said, beaming up at her.

"I'm Bennu. I hatched yesterday." Cyrel's gaze slowly came up to Adom then.

"... The egg?"

"The egg," Adom confirmed.

"Cyrel, this is Bennu. Bennu, Cyrel. She's a friend. She's the one Kianthras belongs to."

"Kianthras!" Bennu lit up.

"We met him on the way!" Cyrel crossed the last of the distance and crouched in front of the boy, bringing herself level with him. For a moment she just stared at the smiling Bennu, then she smiled back.

"I see you made yourself look like him," she said.

"You did it well."

"Thank you!" Bennu said, while stepping in close to her, reaching up to take her hand, turning it over in both of his. Then he went still.

"I knew it was strange, you're not human, are you?"

"No," Cyrel said.

"I'm not." Bennu's head came up, all his attention on her now.

"What are you, then? I haven't seen anything like you yet. There was Adom, and the dryads, and Mr. Biggins, and the cats, but not you. You're something else."

"I'm what people here call a demon," Cyrel said.

"A demon." Bennu's eyes had gone wide and bright.

"What's a demon? Are there a lot of you? Do you all look like this, or do you each look different the way humans do? Can you do the fire? I can do the fire." Cyrel laughed.

"Some of us look like this. Most don't. We're not made of fire like you phoenixes, but something else. And no, there aren't a lot of us." Adom watched as Bennu kept asking her questions. He'd known Cyrel for years now, since the Fae Realm, and in all that time the two of them had settled into something easy. She'd come back to Arkhos with him, more or less adopted the farm and Mary's cart, and made herself useful. People liked her, though she didn't entirely notice, and wouldn't have changed anything if she had.

The trouble was that Adom had never once been able to predict her. Most people ran on a current he could follow, the small social machinery that told you what someone would do a half-second before they did it. Cyrel didn't run on it. She'd grown up among fae and elementals, with humans coming late and as strangers, and it showed; not in anything she lacked, but in the way she'd say the truest possible thing at the least expected moment and then watch him deal with it.

Which was, in fact, the heart of the recent problem. Two months ago, with no warning and in roughly the tone most people used to comment on the mundane, she had told Adom she liked him. It had taken him completely by surprise, which she'd seemed to find reasonable, and they had talked it through and agreed, sensibly, to stay friends. Adom had been single the entire first time around too.

There'd been the usual unremarkable handful here and there, the kind every adult accumulated and then mostly declined to think about again, but nothing that had ever made him reorganize his days. He'd never gotten around to it, and then he'd gotten old, and then he'd died, and now here he was at nineteen with sixty-odd years of not getting around to it sitting behind his eyes. The math didn't help.

Everyone Adom's apparent age was, to him, alarmingly young and the rare exception came with the small problem that he could not explain to anyone why a teenager spoke like a man who'd buried most of the people he'd ever known. Underneath all of it was the matter of the end of the world, which had a way of crowding out the gentler hobbies. It was difficult to give a courtship the attention it deserved while also quietly trying to prevent the extinction of most life in the world.

Sam had a theory that Adom was coping with something and inventing excellent reasons not to look at it. He couldn't say what the something was, but maintained that it was there, and that all the reasons were a wall in front of it. Which, coming from Sam — who still could not speak to a woman he fancied without either stuttering himself senseless or falling silent so completely they began to worry — Adom felt was rather rich.

He let that thought go away, and was halfway back into the easy quiet of the orchard when something moved in the branches above him: a rustle, then a sound that took him a second to place as his own name." Adom Sylla." Adom looked up. A crow sat on a low branch, regarding him with one black eye and then the other. It wasn't a wild one either, but a Xerkes crow.

"Oh," he said.

"Hello there. Got something for me?" The crow shifted its weight, and from its beak let drop a folded letter, sealed." For Adom Sylla," it said, and Adom plucked the letter out of the air before it had fallen a foot. The crow, its one task done, opened its wings and was gone through the leaves.

"What was that?" Bennu had abandoned Cyrel mid-question and was staring up at the spot where the bird had been.

"A crow," Adom said, turning the letter over to break the seal. Bennu drew breath for the obvious follow-up, but Adom got there first.

"They keep my mana signature on file at the academy. It means a crow can find me anywhere on Arkhos, doesn't matter where I am, the bird just knows. It's how they send messages when you're not where they can reach you."" Anywhere," Bennu repeated, deeply impressed. Adom let him have it while he unfolded the page, and read it once. It was short, and brisk, and very much in the academy's house style: congratulations, formalities, a date. His appointment would begin the following week.

He was to report beforehand to settle his materials, confirm his roster, and collect the relevant statutes pertaining to the conduct of teaching staff, which someone had thoughtfully underlined. Adom stared at the page a moment longer, with everything ongoing, he'd almost forgotten he was going to be teaching at Xerkes now.