Chương 12: Unwelcome Power

Solas barked a loud laugh as he finished his tale. He looked at Miriam's horrified face and asked the question which always concluded his stories.

"And what is the lesson here, my dear?" Miriam glowered at the hideous little man.

"Power is never worth sacrificing a life." Solas snorted.

"That is the worst answer yet. No, no, my dear. The real lesson?" He leaned forward to whisper in her ear, breath hot and reeking.

"Never trust Eoin Daithi." Miriam gasped and tried to fling herself away, but Solas thrust more Mind fórsa into the chain around her wrist and she was locked to the floor - shut down by more power than she had ever felt him use. Where she had wormed her way out of Solas's control more and more easily before, now his mind was like a shackle. Solas chuckled again.

"That's the flaw in powerful people. You think everyone weaker than you is a fool. Oh my, yes, you have more power than I do. You're overflowing with it! But Eoin was the even greater fool - or he simply liked to play with you. All you've done by strengthening your fórsa density is to process power for me more efficiently." He brought out his gem, glittering with liquid.

"It's a slow process to be sure, but one Eoin Daithi was too arrogant to see. He thought I wouldn't know what was taking place in my own house! In my own wards!" Miriam couldn't move, but her fórsa was still flowing. With a lurch of her spirit, she summoned up everything she had learned, all that she had built within her, trying to will a vine to rise from the ground and spear the loathsome Wisp through. Nothing happened.

"You think I am so very stupid!" Solas danced around her, his bare feet slapping loudly on the stone floor.

"I see what happens. You take in water nature - I add water negation to the ward. You take in nasty plant nature! I add to the ward! While you're in here neither of your hodgepodge child's powers will serve you - not if I don't allow it!" Miriam could feel tears of frustration, anger and pure loathing run down her face, catching in the whorls of her dryad skin. All that she had done, and the Wisp had beaten her - and beaten Eoin - with barely an effort.

"Now," Solas said.

"We're all done calibrating. All done taking it slow. Now - I take it all!" He pressed the gem to her forehead and Miriam screamed. In the space inside her mind where she gathered and wove her fórsa, she could see the Reel, and the wards that bound her. Along the two rivers of her Water and Life fórsa, there were rusty iron clamps which held the flows down.

She strained as much as she could, ordering the fórsa to obey her, but it stayed locked, unable to free itself from the chains created by the Mind power in Solas's wards. In this space the Reel wasn't a gem at all, but an ooze of greasy power that climbed over every surface, sucking like a leech, subsuming more and more of her fórsa-woven body.

"Eoin was just like Diarmuid. He lacked the patience for perfection," Solas crowed.

"I can't wait to meet him here tonight, sitting where not a whiff of you will remain, to tell him how badly he underestimated me. Me! The first Wisp to attend the Academy! And soon, the first to make it to the Celestial City!" Miriam could feel the ooze of the gem crawling inside her, like it was gumming up her veins. She gasped loudly, sobbing, but no matter what she did there was no breaking Solas's hold. The growing sense of control she'd begun to establish had been a ruse.

When she had broken through the chain's grip it hadn't been because she was so powerful, it was because Solas had allowed it. Made her think she had a chance.

"This is a taste of it," he whispered in her ear.

"You can feel the unfairness. Feel how powerless you are? And I'm only the greatest in the outer ring. You can't fathom the power commanded by those lucky enough to be born in the inner rings! This is what my life has been like - a pale shadow of power blotted out by black clouds waiting just beyond. But not for much longer! A little Wisp, despised by all, striding down the Tír wrapped in the power he's earned!" Desperately writhing in her mindspace, Miriam flailed for anything to grab on to.

The ooze itself was Solas's - it burned away any attempt she made to touch it with a caustic hiss. Perhaps someone with strong enough Mind fórsa could have taken control of it, but that wasn't her. Her two woven fórsa streams were locked down. There was still an unclaimed river of power flowing through her, the third part she had not yet been able to tame.

Too much to handle for either of her other fórsa natures when combined with what she'd already dedicated to, it had been left to flow through her untapped and largely ignored. Isolated from the other rivers, it would have overwhelmed her had she tried this any other time. She could wrap her mind around it now, but to no use. All she could do is hold it, and remain still as the ooze progressed. It had power, but no shape. Motion is life. In stillness there is only death. Stolen novel; please report.

Miriam's eyes flared open. Something familiar, like the dance of water or the song of life. Her spirit was responding to something. It felt like the first time she had coaxed her fórsa into threads, but this time there was no ice skating her fórsa along - it had been forced into stillness. She was no stranger to death. It was a cruel irony that the more life one lived the more death they came to see and she had lived to see a lot of it. Friends, enemies, children, grandchildren, animals, insects, trees.

Even the earth itself could die. Sometimes death was a way to make way for new life, compost and fertilizer - but sometimes it was just stillness. Unearned and unwelcome. Before Miriam's plunge into the well, death had looked like an overdue friend. Holding on to her fórsa, she accepted the stillness. Allowed it to become a part of her, to take up residence in her heart - a void of cold and emptiness. She wanted to force that stillness down her veins to the ooze, but that was simply not how stillness worked.

Instead she invited it in. Looking down, she could see her hand wrapped around Solas's wrist. Her grip unbreakable, her skin cold as ice. His eyes were wild and she could feel the power of his mind bounding through the gem towards her. Whatever this was, it was an unexpected surprise, but he had the power to overcome it. She had only seconds to take whatever action she could. In that moment she locked eyes with this odious little creature and bit out the name of the fórsa that now consumed her." Blight."

Corrosion spread from her fingers, crawling like worms through the Wisp's flesh. His forearm shriveled as necrosis blazed through, the smell of rot and fungus wafting up in the air. Solas clawed at her hand but the same paralysis that had kept her largely immobile worked against him here, as her hand was a vise impossible to pry loose.

He screamed and his Mind fórsa hammered her spirit, the ooze dancing wildly as it struck out wherever it could find purchase, but still the new river of Blight fórsa sat still, as unmoved by the howling as Miriam's willow had been on a windless summer day. Miriam could taste the corruption in the back of her throat - motes of spore dust escaping her lips with every ragged breath.

The icy void seated in her heart didn't pulse - death never moved - but she could feel each one of her heartbeats seem to slowly slide away into nothingness. No one was safe from this blight, she sensed. If she held it too long it would take her flesh just as eagerly as it consumed Solas. His skin was blackened all across his left side now, and blood poured from his eyes and nose.

The ooze sat imperiously in her body still, but it too was fading into stillness as she watched consciousness leave Solas's too-wide eyes. She felt the grip of his mind soften, then finally give way, the shackles holding her fórsa disintegrating. A deep breath roared out of her throat and she collapsed, coughing, over the body of her captor.

Her hands found the closest heavy thing she could - a rusted iron gear the size of her hand - and she slammed it repeatedly against the Wisp's head until she could see nothing that could be recognizably called a face. It might not have even been necessary - his body has the bloated, rotting look of a corpse left for dead a week ago in the bog. Suddenly disgusted, she kicked him across the room, retching. There was still taint in her fórsa.

She was not the expert Eoin was, but even she could tell, like an angry splinter left in a wound. Miriam dove back into her visualization of her fórsa space. Where there was purple ooze left over she washed it away with the calm persistence of her water nature, and it sloughed away into nothingness. She was still left with a feeling of oily residue, like kerosine still too freshly spilled for water to cleanse.

After a few minutes she was satisfied that it was gone, though she might suffer the distaste of its presence for a while to come. Now, what she knew would be the harder part. She saw there the twin rivers of her Water and Life fórsa, flowing strong and clean. Solas's Reel had not been able to corrupt them. The last third of her power, the one she had not been able to wrestle under her control until today, was no longer a flow at all.

It was a lake, calm and bottomless, black - not the black of an oil spill, but the black of… inevitability. Miriam steeled herself. She had taken in this fórsa out of instinct, out of sheer desperation to survive. She did not want it any longer than she needed to to achieve that. She turned her water fórsa towards the lake, but it skittered off the surface, as if the lake were not liquid but ice. She frowned. The water had had no trouble with the Mind fórsa forcibly inserted by Solas's gem.

Perhaps her Life fórsa would be more successful - it was the polar opposite of blight after all. The flow of warm, green energy obeyed her command and pierced the black lake's surface. She smiled as she saw tendrils of tall grasses and vines break through, looking as if it were soaking in the blackness to grow. Miriam's smile faded quickly as those tendrils blackened and fell to rot as she watched, the lake quickly returning to stillness. Miriam opened her eyes, disgusted.

She would just have to wait until she saw Eoin tonight. He would know the right way to purge the Blight from her body. For now she ached for fresh air. Stumbling to her feet, she leaped over the Wisp's body and lurched towards the stairs. She barely noticed as the silver chain around her wrist flecked away into sand at the first tug. Miriam leaped up the stairs by twos, thundered through the main cabin and threw open the door.

In a rare moment for the beach by the Night Shoals, the sun was shining through the clouds. Its warmth hit her like a wave, every part of her body feeling a swelling of energy and life. The air was salty but fresh and for the first time she realized how much Solas's Mind fórsa had been suppressing her. Every plant or insect, every whorl of wind - everything carried life within it, rich in fórsa she could now sense unfettered. And - more than anything else - she felt once again that pull towards the sea.

The freedom she felt, the life stirring all around her, the joy of once again discovering a body not wracked with age and regret - this was one of the best moments of her life. Joy suffused her down to her bones. Staring out at the water, she felt a hunger for this life she hadn't experienced since the first day she'd left home as a youth. But deep in her heart, a cold, still lake served as a chilling counterpoint. Enjoy the warmth of the day all you like. All eventually comes to darkness.