This choice: Experiment with swapping essentia • Go Back...Chapter #58Where No Magician Has Gone Before by: Seuzz   "It can't be that simple," Rick says. "You're born with your essentia, it's all blended together--"
"You're born with your face, too," you retort, "and I can change that around."
"Like you haven't got enough projects to keep you busy," he grunts.
"Then I should get started."
* * * * *
Back in the Big House, hide yourself away in Grandmother's work study with the Libra. You start by searching out the next spell. In all the recent excitement, you've not had the time or opportunity to see what lies beyond the spell that alters distant victims' memories.
It's a shock: The next page is blank, but refuses to turn.
You frown. The Libra is a thick book, and it looks like you're only about ten percent of the way through it. It must be another test. The rest of the book can't be empty.
You try every trick Grandmother knows about invisible writing, but that turns up nothing.
Giving it up as a puzzle for later, you turn to the other projects: Reconstructing the sigils from The Still, and figuring out a sigil for modifying essentia. Both projects involve breaking earlier sigils down into more basic components and studying how they are each built. Your intuitions prove mostly on the mark.
There are four basic sigils: one each for dealing with substantia, essentia, anima, and imago. You've also been able to isolate sigils that copy and sigils that extract these metaphysical elements, and from The Still you isolate sigils that can put them back together again.
You then turn to the spells that modify the physical and mental properties of real people. These are more complex. For a start, they do not contain sigils for imago (for modifying the body) or for anima (for modifying memories and other mental states); rather, they contain a kind of placeholder into which imago and anima can be inserted as variables. They also contain sigils that allow the spell to interface with the "voodoo doll" that acts as a temporary receptacle for the imago and anima, and sigils that force the changes onto distant victims. But after many hours of hard work--and lots of chicken-scratching on waste paper--you isolate the "modify" sigil itself.
After that you take a break for a quick meal and a head-clearing walk around the town. Joe sees you leaving the house, and falls in beside you. "You look exhausted," he says.
"It's been a tough few days," you admit. "But I'm making headway."
"Rosalie doesn't look like she's built for that kind effort," he says with kind diplomacy. "She's a girl made for running through fields of wildflowers in the springtime."
"With a pretty boy running toward her from the other side?" you retort with mild asperity.
"It's hard for me not to flirt," he says. "You know me."
"Inside and out. There aren't any Stellae your age, are there?"
"There's Frank."
"I mean girls."
"No, there aren't." He gives you a sidelong look. "It makes me wonder about might-have-beens."
"And could-be-stills? You want Rosalie back. I think I do too. It's no fun being locked up with Grandmother's head." You frown at the girl in the white shift on the other side of the street, who is staring openly at you. "Go home, Sally!" you shout at her. With glassy eyes the twelve-year-old girl lurches away. "Sarah's been spying on me. The whole town's been spying on me."
"It's just your nerves."
"It's the truth. Well, I spy on them." You shudder. "I want out of this place."
"Strike out on our own? We were going to set up our own little gang. We could still. And between us, and with Rosalie, we've got eight of the ten planets represented."
You run through the names and associated ousiarchs in your mind, and see that he's right: Arbol and Viritrilbia (Joe); Sulva (you and Rosalie); Malacandra (Frank and Rick); Glundandra (Rosalie); Lurga (Frank); Eldibria (Rick); and Kenandandra (you). You're only missing Perelandra and Catilindria. "You mean we could be the 'evil Stellae'?"
"Do we have to be evil?"
You look over at Joe; doubt sits heavily on his face. "You're still his twin in a lot of ways, aren't you?"
He grunts. "Modified a little, for having you inside me for a few weeks."
"What would it be like if I put myself back inside you?"
"Another anima band?"
"A copy of my anima."
"You can't just go spreading that stuff around," he warns. "It's like essentia, you've only got so much of it."
"Enough for half a dozen people, though. Less than that." You do a fast calculation. "If we got all ten ousiarchs, and if I can figure out a way of separating them out and recombining them, we could get all ten into five people, myself included."
"I guess. And you'd be jumping in and out of four of them."
"I guess," you echo. You and Joe hold each other's eyes, and you know you're sharing the thought--insofar as a golem is capable of having a thought of its own.
You'd like to get inside Joe Durras, and Frank Durras, and the others, and exercise the powers that you intend to restore to them.
You sigh deeply, and break away first. The cold air has been refreshing, but it hasn't been enough. "Let's go back to the house. But then I'm going to put you to work."
* * * * *
And so, back inside the cramped study, you wedge yourself into a corner, bring up the control sigil, and plunge into the golem of Joe Durras. Your lips twitch at the sight (again) of Will Prescott in a dress, then turn to bend over the notes you'd drawn up earlier.
It's fortunate that you'd decided to look at things with Joe's brain, for with it you're able to spot some mistakes you'd made. The first is with the "copy" sigils: You see now that the terms don't allow it to work on essentia or substantia. Other corrections are more advantageous, for they allow you to simplify some of the designs and lock them into each other. After a few hours, with Joe's fluid draftsmanship, you're able to sketch out an extremely complicated sigil that can substitute for The Still: With it, you'll be able to extract and recombine the four metaphysical elements that make up people.
As for modifying them: Again, thanks to Joe's attention to detail, you are able to construct a sigil that, in theory, can modify essentia. "In theory," you mutter to yourself as a caution. Essentia isn't like imago or anima; it is radically more simple, which paradoxically will make it more difficult to deal with. You know what it looks like when you open up imago and anima, and they are a complex of simple elements that can be tweaked, internally and in relation to each other. But essentia?
* * * * *
After the dinner time table has been set, you banish the other members of the household and lock the doors so it is only you and Rick and Joe and Frank around the table. You keep your voices low against possible eavesdroppers as you talk.
"So it looks like it's doable," Joe says, speaking on your behalf as you bite off hunks of fried chicken. "At the very least, we can take people apart and put them together again in any combination we want. We might even be able to split our essentia and put it together into new combinations. And we can do all of it without that thing in the basement."
"Which means we don't have to hang out in Cuthbert anymore," you say.
"So what are you thinking of doing," Frank asks.
You and Joe and Rick exchange glances. "If it all works, then there aren't really any limits. Except for-- Well, except for the Stellae. If we don't want to mess with them."
"What do you mean?"
"We could put you and Joe back together again, but with my anima inside you. Fix up Rick the same way. Revive Rosalie." You take a deep breath. "Try to take over the Stellae from the inside."
No one looks very happy at that.
"Or we set up our own gang. What Joe and Frank were talking about down in Saratoga Falls. If we got hold of some Perelandran and Catilindrian essentia we'd have a complete set of ousiarchs, shared among the five of us."
"You also have to think about how to exit Cuthbert," Rick says. "If we go out on our own, we'll have to disappear. Otherwise the Stellae will be after us."
"What's that have to do with exiting Cuthbert?" Joe asks.
"Simplest way to disappear is to stage a catastrophe. Blow up the town, pretend we all went up with it."
Everyone looks at everyone else. You can see it in their expressions, and feel it in your own.
Everyone likes the idea of wiping Cuthbert from the map.
"To do that," Rick continues, "we should get Miko out here. A Catalindrian like her in this place? It's a Nagasaki waiting to happen."
"And she'd provide Catalindria for us," Joe says, turning to you.
"We should make sure about being able to split essentia first," you say.  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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