I do not know how long the human body can live without food or water. All I know is I cannot undo the chains holding me to the wall and I am very tired. And dying.
I don’t want to die, but I have no strength left to prevent it, nothing left to call. There is a hole inside me where there was hunger, gnawing emptiness and wind that doesn’t blow in this world. Is this death for other people? I do not know. I only know that I am a magician, and we do not die as others die. I know that and this darkness and the fear of those who refuse to call me kin. Everything else changes but the fear remains. Even if I told them it was I who ended -- but it does not matter.
I am dying, and I have few illusions left the hunger is not stripping away. I still believe they love me, and hope for the future, but I think one can’t live without those illusions; until I die they, at least, will remain. There is a strange kind of peace, if not strength, in having nothing left. They are killing me with their silence, with no food and water, leaving me to starve to death. Perhaps this will reduce the curse a magician makes when they die.
That wouldn’t be a bad thing; I’d rather not curse anyone when I die. Not even those who deserve it; the world has enough curses without me adding more, and far to much hate as things stand. Or perhaps that is only the darkness speaking, giving its own voice to my pain.
It is not their hate that hurts, but the places it reaches inside me that hurt. I hate myself because they hate me. I don’t want to, but it’s hard to not internalize hate, when you’re hated like that. For being a magician, for having magic, for being a legacy of those who destroyed the world so long ago.
And so: fear, hate. I stare into their hearts -- I can do this without power; it’s a trick -- and all I see is their hatred. I want to ask what it does to them, what chaining me destroys in them, but I never have. It would only hurt, especially if it is true. And now I never will.
But there is enough, in my wishing for another life, to press my thoughts into earth and stone. To make the ground remember what men will forget. In another age some magician will hear my voice, know these words. Perhaps a better one, but from here I cannot see it.
They have not let me out of the room in over a year. The last time was because I wanted to see a rainbow, having never had before. I undid chains and the door and walked upstairs, and they screamed and forced me back down. I said I knew no guests were there, but it didn’t matter. Nothing I could have said would, and doing would only make it worse.
It was a very beautiful rainbow, though, and I kept it inside me for months until someone asked for it. She’d never seen one, and I’d never had someone speak in my head, magic to magic, wishing to wishing. She’d heard a lot of stories, so I won’t give her name. She told me magicians can make the dead answer for crimes, so I think - I think she never even told me her real name. Not even for the rainbow.
She took it, though, when I offered it, and she did things. Terrible things, with the sliver of hope it gave her, to give more to her magic than hate.
They’d removed her eyes, so she couldn’t look at them. And done it again, when they grew back. They did that every single year, and I had no response to that. But I knew hate wasn’t enough, for magic. You needed hope, and the other intangibles of the world. She said that, if we had love, we would have changed the world. Enough of us, enough love -- but we are too few, and too far apart, and she leapt into the darkness between thoughts, between wishes, between people. Years, and she only found me.
And all I did was get her killed.
I lie. Even magicians lie. Maybe especially -- we’re lied to do often that the truth has no value. Now I’m just being silly-stupid. But everything is getting slower, fuzzy at the edges. And the hunger has come back, and the magic can’t make it go away.
All things have limits, even magic. Even wishes.
She wanted to make them pay, though I didn’t see the point. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, since it wouldn’t matter. Maybe that’s why I have nothing left, because I have nothing to try for. She thought so; she’d reached me, not I her. I was younger, and I should have been the one to do it. But I wasn’t driven by hate, and there was nothing else to drive me.
The drought was only local; no one else will care, it will only be a brief season, not even a footnote in history. But she made it, with her hate, with her anger, to try and take them with her when she died. Maybe she was stronger than I was, to hate them on their own terms. I don’t know. I just know I can’t do what she did; when I see people, I know them. And you can’t hate something once you understand it, even if they never understand you.
She never saw; I don’t know what her trick was, if she had one. Maybe she lost it with her eyes. I can’t say. I stopped her, though. For the rainbow. Because there hadn’t been any, since her drought, and I wanted to see more before I died. She had anger and hate, and I had nothing. The nothing won.
I don’t know what that says about her or about me. I just know it took too much, and I am dying now and the drought began to fix itself because she is dead. And people found out about her, from the screaming. My family doesn’t want anyone to know I exist, so I die a slow death I cannot escape from.
I wish I had magic enough to make it didn’t matter. I wish I couldn’t understand why they fear us. I wish I could hate them. I - I wish the magic hadn’t taken that away from me with everything else. Why can I hate myself and not them? How does that ... how does it .... work?
The wind is deeper, the darkness inside me greater now. Someone is coming down the stairs, and I can smell food. I can smell food. Torment or blessing, it doesn’t matter. I have gone where tears cannot reach, beyond the places where words have meaning. I am only a voice, putting word into stone, making a final wishing real.
Only this.
And if you, hearing this, can somehow show me a rainbow
just one
even
I might learn happiness
from
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