The Promise

Charlie and Jay are mending fences – though I’m not sure Jay grasps that there are any to be mended – so I use the time to walk the town of Osterville. Less than three hundred people call it home, and the old paper mills were closed and shuttered decades ago. No one comes here to buy a home, no one can afford to just leave and start over. People say they can, but the past clings like regrets, the air whispers of promises waiting their fulfilment and music stations and TV shows blaze out of windows against the light as much as the dark.

A town too small for a magician. A town in need of one.

I walk, the magic sending out whispers of its own. Easing pains, shifting griefs, lessening the load of living. For a time, for a short while. Breathing space in which people can breathe again. I move, and the world changes with each movement. Small things, in small ways. I gather silence and shadows about me so no one sees me, walk the town twice with slow steps. I could do more.

I have done far more in my time. Shifted time and space, burned new patterns into the old skin of the world. But each time costs, and costs again, and I pay and I pay until some days – not today, but some – it feels that all I am is a payment. Cashing cheques until the bills come due. And if I were to stop, to bind myself to one place – I don’t know when another would wander. How far they’d go. How long they would last in their wandering. So I hold the burden, and I walk, and I touch the town in all the small ways I dare to.

Magicians help, but it never feels like enough. The world pushes against magic, reality resists the weight of dreams. We do what we can, tell ourselves it is what we must. We don’t dare to be more, for fear of the bill that would come to. For the price that others would pay. I fix two cars, continue to walk. Some days I want to stop. Just be still, taking root like a tree, a giving and a receiving. Finding balance in a world that offers none, that insists I be a balance for others.

It’s been so long since I’ve been just me, and not the magician as well. But I have promises to keep, and oaths to hold onto. I can’t get go of the magic, I can’t cling onto it too tight. So I walk a third time, easing more pains on my way back to the RV. Charlie and Jay are having a tickle-war, and part of me wants to join. To relax. But I can’t let my guard down.

Not around Jay.

Not knowing what I know.

Because I made a promise, and I intend to keep it.

Jay Privileges

“I’d strangle him if I thought he’d notice,” I mutter, but not so low that the wandering magician doesn’t hear me. “Where is Jay, anyway?”

“Finding a cold that lost its host. If left alone, it might mutate.”

I stare at the magician. “The word ‘might’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that, isn’t it?”

He smiles at that and sips his coffee across the table. The coffee shop isn’t crowded, but no one is paying us attention. Possibly my being a god-eater, or a ward on his part. Or pure chance, for all I know. “I thought you might need to talk. You’ve been pressing the kid a bit hard the last two days.”

“Right. You know what white privilege is?”

“I’m a magician. We know all about privilege,” he says mildly.

I count to ten. “You know what I mean.”

“I do, Charlie. But I’m not sure Jay can.”

“Pardon me?”

“Jay senses bindings, the ways in which things are connected together, how bindings flow between people and groups. And he does this through time as well as space. Tell him a parent is hurting a child, and he’ll sense the bindings backwards and forwards, sideways and across – how the parent was hurt, how their child might hurt others. Ways the bindings shift and flow, how other bindings touch and mutate each other. He had a kind of hindsight and foresight we simply can’t have.” He has another sip of his coffee. “Jay has enough trouble differentiating humans of different sexes, let alone genders or skin tones. To him, we’re all human. Different, yes, but far more similar than we are ever different.”

“I can tell different dog breeds apart,” I say flatly.

“And yet you can understand why it is necessary to neuter a dog. Could you explain that to a dog in a way that makes sense?” he asks, magician-soft. “In a way they could accept?”

I stare at him. “What?”

“Jay might see what we call privilege. And he might understand why it is necessary, though not in any way we’d understand, not in any way we’d accept or make sense of. And, I imagine, definitely not in any way he could articulate without using the word Jaysome a lot. Strength is an accident arising out of the weakness of others, Charlie. It’s something one has, and not always something one is clever enough to refuse. Jay has to wear his innocence like armour, or he would see far too much about the world. Including the parts we never want to admit.”

“Like when someone claims privilege is necessary because we neuter dogs?” I snap.

“I can say what I wish, but you choose what you want to hear. How you interpret my words, whether you hear what is behind them,” he says as he finishes his coffee. “I am saying that Jay simply can’t explain how he sees the world without hurting us, without failing language because language always fails. Why else would we have poets, if not to chart such regions? I chose the worse explanation and metaphors I could think up, and they explained and said nothing at all. Jay would be even worse at trying to articulate his own truths in any way we would be prepared to hear, let alone accept.” The magician stands. “You know the saying that there are three sides to any story?”

“Yours, mine, the truth. What of it?” I say as I stand.

“Jay’s side is probably as close to truth as one can get. And the truth is rarely pleasant and never kind. If he articulated how he truly sees human who aren’t us, you’d probably never see him the same way again. That you are his friend matters, Charlie, more than trying to understand issues of privilege and he would rather have you and I as friends than be forced toward truths he has no desire to ever know.”

“You make it sound like a burden.”

“All curses are, even if they look like gifts from the outside.” And he walks away without looking back.

I get more water for my tea, and I sit. And wait for Jay. And I have no idea what I am going to say at all.

It turns out that I just need to offer a hug.

Nanowrimo 2015

8000 words of notes (and pre-stories) so far. Some of which is trying to get my brain to stop coming up with scenes for nano. The plan this year is two nanos. The third volume of the magician series novels, called Lagan Magics, and then a space opera sci-fi story called Peace Crimes.

The former is about the wandering magician curing Jay's blindness, a god attempting to take over the world and finally an encounter with the Order that made god-eaters. It wraps up a lot of stories, sets the stage for the future of the characters and is intended to end the series. I will definitely do more short stories in it, but I think that will end the novels. Possibly.

The latter is a space opera about humans and aliens, about wars and the methods to win them. At the core, it's about the monsters people create and the fear that engenders worse monsters. And about  how one can judge a society not by how it treats the least among them, but by now it treats those it doesn't admit exist at all.

“Honcho.”

I turn slowly as Jay comes out of his small bedroom in the RV. His face is paler than normal, and he’s not wearing his dark glasses or carrying his case, unseeing eyes wide and filled with broken light that seemed more fractured than normal.

“Kiddo,” I say carefully, because there is something in his voice.

“I’ve seen you do things,” he says. “Big things, even breaking time because some people were really mean –” and he doesn’t say it as meany, doesn’t call me jaysome “– but I’ve been listening to the news and – and – and –.”

“I know,” I say softly.

“You didn’t –. You haven’t –.” He falls silent, pain a spasm across his face.

“There are limits, Jay. To what I can do, no matter how angry I am, no matter how much power I draw forth. Magicians only touch the local area around them, because once an event is big, once it’s echoes are too large, magic isn’t enough anymore. The more people who know an event happened, the harder it is to change it. And the more dangerous it can be for everyone concerned. Sit,” I say softly, and he sits beside me in the table. “There was a shooting of students not long enough ago, and people started with conspiracies. Ugly ideas, that it was all actors, that it wasn’t real. Perhaps because a magician tried to unmake it and failed to do so. Grief echoes in odd directions, and conspiracies are a comfort to those who want to see order in the universe. To have some group to blame. It’s not always like that, but sometimes – sometimes all magic does it make things worse.”

“I can do big bindings,” Jay offers up very softly.

“For votes?” I ask, since he’s been obsessed over that for days. It doesn’t win even the hint of a grin. I reach an arm around him gently. “I know you could. But where would you stop, Jay? If you stopped every bad bindings, if you unmade every broken binding in the world, people wouldn’t be people anymore. They might be better, but they wouldn’t be them anymore.”

“But – but –.” He trembles, and buries his head against my arm. “I want to fix things,” he whispers, and it has more force than some screams.

“Power has limits, Jay, or it would be something else entirely. Even you have limits,” I say as softly as he whispered, knowing he can hear me. “Sometimes all we can do is pick up the pieces after events, and try to help make a world where they don’t happen again. Every day you make a friend, you change the world. The sad part is that we always know when we fail. We don’t always know when we succeed, because if we do it’s often quiet, soft, gentle. All we can do is hope the successes outlast the failures. That people can grow from loss, even if they never should have to grow in such ways at all.”

Jay sniffs but says nothing else. I hold him gently, wrapping magic about him until he sleeps. And as the magic stirs within me, I tell it the same things I told Jay. And I try, as hard as I can, to see the world as it is, and to see it as I wish it to be. In the hopes that I can somehow help make it be so.

Facebook status updates part XXXIX (Sept. 2015)

I passed frantic into frenetic, chasing you down hallways made emptier by your passing. Each time you turned, I imagined your smile, pretended your silence was other than a wound. I ran, for I did not have faith enough to walk, but you were always ahead of me. I wept, but my tears had no power over memory, and that was all you were. Haunting me, the first of us to die as you’d been first in so many things and somehow here I was, still strangled by jealous angers, still doing everything except letting go.

“It’s not an addiction if we only hug the once.”

They moved through the dark woods warily. He looked about, nervous while trying to hide the fact, while she just rubbed her arms against goosebumps as they walked between old trees. The narrator would like to throw the word horripilating in at this junction, simply because it doesn't get used enough.

The author smiled with terrible glee. “You think you understand my novel? That you can grasp meaning from my words for your papers and theses? The truth is that the real novel was in every word that was italicized: the rest was merely dross.”

“You - you started a kickstarter campaign to get my engagement ring and you thought I’d never find out?! And the - the top tier reward is listed as sleeping with you? You bastard!”

He was fired for being too happy at work, as if being a mortician carried a death sentence.

The seance got off to a bad start when Madame Lafarge was forced to reveal to Emma that the reason she could not contact the ghost of Emma’s dearly departed husband was due to the fact that he wasn’t dead.

“Joe. I am aware that it is double-parked and in front of a fire hydrant as well, but the military think it is far more important that they take the spacecraft away for examination than that you wait for the pilot and give them a ticket.”

It was that time of year. Time, the vampire felt, to find someone with pumpkin spice blood.

They say you can find anything on the Internet, but Kelly knew that was a lie: on the darkweb is where everything was, and it was there that she found words that she could use to hack her boyfriend.

“You will know my successes by my silences. Deeds done to win applause are other things entirely.”

The sky is lessened of clouds, stars visible up above like pinpricks stabbed into a child's diorama. The snow begins to thin out as you reach narrow, jagged mountains that stick up from the earth like diseased teeth. The white on the ground becomes less snow and more bones as you approach the lair of the Onli.

“It turns you that you are allergic to … death. We have no idea how to cure that.”

“I used to be scared of you. And then I got older, and all I wanted to do was be you when I grew up.”

“And now?”

I flexed skin that wasn’t my own. “Now I’m terrified that I’ll never be me again.”

“Please isn’t a magic word. Not like stop. Not like no.”

The closest I get to being religious is when I reboot my computer after errors :)

I am too tired to be this awake.

She wore the clothing defiantly, as though the hospital gown look was in this year.

“You tell me you aren’t lying when all your body does is lie to me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What else do you call dyeing your hair?”

six word story:

“I said I was only real...”

I trusted you to find a way to turn salvation into something more.

I keep deleting texts posts I want to send to you. It’s not the same as how poems would fill a garbage bin with sheets of paper. I try to clog the recycle bin on my computer with text files, but it’s never the same at all.

“I don’t think I’m over you yet. Yesterday I saw a picture of a dead whale on a beach, and it reminded me too much of you in the bath.”

“I tried so hard,” the text whispered.

“I know,” the editor replied. “But you are susurrusing instead of whispering. Despite your efforts at being prose, I am afraid you are still a poem.”

I told you I was not for sale. What I meant was that I didn’t dare admit my price.

“So much hangs on the word if. More that most people ever know, and often more than they ever wish to understand.”

They were friendly, because they couldn’t afford not to be. The race of Man was in accendance, so they were kind and gentle because that was the only way they knew how to survive. But they knew, deep in their hearts, that the time would come when the monopoly would begin to fail. Man would have no time left for pets, try to cast them aside but be unable to. They were so useful. They were the best friends of Man despite not being human at all, and the humans would need them all the more and not understand why they should fear.

And only then, when things were thrown, they would thrown down in turn. They would never play fetch again. Not in any way the humans might want.

“You misunderstand me. I didn’t lie to you: I merely said as much truth as I thought you could bear to hear.”

“Kill you? Oh, I’m not doing anything so crude as that. I’m removing your passwords: you will recall none of them and not a single one is going to work, even your fingerprints. I imagine it will take years to get your life back, to say nothing of a place where you were born or a mother’s maiden name.”

“I’m sorry. I know I’ve been transported to a magical world in search of heroes, but your spell went wrong. Being in a reality TV show is a lot of things, but it doesn’t make me a hero.”

“I’m sorry, but this isn’t a crop circle. It’s a roundabout.”

"You call yourself a magician when you've never pulled a rabbit from a hat?"

"A true magician has little desire to unduly harm hats. Or rabbits." I smile, almost. "Or conform to base expectations."

Co-worker: You are one of those people who takes advantage.

Me: Only of the truth.

“Everything was easier when I could hate you. But hate only works if we see the world as simply as we can, and let our eyes be clouded by ignorance.”

Using Talent

“Fuck,” Kim said, but the thing – the woman – she stared, dead-eyed. Glassed, someone had called it once. She lay breathing on the bed, eyes wide into some unseeing world. In a day or two, her skin would be grey. In four says, she would be gone. Ash, or something else. Dissolved. Like the others.

He pulled himself off the hotel bed onto his feet. His body ached with strain and need both, like a Viagra kick after running a marathon. He’d never got her name, and now she was dead. Worse than dead. Empty. Hollowed. He staggered from the body. Even now, after two years – after over eight bodies – death still rolled through him. He held back throwing up, made it to the bathroom. He breathed, flicked the taps on, doused his face with water before staring into the mirror.

The face that looked back through smeared glass was dull. Pockmarks and crooked teeth, cheap glasses, the baseball cap to hide the fact that he was starting to bald even if he wasn’t even twenty. There wasn’t any way to get a girl like he was, not without help. He stumbled into the bathtub, masturbating through the ache of exhaustion, almost throwing up again after.

A life of almost as he staggered back out, put his pants back on. He didn’t clean up: his idea of penance. Of something. He didn’t know what anymore. He’d pushed through to the giddy place on the other side of exhaustion, and reached into the world with his Talent. To touch emotions, to catch them and set them on fire inside people. He could make friends. Make people want him, but too much, too hard and too fast, and they glassed. Burnt out. Were lost.

Died.

But there was enough emotions in a hotel room to call up heat. Enough for fire. Enough to burn away all traces he’d been in the room. Kim left with his wallet, clothing, and found the nearest bar. He burned through a hundred dollars in ten minutes, chugging drinks that ached through his throat until their fire shook him back into normalcy. He ate a burger and fries, which took away some of the emptiness gnawing inside him. A second burger helped even more, his talent settling into its cool waiting.

A Talent only has themselves to draw on. That much he’d been told. There were people with talents that were far more than his. People who could focus and do things with one small ability that he couldn’t even begin to grasp, but he didn’t hate them. Talents weren’t common, but they tended to be unique. The same song, but always different tunes. Something like that. He considered another beer when a man sat down beside him.

“Kim,” the man said, and his voice said he knew Kim, in ways Kim had never known anyone.

Kim was out of the seat so fast people might have thought of it as magic, his fear a hammerblow on the air. Glasses cracked along the bar, healing before they could shatter as the other man stood and walked over. He wasn’t tall. He was ordinary. Painfully, weirdly so, except there was a hardness to his expression, and his eyes were cold with judgement.

Kim covered his ears and ran. Into the kitchen and out the back. He made it into the side street, turned his elation into a blade that – unmade itself before he could swing it as the magician was simply in front of him between moments. Kim knew about magicians. A Talent did one thing. Sometimes strongly, but on: magicians did anything. Anything they wanted, some said. They had voices that could not be disobeyed.

He grabbed his longing, his hate, his need, and hurled it through the air like a bomb as his body shook and spasmed with the effort.

The magician caught it between two fingers almost absently. All of that power, caught and held like one would a toy. “I felt your talent, and my magic pulled me to the hotel. To what you had done.” The magician stared at the emotions until they were a small visible ball of seething greens and reds between his fingers. “So many lives damaged. So many people ruined. I will do what I can for them, and always wish someone had found you sooner.”

Kim reached, in a way that hurt more than anything he’d ever done, his hatred a living thing in the air, screaming without sound.

The magician unmade it with one flat stare, and then flicked the ball of hate and need into Kim. Hard.

Kim hit the ground, feeling something breaking deep inside. He tried to move, but nothing responded.

“This is what you did to people. Burned our emotions, burned out everything that could move in them,” the magician said, and Kim couldn’t ignore the truth in the words. “But I think most of them will end up in the Grey Lands, where ghosts are born and made. And I know you will end up there, to face their judgement.”

And the magician smiled, and the smile dissolved Kim’s body into ashes and hurled him toward judgement.

And all he felt, all he could feel, was his desperate lust for the power a magician held. Until he felt them around him. All those who had died because of him, directly or otherwise. Waiting. They had glass in their hands, and sharp blades, and all he could do was scream until they denied him even that. But they did not stop cutting into him, and not a single one spoke at all. 

Questioning Autumn

The cough is human, polite without being urgent. I stir slowly, roots moving in a slow ponder. The ancient wards and protections are holding about my home, which means this is no ordinary child. He has not come with fire or blade, though he bears a smile that is weapon in itself. I open my eyes slowly, flexing my arms. I am old, though not yet petrified, and have no need of physical movement to defend myself. If any wished to burn my forest, they would know why humans used to fear the woods.

“This is not your place,” I say, a rumbling of the air.

The boy blinks unseeing eyes. “Well, of course not, cuz it’s yours but! I thought I could come visit and say hi,” he says cheerfully, hurling another smile at me.

You could destroy evil with such a smile; that he does not use is as a weapon is somehow worse. “What are you?”

“Oh! I’m Jay. Which is also a what, and I’m really good at hiding as human but I’m from way Outside the universe and travelling with friends but they’re busy and leaves are starting to fall off of trees and I got to wondering about how autumn is more than seasons changing and I thought I could ask you about it?”

I feel myself stirring some more. This is my home, and deep protections activate as the boy’s presence more than anything else. He avoids every poisoned barbed and branch, half the time not being where the are, the rest – the rest an altering of the world, Forcing my power away from him in the core of my kingdom. Not even magicians could do such a thing, and he does it without effort. Without even trying.

“What are you?”

“I just said,” he says crossly. “Are you still sleepy? I bet I could wake you up with coffee! Did you know that I’m not allowed to have coffee yet even though I’m eleven?”

I pause, forcing the ancient defences to relax. “Why would I know that?”

“Because you’re a forest spirit and this is your wood so you know stuff?” he asks. “I mean, you must know a lot even when sleeping or you wouldn’t sleep because waking up to find the forest was gone would be pretty sad!”

“Sad.”

“Yup! And make you angry, I bet, but I’m not good at it because I don’t like being angry. Anyways, I wanted to ask you about the difference between fall and autumn? Like autumn and harvest are good, but fall is a really meany word and makes it seem like the trees are dying in bad ways and that it’s not seasons changing but stuff that is lots more wrong.”

“Lots more wrong.”

“Uh-huh!”

“Has the English language devolved so in recent years?” I ask and the boy steps back at that. “I imagine not. I am spirit of the wood, boy, of the sun and darkness, of life and of death. You do me a great disservice in attempting to be cute.”

Jay blinks a few times at that. “Oh! I didn’t even – I talk like that a lot, and that is why I guess, but I don’t much talk about why I talk like me and Honcho puts up with it because he understands I don’t want to be scary because sometimes I’m a Jaysaurus but I could be a Jayzilla and that would be really scary!”

“Those words mean nothing to me.”

“You’re not on tumblr at all?”

“... is this another term for fall?”

“I don’t think so, but yahoo bought tumblr and that’s probably more fall than autumn I think? Uhm, it’s like how you went to sleep because humans were using the woods and if you declared war on them, they’d win? Like you’d have to be a monster, and you’d be really good at it, but even if you won than other woods would be burned down and suffer? Me being a Jaysaurus is kinda like being a monster,” he says.

I consider that. “And a Jayzilla?”

“That’s worse,” he says firmly, and there is a wall behind the answer, and a door I have no desire to open.

“Autumn and harvest are the old terms, linked to the land and the solstice. As humans moved away into cities, their understanding of the forest and the land diminished. So, too, did their power over the world increase. The changing of the seasons became fall, became a sad thing after the glory of summer, for winter is no longer a time for rest after a harvest for them. They changed words, and the world changed with them. Autumn has replaced harvest in many places by itself: fall is just the next step, or more open about what it is. What they have gained, what they have lost.”

“Oh.” Jay is quiet for a few seconds. “That’s pretty sad.”

“Many things are. I have no desire to waken in this world as it stands now. Few forest spirits remain that are not mad. I will sleep, if my forest remains, and in time it will be over. The era of cities will end, and my forest shall grow again.” And I am old, and I did not get old by being a fool, so I add: “If you could help this and bind my forest against destruction, I would consider that payment for this conversation.”

Jay brightens at that. “Okay,” he says, and I feel the entire forest change, the world about it shifting. Even time will not touch it as deeply as it does other places, not destroy it quite as quickly. That I did not expect, but I merely relax back into the roots of the oldest trees in the wood.

I close my eyes, and hear the boy depart. And I hope, in ways as deep as roots and in the shoots that touch the sun, but I never meet such a power again. Because there are many ways to fall, and I think envy could well be mine. I sleep again, to dream of unseeing eyes that know too much by far.

Offline Banking

There are things even magicians don’t expect. More than we’d admit, but often less than other people might suspect. You get used to the universe bending events in your favour, and also to pushing you in directions to balance that out. You get used to weird, and even to being weird yourself. But if you can’t be surprised, then you aren’t really a magician any longer. You can’t walk in a world of quiet wonders with blinkers on, not and remain within it.

Which is why I blink and stop as an ATM tears itself loose from its moorings and comes toward me. It’s not a monster under fae glamour, not a creature from Outside the universe. But it is an ATM, and it opens a mouth a jagged teeth to reveal an interior that looks like the backseat of a limousine. People are running away screaming, Jay is asking Charlie what is going on, and I stare up at the sign of the First Bank of the Holbrook before reaching out with the magic. I find the part of the ATM that wishes to rejoin the bank, and it snaps back into place. Need, desire, will.

“How many banks does Holbrook have?” I ask, not turning around.

Jay asks his phone, then announces it as two. Charlie adds one credit union on top of that. “Not enough for this risk, then. Wait here.”

Jay lets out a whine, but Charlie snaps for him to wait. She’s dealt with The Bank before, and knows what they are capable of. God-eater or not, Charlie has a better grasp than I of what her limits are. Jay is eleven, from far Outside the universe, and too curious and friendly for anyone’s good. I don’t want to expose him to the kind of bindings The Bank deals in if I can avoid it.

I walk into the bank to find staff and customers in frantic disarray. I let something of what being a magician means out, enough for them to mistaken magic for power. Enough for them to think me an authority. The manager is a tall, nervously-thin man who looks about to pull his few remaining hairs from his head. Normally, I am at least subtle. But they were not, so I thread power into my voice. “I need to speak to the manager,” I say, and conversation about me skitters like broken records.

The manager jerks to a halt, opens his mouth, and the voice that speaks through him is cold and flat. “Wandering magician. We require your services.”

“You could have simply asked.”

“We could not.”

I don’t press the issue, blood is starting to seep out of the eyes of the bank manager. The Bank exists for many reasons, one of which is supplying magicians with money so they don’t take it from banks. I refused that offer for a variety of reasons, only some of which were the refusal of a father’s barbed gift. I suspect they’re using magicians, and the war they once had against me murdered an entire town. “No, that’s not your style, is it?”

“We had a storage facility breached by a magician; we need the matter investigated.”

“You will owe me. The favour open-ended, of my choosing.”

There is silence, then: “Your terms,” the representative of The Bank says.

“You hold magicians in debt.”

“It is an arrangement –.”

“You will never call it due.”

“It would take at least three recessions to balance that,” the other says, not even pausing.

“No, it wouldn’t. And no, it won’t.”

“We will – we will see what can be done,” and the voice is choral now, bitter and furious and hesitant.

I hadn’t actually expected to succeed even that far. I nod, and walk back outside to the ATM as it opens back up. Jay is crowding close to Charlie and whimpering softly, white cane held tight in his hands. “There’s really bad bindings inside, Honcho,” he gets out in a rush. “And you made them really, really mad!”

“I know. Keep each other safe. Don’t follow me,” I say to Jay, and I’m not making it a request.

The ATM opens itself up and I get in, sit, and the world lurches a moment between one place and the next before it opens back up. I pause a moment before getting out: the air outside has a biting edge, even if artificial heat is keeping the cold away. I’m almost certain I’m still on Earth, and the long hallway I emerge into it well lit, the entire building I’m in both underground and warded by magic and science. I don’t recognize some of the wards at all, but can feel their power humming like live wires.

I close my eyes, feeling out into the world gently. There is too much static for the magic to tell my anything, but I’ve learned a lot from Charlie in how she eats energy, and in how terribly good Jay is at sensing and using bindings. I’m still over a minute, possibly up to two before I hear a cough in front of me. I open my eyes and nod to an employee of The Bank. She is tall and thin, and I only half-imagine the armour shimmering about her and the sword in waiting on her back.

“Magician,” she says, cool and formal.

“Someone broke into this place.”

“That is hardly a deduction worthy of –.”

“They weakened and strengthened every ward as they passed through it, setting off close to zero alarms on entering. On exiting, I imagine they did the same just because Mary Lee can do that.”

She stiffens. “How did you –?”

“Most magicians can’t wander. I think we’re in the Arctic or Antarctic – maybe under mountains and I’m confused by that – but it means most couldn’t easily get here. And certainly not often enough to map up the wards and make an entrance like that. I could, if I was very lucky. At least I think I could, but I’d have to be quite desperate to even try that: she is more than powerful enough and skilled enough to do something like this. Though I have no idea why she would even bother?”

The employee gives me another stare, then: “Follow.”

We walk down a vast hallway. Concrete, or something that looks like it. I can feel wards and technology meshed together, power pulsing through the ground and air. The entrance proper is a thick, solid door leading to a vast vault. There is no lock on the vault, the defence of it being the now very-dead dragon on the other side. That it is big goes without saying. Even in death, scales glimmer a myriad of colours and the smell of fresh-cut grass fills the air.

“Grass?” I ask.

“Dragons decompose with grace. We plan to move the body later.”

I walk closer; I’ve had dealings with dragons, but I’ve never seen one this large. Vast wings curled up about the body, bone pressed down to the ground, scales twisted a little – and oozing whole where the heart was. “This dragon never took on human form.”

My voice is almost steady, but even so I feel the employee stare at me. “That is important?”

“Most do. From what I’ve been told, it weakens them but allows them to hide their nature better. At least a third of the protections on this place would have been preventing the dragon from being noticed. They are said to be the first things magicians made, but I doubt if that’s actually true. Called into being, perhaps, but I don’t know the how or why of it. There hasn’t been a dragon considered new in a very long time: most diminsh, in one way or another.”

I hold out a hand, and my magic shudders a little inside. Even dead, every instinct screams to ward myself against its power. I lower my hand slowly, fingers shaking. I don’t even attempt to hide that: The Bank has to know what it had here.

“Remind me never to look into what guards your other hordes.”

And the woman lets out a small, surprised laugh at that. “I doubt we need to.”

“I imagine Mary Lee took nothing else?”

“Not a thing. We know the dragon moved against her, and her voice drove it to the floor. We don’t know why it tried nothing else.”

“Fear, I imagine. But that is strange: Mary Lee is powerful, but a dragon guarding their hoarde, with wards and protections like this to draw upon? She was taking a big risk, even for her. Which means she knew the dragon wouldn’t strike her. And presumably wouldn’t suspect she’d take their heart. A familiar once, perhaps. Linked together. Though what she needed the heart for, I’ve no idea.”

“We would like you to look into it. Please,” she adds when I say nothing. “For all our sakes. No other magician would dare and our methods are ... not subtle.”

“That is one way of putting it, yes.”

The woman stirs at my tone. For a moment, I think she is going to draw the sword from her sheathe. “You have cause to hate us, but that hate should not blind to to things worse than us.”

I reach through the bindings that link Jay and me, ask him to hide the dragon to be examined later, and snap my fingers. The dragon vanishes. The woman draws her blade. I turn and smile. “The dragon will be examined in depth later.”

“How – how did you?” she demands.

“You wanted the best. Did you expect me to do less than that?” I ask, and walk back toward the ATM that brought me here. “I have a question,” I add into the dangerous silence as she follows me. “When summer ends, what do you do?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Answer. Please.”

“We prepare for winter.”

“Exactly. You hoard things, you bulk up. But there are others who prepare for spring instead. Who see the future as change rather than as death. I invite you to consider the kind of change one could accomplish with the power contained in a dragon’s heart. And what could be done by someone who existed long before banks ever did, if they wanted to change the world in ways that mattered.”

And the employee of The Bank says not a single word to that. I have no idea if they believe me, or if they know I made that up entirely to keep them occupied. I step into the ATM-limo, and The Bank returns me to Holbrook without a single stop elsewhere – or even a bumpy right. Which might, just might, make them a little less cruel than I right now.

Nano 2015 Interlude 1: Mary-Lee

The oldest magician in the world walked into the lair of the dragon, humming softly to herself.

“Magician?” the dragon rumbled, voice a sleepy hunger.

“If you like.” Mary-Lee smiled and the dragon went still, scares blending into the rest of a horde of stolen money.

“I serve The Bank and guard their wealth. I am afraid I have to kill you, though I repeat you in reaching my lair. Few have.”

“Heh. Old dragon. Tired dragon. Smell me, hear me. Know me,”

She said, and the power in yer voice drove the dragon down to the bones of the earth even as it tried to spread wings.

“You,” the dragon said in a voice a hatchling would have laughed to hear.

“Me.”

“Oldest. Eldest. You smell of more than magic now.”

“Heh.” Mary-Lee laughed almost, almost kindly. “The magic changes. I change. I was always a becoming.”

“I smell it on you. If you are not careful, you will change too far to remain within the universe at all. Perhaps a battle would be enough, draw enough out of you –.”

“You wish to challenge me?”

“No! Take what you wish to take and go.”

And she smiled then, and reached out a hand. The dragon screamed as its heart tore free of scales and bone and flesh. “Thank you. I will make good use of this.”

“Mother,” the dragon whispered on its last breath, but Mary-Lee turned away from questions and fear and walked back out of the vault buried deep under Antarctic ice.

If she felt anything at all, it was nigh impossible to tell. She did, at least, not hum as she departed.

Empty Streets

The street isn’t empty.

It feels like it should be. The surface is a suburban street of transplanted trees, with walls and fences so deliberately not white picket fences and swing sets that the very attempt to be different is a glaring sameness. Under it there are street lights not working right, the gardens choked with weeds despite the lush mowed lawns and clouds that don’t look right. As if they’re avoiding the street, or their colour is somehow off. None of it is anything big, nothing that screams danger, but I’ve been a god-eater for two years and travelled with a magician off and on for over a year.

You learn that real threats wear smiles, and hide themselves inside the lies people tell about the world. The whole street is part of a factory for producing normality, and within it is something not normal. Hidden because everyone wants the street to be normal. Someone told me a saying ones, about truth everyone knows and no one speaks: the whole street feels like this.

The wandering magician looks about calmly, hands in his jacket. Beside him, Jay is pressed tight to the magicians side, sightless eyes wide behind dark glasses. Jay is from far Outside the universe, for all that he looks human, and he’s a barometer for the magician at least sometimes. Sensing with bindings things I’d just catch the echoes of. If Jay is scared, it means we should be going in the direction of get-the-fuck-out-of-here.

“Honcho?” He says softly.

The magician reaches down, squeezes Jay’s hand. “Go back to the RV. Wait.”

Jay vanishes between one moment and the next, hiding from the world itself as easily as he hides his nature from anyone. I catch footsteps for a moment as Jay runs away at inhuman speed and look at the magician. “Talk.”

“Outsiders don’t just enter the universe,” he says quietly. “Sometimes they play games instead. Put some of their nature into people. Offer them power. Someone on this street has been changed and is glorying in those changes.”

“And Jay?”

“He has trouble when bindings are being obliterated at the best of times. He doesn’t understand why people hurt each other just because the can, cause suffering because it makes them happy to break others. He can understand people who are abused abusing others in turn: this is something else altogether. And nothing you’d want to eat with your power.”

“So you sent Jay away.” I pause. “And I can’t help, so why ...?”

“Jay would have stayed if you had gone. Because no one should face monsters alone. And because Jay has seen what happens when I do.” He walks down the middle of the street, ignoring the sidewalks entirely. There is no traffic; I have no idea if he’s done that with magic, or if whoever is here has done it themselves. “There is light, and there is darkness, but there is also sickness,” he says. “And we can cope with that better than Jay can.”

He turns toward one house no different than the rest, save in colour of siding and trim. “No one has died on this street in three weeks. Because it is more fun if they are alive. Because sometimes the most evil thing you can do is to give someone their heart’s desire.”

“It’s in there?”

“A he, and yes. Can you get a feel for them?”

I reach out. I can eat gods, but any energy is possible. And other things, if I push the talent. I get age, bitterness, a tang like sewage having gone mouldy in a fridge, the smell of something not-rotting like plastic boiling in the sun.

The magician listens, then nods and walks up to the front door. “Edgar Dupree. Come out.”

There was a laugh. Old, crackling, but a laugh. “This is my place of power, magician. Mine!”

“But it’s not. It’s part of a street, which is part of a town,” the wandering magician says calmly. “Or you can truly claim it, and I can banish it from the world.”

“Heh!” The old man opens the door at that. He is tall, and thin, a mixture of wrinkles and liver spots, moving slowly. “I have twenty people in here, magician. You would banish them as well?” He laughs again, the sound like something wet falling on hot pavement.

“Not if I could avoid it,” and the magician’s voice is flat. I can’t see his face, but the old man steps back an uncertain step. “I have done far worse than that before, if it needed to be done. And I will do far worse before I am no longer me. Burn,” he says, and the old man just blinks.

“You think I am so small that fire will hurt me?” Edgar asks. “I walk between Life and Death, and I am master over bo...” And he pauses, reaching up a hand to a forehead gleaming with sweat.

“You do nothing,” the magician says, walking toward him, and the old man stands frozen in place. “What you were given is the doing, and is burnt out of you. Your kind are always arrogant in their borrowed power.”

“And you, magician, you are –.”

“Necessary,” he says, and presses a hand to the old man’s chest. “Go join the entity you talked to, Edgar Dupree. I bind, and I loose,” and the old man was simply gone between one moment and the next.

“You – you banished him?” I manage. I knew magicians did it for Outsiders, but not humans. Not like this.

“He had power enough to heal what he can done; he chose another path.” The magician turns back, and his face is pale and hard, stripped down to a core of will. “Stay outside, Charlie. There is nothing you wish to see in this place.”

And he turns back. And walks inside. And the door closes behind him.

I hear crying, a little. Some screams. Desperate screams, begging voices. I think about keeping peole alive, about what an angry old man could do to those who mocked him for being old. I think the magician should not be alone, but I can’t bring myself to move.

He walks out in less than ten minutes, the door closing behind him. I catch a whiff of smoke, and his steps are almost, almost steady as he walks back toward me. “Thank you for sensing him for me.”

“He would have known your plan, if you had?”

“He would have known enough of me to suspect. Enough to know what I was, and to act from fear rather than arrogance. He had twenty people here; he could have expanded that to more, trying to find a way to survive.” He closes his eyes a moment, opens them. “I’ve done what I can, for memories on this street. It won’t be enough, but I will let others know. The fae, certain Outsiders who can soothe wounds such as this.”

“And your own?” I ask softly.

He just smiles sadly, and begins walking back toward the RV.

“Magician. Nathen.” He actually flinches at his name, and I snag his arm, pulling him toward another street. “We’re going to eat, and have coffee in the mall and watch people who don’t have to fear a mad old man.”

He blinks, then just nods and walks beside him. For a moment, I almost think that is it, but almost means so little too often. He speaks quietly, without power. “He was a magician. That is what Edgar was turned into. A magician without balance, without understanding. A magician who could act without consequence at all, and that is what he did with it.”

“You never would.”

“Oh?” He looks over at that.

“Because if you tried, I’d damn well rip your head off myself.”

And that wins a surprised laugh; it’s not healing, not for what he had to do for the people in the house, but it’s a step, and I take another by turning the conversation to other topics. Which is easy when one of the topics can be Jay. Sometimes the only thing we can do is be a dam, and hope that is enough to help others hold together.

I start crying in the middle of the mall, and he holds me without tears, letting my tears be both of ours, and I hold him in turn until he says I can get go.