Rite of Passage

I’d like to say I don’t hide, but that has always been a lie. Learning to hide is important: sometimes I think it is the only lesson that matters. If you are seen, learn to be unseen. If you can’t hide, find ways to disguise yourself. It is always easier for some than others. There is a skill to hiding, a knack some master. You could walk past the most powerful magician in the world and never know it. That one wanders far: you have probably met him at least once.

I find some places to live. Places holding unhappy memories or tempered ghosts. The kind of place that are rented rarely simply because no one stays in them. I do what I can for them, and sometimes it is enough and I move on. Oh, I do other things: being the magician of a place means there is much one must do. I am not forced into it. Nothing like that. But I am part of the city, and the city is part of me.

There are problems magic can never solve. Every magician knows that, or they do not last long at all. The magic is a gift more than a talent, a thank-you from the universe. To be bound to a place is closer to a marriage, though not at all like it. Magic is about the places where need and desire meet, you understand? Being bound to a place is not like that at all. There are obligations without duties. Times when one fixes things simply because there is no one else to do it.

I’m heading out to buy dinner: something cheap for the small microwave in the apartment I’m in, so it doesn’t feel lonely. I’m debating time, because I always use the number 9 on my microwave since it is the loneliest number. This is how magicians are, at least some of us. It’s why I don’t notice him until he is almost on top of me.

Tall, thin, eyes bright with desperation, a jacket reeking of stale cigarette smoke two sizes too large. One sleeve hangs empty. The other hand finds my chest, pushes me into the wall.

I have wards. Protections. Power I could draw upon from the city. A thousand vehicles hurling by outside would force him away. But need and desire work both ways.

“Can I help you?”

“Magician,” he hisses. There is no hesitancy in his words. His body shakes with the force of the truth. “You work magic.”

“I am a magician, yes,” I offer.

“Fix me,” he demands.

Sometimes, the ones who find me just want to know. To be certain there is more to the world than they know. To be able to carry that truth with them like a flower the world cannot blow away. Sometimes they want help, too, but too many have eyes riddled with expectations.

I slip away from his grip easily. I feel his anger, certain I would not if he had two arms. Unaware it would not make a difference. I enter my apartment again.

The man follows like something cages. Pauses. The apartment is small and dingy. I’ve done what I can with paint, and spoken to the sadness in this place, but it has not all gone. There is a small laptop, because there is more to the world than the city. The table with the microwave. A sink. A futon I salvaged from a dumpster. Some clothing neatly folded beside the bed. The clothing just shows up every few days, no matter where I’ve been. There are always those who insist on paying you back, even if they never need to.

“I need my arm. I need it back. You can do magic,” he says, his anger rallying him.

I sigh. “I am a magician, yes.” I could tell him what it is really for: that there are holes in the world, and a magician patches them. But he would not understand. He has seen small things I have done, come across repairs to walls, or changed graffiti, or the lost I’ve reunited. Enough to drive him onward. Enough to make him seek me past reason. Hope is always there past reason, burning in his eyes.

“I am afraid you misunderstand, Raoul.” He starts. It always surprises them, when a magician knows their name. “This,” and I hold out a hand, and starlight spills onto the ceiling.

He makes a noise, and there is hunger in it more than wonder.

“This is magic. It is a river, you understand? There are magicians who never understand this, but it is true. Magic is a poem more than prose, and it answers need and meets desire. But what we desire is not the same as what magic does. Not the same as what the world does. I have never met a fish that did not wish to be a bird, and that is the nature of the world.”

“I don’t understand; I want my arm back,” he snarls, but there is less anger. He doesn’t notice some of the stars are brighter, as the anger had to be released somewhere.

“All magic is change, friend. For a wall to become a window. For a duck to become a man. That is what magic can do, what magic is. Oh, one can fix some things, restore other things. But that is not what things desire. All things desire to change, and change looks onto to the future. Magic cannot restore what was lost anymore than I could feed the poor with it, or bring the dead back to life.

“Change is not movement that goes backwards, not for magic,” I finish softly. It is a lesson that took me years to learn, and one I will never master.

“But –. I need –.” He flatters.

“I know.” I head to my futon, reach under it. Return with money. “You could get a prosthetic.”

Raoul stares at the money wordlessly.

“It is from a bank; there is an arrangement with magicians. I do not spurn the arrangement, though I give away far more than I use.”

He takes it slowly. “Magician –.”

“Everything has a cost,” I say, and let him feel how this small apartment is the better for what has happened here. I set the key to it on the counter, get my laptop, and leave.

Raoul doesn’t move. He tries to speak, but nothing emerges.

I offer a faint smile as I leave, enough to let him know I heard.

We only meet once again, that he knows of. I make certain to nod to him as he enters work, and he turns back to stare in shock, leaving bread to scatter and birds to dive as he runs across the road.

“That’s one way to lose other limbs,” I say dryly.

“You – I – I work here now,” and he waves his hand to the soup kitchen. “Government grant, and I – I gave the money away. I found someone who needed legs.”

“There was never an obligation,” I say as gently as I know how.

“I know.” And I think he does, better than some do. He steps back. “I’m still in that apartment.”

I nod. “Good. It needed someone who understood.”

And someone calls for him across the road, an annoyed demand. He turns, and I slip away from his gaze. Not hidden.

Never hidden.

Merely waiting to be found.

Sun Shades

The last reporter has left the building. Everyone else has gone home, even the janitor. I slump back in my deck, eyes blurred. Too many screens, too many questions; too much of anything at all. My hands won’t stop shaking even as I pull my glasses off and rub the bridge of my nose. There are only so many ways you can say ‘this isn’t possible’, only so many ways to spin the truth into acceptable sound bytes that won’t terrify everyone.

Every since I looked out the window earlier, everything has been insane. But somehow I survived it.

I think I understand a little how the Flat-Earthers can lie to themselves. You have to believe the story a bit to sell it. But it’s all lies. The sun isn’t working, and that makes no sense. I’ve had a dozen conspiracy sites email me, and for all I know it could be an alien craft between the earth and the sun. Every satellite claims there is a cloud that doesn’t exist.

I don’t keep anything to properly drink in the office. I’m considering starting or just bursting into tears when the door opens.

A woman I don’t recognize enters, pulling a boy behind her. He is eleven, and looks rather indignant at being dragged into an office. I open my mouth to inform them that the building is closed. But that’s when the boy spots me. And grins.

“Hi,” he says happily. “I’m –.”

“Doctor Cheu doesn’t need to know who you are,” the woman snaps.

“Really?” The boy twists free of the woman’s grip and stares at her in shock.

“Very really, yes.” The woman turns to me. “What happened to the sun was an accident. It is being fixed right now.”

“What?” I say.

“Well,” the boy says, “I found out that @torrentialmonsoon wears sunglasses you know, and big sunglasses hide you from the sun and that makes the sun sad you know! But!,” and the flings the word out excitedly, “the sun hurts eyes too, only I fixed it so it couldn’t and then I got in trouble.”

He lets out a huge, put-upon sigh.

I stare at the woman. “A storm wore sunglasses?”

“It’s complicated. A cloud was put in front of the sun so sunlight wouldn’t necessitate sunglasses.” The woman pauses. “This was noticed,” she says dryly.

I want to ask how, but the grin on the boy’s face somehow got rid of worry and my want to drink as well. No one has ever smiled at me like that. I don’t think anyone will again. “And it’s been fixed?”

She nods. “The –.” She catches herself. “We thought someone should tell you, so you can explain it as something other than aliens.”

“It could be aliens,” the boy says. “I bet I could find the best aliens ever!”

“Yes. You could. But you’re not going to,” the woman says. Her gaze flicks back to me. “There are going to be some abnormal weather patterns over the next few days you can use to explain this.”

“Going to be,” I repeat slowly. “What are you?”

“We’re friends,” the boy says, utterly certain of that statement.

The woman gestures, and the boy heads to the door. They walk through, but end up somewhere than the hallway. The door closes on the boy protesting that he didn’t do an oops at all.

An oops.

Changing how the sun works as some kind of – of accident.

I shut down my computer, turn to the office window and open it. The half-moon hangs in the sky, as bright as it always is. I let out a sigh of relief, close the window, close up my office.

I’m halfway home before it begins to hail.

Abnormal weather patterns, the woman said. I make a mental note to put snow tires on my car first thing tomorrow morning. And then try, as hard as I can, to forget that entire encounter.

(The) Always of Adventuring

The air cracks with broken thunder. I pause outside the door to the hotel suite, drawing up wards made from the annoyance of guests and the simmering bitterness underneath some of the staff as I push the door open to find Jay sitting cross-legged in a chair, his eyes crossed as well. I watch as he twists his arm, his elbow impacting with his face.

I watch as his elbow and arm twist about and he pokes his nose with a frown. “Kidlet?” I say slowly.

Jay grins with the joy only a jaysome eleven year old who is from far Outside the universe can. “Hi, Honcho!”

“Hi. Is there any particular reason you are trying to break your elbow today?”

“I’m trying to break my nose,” he says proudly. “And @argumentsfromwithin says that elbows break noses really good!”

“Ah. And this would be an adventure?”

“Yup!”

The danger in Jay isn’t so much his power over bindings so much as an innocence devoid of limits. And part of being the wandering magician – and more being Honcho to Jay – is knowing how fragile that is and how much of it remains.

“Jay. Breaking bones isn’t an adventure you want. You are tough like a Jay, but that means that when you do get hurt –.” I pause. “May I?”

Jay nods, nothing but trust in him. He is bound to me on levels so deep I can’t sense all of them. His trust perhaps runs deeper still. I reach out. Find the nearest hospital. Find a troll trying to heal an ancient broken hand. Find a crack in the earth that never ceased to hurt. And I bind them into Jay.

A moment, and I release it. There is always pain, and then there is never pain.

Jay doesn’t move. For half a moment, there are shadows in his face that make it too near my own. “Honcho?” He rubs his arm slowly, waits.

“That kind of pain isn’t an adventure. Not all adventures need be sought, not even by a Jay. Some can only offer hurt.”

Jay blinks, once. There is a question in his eyes.

“I don’t seek them out. But a magician answers need.”

“I can do that too!”

And Jay vanishes a moment later. I feel the binding against pain he puts on the hospital, and then he’s visiting the troll to help them as well.

The troll tries to eat him, and while Jay is occupied with that adventure I gently undo most of the binding he put on the hospital. Because pain is important even if Jay doesn’t understand why in human terms. Some day he will, but not until I’ve done everything I can to stop that.

Unless my everything causes it.

“Magician?”

I turn. Charlie has come into the hotel room. The god within her hasn’t stirred, which is good. But Charlie knows me better than almost any other person in our five years of friendship.

“You okay?” she asks.

“No.”

“Is Jay okay?”

“Yes.”

“I can eat what you’re feeling,” she offers, god-eater to magician.

“You can’t.” The words slip out. I have a talent to speak truth that cannot he ignored.

Charlie winces. “His innocent is... important, magcian. We both know that.”

I nod. We’ve met Jay when he is older. Keeping him eleven as long as possible is important.”

“It’s always important, even if it never changes what will be.”

“That was almost a question,” Charlie says softly. “Are you sure you –.”

And Jay returns between moments, to tell us all about his adventures and boast about how not breaking his nose is an adventure and how he’s totally ready for an adventure having suppers now.

The moment passes between us, but I don’t think it will be wholly gone. And I don’t know what to think about that.

Seeing Auras

The aura – I have no words. I’ve been inventing new colours for hours, but this – this is like the dark side of the sun. Like cold fire, like the ending of dreams. The shape is human. That terrifies me even more. Aura upon aura, repetition without end. Nothing should look like this. They walk down the street.

You don’t walk, with an aura like this. You don’t do – human things. But they are. The other auras fade, even my own, as though only this aura was real.

“Apologies,” The man standing before me is maybe thirty, and ordinary, and the aura is gone. Folded away. Moved somewhere where I cannot see it. “Most people who can See learn how to control it quickly. There are not many magicians, but we are – parts of places, as much as other things. It confuses.”

“What?” Mylie moves forward, fists balled. “I don’t know what you’re going on about, but -.”

“I am sorry, but I was not speaking to you.”

Mylie made nurses in the hospital back off; she pulls back instead. Seeing no auras, but the magician’s voice is a deep well of truth.

“Grandma isn’t -. She can’t -.” Mylie flatters. “There was a stroke.”

“Ah. That, a magician would not dare touch.” The magician smiles, slow and sad, at my expression. “You saw auras for a time, Emiline. There is a power to that, but not the kind some might envision. To be a magician is to understand the helplessness of power better than most.” he says, and I don’t think Mylie hears these words.

“A gift one cannot control is not a gift at all.” His sigh is low and tired. “I can bind you so that you no longer see auras. It would be safest, because there is a boy named Jay in this town as well and I do not think you would survive his aura. Not that he ever intends harm, but to see complete auras without control would break you perhaps even beyond what Jay can easily repair.”

There is nothing for me. I don’t speak. I can’t, not words anyone can understand.

The magician hears. I am not surprised, given that aura. “You will be missed. That is hardly nothing. Listen: Jay is eleven, and from far Outside this universe. If your seeing his aura destroyed you, he would try to make it right and never understand the harm he would cause in the process. That is something as well. You have choices still.”

I think about an aura bigger than the magician’s. I think about what it would do, how I would die. Here, in front of Mylie. Broken.

Help me.

The magician touches my forehead. One finger, and I can no longer seen the gentle aura about my granddaughter. It changes nothing between us.

She grabs the magician’s hand, yanking it away, about to make demands.

“I’ve never done a poking game, Honcho!” The boy who is beside the magician is eleven, and his grin – his grin defuses everything. It is pure and innocent and wonderful and the magician gently turns my chair away. I think it is him, though he does not touch it, and the force of the grin diminishes a little.

“Games do get interesting when you plan them, Jay. I was helping here, and am done. You might want to see is Charlie is ready for lunch?”

“Okay! Bye, new friends!” The boy waves to Mylie. She waves back, looking dazed. Every puzzlement she had, every question she was going to ask the magician: it has all been driven from her mind by the sheer exuberance of Jay.

The aura behind that smile that would have destroyed me. I have no doubt about it.

But I think it would have almost been worth it. Almost.

To Answer Need

The house is a small, single-storey affair so drab it almost vanishes into the homes around it. The picket fence is black rather than white, the lawn immaculate in its plainness. Nothing about it jumps out as strange, but even so I’m not surprised when the wandering magician opens the front gate and walks in. I follow carefully. I’m no magician, but we’ve travelled together off and on for almost five years. I feel the wards he pulls up around us, my own power responding to the energy.

Being a god eater doesn’t mean many things, not these days. But it does mean I can eat other energy; I’ve never been foolish enough to test my power against his magic. There are limits, no matter who or what you are. Even he has limits, though sometimes it’s hard to realize that. We’re both human, for all we’ve been and done. He’s bound to a creature from far Outside the universe; there is a god inside me that stirs even now. I feel fur about, claws nothing human can see. A threat, somewhere.

The woman who comes out of the front door of the home is almost as wide as she is tall. She comes up to my shoulder and a long black dress both hugs her and flows about her. Her eyes are dark pits, hollows of rage and despair and the promise of death in her clenched fists. Her teeth are sharp and distressingly white as she bares her teeth. She moves down the stairs with the certainty of an avalanche, her voice inhumanly cold and controlled.

“You are the wandering magician.” The magician nods. “And the god eater; I have heard of you.” Her gaze flicks over me, and back to the magician. “I enter the universe under the auspices of the Cone and the Grave. I am a graduate of the Deep School, part of this world and universe for all that I am from Outside it.” Her voice is low and rolling, waves mingled with thunder.

There is no storm above us. I can’t shake the feeling that there should be one.

“You are bound against acting in the universe,” the magician says softly. “Yet you wish to: your need called me here.”

“That was a day ago.” There is death in those words, naked fury in her eyes. She holds her human form with obvious effort. Her right hand jerks up, and she gestures. Short, sharp. There is energy here, and power, but it is too alien for me to try and eat – even if I was fool enough to try. An image. A human girl. Short, also. Large, but not as large as her mother. Pale, and then – other things, as well. Wounds. Holes. The image vanishes, snaps out of existence.

“My daughter is dead, magician. I demand a response. This is not a matter for human justice.”

“There are other justices. You know who I am. And what?” the magician asks gently.

“I have heard stories.”

“Some are true. This truth I offer to your grief: I am bound to Jayseltosche, who is also from Outside the universe. Jay is, at present, visiting those responsible for the death of your daughter. They will never hurt anyone else again, not in word or deed.”

“That is not enough. They must suffer,” the woman says, and I swear the world buckles around us at the word. For a moment her will imposes some place Other. Some alien wildness that I feel rather than see, know rather than sense as my brain goes blank rather than try to explain it.

“Jay is eleven, for all that he is also from Outside.” The magician lets out a sigh. “There are many things he does not understand. They are trying to explain why they broke so many bindings to him. He is explaining that they were not jaysome at all.”

The woman pauses. Some of the fury settles within her. “That term I know.”

“Jay does get around,” the magician says dryly.

The woman’s laugh surprises her. “You think that will be enough?” she asks. No demand, no bluster to cover for the laugh. She knows herself, and hides nothing.

“What do you know of Jay?” I ask.

The woman turns her gaze back to me. Part of me wishes she wouldn’t, that she’d forget I was here. I hold her gaze despite that, holding the god inside me as tightly. Power always wants to test power; this isn’t the time for that. If there ever is one, this isn’t it at all.

“I have heard of him. That he makes friends with anyone. That he is a force of nature without knowing he is one. That he can bind anything, but would never dream of abusing that. That no power in the universe is as deep as he is, though he is unaware of this. I know you are his friends, and I do not envy you the burden of that. But it changes nothing.”

“Jay won’t make friends with them. For what they did, to your daughter and the others. That will –.” I pause, trying to find words. “There are places Outside the universe that are as real as the universe, as solid as it. You know of them?”

“You should not know of the Far Reaches,” the woman says. There is a fear in her voice at even mentioning them.

“You’ve seen them?”

“Once.”

Which says more than enough about how scary she is. “Imagine being on them. Part of them. Knowing you could be part of them, and then being denied it. Losing friendship with Jay, losing all chances of being jaysome: that is worse than that by far.”

The woman holds my gaze for a moment, then turns back to the wandering magician. “You impress me with your choice of friends.”

“Charlie has her talents. Sometimes,” he adds, after a pause I’ll make him pay for later. “But she does speak truth.”

“They will kill themselves.”

“They won’t. Because then Jay would be very sad. They are going to spend their entire lives trying to be jaysome, to become friends with him, to explain and make amends. And they never will, but I doubt Jay is aware of that. He will hold out a promise they can never have, not understanding he is hurting them. You cannot make them suffer more than this, not by killing them or by keeping them alive.”

“Magician.” There is grudging respect in the word.

“I am sorry I could not be earlier. And Jay – wanted to help, not understand he couldn’t at all. This is not the first time I have done this,” the magician adds, softer still, not hiding what it costs him.

“Another burden,” the woman says, as softly.

“Not as great as your own.”

The woman nods. “I will abide. By rules and law, I hold to my pact.”

“I had hoped you would.” And the wandering magician smiles, his own smile a flash of ice. “You will have another child, and the rules and laws will not apply when you protect them.”

The woman goes still. The dress – not a dress at all – as frozen as her expression. “... who are you, to promise that? What are you, to change my arrangement?”

“Someone who can borrow power to change bindings,” the magician says mildly.

“Not only that.”

“Only that for now,” he says. He doesn’t move, but there are depths here I am not certain I understand at all. Not a secret, nothing so small as that.

The woman nods to the both of us, her movements slow and stiff. “I thank you for your aid.”

“I am sorry for your loss,” the magician says.

We turn, and are at the gate when Jay comes bounding up to us, stepping through the world from some other place. No one notices, because he is jaysome.

“Honcho honcho honcho!”

“Yes?” the wandering magician says.

“I tried making friends with the people who broke bindings but! it didn’t work and everything went weirdy,” Jay flings out. “I think maybe I didn’t want to, even if being jaysome is important for everyone so I was figuring you could fix it!”

“Ah. I can try, at least.”

“Okay. Hi,” Jay adds, waving to the woman.

She waves back, her expression dazed under the force of a jaysome grin of innocent pride and unbridled joy.

The magician asks Jay to take him to the people so he can talk with them, and they vanish between moments.

The woman walks over toward me. Slow, but beside the gate before I move. She opens them for me.

“Jaysome.”

I nod. “He is that.”

“To lose that – it will be enough, I think,” she says, finally understanding. “I am in the debt of the wandering magician.”

“No. There are no debts, not against grief.”

The woman stares into me for a long moment. And nods. She says nothing else.

I walk away. Jay texts me before I’ve gone half a block, saying Honcho is confusled too and they probably need KFC. I have a feeling this is going to be a very long night, but not as long as it could have been.

A First Tattoo

“Axis heading 4:201:78. Confirm?”

“Conformation given. Begin descent.”

I take a deep breath, diving through the ruins of an atmosphere. Ship records data faster than I could try, tossing relevant information across my spectrum. There were wars here long ago, but there have been wars everywhere.

This was a bad one, Ship whispers in my head.

“I can report an invasive breaching.” I pause, adjust my grip. Increase immersion. I am on the control deck. I am also the craft diving through unknown energy signatures, trying to find patterns Ship can match. Data scrolls across my left eye, status reports from the Overmind on my last twelve assignments. I am in danger of losing my own craft. Ship’s strange form of an apology.

“What happened here?”

Unknown. Energy signatures are off all accepted scales.

“Craft integrity?”

Holding.

I pull up slowly, shift into neutral. Burning precious time and resources. Turn. Stare out with my eyes as much as those of Ship. A moon, once orbiting a gas giant. The entire surface cracked and somehow patched back together, the gas giant both a sun and not one. “Life reading. Someone turned this planet into a sun because there is life on the moon.”

As a proxy, it would seem. The energy signature we were sent to recover for the Overmind is in the middle of the moon.

“Can we recover it without damaging the life?”

Ship pauses. I’ve never head one of the AI actually pause before. We can, but it will be noted on your file.

I take a deep breath. “Authorization granted. Slow extraction, no harm. We leave no mark behind us: my call.”

It takes almost two hours in real time; the energy source turns out to be a box, contents unknown. Neither Ship nor I can even scan it at all. It is here, but somehow doesn’t exist as well despite fitting into the hold of our craft. I authorize an emergency jump back; in for one infraction, I might as well add more.

We land in hanger 46-94/2 before I am shunted out of the link. I haven’t lost my link before.

There is no craft, here. There is Ship. I can feel Ship inside me. I don’t move. I can’t, not in the containment field.

“You have exceeded your allocated resources by 684%,” a voice snaps. My connection to the craft – our connection – replaced by an avatar of the Overmind. “You will explain, agent.”

I open my hand, close it. I don’t even have skin left in the nutribath. I don’t even have a brain; Ship is that. Turn someone into an AI, as close as can be done. When did I agree to be sublimated? Did I ever?

We are 26 weeks old, Ship whispers in my head. Quiet. Neither of us knew we were one. Both reporting on each other, so the Overmind would know.

“There is impossible damage to that solar system. It was linked to the item we recovered. It seemed unwise to anger the cause of either the damage or the remair to that system.”

“That is not your call to make,” the avatar states.

“I am sorry,” I say softly, to Ship.

Every warning inside us goes off. I don’t – there is not much that is me left, in the tank. But the tank has alarms, and Ship as well, but they end as quickly as they began.

A human is standing outside our tank. Male. 14. Breathing despite there being no life support outside the tanks. That is how Ship and I would die: turned off, and left in darkness.

The human is holding the box gently in one hand. Something moves inside the box, restless. “It’s okay,” he says gently. “But if you got out now, you would – harm a lot of people connected into the Overmind, and that wouldn’t be right.”

“Who – what –?” I ask.

The human smiles with gentle sadness. “Someone who had a tattoo once, and left it in a box. I decided it might be wise to get it back before your Overmind was hurt. Not that I would care, but it has – many like you under its care.” Something not-human moves under those eyes. There is judgement in them.

We do good work, Ship says.

“You do.” I’m not surprised the human can hear Ship. “But the Overmind needs to ask – and explain more – to those who join it. We are discussing that now. You harmed no one on the moon, which is – why the Overmind is around for a discussion. You will be promoted, I imagine.”

“You made the moon? The gas giant?”

“It was only fair; I broke the solar system as well. Well.” He taps the box. “This did. Sometimes tattoos get rather out of hand, and I had to lock it back up and repair what I could.” He grins, and the grin shuts us down for a moment. Even Ship. There are known energies more terrifying and baffling than known ones: I did not understand that until this moment.

“The Overmind and I came to an agreement. Thank you,” he says, and the not-human – the entity – vanishes from every sense Ship and I have.

The Overmind has a voice that is all of ours, and its own. It would be scary, but it isn’t scary after the human. It tries to make suggestions; I counter with demands. We do important work here. We are important, in salvage and in understanding. But no one should be in the dark, and least of all those of us doing the work.

Making Safe Havens

You never find salvation where you want it, and certainly not when. We live in a mutable world; we change, we are changed. Salvation is a river we dip into from time to time, if it is anything at all. Nothing stays saved, nothing remained damned. Crude terms for complex interactions. That’s often ow it is. These aren’t safe thoughts, but sometimes safety is as far from safe as one can be. I get myself a beer, sitting at the bar. I don’t come into bars often. I don’t find anything of salvation in them, but places can be a kind of salvation too. The rush of voices is a ward, laughter an easy magic for a magician to draw upon.

And Jay is not here. I gulp back beer, letting it settle into me. Using it to ease into a kind of relaxation. If we have chakras, the point is never to wake them up. They are always awake. The point is to deaden them. To make a river. To let things flow. The anger is tight between my shoulder blades. I drink, let some go. Drink some more.

There had been a creature. Winged, made of shadow more than substance, something so old human magic could barely touch it at all. And I am human, for all else I might be, for every story about the wandering magician that verges into fancy. I am also a little buzzed to be using the word verges even in the silence of my own head. The entity had woke, was hurling across the face of the moon, mad with alien hungers, woken in a world too alien for it to know.

I yelled for Jay to bind it. Because Jay is from far Outside the universe, for all that he is eleven. Because his power dwarfs anything I can do, though he refuses to believe that. Instead he watched it move past, and happily told me he’d just had a misadventure, because missing an adventure is an adventure too. I told him he’d miss two suppers as an adventure instead, and to bind that creature.

And it was bound, in a snow globe in my hand, between moments. Handed over, and then Jay vanished in a sulk. I haven’t seen him for hours, which even for Jay is an impressive sulk. There are bindings between us so deep that even Jay might not understand all of them. He knows how angry I was, for all my calm command. How close I came to saying words I know better than to say at all.

I finish the beer slowly, considering another drink when there is a coaster on the bar in front of me that wasn’t there a moment ago. Knitted, I think.

I look up from my drink even more slowly. Jay is behind the bar, radiating pride. He’s wearing a white shirt, tie, formal pants.

“Do you want another drink?” he asks excitedly. “I have drinks!”

“Jay. Eleven year olds don’t tend bars.”

“But I asked really jaysomely, and the bartender said it was okay!”

At the other end of the bar, the bartender is pouring drinks, looking taken aback at the results and trying to understand why he said yes at all.

Saying no to Jay is dangerous; people understand that instinctively.

“And the drinks?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s all really nummy water. With flavours. And and and I have hot chocolate,” he says proudly, pouring me one and handing it over.

“Water and hot chocolate aren’t normal bar drinks.” I pause. “Please tell me you didn’t make snacks.”

“Nope! I had a whole list of things to do, and I did them but forgot that only I’m giving out hugs, which is like a snack but it’s also a hug!”

“A list of things.”

“I got black shoes and everything. Oooh! And a towel!”

The towel he holds up has teeth, and is trying to eat his hand. Jay doesn’t even notice.

The hot chocolate is excellent. Jay moves in a blur down the bar, chatting to people who are more than a little confused about the state of their beverages. They’re left dazed and confused at the onslaught of his irrepressible joy. One person at the back of the room demands a proper drink, and is quiet as a coaster zips through the air and impacts into the wall beside him.

“Drink coasters don’t normally double as throwing stars,” I remark.

“He was getting all rude-face and about to do meany bindings,” Jay says firmly.

“Ah.” I finish my drink quickly. “You’ll have to throw a lot more soon as people are going to get cross.”

“Really?” Jay bounces from foot to foot. “I’d be like a Jayninja!”

“Yes, but the point of ninja was to be unseen. And unnoticed,” I add as Jay vanishes from sight. “I doubt jaysome can avoid being noticed.”

“Oh.” Jay reappears. “Wow! I doubt jaysome could do that at all.”

“I doubt it could either.” I head toward the door. “Perhaps you can end your shift early?”

The bartender looks so grateful when Jay asks that some patrons almost start laughing. The wise ones stop the others from doing so. Jay thanks everyone for being jaysome and then follows me out of the bar. No one breaks the silence we leave behind us.

I glance over at Jay. “Is there a reason you decided to tend a bar?”

“Cuz I’m not allowed in them since I’m eleven, but I am if I’m working and! I sulked for over two hours and thought you might be worried!”

“I am often worried where you are concerned,” I say dryly.

Jay beams proudly; the sarcasm, as ever, misses him entirely, but sometimes I can’t stop it from emerging.

“I assume you’ve learned a lesson from all this?”

Jay thinks that over. “Uhm! I’m not sure, because lessons are kinda hard to learn? But I’m definitely not missing an adventure again!”

I nod and ruffle his hair gently. As long as he doesn’t decide to become a ninja, this has turned out better than I’d have hoped it would.

The Advertising Desk

“Hi!”

I almost jump out of my desk as I spin around. The boy standing in the middle of the office is eleven. Everyone else has gone home, and I know the janitors would never bring their kids to with work.

“Uh –.”

A stranger walks through the main doors. For a moment I think the hallway behind him shows a street instead. The man looks ordinary. “Jay,” he says.

“This is important, Honcho,” the boy says firmly.

The man lets out a resigned sigh.

“Can I help you?” I say weakly.

“You totally do the advertisements for AshleyHomeStore, right?”

“Ah – yes?”

“You have a hugey typo in your ad for jaysom bunk beds!”

“Pardon?”

“It should say jaysome!” And the boy grins. There is a terrible pride in his tone, but his grin – no one has ever smiled like that. Not me, not anyone I know. It hits with a force of innocent joy that takes my breath away.

Somehow, that doesn’t trigger my asthma.

“Jaysome,” I repeat. I can hear the e in his voice, and my own. The word is a possibility, a promise, a trust without end. It is too pure to be sacred, too – too jaysome to be terrifying.

“If I put that in ads, I could sell –.” I flatter. We could sell anything. I would get any promotion I wanted.

“You’d fix the typo really good,” the boy says firmly. I think his smile widens. I lose a few minutes.

The boy has left. The man remains.

“It’s all right,” he says.

I burst into tears. I don’t know the last time I cried.

He waits until I’m done. “Jay wouldn’t understand your tears. Nor what could be done with jaysome.”

He says the word differently. I hear the promise. And the power.

“You could bring down nations with that.”

The man nods. “Jay only has by accident.” His smile is gently rueful.

“What do I do?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

There are footsteps behind us. One of the janitors. Klaus, I think. Only he walks with a coldness in his eyes I’ve never seen. There is something feline about him, something wild and primal and severely pissed off.

“Wandering magician.” His accent is no longer one I know. There is a fury in his tone.

“I thought a fae might provide information.” The man turns. Whatever his smile holds, Klaus blanches at it. “This place sells jaysom bunk beds. Jay noticed the typo, and wishes them to fix it.”

Klaus goes still. Somehow, he pales even further. I can see through him.

“This,” the man called Honcho says, “might be a problem?”

“I can’t – we can’t be certain a glamour would stop everyone from seeing the word. Jay – jaysome – is too big, too real –.” Klaus falls silent. All the threat is gone. He looks small and miserable.

“A glamour so that Jay sees jaysom as jaysome could work. I will try and explain the details to him.”

“Try.”

“This is Jay. Even I can but try.”

Klaus nods. And steps – sideways, somehow, vanishing.

The wandering magician turns and looks at me. His gaze is steady. “Jay. A fae. Myself. This is a large step into a wider world than you knew.”

I nod. “It’s too big.”

“Sometimes. I can help you forget, though you’ll never quite forget Jay.” The man chuckles softly. “I don’t think even Jay could make himself forgotten like that.”

I take a deep breath. I nod.

“Forget,” he says, with a kindness that unmakes so much.

I almost speak, but it is too late to change my mind.

Until I wake, with the memory of even the forget in my head. And nothing forgotten. The magician knew. I don’t know how he knew I’d change my mind, but he knew.

I could return to work. Klaus might not be there. Or look like someone else. I check my bank account, finding over fifty thousand in savings. And an email, sender unknown.

‘For adventures,’ it says, and nothing else.

I resolve to share as much of those adventures as I can with everyone I meet. I am not Jay. But I think anyone can learn jaysome. I am to try.

One Evening, Not Jaysome

“What have you done?”

Power drives me to my knees. I’ve seen the wandering magician pissed off before. But I’ve never had the whole weight of his power against me. Not like this. There is a killing look in his eyes, his will a mountain without end. Magicians are human. I know this. But right now he feels like nothing so much as a force of nature, implacable and ferociously controlled.

“Nathen –,” I try.

His name does not pause him at all. I swear reality itself quakes about us. Afraid. I remember the time he was kin to fae for a second. Somehow this feels beyond that. As though he were real, and everything about us nothing but illusion.

I stand, holding his gaze. The god inside me is the fear in shadows, the darkness in closets, the monster under the bed. Claws and teeth and anger that barely match my own. I don’t try and eat his magic; right now I doubt I’d survive. But I eat my own fear, fan my own anger. Find strength and keep on my feet.

“Magician.” I don’t recognize my own voice for a moment. “Do you have any idea what Jay did?”

“Explain.” My anger doesn’t flow around him so much as crash back into me. There is no give to his expression.

“Jay took it upon himself to make sure I never lost a single calorie despite every diet I have attempted in four fucking years!”

“Because the calories would be sad if they left you,” the magician says, and almost there is a hint of humour, of humanity in the reply.

“I. Don’t. Care. Why.”

“You don’t have a choice, Charlie. You left Jay scared of you. So he ran away.” The magician smiles. I thought I’d seen his coldest smile a few times, the one he tried to hide from Jay and me. This smile is a dark fury I’ve never seen before, remote and alien like a flicker of light in a bottomless hole.

“Nath –.Magician –.”

“Where can Jay run that he believes you cannot follow?” he demands, and the truth of those words forces itself upon me.

“Oh. Oh shit,” I whisper. “He ran back Outside the universe.”

“Almost. I pulled him back in,” and his tone is so bleak I stumble back from it more than the terrible power that hasn’t let up.

“How?”

He blinks, and the pressure is gone. All that power, all the rage, and he pulls it back inside without even a hint it cost him anything to do. “I may tell you. Some day. Jay is hiding in a couch. You will find him, and you will apologize.”

He doesn’t make demands, not like this. Magicians don’t. He turns and walks away.

I open my mouth. He is Honcho. He is Nathen. he is the wandering magician. But none of those names seem to fit him right now. It will be gone. He’ll be the person I know soon. His name will the name I know. But I can’t shake the certainty that he is no longer the person I know, and paid a price to save Jay that neither Jay nor I will ever understand.

I try to say I’m sorry, but the words aren’t enough. Not for anything that matters at all.

Status Updates May 2018

“There is something terrible inside you,” the witch whispered to Boy.

“I think, Boy said after he thought it over, "you mean my conscience? Bess says that not everyone has one and Mr. Fox would probably call it a burden. Do you mean that?”

“Oh, child. If only it was that simple. The world holds many evil people who would be quite less evil were they entirely devoid of goodness.”

Once upon a time there was a king who wasn’t assassinated solely because no one else wanted the thankless task of trying to run the poorest kingdom in the world. The generational plan to make the royal family immune to assassins and coups had succeeded, but even the king sometimes privately wondered if it had been worth the cost.

He says every scar is a battle he lost, with a laugh that breaks to hear. He says burn marks aren’t victory laps, showing the places on his thigh where his uncle stopped smoking. Hre knows enough to know that to survive is not the same as to live, but he knows the lesson too well. There is something almost cruel in how he turns away from love as though it were another form of pain.

The head of the agricultural division of the company did not take kindly to learning their position had them listed as the CIEIEIO in the executive hierarchy

Partial contents of a cover letter:

“But you don’t [redacted]. Or swear.”

“It might be a failing. Point is that I can’t just get a job. Every place wants resumes, interviews, sometimes even cover letters that don’t feel as dull as ditch water. Which isn’t dull at all.”

“You could have said as dull as tap water, but we all know about fluoride.”

“...this was a really bad idea, wasn’t it?”

“I have no idea. YOU are Josh. I don’t even know who I am meant to be in this narrative. You’d think an English major would know that. Instead I’m just a voice in the ether. I can’t even be a muse since those don’t exist. Where were you? Right: applying for a job. You have been using Word and its variants for about twenty five years, and typing far too much fiction in that time. Use that. For once.”

“And reading. Being an English major means reading a lot. Sometimes too much.”

“The apartment is full of books, yes. I have no idea what you expect me to segue into from this. Especially when you don’t own a Segway.”

If gravity were real we would still be together.

“If we continue down this path, one of us will die,” Protagonist said.

“We could not kill each other.” Antagonist paused. “Or have you not considered that option?”

“I am the protagonist. You are the antagonist. We know how this story ends.”

“I’d argue that we don’t. I am an antagonist, yes. There could be others you can kill instead of me?”

“That’s not how this works!”

“What kind of protagonist are you if you can’t change the story?”

“You don’t understand. I’m the protagonist because I can’t.”

“You are dying. It’s not blood: you need some Vitamin D.”

“D? I do not know that one.”

“Pardon me?”

“When I was a child, vitamins only went up to B,” the vampire explained.

“No.” Protagonist pulled his hand free from his sword as the city guard moved toward him. “If I fight them, they are only going to lose.”

The city guard captain stared. “Who are you talking to?” she demanded.

“This isn’t important to you. Consider the Narrator a kind of god.” Protagonist looked about, snapped his blade out and sliced a pattern through the air before sheathing it. “I don’t have many skills, but I am very good with a blade. Better than four guards, and my ignorance of the law about keeping my blade peace-bound in the evening is not reason enough to attack me. You might not have heard of me, but you recognize that skill.”

“Are you talking to us now?” the captain asked.

“Yes. Fine. Call it a misunderstanding. I go my way, you go yours.”

“And if we say no?”

“Then I humiliate all of you and you’re forced to declare some foolish revenge I don’t want to deal with.”

That doesn’t have to happen, the Narrator protested, but the guard sheathed their blades, offered a warning and let Protagonist depart. Grudgingly.

Once upon a time there was a hero who never noticed their call to adventure because they were busy beating a game on their phone.

I ran away. They say there are things no one can run from. But you never know until you try.

I said I was drowning under the weight of your expectations. You just laughed and said I had no idea what drowning was.

And you were right.

The stories about the seariders focus on the fact that the builders are a small subset of them who made mines for reasons that were logical and involved making use of their short stature. The weavers in the woods never used bows and arrows at all.

Protagonist paused mid-stride. “I am on my way to the market for some fruit. Is there any particular reason I thought that?”

“This is dramatic emphasis. Making sure you know they are not dwarves and elves,” the Narrator snapped.

“...but I have no idea what a dwarf or elf is?”

“Good. Keep it that way. Also, Westrin is not set in Europe in the middle ages! That trope is done to death!”

Protagonist stopped. “I don’t even know what any of that means.” And surprised himself by adding: “Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m fine,” the Narrator said in a tone normally used to declare war.

Protagonist wisely continued to the market in the small hope that these were varieties of foreign food he would avoid eating.

I asked if you loved me.

But you said if I had to ask, then I already knew the answer was no.

“I haven’t followed politics in weeks. I just... I can’t keep doing this.”

“That’s how they win.”

“How is it that we burn out, but they never do?”

“I’m scared.”

“No, you’re not.”

“… what?”

“Everyone does a typo about that, autocorrects in their own head.”

“I don’t understand?”

“It’s sacred. Not scared.”

This isn’t the time for jokes!”

“I’m sorry, Commissioner. But as long as the Joker escapes from Arkham it’s always time for jokes.”

“Open up! This is the police!”

“I haven’t opened up to anyone in years.”

I have never written a poem about you, not even the ones that mention you by name.

For Sale: Conscience. Free to a bad home.

By age 35, you too should be a meme.

“There are two paths before you. Down one lies riches, down the other -.”

“I walk between them.”

I am updating my Privacy Policy because so many other places are. Please check your emails accordingly.

I wonder about jobs where you help animals act better in movies.

Imagine the fun of being able to say you'd given acting lessons to a goldfish.

“How do you stop being afraid, when it feels like that is all there is room for you to be?”

“There are other things, even if the fear waits under them. Even our shadows cast shadows. There can be a slim hope in that.”

The most important thing about writing a short story is deciding the name of a smog inside a bathtub is Sidney.

I think there must be a sherlock Holmes pastiche somewhere that goes like this:

"Good day, ma'am. Are you well?"

"I am afraid."

"Nonsense! There is nothing be afraid of. You got up around six because you always got up that early at the farm you lived on as a child for a brief formative time, had a small breakfast with only two eggs, put on your second-best dress, took two trains to get here, stopped at the Piccadilly line, read only the Times on the train and got lost at Clement Street on your way here and you're paranoid everyone is watching you. Oh dear."

“You’re not like other boys I’ve dated,” she said.

“I know – I –. You can’t trust me,” he said.

“You think that’s why?” she asked almost gently.