NOVEL NEXT 76. Off-Script Divergence
Excerpt¹ from Yenna Bookbinder’s ‘A Travelling Mage’s Almanac.’
“I could see that the Ledger was making sense. It brought to mind a lot of unexplainable moments of spontaneity in my life, foremost amongst those being my decision to join the expedition. What had I earned for such trusting vulnerability? Injuries, pain, questions I hadn’t the time to answer, uncomfortable moments with people. Why had I ever deigned to leave my home? I did agree, despite certain reservations. It was the moral thing to do—so no one else would suffer for a moment of weakness.”
Despite Yenna’s abject confusion, the Ledger began to walk away. They stalked forward with practiced fluidity, a strut across a stage that they had performed countless times. Then, reaching some satisfying point, the Ledger reached out with a gauntleted hand and plucked Mulvari from thin air.
In a sudden rush of noise and sound, all the missing people reappeared. Mulvari was the first one Yenna noticed of course, the alchemist’s eyes wide with terror as he fruitlessly attempted to escape the Ledger’s grasp. The chanting horde of ghouls were impossible to miss, and Yenna rushed to cover her ears as the silence shattered around her, ears once again battered by the baffling, discordant prayers of the undead.
Nadhan did not look to be surprised at all by the sudden reappearance of the Ledger—perhaps she had perceived it differently, their conversation taking place in plain sight or maybe even in the blink of an eye. Instead, the warrior looked ecstatic, a long tongue running across sharp teeth in an open display of excitement. She knew what was coming for Mulvari, and was glad to be party to it.
“Mulvari, I am truly sorry,” The Ledger spoke, even as their gauntlets shifted their grip to take him by the neck. “When the world is remade in light and perfection, without pain and suffering, your sadness and agony shall cease to be.”
“Stop! Stop, you– get off of me! Help! Nadhan! Get– urk! Get it off me!”
Mulvari squirmed, attempting to repeat his trick of slipping free of grasps. Even Nadhan had been unable to hold him, but the Ledger held no such troubles—one hand around his neck, the other pressed flat against his chest, the armoured figure held him in place.
The Ledger hadn’t pinned the man’s hands, and Mulvari was not yet out of tricks. However, each of his gambits fell flat immediately and inexplicably. Mulvari flicked a glass bead out of his sleeve, intending to catch it, only for the tiny thing to slip out of his grasp and roll away amongst the ghoul pit. From a pocket he drew a metal tube-thing, a hand-cannon of some type, but when the hammer fell to ignite powder and blast a projectile through metal, it merely made a dull click. Piece by piece, the alchemist rummaged through pockets for a means to escape, and moment by moment the Ledger’s hands glowed brighter and brighter.
Mulvari must have sensed what the Ledger was trying to do. He turned to Yenna, eyes pleading—a man willing to do whatever it took, even beg a former enemy, just to stay alive and whole.
“She will not help you,” The Ledger intoned. “She has agreed to this.”
“I have not!”
Some wellspring of courage shot up in Yenna. That knot of emotion in her chest raged inside her, begging to be freed, and her quicksilver dagger appeared in hand. Cold logic, for once, agreed with her assessment of the situation—if Mulvari is freed and the Ledger incapacitated, then we can both turn on Nadhan and get out of here. The Ledger is acting odd, I must make use of this moment!
Nadhan’s eyes opened in surprise as Yenna wove a spell circle with the tip of her dagger. The warrior leaping to stop her was exactly what the mage expected—the spell was meant for her. A heavy resistance defied her attempts to power the circle, but the spell was entirely magecraft. It was a system that was designed to be robust, self-powering, and capable of alteration to fit the environment—it would take more than the churning force of countless praying corpses to deny the shifting algebra of arcane symbology. With a neat slash, Yenna finished the circle and pushed her magical energy into it.
It felt like moving a leg that had been still for too long, a kind of aching relief of motion. The spell flashed into place momentarily, and Nadhan tensed to dodge an incoming projectile. Ducking low, she did the exact opposite of what she should have done—the coating of slick oil across the ground that appeared under her feet betrayed her skewed centre of gravity, and sent her sprawling in a shout of rage.
Mulvari had resorted to kicking and scratching at the Ledger, his eyes twitching and rolling back as he howled in pain. The armoured gauntlet on his chest was shining with an unearthly rainbow light, and Yenna could see that it was slowly sinking into his body.
Trotting away from Nadhan, Yenna circled around to keep all three of them in her sight. Her new spell circle was intended to be a wave of force, empowered by Flowing water to knock the Ledger over—yet, when Yenna completed the spell and attempted to fill it with her understanding of Flow, the spell failed and left that knot in her chest feeling even tighter.
Is something here stopping my witchcraft?
Yenna had used witchcraft in plenty of unusual situations, and even unwillingly—if it was a matter of strong emotions, she could feel plenty, but they were trapped somehow within her. Yenna could feel a blockage inside her body, too many things trying to move through too small a passageway. The more she thought about it, the more it pained her. Part of her mind was possessed by a sudden urge to reach within and tear apart whatever barrier was preventing her witchcraft, to take the quicksilver dagger in her hand and plunge it straight into her chest. Make a new opening, that evil part of her mind whispered, let your emotions spill forth like sweet, dark wine.
The mage’s hand shook with terror at her own thoughts. Mulvari was still struggling, though he was losing consciousness fast. Nadhan was caught trying to extract herself from the near-frictionless pool of slippery oil that Yenna had conjured, but every moment gave her a new insight on how to maneuver her body, how to free herself to come and end Yenna’s life.
The mage realised through a fog of adrenaline that Nadhan was shouting something, bellowing furiously in a foreign tongue full of harsh, throaty sounds and piled-together consonants. The pieces of that cruel language clicked together like the building blocks of a spell, and the weight of them hit Yenna with the force of a thrown brick. The mage barely had time to process that Nadhan had cast a spell, before her knees began to grow weak. Her entire body felt heavy, pressed down under some unusual pressure, and her mind grew weak with strain. Emergency reserves of energy in Yenna’s cervine body, held for the true do-or-die moments of action inches from the hungry maw of a predator, spooled up and empowered the disciplined mind, allowing Yenna a modicum of concentration in relatively slowed perceptual time.
Nadhan had done something to her, the first time she grabbed Yenna—and had reinforced it now, too. It was something designed to keep her spontaneous witchcraft in check, to bottleneck the power inside her and prevent a sudden escape. A countermeasure that served well when Yenna was in-hand—the warrior was more than fast enough to prevent the mage from attempting magecraft while holding her captive, but this was the only way she could be prevented from suddenly bursting into flame or exploding into a nova of lightning or ice.
Yenna reached down inside herself—figuratively this time, not the literal attempt her mind had urged her towards before—extending her awareness deep into the place her magic came from. Her soul, as far as Yenna understood it, a place thought beyond the reach of all others, was encased in a prison of claws. In her mind’s eye they were harsh talons, sharp claws, rounded, hooked, long and short, all manner of animal and beast claws knitted together to keep her magic deep inside. Her thoughts, feelings and emotions could free themselves through the gaps, but the magical flow they produced, the vital energies of witchcraft, were too great to fit through.
But, isn’t witchcraft about questioning what’s possible?
Lumale came to mind. The old witch had never been terribly nice to her, and it did feel odd how willing the cautious old silupker was to teach her. The witch had made it clear she only did this to help contain and understand the black book, and Yenna understood that her failure to become a witch would have ended in self-destruction. Still, she had been right about a weakness of mages—they prodded and poked for new discoveries, but never returned to scratch away at those basic rules they thought iron-clad. Just what if this cage was not able to hold me?
Yenna didn’t have long to work—her rather mundane facets of physiology, the parts she didn’t know or have words for, were failing quickly under the demands of mental acceleration down here at the end of her rope. Prodding at the gaps in the cage, rolling the knotted emotions across every metaphysical surface from within, the mage knew that releasing that pent up energy would more than bolster her through. A nap afterwards would be nice, however.
She pushed and pulled, poked and prodded, pried and peeked and tugged. The claws shifted to halt her, tore at her semi-real insides as she struggled against them, an impenetrable cage where only information could cross through its bars. However, Yenna knew that information was enough.
In the world around her, the Ledger had its hand entirely inside Mulvari’s chest. Nadhan had slid her way to the edge of the oil-slick and was preparing to stand. Yenna’s time was running out, but she was so close. Her conscious mind sent instructions to the wellspring of magic in her soul, ordered it to ignore the warning signs and loosen the ties that bound it together. These ties were there for a reason, that soul thread that she had first learned of from the unconscious words of the water elemental. To remove it was suicide—but to loosen it, that granted power.
Emotional energy acted as the grip, tugging at the loosened seam. The very act of awakening to the ability to manipulate magic eased it open, and Yenna was ready to forcefully open her soul to a dangerous degree. Pain shot through her, and through stars she could see Nadhan preparing to pounce. She needed more time. A voice cried out from within her—I need help!
A red blur answered her heart’s call, a moment distilled in time. Nadhan had been about to launch forward from the very edge of solid ground, only to be bowled over by a swinging mass of muscle and flesh. Narasanha had arrived, wielding the chains that had bound her as her weapons.
In an unearthly cry of rage, the crimson bodyguard tangled together with her azure sister, beating her with whirling chains, lumps of stone attached to the ends of each. They rolled across the platform in slow motion, almost distracting Yenna from her task. Taking a deep breath, the mage–no, the witch gripped tight the very thread that kept her soul safe and tore it further open.
The sensation was akin to tearing off one’s own skin. Yenna felt herself scream from afar, her mind, body and soul suddenly out of alignment as the shouting of the praying ghouls battered not just her ears but the innermost sanctum of her being. At the same time, her magic flared to life, casting aside the cage of claws like an afterthought. Power pulsed through her being, her frail limbs and shaking knees suddenly bolstered by a shimmering heat-haze of magical energy.
All of her emotions came out in one exhilarating torrent. Fear and despair, the darkest tinge of Pride, crackled into the form of a halo of electrical energy, striking at the ground around her with black bolts of terror. Rage, at her imprisonment, at the violation of her safety, at the thought of her harmed friends, blossomed as a cloak of deep crimson flame across her arms and shoulders. Joy, at the sight of Narasanha freed, of her ally here at her side in her hour of greatest need, manifested as a pulse of force that rippled out from her, washing across everyone nearby. Certainty held her limbs up, reinforced her body, covered her in armour of stone that protected her from her own wild emotions, even as the fear of death manifested in shards of Stasis-made ice, and the tumultuous truth of her own power raged in a glowing aura of pale Flowing water.
Yenna felt like an avatar of a god, all-powerful and unstoppable. She turned and blasted Nadhan with a crackling bolt of black lightning, the warrior’s side scorched just as dark as she was sent rolling across the floor. With a sweep of her hand she silenced the nearest of the howling ghouls in dark fire, and a blizzard of razor-sharp icicles shattered against the Ledger’s armour.
Even as Yenna sent waves of wind and water raging over them, the Ledger did not so much as budge. It did not react, could not react. Yenna knew, somehow, that it—for it was not a person, but a construct of impossibly complex design—was reading from the wrong script. Events had diverged from what the Ledger expected, and unable to adapt or change, it continued to follow a fated future that Yenna had closed it off from. But even all of Yenna’s magical might could not stop the Ledger’s triumph.
It tore its hand back out of Mulvari’s chest, the weathered old alchemist twitching in unconsciousness as it withdrew a shimmering strand of light from his chest. It was a dazzling white, a strand of fluid diamond like the gaps in the Ledger’s armour. It spooled in the Ledger’s hand, even as the construct dropped the inert body of the alchemist to the floor in a crumpled heap. The Ledger turned, to a place where Yenna may well have been, and held it out.
“This is the binding of a soul. It has the power to change reality—to alter one tiny thing. I have asked it to grant your wish. It shall serve as the ‘key’.”
Then, the Ledger turned. A sudden snap of attention, its entire body rotating to face Yenna. Something about it had changed. It was back on script, and looking straight at the witch before it.
“If you truly wish to destroy me, you will not do so with fire and lightning. Take the key.”
“No!” Yenna screamed in anger, shooting a gout of concentrated heat across its armour. With her other hand she flung an orb of purple lightning at it, the arcing bolts earthing themselves in the ground. “Stop, damn you!”
“I cannot be stopped. It is Fate. You will take the key.”
“I won’t! I defy Fate! I’ve already done it once!”
With another sweep of her hands, Yenna conjured a whirlpool into existence, a tearing riptide of water to drag the Ledger down. It continued walking forward, holding out the contents of its hand to Yenna. The witch screamed in frustration, and called out for its death—dark-tinged Stasis answered, freezing the water into pitch-black ice. For a moment it seemed it had worked, until the Ledger walked through it as though it weren’t there.
Yenna backed up, realising she was nearing the edge of the circular platform. She called out to the unearthly stone at the Ledger’s feet, to reach up and grasp the monstrous being, only to watch in dismay as the Certainty of stone shattered upon the inevitability of Fate.
The witch concentrated, called to mind her most joyful moments—her new friends, her students, the quiet moments and kind moments, the laughter and relief, every little scrap of it. She took those thoughts, bundling them with care, and turned them into a blade made of roiling wind—vivid green Joy, to shatter the darkness and return her
happiness to the world. Yenna swung it down, and the Ledger batted it aside with contemptuous ease.“Take the key, Yenna. Create a new world of light and love, and erase me and my horrors from it.”
The Ledger took Yenna’s hand and pressed a small piece of metal into her palm. A simple, black key, perfectly sized for the lock on the book.
¹ - It is unclear where this excerpt came from. While I was writing this retelling of the tale, I discovered it scrawled in an unfamiliar handwriting on a loose piece of paper in one of my copies of the Almanac. An older copy, I traditionally referenced it when I felt that more modern translations were inadequate—being second-hand it is delightfully packed with little scribbled notes and scraps tucked away between the pages, but I did not recognise this one at all. Regardless, it felt appropriate, so I have included it here.
