Sunspot

7 AM. I refresh the page. Shouldn’t it be starting now? The stream chat to the right of the video player is already rushing by too fast to pick out more than a few individual messages, blurbs to the tune of “GET HYPE GET HYPE” and “SPAM THIS :tree: TO HELP BRI”, the simulated roaring chants of a crowd a hundred and twenty thousand strong rather than proper commentary. I refresh the page again and the video buffers for a moment—then it’s live.

“Hello hello, everybody!”

The video feed is drone footage from a few meters overhead, above two figures on a platform extruded from a milky white cliff face. The downward angle reveals that there’s nothing below the platform. No ground, no sea, just mist. Even through the screen, I’m gripped with vertigo and a sense of roiling dread in my stomach. It’s a long, long way down to the water. Neither figure is wearing safety harnesses of any sort, though both are ensheathed in carapace of the same color as the cliff. The speaker is standing, waving energetically up at the camera. Heung the Heron.

More proper commentary from my friends, the inner circle of “serious” fans, scrolled along my second monitor, a private chatroom.

starstar97: hey its e’s boyfriend

ezzen: oi 

ezzen: I’m more normal about him than you are about Heliotrope.

starstar97: oTL

moth30: it’s true. hes more like ezzens dad :3

ezzen: oTL

It was just teasing; my dad was a familiar enough topic with this crowd to be safe.

“I’m here with Bri way up at 14000 feet—that’s 4300 meters—on the Spire’s south face. It’s a balmy thirteen degrees F, minus nine C, and we’re here today to splice in some new spool. This section,” he gestured at the cliff face, “is pretty much straight through the skin from the arboretum, which is why we’re doing this outside today, because Reggy would kill us for doing it next to his magnolias. Bri, want to walk them through how this is going to work?”

I zoned out of Brianna’s explanation. We on the forums had pretty quickly worked it out when the announcement for this stream had gone up a week ago. I glanced over at my second monitor again.

starstar97: told ya. high throughput splice, direct v link. spool 16

starstar97: ds, whats on that spool right now?

ezzen: I mean, when they said it would be Bri, it was going to be this or a rain step demo :P

ezzen: She’s lowest % latticed rn.

DendriteSpinner: @starstar97 lower habitation and some of the manufacturing, so it makes sense they’re putting more of the same for this round of expansions

ezzen: But yeah. Check out how she’s moving the dermis.

ezzen: That’s not even glyph-based!

ezzen: This shit is so rad.

This was routine construction work, really, and this wasn’t even the construction proper, so it wasn’t that interesting to those of us who kept up with the Vaetna. Still, I was interested in what she was actually doing, pulling away layers of the cliff face—the Spire’s skin—to reveal more raw lattice circuitry. She would put her hand toward the surface and the shell-like material would flow outward and away, like water below a helicopter. Eventually she fell silent and Heung picked up.

“I’m seeing a lot of you guys wondering how safe we are up here. Well—”

He stepped over to the ledge of the platform they had grown from the skin and peered over dramatically. He made a show of “tripping” and falling halfway off, arms windmilling, before regaining his balance and sitting with his legs dangling over the ledge. He beckoned the camera down, to a more side view of him facing out toward the void while Bri worked.

“Short answer, it’s fine. Even if one of us did somehow fall, terminal velocity isn’t terminal for us. Me and Bri could probably survive it even without our carapace. Most of us could.”

“Except Mayari,” Bri muttered.

Heung ignored that. “Of course, most of you aren’t really asking about the altitude, more about the odds we’ll get company, with some of the dermis opened up like this. That’s the main reason I’m out here even though Bri could totally do this herself. Buddy system.”

I sipped some hot chocolate and curled up in my seat. The warmth of the drink was my respite from the frigid winter air leaking in through my windows. No coffee for me; it had never done much, and I preferred sweet to bitter this early in the morning. My monitors’ light bathed the otherwise-dark room, glinting off the mug’s rim and the Spire’s symbol printed on its exterior: a simplified design of its silhouette crisscrossed with cutouts representing the thread from which it was woven. My spear, propped against the desk, cast a long shadow across the room, shrouding Heung and Mayari in the poster of the ten’s helmets that was affixed over my bed. I shifted it slightly so that the shadow fell instead on a blank patch of wall.

Other posters adorned the walls with diagrams of the Spire, stylized lexicons of the first-order glyphs, and that era-defining shot of Sani facing the White House, sword in hand. A bookshelf next to my desk was stuffed to the brim with the burgeoning body of literature on magical theory, the short history of the Vaetna, and my own notebooks. I thought figurines were a bit tacky, but I did have random bits of scattered memorabilia from the local Gate’s merch shop the only time I had gone. A t-shirt with a stylized image of a heron lay at the top of the laundry pile on the floor.

I couldn’t imagine anybody would be stupid enough to try something today, not with Heung himself out here…although part of me was hoping we’d get some action. Obviously I’d be horrified at a serious attack, but Heung was…so cool, and part of me itched to see him move.

He sat comfortably over the hazy abyss, his spear in his lap. He always seemed light as a feather in his movements, as if gravity were more of a game than a law. My own motions were ugly, jerking things compared to the singular striking grace of the Heron, a gap in natures that no amount of training could overcome, mirrored in my own spear’s painstakingly hand-carved wooden frame versus the elegant manifested lattice of the Spire’s most iconic vaet. There was an envy there beyond the aesthetic; some basic part of me looked at him and wept that I would never be able to move like that. Still, it was good to have role models.

starstar97: e, stop eyefucking your spear

DendriteSpinner: lol

DendriteSpinner: are you?

ezzen: Aaaaaa. Fuck you star.

She knew me too well.

Bri had gotten the prep work done, and Heung directed the camera inward to show what she was doing. The internal lattices that make up the Spire’s structure, raw thread magic woven into lattice, were dizzying to look at directly. Four-dimensional, rhythmically shifting crosshatches and organic shapes that made your head hurt, forms of exotic matter like time crystals woven through more conventional solids with superfluids flowing between. It was entrancingly beautiful, and mysterious even to me—I had practically written the book on modern LM theory, and I could still barely make sense of what I was seeing. Bri’s commentary was welcome, now.

“That’s a backflow modulator—redundant, actually—that’s piping which jumps to here, and then comes up through some of these projectors and this {RHYTHM} chunk, these are the primary and secondary {MANIFEST} branes, and we go back and back to,” her finger stopped tracing at a black orb so dark it was like a void in reality, “the spool interface. I’m going to thread into it now.”

I watched, rapt, as her entire arm jerked and blurred before igniting with blinding white sparks, which flickered chaotically for a moment before aligning in spiky patterns like ferrofluid clinging to a magnet. The glob of magic twisted and twisted and twisted, growing thinner and denser, until it was a single thread of magic coming off a spool on her arm. The thread lashed for a moment before launching itself into the black orb. I clipped the last 20 seconds of footage and dropped it in the chatroom.

ezzen: Putting this here for later.

moth30: hm

moth30: 0:11 thats a type 1 display. no wonder theyre renovating

moth30: 0:14 oh and that’s why she called the modulator redundant lol

moth30: no way for it to go back upstream with this flow

ezzen: Redundant but not useless I think

ezzen: Sudden tug on the lattice from spool overdraw could definitely get enough upstream ripple for it to hit the mod

ezzen: Given how first-gen that display is. Orange third lol

The Vaetna sat back on her haunches as the thread fed into the orb of nothingness. “And now we wait. Time for that Q&A, H?”

“Yeah! First up…”

The stream overlay shifted, a question running along the bottom. I sat up in my chair. Last night I had gotten a notification from skychicken—the owner of the forum—that some of my own discussions and theories had been viewed by an upper Spire IP address.

DendriteSpinner: fingers crossed, ez

“This one comes from Twitter. Bri, what’s your favorite animal?”

Damn. Not mine, and trite to boot. Starting with a softball, probably. The others agreed.

moth30: boring

moth30: shes just gonna say mantis shrimp. or bees or something

“I’ve always really loved mantis shrimp. But that’s on my Wikipedia, I think—so for the sake of a more interesting answer, let’s say…the leafcutter ant, Atta cephalotes. They cultivate fungus! Hm. Is it boring for a Vaetna to say my favorite animal is a eusocial insect? It feels boring. ‘Wow, they work together to build stuff, no wonder they like them.’ I stand by it, though.”

starstar97: thats bri, lol

starstar97: but at least its better than

starstar97: (watch this)

Heung laughed. “You don’t gotta be self-conscious about it, better answer than mine. I would have just said—”

“Herons. Shocker, that.”

I rolled my eyes too. The chatroom tittered at star’s prediction, so obvious she hadn’t even needed to say it. He had a brand. His fingers played in the air, working some invisible-to-us readout.

“Alright, next up, from Reddit this time—Who’s got your favorite rain step?”

“This is harassment.”

Of the ten Vaetna, Bri was one of only two who couldn’t perform the maneuver, and the only one who couldn’t do it at all—Mayari’s was just too high-ripple to technically qualify.

“What? Naaah. I would never—”

He danced out of the way of Bri’s free fist, laughing, twisting over the edge of the platform in a way which reason insisted should send him tumbling down. “Seriously, I’m not the one who picked these. Go beat up Sani.”

She sighed. “Well, it’s not him. Hm.”

I was quite partial to Heung’s for its directness; couldn’t get hit by the raindrops—or bullets—if your entire being was momentarily concentrated to a single thrust of the spear. But I was a fanboy like that. Could do with the imagery there being a little less phallic, but if that were a dealbreaker for me, I wouldn’t be obsessed with the five-mile-tall shaft sticking out of the North Atlantic.

“I guess…well, the type I want to do is like Kat’s, how she splits. But in terms of elegance, it’s gotta be Sahan.”

She put some footage on the stream overlay to illustrate her point. In shaky cell phone footage, Katya splintered into a thousand shards which floated in the rough approximation of a person as they darted around like a school of hyperactive fish. She walked through a stream of bullets at an almost leisurely pace in contrast to the frenzied dance of her constituent particles. In the other clip, Sahan simply moved through a stream of energy, implacable. Something about him was more vivid, more real, than anything else on the screen—including the two Vaetna on the platform.

Heung chuckled. “I still have no idea how he does that.”

I rolled my eyes.

ezzen: Lying through his goddamn teeth.

ezzen: We SAW him do the same kind of {NULL}-{GRASP} last year.

ezzen: Although ig he probably can’t snapweave it.

_twilitt: thats still just your theory ez

starstar97: a vaetna theory!

starstar97: but if anybody outside the vaetna would know itd be e

ezzen: >/////~/////<

ezzen: anybody can learn about this stuff

Bri shrugged, adjusting how she sat. The spool was thinning out as it vanished into the orb, joining with the Spire’s own lattice. “It’s, uh, force-of-will bullshit. I can’t do it either, obviously, but the ripple speaks for itself.”

That, at least, was undeniable; calculating out the exact values was wholly unnecessary when even witnessing a recording of the technique made the reality of the room around me feel fragile and uncertain by comparison. White ripple made manifest; the reality of unreality. Heung nodded appreciatively.

“That it does. Didn’t he try to teach you?”

That was rhetorical; “vaetna gets hit in the face by a tennis ball for six minutes” had like 170 million views on YouTube. Brianna’s pout was visible despite the fact that her expression was completely concealed in her carapace. Heung leaned back to pat her head; she swatted his hand away, in good spirits.

“Alright, alright. Next up…”

My heart stopped as I saw the words on the screen. My own. A nerd question, the kind of thing that wasn’t a crowd-pleaser, meaning that someone—Sani, apparently—had thought it was genuinely worth answering on its own technical merits, or maybe for a funny anecdote.

“From ‘Ezzen’ on the forums: What was the rationale for switching from pink-green-blue to silver-blue-pink schemas on current-gen lattice displays?”

starstar97: LETS FUCKIN GO E

_twilitt: no way ezzen you made it

DendriteSpinner:

hell yeah

DendriteSpinner: hopefully this will put an end to that fucking thread

ezzen: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

_twilitt: ‘breaking: “why is little magic light pink and not blue?” thread locked after 1394 pages of heated debate, death threats; turns out it was just a typo’

ezzen: Ugh don’t even joke.

skychicken: told you they were looking, ez

starstar97: hi sky!

Bri made a clicking noise. “Been a while since we had one of their questions on.”

One year, five months and two days, in fact; they had shouted out one of my papers where I had mathed out some third-order chains by hand and proven that GWalk wasn’t calculating blue ripple correctly under some circumstances. That had been entirely theoretical, though. By contrast, this question concerned the way a core component of the Spire’s circuitry functioned.

“Okay, so: I was overruled on this when we were working out the schemas initially. The resonances we use to turn ripple measurements into colored light for the displays were picked a little bit at random the first time, since we didn’t yet understand how they affected throughput across channels, and my opinion had—”

She stopped talking, head flicking to the right, then up. “Incoming.”

Heung made a burst of chatter, in the high-density language the Vaetna used to communicate in the span of milliseconds. The stream’s audio was a garbled mess for half a second as they argued. It can’t have been that serious or sensitive, since he threw up a translated transcription onscreen after the fact.

H: I didn’t hear anything.

B: Big ripple, two klicks up. Sounded like the Dubai splash.

H: I’d have heard that. I’ll check anyway, but…

B: Not sure it’s an attack. Flamefall, maybe?

H: Not in its shadow. Sit tight.

Then he vanished from the frame. The camera panned up after a moment to show the hole he had punched in the clouds. Then it adjusted back down to Bri. The spool on her arm had lost much of its volume now, probably two-thirds of the way done with the process. Her dagger had appeared in her free hand, a long, killing thing that would more resemble a shortsword if not for the way she held it like a knife fighter. She really put the vaet in Vaetna.

ezzen: Someone clip that? Check the TL?

DendriteSpinner: im on it

starstar97: ooh, “not in its shadow” is a fun translation

starstar97: a little poetic

DendriteSpinner: looks accurate.

Dendrite was the lead maintainer of Ungarble, the software people used to translate Vaetna chatter. “People” included major organizations like the PCTF, so he was arguably a bigger deal than me when it came to practical Vaetna-related stuff. I just liked glyphs.

skychicken: if it is like the dubai inferno we’re in for a show

ezzen: I feel sorta bad for being excited.

starstar97: meh, action is action :D

Bri looked at the camera, unworried despite her blade being bared. “Well, looks like you guys are getting some action. Not that we’ll see anything from here, probably.”

The public chat was going crazy, of course. Lots of people wanted her to send the camera after Heung, to follow the action, but she shrugged. No point. He was faster than it.

Silence on the screen for a few seconds. Then—

“He sees something. Confirming—it is flamefall…second confirmation from Mayari. The fuck? Check this out.”

She tossed some diagrams on screen, marking a trajectory over a map of the waters surrounding the Spire. After a moment, ghostly trails of other historical flamefalls were superimposed onto it. For the most part, they moved north-south, but this one was going east-west.

DendriteSpinner: not dubai

starstar97: lol it got lost

“Sadly it’s high enough up that I’m not expecting fireworks. So…where was I? Right, so the initial colors were pink-green-orange, and we eventually went with pink-green-blue after the first expansion because orange third was a hassle if the ripple was too high—”

I had a notetaking document on my second monitor, fingers blazing across the keyboard as I copied down what she was saying, and was also recording this part of the stream locally so I could review it later. This kind of historical knowledge of the Spire’s internal systems—LM projection and ripple management—was my passion, my specialty, and not usually the kind of thing that got covered in what little formal literature yet existed. Then the little readout tracking the flamefall’s progress switched direction, coming back toward the Spire from where it had been blazing west toward the Gulf of Mexico.

It all happened fast. Bri blurred, and the air distorted. Later, I’d realize that that was when she had thrown her knife, and the subsequent static noise and way the frame wobbled had been the sonic boom and shockwave. “Okay, maybe it is an attack.” She made another screech of Vaetna-speak, and after a moment—

A bolt of lightning punched down through the clouds. But it wasn’t lightning, it was the Heron diving toward the rogue flame. He lanced through it—

A light like the dawn, an aurora on fast-forward as two shards of the Frozen Flame met in a ripple of splintering fate—

One remaining spark screaming toward the camera—

Ashes—Did we—Ten becomes—Thread—Across the weft, not just the—Oh, of course it’d be—Bind it—It will hurt. Tell them we’re sorry.

Something hit me in the chest. I floated for a moment that seemed to last minutes. Then I hit something and fell to the floor. I was dazed, the breath knocked from my lungs.

Then I realized I was on fire.

I became a writhing animal. I couldn’t think, couldn’t even muster the coherence to stop, drop, and roll. I was so cold. I had to escape it, had to get it off, had to GET IT OFF GET IT OFF—I scrambled for my water bottle and poured it over my face to drown the pain. Nothing happened. I just got colder. It was all like before, fire upon my flesh—but this time, it was inside me.

I couldn’t get the flame off my skin, so it had to go. Anything to escape the pain. I clawed at my face and the skin peeled away. But I was still burning underneath it, so I kept going, flensing away muscle and fat, ripping off my nose in a desperate craze to escape. The fire was all over me, inside me, in my bones. I tore out my eye and tossed it aside to dig into my brain to smother the flames. Everything hurt and I was still burning and it was never going to end, a moment of agony frozen to extend forever. I was desperately scrabbling at the ruined, blackened flesh of my face. Pain and pain and pain and why wouldn’t it stop hurting me—

A moment of bizarre clarity. My remaining eye locked onto my spear. I grabbed it, angled it toward me. I hesitated, some rational, cowering part of my mind constructing a blossoming understanding as my perspective of what was happening to me shifted. Bri’s words. Maybe it is an attack. The memory of something lancing through what had been my father.

I plunged the spear up, into my empty eye socket, to kill the fire that had taken root inside my soul—

I woke up crumpled on the far side of my room, gasping. I couldn’t move for a few seconds, still reeling from whatever had just happened to me. My hand sluggishly roamed across my body. Whole. Unburnt, other than the old scar. Everything hurt, though. And I was still holding my spear in my other hand. What had happened? I tried to collect myself. I had been on fire. Flamefall—the Frozen Flame. The essence of magic. It had gone through the camera and hit me. If I hadn’t stopped it—it would have been an inferno, like Dad. Had I stopped it? I felt like I was forgetting something.

More pressing question—me only? The stream was still going, the monitor showing Heung crouched in front of the camera and poking at it. I stumbled across the room to slide my headphones back on. I was greeted by more bursts of static as the Vaetna spoke to one another, no on-screen transcription this time, a jump in security. Dendrite was providing translation soon after, though, so apparently no encryption or anything.

DendriteSpinner: “—no clue what that was.”

DendriteSpinner: “Huge ripple. Why’d [...] go for the camera?”

DendriteSpinner: “The audience? But the chat’s still going, so it wasn’t distributed.”

The Vaetna were reaching the same conclusion I had. Flamefalls struck people, not machinery, and they had correctly assumed that it had gone after one of the viewers. Why me? Because it had been my question? More likely—the original theories were true: I had somehow been marked the first time, and now the Frozen Flame had come to collect. Both?

The stream chat was already filling up with people saying “IT WAS ME”. Vultures. With shaking hands, I began to write.

ezzen: it hit me

_twilitt: wtf

_twilitt: no bullshit?

ezzen: i was

ezzen: on fire

starstar97: holy shit. u ok? did you just get flametouched?

ezzen: idk

ezzen: I’m fine I think?

ezzen: Sorry, still coming down.

DendriteSpinner: proof? i believe you but

starstar97: ds they just got fuckin FLAMETOUCHED, lay off

DendriteSpinner: sorry

DendriteSpinner: gonna look for similar cases

ezzen: Dw, no harm done I think.

moth30: you should really post on the forum

moth30: THE ezzen just got flametouched

moth30: what are the fuckin odds

Quite low; roughly one in two hundred million given the average number of flamefalls per year and the essentially random distribution. I looked around, did another once-over of my body. I was untouched, but—

ezzen: I think I stopped ignition by stabbing myself with my spear.

On top of that first number, one in five flamefalls became infernos.

ezzen: It didn’t actually do anything to me, but look.

I sent a photo of the wooden tip of my spear, cast in stark shadow by the light of the monitors. It had been warped, blackened by heat, almost charred, but more than that, it had taken on a strange, lumpy texture along the surface, like an icicle half-melted and refrozen a dozen times through winter. It…fuzzed, a bit, at the edges, like my eyes couldn’t decide where it ended and the air around it began.

ezzen: Ripple warping, right? Am I going crazy?

_twilitt: holy shit

starstar97: damn, frozen AND flame

moth30: yeah that’s legit

DendriteSpinner: confirming, that looks a hell of a lot like the rebar from the st louis ff in 2018

DendriteSpinner: no damage to your room though?

ezzen: No. All in my head I guess?

ezzen: I’ll go make that post.

starstar97: e

starstar97:

THINK

starstar97: if youre a flamebearer now you gotta fucking move

starstar97: you gotta get the fuck over to a gate unless you want the peacies or zeroday or whoever to fist your entire ass

She was right. Bad things happened to Flamebearers in the open. They—we?—were too valuable, as ammunition or batteries or ingredients, consumable resources for the novel and terrible war machines of a world newly come into magic. And that was the good scenario, one where I wasn’t devoured by the flame and became a rampaging thing of magic and fire that had to be put down. I had to assume I had already gotten past that point by stabbing myself.

I had fantasized for years about what would happen if I were flametouched, chosen by whatever idiot divinity governed these things, going to the Spire and becoming a Vaetna. All of us had; this group self-selected for that kind of person. But now that it was actually happening, the depth of danger and my own unpreparedness were coming into stark clarity. Outside the swaddling comfort of an idealized dream, the sharp edges of danger were pressing into my psyche, making me jumpy, panicky, uncertain. I had defaulted to making a forum post. Some of the others had given it more serious thought, though.

skychicken: agreed with star, that ship might have already sailed

skychicken: this has just gotten big and dangerous and beyond our paygrade

skychicken: assuming of course you ARE flametouched which might not actually be the case

moth30: CHECK THE STREAM

“—again, we have a hotline for reporting magic events, including flamefall. So if you know anything about what just happened or who was involved, number and link are onscreen…now.”

starstar97: no point

starstar97: itll just get flooded by false reports

moth30: man what the fuck is happening

starstar97: ikr

starstar97: this is some movie shit

My conscious, rational mind was catching up with the panic. Of course, the Vaetna knew that direct reporting mechanisms would get inundated to the point of uselessness, but there wasn’t much else to do until they could backtrace the ripple toward me. And other groups would be doing the same—ones who I really didn’t want to catch me, according to the rumors. The PCTF already had me on record somewhere, even if they weren’t necessarily watching me closely anymore. Meaning…

ezzen: So I should just go to the Gate?

starstar97: yeah

moth30: every second you delay increases the chance you’re gonna get found

DendriteSpinner: christ this sounds scary

DendriteSpinner: let us know if we can help

skychicken: ez, don’t answer that. stop talking.

skychicken: don’t even say which gate or how far away you are

skychicken: i can’t guarantee this room is leak-proof against a three-letter agency, even if i trust you all individually

skychicken: (nothing personal, DS)

ezzen: Wasn’t gonna. Signing off for now.

DendriteSpinner: (no prob, sky. just worried)

starstar97: stay safe.

starstar97: send pics once youre in!

_twilitt: let us know when you’re good

Skychicken went above and beyond, direct-messaging me.

skychicken: you need to figure out whether youre an actual VNT now or if that was just weird residue

He was right—the last time a flamefall had been intercepted, the fragments hadn’t actually made their way to a recipient in any shape for them to really be called a Flamebearer. Sometimes, it was just residuals. I could be the same, and there was an easy enough way to test. I grabbed a bit of scrap paper and scribbled the most basic glyph in the lexicon from memory, so simple that it could be fully captured in only two dimensions, a round and gradiented thing.

ezzen: youre right

ezzen: trying a cast

The actual act of casting, on the other hand, was unintuitive. I thought there was something inside me, the flame’s presence, but how to tug at it, weave it into the glyph? There was sort of a conventional wisdom in it, popularized by a video about casting somatically, from during the firestorms, when there had been no official word on anything about magic. Heel of my hand over my breastbone, thump upward, dislodge it. Cough at the same time, as if you were trying to spark a fire with your diaphragm. Done correctly, you wouldn’t literally breathe fire, but you’d know it when it happened. I had done this before, when I was younger, hoping that the flame would somehow manifest in me despite not having been touched, a near-miss. It never had, of course.

This time was different.

Thump.

A sputtering cough. It felt like I was jumpstarting a car. A burst of energy, a definite kind of “sparking”, but no ignition. A thrill ran through me. This was real.

Thump.

More that time? But not at the tipping point. I tried to visualize the flame inside me igniting, taking shape. Not burning me uncontrollably this time, hopefully. I had spent seven years hoping for this—preparing for it, in a sense, although the fantasies had bowed to the realism of the mundane as my teen years went on. But now—

Thump.

Pain. Heat—too much to bear. Flooded with energy, I stood, trying to will it to obey me. No flame, no flame, just magic. I stared at the glyph. I put my other hand over the one on my chest and kind of tugged, and something sizzling and sparking came forth, drawing a thread. Well, “thread” was entirely too fine of a word, evoking the clean singularity of energy I had seen Brianna pull. It was more of a tangle. In my peripheral vision, the shadows of the room went insane. It was magic, and I pushed it into the glyph, along the lines, back and forth down the gradient. It was a clumsy imitation of what I had seen in countless videos, but I had no frame of reference, no muscle memory, so I did the best I could. The glyph did most of the work, really.

No points for guessing what {ASH} did. The Frozen Flame was, in part, the magical equivalent of an oxidizer, and this glyph focused on that aspect of it, turning matter into lower energy matter. Highly destructive, one of the most basic weapons in a Flamebearer’s arsenal. I flinched at the pulse of heat and light, even knowing it was coming. Cameras didn’t capture how bright the flare was.

I should have considered where I put the rune. It scooped out a sphere of the desk’s matter and turned it into a pile of something else, something every instinct in my body said was unclean, of no value whatsoever, pure waste. Even actual ash had lots of valid uses—this stuff was just worthless and deleterious, an offense to other matter more worthy of the title. I gingerly shoved it into the trash can, automatic domesticity taking over before I processed what had just happened.

I had just woven magic. I was a Flamebearer, a VNT. My heart leapt. The terror deepened, old memories and fresh danger.

ezzen: holy shit. it worked

skychicken: congratulations. and also you are now in SO much more danger, jfc

skychicken: going to put up some dummy posts similar to your experience to hopefully cover your trail a bit

ezzen: That sounds really dangerous.

ezzen: For you, I mean.

skychicken: not nearly as much danger as you’re in

skychicken: you matter now, ez

skychicken: well, you specifically already mattered imo

skychicken: but i mean ripple wise

skychicken: im sure i dont need to tell you of all people this but you have to try to minimize

skychicken: for now, run.

skychicken: ill be in touch. stay safe

My mind was racing a mile a minute. Was I seriously about to drop everything and run away to the Spire? That was my dream, but—it was so sudden.

I was fortunate to live relatively close to a Gate, hardly fifty miles from the one attached to Heathrow that serviced the British Isles, but I’d have to go by bus or taxi, in the open. There was a very real and terrifying risk that some black-ops group dropped a spell on my head and just scooped me straight to some fucking underground holding cell, in public or not. It had happened before, and people didn’t come back from that. Not as people, anyway.

The journey I was now facing had always been a dream of mine, since the moment the Spire had punctured the world. It represented an impossible twist of the future away from the slow decline into widening class divide and spiraling climate disaster, a blazing beacon of hope after the dark days following the coming of magic to the world. Machina ex deus, the work of momentary gods. The only reason I hadn’t gone before was because the Vaetna’s benevolence had logistical limits, and despite being unemployed I was still in a fairly low-priority group for resettlement compared to actual refugees and the other poor and huddled masses—but also Flamebearers. Which meant that now they were obligated to offer me sanctuary…

And that, if a hundred other things went right, I could become a Vaetna. If they ever decided to recruit more, if I had any actual aptitude to back up my theoretical expertise—if I even made it. There was a rush of years-buried childlike giddiness and excitement at the prospect, and terror—suppressed by analysis. Why had it changed directions? It had never done that before, nor gone through a device. What was the significance of the fact that this was my second encounter with the Flame?

No time for questioning the why. Keep moving. I grabbed a bag and started putting stuff in. As I packed up the essentials of my life, in a daze—toothbrush, my good kitchen knife wrapped in a towel, laptop, underwear, my stash of emergency cash, cream for my scars—there was a sort of twisted gratitude that at least I wasn’t leaving anybody behind. My immediate family were either dead or dead to me. All my friends were coming with me on my laptop and phone, years of reclusion and isolation paying for themselves now.

Then there was a knock at the door. I froze, drew the knife, made to hold it like I remembered Bri with her dagger. Then I thought better of it and grabbed my charred spear instead. Maybe not the best weapon in this confined space—but it had saved me once, and I was certainly better with it, in theory. My heart thudded. I padded to the door as quietly as I could, stood off to the side, pointing the speartip toward the doorway in case someone came barging through. I heard a voice through the door.

“Hey, Dalton? It’s Rina from 303 downstairs. Heard a big thump. You okay?”

Suppressed sigh of relief, although I didn’t let my spear down. She had heard me being thrown across the room when I had been struck. My voice came out a bit raspy from disuse.

“I’m fine. Just tripped getting out of bed.”

“Ah. Did you see what happened on the Vaetna stream a little bit ago?”

“Uh—no.”

“Oh. Figured you’d have been up for it. Flamefall, weird one.”

Feign interested ignorance. “Huh. Where?”

“They’re not sure yet. It hit the camera, and they think it got one of the viewers. No clue who, though.”

“Jeez.” I struggled for another comment to mask my relief that I evidently hadn’t already been triangulated. “They must be having a bad day.”

“No shit. ‘Kay, glad you’re fine, just wanted to check.”

The random act of neighborly kindness was appreciated, it really was. Even though we had hardly spoken, and I might not ever see her again. Maybe I was leaving some stuff behind. I exhaled as I heard her steps retreat from my door back toward the stairwell, forcing myself to stop white-knuckling the spear, to exit prey mode. Satisfied she had gone, I made to go back to packing—but now that I had picked up my spear again, I found I couldn’t part with it.

My grip on my spear was just about the only thing keeping me from collapsing into a pile of quivering terror, but it was too visible, too identifying. I couldn’t make the trek with it, but I couldn’t let it go, either. To leave it behind now was to be fully naked against the vast and shadowy things I had every reason to believe were now waking up to hunt me—wasn’t that a thought. Not that it would really make a difference against a group of trained kidnappers with magical support, but I couldn’t convince the cornered animal at the back of my skull of that.

There was an intermediary solution. Hueng always carried his spear, but it wasn’t always physically in his hand. It was shunted off into higher-dimensional space, and then extracted back into his grip by essentially tugging on a single thread of magic. It was ridiculously intimidating and cool to see the effect in action—and more to the point, convenient. Beyond my new abilities, probably…but I didn’t necessarily have to kick it entirely out of this plane of reality, just get it to a state where I could fit it into my bag. Or…

The seed of an idea began to form. I went over to the bookcase, paging through notebooks. I flipped to an empty page and started drawing a sigil. The “real” version of this particular lattice was a complex brane, impossible to fully represent in two dimensions the way {ASH} could be, but I was really just making a sketch, something for my mind to latch onto and twist the Frozen Flame around. I had never had the money to buy a nice sculpture of the full 3D shape, but it was a spiraling, compressing thing, sort of like a funnel. It was also a word or, more accurately, the shadow of one. I tried to picture it, mentally tracing from one end to the other and around, as though I were scanning it in slices like an MRI machine. Fundamentally, that was the wrong way to go about it, but I didn’t quite realize at the time.

I was trying to extrapolate a second-order glyph from a first-order representation; infamously difficult even with training, and I had none. But I did have a near-unrivaled understanding of magical theory. Where snapweaving or creating a proper second-order representation of the glyph were out of the picture, math and blood could fill the gaps. I knew the set of the warp for this lattice, the shape of each transition, the tension that had to intensify down the weft for it to function as intended. As much as it was a process that required intuition I lacked, it was also a matter of geometries that I had exhaustively modeled. I probably knew this lattice better than my own face.

I reached for the flame inside me, something in my spine, at the bottom of my throat, tugging crudely. Sparks came forth. Now that I had called it once, I didn’t have to do the chest-thumping thing, but I still didn’t know how to weave with any sort of grace. I could feel it becoming sort of strand-like, but it wasn’t a flowing ribbon of magic, more a hatched, sketchy, hairy thing of a thousand smaller lines chicken-scratched into approximation; no precision. I tried anyway, attempting to pull it around the lattice in my head.

Unlike before, doing it without the guidance of a proper glyph was agonizing. It was so rough, and it chafed and scorched something inside me with the barbed imperfections. I could feel my brain heating up, like a barely-too-hot pan seeping heat into my hand, soon to become unbearable if I held it for much longer. A gasping sound was dragged from my throat as my face contorted from pain and discomfort, the overwork of freshly formed mental muscles as I tugged the magic into shape. I growled, twisted, struggled. This had become something of a literal trial by fire; if I couldn’t do this, something told me there was no way I was making it to the Gate in one piece.

One of the axis transitions wound up being loose; I scorched my hand on the thread, and putting real tension on the fiber as I wove was painful to the point that I was groaning. It was, in a word, sloppy, not the clean precision of the Vaetna—and that was frustrating. I knew I could do better, but there was no time for perfectionism. I just kept weaving, my muscles burning—that was my brain not knowing how else to interpret the sensation, but it would become literal if I delayed too long. In actuality, the whole process took under ten seconds, but pain has a way of stretching both space and time. In that regard, it’s as magical as the Flame.

At last it was good enough, assembled, held barely together by guesswork and terror of the alternative. I had seconds. I grabbed a box cutter from my desk with my free hand, my right, and carved a line down my left forearm, wincing, gasping, white-knuckling the haft of the spear. I wasn’t used to pain, and this part wasn’t Vaetna magic. It was the blood magic of those who used flame without the control of glyphs. Crude, rudimentary, sacrificial, equally unfamiliar to me in practice—but more reliable than my fragile willpower, for all its gruesomeness. It filled the gaps left by the fraying cord of magic in lieu of finer thread, a structure in flesh to complement that of the glyph.

It was at this point that I realized my mistake, remembered what Sky had told me, a basic miscalculation that showed my inexperience despite all my abstract knowledge: magic does not exist in a vacuum. It makes ripples beyond its direct effects, and monsters watch the water. I hadn’t even attempted to lower the ripple of the spell as I wove, so focused as I was on making it function at all, desperate for some security in my new abilities. And in doing so, I had just given away my position, if perhaps only in some abstract, soothsayer way rather than literal coordinates. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Too late now. I tossed down the pencil and yanked the funnel over the spear. It wasn’t really there, but I could see it, feel it. My arm screamed, an old, familiar pain. My fingers went stiff and numb. Every hair on my neck went on end and my vision flickered. The spear vanished and I half-collapsed, caked in sweat. I felt something leave me, some of the Frozen Flame crystallized out of my soul and into the lattice.

Everything hurt. Someone had scrubbed my spinal cord with steel wool. My head was too hot, my hands too cold. My eyes found the sketch I had been imitating; the lines of graphite had seared straight through the page, and the rest of the sketchbook, scorching themselves onto the desk below. I couldn’t intuitively read the glyph in this two-dimensional version of its proper three-dimensional form, but I knew what I had written.

{COMPOSE}

So where had the spear gone? My forearm had the answer. Instead of a bleeding wound, there was an image, a straight line with a strange, dark, warped tip. A burn scar to cauterize the cut, binding the spear to my body. A mirror to the burn scars covering my right hand. With a simpler glyph, it would have been a one-time trick, or cost me far more to do. But the beauty of the Flame was that it was frozen. It held its shape in lattice, in weave, instead of consumptive one-time use, if you knew how. So I tugged on the lattice with my mind and shook my arm—

And the spear was in my hand. I grinned, despite everything, despite the lingering pain and numbness and the throbbing in my head, the insane escalation of stakes in my life from a mere hour prior and the fact that I had likely just broadcasted myself. This was real magic, reality restructured along the weft of flame, something more elegant and lasting than the simple destruction of {ASH}. Power, potential of which I had always dreamed, a beauty that had enraptured me in spite of what it had taken from me. Kin to the Vaetna and a scant few hundred more in this era of magic.

There was also the screaming sting of the freshly reopened gash on my arm. I put the spear back, a practically instantaneous vanishing and a closing of the wound. This was only for emergencies—if I really needed it, a cut on my arm would be the least of my worries. Now I felt better. It was still just a wooden spear, hardly a match for whatever was coming—but it was a part of me now, a new limb with which to interact with an uglier, more dangerous world than the one I had lived in since my first scorching introduction to magic all those years ago. This time, I was ready to fight back—whatever that meant.

Despite this ordeal, leaving behind my PC setup sucked almost as much for other reasons. Financially, it represented a lot of money scrounged together from part-time jobs. Emotionally, it was more of a signifier of “home” than any of the merch. It was where my friends were. I wondered if I should wipe it—surely someone would eventually break in to track me. I shuddered and browsed through my files, making notes of any autosaved passwords that didn’t also exist on my laptop. After a long, painful moment, I navigated to the option to remove everything, a panic-button full-wipe program I had installed years ago. At the time, fifteen-year-old Dalton had been hoping he’d need it, that I’d need to drop everything to go on the run and would need a way to keep my knowledge from falling into the wrong hands. Now? It hurt. In some ways, this was the point of no return, more than actually leaving the apartment would be. I pressed ‘confirm’, and that was the moment the room ceased to be my home.

There wasn’t much to do after that. I took my most prized notebooks. The total contents of the bookshelf were worth a lot, by my meager standards, but none of them were rare volumes or anything, so I didn’t feel too bad about leaving them. Only my personal notes were of real value, work-in-progress theories that hadn’t yet been introduced to the body of literature on magic.

I threw on appropriate clothes for the brisk and wet English February, checked myself in the mirror for appropriate inconspicuousness. Perfect—all dark clothes without coming off as goth, figure obscured by the heavy black coat and jeans, dark-blue backpack free of any identifying charms. I couldn’t quite part with the little acrylic keychain of the Spire that usually adorned the outside of the bag, so it found a home in one of the internal sub-pockets where it wouldn’t be seen at cursory inspection. Satisfied with my appearance and preparations, I surveyed the room one last time—remembered my passport. The Gate technically didn’t need it, but you never knew. It would wind up being a good decision.

If I hadn’t been on a timer before—I definitely was now. I had already said my goodbyes to the room itself when I had wiped my PC, so I left. I grabbed my bag and fled the apartment, walking as fast as I dared without drawing undue attention. Turned the corner away from my life, from the venerable black, brick building and the grocery store, saying a silent goodbye to the smell of cigarette ash and that obnoxiously slow elevator. 

I found a taxi, forked over some cash upfront. I didn’t care that it was far, or that I was overpaying. Once I got to the Gate, I wouldn’t need money. Even getting there in one piece was basically optional; I just had to get within the aegis of the Spire’s awareness and protection.

“Heathrow.”

I made it six miles before they caught me.