The Endless Solvent

Camaz waited.

Perhaps he was an old fool to wait. A part of him had hoped she would tell him what she was doing, as his ward. As someone who had been under his care for nearly a decade. A part of him was adverse to the idea of simply asking upfront questions. She had room to lie.

He never asked upfront questions without first knowing the truth.

So like a fool he waited and one day he knew he had waited too long. The incident didn’t happen with a flash or a bang; it washed over the world in a deadly silence. One day, Camaz awoke and found that all the Shades that regularly lurked in the lighthouse were gone.

Not just invisible or hiding in the shadows as they often did, but they were gone. He couldn’t sense them in the vicinity through the Solvent. He went around the lighthouse calling for Aris and was met with no response. The next step was to try finding her on the island - a task he dreaded as she was excellent at hiding from anyone. He soon found that he didn’t have to look very hard.

Out on the path between the lighthouse and the beginning of Market Square, a man-made foot path had been created, trailing through trees and foliage. It eventually led to the other side of the shrubbery onto the main path through Market Square. There wasn’t anything but plants and grass along that footpath.

Camaz heard the murmur of conversation before seeing a small crowd on that foot path. He approached to find out what the commotion was and saw Aris’s crumpled form keeled over next to a tree. Blood soaked through her tunic, little cuts about the length of half a finger all along her arms, a few on her face.

“Move,” he thundered at the small crowd of students. They scattered apart to let him through.

“W-we just saw her here,” one of them immediately babbled. “We were trying - “

Camaz ignored them and cradled Aris’s head in his hands. Her eyes were open but unfocused. She was breathing. He picked her up and carried her away from the gawking crowd. The first instinct was to bring her to the infirmary but he glanced down at the little cuts all over her body. She tried to activate a spell of some sort and it made her like this.

Aris’s secret project that she told no one about. The one she didn’t trust him with. He couldn’t tell anyone about it before finding out what she did. He had to protect her. He held her tightly and made the arduous trek up the uneven steps to the lighthouse and laid her on the large table on the ground floor. He cushioned her head with a rolled jacket and covered her with a sheet he retrieved from storage, then pulled back a sleeve from her arm to look at the cuts.

They looked like the ones that marred the walls of the Maroon building, the exact same length and shape.

“Fool child,” he muttered. “What did you do?”

He stilled, realized that the lighthouse and the vicinity was still devoid of any Shades. Even Drape, the shade that was practically glued to her side for the past few weeks, could not be seen. This was not a coincidence. He stared down at Aris whose eyes were still unfocused. Pressing his mouth into a thin line, he reached out into the Solvent to find her Solute. He had to know the answers. He hated having to do this to her but something wasn’t right -

He staggered back from the table where she lay as he touched her Solute with his abilities. It wasn’t right. He was sure it was hers but it felt… different. Like it was lumpier, misshapen. Wrong.

Aris’s eyes snapped open and fully focused and she gave a pained whimper and her form started to fade like a Shade’s. Even the clothes she wore faded with her as if it was a part of her body. Camaz was too shocked to move. He watched her sit up in her ghostly form and take huge gulping breaths, dark transparent hair falling over her face. It all made sense at that instant: the tome about augmentation. The missing Shade. The sounds the Sharp had played to him a few days ago.

Aris had somehow absorbed the ability of a Shade into her.

Eyes wide, he plunged back into the Solvent and was horrified to find her Solute was so misshapen because another Solute had been attached to it - he could just barely recognize it as Drape’s.

“Are you done feeling around in there?” Aris asked coldly. She was still transparent and ghostly - he could see through her body. Camaz quickly withdrew, clenching his fingers into a fist.

“What did you do, Aris?”

She snorted. “You know what I did. Or you can force it out of me.”

“I want you to tell me with your own words,” he said. He could barely keep his voice steady.

She looked down at her transparent body, the bloodied arms hazy. She got up on the table to inspect the rest of herself. All her clothing was transparent. Aris tilted her head up and raised a hand, letting the glow of the lighthouse beacon shine through it. “I killed one of your stupid Shades,” she said. “And ate it.”

Camaz crossed his arms. “One? Just one?”

“Fine, several,” Aris smiled. There wasn’t a trace of remorse on her face. “I couldn’t get the spell working properly for a while.” It was why the Shades were all so upset. They wanted to tell him Aris was killing them off. Was that what the horrible sound signified? The death croak of one of their own?

“This is… reprehensible,” Camaz managed to say. How was he going to begin to explain to the Administration about what happened? What were they going to do with her?

“Why?” Aris stepped off the table and it looked like she was floating. “You always said I had to improve my knowledge of runeology and be more powerful. I did both.”

“Why?” Camaz burst out incredulously. What happened to her? “You’re honestly asking me why killing an innocent creature for your own gain is not horrible?”

She frowned at him, transparent face pinching in contempt. “What, says the man with enough dried ham and sausages to feed an army curing in his pantry? Do we not butcher innocent creatures every day to eat them?”

“You cannot draw a parallel between farm animals and sentient creatures of the Solvent,” Camaz retorted. “And you did not consume a Shade, you desecrated its very Solute! Aris, this is not acceptable behavior.”

“Are you going to lecture me about acceptable behavior?” Aris shot back. “Because I know you like using your abilities like a creep. Do you think I wouldn’t know? Now with this Shade a part of me, it’s so clear to me now. You like touching people’s Solute. Would you like to explain how that’s acceptable behavior?”

The accusation, as accurate as it was, shot through his heart like an arrow. The pleasure of using Inner Eye abilities was all too familiar to him - it was how he understood why the Head Librarian would rather spend all day shelving books. Some people found their abilities scratched a specific itch and would spend their whole life scratching it. A long time ago, he was one of those people. For two decades, he would sink his fingers into Solute and wring information out of people. The nations he worked for loved him for it and paid him exorbitant amounts of money for any kind of nonsense he could squeeze out of their enemies. The feeling of wrapping a proverbial hand around a Solute was, to him, the ultimate form of ecstasy.

But now it turned his stomach with guilt. The pleasure was still there but he… he could no longer enjoy it.

“Fine then,” he said, straightening. “Explain to me how your reasoning behind this stupid procedure you’ve put yourself through. If we’re not to debate morals, then we shall debate intelligence.”

Aris’s expression turned from contempt to annoyance. “Were you not the one saying I was lacking? Here I am, trying to be a better person, a better student and you’re still disappointed.”

“You’ve turned yourself transparent,” Camaz said acidly. “Congratulations. I hope killing that Shade was worth it.”

“It was,” Aris replied smugly. “Because now you can’t keep me here. I can return home and - “

“Try to frighten off all the Unseeing by pretending to be a ghost?”

Aris shot him an angry glare, then turned to the chair and walked through it, akin to the way Shades can pass through solid walls and doors. “This is what I mean, moron. You can’t trap me.”

“For your kingdom’s sake, I hope you can return to corporeal form, not sure if many people want to be ruled by a shadow queen,” Camaz rolled his eyes.

Flushing with anger (the color coming through despite her transparency), Aris’s form solidified after a few seconds. She winced - it seemed she could feel her injuries more in her solid form. Without hesitation, Camaz whipped his hand out and grabbed her arm, twisting it back. Her first instinct was to struggle, but then he felt the stone floor under him shift. It was a nasty trick she learned as a child before coming to the Academy. He was thrown off balance and she immediately twisted her arm hard to escape his grasp.

She grunted in pain, the wounds on her arm probably stinging from the abrasion. He didn’t see her other arm and an elbow crashed into the side of his face. Cursing, he instinctively reached into the solvent again to her malformed Solute. At the same time she returned to a shadowy form to escape his grasp.

“No!”

He cursed again as Aris resisted his grasp in the Solvent. It was like it had grown slippery and he had trouble ‘gripping‘ it.

You like it don’t you?

A wave of revulsion washed over him, accented by the pounding pain of being struck in the face. No! He wasn’t… it wasn’t because he liked it. It was for Aris. He had to…

“You don’t get it do you?” Aris said from somewhere above him. She had disappeared somewhere into the walls of the lighthouse. “You and Gardlo and all those other old men who think they run everyone’s life here, you don’t get it. There’s more to life than this stupid island. My home that none of you give a shit about. My brother. My kingdom. You wouldn’t even let me visit the Heart.”

“You know why you must stay here,” Camaz growled, gripping his aching face. “And it was your Parts damned captain that told you to stay here. It’s for your protection - ”

“My protection? Nobody cares about Caelis anymore,” her voice rose to a shrill. “Why would anyone try to kill me? They think I'm dead. They think my brother is dead. It’s been ten years. Why don’t you tell me the real reason why you’re making me stay here, Camaz?”

“Obviously it isn’t to force more sense into you,” he said.

“It’s always a part-fucking joke to you,” Aris spat. “Doing things because it amuses you. Admit it, you thought it was funny having a princess as your ward with no one any wiser. And when I retrieve the throne back at Caelis I’m supposed to be oh so grateful to your pathetic ass. I was just another secret for you to keep in your back pocket.”

Aris wasn’t completely wrong. Before the tragedy that fell Caelis, Camaz sought for Aris’s enrollment into the Academy for completely selfish reasons. How the Parts must laugh at him when the Captain brought the princess all the way to him for protection. They had traveled on foot for weeks all the way across the continent. Rask was convinced they were meant to survive.

Camaz clearly remembered the grizzled captain hidden behind an overgrown beard, looking exhausted with two children in tow. A boy with bright red hair barely hidden under a hood who clung to Rask looked at him with eyes swollen from crying. A girl with long straight hair who looked stonily at him with slate gray eyes.

A girl who looked much too serious for someone so young. A girl who looked like she had given up on feeling anything. Camaz remembered putting a hand on her head and smiling.

“Your mother told me to expect you,” he had said to her.

Camaz remembered those serious gray eyes staring at him for a long time before the small, dirty face scrunched up and burst into tears. It was the first time they’d met but for some reason he knew she had been holding on to the tears for a very, very long time.

It was Aris’s misconception that Camaz didn’t care about her. He didn’t care about clearing that misconception, truth was never the trade he dealt in. But he sincerely lived the last ten years holding on to the memory of her tears. He swore that he would find a way for her to live where she would never cry like that again.

After seeing her shadowy form, Camaz believed he failed.

“I see you have become too annoying to be amusing any longer,” he said, straightening and trying to ignore his pounding face. “You’re right. You were just a joke to me. And I think you misunderstand something: you were never trapped here. You were always free to leave. You would have realized this if you spent more time thinking instead of whining.”

There was an indignant sound. He ignored it and continued.

“Understand that I will be appealing to the administrators to kick you off the island so your time to stop whining is now. You can leave. In fact, you have to leave because I am banning you from returning.”

There was silence.

“Go, Aris of Caelis, and think about the fucked up thing you did. I don’t want to see your face again. And I want to make this clear: this isn’t a joke.”

He left his lighthouse, face throbbing, heart sore, head empty. He mechanically went to the Administrator’s office and called for an audience to report the incident. Many professors, including Gardlo, were shocked and questioned if he was sure Aris did what she did. Many questioned how she was able to execute such an advanced spell. Others wondered how she was still alive. All of them agreed she should not be forgiven for her misconduct.

A lot of bureaucratic nonsense over the murder of a sentient being.

Ex-princess of Caelis, blessed with the bloodline of the Solaris. He was abandoning her.

It was what she wanted, right?