The Glass Wizard - The tale of a somewhat depressed wizard

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An so he stood in the kitchen.

It was strange. It felt wrong.

To be here. Alone.

All by himself.

In this vast room.

There was so much going on around him, and within him, yet nothing moved in here. Things just stood around.

So did Yu.

At last his eyes stirred, hesitant, searching for the right way to surface through the haze. He focussed on the wide hearth first. It was the only thing here that still breathed sound, though faintly. One of the two pots squatted heavy above the metal grid that glowed but no longer showed flames. From there, his gaze dove across the room, left to right. The kitchen was rectangular, dominated by the two long tables that made one central workbench. Cupboards, racks and tools clung to the walls all around, with the two obscene portraits hanging above. There were no alcoves, no shadows to vanish into, no sudden recesses. The whole room lay exposed before him.

Yu moved. Slowly, he walked around the workbench. He did a full circle; going right first, then all the way round. As he did, he started and stopped with almost every step. With every pause, he checked corners that did not exist, and bent to peer beneath the workbench several times. The motions were absurd, but necessary. It made no sense, but at the same time, he needed to do it. He needed to make sure, from every perspectives and every angle, that no one else was in the room with him. He needed to see, because his ears still offered nothing, not even the ordinary breath of a room. They found only the quiet rest of old fire, as Yu again approached the hearth. There he halted, with the door now at his left side.

This quiet was the rarest sound Yu had ever known. No voices bled in from the common room, no boots dragged across the floor, no bodies shifted in the rooms above. Even the mountain storms, which scraped day and night across the stone, seemed absent. The thing that had circled him in the hallway had also left; the low hum that had flickered in and out of reach. The world outside had drowned. Just like him. It became more and more difficult to hear himself. There was neither the scrape of his own talons against the flagstones, nor the faint rustle of his feathers as he pressed his wings against his chest. His breath should be loud and fast and raw, but if he did not feel his chest rise and fall through his wings, he would not know that he was still alive.

Yu knew well that fina were no swimmers and no divers. He had nearly drowned once, as a child. His memory of the incident was nothing but a full on thrashing, with his wings and claws cleaving and kicking the water for dear life, while his pulse had filled his ears and hammered against his skull. This drowning deafness now was not that. This was not the struggle, but the after. It was what he imagined came once the body gave up, when the lungs and ears were long flooded, with pressure on the skull but no more resistance, and all sound sealed off. He was all the way down at the bottom. Only one thing reached him here. It was the fleeting reminder of the dying flames in front of him, not fire proper, but its last phantom echo clinging to the hearth. Yu was not sure if it was real, or if he imagined it. It drew him toward the pot, and from there toward the metal door behind the hearth. It irritated Yu that he had not noticed it before. Then again, his first visit to the kitchen had been brief, and the door, though tall, sat flush at the back wall, dull and stone-coloured, betrayed only by a narrow slit of glass. He recognised it as an observation window, a twin to the one in the sickbay, and then he understood that he the surgery lay boxed in between the two rooms. Like that, any procedures could be observed from both sides.

That small recognition did more than expand Yu's understanding of the guild layout. It changed his perception of the kitchen itself. The room no longer seemed anchored by the hearth, and it no longer revolved around the center workbench. Its axis shifted and everything got rearranged, until it all pivoted around that narrow slit of glass at the back. Yu's spinning gaze fell again to the many tools along the back wall. Heavy knives. Iron rods. Saws. Their outlines ran together, edges blurred as though seen through the never-draining water in his eyes. He could not tell one from the next, lest distinguish them by name or function. He could only measure them by scale; in particular the saws: there was a big one, a bigger one, one bigger still, and the grotesquely biggest. Four hung in sequence where there should be five. The second hook on the left was bare. The gap was obvious.

A sick suspicion rose in him. Yu readily believed that the saws could be used for carving through the bodies of beasts, yes, most definitely for handling animals like wapa … Well, for whatever handling needed a saw … But the longer his eyes lingered and his imagination roamed, the harder it was not to notice that the tools in here were … not only cooking utensils. Some did not belong into a kitchen at all. All of this, every twisted thing he saw in here was an instrument. For meat, and for flesh. For food, and for people. Because what stopped you from doing to people what you could do to animals —

Something drove him to act. No, not curiosity, and surely not any thrill in the suffering of others. There was nothing to gain from that, no satisfaction. Yu wanted to believe that he moved because his imagination overflowed. Silence thickened thought, and better to see one truth than invent a dozen. That was what the mask reasoned. But beneath that reassuringly sensible whisper, the wanting self pressed closer. It wanted to know if she was there. And deeper still, peeling past reason, past common instinct and distorted impulse, and down to the oldest stratum of self, the primordial feat still steered. It steered without a sound. It sought company in torment. It would rather see Yu's own undoing mirrored in the breaking of another than face his silencing with no reflection.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Yu pushed a stool to the back door, barely noticing the rasp of wood against stone. The thing had no back or arm rest, so he needed to hold onto the seat with his stumps and then crouch-step on. He held on all fours until the wobbling stopped, and then stood himself up. As he rose, the metal door threw him back with his own reflection; one eye ringed in black feathers, then white mess all around, distorted and stretched thin. The mirror self rose with him until he reached the window slit. The glass did not reflect. It became a gap where his eyes should be.

Yu held a breath. Then he leaned forward.

The room beyond swam into focus.

Bubs was there, hunched yet steady, his small frame bent over the limp figure. Yu caught fragments only, but filled the gaps with reasonable guesswork — pieces of bone pressed back into place, a twisted knee wrenched straight, metal and cloth bound tight, a splint lashed on. Deltington stood at his side, passing instruments arranged in a neat rows, amongst them rods, hooks, and pincers.

For a moment, Yu's gaze shifted, pulled toward the far door, to the answering slit that opened to the sickbay. There was no movement. No shadows. From the distance, all he could discern was the steady glow of orblight caught on the blank glass.

So he watched.

Bubs worked with unsettling delicacy. His thin fingers moved with the exactness of a watchmaker or a silkweaver; hands made for fine mechanisms now dissecting flesh. The splint was fixed, but beneath it ran a fresh cut, straight from the knee all the way to the ankle, with the skin folded back and pinned in place. Under all the blood, it almost seemed like a display, as if to showcase all the layers down to the bone. On a tray lay a scatter of white fragments, bone shards like teeth and splinters. Bubs plucked out more with each pass, some so small that Yu could not even see them as the pincers moved back and forth between the wound and the tray. Meanwhile, Deltington applied gazes and pressure to keep the bleeding at bay. Their movements were so composed and coordinated, that the operation seemed not the medical mending of an emergency, but a display of deliberate construction and delicate craft.

It was wrong. It was wrong to see such unnatural grace applied to living flesh. It was wrong how this mechanical patience looked so much like cruelty. And wrongest of all, Yu thought, most out of place in this whole scenario, was the human herself.

Yu was not familiar with this level of care for humans. Tria had never done anything like it. Injuries in the settlements were lessons, left to mend or to kill. Humans bled, or drowned, or birthed themselves into graves. It was part of what she called natural selection. Yu had seen that indifference far more often than he had seen care. Instead of intervening, Tria observed. She evaluated how her humans dealt with their injured, and marked which of endured and which were discarded.

Yu did not seek them, these memories of Tria. He did not recall them deliberately, but still they answered. They surfaced on their own, rising to meet the sight through the slit. He knew there were a hundred other things he ought to be thinking of, but all slipped past him, and none offered hold. His drowning mind reached for fragments from beyond the Albweiss. They belonged to the old self. They helped anchor him.

When Tria first took control of the habitat, the second most common cause of death was drowning, simply because of the many streams running through the territory. The first was childbirth, with high tolls for both infants and females. Despite that, Tria did not restrict the humans' access to water. In fact, she did the opposite. She forced their lives into it and made fishing the centre of their survival. Unlike what you would expect, drowning actually became less frequent. Surprisingly, the humans learned to swim, all on their own. At first they waded while working their nets in the shallows. As they started to move into deeper waters, they found ways to keep their head above the surface even when the ground dropped away. Then they discovered how to float for long stretches of time, and eventually, they could drift and move with their limbs in steady rhythm. In the end, they swam while handling their gear. Some even dove. They grew so bold that Tria had to reinforce the fencing and send patrols along the habitat streams. By the time Yu came to the estate, swimming had become not only a necessary discipline for survival and industry, but also a significant part of their – for the lack of better word – culture: children were taught to swim almost as early as they could walk or knot nets. They had a recognisable hierarchy, where older children supervised the younger ones by the rivers. There were crude rituals and challenges to fetch stones or trinkets from deeper waters, all primitive and rather stupid, of course, but still, recognisable as ambition.

That they learned to swim was astonishing, though not unthinkable. To some measure, you could have even expected that. Human and tairan bodies were alike enough. The tairan of today had no similarities whatsoever with the beasts and peoples of the water, yet, within their given limitations, they swam passably well. Their ancestors had come from the unknown overseas. They had been expert sailors. That knowledge had been all but erased in the wars three centuries ago, though fragments survived. Tria hoarded them. She had always collected notable documents from the surrounding regions, but after the paigan hunter wizard had pressed her, she became deliberate. Yu did not know what their arrangement was, but since then, she had started to offer large sums for original tairan logbooks, and for all those illegible maps scrawled with routes and coasts now forgotten. There seemed to be more seaworthiness preserved in those papers than in the tairan who inherited the name. Still, their will and skill to defy the sea had left its mark; even now, their descendants swam the streams for pleasure.

But the humans in the habitat had gone even further. As their lives and rituals gradually shifted towards the streams, the humans began to give birth in the water as well. At first, it was crude. They had established a designated bend in the river where several females gathered whenever one was ready. Then, seven years ago, they had diverted a branch, shaping a pond for that purpose alone. This overall change had made birthing a conscious and collective thing, a shared experience amongst females rather than a secret and solitary ordeal within a cramped hut. What had belonged to the privacy of the pregnant female's closest family members became a public rite. By now, they had a head female with several subordinates. These attendants oversaw each pregnancy, long before the birth itself. They instructed one another in the process. They built order from it. And with that order came survival: the deaths fell away, not only the drownings, but also those of childbirth.

From an economic view, this was more than sufficient. From any other, it was unnerving. It was almost frightening how swiftly humans reshaped themselves; how fast one generation dissolved into the next, how quickly a habit became ritual, and ritual ossified into purpose and structure. It was all the more disquieting if you had lived with borman, whose – again using the word as the most of abstract placeholders – culture did not seem to go anywhere but backwards. Their only tradition was decline.

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