“All Magic Leads...”
With a creak barely audible over the screams outside, the door to the interrogation room opens, and my guards bring the witch in.
I'd expected either some flashy anomaly decked out in glamoured robes, or an untidy bog-dweller. Not this. Clad in a tunic and hood, and aside from looking a little younger than her gaze implied, she seems... Normal. Messy brown hair, light bags under her downcast eyes – like an overworked surgical academy student, more than anything. Could've been somebody's daughter. She seemed... Bitter, but not at us.
The guards unceremoniously shove her into the simple wooden chair, to some grunting noises, then return to their positions beside the door. I reach for a reminder card I kept tucked into my desk drawer – a little rummaging inside it, and I'm reading. “By the order of the King, His Majesty's loyal service guiding us each day, you should be informed that you have the right not to incriminate yourself—”
“Shut it.” Her voice is... sharp, cutting through the air more like a dagger than a scalpel. It wasn't loud, but in this stone room with its echoey acoustics, it rang. A brief silence from the chaos outside seem to cease briefly after it; the guards look each other, and then one of the King's dragons roared, and she spoke again. “Look. I've already lost everything you can take from me, but I know you keep interrogation logs forever. Just let me say my piece for posterity, and you can... I dunno, drop me in a lake of lead or whatever it is you do to us these days.”
“It's molten bismuth—” Even through that messy hair, her glare is clear as day, and I opt to move on. “Right. So, you are being charged with... 'heresy so breathtaking that it falls to the Church to define it better.' You did something so uniquely evil they didn't even have a law against it yet, huh?” I chuckle to myself a little – even having read her file already, it sounds ridiculous. “I'm not cleared on the specifics, nobody tells me what's going on out there, but how in the hells did a daughter of nobility get that on your file? Did you make some kind of... sin-weapon?”
I chuckle, and her silence tells me enough that I stop. “Not quite deliberately,” she says, once the room is quiet – her own incisive tone now mouse-like to match it. “It wasn't supposed to be a weapon.”
I scowl. “How would you ever think it could be anything else? A force that runs on blood? I've been in magical places, and I could feel how profane the very air was, corrupted by—”
“IT WASN'T BLOOD MAGIC!” Her hands were on the desk, cuffs broken into shrapnel behind her, a wind howling through the shut-windowed room, pulling all that messy hair back so she could stare into my eyes. Outside, I heard something collapse. “It...” The iron drains out of her, leaving her deflating into something more like a crumpling sack of leaves. “It wasn't supposed to be blood magic...” she whimpers, as she pulls herself back to her seat.
One of the guards takes an unsteady step towards her; she rolls her eyes, and extends her hands behind her, resignation in her eyes as he approaches to put a second set of cuffs on her. A moment later, she was as she was before, downcast and irritated. “Right, well... What was it supposed to be, then?” I pause, and realize, “Because I'll admit, that didn't feel bloody.” I glance to my stenographer with a glare, and she quickly scribbles out that line.
“Stargazing.”
“Huh?”
“When I was a kid, I had a friend I'd go stargazing with sometimes. I'd sneak out of my parents' place at night, run with him to the big hill on the north side of the City, and we'd watch them go by.” Her mouth curled downward. “My parents thought stargazing was something nobody decent did. A watchmaker and a chemist, both telling me I should only care about what's on Earth.”
“Strict, huh,” I say, looking to my stenographer. “Unfortunate, but I know some families are like that. A good defense against the dark arts.”
“Hah! Defense.” She spat, and yet no spit seemed to actually emerge from her mouth. “A defense made of deadbolted doors and torn-up science texts. You know I didn't get to see the moon until I was nine?” She sighed. “So I snuck out, and without any astronomy books, we'd just make up our own constellations of what we saw up there. Y'know that hook on the Overfed Camel's nostril? We made that the keyhole of something called Heaven's Lid, and its hump became the Leafy Bandage. Just watching nature and making fun little connections.”
“And that led you to magic?”
“That led me to my friend tumbling down a hill, me getting a stain on my dress from treating his cut, and when I got home my parents were waiting for me. They said he'd been doing blood magic, beat him, and broke my telescope. I never saw him again, and I heard his family was wanted for questioning.”
“...My condolences,” and I catch myself before too much sympathy comes out, “witch.” She proceeds with a dismissive “Eh. It taught me how to make bandages from leaves, and I have a lot of fond memories.” The dismissive words do not line up with her strained tone.
“So, what does that have to do with magic?”
“Well, when it came time to choose a career, I applied with the pyrotechnician's guild. I remembered those days of stargazing, and I wondered, what if I could give people something new to look at in the sky? None of that stargazing people were so scared of, just... Something anyone could enjoy.” She seems more wistful with each word she speaks, bitterness slowly fading. “So many days making great booming bursts, a common experience across the City as the starscape was for the planet! More colors than the heavens, brighter than the moon – and yet all created from earthly things and the hands of mankind...”
I double-check part of her dossier. “And your guild was shuttered over accusations of encouraging illicit use of magic?”
Her voice immediately turned sour. “We were shuttered because we didn't want to put drugs in them. The archbishop gave us something he called 'holy water' for a show on the Ceremony of Pillars, our best instructor refused, and they hauled him away for possessing an illegal 'magical' potion – namely the holy water.”
“Miss, you can't possibly intend such slander against the Church—”
“Keep writing, and add the slander to my list of charges.” Her voice was snarling again, and I noticed a small crack near the far side of my desk. “We burned our remaining stock and schematics after that. Not giving the Church a way to brainwash people with our craft.”
“The Church only wants what's best for us,” I guiltily lie. Her gaze softens, as if with sympathy. “Moving on. What did you do next?”
“Well, I decided to return home. With pyrotechnics ruled out, I figured maybe I could learn some trade skills from my parents, something to combine their knowledge of chemistry and mechanics. Patent Medical-47991-H, I know you've got the file for it in that folder of yours.”
A moment of shuffling later, it's in front of me – schematics for a strange sort of gauntlet, a little like the Claw of the Damned but without the big spike near the wrist, hoses running through it. Just like the one sitting in her confiscated personal effects. “It's... a glove?”
“Look at it a little closer.” She's actually grinning now – she seems to be proud of this. “See those little tubes? Put a vial of healing potion in that reservoir, and it'll trickle it through those little pores in the fingers. Wear it during surgery, and it keeps anywhere those fingers go sterile and nourished.” The logic seems sound, I conclude, looking it over, although the tubing seems to coil in some superfluous shapes. “Why does it look like a leafy bandage?”
“Because I was having fun. All that connecting disciplines of machines and chemicals made me think of connecting the stars again.”
“...I'd complain, but my files say this thing actually cut surgical infections by 40%. I've seen the King pardon people for murder for lesser contributions – why didn't this work for you?”
“Because it doesn't work anymore. Try putting it on for a moment.”
“Are you mad?”
“Look, nothing in that device can draw blood – the worst it'll do is pinch you a little with its hinges. It's been vetted by the patent office. Go ahead.”
Reluctantly, I lift the fragile contraption, a leaf of coiled tubing visible on the back of its palm, and slip it on. Several springs and hinges seem to adjust to my grip, I feel a slight pinch— and then I smell something foul in the air, something all too recognizable. I scramble to rip it off my hand, and it falls to my desk with a clatter – blood dripping from its fingers, staining a couple of her dossier pages.
Looking at my (unharmed?) hand in utter horror, I clench it into a fist and swing across the table. It feels like I'm punching a very light statue – she doesn't flinch, but her chair slides across the ground. “Did you just try to make me cast blood magic?” I sneer at her.
“Thought you might react like that,” she laughs bitterly before coughing up a significant quantity of blood. “It only drained from me, and it only did it like this because the Leafy Bandage's been ruined. Your soul or whatever's intact.” Another cough, more blood. “It didn't use to work like this. 40% improvement rate during its limited trials, remember? Not that it ever got used for anything more serious than cosmetic surgery.”
“...You're gonna have to explain to me how this works, eventually.”
“Look, here's the trick – you see a pattern in the stars, something everyone can see, something too alien for earthly concerns to matter in it, throw in a little pain as a catalyst, and it just works. I can't tell you why that leaf pattern made the potions dispensed three times as effective, nothing either of my parents told me prepared me for that. Even I thought it was a coincidence and didn't figure it out until I started work on my next glove. Patent Medical-48030-H.”
“You... You mean to imply that you made a magic of astronomy? Of seeing constellations?“
“Anyone could if our current bevy of 'known' constellations weren't all useless. Nothing in an official astronomy book has ever gotten anywhere, but when I look up at the sky and make connections on my own... Things happen.” I open my mouth, but before I can even begin considering never looking at the sky again, she interrupts me with “Patent Medical-48030-H,” and I reluctantly go back to my papers.
“Next glove, eh... patent 48030, 48030... ah, here we are!” Once again, it matches one in her personal effects – although hers has a giant chunk of wiring ripped out of it, and this one on paper has the same familiar leaf shape, in copper instead of tubing. “Magnets and springs everywhere, but no hoses. What was this for?”
“To make someone feel better. In my trials of patent 47991, I met a girl I knew we wouldn't be able to save. Caught the potionbane pox at 12, it never went away, and when I met her seven years later later her organs were shutting down. So I tried making something that would bring her calm and acceptance, instead – something to heal mental ills.”
“With massages?”
“Look, I'm an engineer, not a poet. And even poets don't have much reassuring to tell someone who's dying at 20.” She looked over at my blueprints. “The leaf sign worked much the same there as it did on the last one – by the blueprints it should've just shaken and vibrated a bit, but if you press it to someone... for a couple minutes while its springs stay wound, no pains in the world can get to them. Not the pain of never getting to live a real life, not the pain of not getting to meet enough people.” Her eyes begin to tear up. “Just a couple minutes where that poor girl could feel like a person, not an unfairly condemned death-row inmate.”
“...I'm sorry.” I pause for a couple moments, caught up in sympathy before fury comes back to me. “It still doesn't excuse the use of magic, but—”
“Like the hells it doesn't! Your Church had nothing for Seria—” She stops, takes a deep breath, and relaxes slightly in her chair. “Look. Point is, I made it with the leaf and a small needle – coated with enough potion not to bleed, just big enough to cause a little pain to start the reaction – and it worked pretty well, but it's hard to believe in a symbol of healing when caring for someone dying. So I tried a different one of my old constellations...” Her eyes grow somewhat wide, and she goes from confident eye contact to a thousand-yard-stare, gazing into the glove's abyss of torn wiring. “Heaven's Lid.”
“...Witch, are you—”
it wasn't supposed to be so deep
The thought seems to come from within my head, the witch frozen in her contemplation without moving her lips, and
i just thought she'd get to look through the keyhole and see something nice
but a little bloodless pain picked its lock
it opened
it opened so fucking wide
and it
was
b e a u t i f u l
“...Seria Jacobson, deceased age 20. Several months after your last contact. By all reports, the funeral...” I reread my notes, making sure to quote them literally. “ 'Was interrupted as the deceased's body was suddenly disintegrated in a pillar of light.' 40 witnesses, 28 of whom recanted after a visit from the archbishop. I take it you were among the 12.”
i finally did it
i made someone truly happy
not with some transient fireworks
not just by giving them superficial improvements
i made it so this girl missed out on nothing
i should never have doubted this force's capacity for good
...
When I regained my own thoughts, one of the guards had collapsed, and the other was limping over to apply a third set of cuffs to the witch, as she sobbed with her face in her hands.
“...And you still submitted the design to the patent bureau, despite knowing it worked on magic.”
“I only had suspicions!” she cried. “What I knew is that it worked on Heaven! That somewhere above us, beyond convention, lie the possibilities to connect things into things that this world can benefit from! Can you imagine what we could make – what we could find, or maybe even simulate with enough fireworks?” There was a sneer in her voice again; the varnish on my desk began to crack. “If magic could be this simple, this non-bloody, this beneficial, have this much potential, and if the alternative was to blot out the sky and drug people and block the gates of Heaven with illusions just to keep them away from it?” My desk was rotting now, and one of its legs began to sag. “I wanted it to win. Who even cares about the power boost of blood magic when you can get all this from the stars? Who'd even resort to that when healing and Heaven are this easy? That cancerous taboo's haunted me all my life, and I never even wanted to break it!” The screams outside were growing by the moment. “So I made another invention. You don't have a blueprint of it – they've been burned – but it's the black one you confiscated.” Her voice had cooled to a raging simmer now, and my desk's ongoing rot seemed to have stopped.
I reached into the bin, and removed a black gauntlet. “A Claw of the Damned.”
“The Hand of the Stars,” she snipped. “Built with potion-lines and vibration magnets alike. That pin-board on the back can be rearranged to form any constellation up there, connecting them with electrical force. I joined some stargazing clubs outside the City, ones completely oblivious to magic, and showed them that with this little design and some interpretation of the skies, they could heal people. Or just feel nice, as the case may be.” She sighed. “I distributed a few of them with the Leafy Bandage already in place. They had a little fun with it. One or two tried making their own constellations... I was so proud of them...”
“And then they figured out it was magic?”
“And then they figured out it was magic. And realized that, technically, they were surrounded by potential blood mages. And immediately lost their damned minds.” She sighs. “You'll notice MINE still has a little potion-coated needle for the pain catalyst. Not one of those modded wrist-gougers you'll see those psychos outside using. Not the GIANT BLOOD RESERVOIRS those damn drake-riders are carting around. You think I wanted people to kill each other for more physical power? You think I wanted people to be any better at killing each other? The point was to give them everything they wanted so they'd never need to.”
She buried her face in her hands, again, and sat like that for a minute before I spoke up.
“So, what did you learn?”
“That what you fear-driven fools want, more than anything, is to hurt each other, and you'd blind the skies to avoid admitting that? That if I ever showed anyone Heaven's Lid, then Heaven itself would be soaked in blood, leading to horrors I can scarcely even imagine?”
“No. That all magic leads to blood magic, witch,” I said, motioning to the guards.
“It... it doesn't have to be that way! You've seen the stars, and with Heaven among them, can you really tell yourself there's nothing up there? That you'll never draw a few lines between them?”
A mental image enters my mind unbidden – a box, opening, and a moment of hideous bliss – and terror strikes me. I scramble to put any other image in its place, a sword, a corpse, anything— and I settle on a skull, helpfully provided from some abyss of memory and imagination.
“But it IS that way!” I shout, brushing an image of a starfield out of my mind, a memory of every walk I've taken at night. “Take her away!”
As my men march her out, I ruefully glance out the window.
And I see that same skull peering down at me from the stars.