4.03: Perspective

“Today, we’ll be looking at memory potions,” Instruktanto Costa announced, adjusting her glasses and sweeping her raptor-like gaze over the class. “It’s that time of year where a lot of people start testing up or graduating, so if you’re going to be putting your health on the line and using magic to help you study, you should at least know how to do it safely. I’ve sent you all an information sheet, so give it a look and answer the basic questions on the worksheet.”

I glanced down at the information, and almost turned to make a snarky observation to Saina before I remembered that she wasn’t there. I had the whole desk to myself. Was she just… gone, now? Her family probably had the power to stop Skolala Refujeyo from making her come back, if she’d decided that the school wasn’t safe, or something.

Memory potions fell into two major categories – those for improving memory, and those for eliminating memories. The memory elimination section was short, a simple explanation that using such potions was dangerous and highly illegal unless prescribed by and taken under the supervision of a qualified mental health professional. Most of the paragraph was taken up detailing the legal consequences for illegally making or trafficking such potions. No further details or recipes were included, simply a note that if the reader was struggling with extremely distressing unwanted memories, they could get help from Refujeyo’s mental health resources.

I blinked at the paragraph. A controlled substance? I didn’t know Refujeyo had such things. Oh, sure, the school mandated uniform colours and wouldn’t let in outside electronics and stuff like that, but they were just… school rules. How dangerous did something have to be, for the place that just shrugged and gave me hormones on demand, the place where my potion teacher was openly telling us to be sensible when we started taking magical study aids, the place where I could book a workshop and make whatever I wanted out of giant books full of potions, to actually have laws against something?

The memory aiding potion category was more helpful. Apparently there were two kinds – retention potions and recall potions. Retention potions simply increased focus and memory retention for a period of time after taking them, bypassing some of the normal forgetting mechanisms of the mind so that things were remembered in greater detail and easier to recall. Retention potions resulted in much more accurate memories, but without the normal editing mechanisms of the brain in the way, they lacked the normal ‘tunnel vision’ of recalling significant details and it was usually harder to remember which parts of them were important or why.

Recall potions allowed one to recall existing memories more clearly, which meant that they could be taken after the event. However, they tended to be a lot less reliable. The sheet noted that the potions could only work on what was still in the mind – memories were edited over time with every recall, so just because they were recalled under a potion didn’t mean they were more accurate, just easier to remember.

The categories were broken down further than that, and I read them thoroughly enough to fill out the worksheet, but I wasn’t really thinking about the academic details. I kept looking back up at the description of recall potions, and running my thumb along the scars on my wrist. The recall potions didn’t sound dangerous (although the info sheet included a long list of warning about the danger of taking them with brain damage, or certain neurodivergences, but none of them applied to me). How hard were they to make?

I checked the potion books I had on my tablet. All of them flat out refused to provide recipes for memory eliminators, repeating the warnings about how dangerous and illegal they were, but recall potions weren’t that difficult. I found a couple that used ingredients I was pretty sure I could get a hold of, although the preparation process looked annoyingly complicated.

Although maybe that was a good thing. I was pretty good at potionmaking. If I mastered this, I could probably sell it to other students, who couldn’t (or didn’t want to bother to) make it themselves. If I was lucky, I might be able to put off having to get an actual job. I flagged the recipes for future reference and got back to classwork.

After class, Peter found me in the hall. “Did Saina talk to you?” he asked, without preamble.

“Talk to me about what?” I asked cautiously. I wasn’t sure how much Peter knew about Saina.

“Apparently she’s had to take some time off school for family stuff. She doesn’t know when she’ll be back. So where does that leave us with pit comps? I can look for three-member events for us, but there aren’t very many of those around. That’s why we needed you in the first place. We can wait for her, or we can pull in a temporary replacement. Thoughts?”

Ah, to be worried about school sports. For a moment I was genuinely, pathetically jealous. “Um. I’ll go along with whatever you and Hammond want to do. But I think we should wait, at least for a bit. Pulling someone else temporarily in when we don’t know how long it’s for could be… messy… and it’d be kind of a dick move to pull in a permanent backup without Saina being involved in the decision, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, Hammond said similar things,” Peter said, sounding vaguely frustrated.

I clapped him on the back. “Hey, it gives you time to focus on one-on-one duels for a bit! Get those aggressive instincts out!”

“Yes, yes. I just hope this whole thing doesn’t collapse after one event together.”

It might, I thought, depending on how long I have.

And with that lovely thought, I suddenly found myself needing to be alone for a bit, and found a random dead-end tunnel to sit in and just kind of… feel dread.

The Hero’s life cannot be saved. The Child will not be enslaved. Like every prophecy that Kylie had given since I’d become her familiar, the words were etched into my brain, clean and unforgettable. And I’d made the decision not to dither about with bullshit denial any more, since all that seemed to do was put everyone in more danger, so I couldn’t keep pretending that that prophecy wasn’t really obviously about me. I was going to die, and it felt… surprisingly a lot worse, than normal.

I’d spent my childhood with a time bomb in my chest, expecting it to kill me at any moment. I’d grown up with it, learned to tolerate it as a fact of life. Then I’d had a brief period of safety, where it wasn’t going to kill me after all, before the familiarity link took its place, another thing that could flare up and kill me at any time. So this prophecy shouldn’t be anything new, really. But it was. It was terrifying.

The curse had been an ongoing hazard, a thing that might strike at any time, like being prone to strokes or heart attacks or something, but it had been… abstract. Kind of like I imagined living under the threat of a war would be, or on an active volcano with no emergency evacuation plan. There, present, a ‘maybe’ disaster, a ‘probably’ disaster even, but… a nebulous future thing that might not happen. The familiarity link had been even less trouble, because despite everyone else’s panic, after I survived the first night I was pretty sure I was safe. Or at least, that the magic was no more likely to kill me than the various other hazards I regularly encountered. But the prophecy… the prophecy was a certain end. More certain than when that lake monster had been drowning me, where everything had been desperation and adrenaline rather than waiting for an inevitable end; more certain than the spellthing trapping me in its cabin in the Initiation and giving me no way out, when I’d been busy searching for – and had found – a way to convince it otherwise. This was a patient future, a set finish, although we didn’t know when it would be. And… I guess everyone has that? Everyone will die eventually and most people don’t know when. And lots of people have things they need to do before they die, like I needed to keep my friends safe and figure out what the hell preparing my heart “in offering” was supposed to mean. (I hoped it was something I could do myself. I didn’t think my friends would be able to bring themselves to kill me, even to protect us from whatever nebulous disaster it was supposed to protect us from. I wouldn’t ask them to, if there was any choice in the matter. But I didn’t want to have to go finding someone else and convincing them that they needed to do it.)

I’d tried to explain it to Kylie, how seriously we needed to take this, how we couldn’t pretend any more. I’d tried, and she’d listened, but I didn’t think she was going to stop pretending. I didn’t fancy my chances convincing Max, either. They didn’t want the prophecy to be about me, and… it would be kind of unfair for me to force them, I supposed. To make them help figure it out. I’d have to see if I could puzzle things out on my own.

When I got back to our room, nobody else was there. I shut my bedcurtains, pulled out some paper, and wrote the prophecy down.

In a time that’s mostly been, a Hero dreamed a thousand dreams.
A goal, a wish upon a star, a kiss blown to travel far.
In a time that’s partly been, a Child screams a thousand screams.
Imprisoned in the buried heart it pushes, presses, tries to start.
In a time that’s not yet been, the Hero dies, the Child free.
Breaks mirrors, chains, and crushes pearls, to rise from the top of the world.

The Hero’s life cannot be saved. The Child will not be enslaved.
But jailers have a chance to choose just how much they wish to lose.
Safety has a simple price – a single Child sacrifice.
Prepare its heart in offering, and be the music – climb, and sing.

That was extremely unhelpful.

There would be climbing involved. That was something. And singing – a ritual chant of some kind? “Be the music” suggested that might be the case, people forming a chorus? Or it could just be a roundabout reference to my elemental designation of sound?

If I was interpreting this right, then it was suggesting the Child – my spell – had to be sacrificed, which… was that possible? Could you kill a spell? They had to, well, break down eventually, right, or everyone would have one? Although that probably depended on the rate at which they were created… Max would be able to crunch the numbers on that. I could probably find a way to ask him without making it obvious that it was about the prophecy.

Oh! Wait!

My life can’t be saved. The spell won’t be enslaved. The spell needs to be sacrificed. No timeline given in the prophecy. It was so obvious!

I recalled taking to Malas about his spells, a pair so powerful that they were destroying his body and if he ever left his locus and they lost the power to sustain him, he’d die. He’d told me that when he did eventually die, his spells would seek out one of his apprentices… and mentioned offhand that it would probably kill several of them before finding one that could survive it. I’d been so distracted by thinking of my spell in the way I’d been taught to as a child, as a dangerous thing that might trigger and give me the power to cause great harm someday, but what if this wasn’t about the spell awakening at all?

What if it was about what the spell would do after I died, whenever and however that happened? “The Hero’s life cannot be saved” could just mean that everyone dies eventually.

I’d been a familiar for several months now, with no ill effects beyond the familiarity link refusing to be broken. Malas had told me, the first time he’d looked at my spell, that it was one of the extremely clingy ones, probably impossible to remove. Different people responded to hosting spells differently, and the available evidence suggested that I was a) walking magical flypaper, for some reason and b) had an unusually high tolerance for magic. If a particularly powerful curse was flying around, one that would kill most hosts, and I, a six month old uncursed baby, had been in the vicinity…

Maybe I wasn’t a time bomb. Maybe I was a radioactive waste containment facility.

Okay, so I’m not great at metaphors, but it gave me something to work with. The purpose wasn’t to kill me before I could hurt everyone or break everything or whatever the prophecy was warning against; it was to kill my spell before I died. And, okay so the wording suggested I might have to be killed as a part of this, but maybe not, and it felt different, somehow, to frame it as a problem inherent to the curse, not to me. And it gave me somewhere to look. There were, presumably, scientists who researched this kind of thing. Who probably had techniques for this kind of thing.

I just needed to learn how to kill magic.