Blackness swallowed the room entirely. It felt odd for there to be no difference between having my eyes open or shut. Filling the silence, the sorcerer’s chanting rose in volume.
I couldn’t understand his words, but the longing in them moved me. What had I ever wanted with that intensity, aside from my own survival?
At the culmination of his spell, the diagram blazed, a burst of light that made me shield my eyes. It floated off the page, then grew to fill the room. Several golden spheres rotated in wide orbit around a central, burning mass.
“This is the sun.” Merulo, dimly visibly in the golden glow, pointed to the sphere of fire. “And here we are, on this planet.” His finger moved to a middling orb with a mottled surface. “Everything you know, every person, every mountain, is here.”
“But there are others,” I protested. “And bigger ones. What about that?” A larger sphere with a ring had caught my attention.
“Dead planets,” said the sorcerer. “Lifeless. Though we’d begun to take them. We had a foothold here, on our moon”—he pointed to a smaller ball, spinning companionably about our world—“and on Mars.” He indicated an unimpressive planet, one orbit outward from ours. “And more would have followed. Our empire was spreading. It was a time of unprecedented innovation, with exponential growth in the sciences and in our population. The start of our mastery over the solar system!”
Someone who liked the sorcerer less might have found this speech fanatical. He stared at me with giddy eagerness through the shifting lights of the display, like an over-excited kid who’d finally found someone to play with him. “When God arrived, it destroyed everything. Eviscerated thevery rules on which reality operated. Genius technologies, millennia of accumulated human intelligence, rendered into useless trash overnight. All of life reshaped, made magical. It was the day the world ended.”
With a wave of his hand, the diagram vanished, the orb of witch-light returning to its place above his head. The sorcerer looked breathless and sad. “We were our own Gods. All I want is for that to be the case once more.”
I didn’t understand most of it, but he seemed to appreciate a listening ear. “Dragons must have liked the old world,” I tried. “Without magic, nobody would have had reason to hunt them.”
“No, no.” The sorcerer shook his head, exasperated. “There weren’t any dragons!”
I pulled at my feet, tucking them in further. The soft cushion and dim room conspired to make me sleepy. “What do you mean—they were all born on the Day of Descent?”
“Not born—transformed. They were . . . artificial intelligences. Super brains, massive devices that filled rooms, and operated on the principles of physics. They ruled countries in lieu of kings.” An odd, wistful look came over him. “Their bodies were incapable of motion. But their minds spanned continents.”
I yawned, nestling deeper in the chair. “So, if you change the world back . . . then what? No more spells? Seems to me, being an unbeatable magical genius isn’t so bad. Merulo, you cast more incantations in a day than most people do in a lifetime. Why crave a world where you’d be ordinary?”
The thin man sagged and returned to his seat. “Is that all there is to me, then? My power?”
“No, obviously you have that big ol’ brain.” I closed my eyes experimentally, leaning back in my chair. “I reckon you could become the genius of anti-magic instead. That sounds about right.”
The sorcerer huffed, not sounding entirely displeased.
“So long as we’re sharing . . .” I sank further into the cushions, my senses muddled by comfort. “What’s with the eye?”
“What do you mean,what’s with the eye?”
“Ssnot in there.” I yawned.
“Are you asking me how I came to lose my eye?”
I grunted in confirmation.
“I . . .” He sighed. “I removed it myself. To better control my constructs. And so that it might be used in a spell.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “Ahmm.”
“Are you even listening to me? Are you even awake?” The sorcerer gave another heaving sigh. Then came the whisper of turning pages as he resumed reading.
It is possible, at some point after, that I fell asleep.
When I woke, morning light fell through the thin library windows, and someone had draped the blanket from my cot over me.
CHAPTER 14
In Which I Woke Up with a Curious Lightness and Went through the Day Humming under My Breath until I Realized, with Something Not Unlike Horror, that This Is the Happiest I’ve Ever Been in My Life, and that I Have No Desire for Humanity to Forgive Me.
Heresy became our preferred method of bonding. I followed the mad sorcerer like a little black lamb, absorbing his forbidden teachings. “A goat,” he corrected, when I voiced the image out loud. “Goats think for themselves.”
Questions became a fun game.
