The Spell Realm (29 page)

And somehow Blaise knew what was in front of him.

“Gala,” he thought with joy, addressing the intricate design.

“Yes, this is me,” her thought came at him in response.

The feeling of relief was so strong, Blaise would’ve shook with it if he had a body. His mind pulsated with joy. He found her. He had succeeded.

There were a million things he needed to ask her, but all he could say was, “How could you do this? How could you disappear like that?” The words came across as angry, yet anger was the last emotion he was experiencing right now.

There was no response for a moment. Instead, Blaise could see the colors in the Gala pattern changing. Lightning flashed, and the chamomile color red became violet—which smelled like rosemary for some reason—and Blaise tasted thirteen, which reminded him of a peach. Overwhelmed, he experienced the wonder that was his creation. “You are beautiful even here,” he thought at her, unable to help himself.

Instead of a thought, he felt a response of a different sort. Suddenly, he was overcome by a deep sense of belonging, an intense feeling of happiness that somehow was not his own.

He was feeling Gala’s emotions, Blaise realized, and he tried to project his own feelings at her. All the love and worry had now transformed into an almost incandescent joy, and he let her feel it, opening his mind as he had never done before. She responded with a plethora of her own sensations. It was intense, but he did not want it to stop.

And then he felt the pattern that was Gala begin to join his. Slowly and methodically, they became a bigger, joint pattern. It was strange and wonderful, reminding him of the night before, when they made love for the first time.

As the merging was coming to an end, Blaise received visions of Gala. He saw her whole life, as short as it was. He saw himself through her eyes, that first time in his study. Then he became her, reading all those books in his library. He was seeing her time in the village, the trial and the fair, the wonder and horror of the coliseum. He suffered with her in the battle with the Sorcerer Guard, and felt regret at the lives she destroyed. He saw himself teach her magic, felt her battle the storm, and in one violent flash he saw their night together and the battle afterwards. He even saw the Spell Realm through Gala’s eyes and realized that she was experiencing it in a different manner. The spells, the strange being she’d encountered, even himself—Blaise saw it all. The culmination of the vision was an ecstasy unlike any other, an exquisite pleasure that was born of the mind, not the body. It seemed to last forever.

When it did end, he felt her explore his own mind the way he just did hers, and the ecstasy began again.

Chapter 52: Barson 

The day after the takeover, after all the corpses had been removed from the Council Hall and the room had been thoroughly scrubbed, Barson gathered his men and the sorcerers who had been spared.

Looking at the faces in front of him, he felt jubilant. This was the moment he had dreamed of all of his life, ever since he had learned that he was a descendant of the rightful kings.

Dara and Larn stood to the right of him, holding hands. On his left were his sorcerer allies and his closest lieutenants. All present were dressed in their best clothes, and Barson himself wore decorative armor that had been passed down from times of old.

The only thing missing was the woman he had planned to have by his side at this ceremony—Augusta. Where was she? Where was the Council? The questions tormented Barson, interfering with his joy at this victory, and he knew his first order of business would be to find answers.

But first, he had to get through the ceremony.

Stepping forward, he surveyed his new subjects, watching as a pair of young women walked toward the throne, carrying a golden crown on a velvet-wrapped tray. As they got closer, Dara took the crown from them, raising it high over her head. Then she reverently placed it on Barson’s head.

“Long live the king!” she shouted, turning toward the crowd.

“Long live the king!” Their answering cry echoed through the hallways, filling the Tower with the sound of a new beginning.

Chapter 53: Blaise

When the merging of their minds was long over, Blaise thought back to what he’d learned through the experience. He was particularly fascinated with whatever intelligences seemed to exist in this realm. “What do you think Dranel is?” he asked Gala silently, remembering the brief image he got from her mind.

“I don’t know,” Gala responded, a bit dreamily. She appeared to be still under the influence of their joining. “He seems to be more like you than me, though his pattern is still quite different.”

Blaise thought about it, remembering seeing his own pattern through her eyes and comparing them in his mind. He could not see any resemblance, but then he didn’t have Gala’s ability to process complex information quickly. Being in her mind here had been a very different experience. She was less like a human being here; instead, she was something different, something greater.

Dwelling on it, Blaise slowly felt his thoughts fade as his newfound senses took over. It was so beautiful, so peaceful, that the nothingness lured him in.

* * *

“Blaise?” Gala’s thought brought him into consciousness.

“Yes?” he responded, confused.

“You have not thought for a while,” she explained, and he could detect a hint of worry in her pattern.

What had happened? Did he pass out? Was it possible to do that in this place? Mildly disturbed, Blaise tried to refocus on something he almost forgot, though it was on his mind earlier.

“How do we go back?” he thought, finally remembering his original intent. He had come here to retrieve Gala. To save her. To take her back to his world.

“Do you want to go back?” she thought back, her pattern seeming to pulsate with a feeling Blaise could only describe as hesitation.

He was not sure he did. This existence was very direct and pure. Blaise could feel what Gala felt, and she knew his innermost thoughts. But somehow, he still felt like an intruder here, though the feeling lessened with every moment. Yet as the feeling lessened, so did his sense of identity, of knowing what and who he was. It was only Gala’s presence that seemed to ground him somewhat, and Blaise had a bad feeling about the episode he’d just experienced. It was possible that he would have more periods of time without thought, his mind getting absorbed into the serene, mathematical beauty of the patterns around him. Could he slowly lose himself here? The idea was frightening.

“Then I will go back with you,” she said simply. Blaise hadn’t voiced his thoughts, but she was answering them anyway. Blaise could also sense Gala’s feelings on this matter. She was much more ambivalent about returning. He understood her hesitation; she was a product of both realms and was nearly as at home here as she was in his world. In many ways, she preferred this serene, startlingly different place. There was no ugliness here, no injustice that she could not abide.

“Maybe we could do something about that,” Blaise thought, remembering his original intentions. He still wanted to help people, to eliminate the suffering that made Gala so uncomfortable.

For a short time, she appeared to muse about something that he could not discern. Then a pattern appeared in front of him. A strange, complex shape that didn’t contain the intelligent components he could see in Gala.

“This is part of the spell you wove before,” she explained, projecting her thoughts at him.

Blaise studied the shape curiously. All he saw, tasted, and smelled were unusual textures and things that had nothing in common with the arcane words he’d written on cards.

Gala, however, seemed to know what to do with it. He could see that she was altering the structure, changing it as she went along. Looking closer, Blaise could tell that there were flaws in the spell’s intricate mathematics—errors that he had inadvertently made—and he could see that Gala was fixing them. The changes started small, but with time they almost recreated the structure, giving it new life. With each tweak that Gala made, new tastes, smells, and associations occurred to Blaise, overwhelming his new senses.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, the activity stopped.

“Are you ready?” her thought came.

“Yes. Take us home,” he thought back, and watched the colors in the spell structure flare brighter as they departed for the Physical Realm.

Epilogue: Dranel

This time, when lucidity came, Dranel knew himself instantly. The last thing he remembered was observing Gala. She had done something, and he had reacted. Whatever it was, it had brought him the deep calm he longed for. But now the lucidity he often cursed was back.

Dranel’s thoughts were clearer than he could ever recall, and he arrived at a decision. He strongly preferred the serenity of not thinking to this state of lucidity. Yes, lucidity had its moments, like when he was observing Gala, but as fascinating as those small moments were, on the whole they did not seem worth leaving the blissful state he so often found himself in.

Thinking of Gala distracted Dranel again. He felt something related to her. A sense of urgency. A sense of awe. She was here. And not in the ephemeral presence he had witnessed before, when he’d learned her name. No, she was here in the same way Dranel was here.

Quickly he brought his attention to her and saw that he was too late. She had just become interwoven in a spell. He examined the algorithm of the spell. What the mathematics implied was genius.

It was a way out of this realm—something Dranel had thought impossible to initiate from within the Spell Realm itself.

He reacted instantly. He didn’t want Gala to leave. He wanted to interact with her once more.

He tried to change the pattern responsible for her departure, to stop its unfolding, but it didn’t work. Still, Dranel knew he should be able to do something to that pattern, so he tried again. This time, he attempted to slow the spell down, and that seemed to have a small effect. Even so, he only had mere moments to observe her before she left. Fleetingly, he wondered if this slowdown would harm Gala somehow, but decided that it would not. In the worst case, as a side effect, it could tamper with the timeline of when she would appear in the Physical Realm.

With no time to lose, Dranel began examining Gala and her handiwork. As he marveled at her beauty, he became aware of something else. She was not the only strange pattern interwoven into this departure spell. There was another. Curious, Dranel took a closer look at this other being—and recoiled.

Something about this other pattern filled Dranel with dread—and it was only when he felt it that he realized what dread meant. It was an emotion, and emotions were the reason he preferred never to be lucid.

This pattern evoked a barrage of emotions in Dranel, each one worse than the one preceding it. It wasn’t the pattern itself—Dranel was certain he had never seen it before—but rather the way the pattern made Dranel feel. There was anger and a sense of loss, desperate longing and regret. He felt overwhelmed with feelings. And in the midst of all this turmoil, Dranel wished for one thing above all: for the silence of the Spell Realm to take all of these emotions away.

Before he could even start to contemplate how to regain his serenity, the spell he tried to slow down finished its execution, taking Gala and whatever accompanied her to the Physical Realm.

Dranel stayed behind, his thoughts in turmoil. He wanted to return to his former peaceful existence, but he didn’t know how. Something about what had just happened disturbed him deeply, and he didn’t understand what it was.

As he drifted, lucid, in the pattern-filled world surrounding him, he found himself resenting every bit of noise, every spell that felt like an intrusion. He tried to be someplace where there were no disruptions, no echoes from the Physical Realm, but such a place could not be found.

And as time went on, Dranel slowly came to the realization that nothing would ever be the same again—unless he did something to restore the peace and quiet he longed for.

Unless he silenced the source of his distress.

Sneak Peeks

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