Chương 299: Burn

To maximize turnover, each of temple's visitors were asked to be ready before the previous one had returned. So when Miss Vinner emerged from the hole, soot-stained and ecstatic, I was standing by to leap down, with barely time for a nod between us. I let myself plunge, I could see the way with my affinities, no need to trust my eyes. The way was a mix of dark and light, the sunlight was gone almost immediately and the firelight from below was reflected off of smooth rock faces and absorbed by charred surfaces.

Smoke carried choking shadows or sometimes brilliant cinders. I was falling through a weaving, waving mirror-maze of sensations, but I appreciated them for atmosphere and dropped through, unhindered. The way widened slightly, walls sloping open back from my plummet. I landed daintily, a tap-tap of my shoes, and I stood on a stone platform no more than five feet across. The chasms that circled this plinth were roaring with flames that formed a high wall, spinning and dancing around me.

The world and the way above was immediately lost to sight, I could see no darkness through this biting light. Heated updrafts pulled at my clothes and my hair, and I held my peace. A lifetime of habit urged me to smooth my clothing, sort my hair. All was cut off, all was hidden, from here those flames were the whole world, save only the island of stone that I stood atop. Flat and worn, and oddly regular. If this is a temple, I stand atop the altar now, like a sacrificial offering.

Part of me resents this and is already winding up to fight back, to argue, to shape things, to make demands, to flex my power. But this was not the time. Any other day I would assert myself and force things to accommodate me. The last time that the fire and I had been face-to-face, I had shouted my demands while I shoveled coal into the furnace.

And for my trouble, I had not only been rebuffed and ignored yet again, but I had momentarily lost my affinity entirely, my 40% dropping to 0% just long enough for me to see how serious this was. Instead, I sat on the stone. For years I've tried to do this my way, and for years I've failed. With patience and perseverance I had gathered a couple dozen percentage. With rage and resentment I had earned more.

The fire had seen me from the vantage point of a candle's dancing wick, and seen me in comfort and warmth and control. The fire had seen me in my fury and frustration, and my vast capacity for violence, and had rewarded me with more. All of this was me doing things my way: opening my soul and absorbing the material, dissecting it in my senses. And there was a significant portion of my thoughts that wanted to storm into this place and demand answers again.

To argue and win, to shout and insist and if necessary to threaten. The essence of fire has spurned me for a long time, and my resentment is a strong thing. It is a fast-flowing river that has cut its channels deep, and when I feel resentment or affronted I lash out with leverage, strength, viciousness, violence- whatever will work. But not today. I am a great power, I am brilliant and strong. But I am not bigger than fire itself, and I am not in a position to shout, demand, cajole. This is a temple.

Sorcerers have called these sites temples since time immemorial. And the word was not chosen by accident, the meaning is clear. We do not arrive as visitors or customers, we arrive as supplicants. I folded my legs like Kimothy had done, and it felt natural. The instinct was there. Sorcery is very vibes-based. We don't learn our abilities with a hundred hours of practicing technique like the scriveners, or studying a hundred months of mathematics like the wizards.

I took a deep breath, let it in, and let it out again. We receive an epiphany. A moment of realization, a rush of recognition so strong that it becomes an instinctive intuition immediately. It would be fair to say that sorcery is the 'vibes-based' form of magic. The other mages all act like we're just toddlers playing with dangerous weapons, that we just receive our abilities by blind chance and never do anything to earn our way to what power we have. But that is not really the answer.

What we have is the ability to form an understanding so deep and profound that there is no point in explaining it. And that's what I'm here for. I breathe, my eyes closed, and I allow it to happen. I've screwed this up before. The fire has spoken to me before, pressing its nature against my understanding until I could perceive messages. And I tried to overcome with intellect, or power, or stubbornness. Today is not the day to repeat mistakes. Today is the day to prove that I'm more smart than stubborn.

Ancient sorcerers had that same sense of understanding and intuition, that same capacity to absorb an essence's nature and build an affinity. And they deemed these sites of contact to be 'temples', a place of supplication, where we come to allow an understanding of something greater than us to be impressed onto us. My hands resting on my knees, my back straight, my breathing even.

I am surrounded by walls of flames that reach up dozens of feet, a guttering guttural growl of rushing heat that beats and eats at the air itself, and ensconced in the only safety down here, I shut my eyes and draw my senses inward for once. I do not unpin my soul, I do not release my own essence. I hold myself in the pose, and I sit, and I let myself learn the hard way. I clear my thoughts, I take my mind away from the conversation. I let the essence of fire reach out to me, and filter through my skin.

I watched Kimothy and the capybaras, I watched him absorb one essence after another as we traveled the kingdom from temple to temple. I saw how he did it. I sit, I breathe, I focus on awareness, on absorbing this epiphany. Kimothy is not just a classmate, not just a love interest. He is [The Sorcerer], with a definite article. He is sorcery like Nux is a madman, like Rabert is ruthless, like Tiviti is a huntress. Their traits are writ large, dominant themes.

So I do need to understand magic the way he understands magic, not just the way that I do. I cannot let just one trait given me by a goddess's resurrection define my abilities. For this, I need to trust the process. Fire's heat pressed against my skin. Not just spiritually, but as an uncomfortable stifling blanket. A test of endurance as well as patience. I don't only need to humble myself before fire as a supplicant. I need to subdue my pride and let myself be just like any other sorcerer.

To not use my cheat code, and just go through the normal process in the normal way. And frankly, it tells me something about myself that I'm having so much trouble convincing myself to do this. Well, except for one thing. [Fire: 43%] It's working. I don't even really feel like I'm doing anything. I'm just bathing in it, letting its essence and mine attune to each other. Wavelengths slowly shifting into synchronization. I sit, and I stay still, and I let my thoughts go still.

Most of what I'm doing is just keeping myself out of my own way. Still the thoughts, exclude the distractions, quiet the body, reduce movement. Just sit. Just be. 46%. I think it's about one percent per minute. Could be close. It takes a while for me to feel anything. Or, anything I can pinpoint as being magical. I can be forgiven for taking a while to catch on. After all, there are damn good reasons why I would feel hot, feverish, and hungry right now.

For several minutes I just watched the Number Go Up, ticking a percentage at a time, and felt myself getting hotter and hungrier because I'm surrounded by a towering inferno and I've been too wound up to eat a decent meal for a while. But the sensation tickled at me, from recent experience. It did not feel entirely normal. It felt like when I was crossing over with Belisa, the sensations from her body. Borrowed perceptions, nothing more than fragmentary impressions.

Like this was not my fever and craving, but referred from someone else, someone nearby. With Belisa it had happened when I brought my essence outside myself, but now it was happening while I'm alone in my body. The heat and hunger, the sense of suffocation, that was the first brush of awareness. And after that came the sense of magnitude. I haven't seen a mountain in sixteen years but I can feel one now, looming high. A sense of weight, mass, gravity, all hovering over me, surrounding me.

Poised to crush but angled to give me space. I often like to watch the stars and the sky to feel that sense of the infinite, letting it make me feel small. This was different. This was something infinite looking back at me, crouching down from miles above to bring its awareness close to me. Well no wonder Kimothy looked like he had come through a religious experience each time we stopped at a temple. This is not at all like unpinning my essence to surround and assimilate something.

A few times before, the fire had spoken to me. I could almost say it had spoken with me. But we were not doing that now, I was too close. I was in the heart of its heat, too close for words. The concept of communication was not as intimate as what was happening in that temple. I could not hear its voice because I was inside that voice, I could not see its face because I was encapsulated. I was in the heart, and the only thing it could share with me was the beat. Thump.

I was every hearth and candle and forge and torch, all at once. I was spread across the land like a field of stars, every pinpoint was all part of me. Thump. I was the night sky looking down onto the land, those flames were mirrors of my image. I was every giant, supergiant, post-main sequence star. Everywhere that heat and oxygen would dance and battle, I was there. Thump. Wizards in Stableholt throwing storms of hellfire at the wilderness to burn back the forests where monsters would hide.

Smelters and crucibles producing the most rapturous, exquisitely-focused heat. Flickers from the planet's core like sharp snapping sparks. Small everlasting flames that slowly burned off hidden gas deposits, unseen by human eyes. Vast feast-fires that crisped apples and melted fats. Sorcerers with party tricks. A lightning-touched wildfire on the other side of the planet. The veins and lungs of a dragon larger than cities. Thump. And me. It saw me. Those fires all shared a soul and that soul was looking into me.

It knew me, it remembered. My arrogance, my demands, my pain. It remembered how I ran in fear, but also how I ran back in courage. The way I fought, water and air, walked burning timbers for the sake of strongest love and barest acquaintance. Years spent lighting a candle with matches. It saw me chaining a blaze like a slave to melt iron, fed on conjured coal to dispel it again and again, forcing the fire to work in starvation. And it saw deeper. Through me. Every thought that I had of fire was known to it.

Through me it saw itself take Hearstcliff. Through me, it saw the deaths of millions, sheets of falling flame descending onto cities to contain the infection and destroy the enemy, as the innocent and the terrified crackled like kindling. Through me it saw the weapons and machines we were building.

It saw the destruction of the east, how decades of pressure and friction struck flint and the flames that should have cauterized the wounds were instead blown on angry winds to sweep death onto a thousand miles of the kingdom, an injury it could not recover from. And the slow, crumbling embers as every fire died at once, extinguished by failure and helplessness. These are the things that I showed to the fire. But it showed me so much.

It showed me Natalie, inside, building walls out of plans and rationales, carving blocks to shape and stacking them to lock the fire inside. It showed me leashing myself, lying to myself, locking chains around rage that pushed outward, trying to craft channels and valves to take the pressure off, trying to build/think/organize/control myself because the fire I've always been scared of has been my own.

It showed me Natalie, inside those walls, raging against the bricks that hemmed me in, slamming myself against chains and walls that trapped my heat and hunger. I have never lacked fire. I was angry before I died young, before a goddess's challenge, before I was trapped on a dying world with an impossible mission. I was ambitious before I ever saw a palace, before I ever commanded an army. Thump. The fire could see both of me, the one that feared and controlled, the one that destroyed and advanced.

It showed me the people that it saw inside me. It was not asking me to choose, it was asking me to change. That is what fire does. Fuse, melt, char, smoke, glow, it demands change. I can't just stop. I started for a reason. I can't just go wild, I can't abandon my path. I need those plans, those structures, those alliances. I need the things I've built. But I don't have to do it out of fear. I don't have to lock down options so the future becomes small enough for me to wrestle it. People are counting on me.

I have to earn their trust. I need to be someone that they can count on. I need to be someone who does not fail or waver. They are counting on you to be your best, and you have not been that. You cannot deserve their trust by betraying yourself. My work and my strategies, my maps and schedules are going to shape a future that we can all survive in. I cannot leave that to chance. I cannot afford to lose. I don't need to lose to take risks, I don't need to fail to dare. I can have my plans. I can have my structure.

And I can do it without hiding from my fears. Cowards cannot win. One need not be a fool to be brave. Embrace both. Merge. Fuse. Temper the blade. Bring thought to your courage, bring strength to your plans. Quit dividing your strength against itself. I was standing, I don't recall that. Linen skirts fluttered around me, updrafts carrying the fabric, I was lit from all sides. Each of my hands held the sun itself, a pair of molten orbs that glowed with fierce eye-searing light.

The cavern was lit by me, light blazing out from my flesh and my fingertips, the walls of blazing inferno were gone, I had captured them. I held them in my hands now. The altar-stone stood high and lonely, and the rock faces around me danced in shifting light from my hands. Left hand. Right hand. I weighed them, stared at them. I turned my wrists, lifted my elbows, and I forced the fires back together. Fused. Merged.

Molten together, and the heat peaked, surging out in a wave that made the air shimmer like running water. Thump. The fire would not burn me. I was inside it now, I had the fire back. A portal opened behind me, and for once its light was equaled. I cast my hands out, and the fire lashed out in sheets, filling the chasm, reigniting the ancient blaze. [Fire: 100%] I stepped through fire, and I took myself away.