Chương 123: Chapter 120: In Her Shoes

"So, what does it feel like?" Damian considered this for a few seconds.

"Like being stabbed in the head," he said.

"Except it doesn't hurt. I just… know that someone else is in there. It's hard to explain." He rubbed the back of his neck.

"Like a door I didn't know I had being opened from the other side, maybe?" That was eloquent, and a lot more useful than how Violet had described it.

"But it doesn't hurt."

"No. It doesn't hurt." He confirmed. Good. I did not want any of this to be painful. I had been at this all morning. Violet had been first, then Damian, then Violet again when she got bored of watching and demanded another turn. Through my experiments, I was starting to understand just how this all worked. I had been completely wrong about my Edict. I had been trying to force my will onto other people, and hoping that my mana would let me bridge a gap I thought was there. Empathy was the bridge.

If I genuinely felt what the other person was feeling, the connection was almost automatic, even on a thread of mana so thin I didn't even notice using it. But if I reached for something superficial, nothing happened at all. I had spent ten minutes earlier trying to connect to Violet by focusing on what it was like to breathe the same air as her. Ten minutes, and enough mana to perhaps light every Magical Implement in my District, all to no avail. My Gift could not force its way in.

That had been my fear, that I would force my way into other's lives the way my mother had forced her way into mine. It wasn't entirely different. Just because I felt what the other person felt, didn't make the power itself any different. Still, something about it did make me feel better. My new discovered power had limits. Or maybe I simply wasn't good enough at using it yet. I couldn't connect with multiple people at once.

I had tried, reaching for both Violet and Damian at the same time, and it was like trying to hold two conversations in two different languages at the same time. The connections had flickered and collapsed within seconds. Maybe it was possible with practice. I hoped it was.

"Hey, rockboy." Violet's voice cut through my thoughts. She was already standing, cracking her knuckles.

"Let's fight. I mean, train." Damian sighed.

"That's the second time just this morning."

"So? You scared?"

"Tired, more like." He pushed himself up from the grass.

"But sure." They moved off toward the raised ring. I watched them go. Violet had unslung her hammer before she'd taken three steps. I gave the ring roughly six minutes before Damian had to make a new one. That left me and Sere. She sat cross-legged on the grass a few paces to my left, her notepad balanced on one knee. She was drawing the sky. The clouds had arranged themselves in long strips across the afternoon blue, turning everything grey. Maybe it was going to rain soon.

Every now and then she would look up, frown at something only she could see, and then her pencil would move faster.

"Sere, can I try with you?" She looked up, nodded once and went back to her sky. With Violet and Damian, I had asked them to describe what they were feeling first. It had been useful and made everything go much easier, but I had abandoned that quickly. Anybody I needed to use this power against wasn't going to just tell me what they were feeling or thinking. If this was ever going to be a useful power, then I was going to have to guess. I sent my mana out toward Sere and thought. She was drawing.

That was the obvious starting point. I reached for the wonder of it, of what it must feel like to see the world and want to put it on paper. From everything I knew about her, from every drawing she'd ever shown me, this felt right. Nothing happened. Sere tilted her head up at me curiously. I tried again, and again there was nothing. I pulled the mana back and stared at her. It should have worked. The emotion was real enough. I had felt it myself, sometimes, watching her draw. So why- Unless I was wrong.

Unless I had just been assuming. No, the Edict itself didn't matter. More than that, I realized that I had never actually asked something I should have asked a very long time ago.

"Hey, Sere." She looked up.

"Why do you like to draw?" Sere thought about it. She thought about it for longer than I expected, her pencil hovering over the notepad. Then she started to write. She turned the paper toward me and held it up. Can't speak. What else can do? I read the words. There were just six words, and each one felt like it had the weight of paragraphs. Of course. Of course that was why. She didn't draw because the world was beautiful.

She drew because every thought and feeling that lived inside her had no way out except through a pencil, through clumsy letters on a page. I felt like the biggest fool in the entire world. I wanted to hit myself. Vaelin pulsed once in the back of my mind, one that only carried a strange heaviness. Even the blade had nothing to say. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. I reached forward and hugged her. Sere went still under the embrace.

Then her arms came up around me and she hugged me back. I pulled away slowly.

"I'm going to try again, okay?" Sere nodded. I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes. I didn't think about wonder. I didn't think about beauty. I thought about what it must be like to want to say so much and have no way of saying it. To write because your tongue was taken from you. To draw because the alternative was screaming inside your own head forever. It must be lonely. Even surrounded by people who cared, even held by someone who loved her, there must be a loneliness in it that never fully went away.

Connection. The world split. For a moment I was looking at Sere and at myself at the same time. Then the split resolved, and I was only looking at myself. It was strange, seeing my own face from the outside. There were faint shadows under my red eyes that I hadn't noticed in the mirror, but had through Violet and Damian's eyes. I was smaller than I thought I had thought I was before today. No wonder so many people kept bringing it up. Then the feelings came. There was determination, first.

A steel thread running through everything else. Then there was loneliness, exactly as I had guessed, except it was quieter than I had imagined. And under both of those, so deep I almost missed it, there was… contentment. She was happy. Despite everything. When her gaze settled on me, I felt protectiveness rise through her like a wave. It was like what I had felt in Violet, but it was not the same. How it was different, I could not say, even when I was literally inside their heads.

I just knew that it was different, somehow. Something tightened in my chest. I almost broke the connection right there. Then there were the knobs. I found them easily, the same mental layout as my own, the same architecture as I had found in Damian and Violet. Whatever governed this strange arrangement was universal, it seemed. I could more or less guess what each of them did. And then there was something else. A passive…. pulling. Something in Sere that was trying to draw in mana, but wasn't being fed.

It was the strangest thing. I fed it a thread of power. The world dimmed, just slightly. The colors washed out by a fraction, as if someone had pulled a thin curtain across everything. The sounds of the training yard grew just a little bit softer. As if the world itself was forgetting that Sere was here. So this is what it's like. The blanket extended out from me/Sere. It settled over the space in the range I already knew. It was a hundred meters, give or take. It was drawing a lot of mana.

Sere probably regulated the range whenever she used it. Finally, there was the thread. The connection that tied me to Sere, one I could sever at any point, if I so wished. I almost did it. Instead, I did something I should not have done, perhaps. I tried to speak. I opened Sere's mouth and pushed. What came out was a huff of air. Barely anything at all. Sere's sadness welled up through the link. It came and flooded her, and underneath it was… guilt. So much guilt. What this guilt was for, I did not know.

She had nothing to feel guilty for. I almost let go. I took a breath and held. Can I? Another feeling rose, one that felt like assent. I stood in Sere's body. It was strange. Her center of balance was lower than mine. Each step required thought. My first step wobbled. The second was worse. The third almost sent us both to the ground. Controlling someone remotely was probably not very useful then. Something like hopping into a person's head and turning down their sight, however, was probably how I'd use this Edict.

My Edict's control was not absolute. I had learned that much from the others. If the person fought back, the connection broke fast. Violet had thrown me out almost instantly when she'd tried. Damian had taken longer. Whether the difference was will, or mana, or something else entirely, I didn't know. This was going to take practice. A tremendous amount of practice. I broke the connection. The world lurched. For a dizzy heartbeat I was nowhere, and then I was myself again, and even that felt wrong for a second.

I took a deep breath, then another. I looked up. Sere was standing a few paces away, and she was shrinking. Something in her posture had folded inward, her shoulders drawing together, her notepad pressed tight against her chest. She wasn't looking at me.

"Sere, that's-" I reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were small and cold.

"It's okay. You don't have to be guilty about a thing. Not one thing. Do you understand me?" Sere looked at our joined hands. She looked at my face. Whatever she saw there must have been enough, because she nodded, slowly. Then she stepped forward and hugged me, her arms around my waist, her face pressed against my coat. I held her. I brushed her hair with my fingers, working through the tangles the way I always did, or tried to, one knot at a time. She pulled back after a time. Her pencil moved across the notepad.

She turned it around. Did it help? I smiled.

"Of course it did. It helped just fine." Sere studied my face for a moment. Then she nodded, and something in her posture eased. She started writing again. Help me fight? She pointed past me, toward the ring. I turned. The ring that Damian had so painstakingly rebuilt was rubble again. Damian was flat on his back three feet outside the remains, staring up at the sky with the expression of a boy who really wondered how he'd ended up there.

Violet stood over him, one hand resting on the head of her hammer, the other on her hip. She did not look remotely sorry.

"Sure," I said.

"Why not." Hours passed. Sere and I trained in a separate ring that Damian had raised for us. I tried to hold back at first. Sere very quickly proved why that was a stupid idea for my own safety. She had been training, and she was using a similar stance to the one I'd seen Estovan use a few times. Similar, but not the same. Sere's Gift made fighting her even more dangerous than her mana.

It wasn't like I couldn't see through her Gift, but a single second of disorientation was more than enough for her to launch me outside the ring. And she did, several times. Damian and Violet fought in their own ring. The original ring, though after how many times Damian repaired it, calling it so felt at least a little facetious. The sun hung low over the manor, or at least I think it did, behind the clouds. It hadn't rained. I was sweating, wiping my hands on my coat outside the ring. Sere had won this round.

That put us at five each which was… less than I would have liked, even if I was proud of her. I turned and saw Anias. She was crossing the grounds toward the rings, and she was hurrying. The same way she had hurried when there had been a Princess waiting for me. I tried not to groan. That would be un-Ladylike. I moved to meet her halfway.

"What's wrong?" Anias stopped. She was composed, but I saw the faintest strain on her face. And she had a letter. One that was in a seal I recognized. Count Sterling's seal.

"It seems," she said, "Greenward has made his first move." The sky chose that moment to start raining.