Chương 55: Chapter 54: Unexpected Conversations

++Some say that twelve is too young for matters of romance. I would agree with that. In fact, I would add that twelve thousand is too old too. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E.

"You're hurt," Sascithius cooed as I entered the dungeon.

"I can smell it. Blood. Cover was exposed, was it? Or did you just get in a more random fight, what was it? You're limping, interesting. Just how bad was your little wound?" He always had tended to overlook an obvious explanation, perhaps that was my doing. My apprentices tended to see schemes and conspiracies everywhere, even when there were none. That was, I reasoned, a far better trait than not seeing schemes and conspiracies where there were some.

In any case, Sascithius' overactive imagination had stopped being my problem long ago. My prisoner was right where I had left him, which was good, and the room was just as it had been as I last exited it. Sterile and clean, bare except for the things I needed to do my work, cold and dry. I took a moment to simply stand there and breathe it in. Then, of course, my idiot apprentice ruined that as well.

"You're acting a lot more human than I remember."

"I have always been human," I told him, careful to keep the growl from my voice. I did not wish to give this imbecile the satisfaction of hearing me irritated. He laughed, rather than answer me. That did enrage me. Even I had to admit, it got to me. Touched some deep bundle of annoyance that I had not known I had. But confronting Sascithius about it would only show him where the nerve was, and let him touch it again more deliberately in the future. Instead I turned to my prisoner.

"We are going to begin a different kind of experimentation soon," I informed him. He whimpered, which I had to admit was not an irrational response on his part. It would not, after all, be very good for him, not unless it all went unusually well.

"What…what sort?" he croaked. He had actually gotten a much stronger spine recently than when I first received him as my captive, which I did not care for one bit. A good prisoner was a frightened prisoner, provided the fear was not so great that it propelled them into an escape attempt. As with so many other things in life, it is a balancing act.

"I am going to carry out procedures on you. They will make you stronger, faster and more durable. All the benefits you get from being a warrior already will be improved on." That was if the procedures went well; of course, they might not. One did not make a scientific or magical breakthrough without a few failures first. But I saw no point in telling my prisoner about that, if he thought he was likely to die or mutate then he would become a lot more unmanageable.

He may even decide to test that bracelet of his, and that would be terribly inconvenient for me.

"And I can go after you're done?" he asked. It was quite a stupid question, I thought. Of course he could not, that would ruin my secrecy and be tantamount to me confessing my true nature to the whole world.

"Yes," I told him. I did not give my word. A lot of what I was doing with magic now was beyond the raw power of my own abilities, especially the production and control of living tissue. I had learned a modest amount about healing magic, repairing damage to living things and such, and my necromantic expertise had a convenient amount of overlap too, but the actual, practical ability to make my powers produce such changes was still temporarily beyond me.

Fortunately, a magician can compensate for raw ability a great deal if he or she takes advantage of enough preparation time and external resources. That was, ultimately, what the laboratory was for. Modern science went a long way in this regard, too. Garamon had long-since learned of both germs and cells, which I wasted no time in exploring myself. Observing them was difficult, but doable.

I pressed the Grandmaster into supplying me with the equipment needed to do so, a large machine made as much of science as magic that used alternating lenses and light-amplifying enchantments to peer down into the 'microscopic' scale. This was where most of my work was being done. It was also where I learned something new; magic was far more active on that scale than it was on the macro.

As I watched the cells in a sample of my pet warrior's tissue, saw them aimlessly drift and quiver in the dish, I saw with my own sight, my arcane eye, how mana swirled around them. It resembled clouds coiling at the top of a hurricane, events of pure power dancing around the solid matter beneath them. At first I just stared in awe. This was a rare experience for me, a precious one. It was a new facet of mana that I had not ever been able to see myself. I watched and soaked it in, and then the inevitable happened.

I began to cry. There was no helping it, the beauty just… overwhelmed me. Magic is, and always will be, the most wonderful thing in the universe. No matter how many aeons I existed for, I would never get tired of it.

"You're insane." The words snapped me out of my reverie and snatched my head around to stare at their source. The prisoner, of course. He was craning his neck to look at me, though still flinching back hard into the wall behind him. There was a look on his face that seemed made equally of fear, disgust and fascination.

"What?" I asked, angry to have been interrupted during such a wonderful moment and letting it bleed into my voice. Here, at least, there was no need for hiding.

"You're insane," the prisoner repeated.

"That's the only explanation. You…you do the things you've done, never without even a twitch of an eyebrow. And now you're crying at a microscope? What…what sort of person can do that? How can you cry, and still do…still…" Now he was crying, though unlike my appreciation for the universe's majesty, he seemed to just be tantruming.

"I cry because there are things in the cosmos that deserve my tears," I told him coolly.

"And I do the things I do because there are things in the cosmos that deserve my enmity." His tears started faltering as he worked hard to reign them in, still trembling and swallowing, still staring.

"What… what do you mean?" I considered what to tell him. On the one hand, I knew it was a pointless risk. The Grandmaster may well get whatever information I gave to this man back out of him. On the other hand, that was easily enough accounted for by being a bit more selective with my confessions. I did not need to tell him everything to feel the joy of confession. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

And I wanted so very much to share my thoughts. To confide in another. As I have said, I am still a human. Nothing about body or mind can change that fundamental fact. We like to be understood, and from time to time even I indulge in that weakness.

"The world is wide and wonderful. The most extraordinary thing in it is magic, but there are creatures that impose their will on humanity and keep us from exploring our full magical potential. From exploring the universe. I find this unacceptable. So I do what I do to acquire strength and one day challenge them, so that mankind can control its own fate." He took a moment to think about that, then the words erupted from him all at once.

"The Gods! You're talking about the Gods!?"

"I am, yes." My lip curled just thinking about them.

"They are jealous, spiteful, petty little creatures and it is only our bad luck that saw them born with more magic than us. For now. One day we will overthrow them, and I am working to make that day arrive sooner rather than later." I will never cease to be amazed at the drive of a zealot. Even now, chained, hurt and terrified, my prisoner found a sudden spark of defiance as I spoke ill of his tormentors.

"You're nothing but a blasphemer," he snarled.

"The Gods have guarded us for generations—for thousands of years. Under them, we've built an empire the likes of which the world has never seen, we've devised technology to redefine the world. Your magic is getting less useful by the generation." I was in front of him before even I knew what I was intending to do, sudden fury moving me as fast as my shrunken legs could manage. Faster.

"What do you think might be possible, right now, if humanity had not been developing under the Gods?" I demanded.

"I have read the histories, seen how our technology advanced. The Godtouched have dragged their heels through every development. They have stifled medicine, to ensure their own divine healing remains useful and keeps society reliant on it. They have stifled steam and fuel development, to ensure that human construction never produces things they cannot confidently stamp down. And your Empire, this place? This tiny little shrivelled raisin of a society? How about the stars?

How about a society of humans flitting between one planet and the next?" There was not much of an argument following that, but I suspected it was more due to my prisoner's bottomless terror than any level of logical cohesion in my point. He simply sat there and trembled, while I sighed and stepped back.

"Understand that the Gods wish to keep power and you will understand everything they do," I concluded.

"So that's your goal? You want to overthrow the Gods, and then what? Have everybody rule themselves, abolish government and aristocracy? What society would you set up?" I found myself considering that.

"You know, I have never once thought about it. I simply know that I should rule the world, and it bothers me to see inferior beings do so instead." The rest of my day was spent toying with the tissue samples I had collected, trying and, usually, failing to meaningfully alter how they reacted when the flow of mana running through them was tweaked. Once again, I was treading ground left for me to pioneer myself.

Cells were certainly known in Garamon, as was the fact that mana had effects on the micro-scale, but as far as I knew my ability to see mana remained fully unique, even now. And nobody without that had the basic ability to even begin experimenting as I was. Whatever was possible with this new field of study, I would have to discover it all myself from the ground up. Unfortunately, pioneering a new field means slow returns on your work. Uncertain returns, too.

For all my confidence that there was something to be found here, I did not know that, and unlike with my other studies I had no Professors of greater experience to assure me when I was closing in on progress. This did not slow my work, I was not so feeble-minded as to need constant reassurance, but it did make the excitement of it all start to diminish as I continued. That, and I was still beset by the damned cramps in my lower abdomen. I missed being a skeleton more and more by the day.

There had still been no real progress by the time I left my laboratory, though I had made a great many observations. Sometimes I wished that my ability to see magic was not so unique. If reading about Garamon's history had told me anything, it was that lone genius did not measure up to simply having more minds working on the same problem. Then again, if others could see magic, I would not enjoy anywhere near as much of an advantage.

Natural superiority is hardly something to complain about, I was just feeling petulant from the day's events. I headed back to my new quarters, appreciating yet again that they were so close to the dungeons and, more importantly, that they were so far from the common room. I was in no mood to deal with my mouth-breathing peers currently. Unfortunately, the mouth-breathers in question did not care what mood I was in. Gyrat specifically, that was.

I found him waiting outside my room with that same, twisted sneer on his face, the one that made me think back to better times, when I could atomize a person at fifty paces with only an idle thought.

"I've been waiting for you," he grunted.

"Why?" I asked him, far too irritable to be as glib as I was last time.

"You wish to strike me or something, is that it?" He made his way over to me, and I readied my magic. It was frowned upon to use it for anything but self-defence, and the Institute was far less tolerant of that on my part than it would be for the child of a magician family, but I would do so if it came down to it. Better that than let myself be bullied physically. But even I could not have predicted what Gyrat's actual intentions were.

He moved over, growing less certain by the step, and then grabbed my hand quite hard before staring into my face with a look that seemed halfway between total agony and severe constipation.

"I'm in love with you," he told me. I could not control what happened next, it was entirely involuntary. Without the slightest say in the matter, I burst out laughing.

"What?!" It had been literally aeons since I had laughed, let alone so hard and long as I did then, but what other reaction was there? This was quite simply one of the most ridiculous things I had ever seen.

"Stop laughing," the boy snapped.

"No," I laughed harder.

"What do you mean you are in love with me?!" His face was burning, and he took several shaky steps back as though he had just been shot.

"You're…you're…"he was mumbling the words out, now, gaze dropping down to his feet.

"You're pretty." I was? That was news to me, I had never really thought about it. And I had no intention of thinking about it going on from now, either. The idea of copulation had little of interest to me, the idea of copulation with a child, obviously, had less than none.

"You are attracted to me, then," I sighed, "that is what you meant."

"I'm in love with you!" he repeated, now more angry than embarrassed. More the shame, rage seemed to be giving him the courage to speak more of his tiny mind.

"You're the most beautiful woman I've ever met. And…and you're so commanding, so certain. Not like other girls at all, they're all mewling weaklings but you—you're like a queen, Isabel, a queen! Always calm, always certain, like everything you do is planned and everything that happens is according to that plan. It's not just your beauty, I love you!" I had to admit, he was wording it better now than at first. That did not change the fundamental fact that he was a child of course.

"I am not interested in you romantically, nor will I ever be." After spending so much time around Agrian growing up, I had become well aware of how influential my adult's mind would make me on people who knew me as children. The thought of becoming entangled with one was the thought of becoming a God to them. Not something I was interested in romantically, even if I were interested in romance at all. But Gyrat did not know that, and I could see by the frost in his eyes that he did not care.

"I'm not good enough, is that it?"

"No," I told him.

"I am just not interested."

"Why!?" he growled, taking a step forward. I would have been intimidated, were his voice not more pleading than demanding.

"What's wrong with me?"

"I just am not interested in you," I repeated. I could see his face trembling for a moment, and I found myself entirely uncertain of what he might do next. Would he explode into a violent rage, begin seizing, kill himself on the spot? Who knew, I had no experience with such things. It is rare that I enjoy a true novelty like this, and I did enjoy the intellectual aspect to it, even if the situation itself was far from comfortable. Eventually, Gyrat spoke again.

His voice was terribly calm now, which I decided was not a good sign at all.

"I need to prove myself to you, right? That's what you're getting at, I understand. Of course I do. I'll show you what I'm capable of, mark my words." I would have liked to reply to that with some calmer, more rational response. Perhaps; "no, stop being stupid", but unfortunately Gyrat did not give me the chance. No sooner had the words left his own lips than he was already turning around and disappearing down the corridor like a frightened rat fleeing a burning ship.

I watched him go with the vague sense that what happened next would probably not be to my advantage. I could not, unfortunately, think of how I might possibly convince him not to do it.