Chương 19: Candlelit Vigil

An hour later, Enzo sat in the armchair he'd claimed as his own sometime around the age of twelve and never relinquished. The living room looked the same as it always had. Same sofas. Same coffee table with the ring stain his mother had never forgiven him for. Same fireplace, unlit, with family photos clustered along the mantelpiece, broken up by the smooth stones and crystals his mother collected. Healing crystals, she called them. Amethyst for calm. Rose quartz for love.

He'd always steered clear of that particular conversation. What was different was the silence. No hum from the old fridge in the kitchen through the archway. No buzz from the freezer. No TV murmuring in the background. The power had been out for days, he knew that, but knowing it and sitting in the room where he'd grown up feeling it were different things. The only light came through the large windows, afternoon sun filtered green through the redwood canopy, and the only sounds were voices.

They'd spent the hour filling in the gaps. Where they were when the rain started. What came after. There was a lot of ground to cover, and the telling had been uneven, lurching between the clinical and the raw depending on who was speaking and what they were remembering. His parents listened through most of it. His mother held his father's hand. His father asked questions at the points that mattered and stayed quiet through the rest. His mother sat tucked under his father's arm on the larger sofa, Val beside them.

Kenzo and Sumi shared the other, Sumi leaning over Kenzo's forearm with the greenish glow of healing mana illuminating the space between her palms and his skin. She'd been at it since they sat down, working through each wound one at a time, dissolving the stitches and closing the tissue beneath. Kenzo watched the process with undimmed fascination, occasionally wincing when she pulled a thread free.

"So you made a ring," his mother said, leaning forward, "that let your sister cast your spell? Even though she can't, because she's a blood mage instead of a brain mage?" Val closed her eyes.

"Mom, I'm a cultivator. Not a blood mage." She paused.

"And Enzo's more like a half-a-brain mage." Kenzo's booming laughter filled the room. His father hadn't laughed. He was looking at Enzo with an expression that was harder to read.

"You think your magic items might work for us normal folk, too?" Sumi's hands stilled. The green glow faded as she looked across the room at Enzo, her head tilted with that quiet curiosity he'd come to recognize. Enzo frowned.

"I don't know. The ring I made for Val doesn't work without mana. She has to push it from her hand to activate the enchantment, or I have to thread it in from a distance. Without that, it's just a ring." He turned the problem over, the way he'd turn a gemstone under a loupe.

"There would need to be some way to get mana into the item without a mage. And then some other mechanism to trigger the effect." He fell quiet. It seemed like the sort of thing that might be possible, but he'd barely started down this road. He had no idea where the limits were, or if there even were limits. His father nodded, as if the answer confirmed something he'd been thinking about. A strangled sound cut through the room. Enzo's head snapped toward the other sofa.

Sumi had gone completely still, her hands frozen where they'd been working a moment ago, the green glow of healing mana already fading. Her mouth opened.

"Kenzo?" Kenzo's eyes had rolled back. His jaw was clenched, tendons standing out in his neck, and for a single, horrible second, the big man was rigid from head to toe. Then his leg kicked out. The coffee table launched across the room and cracked against the far wall, scattering magazines and one of his mother's crystals across the hardwood. Kenzo began to convulse, his massive frame shaking the sofa with each spasm. His mother screamed.

"Kenzo!" The old man was already moving. He got his arms under Kenzo's shoulders, cradling the big man's head against his chest and rolling him onto his side.

"Someone grab his legs before he hurts himself." Enzo and Val locked eyes. Sumi turned to Enzo from beside the sofa, her face white.

"I don't— I didn't—" Val stepped around their father. She took Sumi by the shoulders, gentle but firm, and moved her out of the way.

"It's okay. Come here." Enzo stood, his knee screaming at the sudden shift in weight. He steadied himself on the arm of the chair.

"Mom. Please calm down." He took a breath.

"We know what's happening." His father looked over his shoulder, still holding Kenzo steady.

"What is it?"

"It's what happened to the rest of us. After coming into contact with the blood." He glanced at Val and Sumi, standing together at the end of the sofa.

"I don't know why it just happened, but it's exactly the same reaction." Enzo stepped over to the sofa and secured Kenzo's legs.

"Sumi, were the nurses at the hospital doing anything else for the seizures? How long did they last?" Sumi stared at him for a few heartbeats before she shook her head.

"N-no. Just keeping them on their side and making sure they're safe. They last about an hour, if they…" She trailed off. He heard what she'd left unsaid. If they survived.

Hours passed. Val had agreed to check in on Kenzo's mother and stay the night there. Sumi had gone with her, looking dejected despite their reassurances. They'd discussed the situation at length, and everyone agreed it wasn't her fault. Enzo's current theory was that the rain had triggered seizures so fast because the Star Eater's blood contained dense, maybe even compressed mana. Kenzo suffering an awakening now had chilling implications.

The threat of awakening or dying wasn't over just because people had avoided the rain. Rising amounts of ambient mana, and the slow, natural absorption of mana into everything, meant it would eventually trigger for everyone with the gene. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. He'd left unsaid the possibility that Sumi's healing had stirred up the mana in Kenzo's body.

It wasn't something any of them could have known, and she wasn't responsible even if it was what had happened. It had only accelerated the timing. His parents had gone to bed after night fell, leaving Enzo with a few of his mother's candles. Collecting them was another of her hobbies he'd long ago learned to leave alone, but at least it meant he had light. Kenzo had stopped seizing within the first hour, but remained unconscious on the sofa, his breathing returning to normal.

Unable to sleep and unwilling to just sit there watching for his best friend to die, Enzo set himself to working on practical challenges. He tried conversion first, focusing on the concept of earth mana this time. And failed. But it wasn't the same as past attempts. Where all other elements had felt non-existent, earth felt like something tangible and real to his senses. That was the best he could describe it.

The ambient arcane mana still responded easily to his call, flowing from atmospheric, wispy form into his mind through the third eye. But at the threshold, with his desire set on converting arcane into earth, the mana stuttered. Then entered his mind as arcane, turning hope to ash no matter how hard he strained. Neither Val nor Sumi had mentioned mana stuttering during absorption, not when filling their reserves normally or converting. Enzo knew it indicated something, but had no idea what.

The others had mentioned that conversion or some mana types were easier than others. For Val, fire came naturally. Earth was slower and less responsive, but about the same as body. Life barely worked. Sumi, on the other hand, managed life and body mana with ease, while fire and earth were more difficult. They'd come to believe people harmonized differently with each type of mana. Like natural chemistry. Or affinity.

The other two hadn't been as methodical as he was, primarily relying on mana types they knew and used. Only he had attempted all the known types so far. And some types none of them were certain existed. That would take successful conversion followed by adoption into spell form or technique. Following the failed conversion session, Enzo had grabbed the journal he still half-jokingly considered his spellbook and started work on drafting potential adaptations to his Bolt spell form instead.

He was four pages deep into theoretical designs and notes mostly intended to convince him his own ideas had some grounding in reality when a snore broke the silence. Enzo turned to look at where Kenzo lay. His friend shifted, partially rolling onto his back, and let out a snort. Then smacked his lips a few times before his breathing settled into an easy rhythm.

It was impossible for him to determine how many hours it had been since Kenzo had initially seized, but the man looked perfectly normal and comfortable by this point. He hoped that meant the big guy had passed the magical litmus test. And that he would not have to do… it. That was the real reason he'd sent everyone away. If the worst had happened, he wasn't even sure he had the strength to do what was necessary, let alone while the others were around.

He knew Val loved Kenzo like a second brother, much as he himself did. There were probably not enough words in the universe to allow Sumi to forgive herself if it happened. And he wouldn't forgive himself if cowardice forced his mother or father to handle it themselves. Kenzo was his best friend. Even if Enzo had been a pretty shitty friend for the past few years. Which is why he would sit vigil the entire night. And if it happened, if the worst came to pass, he would do what needed to be done.

Kenzo would have done the same for him. He turned back to his spellbook, and the hours of designs he'd been working on. There were variations on all three recommendations provided by the guide. For piercing, he'd connected the idea of reinforcing the shape of the spell and adding rotation to the hardened core some bullets had and the mechanical rifling used in firearms. Obviously, he wasn't firing the spell down a barrel, which meant rotation had to be built into the spell itself.

His best idea so far was a pair of threads attached to opposite sides of the form, pulled in opposing directions at the moment of release to impart spin. Like winding a top with a string. Guided had proven the hardest to conceptualize, and so far none of his designs felt satisfactory. The closest he had to something viable was a spiral-shaped length of mana thread held loosely in reserve, similar to running line when fly-fishing, which would trail behind the bolt when fired. It seemed wholly insufficient.

Not to mention inefficient. The thread itself would need to run out to the full range he could fire the bolt, which was roughly thirty-five meters based on the earlier tests. That was almost thirty times the amount of mana thread he used to form the spell itself in its current iteration. He shook his head and turned to the last variation. Charged. This was the one he was most proud of right now, even though he had no idea whether it would work, or even if the whole concept was stupid.

For each line of the design, he'd added a double hinge. The hinges would allow the three-dimensional shape to expand when more mana was packed into it, then collapse back to its original size, compressing the accumulated energy into the same volume as a standard Bolt. More energy, same size, greater power. Testing would have to wait until daylight, though. Outside, too. His father would not take kindly to finding holes in the walls or floors. Enzo flipped to a fresh page and started on a new idea.

The old man had raised an interesting question. Without a doubt, the apocalypse had changed the world already. But it wasn't done. And if the numbers they'd calculated at the hospital were right, mages would be rare. Relatively speaking, at least. He had little doubt any successful, surviving community would have at least one. It would be almost a requirement in a world that kept spitting out Eaters. And that was only considering the humans. They'd seen animals on their way home, both Eaters and… something else.

He glanced down beside the armchair at where Murph lay curled up on the floor, a few old towels hastily thrown together for a makeshift bed. So much had happened since the first day that he hadn't had time to process it all fully. Not to mention he was running out of compartmentalizing space for all the past, present, and future horrors, both remembered and imagined. But he was glad Murph had survived. Whatever stupidly low odds had come into play to make that happen, he couldn't even begin to calculate.

Whether animals might have the two mana genes or survived through some other mechanism was irrelevant at this moment. He'd explore those ideas later. They'd made it home, safe and sound. Well, mostly sound. Everything was as right in the world as it could be in the face of an apocalypse. He began jotting down notes at the top of the pages in small, messy scrawl. The goal was to gather mana using an enchanting schema. And the form seemed almost blatantly obvious, which made him hesitate.

Shield was his second spell form. It proved that you could shape a spell and let it do the work of taking in extra mana to complete form. The problem was that he needed the mana to remain loose, formless, until the spell was triggered. Which was going to be another problem, but not the immediate one. He could solve that bridge when he got to it. Enzo started with a circle.

Then leaned back and chewed on the end of the pen, thinking about the geometric shapes and abstracted ideas behind the lines across the range of designs they already had. After several minutes, he decided to mimic the idea used in bolster, but in reverse. Sumi's design took the encapsulated mana and channeled it out into the individual the spell was cast on through a series of threads shaped like gentle curved hooks. But he needed to do the opposite. Take mana in and trap it.

Instead of hooks, he drew straight lines connected at a point within the circle, like two sides of a triangle with the base open, where mana should enter and flow into the containment. It reminded him a bit of the fisherman's traps that allowed fish and crabs to climb into the netting, while making it almost impossible for them to leave the same way. A notification pinged in his mind, disrupting his concentration. He frowned and pulled it up.