FIFTY-NINE: Mother, pt. 1

 

The boy stood in front of a white door.

He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, or where he had come from, or what he was supposed to do next. His fingers hovered over the access panel without touching it. He watched them for a while. A dark silver ring etched with symbols appeared on the middle one.

Eventually, he looked up.

A logogram had been drawn on the door in blue paint. It said WELCOME.

“Oh.” Alden blinked at it. “I’ve done this before.”

The paint shifted. New logograms appeared, then they morphed into letters:

 

YOU’VE HAD A DIFFICULT JOURNEY.

COME INSIDE. REST FOR A WHILE.

 

Alden pressed his hand to the access panel. The white door fractured into oddly-shaped segments and slid into the walls.

He stepped through the opening into a living room. Not the one at the laboratory, or the one he shared with Aunt Connie. Not the one from the apartment.

His first one.

It was the house in Nashville. Wheat-colored carpet was soft under his feet. He could hear the tick of the grandfather clock from the hall.

A Douglas fir Christmas tree, too large for the space, blocked part of the television. The rainbow lights were set to blink. The presents were all wrapped in paper covered in either cartoonish dump trucks, bulldozers, or superhero sigils.

That’s right, Alden thought, gazing at the gifts. I had a pretty serious fascination with construction equipment for a while.

Childhood passions were so bizarre. One day you loved backhoes and steamrollers more than anything, and then you suddenly just…didn’t.

The house smelled like the tree. And orange cinnamon rolls.

Never homemade, he remembered. Mom was always too busy for that. We did the kind that came out of a tube.

He heard the creak of the oven door.

Have to wait a few minutes before you can smear the frosting on.

That was the best job. So of course it was his.

Footsteps on the linoleum. Then the carpet. Right behind him.

Alden didn’t turn around.

“I don’t want to see her,” he said. “Not like this. It’s too real.”

There was a pause.

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” an unfamiliar voice said.

Alden looked.

Behind him stood an Artonan woman. He had never seen her before, but she looked like a mix of a lot people he knew. Pink eyes like Thenn-ar. Braided brown hair like Hannah and Kibby. Brows set at an angle that made her look calm, like Instructor Gwen-lor.

She was only a little shorter than him. She held two steaming mugs.

“Can I offer you some—”

“Wevvi?” he asked in a resigned voice.

“Of course not, Alden. It’s hot chocolate. You’re new to me, but I can get at least that much right.”

He accepted a mug with a reindeer on it from her and stared down. The marshmallows were half melted, just like he preferred them.

She walked over to the sofa, drinking from her own mug, and sat down. She patted the cushion beside her.

Alden joined her.

“I’m not dead,” he noted, sipping his hot cocoa. It was perfect. “I’m really glad about that. You’re the Artona I System?”

“Sometimes. A part of it,” she said. “The kernel.”

“You have a different vibe from the Earth System,” Alden noted.

“It’s young. And more rigid by design. My children prefer for me to be something more personal.”

She pointed at the television with one finger, and it clicked on. On the screen, Alden saw himself sitting on a foam mattress across from the white, featureless mannequin the Earth System had used to talk to him when it was affixing his skill the first time around.

“I am in close communication with it while I work on you. It has known you since the moment of your birth, while the two of us have only just met. It seems you have become an interesting existence over the past few months. You are quite complex for your species and your age.”

Something twinkled on the Christmas tree, and Alden glanced over to see an ornament that definitely hadn’t been there when he was six. It looked like Gorgon, if Gorgon had more than one face.

He examined the tree closely and realized there were other significant things there. A small planet Earth perched on top in place of the star. The branches were draped in the iridescent indigo loops of his auriad instead of tinsel. One of the ornaments was the Ryeh-b’t toy with the missing wing.

“You have choices to make,” the woman said. “Important ones. Hard ones. Irrevocable ones. Several of them.”

“And then I can go home?”

“You can go where you wish,” she said. “My children tell me home is harder to find every time you change. But you can try.”

She pointed at the tree, and the auriad separated itself and drifted over to hover in front of him. Alden reached for it, and it moved just beyond his grasp.

“Not so fast. This is the most significant decision. Once you make it, no matter what you choose, many paths will close to you and others will open. Do you want to continue forward with the ability you’ve gained to sense your own authority? Or do you want me to remove it from you?”

Alden frowned. His hand was still outstretched toward the auriad.

“Why would I ever want you to take it away?”

“I’ll help you remember.”

 

*********************

 

Alden suddenly found himself in the shower at the lab. The hot water was beating down on him. He was leaning against the tiles. A few minutes before, he’d run out on his lesson with Kibby because he’d just begun to realize how much he loved magic.

He’d just begun to understand how restrained he truly was by the gift the System had given him.

Another memory. Another day. He was lying awake in the vault, unable to find the rest he needed because he was fighting against his own skill. His bound authority raged against the very shape of its own existence. His free authority scraped against it from the outside. It was maddening. It hurt.

He couldn’t make himself stop.

He screwed his eyes shut. He screamed into the pillow.

He ran across Moon Thegund with Kibby on his back. He felt no pain. Only he did. His affixation cracked. He wished it would disappear. He repaired it anyway.

It cracked again. He patched it again.

He knew he would die without. He knew Kibby would die without it.

He was grateful for it. He hated it.

He clung to it with everything he had because it was the last thing he had.

 

**************************

 

“Pursuing anything more would be a cruel thing to do to yourself,” said the woman on the sofa beside Alden.

He shook himself free of the memories.

“Joe said that to me. When I asked if I could learn to cast spells like wizards do.”

“Worli Ro-den. I have met him through other peoples’ minds on occasion. Most of them had far less favorable opinions of him than you do.”

Alden laughed. “I like him more than the average person does?”

“You had low expectations for him. Maybe because you’re human. He exceeded them.”

I guess that’s true.

“I understand that having an authority sense and being an Avowed at the same time is hard in a lot of ways,” said Alden. “But it’s not like I can’t do it, right? I’ll…lose my ability to cast spells for a while after my authority is bound. But I can get stronger again. And cast again. Can’t I?”

“And then lose it all again. Yes. That’s correct.”

“And it’s really helpful for actually using the skill. So much easier to understand and control than Joe’s perception lessons. Eventually I’ll get used to the bound authority, and it won’t bother me so much. I can—”

“You won’t ever get used to it.”

Alden let his hand fall away from the auriad.

“How do you know?”

She slurped her hot chocolate loudly, like a kid. “By its very nature, authority is that which rejects limitations on existence. The affixation is a profound limitation. You may come to accept it intellectually. You may even be able to appreciate what it does for you. But as a person who has come to know your own authority, the affixation will never be something you can ignore. And certainly it won’t be something you enjoy.”

There was a rustle of branches from the Christmas tree, and he suddenly found himself holding the many-faced Gorgon ornament in his free hand.

“There is a fascinating and noisy part of you that keeps informing me our comprehensions of this matter do not truly match. I could trick it or overwhelm it into silence, but I won’t. Alden, of all the choices you will ever make, this is the one that interests me the most. I would like for you to be fully informed.”

Alden ran a thumb over the tips of the ornament’s horns. The gremlin might be confused sometimes, but it did come in handy.

“You can just explain it to me in detail?” he suggested.

“I think I will show you instead. It’s a private matter, but I will excise the memory from you before I finish you if it becomes necessary.”

That was a little scary. The Earth System had been clear that unwanted mental modifications were a violation of terms and something it wouldn’t do except in emergencies. This kernel of Artona I seemed a lot more willing and able to be…creative.

The sound of a large bell echoed from the television.

Startled, Alden looked and saw that the image of himself with the Earth System had been replaced. On the screen, tiered oval rings of wooden benches looked down on an empty expanse of ground covered in a fine layer of pristine snow.

“Where is that?” he asked.

His breath fogged. The cold bit at him.

He blinked in surprise, and an instant later, he found himself standing in a large group of Artonan kids a few years younger than him. There were around a hundred of them. They were wearing matching quilted purple coats, and they were all shivering as they watched adults in different versions of the knights’ uniform pass by on their way into the small stadium area.

Everyone was quiet.

A man walked over to Alden and the kids. He had long purple-black hair pulled back at the temples with jeweled clips, and though his short sleeves left his forearms bare, he didn’t seem at all bothered by the weather.

“Greetings, Instructor Rel-art’h.”

The children spoke in unison but very softly. Their voices were almost whispers.

He nodded at them, searching them all with dark eyes.

“Noh-en,” he said, in a voice no louder than his students’ own, “you have been crying. Leave.”

Alden glanced at the girl he’d spoken to. Her eyes were a little red. He wouldn’t even have noticed if it hadn’t been pointed out. But No-en turned without a word of complaint and walked toward a line of tall trees in the distance.

“Asay-tor,” said the instructor to a boy on the edge of the group, “you are clenching your fists. Leave.”

“I’m sorry,” the boy murmured. “I—”

“Your feelings of inadequacy are far less important than you imagine. Leave.”

The boy paled and headed off after the girl with a stiff gait that suggested he really wished he could run.

I don’t even know what’s going on, Alden thought. And I can still almost taste the tension.

Even though this scene was all playing out in his own head, he was afraid the instructor knight was about to find him wanting and send him off toward the forest.

“Anyone else who fears they cannot conduct themselves in the manner the day requires may also leave,” said the man. “No one will think less of you for it. If you stay, you will not make the event more difficult for any of the knights, especially those who will choose their rest. If a member of your own family stands when the time comes, I will help you to control yourself. That is all.”

None of the kids left.

The instructor’s eyes lingered on a boy near the front of the group, but eventually he turned away. The stoic children followed him. And Alden, feeling a lot more trepidation than any of the students were showing, walked after them.

In the stadium, the dark wooden benches were polished to an almost mirror-like shine. There were at least a couple thousand knights present, recognizable by the metal studs they wore on their clothes in lieu of embroidery. But they still only filled a quarter of the seats.

Nobody in embroidery at all, Alden noted. He wasn’t sure what it meant.

Apart from the knights, there were only people in the purple student coats. The group Alden was with seemed to be the youngest class…if this even was a class in the traditional sense. They took their place in a separate section of the stands, sitting on the topmost bench. Below them, older kids sat in small groups.

The group Alden was with were all human-equivalent twelve or thirteen by his estimation. The oldest people in purple were closer to twenty. There weren’t as many of them. Only a dozen. It seemed like class sizes reduced dramatically with age.

Alden looked for a place to sit, and he realized there was a familiar face in the crowd. The boy the instructor had stared at for longer than the others was in the center of his classmates. It was Stu-art’h, but younger than when Alden had met him.

An empty seat suddenly appeared right beside him.

“Pretty sure that’s not what happened in real life,” Alden murmured. But he took the hint and claimed the spot for himself.

The bell he’d heard on the television began to toll.

The author’s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Nobody said a word.

This setting, the dire warnings from the instructor, people going to “their rest…”

This feels like a public execution. Not that I’ve ever been to one.

Alden hoped he was wrong. Maybe he was. From what he knew about human history, public executions had often been celebratory, extravagant events. Government-sponsored shows with cheering, jeering crowds ready to see someone suffering. Because people could be monsters.

Whatever this was, it was a lot more somber.

The unseen bell tolled again. Someone sitting on the bottom level of seats stood and walked to the center of the snow-covered grounds. A single line of footprints was left in his wake.

It was too far to see his face clearly, but Alden recognized him by his hair. A shade of purple so pale it was nearly white. The Primary.

When he reached the center of the field, he stopped.