CHAPTER 121 – Recursion

Elduin was wrong about Saphienne.

The High Master had arrived to interview her without assumptions, seeking to contextualise the information he’d gathered and test the hypotheses that he’d assembled against the magician they concerned. He’d theorised that she’d been suicidal, her choice to die summoning the dragon, and he’d further reasoned that she was alive because her wyrd couldn’t allow her to perish in dragons’ fire while she was within the woodlands. In essence, Elduin’s conjecture had been that she’d uncovered a contradiction in her destiny; his inference was that she’d thereby regained hope.

Yet confirming these suspicions – and the specifics of how she’d driven off the dragon – had been secondary to his overriding purpose. The High Master had needed to meet her, had needed to understand who she was as a person to discern how much of a problem she posed to the woodlands.

Then, during the interview, Elduin had seen a dragon’s blood for the first – or perhaps the second – time.

Saphienne distantly pieced all of this together as she sat listening to Elduin’s sudden supposition about Kythalaen. He surmised that Saphienne’s ancestor had mated with a dragon; this shed light on his earlier questions.

“Elduin,” she managed after he was done, “when you asked me about wisdom, and queried how I felt about justice…”

“I can be like a spirit in how I see things.” His gaze was pointed. “You, meanwhile, have a tendency toward literalism over the hypothetical, directness in word and deed, and seeking confrontation in disputes. You’re known to be certain in your beliefs.”

All draconic traits.

“On the other hand,” he mused, “Lenitha said you try hard to defy yourself. She said that you’re solitary and guarded, yet you force yourself to be vulnerable. Master Vestaele didn’t suggest this, but my feeling is that you disdained choosing Fascination as your focus because you don’t trust yourself to have that specific power over others — to be able to assert your beliefs on them.” He clasped his hands together in his lap. “And then, there’s your preoccupation.”

“…With?”

“I worried you were concerned with justice above all else.” His light brown gaze didn’t hide his amusement, or his relaxation. “A magician who pursues a vision of justice without compromise is not someone who can belong in the Luminary Vale, and perhaps not even in the woodlands. Yet the principle you cannot bring yourself to compromise is much subtler, and poses no problem, because you can’t force others to embody it.”

Saphienne studied him for what felt like an age of the world. “…Mercy.”

“Mercy can’t be compelled, can it? Whether or not you agree with the consensus or the ancient ways doesn’t matter: forcing that a duly reached judgement be set aside goes against justice.”

“…Mercy must be granted…”

“That’s what makes it mercy.”

Had she always been merciful? No. Yet mercy was a choice, and so could be neither compelled nor compulsive. Mercy flourished in moments, made bright because they stood out against justice’s unyielding demands.

That was what she wanted. Not kindness – not their kindness – but mercy. She couldn’t be at peace in a merciless world.

“Given that dragons are incapable of mercy, you obviously aren’t a tyrant at heart. You may feel like an aberration…” He gestured to the vial of dragon’s blood she held. “…But you’re really just a little distinctive — more than a little.”

Her smile for him was wordless and wide.

“Hopefully,” Elduin opined as he lifted his empty cup, “researching dragons while you wait for your admission will reaffirm what you realised when you fought Parthenos. I’m approving your request.” He stood and went back through to the kitchen, calling to her over his shoulder. “You really do belong in the woodlands, Saphienne.”

He thought she was smiling because he’d reassured her. That wasn’t why she smiled.

Elduin was wrong about Saphienne…

For Elduin was wrong about dragons.

 

* * *

 

As he gathered up his papers and returned the vial of blood to the backpack, Saphienne asked the High Master about her ancestor. “Why do you think she was likely killed by her own daughter?”

Elduin hesitated where he perched on the couch; Saphienne had the impression he was weighing what to divulge. “…How much have you studied about curses?”

“As much as I could get access to — which was little.” She remained standing, arms crossed as she reflected on the subject. “Any malign spell can be called a curse, but true curses apply Divination to assert an outcome over their victim. The theories explaining how this functions are highly disputed between scholars. The noteworthy feature of true curses is that they’re all contingent in some fashion, depending on a choice or event that may or may not come to pass.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why that is.”

“The syllabus for apprentices is intentionally light on specifics,” he conceded. “There are no good uses for curses, and the Luminary Vale long ago decreed that no elven magician would be permitted to lay them upon anyone, for any reason. In a metaphysical sense? They’re akin to slavery.”

Saphienne found that sentiment relatable. “Both Masters Almon and Vestaele told me that the study of curses is restricted to magicians in good standing, with unimpugnable reasons for wanting to learn about them.”

“We permit the study of curses for the purposes of breaking them.” He folded his hands together and sat back. “Rarely, for the general advancement of magical understanding, but we’re extremely selective in accepting that justification. Nobody is permitted to study them out of mere curiosity.”

Her smile was tight. “According to the response I received, my desire to break my own apparently wasn’t good enough to learn more.”

“Don’t take it personally. We convene to approve requests for in-depth scholarship on curses, and Lenitha never put yours forward while she was keeping your relation to Kythalaen from us.”

Saphienne tilted her head. “Would I be approved now?”

“Only to a limited extent — you lack the prerequisite mastery to comprehend more than the most basic curses.” He indicated the seat next to him on the couch. “Sit, and I’ll share a little. I don’t believe you would ever intentionally curse someone, and Lenitha firmly established your discretion while scrying on you.”

She sank down, intrigued. “What did I do to–”

“She caught you sharing magical knowledge with that boy you advocate, Faylar. Apparently you told him about figments?”

Pale with momentary fright, Saphienne forced herself to calm. “…At the previous solstice festival. Shouldn’t my apprenticeship have been ended?”

Elduin chuckled. “She said what you told him was uncommon, yet not restricted knowledge. You didn’t have the right to disclose it as an apprentice, but then again, she was intruding on your privacy to check you were well. Had Master Almon been the one to catch you? I expect you would have received a serious rebuke.”

“Or worse, back then.”

“That’s more a reflection of your relationship.” He didn’t hide his amusement. “What impressed Lenitha was that you didn’t believe you’d be caught, but you still restrained yourself in what you shared with him, and apparently this sharing was very much the exception to the norm between you two. The point of the rule isn’t blind obedience, rather to prevent dangerous knowledge and power falling into irresponsible hands.”

Hence High Master Lenitha had told Saphienne about her wyrd, and had been willing to contemplate that she could be trusted with the sensitive book she’d requested, over which Elduin’s opinion was then sought. “Faylar already knew Hallucination depends on belief, and he’d encountered figments at Celaena’s home. I didn’t think I was teaching him anything substantial… which I wasn’t.”

“Not your decision to make at the time, but every apprentice lets something slip, which is why we’re careful with the syllabus…” He inhaled slowly. “…Especially around curses. Any magician who can perform an augury can perform a simple curse, and the principles that make it possible are taught to apprentices, because they have to be, but we take pains not to draw the connection. Care to impress me?”

Engaged, Saphienne leant forward. “…You say principles, which implies foundational teaching. Early on in the lessons?”

“During the introduction to Divination.”

She thought over what she knew. “…An augury that’s consented to is likely to become unavoidable prophecy. Binding someone to a fate is essentially cursing them, assuming the foreseen outcome is negative. Yet successful augury reveals what will come to pass, and influencing that…”

Elduin was impassive as she talked aloud.

“Purely from what you’ve told me, it must be possible.” She closed her eyes as she felt through the fundamentals — and then opened them as insight struck her. “…The secret of the Second Degree.”

“We are sufficiently warded that you may speak freely.” He smirked, glancing out the window to the mighty Abjuration spell in which he had enshrouded her home. “Unless you have reason to believe I don’t know it?”

Her glance was mildly withering. “‘Magic shifts in response to our perceptions,’ and auguries are sensitive enough that they can’t be performed unless we account for the influence of our perception distorting the divination. But the principle applies to all magic… such as divinations only revealing what the magician can conceive of, in the way they comprehend. How the divination is formulated affects the answer.”

“In conclusion…?”

“Were I to trick someone into consenting to their future being divined, the fate I bind them to could be shaped by my framing of the question… and would be dependant upon my comprehension of that framing.”

He nodded. “You’ve got it. Tricky to do in practice: it takes a very skilled diviner to know how to ask questions to get the answer they want, and identifying a future that is both possible, probable, and negative requires a lot of experience with auguries and the individual in question. Witches of the dark used to divine people’s past behaviour prior to ensnaring them, better to understand them.”

Saphienne was puzzling through the implications. “That suggests successful auguries are fixing the future in place, rather than revealing a predetermined future.”

“If you really want to impress me,” Elduin challenged her, “examine the central insight of ‘Meditations on the Aether’ through the secret of the Second Degree. I’ll warn you: holy brew might be necessary to wrap your head around what results.”

Committed to wringing as much knowledge from the High Master as she could, Saphienne threw herself at the problem, guided by intuition. “Your central insight was ‘The spell is not the magic. The spell is not the world. The spell is where magic touches the world.’ Magic being affected by our perceptions means that spells are affected by them… and the context of our discussion implies that this includes our perception of time.” She recalled more of the confusing passages in his treatise. “Your own writing supports that; you wrote about time being cyclical, except the real implication was how past, present, and future weren’t so much a recurring cycle as coterminous.”

Elduin grinned. “‘What was is, and what is will be, and what will be shall have become what was.’ Took me a day to work out what I’d meant by that, after I was sober.”

She drummed her fingers against her elbow. “If we start with the observation that past, present, and future are meaningfully distinguished by the motion of time; and note that spells can ignore this motion to peer into the past and future; and we accept that spells are where magic touches the world; then I’m left with the presumption that, from the perspective of magic, there is no distinction between past, present, and future, since magic transcends the world in which time exists.”

“Good.” He remained expectant.

“…More?” Her ears flicked in irritation. “Let’s see… if there’s no distinction between past, present, and future to magic, and if the spell is neither magic nor the world, but where they touch, then the constraints of time only apply to magic because it comes into contact with the world as a spell…”

 

“…Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour…”

 

Saphienne’s feeling of vertigo was overwhelming.

“…The spell needn’t be constrained by the world. Magic transcends the world. The spell is constrained by the magician’s understanding.” Her awe begat existential terror, and where one began and the other ended was indeterminable. “Our perspective on time limits our spellcasting. When we conceive of time as linear, we constrain what our spells can do.”

“Even with my prompting,” Elduin confessed, “I’m surprised you got there.”

Saphienne massaged her temples. “But how does– if time needn’t be linear–”

“A mystery to contemplate at length!” The High Master was replete with the fond sympathy of one who had surveyed the view from where she now stood. “I’ll spare you some grief, and confirm that how the magician conceives of time isn’t the only constraint.”

“…The world still imparts limitations.” She thought about Conjuration, and how conjured fire couldn’t exist where the conditions that made fire possible weren’t present. “The point is that the constraints imposed by the world are looser than those imposed by the magician, isn’t it?”

“Very much so. There are competing theories, but the prevailing is that spells must maintain coherence with the world. No spell can alter the past, because while magic is not subject to linear time, you and I very much are. To change the past would be to change yourself would be to change the spell, reflecting the same problem as auguries, except in less forgiving terms.”

Saphienne’s thoughts raced. “My initial question was whether casting an augury fixed the future in place, but… that question was naïve. From the perspective of magic? Past, present, and future are all the same — which implies that the future is predetermined, but only if we look at it with the presumptions of linear time. If we drop that perspective entirely, then there’s nothing to say that past, present, or future are fixed at all.”

He was silent, appraising her.

“Which means it’s a matter of perspective, I suppose.” She found the insight difficult to envision. “Whether a spell fixes the future in place or reveals what was always going to happen — that’s redundant from the perspective of magic. Time isn’t linear to magic. Spells have to maintain coherence with the world, so while a spell can change the world, it can’t do so in a way that creates a contradiction… like ignoring the unfolding of the present from the past…”

“But?”

She caught the subtlety, and stared. “…The spell itself can be a contradiction. Of course it can — Conjuration creates from nothing, and a Translocation ignores the dimensions of space! What they achieve must remain partially coherent while the spell is in progress, and totally coherent after it ends.” Her head throbbed as impossibilities blossomed. “When it comes to causality… this suggests a spell that was cast in the past, examined in the past, has to maintain causality within that past moment… but the same spell looked back on from the present… only has to maintain causality with the present moment?”

And Elduin laughed at her consternation.

Saphienne gave up, utterly lost in the seeming paradox. “…This isn’t even complicated by the standard of your attainment, is it?”

“No.” He took pity. “What you’ve reached is the understanding that an augury can be selectively binding: an augury can bind your future to compel a choice, leave the freedom to choose, then bind the consequences proceeding from your choice. Viewed from the moment it was cast, the spell didn’t bind anything from the choice onward… but looked back on after the choice was made, it bound everything that occurred.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“And this isn’t a retroactive change?”

“No — the spell did both at the moment it was cast, but what it did varies from the perspective it’s viewed from.”

“Then my wyrd was set in motion by an augury like this?”

“Saphienne,” Elduin sighed, “if it were this simple, Lenitha could have freed Kythalaen from her wyrd with relatively little effort. The form of curse I just outlined to you is one that – with further education – you could lay upon someone, requiring no greater attainment than the Second Degree. What was done to set your wyrd in motion incorporates occult principles that are far more complicated, as well as secrets that escape our understanding.”

That was the precise moment when Saphienne realised how little of the Great Art she’d truly grasped.

“Even calling it your ‘wyrd’ is shorthand: unlike Lenitha, I’m not convinced that wyrd really exists, only that the magician who laid this upon you believed that it did, and so incorporated the concept into her spell. Since wyrd is poetic in conception, what affects you and affected Kythalaen unfolds poetically…”

Saphienne swallowed. “…And Kythalaen being burned by the daughter she conceived to try to thwart her wyrd would be the most poetic of tragedies.”

“After which,” he guessed, “her wyrd likely remained passive, steering the descendants of Kythalaen to reproduce with elves until your mother was born elven enough to be accepted into the woodlands, and so permit the fifth omen.”

Saphienne blinked. “Did the daughter of Kythalaen have scales?”

“Most draconic children are more like their dragon parent.” The High Master slipped his threadbare satchel onto his shoulder, standing as he lifted the pack at his feet.

She rose with him. “May I ask one more question?”

Elduin paused to hear her.

Clasping her bad hand in her good, Saphienne bowed. “You spoke as though you know who did this to my family. High Master Lenitha said it was done six thousand years ago–”

“She never told you?”

Saphienne looked up, seeing he was taken aback. “…No.”

He recovered quickly. “You were only fourteen at the time… and your wyrd was enough to take in…”

That all but confirmed her fear.

“…You have a right to know. I would want to, in your position.” Elduin nevertheless delayed, unsure of how to burden her with what Lenitha had considered too heavy.

Saphienne waited.

“…Lonareath; your wyrd was fashioned by Lonareath. Her final spell, consuming herself to enact personal vengeance on the lineage of her betrayer.”

 

* * *

 

Aware that he’d prompted introspection, Elduin did not linger for long after he told Saphienne her origin.

Nor would he elaborate further. “The rest is ancient history — and history that is largely forgotten. I don’t know who betrayed Lonareath and was cursed, and the High Masters surviving from the period won’t talk about it. Whoever was cursed by Death’s Consort, and whatever the circumstances? Who did what to whom and why no longer matters, not compared to its consequences. You’re blameless.”

She brooded on that as she saw him to the door.

“As for everything else…” Elduin halted on the threshold, the wind stirring, his eyes yellowing as spiritual possession took hold of him. “…Excuse us. As Elduin was saying: do not be concerned about how you are treated by the spirits. We advise you to be polite but noncommittal — as merciful as you are, the ancient ways will not be changed, so do not waste yourself arguing for what will not be allowed. Proceed with kindness, but kindly abstain from politics.”

Saphienne was unnerved by how casually the High Master had begun walking with the spirit. “…To whom am I speaking?”

“Elduin and Hazel.” They smiled readily. “His familiar.”

Different worries supplanted her wyrd. “…I see. When Elduin wrote about facing the same choice as myself…”

“We are aware of Hyacinth — and we will not sway your decision.”

Yet Saphienne was dissatisfied. “Will you answer a question?”

“If you wish.”

She peered into the furthest reaches of their sun-bright gaze. “Have either of you ever regretted it?”

And the giggle that escaped Elduin’s lips was not wholly incongruous with the man whom she had met. “No. We made our peace with our natures, and allowed ourselves to shape each other to find happiness in the woodlands. That was our choice; you must make your own.”

“If my wyrd allows that…”

There, the yellow in his eyes dimmed as Elduin reemerged. “You’ve already found a loophole — there may well be more. Don’t allow yourself to despair.”

Saphienne wondered…

“You could do with some privacy, I think.” He glanced at the hazy boundary of his ward around the house. “I’ll leave this up for another hour or two.”

“Am I to trust that you won’t scry on me?”

A superior smile gilded his lips. “That, too, is your choice… but I think you’ll soon find reason to believe that I’ve been honest with you. Farewell, Saphienne: I hope – and anticipate – that we won’t meet again for many years.”

What else was there to do? She bowed very low, partly in performance, partly in gratitude for the reprieve she’d been granted. “Let it be so.”

She watched him stroll out into the summery haze.