“I don’t see much choice between the two of you. She hasn’t built forty enclaves’ worth of maw-mouths,” I said. Although that wasn’t entirely true. As far as my gut was concerned, he was better. He wasn’t a maleficer at all. I reckon other wizards had actually carried out the enclave-building spells; he’d just helped them along. Perversely, it only made me angrier, as if there was some virtue in Ophelia getting her own hands dirty.
“Ophelia and I are fighting the same war, and have been for many years,” he said. “It breeds similarity—and compromise. I’ve done many things I regret. But the ones I regret the most are the choices I made without information. That’s what I’m here to offer you, if you’ll take it.”
“By which you mean, you’d like to tell me what a terrible person Ophelia is, and how much better you are,” I said. I’d come over here precisely because I wanted information, and to stop Ophelia, but now I almost wanted more to tell him to go jump in a crevasse. But I swallowed the impulse. Otherwise what would I do? I could storm over to the New York side and talk to Ophelia a bit, get enraged at her again, come over here and chat with Shanfeng, get angry at him, and ping-pong back and forth until I just exploded us all in a final maelstrom of fury. “Go on, then. Tell me something I don’t know.”
If I had ruffled him, he didn’t show it. He paused, and then said in a very level tone, “When I entered the maw-mouth, I was inside armor that I’d built, with a circle of everyone I loved—all my living family, my friends, every wizard I could persuade to help me—fighting to keep it whole around me. It was six days before I glimpsed the core of the maw-mouth. But of course, I was not going anywhere, that whole time. I was only making it smaller. By killing all the people inside it, before they could drag me down into their own torment.”
He doled out each word at a measured pace, as if he had to keep a firm control over them. It had been fifty years ago, but the tendons in his neck were standing out sharply, and every internal organ in my belly flopped itself completely over in sympathy, sharing the memory of that same horror. I wanted to just scream in his face, or vomit.
“But I couldn’t do it,” he said.
I stared at him. “What?”
“It was a big maw-mouth. It had eaten a lot of lives when it broke into Shanghai. Too many: I couldn’t kill them all. And my circle was running out of mana,” he said. “That’s how you destroy them, isn’t it? You just kill everyone inside.”
“I used to,” I said, blankly. I was still trying to deal with the idea that apparently an entire circle of wizards hadn’t been enough to replicate my method. “Now—I just tell them they’re already dead.”
He nodded in understanding. “But that works for you, surely, because you’ve already done it the hard way, once. You speak to them now from the certainty of their death. I couldn’t do the same. But I had already studied enclave-building by then. I knew the fundamental challenges of establishing a foundation in the void. So when I got close enough to the core of the maw-mouth, I understood what I was looking at. The foundation of some other enclave. The longing of a circle of wizards for a place where they and their children can be safe and powerful. The bottomless hunger that makes us willing to devour others down to their bones.”
He was right, I suppose, but I didn’t see what good that understanding would do you when you were six days deep inside a maw-mouth and running out of mana. “What did you do?”
“I found only one way to defeat that longing,” he said, tiredly, a sound of years of looking in his voice. “By overwhelming it with our own. I had been working on a tool to clarify the will of a wizard, to amplify it—”
“A reviser,” I blurted, remembering Zixuan using his version against me in the gym.
“Yes. I had one with me. It didn’t help with the killing. Killing is already very simple. But once I was in range of the core—I was able to use it to amplify our longing, the longing of my entire circle, to have our home back. To have our own place of shelter and power. And there were just enough of us in my circle that, with the help of my reviser, our longing replaced the longing at the core. We created a new foundation for Shanghai upon it. But—”
“The maw-mouth wasn’t destroyed,” I said, sickened, in understanding.
“No. But it was much smaller. The process required as much mana as founding an enclave—and it extracted that mana from the maw-mouth itself. I was left outside. We were able to translocate what was left of it away, before it could take any of us, and put wards up to keep it out. We had our enclave back, even stronger than before, with a doubled foundation. But later that same day, as I lay weeping alone, one of my friends came and whispered to me that another enclave had been destroyed. The enclave in San Diego—on the other side of the world.”