Wonder filled Sciona with hope and the light of God. Before the Freynan Mirror, she was sure that the God who had created this ocean and this sunlit sand could only be good. The magic that enabled Sciona to behold all these wonders could only be good.
Thomil would see.
She hit the siphoning key.
Because a God great enough to spin these wonders would never allow His mages to take human life. Bushes, maybe. Animals, maybe. Not humans. Never—
The girl’s hand lit bright white like paper caught in a candle flame. She started, spilling shells. Then threw her head back, black eyes wide and mouth open in soundless agony as her arm began to come apart.
“No!” Sciona screamed as the last of her world collapsed. “No! NO! NO!”
She scrambled to abort the spell, grabbing a pen from beside the spellograph and slashing a line through the paper. The pen sizzled and split in her hand, burning skin, but it didn’t stop the siphoning. The white light had spun all the way up the black-haired girl’s arm to ignite her chest. Grabbing hold of the spellpaper itself, Sciona tore it from the machine. The mid-spell disruption caused an explosion, which knocked both Sciona and the spellograph to the floor.
The siphoning had ceased, but the mapping coil had not deactivated. When Sciona uncurled onto her hands and knees, the foreign girl lay before her in that circle of copper, half unraveled, twitching as she struggled to breathe. The shells she had been collecting were scattered around her, and the crystal ocean shallows had gone pink with her blood. Her right arm was gone but for a fleshless humerus hanging by a few sinews from her shoulder and swaying hideously with the lapping water.
Sciona reached for the girl, tears streaming from her eyes. Her victim was still alive. Through her stripped white ribs, Sciona could see her lungs moving, heaving to sustain her. Other people had rushed to her side. Her family, perhaps? Her friends? An old woman cradled the girl’s head, weeping, screaming without sound. A younger child clutched her remaining hand. But what could they do? What could they do except hold her as the water gently washed her blood and muscle tissue out to sea?
Whatever this girl’s life had been, it was over, traded for a flash of fire here in Sciona’s lab a thousand miles away.
“I’m sorry!” Sciona sobbed. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
She had never felt as powerless as she did before that mapping coil, watching those bright black eyes go dead.
“Vile brutes of the Kwen are ever given unto their basest ills. Woe unto them! God has reserved for these the darkness, in which they will dwell in eternal savagery.”
- The Tirasid, Foundation, Verse 48 （56 of Tiran）
FOR A LONG time, Sciona didn’t hear the pounding on the door through her own screams.
“Miss Freynan!” voices called from outside.
“Freynan, open up! Speak to us! Are you alright?”
One of the voices belonged to Archmage Bringham. Someone must have gone to get him when she wouldn’t open the door for anyone else. But Sciona couldn’t move from where she knelt on the floor. At some point, the mapping spell had run its course, and the image had faded to nothing. But Sciona was still staring into the coil, the lifeless girl seared into her eyes, when the door broke down.
A rush of bodies overwhelmed the room, voices rambling in concern and anger. Meaningless hands took Sciona’s arms, pulled her up, bore her to an empty classroom on the third floor, wrapped a blanket around her shaking shoulders, and pressed a mug of tea into her hands. She couldn’t drink it. All she could do was watch the leaves bleed color into the water and think of red in the shallows. What life had paid for this tea? To bring the leaves here from their native range, to push the water through the pipes, to make it hot enough to sting her burned hands?
“Sciona,” Archmage Bringham’s voice finally pierced her stupor, and she looked up. They were alone in the deserted lecture hall, dim light from the barrier filtering through the film on the great windows. “Speak to me. Please.” There was so much concern in his voice.
Did he know? Did all the archmages know the real cost of magic?
“Sciona,” he repeated even more softly.
No, she decided as she finally met his eyes. No one who looked at another person with that kind of compassion could know such evil and keep living.
“Are you alright?” he said again.
“Did you see?” she whispered.
“See what, my dear?”
He hadn’t seen the girl in the water, then. Of course. Sciona’s mapping coil had deactivated before the other mages burst into the room. The blood was just there every time she blinked, filling the dark insides of her eyelids, seeping across the gray of the barrier light through the windows.
“Highmage Freynan, what happened back there?”
“I was… Th-there was a girl…” Just saying the words brought tears back into Sciona’s eyes. “A young girl. Fifteen or sixteen. She had hair the color of ink. I… Feryn, forgive me, I killed her!”
“You killed someone?” Bringham said in alarm. “When? Where?”
“B-back in my lab. Sh-she…” Sciona shook her head, trying to clear it of the swirling viscera. Focus. She had to tell Bringham, make him understand. “Listen, Archmage Bringham. The Otherrealm isn’t what we thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not a separate realm. It’s the Kwen and the lands beyond it. I saw it!”
“What?” He shook his head uncomprehending. “Don’t you see the Otherrealm every day, Miss Freynan?”
“No, sir. Not like this. I mean I actually saw it—like I’m seeing you now. The girl in my mapping coil. When I siphoned, sh-she…” Emotion and nausea seized Sciona’s throat. She just managed to set the teacup down before pitching forward and vomiting all over the floor at Bringham’s feet.
When she came back to herself, she had been moved to a different seat while a Kwen janitor cleaned up the vomit. This one was younger than Thomil—just a boy, really, judging by the narrow set of his shoulders. Sciona couldn’t see his face. Like Thomil, he kept his copper-haired head down, his eyes obscured beneath his cap. As Bringham spoke kindly to Sciona, offering her water, she couldn’t hear him. All she could hear was the scrape of the boy’s cleaning brush on the floor. All she could see was his wiry little form coming apart in spirals of light again—scrape—and again, with each circle of the brush on the tile.
It was only when the boy had finished and faded away that Bringham’s voice pulled her back.
“Listen to me, Sciona.” He had a hand on her shoulder. “Are you with me?”
She nodded weakly.
“From what you describe, I think you’ve run afoul of a curse.”
“What?”
“Not the common sort of coursework with which you would be familiar,” Archmage Bringham said. “There are darker magics that even the whole of the High Magistry hasn’t purged or come to understand. It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve delved deep enough to trigger one of these antique curses so early in your career, you clever little devil.”
“So…” Hope flickered back on in the depths. “You think I’ve been tricked? This has happened to other highmages?”