— Archmage Lufred Ayerman, Medical Alchemy （272 of Tiran）
THE NIGHTMARES WERE not of Blight. Instead, the thing that stalked Sciona through the stacks was a slow and inexorable rot.
She gripped the leather spine of the Leonid and pulled it to her, sure that the light of knowledge would drive back the decay. But when she cracked the holy book open for answers, murky blood poured from the binding and stuck to her hands, coating her clothes so that they constricted around her, squeezing her muscles, searing flesh. Rot and worms crawled up her arms and burrowed under her skin. She tried to strip her clothes off, to rid herself of the filth, only to find that the searing stickiness had become one with the fabric and fused with her skin. As she tore the dress from her body, her flesh came away with it, pulling from her skeleton in putrid strings of sinew, all permeated with maggots. The bone beneath cracked and oozed the same deep red muck as the Leonid—because decay had not just come from the book but from Sciona herself. From deep in her marrow.
She woke screaming.
Alba was there every time, catching up her flailing arms and speaking softly, helplessly, in an attempt to make it better. “What can I do?” she said in increasing panic and then despair. “What can I do, Sciona? What can I do?”
“Tell me how to stop feeling this way!” Sciona roared, clutching her chest in physical pain, cold sweat sticking her nightdress to her skin, her fingernails raking the lace as she gasped for breath. “H-how do I stop feeling this way?”
There was no answer, of course. Every seeming way out ended in blood and horrors.
And Sciona’s mind was left crashing around its cage in agony. God’s great universe, which had once been so big and full of possibility, had narrowed to a trap.
“What can I do?” poor Alba was still asking the next morning as she sat Sciona at the kitchen table and tried to get her to eat. She had taken the day off work to be with Sciona, plainly terrified that she would come home to find her cousin splattered on the street below the window or hung from the rafters by a twisted sheet.
“Tell me how to stop this!” Sciona was still sobbing. Not to Alba. To God. To any soul in this Blighted universe who could possibly answer. “Tell me how to stop feeling this way!”
But even if Alba or God had had a response—a magic medicine to pour down Sciona’s throat, purge her memories, and calm all her nerves, it wouldn’t be a solution. Not a real one, anyway. Because Sciona was a mage to her core. Her religion and treasured discipline hinged on seeking the truth. Washing her mind of knowledge would be a different kind of damnation, destroying any possibility of salvation.
“But then how do I stop this?” Sciona asked her own internal monologue, her forehead ground into the kitchen table, hands clenched in her hair so hard her scalp went numb. “God, God, how do I make it go away?”
The answer was that she couldn’t. Not without letting go of the fibers that held her together. But the fibers were on fire, the poison stitched into her being. The sickness would kill her. The antidote would kill her.
She screamed anew and felt Alba’s hand rubbing a circle on her back, her soft voice begging her, “Breathe, Sciona. Breathe, sweetheart, please!” Alba was crying now, exhausted from two days sitting awake with her disintegrating cousin.
Sciona barely registered Aunt Winny coming home hours later, didn’t process the conversation Winny and Alba had over her head, even as their voices rose in argument.
“A highmage she may be, but she is still just a young woman. She still needs guidance from a man who knows better than she does.”
“Not like this, Mama!” Alba protested. “You’ve seen what their remedies do to people when they decide someone is too far gone to fix! They won’t understand that she’s not broken. She’s just—Sciona.”
“Look at her, Alba. She’s out of control.”
“But they’ll ruin her! And for what? All that treatment they gave the baker’s boy and, in the end, it didn’t even stop him from…”
A fraught silence.
Aunt Winny said tightly, “That was different. And this can’t go on. I’m getting the doctor.”
When the apartment door closed behind Aunt Winny, Alba grabbed Sciona’s shoulders with new urgency and shook her. “Sciona, do you hear me? Do you understand what’s happening?”
Sciona stared through her cousin, too exhausted to respond.
“Mama has gone for a medical alchemist. Don’t you have any reaction to that? Don’t you understand what that means?”
“Does it matter?” Sciona breathed, her voice barely a croak.
“Bite your tongue, Sciona!” Alba gripped her cousin’s face between her hands hard enough to hurt—to yank Sciona to the present for a moment. “Listen!”
“What?”
“You need to pull yourself together! If you’re still like this—out of control—when the doctor gets here, you know he won’t give you a choice whether you accept treatment or not. If he decides you’re a danger to yourself, he’s going to come back with assistants to hold you down.”
Dimly, Sciona understood that Alba was right. Sciona might stand on a knife edge between hells—knowledge on one side and nothingness on the other—but an alchemist would pull her firmly to the side of nothingness whether she consented or not. And the local doctor didn’t live far. If Sciona was going to resist oblivion, she didn’t have much time to get her feet under her… but how? How when there was no solid ground? How when everything that once gave Sciona strength had turned to hellfire?
“I don’t know what you’re going through, Sciona, but I know one thing. I know there’s no one else who can do what you do. Not your teachers, not your peers, not even the mages who came before you.” Alba’s words were coming out breathy and rushed like she thought that if she just spoke them fast enough, they would mass in some kind of shield between Sciona and her darkness. “So, just don’t…” She pulled Sciona into a hug, all but smothering her against her shoulder. “Don’t even think about leaving us, you understand? By hurting yourself or by letting some alchemist muddle your brain. You’re too precious—to me, to Mama, to Tiran.”
“To Tiran…” Sciona murmured into Alba’s shoulder. The words were so bitter now they made her gag.
“Yes, my love,” Alba said, mistaking Sciona’s disgust for skepticism. “You’re the first female highmage in history, for Feryn’s sake! There’s no one else in this city or this wide world like you.”
Except the meidrae of the Kwen, Sciona thought, who are all gone thanks to the work of my predecessors. My heroes.
“You’re something special, Sciona.” Alba, as usual, was just casting clumsily around for the right thing to say, but there she had at least hit on something true… Sciona was something different from everyone who had preceded her. She had skills they didn’t, knowledge they didn’t. “Are you really going to let some doctor take that away from you?”
“No,” Sciona realized. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
Accepting treatment would be conceding that some man—some regular graduate mage—knew better than she did, that he had the right to erase her. Even after everything else in the world had collapsed, an invincible shard of Sciona’s pride remained. That was where she found her footing—on her deepest of vices as a woman. It was damning proof of every disapproving thing anyone had ever said of Sciona’s character—perhaps even proof of her insanity—that her ego persisted in the absence of any delusions of virtue.