She’d clamped down on him, cut off his sphere of influence. But she knew how well that’d worked last time, and… Detan’s vision went white. He pushed against Aella’s shield with all he was worth, and then –
At first he didn’t understand what he was sensing, what he was feeling. Not consciously – this was not a thing that one could come to realize through force, through effort. As Ranalae laughed, lectured, paced and gloated, Detan sensed, for the first time in his life – for the first time in many, many lives – the world spool out around him.
Aella had him shut down, true. But the injections didn’t work on her. The girl couldn’t touch, couldn’t sense the world he was experiencing now. He’d gone beyond her. So far out of her reach he couldn’t even begin to explain it to himself.
Selium. Everywhere. He knew that, of course, in the intellectual way that one knows that sandstone makes brown sand and firestone black sand. Had even caught glimpses of that truth at the height of his control and power. But this. This was nothing like he ever could have imagined. Nothing he had words to describe, to contextualize. Wasn’t fair this was happening to him, probably. Greater minds than Detan’s gravel-sized noggin could probably glean something of use from this moment. But he tried. He was always trying.
And so back to the selium: to it being everywhere.
He could sense the great, vast network of it. Glimmering fragments – molecules, Aella had called them in one of her many lectures. Yes. That was the right term. Molecules of selium drifted in the air he breathed, the air everyone breathed. He could sense them, tiny as they were – impossible as they were – seep through his lungs, seep into his bloodstream. Seep into everyone’s bloodstreams.
With his eyes opened it was like he was seeing another world, the true world, laid in false and shifting color over the world he could touch and taste and scent. This world, this true world, wasn’t for his eyes. It was an extension of his sel-sense – he must derive a better name for it. Seles? No. Ripka would have a better idea. She always did. But he could see it, such as it was, for human brains were adaptable, clever things, and this new rush of information had to be processed somehow.
So it was everywhere. In every pore and breath and cell. He could see it, as he watched Ranalae. She breathed it in, and it escaped her lungs to the flow of her blood and bonded there. Stray molecules of selium which found no blood to bond with leached into her muscles, ate away at her bones instead.
Bonewither. Huh. So that was how that worked.
But the real kicker, the thing that made him breathe slow and easy because he knew – knew now more than he ever had in his life – that the world was about to change for the better, was this: he could see how sel-sense worked. The very thing the Bone Tower had been digging around in bodies for decades trying to puzzle out. He could just look at Ranalae, look at any other sensitive, and see it. He would have laughed, if his throat weren’t so raw.
As the selium coursed through a body it hit a barrier near the brainstem, something he could make no real sense of – Tibs would have called it a valve, maybe, or a filter. Either way, when he looked at Ranalae he saw the sel course pass that barrier, enter the brain, respond to whatever crazy chemistry was taking place there and then the command reverberated throughout the rest of the selium in her sphere of influence. And her strength was huge. Ranalae’s sphere pulsed as she worked at the edge of her ability, slinging selium like it was acid at her enemies. When he looked at Ripka, all that sel that seeped into her body reached that barrier and just… stopped. Coursed back through her blood and escaped through her exhalations.
But he could change that.
And so much more.
His sphere of influence flowed beyond the strength of simple vision. At a certain point the sight of the world ceased, blended into the horizon or a wall or any other everyday obstruction. But he was beyond the lenses in his eyes, now. His senses spiraled outward, a gyrating torrent of awareness that swept from the heart of the palace and out, out, encompassing people and beings beyond his ability to count. Folded in the whole of the neighborhood, the city. Consciousnesses danced like nodes of light amongst the firings of his own mind, prickles of brilliant, beautiful, life. Thousands and thousands, sensitive and not, aged and curled in the womb.
His own reach took his breath away. Even as he spotted the little blots of life he never lost sight of selium itself, omnipresent, trapped in breezes and bellied within the hot, churning core of the planet. Its presence in the air was so thin no unenhanced eye could see it, and only the finest of sensitives could detect it. But to Detan those molecules were as clear as dappled sunlight through leaves, clustering and thinning and occasionally joining together in numbers large enough to break through the eddies in the air and float toward the sky.
But those lights. Those consciousnesses. He selected those with the firm filters, the tightened valves. It took him only a thought, a moment. He breathed in, breathed out, then held the fates of all those banal lives in the wide sphere of his control.
“Ranalae.”
Her head snapped up, jerked toward him, eyes narrowed. He couldn’t blame her. His voice sounded foreign to his own ears. Calm. Distant.
But he was not calm. Anger boiled in his veins, held at a low simmer, and though his sense had extended to show him something heart-achingly beautiful, a tiny sliver of a voice deep in his darkest mind whispered to him to let loose. To leave this place, this whole city – and maybe the whole continent, if he were lucky – a smoldering crater.
But that was an old voice, smoothed over by time and control. Just looking at Ripka, at her pale and sweat-slicked face, he knew he could never listen to it. Never go back to the temptations that had called to him, siren-like, before. He was not his anger’s puppet. He was its master.
He would lash out again, if the need arose. Would burn the whole fucking world if it meant keeping just this city and the people in it safe. He had not lost that ability, he had simply grown into another.
And wouldn’t Aella be just delighted to study him now.
“This city,” Ranalae was saying, and Detan realized she’d been talking while he watched Ripka. “Is under the martial control of Valathea. Order your people to stand down at once.”
“You cannot have this place.” The place where my mother’s bones are buried.
She sneered. “I already have it.”
Ah, right, they were surrounded. Funny how easy it was to forget things like that when you were busy having a sense-awakening. “And what is it that you have, exactly?”
“Detan–” Ripka’s voice, soft and choked with grief. Tibs hushed her, slipped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her back a step. Sweet, stubborn Tibs. He always knew when Detan was about to do something, and he wondered if his old friend could feel him now. Feel the hold Detan exuded over the whole of this city. If he didn’t, he would soon.
His question took Ranalae aback. She scowled down her long nose at him. “A rebellious little city, is what I have. A dog gone feral that needs to be brought to heel. Remember your ancestors, Detan. Remember they founded this city while seeking fertile ground in the name of the empire.”
“Did you ever wonder where my ancestors came from?”
“Why in the fiery pits would I? This is inane. You have one minute to disarm your ragamuffins or I will order you all felled. Do not test my patience.”
The brigade shifted to ready stances, raising weapons, preparing to pounce. Detan made a soft, negating sound, and they eased back, but only slightly.
“History matters, Ranalae, and this city is the confluence of many historical paths. The founders of my family – the real founders, those whose names we’ve lost to the erosion of time – were not Valathean. They were Catari. They must have been. And do you know why they came to the Valathean isles? Do you know why the patient, accepting, kind Catari would ever kick a family out?”