Hours? And to think that normal folks considered this Traveling… “I’d like to know—”
The thump of a thick stack of papers onto the table interrupted her and threatened to knock the giant plate of cookies onto the rug. The papers were bound together with string, and Jacques quickly untied it and let them spill outward in a mass of chaotic correspondence.
Faye picked up one of the old letters. This envelope was discolored with age and had been damaged by water at some point. The handwriting was very swoopy and hard to read. “What is this?”
“I told you Anand Sivaram was a prolific writer. Perhaps if you can get a glimpse into the one who first bore the mantle of the Spellbound, you will understand more about your own Power. You had best get started.”
Hours and miles flew by as Faye read about Anand Sivaram.
It was in my twenty-fifth year, while still mastering my own connection to the Power, that I received my first glimmer of understanding. I have read the words of the learned and respected, scientists and philosophers, zealots and eugenicists, and yet it was in a pathetic excuse for a hospice where I came to understand that all of them were wrong. They did not understand magic because they could not experience magic. Magic must be lived. It must be breathed. It must be part of your soul. Only through immersion into this river of magic do we truly commune with the Power.
It was during an extended convalescence, healing from an accidental misuse of my own magic, that I spent the time necessary to let my mind roam to truly formulate my understanding of magic. I had injured my back after foolishly placing myself in a precarious situation. Barely able to walk, I had been forced to lie still, with nothing else to do for days but turn my thoughts inward.
All Travelers, as they have taken to calling my kind, develop some instinctive form of sensory ability relating to the area in which we are set to appear, or we die in short order. It is that simple. Despite being faithful to the methods I had developed in order to protect myself from injury while using my magic, I still found myself injured. On the day of my accident, I had done as I had taught myself, and opened my mind for any sense of foreign bodies which could potentially impact or embed themselves in me—the single greatest cause of death among young Travelers is flying insects—before Traveling. Yet in a moment of distraction I had foolishly landed and placed my feet upon slick stones, slipped, and wrenched the vertebra of my lower back.
Thus confined to bed for weeks on end, I had set myself to the mental task of improving my methodology. I meditated upon this at great length. In time, my mind seemed to expand beyond my physical presence, and for the first time in my life, I saw the Power as it really was.
My eyes were opened. My journey had begun.
Jacques chuckled, and it broke her concentration. Faye looked up from the note. “What’s so funny?”
“You move your lips when you read. I just noticed that. You really shouldn’t do that. Terrible habit to have in the field, secret messages to you won’t be very secret if there is an Imperium spy around who can read lips.”
“I’m not afraid of Imperium spies.”
“You should be. The really clever ones will seduce you and then leave you to pay the bill. Ah, never mind. That is a story best shared with more mature company. Speaking of spies reminds me, though, you have yet to spot all of my men.”
Faye scowled at him. She had never been particularly good at reading, and if it hadn’t been for Grandpa, she wouldn’t have known how to at all, so going through the letters of Anand Sivaram was a difficult, frustrating, time-consuming process.
But she simply couldn’t stop.
“Shut up and eat your cookies.” Faye picked up another paper. This one was an amazingly complex drawing of a spell. She recognized it instinctively. Faye didn’t need Buckminster Fuller’s Power to tell that all of those complicated shapes stuck together represented the part of the Power that controlled Traveling. Sivaram had been bored in a hospital and his mind had wandered until he’d first seen the Power. Faye had once followed Mr. Sullivan’s dying spirit to the place where the dead people dream in order to see the Power itself. She liked Sivaram’s way better, but it did make her wonder, did it take somebody who could Travel to actually see the Power? Without dying first and getting dragged back first like Mr. Sullivan had, at least? The Chairman had been visiting there for years, which explained how come Imperium magic sometimes seemed so much more advanced than theirs, but then again, it seemed like the Chairman had been able to do whatever he felt like.
Many of Sivaram’s letters had been dated, so she’d put them into order as best as she could. Then there were loose pages, random scribbles, doodles, old photographs, and even napkins with hasty notes scrawled on them. There were huge gaps in time, obvious spots Jacques hadn’t been able to fill in, references to things Sivaram had written that there was no record of, but despite those handicaps, she could follow his path, clear as day. Sivaram had been consumed with a desire to understand the way things worked, and it had dragged him across the whole world.
The majority of the letters were to his wife. The love there was obvious, especially in the early letters, but that began to fade as he became more and more distracted, and his devotion changed from people to magic.
Dearest Devika. I will not be returning home this month as planned. I can only hope that you can endure my continued absence. I cannot give up when I am this close. The journey must continue. This week we went even further in the jungle. When I first heard the British ambassador speaking of this man known as the wizard, I knew I had to seek him out. What manner of man could manipulate magic into all new forms? It has taken years for me to even begin to understand my own Power, yet I cannot conceive of such a skill. As a Traveler, I can catch but the tiniest glimpse at times of what magic really is. I have learned so much, but the things they attribute to this wizard, if even only true in the smallest measure, could drastically increase our understanding of magic. They say that he has learned to draw magic. Draw it? As if it is so easily manipulated! They say that he has engraved magic upon his own body, giving himself whole new types of Power. Surely this is impossible, but I simply must know for myself.
There was a quickly drawn map of a place she didn’t know, and the margins were filled with geometric doodles that were obviously Sivaram’s guesses at what the Power really looked like. It seemed that even before he went and broke his brain and went full-on murder crazy, he was already wound a little tight.
Dearest Devika. I know this letter must come as a surprise, as so much time has passed that surely you must have thought me lost and dead in the jungles, but I have prevailed. My journey to the colonies has been a success. I found the man I have been looking for. The stories about the wizard are true. All of the stories are true. It is magnificent. It is not the creation of new magic, for the magic is already there, we are simply reaching out and taking more of it for ourselves. The Power is an incredible entity, made up of thousands and thousands of intersecting nodes, each one of those capable of some small shifting of the supposedly immutable laws of the universe. I have taken new forms of magic to myself, as many as my frail mortal body can bear. With each one, the mysteries have become clearer. Reality is far more beautiful and far more terrifying than we have ever imagined.