Chapter 34
Alexander screamed. He put his hands on either side of his head like he was trying to keep it from coming apart and screamed again. The pain was unbearable. He didn’t know that anything could hurt so much. He slumped to his knees. The searing agony began to expand from the breathtaking torment in his head to the rest of his body. It felt like molten lead flowed slowly through his veins from his head into his torso and out to his extremities. He wanted to scream again but couldn’t draw enough breath. He was on his knees slumped over with his forehead on the cold stone floor when a convulsion of tingling, burning misery tore through him. He fell over on his side and gasped for breath. His lungs simply wouldn’t work. He felt them burn with need for air but couldn’t make them draw breath. He shook in a paroxysm and imagined that this must be what it felt like to drown in liquid fire. His vision started to close down and he felt himself losing consciousness. He nearly panicked. He knew he would lose everything if he let himself succumb now. He had to endure the trial of pain, or perish.
Alexander had spent the week prior studying with Mason, learning about the mana fast and what he could expect. He worked hard and long to learn the mental concentration exercises and visualization techniques he would need to survive the ordeal and to control his access to the firmament once he succeeded.
Mason told him he wasn’t ready. Most apprentice wizards spent years of daily study learning the strict mental discipline required of a wizard. Alexander had some training from Lucky disguised as simple thought exercises but without the rigor. He hadn’t practiced the meditation and the careful, methodical creation of vivid and exacting images in his mind that was so necessary to a wizard.
Alexander had insisted. He needed the power that the mana fast represented if he was going to have any chance of stopping Phane. And he knew he needed to do this now, before he left for Blackstone Keep, or he might never get the chance again.
Isabel had asked him to wait. She begged him to put this off. It broke his heart to see the fear in her beautiful green eyes. She railed at him when begging didn’t work. He took it without flinching. When that didn’t work she fell into his arms and cried. He held her and promised her it would be all right. She stood at the door and watched with tears streaming down her face when he locked himself into the tower room to begin the ordeal.
Abigail had been angrier than Isabel but she knew her brother better and knew he wouldn’t be swayed once he’d set his course. She told him she loved him and made him promise he would survive. She was standing next to Isabel when he secluded himself away for the fast.
Anatoly and Lucky hadn’t tried to talk him out of it. Anatoly simply asked if he was sure he had to do this. When he saw the look of resolve on Alexander’s face, he just nodded. Lucky gave him a few suggestions, pointers, and reminders of lessons past to help him with the trials that lay ahead. Alexander thanked them both for their support and promised he would survive and emerge stronger.
Mason had prepared the top room of his tower for Alexander. It was a round room just over thirty feet across, with a centered, twenty foot magic circle inlaid in gold. Mason set up a cot, a small table, a meditation cushion, and a barrel of drinking water inside the circle for Alexander and cast the invocation that would protect the world outside the circle from the forces that Alexander might call forth. Until he completed the fast, he wouldn’t be able to leave the circle. He had committed to his course. If he succeeded, he would live.
As the torment threatened to overwhelm his sanity he focused his mind on the pain itself. He embraced it and welcomed it into every part of his being. He felt like he was on fire but still he held onto the pain. Mason had told him that he had to face each trial directly in order to succeed. He had to become larger than the trial within his own mind. He had to master the challenge and learn to focus, concentrate, and control his mind and feelings in spite of the trial.
He lay on the floor all that night struggling for each breath, shuddering in unmitigated torment, occasionally convulsing when a wave of agony ripped through him. When dawn came he focused on the light from the tiny window and clung to the pain. He focused his will and looked for a place of clarity where he could find refuge from the gales of unrelenting agony that racked him down to the marrow of his being. He cast about within the confines of his consciousness for a place of safe harbor.
And then, after countless hours of torture, he found it: the eye of the storm. A tiny little part of his being that was held apart from the agony that so completely consumed him. He drew himself into that calm; took shelter in the stillness. For what seemed like a very long time, he just took refuge. But he knew that wasn’t enough. He had to master the trial. He had to master the pain. He had to find a way to command his mind, his body, and his spirit in the face of the torture.
The eye of the storm was the key. He drew himself up from there and watched the pain wash through the rest of him. He detached his will from the suffering, detached his mind from the distraction of it. And then he began to gain command over his body. Bit by bit he was able to impose his will on his pain-racked body and bit by bit his body responded despite the crushing agony.
He made it to his feet with an effort that was beyond anything he’d ever exerted in his life before that moment. Once standing, the pain coursed through him as though it was rising to meet the challenge and maintain its supremacy over him. He bore down with his will. He allowed the pain to have full run of his body, looked it in the face and commanded his arms and legs to obey him anyway. And they did, slowly at first, but soon he was working through fighting sequences with an imaginary sword. Thrust, parry, advance, riposte, withdraw, and counterstrike. He could see the sequence of moves in his mind’s eye and he commanded his body to perform the movements even through the blinding agony. He moved with jerking and halting steps. Each technique was forced and sloppy at first, but he kept at it.
He began to move more fluidly and cleanly. The pain was still there but he had control. He could act in spite of it. Like a dam breaking, the pain suddenly drained away. His nerves were raw and worn and he was exhausted, but the sudden absence of pain was one of the most sublime and uplifting feelings he’d ever experienced. A great wave of relief washed over his sweat-slick body as he collapsed onto his cot. The cool air felt soothing in his lungs and he felt lighter in spite of his fatigue.
It was midafternoon on the fourth day of the mana fast when Alexander passed the trial of pain. The first three days had been nothing more than meditating on an empty stomach and struggling with the solitude. The trial of pain came as suddenly as it faded away. He knew he needed sleep but he also knew he needed to drink the fourth vial of Wizard’s Dust-infused water before he let himself drift off. Mason had impressed upon him the importance of drinking one vial each day without fail. He didn’t say what would happen if he failed to do so but implied it would be very dangerous. Alexander rolled over and flipped open the lid to the little felt-lined case, removed the next vial, popped the sealed glass stopper off and downed the slightly sweet contents. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
He woke sometime in the middle of the night in terror. The fear was so palpable he could feel it closing in around him in the darkness. His heart hammered in his chest and he held his breath for fear of the darkness hearing him. He curled into a ball on his cot and whimpered. He didn’t know what was out there but he knew it was horrible and it was coming for him.
He shivered in cold sweat while the dread coursed through him. He couldn’t tell if he was asleep and caught up in a nightmare or awake and waiting for one of Phane’s conjured beasts to rend him flesh from bone. He simply couldn’t make his mind work right. The fear invaded every corner of his being and poisoned his reason with deep dark foreboding that ebbed and flowed like a tide, sometimes rising to the level of blind, paralyzing panic and other times receding into trembling trepidation.
When dawn came, he feared the light. In the light the things stalking in the recesses of his imagination could
see him. There would be nowhere to hide. He found himself sitting in the middle of his cot, knees pulled up to his chest shivering in fear when he remembered that he had to face the trial to overcome it. But this time he already knew of a place where he could find shelter. He knew there was a refuge of stillness somewhere within him where he could stand apart from the stalking, formless fright that lurked on the edge of his awareness.
It took him quite some time to find it. He kept retreating away from it and, spooked by his own imagination, stumbling into a new and yet darker corner of his own mind. When he finally rediscovered the place of stillness where his own personal witness lived, he found the fear was distant there and no longer clouded his mind and corrupted his reason. He could watch it without feeling it. Gradually, slowly, he pushed the place of detachment from the little corner of his mind out into the rest of his consciousness. He almost felt foolish when the fear abruptly evaporated like darkness before the dawn. It had no substance except what he gave it. It had no power except what he permitted it to have. He had passed the trial of fear.
He drank the fifth vial at dusk and tried to sleep. To his surprise he slept quite well. He woke on the sixth day expecting that the final trial would accost him at any moment, but it didn’t. He spent the whole day meditating. At dusk he drank the sixth vial and lay down on his cot. He started to doze off when it happened.
It felt like his awareness was ripped from his body and cast into the firmament itself. He saw the flow of time, space, and matter differently than he had ever imagined it before. It was one all-encompassing, living, breathing thing. It flowed inexorably forward. He could see all things as they came to be, but from behind the curtain, so to speak. He watched reality form like a wave in the firmament and crest in the moment of now, always moving, always in flux.
Then the wave of time sped up and he could see the future, or at least one possible future. Phane had conquered the whole of the Seven Isles. Alexander saw his parents, his sister, Lucky, Anatoly, and Isabel being tortured by Phane. The Reishi Prince cast powerful spells on them to keep them alive while he took perverse delight in their suffering.
Alexander was aghast at the magnitude of Phane’s depravity. He was repulsed by the horror of what was being done to the ones he loved. He saw Phane cutting into Isabel and heard her call his name, beseeching his help, crying out in forlorn despair. As Phane maimed her, she lost that spark in her eye that so captivated Alexander. She lost hope and became despondent, no longer even interested in screaming at the ruinous things Phane did to her. Her will to live dimmed. The vibrancy of her spirit failed. She begged for death, pleaded for a quick end, but Phane pressed on. He took her past the limits of sanity and brought her to a place of total, abject, desperate anguish.
Alexander thought his soul would surely fail him. He wanted to cast himself into the infinity of the firmament itself and allow it to consume every trace of his being to escape the impossible horror of watching Isabel be so totally destroyed. When he thought it could get no worse, when he had seen every gruesome detail of each of his loved one’s brutal and ruinous torture, Phane looked right at him as if he knew he was watching and giggled madly before he cast their souls into the pits of the netherworld.
Alexander followed into the darkness and watched helplessly while each of those he loved most was savaged in ways that made Phane’s torture seem amateurish. The netherworld was a timeless place, so there was no end to their suffering. His loved ones were already dead, so they couldn’t escape the unrelenting torture except by surrendering their sanity and all vestiges of their mind and will, leaving nothing that Alexander even recognized.
He witnessed these horrors and was powerless to stop them. He felt the despair threaten to overtake his reason and begin to insinuate its dark tendrils into the cracks in his sanity. He was to blame for their suffering. He had failed. Phane had cast the world into a thousand years of darkness and it was his fault.
He began to let go. He saw no point in remaining himself. The essence of his being was already adrift on the waves of the firmament, beneath reality itself. All he had to do was let go and he would cease to exist. The very fabric of his being would unravel and scatter into the stuff from which it was made. The despair would end. The knowledge of his loved ones suffering would be unmade and he would be no more.
But then he thought of Isabel. He couldn’t let go of her. Her smile and the intelligence sparkling in her piercing green eyes were worth holding onto. He felt himself slipping away even as he clung to the memory of her.
Alexander suddenly felt a desperate need to live. Isabel would want him to fight. She would want him to live and he couldn’t let her memory die. If she was truly gone, then she deserved to have someone remember her. As the raw despair began to fade with his determination to hold on, he remembered, ever so faintly at first, that he was facing the test of despair. He seized on that tiny scrap of reason in an ocean of hopelessness and nurtured it, fed it, and breathed life into it until it became a beacon he could see the truth by. He couldn’t trust anything. Nothing in this place could be believed and so he resolved to believe in hope, whether his senses told him it made sense or not.
He pictured his family, his friends, and Isabel all alive and well. He focused on those thoughts even as wave after wave of horror from a very dark possible future crashed over him. He stood his ground and weathered the storm.
In the face of despair, he chose hope.
As abruptly as it had come, the despair receded.