Just a Bystander

Sorry. Despite the rising panic that was threatening to choke him, Caden realised that the augera were, in fact, truly feeling it. It wasn't a throwaway word. They were truly, sincerely sorry about what was happening. He could literally feel their remorse.

Their method of communicating through the arcana meant that it was his own mind that filtered their responses, and whenever they 'spoke', his subconscious mind would supply the closest word that matched his own understanding. But now, what had caught him by surprise was how perfectly the emotions matched. It was very unlike the usual tenor of his communication with the augera, where he only felt or comprehended a portion of what they were communicating. For the first time, there was a perfect match between what they meant and what he understood. The augera weren't feeling an emotion that was vaguely analogous to human sorrow and regret — it was a perfect echo of actual human emotion. In fact, it was so perfect that he found himself tearing up in sympathy.

"Transformed?" He found himself speaking aloud and into the arcana, unable to properly confine himself to one medium. There was so much going on in his mind and in his heart that he couldn't stop the spillage, couldn't focus enough to narrow his words so that they reached no further than the arcanic shell. "Is she alive? How do we get her back?"

The twins heard his spoken words, even if they couldn't entirely follow his arcanic communication. Kevan spun to him, his eyes widening. But Caden was too preoccupied to offer any kind of consolation or placatory words.

'The brilliant-sighted-singer is alive. She will always be alive now, her voice joined to the symphony.'

Kevan gaped at Caden, then stared around at the haze of arcana that they were standing in. Caden couldn't be sure, but it seemed like Kevan had heard the augera this time. Lynus was still looking around in confusion.

"What is it?" Lynus asked, turning to his brother and gesturing at Caden. "Who's he talking to? What's going on?"

The sorrow that the augera were feeling intensified to the point where Caden found himself doubling over in grief. He sank to his knees, sobbing uncontrollably. "Stop!" Caden managed to choke out. "Stop this. Get out. GET OUT!"

But it seemed like the augera themselves were getting washed away in the tide of their own remorse. They continued to send impressions and thoughts to Caden, trying to communicate, but it was now a barely coherent stream, drowned out by the noise of his own crying in his ears, and the soul-crushing sorrow that thundered through his auric-ambient-flare with every pulse of the arcanic shell.

Then the tangled-broken-power was there, right next to him. Caden flinched away from Kevan's presence, but the latter seized him firmly by the shoulders while also locking his auric-ambient-flare in place with bands of arcana. Dimly, Caden thought he recognised something about this strange sensation — the arcanic signature reminded him a little of the sequence that had adorned the knife that Kevan and Lynus had fashioned with the knowledge gifted to them by the Academy augera. The knife that was supposed to somehow destroy him.

He felt a brief thrill of fear that was sharp enough to cut through the grief. Was Kevan going to use this moment of weakness to end him? But how, if he didn't actually have that knife? Was he going to use arcana alone to re-create its effects? Caden thought of marshaling some sort of defense, but the crushing grief had washed away any sense of self-preservation, and he simply went limp.

The end did not come. It took several seconds before Caden managed to focus a little more through the veil of grief, and he realised that Kevan wasn't using the full knife sequence. It seemed Kevan had simply cannibalised a part of the sequence and was now using it to hold Caden in place. And Kevan was trying to force through an ensorcelment in order to reach him through that horrible, cloying emotion, trying to drag him out of the growing hole of despair. But the arcanic shell laid over him was making it impossible, protecting him out of reflex.

"Come on, work with me," Kevan said through gritted teeth, while also reaching out through the arcana. "Help me to help you!"

Why did he even think ensorcelment was going to help here? Despite everything, a small muscle in Caden's jaw twitched, signaling annoyance and incredulity. Ensorcelment, really?

Under any other circumstances, Caden would never have entertained the idea. But the grief that originated from the augera had carried him past caring, just like how it had arrested his desire to protect himself earlier when it had seemed like Kevan was about to kill him. And so he simply did not care enough to respond or engage with Kevan. The augeric shell, taking its cue from his utter surrender, stopped resisting and permitted the ensorcelment.

And remarkably, the instant Kevan made the connection, Caden's mind reasserted itself. The hopelessness and grief were still there, crashing against him and bearing him towards a terrible waterfall that terminated in utter despair. But now he had found a small rock to cling on to. Kevan had reached in and given Caden that strange blend of emotions that formed the core of his own defence against the despair that plagued him.

"Tangled-broken-power, remember?" Kevan asked wryly.

Caden's sobbing had subsided enough for him to take in shuddering breaths, and he stared up at Kevan. "This... is you? All the time?"

"Not this bad," Kevan answered, grimacing a little. "This is... a hundred, a thousand times worse. But it's the same... flavour, I guess you'd call it. I recognised it in your spillage."

Now that the torrent of grief was less overwhelming, Caden could think a little more clearly, and he remembered that this was indeed a lot like the time Kevan had ensorcelled them the very first time. Back then, it hadn't been one of the face aspects of his auric-ambient-flare, but it had been brought out after Jerric's savage attack on Kevan in the Geldor Spire. Now, Kevan had given him his own answer to that internal anguish.

The augeric shell's spillage was still pulsing through Caden, threatening to destabilise him again, so he seized this moment of clarity that Kevan had given him to try and shore up his own mind. Kevan's ensorcelment wasn't as perfect as Ambrose's method of knowledge-transference through arcana, but it gave him enough to work with. The core of the ensorcelment itself was the chief ingredient for the defence, and when Caden realised it, he felt a strange sense of wamrth and kinship with Kevan.

It was love.

Caden's heightened sense of the arcana helped him extract a little more detail, and he understood that Kevan had anchored himself to his brother and father. They formed the robust roots of his desire to preserve himself in the face of his own existential despair. And Emilia was there, too — a connection that was recent, but by no means weak. But there was a special dimension to it that the other two did not possess. Kevan's love for Emilia didn't just anchor him to the present so he could endure; it led him to hope in the future.

These were things Caden could perceive because he, too, had these personal anchors. It was just that Caden had never been tested in quite the same way as Kevan, and his life had never led him to moments of crisis that had forced him to literally use his love as a shield for his own mind. Caden still didn't know what might have led Kevan down these trains of thought and to these final conclusions, but Kevan had spared him the need to tread that same path of bitter experience by simply giving him that seed of hard-won mental fortitude. Now all Caden needed to do was water it with his own connections.

And there were so many connections he could pour into this seed. His family appeared in his mind's eye, bringing with it an ocean of memory, every drop of water containing a whole world of light within it. Even the moments of sadness and anger served only to colour the canvas of his life so that the brighter hues stood out even more.

The surge of protective warmth that swelled from the stitches of Caden's auric-ambient-flare washed away every trace of grief, and in a moment the augeric shell around him shuddered in sympathy. The chorus of augeric voices cried out once in surprise, then settled into equilibrium.

'...what did you do?' the young augeric voice whispered. Now, more than ever, it reminded Caden of his sister.

"I got helped by a friend," Caden said, getting to his feet and drying his eyes. He reached out with one hand and laid it on Kevan's shoulder. "Thank you."

"I think I caught maybe seventy percent of that," Lynus said sheepishly, looking from Caden to his brother.

"I'll fill you in on the rest later," Kevan said to Lynus. He gave Caden a clap on the back. "Right, so... as far as I can tell, you're in contact with the augera somehow. They just fritzed out for some reason, but you've managed to get that under control. They said Emilia's alive, but... joined to the symphony? So how do we get her back?"

"The 'symphony' seems to be the augera's shorthand term for the Prophecy," Caden explained. "I don't know what it means if Emilia's joined to it. I don't understand how this is different from all of you just being bound by the Prophecy."

"Okay. Did you ask them what's going on here with all this?" Kevan gestured at the arcana swirling in the air around them.

"Yes. They said Emilia's right here, but she's being transformed." Caden paused for a moment, trying to think of how to quickly explain the situation. "There's... there's a lot of background stuff to cover, but the brief version is that there seems to be, like, layers to arcana. You already know there's the arcanic sea, the layer beneath the physical world. Well, there's a layer beyond the arcanic sea and most of Emilia is in that layer now, which has somehow brought her beyond the physical world."

Kevan and Lynus looked both awed and frightened at this piece of information, and Caden suspected they were wondering how difficult it would be to navigate that new layer of arcana since it had been such a trial for all of them to get used to the arcanic sea.

"Can you get there?" Kevan asked.

"I've only managed it a couple of times, so not reliably. And I don't know how to really do things there," Caden admitted. "And I've never just gone over like Emilia before — in all the previous times, my body was right here in the physical world."

"That means yes," Kevan said, grabbing Caden by the shoulders and shaking him slightly. There was a hint of desperation in his manner. "Please, Caden. Try. Try and get her back."

An hour ago, Caden might have hesitated a little. He would likely have gone anyway, but there would have been a brief moment of indecision as he weighed the difficulty of the task and balked at the unknown challenges that lay ahead. But a strange sense of certainty had settled over him now, perhaps because he had just been reminded about WHY he had set out on this mad journey in the first place — to save his sister and father from the prophecy that hung over them — which had begun what felt like a lifetime ago when he had set his sights on being enrolled in the Academy.

And what was more, Caden realised that he didn't just want to do it for himself. Now that he understood Kevan a little better, he knew the personal stakes here. He knew how much Emilia meant to Kevan, and that it was more than some passing crush. Kevan hadn't really done much to earn his friendship, but when Kevan had ensorceled Caden to share his deepest fears and insecurities, and also his hopes, Caden realised that the two of them weren't really that different after all. And if there was a chance he could help Kevan find some peace, then he was damn well going to try.

Caden nodded and gently extricated himself from Kevan's grasp. "I'll do everything I can to get her back," he promised.

He turned away, feeling a sudden calm wash over him. His footsteps felt lighter than air. When he turned his mind to these sensations, it sent him right into his state of absolute dissociation and clarity, so that it seemed like he was watching himself from a distance while still being keenly aware of every sensation.

I am {~?~}, he thought to himself, and the smallest sliver of comprehension flickered in his auric-ambient-flare.

And then he was gone.