Chapter 51 - Swings and Roundabouts

My mind goes blank for a fraction of a second, the image of blood weeping from Clovis’s eyes short-circuiting every rational thought. 

I scramble to my feet, my own phantom aches forgotten.

“A towel.” I mutter, my brain managing to latch onto one single practical thought. 

My eyes dart around the homestead, before I finally clock a small stack of clean cloth on a shelf. I snatch one as I turn to rush back to her side.

Clovis doesn’t look at me; her gaze is fixed on some distant point of agony. She reaches out a shaky hand, not for the towel, but towards the basin of water on her workbench. 

A small orb of water lifts from the basin, hovering in the air for a moment before zipping across the room and saturating the cloth in my hand. 

It’s a testament to her skill that even in this state, her magic is precise.

She takes the dampened towel from me and presses it into her eyes, blotting away the thin trails of blood that are staining her cheeks. The bleeding seems to have stopped, but she keeps the cloth pressed to her face.

“Thank you.” she says, her voice muffled by the fabric.

“What was that? Are you ok now?” I ask, kneeling in front of her, trying to keep the panic from my voice.

She slowly lowers the towel. Her eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot, but the crimson of her irises seems to burn with a new, horrified intensity. “It felt like a cold heat rose from my arm and up through my body into my eyes.”

“It wasn't just the heat that made me panic. It was as if my vision was being pulled apart by this force that I can’t describe.”

My face twinges as she describes the sensation.

I know that feeling. I know it with a sickening intimacy that I’ve tried my best to forget.

“It was a pressure.” I hear myself say, quiet and sure. 

“A sharp, cold pressure that builds up behind your eyes. It feels like it’s trying to occupy the same space as you; trying to push you out of your own body.”

The towel falls from her face into her lap. Her mouth is slightly agape. 

The shock on her face is not from the pain anymore, but from my words. “How… How could you possibly know that?” she breathes. “You didn’t touch the slate.”

“I didn’t have to,” I confess, “I’ve felt it before. Twice.”

I look down at my left arm, at my sleeve that hides my violet-tinged scars. “The first time was during my first visualisation lesson with you. When I couldn’t hold onto the flame. It was the same feeling, but in my arm. A cold, alien pressure fighting against my own magic.” 

I pull my eyes up to meet hers, the memory of the attack, of the searing white light and the phantom pain becoming real, is still raw. “The second time was during the attack. When I… when I lost control.”

Clovis’s eyes widen further, a dawning comprehension chasing away the last vestiges of her own pain. The gears are turning in her mind, connecting disparate pieces of information with the speed of a master scholar. 

Her expression shifts from shock to a feverish, intellectual excitement.

“Your arm,” she murmurs to herself but I can still hear her. “The attack… The flame…” 

She stands up, beginning to pace back and forth in the small space, her distress completely forgotten in the face of a new, compelling puzzle.

“You mentioned something before, didn’t you?” she says, stopping suddenly and pointing a finger at me, a gesture I’m becoming familiar with. 

“When you were trying to convince me to help you with this theory initially. You blurted something out about mana types, right?”

I nod slowly, confused by the sudden shift in topic. “Yes, but it was just a passing idea. I wasn’t sure if it could really be a thing.”

A wild, brilliant smile spreads across her face. “Visualisation and written magic draw upon the caster’s mana, but as you know, incantations are different. They don’t seem to pull from that same source. The accepted theory is that they don’t use mana at all, that they’re powered solely by the caster’s emotional energy.”

“But what if the mana incantations use doesn’t come from the caster at all? What if it's drawn from somewhere else. A different source, a different type of mana that responds to emotion instead of will.”

The gears are turning in my head now, too, but the pieces aren’t clicking into place.

I can see the theoretical elegance of her idea, but I don’t understand how it connects to the immediate, painful reality of the corrupted stones on her workbench.

“Okay.” I say, trying to follow her train of thought. “But how does that help us understand what just happened with the stones?”

Clovis stops pacing and looks at me, her red eyes burning with the intensity of her breakthrough.

“Because, Shikara.” she playfully says my name in an exaggerated way, she’s having fun with this. “What if that’s the key? What if the pain we’re experiencing is the result of trying to force two fundamentally different, incompatible types of mana together?”

She gestures to the inert, corrupted stone still sitting on the slate. “That stone isn’t empty. It isn’t inert. It’s full. It’s saturated with a different kind of mana. And when we try to force our own internal mana into it… it fights back.”

“So what you’re saying is, these corrupted stones are filled with an unknown source of mana that is causing them to act bizarrely?” I string the words together as I try to get on the same page as Clovis.

“Yes, that's correct! The only question is what is that unknown source of mana? It can’t be our yet unproven ambient mana as mana stones seem to use the same kind of mana as visualisation and written magic. It must be what you’ve been calling this mana sickness.” She takes a seat at the workbench as she stops to have a real think. 

My jumbled notes and half-formed questions have brought us down an avenue that could lead to a real discovery. 

In this room's cluttered quiet, a new, fragile, yet luminous theory emerges.