Illusions of the Past

The classroom did not fade.

That was the problem. Not that it was convincing. That it refused to stop being there.

I knew what it was. I had known within the first three seconds, and the knowledge changed nothing at all. The fluorescent light kept buzzing. A chair scraped somewhere behind me. Someone laughed at something I hadn't heard, and the sound was exactly right, and my body responded to it before my mind could get in the way.

Daiki stretched in his seat. Aki was teasing the teacher about something, leaning too far forward over her desk the way she always did when she thought she was being funny.

I sat and watched a world I had lived in go on without hesitation.

The cloaked figure stood at the back of the room. He had stopped talking. He was letting it work.

My hands were flat on the desk and they wouldn't stop shaking.

All of it was here. No mana. No Guardians. No beasts. Just the room, and the light, and people who had known me long enough to make fun of me properly.

For a moment, the thought was comfortable.

That was the part I would think about afterward. Not the fear. The comfort.

"You see. This was always what was real."

The voice arrived inside my head rather than across the room.

"You were a boy from a world with no magic in it. Nothing else. Why did you ever believe you belonged among us, holding something even the people who love you are frightened of?"

"Because I was there,"

I said. "I lived it."

"Dreams feel real from the inside. Look closely."

Aki leaned across the aisle and tapped my forehead with the blunt end of her pencil.

"Spacing out again. You're hopeless."

Daiki snorted.

"Some things don't change."

Warm. Familiar. Correct in every detail I could name.

And then her smile went a fraction too far at one corner. It came back before I could be certain. Daiki's eyes went black for the length of a blink and were his again.

I looked at the desk. At the grain of it. At the small ink stain near the top edge that had been there since my second year.

Whoever made this had been thorough.

"This is wrong,"

I said.

The figure stepped closer. The sunlight coming across the desks bent slightly where he moved through it, and none of the students so much as turned their heads.

"It feels wrong because you don't want to put it down. Think about it properly. Which of the two is worth keeping? The one with war in it, and beasts, and things that follow you at night? Or this. Where you wake up and go to school and go home again."

A pause.

"You are permitted to want the easier one."

That was the sentence that landed. Not the argument. The permission.

Because I did want it. I had wanted it for a year and had not said so to anyone, including myself, with any real honesty. The safety of a world where nothing was hunting me. The warmth of people who had known me before any of this. The specific ordinary comfort of knowing what tomorrow was going to look like.

I wanted to sit at this desk and have nothing larger than exams waiting on the other side of the door.

My eyes burned.

"Then take it,"

he said. Quietly. Almost kindly, which was the worst part of it.

"Put down what you have been carrying. It was never yours. Not Usarita. Not Jorentu. None of it was ever handed to you. You picked it up because there was no one else standing there."

The classroom blurred and sharpened again, settling deeper around me. My hands were still on the desk. I could feel the wood.

And then.

"YU-UU!"

The shout went through my skull.

My head came up. That voice was not in this room and had never been in this room.

Talen.

Another came in behind it, sharper.

"Yuu. Wake up. This isn't you. Don't let him keep you there."

Kaelra.

The classroom flickered like something failing. Aki's face split into a grin that had too much of itself in it. Daiki's hand bent at an angle hands did not bend. Their laughter came apart into static and then came back wrong.

My nails were in my palms hard enough to break skin.

"They're waiting,"

I said.

"I told them I'd protect them."

"You told an illusion you would protect it."

The voice was no longer kind.

"They will betray you. Everything does. You were never one of them and you have known that since the day you arrived."

I brought my fist down on the desk. The wood split under my knuckles.

"I AM ONE OF THEM."

The classroom shattered.

Desks went. The chalkboards cracked across their length. The windows blew outward into fragments of light. My friends' faces melted into shadow and twisted and screamed on the way out, which was the part I would remember longest, because they had not deserved to be used like that even as copies.

And then I was falling.

I came back on my hands and knees on cobblestone.

The spell was still there. Kaelra and Talen were pinned to the ground inside a ring of black symbols, faces pale, their mana bound down to nothing. The cloaked figure stood over them.

I got up.

There was no decision involved in what happened next. I had spent a year holding something down with both hands and I simply stopped holding it.

Light came up through my veins. Something darker gathered at my fingers. Fire and water and wind stirred in my chest without being asked, all of it at once, the way it had wanted to for months.

I put both hands forward.

White out of the right. Black out of the left. They met the chains and the sound went through the whole street.

The barrier screamed. It fractured. It came apart in a storm of sparks that opened the ring outward and left scorch marks in a circle four meters across.

Kaelra pulled in a full breath. Talen coughed hard and rolled onto his knees.

Both of them looked at me.

I had been avoiding exactly that for a very long time.

"So you show your hand,"

the figure said. His voice had dropped into something closer to satisfaction.

"I wondered how long you would keep hiding behind the restraint. Tell me. Does it feel better?"

"Shut your mouth."

My aura was still up around me. I couldn't have put it down at that point if I had wanted to.

"If you want me, take me."

Kaelra got to her feet. Her sword came up, the blade running with fire-infused mana.

"You aren't alone in this."

Talen stood. Blood down his lip. Fists closed.

"You pulled me out of a wall. I'm not sitting on the ground for the rest of it."

The figure laughed and dark energy rippled outward from him.

"Then come."

The fight lasted about two minutes and I could not tell you the order of most of it.

I threw blades of light and torrents of dark and wove them together with a precision I had never used in front of anyone. Kaelra cut arcs of fire beside me, her sword ringing against conjured shadow. Talen went straight up the middle and hit things that should have broken his hands.

The figure moved through all of it.

That was the thing that mattered. Not that he was winning. That he was not being pressed. Shadow tendrils lashing out, black fire opening craters in the street, and underneath it the same low sound of amusement that had not changed since he arrived.

"Is this the strength? Borrowed bonds and stolen sparks."

Blood was running down my arm where a tendril had opened it. I got back up and raised my hand and light and dark surged together into a sphere that pulsed like something with a pulse.

"They're not borrowed."

My voice came out raw.

"They're mine. And with them I have everything I need."

I threw it.

The detonation swept the street. Kaelra put an arm across her face. Talen dug his feet into the stone. The figure took the full weight of it and his cloak ripped open and for one second I saw the face underneath.

Human. Older than I expected. Something had been done to it, but it had started human.

He staggered back and kept laughing.

"Yes. That is what I came for. The crack in it. The real taste."

He straightened up.

"You will understand eventually. You are not theirs. You are ours."

His body went to smoke and up into the night, and what was left was scorched ground and the sound of it fading.

I went down onto one knee.

Kaelra was beside me immediately, hand on my shoulder.

"Yuu—"

"I'm fine."

I wasn't, and she knew it, and she let it stand.

"He isn't finished."

Talen wiped blood off his chin and made himself grin.

"Then next time we're readier. He had tricks. That's all he had."

I closed my fists.

The classroom was still in the back of my head. Not the shattering. The moment before it, when I had sat at that desk and found it comfortable.

I had come close. Closer than I was going to say out loud to either of them.

The street smelled of scorched stone. My knees were not reliable. Kaelra knelt beside me with her hand steady on my shoulder, still watching the dark.

"Rest. You put out too much too fast."

Talen stood a few paces off with his fists still closed, chest working. He smirked, which did nothing at all for the state of his ribs.

"Take five. We can handle a shadow freak or two."

The ground trembled.

Shadows came back out of the cracks in the stone and started up the walls of the ruined street.

And he was there again.

He stepped out of nothing as though he had never gone, eyes faintly red under the hood, and his voice was calm in a way that had no relationship to anything around us.

"Did you think that was the end of it? No. This has barely started."

I did not see him move.

One moment he was across the street and the next he was behind me with a blade of shadow already in his hand, and the strike caught me across the back and put me through a stone wall and into the side of a building.

The impact went up through the whole street.

"Yuu!"

Kaelra's scream came through the dust.

Talen's smirk was gone. His fists lit with mana dense enough to crack the ground under his feet and he launched forward faster than I had ever seen him move, faster than the figure had accounted for, and his fist caught the man square in the chest.

The figure went back four steps.

Talen did not stop. He drove punch after punch into him, and none of it was technique, and it was working anyway.

"You don't touch my friends."

For a moment the figure was actually defending. Shadow shields splintering and rebuilding under the barrage.

Kaelra came in from the flank with her blade burning. She went under a sweep of black energy, cut upward, opened the cloak along one side. A twist of her wrist put a burst of fire into the gap that went up as a pillar of heat and swallowed him whole.

He came out of it unharmed and slower.

That was the first real result either of them had produced.

"So you two are not entirely useless."

"Shut up!"

Kaelra pressed forward without waiting, her sword a blur, every strike carrying one purpose that did not require explaining. Her flames put orange across the dark and each swing carved into the stone underneath.

Talen leapt and brought both fists down together. The impact split the ground and sent shockwaves out that toppled the standing debris and forced the figure to plant his feet.

"I don't care how strong you are. We're not moving."

I dragged myself up out of the rubble with a hand against my side. Something in my ribs had gone and I could not spare the attention to work out what.

I watched them. Both hurt, both outmatched, both forcing this thing to deal with them instead of walking around them.

The figure shifted his stance and his aura went cold.

"If you are this eager, let me show you the difference between gnats and gods."

Shadows twisted up into beasts. Teeth and claws. They went for Kaelra and Talen at the same time.

Kaelra spun and split one down the centre. She dropped low, thrust, and flames took another apart from the inside. Her breathing was going. Her focus was not.

"You are not putting a hand on him."

Talen met the charge head-on. He slammed one aside, grappled the next, took its claws across both forearms and did not let go. He lifted it off the ground and put it down hard enough to crack the flagstones.

"Wrong team."

The street was chaos and what was sitting in my chest was not fear.

It was something closer to pride, and I did not have room to examine it.

I got upright and raised my arms.

"Together."

They moved without needing any of it explained. Kaelra's firestorm took the figure's sight for a beat. Talen's strike took his stance. I put everything I had left into a sphere of twisting light and shadow that was painful to look directly at.

He felt it coming and turned and raised his own energy to meet it.

I threw it anyway.

The detonation opened the ground between us and drowned the street in white.

When it cleared he was standing. Cloak in strips. Breathing unevenly for the first time since he had arrived.

His eyes found mine and there was nothing amused left in his voice.

"So that is the depth of it. Very well. Take the small victories while they are available. There will come a point where the bonds you are so proud of will not hold you where you are standing."

He went to shadow and into the night and left silence.

Kaelra leaned hard on her sword. Talen dropped to one knee, fists bloody, the grin faint and still present.

I got to them and put a hand on each and steadied all three of us at once, which was mostly a fiction.

"We won,"

Talen rasped. He coughed blood and kept smiling.

"Or we didn't lose. Either way."

Kaelra let out a small tired laugh.

"Not this time."

I nodded. My eyes stayed on the place where he had gone.

The fight was over. That was all that was true about it.