Interlude II

While Father’s friends would all stay in the guest bedrooms during their visits, only Greg had his own designated quarters. At some point, he became an evergreen part of the family. Increasingly, he would eschew his duties as the director of a prestigious research institute and spend weeks in our castle, discussing his latest project with Father. It was fine that he did so, despite not even the President of the United States knowing the details; Father gave his honorable word, and privileged information about the magical world in exchange.

Thinking about it now, Greg was getting a good deal; Father valued honor more than life, and it was not as if there was any reason for a recluse like him to involve himself in the politics of non-magicians. Maybe Father knew this, and simply enjoyed talking about his world to his best friend. Surely he, like everyone else, relished the chance to speak about themselves to an attentive listener. And listen Greg did; he was certainly both more knowledgeable about and more interested in magic than I ever was. In fact, what little Father passed on to me was only mastered thanks to the encouragement of my godfather, who would oversee my daily practice.

“This is so boring,” I groaned while practicing anti-aging charms on my bed. “If only I could learn how to make a fireball.”

“I can only imagine what you would do with a new power like that.” Greg smirked and closed the tattered book on his lap. “It’s a shame that magicians are the ones quickest to abandon their craft. You wouldn’t believe how much people pay to grow back their hair and hide their wrinkles.”

When he touched his thinning scalp and laughed, crow’s feet appearing around his eyes. Greg was decades younger than Father, yet looked decades older. Despite Father nearing eighty, he appeared about the same age as a non-magical thirty-year-old thanks to a combination of health and beautification magic. As he, like other heads of magical families, was loathe to develop and pass on any magic rendered obsolete by science, those anti-aging charms were the only forms he had taught me, his intended heiress.

“But science is cooler!” I hopped off my bed and danced around the room, arms spread like wings. “Being able to fly without any incantations or potions is awesome. When scientists figure out how to slow down aging, I will have no need for magic at all!”

Greg stood up from the chair and looked out the window at the well-tended garden below. “I still remember when your mother would present the most marvelous creations at dinnertime.” 

I did, too. When guests were over, she used to oversee meal preparations rather than leave it up to the family chef and his assistants. Using her own family’s magic-assisted recipes, she would serve the most incredible dishes: meat roasts cooked uniformly inside and out, soups that changed flavor, desserts that sparkled like stars and melted on the tongue. Though dinner guests had ecstatically given their compliments to the lady of the house, Father would firmly rebuke her in private.

“We must be sensible ambassadors of magic,” I had heard him say. “Magic is not to be used frivolously.”

Mother had protested that even the latest gastronomical technologies could not compare to the magical techniques passed on by her own mother, but her defense had only became less emboldened over time. And one day, her frivolous use of magic had stopped completely.

“A world without your mother’s desserts is a sad one.” Greg turned to me. “One day, you’ll look back on your childhood and cherish the most meaningless things — the most magical things.”

His shimmering eyes, his unshaven lip, his tired demeanor. It had been a while since Greg mentioned his beloved daughter, since he treated me with his former tenderness. By Mother’s firm instructions, I was not to pry into his family matters. If only he and his daughter would make up soon, I thought. Though it would mean he would be with her instead of by my side, I could only selfishly wish that Greg might retrieve the happiness that he once selflessly shared with me. The more tortured Greg was by his scientific pursuits — the more terrified he became of his work — the farther my goal of helping him and his daughter uncover the secrets of the universe escaped from my two hands.

One day, he left our castle for the last time, having announced to Father his resolution to abandon everything for his research. Guests were no longer invited after that. It seemed that Father had picked favorites between his friends. With no way to contact the outside world, I grew restless. Home, more than ever before, became my prison; my parents, my jailers.

When I ran away many years later, I learned that Dr. Gregory Clarence Keller, director of the Social Simulation Institute, had died three years ago under suspicious circumstances — likely related to the political gravity of his work. Less than two years later, his young successor followed in his footsteps, also succumbing to the evils of the world in her twenties.

I wonder if Greg’s daughter, before joining her father in death, knew that I was out there, locked up in an old hilltop castle, sustaining myself with the conviction that I would escape and join my long-lost father and sister. I wonder if Dr. Samantha Keller expected that a young maiden she never met would cry at her grave and apologize for not being brave enough to follow them.

I, that cowardly seventeen-year-old, slumped to my knees and wept, my tears shimmering glass apples in the light of the setting autumnal sun. But like Man exiled from Eden, I overcame the Fall. I stood up and dried my eyes with the back of my hand. Soon, the saline moisture on my cheeks would evaporate. Wisps of water vapor would rise toward the heavens, overcoming gravity’s pull and soaring up to the clouds above.