Black Eye for a Proud House

Years ago, rows of cells. The details of it blurry and vague by time. Certain irrelevancies, certain important bits, intermixed without distinction. The faces and the feelings like clearer memories. Details in mundanity. The things her brain focused on as she did the boring parts of the work. Tonight for the first time she helped the man in the isolation room. She expected… well she wasn’t sure what at first. The people in the cells only so rarely turned the kind of snarling mad her mind prescribed to chained animals. The sad reality of the captivity was harder to take. Soft, lonely conversations. People separated from the thing which they understand to be life. She wondered at first about her notions of animals growing up in captivity. If any of them hadn’t known life outside, how would they handle their status? It was the mixture of boring and sad that you took home with you. She was going to quit. If she’d been assigned to a different block that night, she might have made it too.

The man in isolation seemed the most like the image her mind had come up with for an animal born into it. Calm, muted, completely focused but talking almost in a different language. She had assumed when she learned he was kept in isolation that he was more dangerous. She would know later that it was because he didn’t shut up.

“That is how you have been made to see it,” His voice was soft and almost uncertain, likely the side effect of now rare use.

"Is there another way to see it?" She asked honestly.

It seemed like the innocence of the question changed something in him. He leaned forward and sighed.

"How we see the world is both true and untrue. Let me start small. Surely you must think that there are cases where somebody is not in the wrong for breaking a law."

"Well, maybe not in the wrong. Like if somebody steals food to feed their family, but I don't think that makes them exempt from punishment."

"Not in the wrong and shouldn't be punished don't mean the same thing," He leaned farther forward. "Sometimes a person may be punished for doing what is right, sometimes a person may not be even if they were wrong. Law does not come from on high, it comes from man and man wields it. And man can be wrong. Man can be good at some things and bad at others. If a man breaks the law, he should be punished. If the law is wrong, what do you make of his punishment?."

"They say you killed people, how can that be an example of the law being wrong? What would bring you to kill somebody?"

She was young then, she's young now. Excuses are like assholes.

"A law cannot be neutral. If mages are kept under lock and key, the laws which protect us are not the exception to neutrality. They are small concessions made to the **** otherwise applied. Bandages are wasted on a wound where the blade is still in place."

Her hands had fidgeted at the hem of her shirt. At the time, she worried that he would see it and give her away. In hindsight, he had always known.

"That isn't an answer."

"My parents saw my gift as an affliction and I went to the mageseekers willingly. When they saw what I could do, they made me a weapon. Our **** is accepted so long as it is useful."

"That isn't either."

He sat back on his heels, shaking his chains in her direction.

"Would any answer I gave you hold water? Accurate communication is only possible between peers. Transactions, explanations, excuses. So long as you hold the power in the situation, all I can do is blow smoke and hope you see fire."

She frowned, some notion that was still nascent in her mind at the time had been brushed.

"Really? What power do I hold over you?"

"The time a prisoner spends in chains does not change his nature. They could no more erase my crimes than they could remove the spark of mana that rests inside of me. What they have done is isolated me, allowed the world to pass me by. If I ever were freed again, I would be the same as I was when they locked the door, but everything else would have changed. The dissolution of resistance is just as hard a show of **** as a blow."

"Does going insane keep you from giving straight answers?" She hugged her knees to her chest.

He leaned forward slowly until his face was only inches from hers.

"I had no intention to kill anybody. The mageseekers taught me how to use my power to find other mages, they never honed the knife edge of it. A tool is a tool, the same hammer that pounds a nail can smash a window. Grip is what matters."

She froze, then sighed and rose back to her feet.

"Is that really all you have? Saying that you didn’t mean to do it?"

“I told you, all I can do is blow smoke.”

She finally picked up the used plate from just outside the bars and rose.

“I guess you’ve got that right,” She mumbled. “Or hot air.”

"When you return home tonight, I want you to ask yourself something."

"I'll try my best," She answered, already stepping toward the door.

"The mageseekers rarely go door to door, even when rumors get loud enough to reach them. Most mages from the lesser quarters turn themselves in, most from the other quarters are turned in by those around them."

"That's not a question."

"How do they find the mages in the wealthy districts? Where caring mothers and fathers see their child’s strangeness as shame and not danger?"

She turned away from him and swallowed heavily. She was having increasing trouble fighting the notion that he was looking directly through her.

"I don't know, how?"

“They pick through ashes and look for survivors.”

***

Time flows in three patterns. One breeze turns from start to finish. The other from the beginning on back to the start. The third is the intersection of those two winds. The past and present are as influenced by the future as the future is the past.

The first time she was measured for her riding gear, she had been a small child. Misunderstanding a direction, she sucked in her stomach and held her breath during one of the measurements and her first set of riding gear was too tight. Because her gear was too tight, she did poorly in her early lessons. Because she did poorly in her early lessons, her parents shifted the focus of her studies. There, as the shadows grew long in her room and she lay wrapped around written words, she found the light.

When she was older, she would learn about how magic manifested. How for some it came as lightning and some as the murmur of voices. A tool that seemed shaped for the person’s hand or an animal that seemed to be linked to the human as if their minds worked by the same pathways. They say that when Doran came to Demacia, a mule’s kick to his head turned him from a magical prodigy to a craftsman whose creations seemed imbued with values that defied explanation. But when the accounts of history shift and change, moving in and out of credibility as they drown in an ocean of their peers, these things can become hard to pinpoint. Where is the place for Doran the craftsman in a world of stories about Doran the old wise master?

Law and truth are not given to man, they both come from him. If one wanted to view childish mistakes of the past as the devices of predetermination and not the circumstances which gave the present and future birth, it is merely a matter of perspective.

His words, not hers.

The way he told it, the cave is where the story starts. Both from the time he learned about his own magic to the time he started working for the mageseekers, the cave was always there. Forgone conclusions like deja vu.

He saw the cave the first time it happened. Small, childish hands reaching out to grab food from the grasp of a vendor. The brush of fingers, the kind of thing that only gained meaning when given it. And for a moment the mind of every person in the market was a stringed instrument, playing in unique tunes and timbres. Each interaction one of the players reaching across the aisle to pluck notes on another’s mind. Turning back to her, seeing the knowing look in her eyes as much as the confusion. A smile, her player a more aware and awake one reaching out to purposefully soothe him as it strummed a soft chord. The images of the strings fading as he walked home. In a moment, two realizations in his mind. The first; that for her, this was how it always was. Always had been. Always would be.

The second, her song ended when they hanged her a month later. And the cut strings laid like pooling blood around her when he passed by the gallows.

He saw the cave again the first week he was in the care of the mageseekers. Not more than a year older than the child in the market. Small thing, simple cut purse. Of course, at that time the Fear was higher than usual. Everybody in jail got checked. Sometimes loudly, sometimes they passed the boy off as a hand delivering food so that he made contact with each of them for a moment.

Pig-faced factory man, the kind of ugly that doesn’t make for good martyrs but makes for great spies. The kind of fat that you didn’t put to a cut purse. When their hands touched he saw shadows bloom around him. Each time somebody turned their head, reached up to scratch their ears or to blink. The hundred little blind spots, the thousand sounds that rang out without being processed. It seemed like a handy gift for a spy. Or perhaps it was just a useless gift for a factory worker. Always impossible to say which came first. The man seemed horrified. For the first time in his life seeing somebody else who was more person than shadow. He’d been a good boy then, he’d done as he was told. The secret stayed with them until he was on the other side of the doors.

And when his real bosses didn’t want him back, the jailers took his eyes and ears and let him go to waste in the cell.

There, he explained, was what it meant to be a mage. All of them patients with a unifying, ultimately terminal condition. Given mutual identity by the day where each would reach a point of being seen as more trouble than they were benefit.

They found the girl in a cave not far from what remained of her childhood home. Tracks identified while looking through ashes for survivors. When he retold the stories, Sylas often said that his only regret was not knowing the names. The mageseekers, the ones he held to blame, they got to have names. He didn’t speak them aloud, refused to give them the power of his memory where others had been denied.

Physical magic, destructive magic, those were rarer breeds. In some ways, both what the Fear was all about but invoking it less directly. When they found her she begged them to walk away, to leave her to die. She was so alight with her own magic that they didn’t need to test her. Two dead to her name, results of losing control at home. Lightning crackling at her fingers like the image of a spirit curled on stones.

And in a moment, after years of being the young dog moving among adults, he was aware that she was younger than him. And he saw the chances he had been given to escape this day which had never been there for her. Here, where her benefit had vanished in the face of her trouble, he stood in the penumbra cast by a pair of men whose blades had been the one constant of life as a mage since before he was born. Before him, deeper in, a scared child with the same countdown to extinction above her head as his own.

He had stepped further into the cave.

***

At least, that all was how he told it. Law and truth come from man, if sagacity is your measuring stick of their honesty you find most people are better liars than you thought. A teenager is usually not the standard-bearer for character judgment.

Whoever the girl in the cave was, she was honored dead now. Lots of people were. That was all part of his plan, if he had one. Lots of people had to be un-honored dead too. Beyond any in-group or out-group politicizing, the distinction between the honored and unhonored dead seemed to be in the eye of the killer. Making martyrs of others tended to be the way you attracted a following. Some days she told herself there wasn’t an excuse for it. She should have seen the signs. If truth was what you couldn’t change, that made the past truth. No freedom in that. The truth of the past made an ever-narrowing funnel neck of the present and the future. All that was left to do was slide onward into uncertainty. That was how the mind tended to record things, to ascribe certainty to the past and the future. Convincing yourself that you would do right if you could go back and do it again, ignoring the notion that you might do it worse. Would have been hard to do worse than she had. She could call it a lesson learned if nothing else.

Excuses are like assholes.