Of Caverns and Casters ✓ [TLRQ #1]

Chapter 52 - Leavi

Downstairs, glasses tinkle, forks clink against their dinner plates, and voices rise and fall in the rhythm of warm, overlapped conversation. In the dim hall, I can't see twinkling candles and bright smiles, but they tease the edges of my thoughts like ghosts. The world feels like a parody of itself, and I'm desperate to filter all the levity out and just think.

I worry, though, even in the darkest, quietest room, this would no longer be something I could simply think my way out of. Thoughts chase each other like river currents, crashing against the banks of my mind, eddying in circles of contradictions, and sinking back to the unknowable deep. You cannot prove a hypothesis by philosophizing on it.

My fingers brush the wood of Aster's door. No, sometimes a question can only be answered by action. The clamor downstairs rises as chairs scrape back and dishes clank. I glance over my shoulder, but the hall is empty for now.

My fingertips press Aster's door open, and my feet wade through the sea of orange to his window. I throw it open. The curtains shiver in the evening breeze, and the setting sun paints blood on the fallen snow. As I step onto the window ledge, the wind tosses my hair and bites my skin. The sky is cloudless for the first time in days, and I look out over the dusted forest. Here I stand on the border between worlds—safe and trapped in the confines of the house's ignorance, or reckless and receptive to the knowledge an open world has to offer me.

Science and magic cannot coexist, but the uncertainty of how to reconcile everything that's happened wraps the talons of amura around my mind. Here in the Outerlands, I still have no basis for reality. If I don't find one, those talons will dig in deeper and tear me apart.

The cold wind blows across my face, and I drink it in. If science is real, then magic is not. If magic is not, then nothing Aster has... seen, means anything. It's just the mutterings of a madman, the con of a trickster, the superstition of a layman. It means nothing.

So nothing will happen.

But if I'm wrong, a soft voice inside me argues.

Quiet, the rest of me calls.

I drag myself onto the roof. Snow crunches under my fingers, setting them to tingling, and I push up. For a minute, I stay there, frozen as the icy layer I stand upon. Vertigo takes over, as though the ground pulls me toward it. I squeeze my eyes shut and draw in a deep breath. Unlike perception, gravity is constant. Blowing the air back out, I look around. The roof is flat, nothing is moving, and I'm certainly not falling. My mind was playing tricks on me, paying too much heed to the words of a madman. I'm completely safe.

I walk across the roof, toward the other half of the forest, and a relieved laugh escapes my lips. There is no such thing as magic, no such talent as seeing the future, no mystical forces playing beyond my reach. Sean was right; everything has a rational explanation. Amura's talons withdraw, leaving me with a lightness I haven't felt in days.