EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (111 page)

This little rebellion, like so many others in the past couple of years, was no doubt motivated by the drought. It was an unfortunate occurrence, and Augusta could understand the peasants’ unhappiness with ruined crops and high food prices—but that didn’t make it acceptable for them to march on Turingrad like Ganir claimed they were doing.

The north of Koldun—where these rebels were coming from—was particularly hard-hit. Augusta’s own territory was further south, but even her subjects were grumbling about the lack of food. They wouldn’t dare do any rioting, of course, but Augusta was not oblivious to the fact that they were unhappy. For almost two years, the rain had been sparse, and grain was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Augusta did her best to purchase whatever grain was available and send it to her people, but the ungrateful wretches still complained.
 

“Who’s ruling over the territory of the rebels? Is it Jandison or Moriner?” she asked, wondering which sorcerer couldn’t control his own peasants.

“Jandison.”

Jandison
. Well, that explained it, Augusta thought. Despite his advanced age and position on the Council, Jandison was considered to be something of a weakling. He was good at teleportation (admittedly, a useful skill) and not much else. How he had ended up on the Council—a ruling body consisting of the most powerful sorcerers—Augusta would never understand.

“Some of his peasants ran off to the mountains,” Barson said, looking annoyed with the situation. “And some decided to riot. It’s a mess over there.”

“To the mountains?” Augusta couldn’t suppress her shock. The mountains surrounded the land of Koldun, serving as a natural barrier against the fierce storms that raged beyond them. Only the most intrepid explorers ever ventured out there, given the unpredictable weather and proximity to the dangerous ocean. And these peasants actually went there?

“Yes,” Barson confirmed. “At least twenty of them from Jandison’s northernmost village fled there.”

“They must be suicidal,” Augusta said, shaking her head. “Who in their right mind would do something like that?”

“Someone desperate and hungry, I would imagine.” Her lover gave her an ironic look. “You don’t know hunger, do you?”

“No,” Augusta admitted. Most sorcerers only ate for pleasure; spells to sustain the body’s energy were simple to do—and were one of the first things parents taught their children. Augusta had mastered those spells at the age of ten, and she’d never felt hungry since.
 

Barson smiled in response and reached over to squeeze her knee with his large callused hand.

Chapter III

Gala

G
ALA
STARED
AT
THE
TALL
, broad-shouldered man who was her creator, trying to figure out the best way to answer his question. She found it difficult to focus, her senses overwhelmed by being here, in this place Blaise called the Physical Realm. Her body was reacting to the different stimuli in strange and unpredictable ways, her mind attempting to process all the images, sounds, and smells so she could understand everything.

One particularly strong distraction was Blaise himself. She couldn’t stop looking at him because he was unlike anything she had seen before. Something about the angular symmetry of his face appealed to her, resonating with her in a way she didn’t fully comprehend. She liked everything about it, from the blue color of his eyes to the darkness of the stubble shadowing his firm jaw. She wondered if it would be acceptable to reach out and touch his hair—those short, almost-black locks that looked so different from her own pale strands.

First, though, she wanted to answer his question. Concentrating, she thought back to
before
, to what had happened prior to her experiencing reality for the first time. “I remember realizing that I exist,” she said slowly, trying to put into words the strange sensations at the beginning.

“You mean you existed for a time without realizing it?” he asked, his dark eyebrows coming together slightly. Gala thought that expression likely meant confusion because her own eyebrows did the same thing when she didn’t understand something.

“It’s like there were two ways I existed,” she tried to explain. “One way would just happen. This went on longer. When I say I realized that I exist—that’s when this other part of me first realized that I am
me.
These parts are not separate; in fact, they are the same thing. There is a strange looping arrangement between the two parts that I don’t fully understand and don’t know how to put into words—”
 

“I think I do understand,” he said, leaning forward and staring at her intently. “You became self-aware. At first, you existed on a subconscious level, and then, at some critical threshold, you achieved a conscious state of being.” He appeared excited, Gala thought, somehow finding the right word to describe her creator’s emotional state.
 

“What is the difference between a conscious and a subconscious state?” she asked, hungering for more information.

“In a human being, the subconscious parts of the mind are in charge of things like breathing or the heart beating,” he said, his eyes gleaming brightly. “When I run, my subconscious figures out the complex trajectories of how my limbs move. Some sorcerers also think dreams form in that part of our minds.”

“I am not a human being,” Gala said, looking at him. That much she knew now. She was something different, and she needed to learn what that something was.

He smiled—an expression that made his face even more fascinating to her. “No,” he said softly, “you’re not. But you definitely seem like one to me.”
 

“But that was not your intention, right?”

“Right,” he confirmed. “However, the parts of you that I designed are based on how I theorized human minds might work. Lenard the Great is the one who first discovered the conscious-subconscious dynamic, and I’ve always been fascinated by his work. I’ve done spells on people that gave me insight into their states of being, and that was my framework for you. Additionally, I had some help from Lenard’s writings. The spell that created you was supposed to make an interconnected structure of nodes—nodes that can learn. Billions and billions of nodes in the Spell Realm, all magically connected together—”

How interesting, Gala thought, observing the way his face became more animated as he spoke.
 

“And then, once I performed the spell,” he continued, “I sent dozens of Life Captures to the Spell Realm, as many Life Captures as I could get my hands on—”

“Life Captures?” The term didn’t make sense to Gala.

Blaise nodded, his expression darkening for some reason. “Yes. Life Captures are an example of a magical object. A sorcerer named Ganir recently invented these things. It’s a little hard to explain what they are. Basically, when you take a Life Capture, you see what someone else saw, you smell what they smelled, and you think you are them for the duration of the spell. You have to experience it to truly understand.”

“I think I do understand,” Gala said, thinking back to the strange experiences she’d had prior to coming here. “This probably explains my visions.”

“Your visions?”

“I think I saw glimpses of the Physical Realm,” Gala told him, “and it was like I was in them.” The memories were not pleasant; for the longest time, she’d felt lost, not knowing that she was living other people’s lives.
 

“Of course.” His eyes widened with understanding. “I should’ve realized that once your mind was sufficiently developed, you would simply experience the Life Captures like we do—except that you had never been in the real world and probably had no idea what was happening to you. I’m sorry about that. It must’ve been terribly confusing for you.”

Gala shrugged, a gesture she’d seen used once or twice in her visions. She had deduced that it indicated uncertainty. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the Life Captures. Seeing the world through them had definitely been confusing, but she
had
gained a lot of knowledge about the Physical Realm that way. There was still a lot she didn’t know, of course, but she was not nearly as lost now as she would’ve been otherwise.
 

Blaise smiled at her, and she thought again how much she liked his smile. Such a simple thing, just lips curving upwards and a flash of white teeth, and yet it had an effect on her, warming her on the inside and making her want to smile back at him in return. So she did, mimicking his expression. His eyes gleamed brighter, and Gala sensed that she’d done the right thing, that she’d pleased him in some way.
 

“So what was the Spell Realm itself like?” he asked, still looking at her with that smile. “I can’t even imagine what it must be like there . . .” His voice trailed off, and Gala understood that he was hoping she’d tell him about it.

She thought about it, trying to figure out the best way to explain. “It’s very . . . different,” she finally said. “I don’t really know how to describe it to you. There wasn’t a lot of time between visions, and when I wasn’t experiencing the visions, I couldn’t use human senses. It’s like there were flashes of light, sound, taste, and smell, but they were coming at me in some other way. I was never able to process them fully before I would get absorbed in another vision. And then I was pulled here—”

“Pulled here?”
 

“Yes, that’s what it felt like,” Gala said. “It was like something pulled me here, into this place you’re calling the Physical Realm.” She paused for a second. “Pulled me to you.”

Chapter IV

Blaise

P
ULLED
TO
HIM
. S
HE
HAD
been pulled to him.

It must’ve been that last spell he performed that brought Gala to his study, Blaise realized. He had been trying to do a physical manifestation of the magical object, and instead he’d ended up bringing Gala here, to the Physical Realm.

She was looking at him with her large blue eyes, studying him with that odd mixture of childlike curiosity and sharp intelligence. Blaise wondered what she was thinking. Did she have the same emotions as a regular human being? Did she even understand the concept of emotions? Her reactions seemed to indicate that she did. She had smiled in response to his smile, so, at the very least, she knew facial expressions.

“I want to see it,” she said suddenly, leaning forward. “Blaise, I want to experience more of this world. I want to learn about this place. Can you show it to me, please?”

“Of course,” Blaise said, getting up. He had a million more questions for her, but she was probably even more eager for knowledge than he was. “Let me start by showing you my house.”

He began the tour upstairs, where his study and the bedrooms were located. Gala trailed in his wake, listening attentively as he explained the purpose of each room. Everything seemed to fascinate her, from the closet filled with Augusta’s dresses to the glazed windows in Blaise’s bedroom.

Approaching one particularly large window, she climbed onto the windowsill and stared outside, pressing her nose against the glass. Blaise couldn’t help smiling at that, charmed by the picture she presented.

“What is out there?” she asked, turning her head to look at him. “I want to go down there.”

“It’s my gardens,” Blaise explained, coming closer to help her climb down from the windowsill. “We can go there next.”

Reaching up, he took her hand and carefully guided her down. Her hand was small and warm within his grasp, and Blaise again marveled at the striking beauty of his creation . . . and at the strength of his own reaction to her. He hadn’t been this attracted to a woman in a long time, not since Augusta—

No, don’t think about her,
he told himself, feeling the familiar ache in his chest. The fact that his former fiancée still occupied his thoughts to such extent made him furious. After the way she had betrayed him, he had done his best to erase her from memory, but it was not that easy.
 

He had known Augusta for over a decade, having met her in the Academy when they were both lowly acolytes. He’d always thought she was beautiful, with her dark, sultry looks, but it wasn’t until they began working together on the Interpreter Stone that he found himself falling for her. Young and ambitious, they had seemed like the perfect match, even if they didn’t always see eye-to-eye on certain matters. For years, their passion—both for their work and for each other—had been enough to bridge their differences, and it wasn’t until Louie’s trial that Blaise had found out just how deep the divide between them truly was.
 

“Here, come with me,” he said, forcing himself to release Gala’s hand. “Let’s go downstairs.”
 

They walked down the stairs and out through the long hallway. Gala kept touching everything along the way, running her fingers over each new surface she encountered.
 

Finally, they were outside.
 

“These are my gardens,” Blaise said, pointing at the wide green expanse in front of them. “They are a little overgrown at this point—”

“They are beautiful,” Gala said slowly, turning in a circle. The look on her face was almost rapturous. “Oh, your Physical Realm is so beautiful, Blaise . . .”

“Yes,” Blaise murmured, mesmerized by her. “You’re right, it is.” Blinking, he forced himself to look away, to stare at something other than her gorgeous features.
 

She laughed joyously, drawing his gaze back to her, and he saw that she was reaching for a bright-colored butterfly sitting on a white flower. She did feel emotions, he realized, seeing her face glowing with happiness and excitement.
 

He tried to view the familiar surroundings as Gala must be seeing them, and he had to admit that the gardens had a certain wild beauty to them. His mother had been excellent with plants, judiciously using spells to promote the growth of flowers and fruit trees, and Blaise could still see traces of her magic everywhere.