Chapter 13: Chapter 13 – Subject To Doctors And Laws

Chemical Burn, Least, Tongue. I wonder what that—ow. “Ow, ow, ow. Ow! Fuck!”

“Sophie?” I heard a scrape as a chair was moved, and then a thump as the chair—Kelly’s presumably—hit the floor. I couldn’t see anything; my eyes were full of tears. “Sophie, what’s wrong?”

“Burns,” I slurred, tongue feeling swollen and ashy. “Water.” I reached out, touching a glass, but I didn’t know if it was the water glass, and apparently I guessed wrong, because someone pushed my hand to a different glass. I swirled a mouthful of water, grabbed another glass, spat, and did it again, and then winced as I realized what I’d just done.

“What just happened? Are you okay?”

I grabbed a napkin and rubbed at my eyes, sighing. “I’m fine, I’m fine.” I looked up and over at Kelly, who was sort of hovering over my shoulder. It took some careful effort to speak with decent diction, but my tongue was already going from numb burning to raw tingling.

“Sophie.” Kelly folded her arms across her stomach, glaring at me. “What did we just talk about?”

“I am fine!” I grimaced, then sighed. “I did, however, just unlock the Apprentice Alchemist class by giving my tongue whatever Chemical Burn, Least means.”

There was a moment of stupefied silence, like people couldn’t figure out whether to yell at me or laugh.

“Miss Avara, I do believe that we have identified a possible first Class in Scholar Nadash’s Path.”

“You’re laughing at me.” I glare at Kan without any heat. “You can keep a poker face all you like, but I know you’re laughing at me.”

He inclined his head in a gesture of acknowledgement. “The good Scholar possesses the wisdom of her station.”

“Jerk.” He snickered, breaking his stoic expression, and the momentary tension around the table broke as we all laughed with him.

Footsteps sounded, alerting me to someone’s approach. I turned, getting ready to say hello, but Kelly beat me to it. “Rafa! You have impeccable timing.”

The woman walking over to us snorted. “It’s a refectory, not the Thousand.” Her voice was acerbic and pointed, but I could swear there was a deliberate kindly twinkle in her eyes. It went well with her whole aesthetic; she was a mass of wrinkles, by a large margin the oldest-looking person I’d seen in the village. “Raphaella. Call me Rafa. Herbalist and Healer.”

“A pleasure to—”

“Yeah yeah, what’d you do, catalyze a reaction inside your face? Look here.” She grabbed my jaw with her left hand, gently but firmly, and waggled it side to side. “No bone damage, no muscular atrophy. Open up.”

“Uh.” I looked at her dubiously, and opened my mouth despite my misgivings.

“Hm.” She tilted my head to one side, then the other, and performed a series of seemingly random checks, tapping my teeth and poking the inside of my cheek. She avoided touching my tongue at all, but she got a wince when she brusquely ran a finger across my upper palate, and that got another contemplative sound.

Eventually, she let go, glowering at me, and I raised an eyebrow at her. “Well?” I kept my voice level, or at least tried to.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Excuse you, what? I had no way of knowing—”

“Not that. Obviously you didn’t know the egg-greens would react with the cranberry juice. Kan knows, but that’s on him.” She waved a hand dismissively. “[Suppress Affliction]. [Hasten Recovery]. That burn should have been qualified as Minor at least in your System.” Her eyes narrowed, trapping mine, as the pain blessedly—or magically—faded into nothingness. “If you got a habit of self-harm, you go to the Clerk right now and tell him you need to see someone qualified to handle that. [Healer’s Orders].”

“Peace!” I waved her off, sighing and relaxing back into the chair. Amazing how much it sucks to go back to hurting, I thought to myself wryly. “I had chronic pain. Ligaments and joints, mostly. Maybe my scale is just off from that, I was never the self-harming sort.”

I hadn’t felt any sort of magical aura or influence from any of those ringing invocations that the world had trembled to hear. I had the feeling, though, that if I had been… if I’d had a history of self-harm, if that was why my pain scale was broken, I’d be marching off without another word.

Rot my eyes, I might have done that just from the tone of her voice, no magic needed.

“Hmph.” She glared at the chair on the floor, and Kelly scurried over and picked it up, holding it for her. “You get that taken care of? I’m hearing a past tense.”

“Yeah. Got fixed up a fair bit by one of the Gods involved in sending me here—”

“Travelers.” She made it sound like a swear word, and I grinned. So did she, a moment later.

“—and I got Hale for an Attribute when I… initialized? Or at least, that’s what my System wrote. So hopefully that’ll help too.”

“Mmm.” She didn’t seem particularly displeased at that. “They tell you much about the Theurgist’s Guttering?”

Everyone around us looked mildly horrified, but I found myself snickering. “My Divine Flame,” I said with deliberate and mildly sardonic emphasis, “hasn’t really been the subject of much conversation. It sure is something, though. Incredibly bombastic.”

“Hmph.” Rafa looked over at Kelly, lips thin and jaws tense, as though she was fighting to avoid saying something. “Orthodox approach,” she eventually said disapprovingly.

“I’m not Tethanne, ma’am,” the First Friend replied in an odd mix of heat and primness. “Call it by the books if you want, it’s in the books for a reason.”

“Book or not, it’s morning of the second day, and she’s not a child.” Rafa stood up, and I recognized the way she held the edge of the table in doing so, the careful way she made sure not to put torsion on her joints. “I’ll leave you to it.”

We let her go in silence. She walked steadily towards the other table, rejoining a conversation there, and none of us spoke until she sat back down.

“Well.” Kelly had a grimace like she’d bitten into a tomato she thought would be good and it’d turned out to be mealy, but her voice was level and cheerful.

That’s how she sounds when she’s forcing cheer, I noted to myself in passing, and nodded to her. “Well.”

“That… was Rafa. She’s…” She hesitated, then forged ahead. “She’s someone to listen to, about anything she says, no matter what it is. I’m gonna listen to her! Anyway. Right! Kan, Kanatan. You don’t have to stay if you don’t wanna. This is basic stuff, and it might be boring.”

Kan looked at his kid, tilting his head a little. The boy in question squirmed in his chair, obviously conflicted or stuck between conflicting… I couldn’t tell, really. Desires, priorities, obligations, something along those lines.

“Miss Kelly and Miss Sophie are really fun,” he finally said, “but I wanna go play with Tino.”

“And where, young man, are you going to meet Tino?”

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I could hear the eyeroll like a clarion call. “Tome, dad. Mamma Savata is gonna be there with him and Zak all morning, ‘cause Tino sleeps better with the training noise, I’ve told you this.”

“So you have, so you have.” Kan’s smugness was palpable to me, but probably not to his son. A fine line, that, sometimes; other times, not so much. “Off you go, then. We won’t be at Fall for lunch, since we’re doing road work, so if you need—”

“—anything, I talk to Pat,” Kanatan said in an impatient singsong. “And if Pat isn’t there I talk to Clerk James or Captain Meredith, or I wait in the Library or in Admin or Writ.”

He slid out of his chair and then paused to look over his shoulder, almost sheepishly. Kan gave him a nod, and he shot off at an eerily familiar not-quite-run, not-quite-walk.

Some things never change, I thought to myself with a smile. “So, what now?”

“Now,” Kelly said firmly, “we talk about the Law.”

I gave her a skeptical look. “Like, the code of law enforced by the State through the threat of coercive force?”

She made a face. “No, important as that might be, that’s mortal business, and if you transgress, it’s a matter for the Captain or Writ. Besides, it’s a way longer conversation than we could possibly have time for!” She shook her head. “No, for Shemmai lay-law, what we call civic or civil law, I mean, I’ll help, obviously, but that’s the whole body of law! It’s tomes and tomes!”

“Lay-law.” My eyes narrowed in thought. “So, the Law is something related to the Gods?”

“Exactly. Okay. This is going to be kinda weird and a little scary, probably, and I can’t tell you, I can only show you. Ready? Trust me?”

She grinned at me, and I grinned back sheepishly, flushing a little for no particular reason and thinking about the day before. “Yeah, do it.”

“Okay. And after this, we’re gonna talk about Classes and Paths! And about your System and how you can work with it instead of just… we’re gonna talk about that stuff.” It was her turn to look sheepish as she deliberately reigned herself in, but her eyes retained a spark of excitement; it was pretty obvious what she was more looking forward to. “So, the Law. I’m gonna skip the history lesson; let’s just say for now the Divine part of the Divine Flame is a real thing, and anyone with a System gets a connection to the Law through it. Right?

“Right. So, um.” She blinked a few times. “You haven’t set a Path yet, much less picked a Class, right?” At my nod, her shoulders settle in a movement of relief. “Okay, I was a little worried about you having done some Path stuff. That makes this easy! Really easy. Because… so, a Class is a step towards divinity, right?

“It’s a transcension of the mundane, of who you were as a mortal. It’s a confirmation of who you are, rising, and movement towards apotheosis. But Classes can be specific, and Skills can be narrow, and Paths might be inconvenient. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could make someone be useful to society? If you had a child, and you could make sure they picked right—”

The pressure hit me, blocking out my hearing and turning the world to a ringing halt. Time itself felt like it was stretching, and there was a weight, a gaze boring into me. “Stop.” The word tore itself out of my mouth. “Stop, stop, stop.”

It was a raw, certain need like nothing I’d ever experienced, a knowledge that left no room for doubt or questioning. It was almost entirely foreign to me—I’d never been a person of particular faith—but it sang of that same purity and clarity of knowledge I’d come into over years of struggling.

It wasn’t exactly the same, though. My knowledge that I, as a woman, was utterly uninterested in men, attracted almost exclusively to other women? That came from within, from the same place as my uncertainties and my curiosities and sense of wonder. This was an external intrusive thought, something that had a meta-tag in a sense I couldn’t describe in words.

It wasn’t incompatible with my own beliefs, the ones I had come to through my life and my experiences, but it was distinct. This was my System bridge talking, in a way; conveying that I needed this conversation to end, because Kelly was right in a lot of respects—fuck, I worked my ass off to convince my niece to minor instead of majoring in music comp—but what she proposed was wrong, it was a violation.

“That was fast!” Kelly looked triumphant, for all the sympathy in her voice. “The Edict of Paths. The choices we make in the System are ours and ours alone. You can teach, you can advise, but anything that narrows someone’s agency? Nope! ‘Cause the road the Theurgist charted is personal.”

“That was kinda trippy and really unpleasant. My head hurts.”

“I know!” Now the sympathy was on her face, crowding out the triumph. “But the good news is that you’ll never violate the Law by accident, and now you understand why.”

“And the downside is that that’s because the Gods are literally reading my mind.”

“Might we otherwise suppose otherwise?” I had forgotten that Kan was even still around, what with the weight of what’d just happened. I quirked an eyebrow at him, and he shook his head. “You are right to rebuke me, Scholar Nadash. To repeat myself in such a manner is atrocious wordsmithing; I should have asked whether in the absence of the Law we might suppose otherwise.”

“You’re kind of ridiculous.” That got me a smirk and a nod, and I sighed. “But you’re right. There’s no point in worrying about literal Gods knowing what I’m thinking; they have better shit to do than thought-police me, and I can’t do anything about it anyway.”

Kelly coughed. “Well, that’s not really true, is it?” I cocked my head inquisitively at her, and she grimaced. “Well, I mean, there’s no Law against Theurgy. It’s within our remit to try to usurp the Gods, or ascend to join them. If you oppose the Law, you can walk that Path, and try to change things.”

For a moment, all I could do was boggle at her. “Um. What?”

“He—the Theurgist—stole the Divine Flame in the first place, and we know for sure that, um.” She looked at Kan imploringly. “Kan, do you know how many Ascenders there were? Like, for sure, confirmed, one hundred percent?”

“Thoroughly attested and with neither divine nor mortal disagreement? Seven, in the Time of Light. That is one of the many ways,” he explained to me in an aside, holding one finger up meaningfully in a gesture I had no context for, “we refer to the years since the creation of his System. Years since the inception of structured magic, since the defined road to apotheosis.

“Their names and deeds are known, these seven, and these are they: Eichan, who strives; Naga, who defies; Emmna, the shield; Basathon, who builds; Shei Maham, whose wilds overtake desolation; Li Li Deshta of the crossroads; and Theophania, the spark of sudden insight.”

In Kan’s resonant baritone, those names were an invocation, a prayer. It rang in the silence after his words, and it felt almost wrong to disrupt it.

“Well! Thanks, Kan!” Kelly broke the mood with cheerful insouciance. “Okay. Moving on—”

“Wait, we’re just going to move on from that?”

“Sophie, please.” Kelly smirked at me. “As much as I love history, we should talk about the present. Time’s a-wastin!”

“Talk about the—time’s a-wast—oh fuck you.” I stuck my tongue out at her like a girl half my age. “This morning, I’m not the one going on wild tangents, and you know it.”

“Your System,” she said, pointedly ignoring me except to smirk wider, “is in a lot of ways a little personal God. It responds to prayer, and it’s smart enough to listen.”

I stopped good-naturedly seething at her to consider that. “Back in the Thousand, I formed little mental packets of… words, concepts, and intentions, and sent them deliberately on. I can do that and ask my System to tone it down a little?”

At Kelly’s nod, and her expectant, level look, I settled myself down and thought for a moment. I honestly found the extravagant enthusiasm of that text rather charming, but it wasn’t… efficient, and I wanted a way to get the most relevant bits in an easily digestible form.

Existing or unchanged information in a compressed form, I thought to myself, mentally building it into a construct. You can go ham with new things and major changes, unless they’re time-critical.

I sealed it off and, with a nudge and an odd, fluttery sense of anticipation, I let it drift towards my mental bridge.

A moment later, the world faded, and I looked at the first iteration of my Status Report.

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