‘Meaning less coincidences.’

April 19th, 2000 — Night

The Pisces lounge, a room I’ve spent at least quarter of my life in, is unrepentantly cold. I shiver in my jacket as I stare across the coffee table at the room’s resident keeper, one Erika Weiss, as per agreed upon this morning. Between us, the map of Sapphire Isle me and Felix had scrawled upon earlier in the day.

I can’t figure out for the life of me why it’s so damned cold. The local thermostat spouts an ambient temperature of 22 degrees Celsius, but it feels much lower than that. It feels like my fingers are going numb, maybe a few minutes away from shattering into innumerable fragments of Marie ice. I shove them between my thighs in a vain attempt to warm them.

“Where was I?” I murmur, blinking.

“The Plaza. You were talking about the Plaza,” says Erika, flipping through another esoteric tome. I can’t even make out the language — blocky characters made out of lines. Might be an orient script of some sort.

“R-Right. There was some sort of drill-like phenomena in the middle of the Ridge — right above the weird obelisk in the center. Seems to be trying to reach something.”

“Mhm.” Page flip.

“Church refused to help. As expected.”

Erika’s emerald eyes flit to me. “Why did you bother if you already knew what would happen?”

“Felix’s idea.”

“As expected.” She sets aside her foreign novel and clasps her hands together. “Anything else?”

Jules’s scornful figure looms over my shoulder, a spectre of imagination. Filthy. A Miasma. Leave while you still can, she said, her expression swimming in nausea. Then there was Felix, too. He left without a word, in corpse silence. I don’t think my personality is bad enough to warrant that.

I look up and study the angles in Erika’s face. Her face is a perfect mask of indifference — nothing I said phased her. I feel my own lips pulling back in a stout frown.

“Jules freaked out when I was leaving. Said I had some ‘disgusting’ aura around me.”

“Any details in particular?”

“Said I was ‘marked.’ Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.”

Erika closes her eyes and nods. “Hmm. Congruent with my observations.”

“...What?”

“Oops. Did I say that out loud?”

Everything was congruent with her observations. My fists settle into clenched balls between my thighs — raw emotion sends my fingernails into the skin of my palm. How could she be so nonchalant about a literal storm brewing not even an hour away from us? Something about that final dismissive remark rubs against me like a serrated knife, drawing red rivets in my mind. The way she says it makes it sound like she revealed a card merely to put false expectations in an opponent. I square my shoulders, barely able to contain the jittering of my fists.

“What’s going on?”

“Many things,” Erika says, nonchalant as ever. “But it’s my duty to not confound you with extraneous details.”

“I know this might be sudden, but I can handle the big picture. Don’t you trust me?”

An exploitation of emotions. I see her expression squirm with an uncharacteristic twinge of nervousness. She places her pale hands in her lap, one atop another. “Frankly speaking, as a witch, not at all. You’re hopeless when it comes to conventional spellcraft.”

Not like I can disagree with that. I struggle to comprehend the most basic of spells — something about them just don’t click with me.

“But…”

“But?”

“From what I’ve garnered on my own, your arcane ability matters little — this is an issue about commitment.” She places her hand to her chest and smiles bitterly. “Your grandma bestowed us with a particular contract. I can sense your desires, sometimes, even stronger than my own. You want an ordinary life more than anything, don’t you?”

An ordinary life with ordinary struggles. When she puts it that way, the idea is alluring. First love. First car. First kiss. First job, first kids, first vacation. Ordinary achievements for an ordinary life. Rays of sunshine for a dying liana, guiding it to the light.

“I can see some of your dreams, sometimes. Every night, I watch ordinary days play out in your dreams, where nothing happens. You have quite the cruel imagination, Marie. Every time, you give me such ordinary joys that it makes me sick.”

My dreams. I suppose it’s only natural that our connection allows for a two-way traversal of subconscious thoughts. But never did I realize Erika felt this way — I figured she couldn’t.

“You’ve ruined me too, you know? I’m like a wolf that’s lost its teeth.” She chortles at the metaphor, but the intended comedy flies straight over my head. “So hurry up and pick a path already, won’t you? Before I melt into a blob of sentimentality. Like you.”

“How crude,” I mutter, shaking myself free of introspection. No matter how romantic or sappy my thoughts get, the cold and hard facts won’t change.

The enemy mage is after something in the land itself, a secret hidden in the leylines. Running away will only put my friends at risk. That’s enough for now — I don’t need to decide my life on the spot. “I’ll do what I need to. Personal feelings won’t help us at all right now.”

Erika regards me with tired eyes, then bows her head apologetically. “...I suppose I was getting a bit ahead of myself. Very well.”

She sweeps her hand over the map, but several sections of her arm’s shadow snag on certain points. They split off and form small globules of darkness that quickly sharpen into conical markers. “Over the past month, our enemy has been attacking divergence points in our leyline mesh. I don’t know how much you remember from our lessons, but these are the linchpins in our cat’s cradle. I’ve been able to patch up the holes as they appear, but the enemy mage is only testing us. There may be stronger Phantasma still.”

“I remember that much.” I lean over and visually gloss over the map. There are around a dozen points — I instantly recognize the one in the Ridge. Same one as we saw in person, a vortex of harvested mana. I point to it and frown. “So what's the deal with those obelisks around town?”

“Decoys. Since this place is inherently special, your grandmother threw up a bunch of distractors. They’re literally made to do nothing but look special — the interiors have just enough complexity to make them seem arcane in nature.” Erika gestures to the non-obelisk points located around the edges of the map. “Our territory is extraordinarily well concealed to an outsider, due to my domain over ‘reflections.’ So the fact that they haven’t given up yet means they know something about us.”

“Could just be stubborn,” I say, but I quickly shake off the thought. “...No. I guess you’re right. This is too much for random chance.”

“Correct. Somebody might be leaking information about us — there’s only a handful in this town that know our secret. And you know how information has a way of propagating over time.”

The Order. The Syndicate. Our acquaintances in town. Even my Grandma’s connections. Erika is right: only a single person needs to reveal our secret for it to reach the wrong ears. “But… why would they do this?”

She nods, tracing a circle on the map. “If you’d like, you could think of the field around Sapphire Isle as a massive ritual circle. Our entire territory is a massive arcane pile bunker aimed into the Earth — this was by your grandmother’s design.”

A pile bunker. A pile driver, but cooler. “What the hell is important enough to warrant all of this preparation?”

To that, Erika offers a shrug. “Only your grandmother knows the answer to that. And whatever it is, it seems like our enemy knows more than us there. They’re trying to manually take over our territory, or rather, seek the activation for the bolt that will pierce the earth and unveil its secrets. Your grandmother’s buried legacy.”

A mysterious ritual that only a distant puppet master knows the full details about. Great.

“...So just for information’s sake, how exactly would you activate this ritual in the first place?”

“A two-piece key. One part is embedded in the land itself — it can only be activated by somebody with the other half.”

Makes enough sense. “Where exactly is this other half? If they’ve been flailing around trying to locate it, we should just swoop it up ourselves and get it over with, right?”

Erika raises her hand. She looks around the map, scanning for a spot to place her index finger on. But then, with a long sigh, she points her finger at me.

The winds are strong tonight. From his bedside, Felix watches a rogue current form into a miniature cyclone in the middle of his cell, picking up and churning fragments of torn paper. If he watches carefully, he can almost see the exact edges of the wind outlined in bleached splotches. A cruel, unshapely thing, malformed and constrained by a brick prison.

His thoughts constrain him to the bed, a wreath of conflicting memories.

“You speak of your arrival, yes?” Father Kozlow had said, standing up from his seat. “It was the strangest thing, indeed. We got the request out of the blue back in late February.”

Felix got out of his seat and faced the now pacing priest. “February.”

For the first time, he looked back upon his past, searching for the door of February. There was an unnatural clarity, a waterfall of memories deposited on top of him — a crushing weight of archived, glassy moments. An adamant reconfirmation of his identity: Felix is his name. Felix Conti, born in New York, a boy who specializes in oceanology. He is a normal boy with only a slightly eccentric outwards appearance. It was so overpowering that it nearly made his head go blank, a sheer pale white curtain of truth.

A pale wind of bone fragments. Thoughts and desires fell away to a vacant void. Factory reset, clockwork lubricant, time to go.

But a blackened, greasy stain remained in that pristine paradise. His flailing mind latched onto that imperfection with all of his mental fortitude, reaching out to that thorn-ripe rose embedded in his body.

When the episode ended, Felix found himself standing in the ritzy church room, light-headed, still there. He could still remember those he met.

“It was a mundane request,” Father Kozlow continues, “but if you entered Marie’s supervision, I suspect you have fallen in with the… other parts of this world.”

He holds a hand to his chest, faintly aware of the rune trapping his spine and heart. “You could say that.”

A curse was a blessing in disguise. Not as romantic as the idea of friendship and love saving him, but close enough. Pursuing that thought would have to wait — he was already close to an answer.

“We were to look after you until the end of the spring semester, which incidentally coincides with the local high-school academic year. You were to send occasional reports via the Reyes Cooper fax machine to your supervisor, I believe.”

His first time hearing of it. Not once had he submitted a report.

“I’ve been told by my colleagues that you have, though. Every single week for the past month.”

That couldn’t possibly be right. Felix never wrote a single report, let alone send them in with such a consistent schedule. There was absolutely nothing in his conscious memory that lended itself to the fact — his mind jumped to the next most plausible conclusion. Somebody was using his name to fill in these reports he should’ve been writing.

He recalls installing motion sensors on the church’s exits, but he can’t remember why. He went out to sea, but he can’t remember why. A private investigator. A full toolkit meant to locate and destroy magical creatures.

He met Marie, but he can’t remember why.

His reality and the one reported to him didn’t match up. It was only the beginning of a downwards spiral — his gut tightened in on itself, and a cloying sense of uneasiness wrapped around him.

“What about the mailing lists?”

Yes, the mailing lists — the set of instructions he received each week. They were the thing that told him where to direct his oceanic pursuits. Evidence.

But Father’s Kozlow’s brow only furrowed. “Sister Jules never mentioned any physical mail.”

His mind truly went blank. He watched himself turn and stumble out of the priests room without another word. Jules was in the hall outside, shoulders slumped — she gasped and staggered against the wall as he rushed past her. “Felix? What’re you—”

He paid her no mind as he stumbled into the clergy room where he once stayed. Everything was immaculate. Uncreased sheets, clean navy duvet covers, pillows that had received the perfect amount of fluffing; it was like he never even lived here at all.

“Is everything alright? Felix? Felix!?”

Words reached him, but he didn’t hear it. His hands grew minds of their own, propelling themselves to the bunk he occupied. They met something underneath the mattress, a plain clipboard-sized envelope labeled FORMS.

But when he opened the envelope, there were only blank sheets.

Those blank sheets now twist and turn in the moonlight, giving form to the ocean’s breeze, torn to shreds by his own hands. He stares through the gale, hoping the wind will reveal the empty sheet’s mysteries to him.

The Priest, nor Sister Jules knew anything useful when he asked. They just gave him looks befitting of a raving madman — pity, concern, sadness. Those looks still haunt him, even as he tries to sleep.

Erika’s finger lingers in the air, aimed directly at my chest. I look down dumly at it — my hand ends up on my chest, instinctively protecting my heart.

“At your grandma’s behest, I remodeled your body to serve as a half of the key,” she says, quietly. “You were to grow and become some… someone who can unlock the gate.”

Erika’s almost said something instead of someone.

I suppose she’s grown attached to me over our many years together. It hurts a little to think that I started out as just a ‘thing,’ but there wasn’t much in that dead-eyed little girl that could be called a ‘person.’ Not that it’s any consolation — the almost-insult doesn't warm my bitterly cold body. Hell, it’s like my body is starting to crave the warmth of others in a very literal way.

That’s never a good sign.

No matter how much I shiver and fidget, I can’t work warmth back into my fingers. Not that I’m not preoccupied with reconnaissance, my mind has time to isolate the root of the chill. It’s not something that comes from my stomach, but an almost-intangible weight that pushes down on my heart. I can feel it’s desires written out in my limbs.

The cold has become ravenous, an imperceptible beast of gnashing, icicle teeth. The urge to bite down into Erika and savour the tender flesh of her neck nibbles away at my mind. A taste of bone, flesh, nerves, blood, gristle, ground by my teeth into mushy sustenance — the invading thought causes a shameful heat to flare up in my loins. “I-Is that what’s happening to me?”

Erika stands up and paces to me with a hint of concern. She places a warm finger on the back of my neck — feels more like a scalding hot iron.

“Seems like it.” She pulls her fingers away and takes a seat beside me, nodding thoughtfully. “Your body is reacting to your stunt the other night. Rather, your Sigil is.”

The imaginary smell of burnt meat fills my nostrils. Salivation fills my cheeks and wets my tongue — something about Erika in particular is especially tantalizing. I bite my tongue and nod along to her words.

“I’m sure you’re already aware that your grandmother only gave you half of your family’s Sigil. But Sigils are strange constructs — some, like ours, operate more like organs. Running an astronomical amount of mana through yours must’ve tricked them into regenerating the missing half.”

So that’s what’s going on. I’m hungry for mana — for other people’s life force. “Hah, what am I, a shitty vampire?”

The half-hearted joke doesn’t even get a smirk from Erika. She takes my hand with the efficacy of a practiced nurse and holds her palm above mine. Little tendrils of viscous black latch off from her skin and penetrate mine.

The transfer is like an injection: a brief bout of pain, then a gush of warmth that runs up and down my spine and settles in my gut — my legs tremble a little from the intenseness of it all.

“If I hand over the entire mana reserve we have,” she whispers, “your body might end up self destructing — your Sigil will turn into cancerous-growth and cannibalize your body. So for now, you’ll have to deal with a drip feed.”

“Thanks,” I mutter, looking away.

“And while you were running around and playing detective today, I was off patching up holes — might as well become a tailor at this point.” She sighs and places her palm over mine. “...Say, did you ever look into that white book?”

The white book. Our most promising lead — it completely slipped my mind. Aniya completely threw me off my game. “I, uh, got distracted… I swear I’ll look into it tomorrow.”

Erika sighs, expectedly. “May I ask by what?”

Erika may be the only person I can be blatantly straight forward with. But I can still feel my cheeks glowing as I recall the situation with Aniya. “Well, you see, there’s this one girl that confessed to me—”

“Is she cute?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Do you like her?”

“Y-Yeah, but—”

“Well, if you think you can deal with the whole secrecy biz. I know a few ways you could produce heirs…”

I press my lips together. “Erika…”

She snaps her fingers and sprouts the smuggest, shit-eatingest, most punchable grin I or any other human will ever witness. “What? I’ve been around a long time — I’ve picked up a few tricks. I know you want to say ‘we’re both girls,’ but that’s a cheap excuse to us witches. And since I can share senses, it’s not like I’m losing anything here.”

I can’t be dealing with this. I raise a hand and push away Erika’s face with a flushed sigh. “Nevermind. Just… nevermind.”

Whatever tension remained has been tactically annihilated by Erika’s remark. I roll my eyes and groan. I suppose this is her way of saying she doesn’t want to talk about business anymore — it’s been a long day for the both of us.

“Aaaaaaanyway… It’s Good Friday and Easter Monday this weekend.” Erika flops back and regards the lounge’s dead TV with a wave of her hand. “I suppose this whole enemy mage thing ruins our usual long weekend routine. Wanna do something tonight?”

“Could bake a pizza and mess with late night infomercials.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

One last day of relaxation. I cast aside my problems and resign myself to a few hours of respite. Tomorrow would be the day where I could focus on sniffing out the enemy mage with a fresh mind and full overview of the situation.

It may be a bad habit of mine, but my mind is somewhere else as we chat the night away. Something was off about Erika’s whole description of the bigger picture — there was something crucial missing.

If Grandma only handed me half of our family’s legacy, where did the other half go?