Above Us, Only Sky

Awaken: part 1

     Sigma was everything but apathetic. She had opinions, stronger than the marble walls, on everything: she either loved something or hated it with a terrifying passion, would die so an idea might be furthered or flung the formidable force of her will against it without concern for personal injury. She couldn't imagine loving an individual, not romantically, but loved the world as a whole and grieved the many rifts and wounds she saw within it. And she was supernaturally clever, but an incompetent teacher: Io would almost have preferred the droning engineering professor with his unkempt beard who, she was sure, had never built so much as a drone fly in his life, and yet expected everyone in her class to construct synthetic eyes in the first week.

     Io had been the only one to succeed. The eyes she built were grey-blue-green like storms on the ocean, deep and gentle and knowing: a reconstruction of an old memory. Dimly, distantly she remembered a boy with copper hair, legs permanently broken, eyes exactly like the ones she reluctantly handed to the old professor, trying to ascribe them to a name, a solid human face, as she walked away feeling empty. A strange jolt of pain struck her then: grief for lost family, lost love, and agony like twin knives deflating her lungs. But it was someone else's pain, someone else's memory. For years, alone in prison, she'd tried to figure out whose it was.

     But there was no time, no room in her mind for memories. Sigma was determined that she learn to use magic. So she spent every waking hour and the majority of her dreams learning how to conduct electricity through her nerves, how to manually split, build, reform an atom, how to sense and distort gravitational waves, how to take, give, transform energy, how to convert matter into energy and back again. She knew every detail but could do nothing, and she stagnated in her frustration. 

     It didn't help that Sigma was frequently absent, or that without her, the temple-- house?-- shut itself down, slowly regressing from a place of elegance and light to a mere tomb. And she always left Io behind. Alone.