Bereft: Foretold

45 | A Silver Ribbon

Cage shrugged, feeling the weight of the objects in his pockets pull upon his shoulders. The obtrusive glow coming off the charged construct and scripts bathed both mages in a mixture of yellow and blue light. "Torturers have loose lips, ol' boy. I feed them inane bits of information while in their care and they reciprocate ten fold. Honestly, they should learn better, but they never do."

"That's insane. You know that."

"I never said it was pleasant."

A sliver of discomfort lodged itself in Cage's throat and he cleared it, fingers toying with the ends of his ribbon.

Lucian tracked the motion of Cage's hand but made no mention of it. He knew what the ribbon was for. "I once read a fascinating treatise written by Armando Rinald of the Emerald Quill Syndicate about the transposition of energy through the void and the resonances of various signatures in the absence of relative motion." 

"Oh dear god," Cage groaned.

"It was an educational reading."

"Rinald was a hack." He paused. "Actually, didn't the Blue Fire boys label him an outlaw and strap him to a pyre?"

"They did indeed." Lucian gestured for another mage to come over and transferred control of the construct to him. The Black Iris Master released a tired breath as he massaged his hands. "It was revolutionary for its time, and we know what Blue Fire does with revolutionary men. Anyway, he supposed that the frequencies elicited by various forms of magic obey the conservation of momentum when being transported through the void, but momentum could not be achieved by our known frequencies on the other side of the void, as the variation in friction results in terminal energy loss. He went into great depth about the various ideal actions and elasticity of mage magic versus witch magic and how they are affected by the lost energy—."

"Lucian," Cage interrupted, holding a hand over his heart. "Lucian, my dear boy, I am exhausted. I spent nearly a week in that cell, and they were not tender with my care. I enjoy trading lectures with you and would love to tear Rinald's theories to metaphoric shreds—but could you get to the point?"

Lucian scowled as he sniffed, lowering his hands to his sides. "While our spells are capable of moving through the void when they originate here in Terrestria, they cannot be triggered in the other realms. You didn't give Pride a spell. He wouldn't be able to use it in the fallen Isle."

"And?"

"How is he supposed to return a spirit to form a body without the means to retrieve the spirit in question? He is incapable of using any spell, prepped or not prepped, to bring the spirit to any source of power—and such a spell doesn't even exist, regardless of its usability."

"Remind me when this is over to tell you all the ways in which you're wrong."

"I am not wrong."

No, he wasn't wrong. He was too clever for his own good sometimes, and Cage would've complimented him on that under different circumstances, but Cage had been instructed not to enlighten Darius of the truth.

Discomfort rose again and Cage pressed his fingertips into his throat, soothing the ache in his esophagus. A single word followed the pain, wispy as the utterance of a waking dreamer.

<Now.>

Cage blinked, clearing his eyes of the red haze, and turned. "It's ready. Perform the spell, Lucian."

He did. The man lifted his hands in steady, memorized patterns and spoke the proper lines. Cage paced the construct's edge, arms braced behind his back, and voiced the specific syllables needed to finish the script's cycles.