The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Episodes 1-3 of 7)

THE SEER - KELLATRA

Undaunted, she stepped to where a potted fern grew wild beside several troughs of weed-riddled flowers. She pushed her hand against the thick trunk of the tall plant, tilting the pot back at a slight angle, before reaching to retrieve a key from beneath the clay vessel. She tried the key in the lock of the door. It did not turn. She cursed and wiped her brow on the back of her sleeve. The lock had rusted shut, unused since her departure more than ten years previously.

She could try to force the key to move, or try to break the glass, or she could do what she would have once done without consideration. She could safely use The Sight to unlock the door. Such a small bending of reality would be unlikely to alert her father to her presence.

She had not refrained entirely from using The Sight after her banishment, but she had limited its use to circumstances where it seemed absolutely necessary. In Punderra, to use The Sight outside the Keth councils risked more than merely being revealed as a seer. The best she might have hoped for would have been a second banishment. She used The Sight only at times when bending reality to her will saved the course of her life from dire interruption. She never used it for petty reasons. Not to end a bad cold or mend a broken arm. Not to ease the minds of drunken, violent men to quick slumber. She had only used it when no other path proved possible. When her son had contracted a dangerous fever and lay moments from death. When thieves threatened her alone at night. When a soul catcher pretending to be an old friend showed up looking for a certain package.

She exhaled slowly, opening her mind to the truth behind all reality, the essence of all existence. This vision, this way of seeing, came easily enough. While she did not practice the use of The Sight, she had not abandoned cultivating the particular way of perceiving reality necessary for its implementation. If anything, it came more readily and she held it more deeply than she had on the night she last stood on the balcony ten years ago.

While people commonly referred to it as The Sight, the seeing of True Reality only completed the least essential aspect of the craft. Many could accomplish the mental training necessary to see the hidden world, the True Reality. Monks and mystics often obtained the perceptive stance of mind required, but they generally sought inner wisdom, insight to the subtle realms beyond thought, not mastery over the gross world of physical components. To attain this, to achieve The Sight in full, one needed to cultivate one's willpower. With the proper alignment of will and sight, a seer could influence the subtle and causal natures of reality, forcing them to shift in ways reflected in the gross, physical world. One could learn to see the True Reality and bend it to conform to one's desires.

Kellatra looked at the key in the lock of the door handle and intuited its nature more with her mind than her eyes and senses. She imagined the key turning smoothly, the gears of the lock uninhibited by rust and age, envisioned those gears working as they once had when first fashioned. Then she concentrated and insisted that the lock become as she envisioned it, that the truth of what she saw behind the lock's subtle existence conform with the vision of it in her mind. She witnessed reality bending, remaking itself, aligning with her demand.

She turned her fingers, and the key rotated in the lock, the handle turning in her palm. She removed the key, opened the door, and slid inside the room. She silently closed the door and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. The light from the moons cascaded through the glass of the balcony door and windows to illuminate the opulent sleeping chamber. A dressing table with a large mirror stood beside a massive, canopied bed, across from a large fireplace. Couches sat beside full-sized dressing dolls, their bare wooden frames showing a thin layer of dust in the bluish double light of the moons.

Her room had not changed since she last stood on its thick carpets. Odd that her father had left it intact, as though she might return any night to lie once more upon the feathered mattress and silken sheets, an oddity that kindled a vague hope within Kellatra's heart. Surely the static state of the chamber implied some manner of longing on her father's part.