Maybe success is an endless slog on the hedonic treadmill, and every victory will eventually become pat and pointless. But I have to admit that even writing a first draft of this ritual felt good. If you had time in the next week or so, I would love your thoughts on whether my analysis was sound, and whether you think the ritual would actually work. If I was completely delusional in my reasoning at any point, please go easy onme.
I think part of the reason I was so productive this weekend is because I was willing myself not to think about you. If I was translating Aramaic and Italian, then maybe my brain would be too occupied to dwell on the way your smile reveals yourever-so-slightly crooked teeth, or how good you smell. Even I know that it’s not smart to be thinking this much about how good your thesis adviser smells.
I spent my life wanting to become a scholar of arcane mechanicals; it was my singular focus, and after the disaster of my Arcanus, I thought that dream was over. Now that I’ve been granted this rare second chance, an invaluable opportunity, IknowI should avoidanythingat all that might risk my future. And yet…
How do I best put this? Have you ever been driving along a coastal highway and imagined how easy it would be to jerk the steering wheel and disappear into oblivion? It’s not that youwantto die—it’s almost as if your brain is taunting you with how fine the line between chaos and order truly is. It’s a fairly common psychological phenomenon. They call itL’appel du Vide.The Call of the Void.
All of that is to say, I should be focused entirely on protecting my precious academic career, but it’s taking everything in me to stop thinking about that moment by the door, when we stood so close I could feel your breath on my skin. When you almost kissed me. That was what almost happened, wasn’t it? I can’t stop thinking about you, and I can’t stop thinking about the possibility of you and I performing an illegal ritual together. Two equally dangerous prospects.
I admit, with other boys I’ve pulled the classic “leaving my coat” trick in order to guarantee a second encounter and I should probably preserve the fiction here that I am a cool femme fatale, the vixen who knows exactly what she’s doing. But we’re getting to know each other. We’re supposed to trust each other. And so I will be honest with you here: I left my coat only because that moment with you left me lightheaded and a little senseless. I didn’t even notice it was missing until you emailed yesterday.
x
Rawlins
It was an unseasonably warm night, fragrant with autumn decay. Rawlins sat on his back deck, ignoring the expansive view of Newlyn, his attention fully engrossed in his laptop. He was oblivious to the creak of his wooden chair, to the clink of the single ice cube in his highball glass as he swirled it back and forth. The glowing screen periodically attracted bugs; he shooed away a moth as he scrolled back up to the top of the PDF for the third time, trying to understand what he was lookingat.
As soon as he opened it, he found the organization of Ellsbeth’s ritual annoying and slightly pretentious; she was employing the two-column structure popularized by European scholars in the nineteenth century, which required the reader to ping-pong between elemental activations and diagrams. The style was probably thanks to the time she had spent reading Wentz; he found it stuffy and counterintuitive.
As was typically the case with nearly any first-year grad student’s work, it was unnecessarily long; the third and fourth steps could be easily combined, and Rawlins found several other inelegant repetitions. He also noted a handful of typos and an obvious but crucial mistake she had made with the abbreviation of an elemental.
Even with these mistakes and imperfections, he was struck, upon reading it, with a singular, certain conclusion: It was brilliant.
It would work.
A written ritual was somewhere between a baking recipe and amathematical proof; it had an insular logic, combining scientific principles of biology and physics with the energetic forces of arcane mechanics. Devising a new ritual was thus a complex undertaking, one that inevitably required endless rounds of iteration, a search for the delicate balance of forces that would yield the desired result. When it was completed, it always needed to be tested—but Rawlins had developed a nearly infallible sense for when a ritual as written would actuallywork.His ability to spot it on the page was honed by his own trial and error, his years of grading graduate theses, and the tedious hours of peer-review journal work he contributed.
Somehow, Ellsbeth had—in a weekend, with little input beyond what she could glean from some antiquated volumes—constructed an original written ritual from the ground up. For a banned magical practice. That, in itself, was a miracle.
In a sense, she had actually found a very clever way to reconstruct a very old ritual. Ellsbeth had determined the ritual’s function by combining a vague allusion in Wentz (a binding useful for restraint of the accused) with a document on sixteenth-century courtroom procedure, which dictated that a defendant’s wrists ought to be tied and their legs immobilized. Ellsbeth had then extrapolated the forces necessary to achieve such a binding through arcane mechanical forces by cross-referencing a wide array of related effects.
It was an astonishingly impressive feat of scholarship. Rawlins would be tempted to think the work was plagiarized if not for the fact that he couldn’t even imagine where one might find a source to copy from.
Perhaps she had gotten lucky? Not likely, given the density of ideas needed to populate a ritual of this complexity. Layers of new thoughts and extrapolations. Connections that couldn’t be looked up in the back of any book or searched for on the internet. Perhaps she had been helped by someone else? That seemed even less likely, given the foolishness of involving a stranger in her banned topic.
Or perhaps she was truly, prodigiouslygiftedat the study of arcane mechanicals. Perhaps she had arrived at his door with her vast ability completely obscured by the unique circumstances of her aborted attempt at the Arcanus exam. Perhaps she was a singular mind with the potential to revolutionize his field of study.
That was the possibility that troubled Rawlins most of all.
He closed his laptop, and gray spots appeared in his vision as his eyes adjusted to the night. The view of Newlyn at dusk swam into clarity—the valley below him, the river that cut through town, the red-brick buildings of campus hugging its curves.
Amid the familiar buildings, his gaze found the Pembroke dorm. Rebuilt and renovated years ago, but he could still see, in his mind’s eye, the blue flame that had once consumed its top two floors.
On Tuesday afternoon, Rawlins atelunch alone in the faculty dining hall while flipping through a dull paper on thaumaturgy for one of the conferences he chaired, when he was interrupted by a familiar voice.
“Afternoon, Tad,” said Paul Gallway as he slid uninvited into an empty chair. “Wanted to chat about something. Cone of silence.” He clearly expected that would get Rawlins’s attention; Gallway always loved to invoke an air of collegial secrecy, but Rawlins saw through the transparent strategy and found it grating. “It’s about the Taylor Prize,” Gallway added when Rawlins didn’t reply.
The Taylor Prize was the most prestigious student award in the field of the arcane arts; the winner was always a graduate student from one of the most elite universities, and the schools all bragged about the number of Taylor Prize winners that had matriculated from their programs. Newlyn had had its share, but it had been half a decade since the last one.
“You’re nominating someone?” Rawlins asked, thinking about the students whose thesis committees were chaired by Gallway. “Victor Hamada?”
Gallway shook his head. “Actually, I’m hopingyou’llnominate someone. And certainly not Hamada. I was thinking Curt. He won the MacGregor Fellowship already. He has a legitimate shot!”
Rawlins squinted. Curt becoming a MacGregor Fellow was impressive, but also, to Rawlins, utterly baffling for such an ordinary scholar. He suspected there may have been a late disqualification, or that Curt had family connections pulling strings on the committee that granted it. Probably both.
“Curt is a fine student,” Rawlins said. “But he’s not exactly a genius.”
“Come on, Tad. This isn’t a field for geniuses anymore. And honestly, that’s a good thing. We’re not going to find a place within the culture by pioneering esoteric use cases. It’s about practical applications that have social benefit and commercial value. Curt’s work might not seem intellectually exciting to you, but itisthe future of the arcane arts.”
