Book 4, Chapter 28: Lost in the Symbols
We were in the tower, where I’d come to practice ever since cleansing it through rage and fire. Because if I could control the energy here, I could control it anywhere. After all, it was a good place. A good room. Bechalle had been tossed out the window here.
“Excellent. Now slow down the energy even more.”
Sitting on the floor, but some time ago I’d had enough sense to bring a few rugs up, so we wouldn’t be so cold, and wood in the fireplace, eyes closed, I did what he ordered. I could feel it now, moving around me lazily. Kind of felt like being in a hot tub when a warm current passes by.
“That is quite the improvement. Alright, and this will be difficult, I’d like you to dissipate only the yellow streams.”
“Can I open my eyes?”
“Please keep them closed.”
“I can’t separate the colors without looking.”
“Try.”
Still using the hot tub metaphor, it was like he put some dye in the water and asked me what color it was. I didn’t have a clue. But I could feel the energy speed up, losing its stream-like quality.
“Your magic is becoming erratic.”
I really wanted to open my eyes. I could feel it weaving around my body, little lightning zipping around, one arching over my left wrist.
“Ok, alright. Calm the magic back down. That’s enough for today. If you could, please.”
I willed it away and it left. Getting out of this hot tub and not even wet! Opened my eyes, “Sorry, I can’t tell the difference between the energy, unless I can see it.”
“That’ll come with practice. Otherwise, you did quite well. But let’s get the iron back on you, just in case.”
“Sounds great.”
***
Etienne spread the charcoal rendering of the symbol on my back on the table, next to the painting.
“You see this area?” he pointed to the drawing. Lines carved into my body. A body, one I stole or maybe was gifted, or born into and this universe created around me, I didn’t know which, but there it was, the symbol. Etched into a young girl’s back.
I couldn’t help myself but be drawn to this horrible fact. My body, now. Me. “Over my right shoulder?”
He looked at me sideways, “Yes, the runes. Here, they are a summoning. To the left, a description.”
They were odd patterns. I’d never seen them like this, on a flat surface – I couldn’t, just couldn’t look at the paintings after they were finished – but this experience, these shapes, this writing, I knew.
“A description, Your Highness, mirrored on the opposite side,” as if to impress that upon me.
Familiar, but I couldn’t read them. The knowledge lingering just out of reach.
Etienne continued, “The lower part of the symbol is likewise divided in two, but less obviously. Here,” he wiped his hand across the image of my mid back in a u-shape, almost drawing a line from kidney to kidney, “differs from the symbol underneath,” hand over my lower back to tailbone.
It had taken him months, but he still didn’t understand it.
“The lowest rune is incomplete.”
As I stared, the runes stood out above all else and my body faded into the background. It was a description, but not as it appeared. Symmetrical from our perspective, in two-dimensional space, but we were looking at it edge on. A drawing of a perfect three-dimensional rectangle, a cuboid by name, from head-on looks like a square. Tilted slightly and you’d see it, the full 3D shape. Maybe a block of wood, like a 2 by 4, if it was a cuboid.
“I have to apologize my lady, looking at this must be disturbing for you.”
But this was symmetrical and therefore it was not a 3D representation. It couldn’t be, no 3D object could be rendered in 2D and stretch out in both directions while being on its face. “This is a fourth dimensional polygon.”
“Excuse me?”
I looked up in horror. Why’d I say that out loud? Damn. I just had to go with it. “A fourth dimensional polygon. And it’s a prime number.” Shut up! Shut up! Why did I say that?
“It can’t be. There are one hundred, twenty-five strokes. Cuts. I apologize.”
Stop, the voice inside me said, but I did not. “Your count is wrong. Sorry, sorry, that doesn’t matter. It has one hundred and thirty-seven sides. If you finish the line he was unable to. And imagine the ones we can’t see, but are necessarily there. Though some of these lines don’t connect to, they aren’t relevant, sorry, to the sides.” Damn. He really couldn’t see it. 137. That number had a special meaning. But I couldn’t remember.
“How can you know how the unfinished diagram appears? And how did you determine-”
“I just do! Damnit, Etienne, you’ve never studied” shut up, shut up, stop talking. “Nothing, sorry. Nothing. Right, one twenty-five. What does that mean?”
He sighed and faced me, “Princess Cayce, please. We both know you have . . . unusual knowledge. I’m willing to accept it came from this magical inscription, but please, if you share with me what you know, it will help my research.”
“Alright. Ok. But,” I took him by the arm and led him to the chairs near the fireplace, “I’m having an ale. And you are, too. I insist.”
We sat down and I poured for us both. I held mine up to salute him, then finished it in one go. And poured another. Then I sighed, slumped shoulders, sat forward. My explanations never really held water for these people, lacking in advanced science – how did I find myself here? Physics, I was going to tell him he’d never studied physics. Though he was trained as a mage. I wondered how they represented magic. Maybe I could get it out of him.
“Let me lay some groundwork and, sorry, I’m going to go over this quickly. A cube is a three-dimensional rendition of a square, yes?” He nodded. “A hypercube is a fourth dimensional rendition.”
“There aren’t four dimensions.”
“What do you think time is?”
“Time?”
“Never mind. A hypercube represented on two-dimensional space exists in multiple 3D spaces at the same time. You can’t fully represent it on paper. So, you draw it on one side, then the other side. It’s constantly shifting. That’s what’s on my back. But a bigger number of sides. Hence, it’s a polygon.”
“I don’t fully understand what you’re saying.”
“Of course, you don’t.” Unless their magic was represented by math.
“My lady?”
“Oh my god, Etienne, you’re lying to me. You know it’s a hyper-polygon! I’m guessing your magic is based on such representations in written form.”
He looked down into his ale and spoke softly, “The geas. The geas, I’m afraid.”
“Ah.” So, I was right. Their language of magic was represented in runes and numbers, but somehow Bechalle had stumped him and written in fourth dimensional code. This is fun. This is how I wanted to spend my weekend.
I continued, “I don’t think I can figure out what it means, not without a dictionary of some sort.” Except that I could. Or, did. At one point, the description, the rune, made sense to me. The tip of my tongue feeling would not go away. I drank another full cup slowly and deliberately over my tongue, to punish it. Poured more.
Just then I wished, more than anything else, I could drink myself into a hangover.
Math. Fourth dimensional math wasn’t easy, but it was magnitudes easier than fifth dimensional math. And I knew, I just knew, that I was dealing with fifth dimensional math and that it would remain hidden to me. At least Bechalle gave me that much. “Fucking Bechalle.”
“What’s that, my lady?”
“Ah, sorry. I broke my no swearing rule. How did he, Bechalle, how did he work this out, a symbol so complicated that you can’t understand it?”
“You are correct on that point. I still don’t know what it means. It appears to be a summoning, followed by a description of the being summoned, an entrapment and a transfer. That much, he admitted to you. But, as you pointed out, the actuality of it all is much, much more complicated.”
Was it possible that Bechalle, by carving this into my back, called me into this body months prior? If time was one of the dimensions, and multiplying them produced a smaller sum, maybe he did.
I didn’t like that thought, not even a little. One thing he was doing from the past: giving me a headache, making me wish I’d been the one to toss him out the window.
And all this made me wonder again if I was, indeed, in a simulation. Why would magic be math?
But why wouldn’t it? “Ok, Etienne, I gotta be honest with you. And I know, oh I know, you can’t tell me anything, so I’m just going to ignore my inner voice and rant at you for a moment.”
He smiled, waiting.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me that your magic can be described by math. Let alone polygons.”
“It isn’t, usually.”
“Be careful now, Etienne. The geas.”
“Yes, thank you.” His turn to drink too much ale. I refilled his cup.
“Alright. The crazy thing about the universe is that math is unreasonably effective at describing it.” An old saying where I was from. He looked at me strangely. “No, it is. I’ll show you some experiments sometime – like, we could drop balls of differing weights and you know what? They fall at the same speed. A feather in a vacuum – never mind – we could work out the gravitational constant from such experiments if we wanted. The thing is – magic. It breaks the rules. If magic, no math! But that doesn’t seem to be the case and anyways, I’m getting tipsy and drinking too much. That was the first time I’d looked at the drawings, you know.”
“The first time?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t bring myself to before. It was awful, Etienne.” I glanced at the center of the room, “Over there. He tied me up, naked, like an X. No! On an X! Beat me until I couldn’t move and then . . .” looked into my cup, staring at the brown, almost thick surface, downed that cup, too. I was drinking too fast. Maybe to stop my mind from itself.
He picked up the jug a little too easily, then set it back down and picked up another, with slightly more difficulty, as it was heavier, and refilled it for me. One of the few times a man has poured me, the princess, an ale. And the first time from a wizard. Life is strange.
“I should hate this room, you know. But I don’t. It’s like I was reborn. If I’m being honest, it’s the-” I caught myself about to say ‘second time I’ve been born,’ and listened to my shut up voice screaming at me, going instead with, “I was reborn through pain.”
“But also terrible, powerful magic.”
“Yes.”
“Princess Cayce, you can never use it.”
“I know.”
“But you are going to use it.”
“Yeah.”
“And when you do, I won’t be able to stop them.”
“You won’t join them?”
“I will succumb.”
“Succumb?”
“To my geas.”
“Oh.”
“You have my word.”
“Thank you, Etienne. That means a lot.”
Comments (0)
Please login or sign up to post a comment.