Apologies for the delay. As it’s the end of the school year, I’ve had a lot of tests and almost no spare time. Anyway, sporking time!

Chapter 10 – The All-Seeing Eye

Therapass is trying to burn Kyja alive. No, really.

Kyja stood at the center of a whirling vortex of blue flame that danced and crackled about her entire body. Around her feet the white marble floor turned black and began to crack, while the air between herself and Master Therapass shimmered from the heat.

“Do you feel anything?” the wizard asked, his ivory and silver wand held out before him.

Kyja sighed and shook her head. Nothing at all. Not so much as a single bead of sweat.

“Dragon droppings,” he said, lowering his wand.

Nice curse, Therapass. The reasoning why he’s trying to set Kyja on fire is to see if he can find a way to make magic affect her (remember she can not only not use magic, but is immune to everything magical as well.) There’s a huge flaw to this plan. If Therapass’s fire could somehow affect Kyja, it would burn her. Badly. What was his plan if that did happen? Heal her with magic? Sounds risky, especially if fire was the only thing that could affect her and healing magics couldn’t. For a wise old man Therapass doesn’t seem to be all that intelligent.

The fire doesn’t do anything, and Kyja is very disappointed. (It reads like she wanted to be burnt just to prove that she actually does have magic.) She angsts for a bit about how she could have ten tons of magic manure dumped on her and would still smell perfectly fine. This raises a question about her defenses against magic. If ten tons of manure were dropped on anyone, it would kill them from the weight. So how would that affect Kyja? Would she still be killed, or is she somehow non-existent to magic?

Kyja whines about needing to find more ways to find the magic inside of her (as though a method like being burned alive would help solve her problem. It would only make more. Really, Savage. T_T) Therapass says there’s one more thing they can try. It’s a window called an aptura discerna.

Master Therapass placed his hands on either side of the window, his wrinkled face illuminated by its pink glow. “Most windows look out on the world. This window looks in. I sense that much of your unhappiness, little one, comes from your confusion about who you are and where you fit in. And I am to blame for most of that confusion.”

Really, Therapass? You sense that that’s the cause of her unhappiness? She complains non-stop that that’s the reason. Stop trying to sound mysterious and insightful. And you’re not mostly to blame for her confusion. Everyone in your society is, because they make her feel like an outcast. By what we’ve read so far, you’ve been nothing but kind to her. And please stop calling her little one. It comes off as condescension masquerading as affection.

The aptura discerna is essentially a window to the soul that “explores the depths of whoever gazes into its surface and displays what it finds.” Therapass tells Kyja that in order for the window to work, she has to cast aside all of her negative feelings, especially resentment. How this is going to bring out the magic inside her, I don’t know.

The window turns blood red as she recalls suddenly all the abuse she’d had to endure for being different. Therapass tells her to think of those who have been kind to her. She can think of only a few people- Therapass, Bella, the Goodnuffs, Anthor, the weapons master, Lady Jintette, a prophetess, and Jade, the seamstress. She’s known Therapass all her life, because he found her abandoned as a baby. Sounds a lot like Marcus’s past, doesn’t it?

Then Kyja is told to remember all the kind things she’s done for others. She thinks of different occasions, imagining the people she’s been good to in her head. Then she notices that their images have appeared in the window. She stares at the window, trying to see if there’s any magic in it. Therapass doesn’t give her any clues as to how she might see the magic, or if it would even be visible. It’s also strange that this window is working for her, given that nothing that uses magic can be used by or on her. So by all rights what she’s doing shouldn’t even work, unless she actually does have magic, in which case this should be obvious because she’s USING THE MAGIC WINDOW. Consistency!

Suddenly the window changes to show a boy whose “features were vaguely familiar, as if she’d glimpsed his face long ago, in a forgotten dream.”

As she watched, a skinny man with a length of cloth wrapped about his neck like a narrow scarf walked into view and pulled up the sleeve of the boy’s shirt. What Kyja saw there made her gasp in surprise. Standing out clearly on the boy’s arm was an image Kyja knew well. That exact same image was engraved on the amulet she wore about her neck- the amulet Master Therapass hard given her for her eighth birthday.

The view in the window shifted to show another man. Although he was dressed in the same type of clothing as the man with the scarf around his neck, Kyja knew at once that he was not like th mean or the boy. He was a monster in disguise.

She knew something else as well. The man wanted the boy, and unless something happened soon, the boy didn’t have long to live.

The window turns black, and Kyja finds herself being shaken by Therapass.

“Terrible danger,” he gasped, his eyes wide with fear. “They’ve found him. You could be next. You must go. Now!”

Just in case you didn’t guess, the boy she saw is Marcus. It’s kind of a decent way to end a chapter, because now we’re supposed to be wondering how Therapass knows Marcus and why Kyja is in danger.

Comment

  1. Danielle on 23 May 2012, 14:21 said:

    This reminds me of a story I wrote when I was twelve. There was a race of shapeshifters who were identified by birthmarks on their right shoulders that changed to reflect the last form they had taken. Several of them were supposed to be undercover. Fortunately, I realized that the whole scenario was one big gaping plothole and abandoned the story quickly.

    Savage, unfortunately, has no concept of plotholes. He covers them with tarps and hopes no one will notice.

  2. swenson on 23 May 2012, 22:01 said:

    The pity is that nobody in Kyja’s society has realized that she’s pretty well the most powerful one around. If everyone else relies on magic, she’s not at a loss, she’s at a gain! Let’s say a mugger or bandit wants to hold her up with magic. Too bad, she’s immune. Maybe a spell goes bad and everyone falls under a curse. No skin off her back. Maybe everyone contracts a horrible magic disease. Again, Kyja would be completely fine.

    Or like what if she became a bodyguard? A duke or king or whoever gets attacked by magic—Kyja just has to step in front of the spell (assuming they work that way) to block it.

    This is probably because I don’t know much about how the world works, but I’m failing to see why this is such a bad thing. You’d think someone would’ve thought of the benefits by now. (not Kyja, she’s pretty young after all, but Therapass or somebody should’ve recognized how powerful that makes her)

    Also, let me make a prediction: Therapass sends Kyja off with inadequate explanation of who the “him” is, who the “they” is that found him, why they would be after her as well, what the “terrible danger” is, where she should go, what she should do, or how she can protect herself (and presumably Marcus) against them. Instead, he yells NO TIME TO EXPLAIN and shoves her out into the wilderness with nothing but the bare minimum of supplies.

  3. Asahel on 23 May 2012, 22:18 said:

    While I must admit that I’m a fan of this particular reversal (instead of a special magic person in a non-magic world we have a special magic-immune person in a magic filled world), this angst is getting a little overdone. Ok, you don’t have magic and everyone else does. I understand that’s upsetting. But do you have any positive thoughts regarding the fact that you are immune to everyone elses’ power? No?

    SLAP

    Snap out of it!

  4. Mingnon on 24 May 2012, 07:04 said:

    “…The amulet Master Therapass hard given her for her eighth birthday.”

    “Kyja knew at once that he was not like th mean or the boy.”

    Were these really in the book? oAo

  5. LoneWolf on 24 May 2012, 12:41 said:

    Probably not, original typos are usually indicated by (sic).

    Anyway, the books seems to have some pacing issues. THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING ME!!!!

  6. Sweguy on 25 May 2012, 17:35 said:

    Interesting. I’m still holding up hopes for this book until something really awful comes up, but so for it has been pretty decent (in a very childish way). I just finished reading the hawkmistress!-sporking, and compared to it this is a golden mine. Hence my jolly good rogery-attitude.

  7. Danielle on 25 May 2012, 18:09 said:

    I just finished reading the hawkmistress!-sporking, and compared to it this is a golden mine.

    This is true. Kyja has yet to throw herself on her bed and cry because her immunity to magic has forced her adoptive parents to marry her off to an EVUL MISOGYNIST SUITOR.

    The plot holes in this story are big enough to drive a VW bus through, but at least all of the VW buses in this case are filled with friendly college freshmen….not angry lesbian hippies. :P

  8. Mingnon on 26 May 2012, 17:49 said:

    ‘Let me make a prediction: Therapass sends Kyja off with inadequate explanation of who the “him” is, who the “they” is that found him, why they would be after her as well, what the “terrible danger” is, where she should go, what she should do, or how she can protect herself (and presumably Marcus) against them. Instead, he yells NO TIME TO EXPLAIN and shoves her out into the wilderness with nothing but the bare minimum of supplies.’

    I figured Limyaael might have something to say about this. Which I would also agree is yet another cliche that needs to be squashed, stat:

    “Meanwhile, characters like Jordan’s Moiraine, Goodkind’s Zed, and other “wise mentors” in fantasy run about holding knowledge that could help their students secret, because God forbid the protagonist, and thus the audience, find out about the information when it is actually useful. No, the Dark Lord’s soldiers have to attack first, the protagonist has to show off magic that nearly gets her or someone else killed, and their lives have to be torn to shreds and the people who raised them revealed to be only adoptive parents, before the mentor releases even a scrap of information. And even then, is it something like, “Here is the magic you have and how to control it?” No. Instead we get, “Here is the history of the world going back 6000 years.”

    Most of the time, the only reason that the mentor doesn’t tell the protagonist that he’s really her grandson, or that he’s really the savior of the world, or what he has to do to control his powers, is because of the author’s ill-advised attempt to set up a mystery plot. Oooh, we must save the knowledge for later in the book and a Dramatic Revelation!

    Bah. That goes against the primary responsibility the mentor usually has (keeping the protagonist alive), because, stumbling blind through the dark, he can’t protect himself or other people as well. And a teacher who hides information from his students and then blames them for failing the test because they lack it is automatically a bad teacher.”

  9. LoneWolf on 27 May 2012, 01:52 said:

    Yeah, let’s see the extent to which Therapass suffers from Wiseoldmentorism.