Worlds
an excerpt

This is what happened.

Four months ago, when the enemies came.

I was in the Silver Chamber, practising a spell, so I didn’t see them arrive. I can imagine them appearing like sparks between the peaks and swarming over the mountains in antlike shuddering swells, but I didn’t actually see it. I was blissfully unaware. While they poured into the village I was at peace, swirling deep golden liquid in my pale hands and tipping it into stone beakers. I became aware soon enough, though, when a sound like a scream cut into the room and pierced the air.

I ran outside. Not just one scream, but hundreds, clashing together and fighting for space. The strangers wore deep dark blistering red uniforms, and carried black swords that seemed to avoid rays of light; they were like vortexes or black holes and I couldn’t look at them properly. They had stone tablets affixed to their shields. The tablets had a kind of magic about them, I could sense it, but it wasn’t a kind I had ever come across before or understood

My eyes flickered across their subtle figures momentarily; I looked at them long enough to be afraid, long enough to see one of them slice Nadayal Lolar in half with his cold black sword. Then I ducked back into the Silver Chamber and shivered horribly. The cut had been quick and smooth, the sword slicing through her clenched body as though it was barely existent, as though she was nothing more than a curtain of skin. I had not seen her face, though her high screaming told me she had been terrified, but the angry spurts of blood that scattered out from her stomach stick with me even now.

I huddled in the Silver Chamber, trapped, knowing that it was only a matter of time before they came and found me. Outside, I could hear them shouting instructions. "Get in line! Don’t resist and you won’t be hurt. Get in line, follow us. We are taking you. Don’t move, or someone will get hurt; perhaps it will be your children. Stay still, stay still, we don’t want to harm you but we are perfectly content to do so." They spoke with strange accents and faraway voices, as if from somewhere unimaginable. I was full of horror; I knew I could not let them take me away, take me from Mataya. But they could kill me.

They could kill me, yes, and I knew they could because I had directed a silent spell at them as I stood in the doorway. It had met the nearest man’s skin and shuddered to a halt, then faded into non-existence. I could not touch them with magic. I was always the best, always the real mage in the village, but I couldn’t even scratch their perfect translucent white skin, could not so much as dent their silver-blue veins or mar their deep golden eyes.

I crawled under the table in the centre of the chamber, and, hidden by the silvery magic fibre cloth that drapes down over its edges, I crouched and mumbled a spell inside my head. Keep me safe, I thought, keep me hidden, keep me invisible.

Nobody else in the village could have done it. They would never have been good enough. It was a spell that required all the pigment in my skin to vanish, for my whole brain and body and clothes to fade into mist and air. My body resisted, my mind struggled against itself; it was so very unnatural. But I did it. I did it, and they did not. Maybe the reason I managed and they didn’t was simply that I always had better magic, better mental concentration than they did. Or perhaps it was because I was used to fading into the background. All I know is that I disappeared, while they were seen and taken.

I have no idea how long I was there. I sat there, trickling into dust and waiting desperately, waiting with no sense of time or place. There were fewer and fewer screams. Footsteps muffled themselves around the door. I assumed that they were getting into line as they had been ordered to. What else could they do?

I had to concentrate fiercely. I couldn’t let my mind wander or my layers of invisibility would peel away and leave me exposed to searching golden eyes.

It took a long time for them to start checking the buildings. I imagine that other people were hiding like me, in bales of straw or baking ovens or behind stacks of crystal bottles. They were all found though, and I know that because I searched for them everywhere all day after the soldiers left. But not me. They came into the Silver Chamber and examined it. One of them peered under the table and my dark grey eyes locked with his shadowy shining ones. But he did not see me; he straightened up and left. As he moved upwards, the stone tablet from his shield clattered to the floor, but he had heard a noise outside and was going to investigate; he didn’t notice. The tablet is still there, next to the table.

And finally, finally, I heard their steps vanishing into the future and out of my life. That wasn’t enough, of course; half deranged with fear I imagined that it was a trap specially for me. That was ridiculous, of course; they did not need to trick me specially, their swords could have cut me through the same as anyone. But I imagined they had set me up, I could not be sure that they had gone, so still I waited.

When finally I let the colour drain back into my skin I was thirsty and tired and scared. Sometimes I think that all those hours of invisibility left a permanent mark on me; that my skin will always have a kind of transparency and my face will always half-fade into darkness. I feel barely alive now, would not be at all surprised if people were to walk past me without looking. I feel part of the mountains, part of Mataya, or nothing at all. It was always true in a sense – I never was distinctive. My hair is floppy and the colour is brown, but a brown diluted with grey water. My eyes are grey too, and my skin greyish-white. I was awfully colourless even before. But now, without other people to affirm my identity, I feel it slipping away. Not that this means I want to get them back; not that this means I need them. I don’t. I never have. I can survive alone.

This was not foremost in my mind then. The sensation of returning colour was a warm one, like relief or firelight. I crawled forward and pushed the silver cloth out of the way. It slithered over my head like running water, cool and soothing. I felt calmer, but not calm. I got to my feet.

There are not really any words but I will say them anyway. It tested all my resolve and conditioning: I genuinely believed that I had not cared about any of them, but to see their bodies cut apart on the cobblestones…

There weren’t many. Obviously most people had gone along with it, obviously after these few had been cut down the others had been terrified, terrorised into submission. There were five dead. But worse than dead: I suppose the soldiers had wanted to make an example, and had sliced at the bodies with their swords more than once. At least, I hope they waited till the people had become bodies, I hope they did not cut out pieces of flesh while they were still breathing.

There were about two hundred people in Mataya. Now, of course, there is only one. With two hundred people you cannot expect to be friends with all of them, but you do end up knowing all of them by name and by sight. I could put names to all the dead. I recognised their faces, even though they were bloodied and scarred with sword memories. Their ears had been sliced off and one or two of them had eyes spurting with white fluid. I think the eyes had been crushed with ramming fists rather than engraved by swords. I could still see expression in them; angry or horrified or raging with death’s insanity. I turned away. I think I might have let out a sob, but I am sure that there was no more than one sob, that I hauled myself in, reined myself in, took breath after breath. I knew I had to calm down.

I am very calm now. I can even remember it with impunity; can see their battered faces again without sinking in a juddering heap to the floor. I feel cold towards them again now; I have recovered my distance. But I lost it for a moment then. I felt linked, connected, agonisingly close. I felt as if it was me who was dead and scattered with random incisions. Not now. I am fine now.

Four months have passed, and being alone has made me more divided than I was even before they left. But that kind of connection can’t be completely erased. It lingers in my flesh and the back of my head, gnaws at the inside of my lips and slides up and down in my throat. I expect one day it will all come back and I will scream myself into everlasting sleep. I expect it will lead to my breaking down in the future, but now I am quite capable of coping. There are no joins; how can there be when they are so far away? Out of sight, out of mind; it is not quite true but it is true enough.