And then there were the eyes.
All around the room, eyes glittered like faceted jewels embedded in the walls, and a few even adorned the ceiling, peering down at me from on high. Most of the eyes were closed, as though they were sleeping, but a few were open.
When I was a child, I’d thought the eyes were black, but they were actually a deep, dark blue with flecks of black sparkling in them, like the night sky the instant before it gave way to full, unrelenting dark. In fact, the eyes looked just like the sapphsidian jewels embedded in the stormsword in the Kent Corp weapons lab. Weird.
The unblinking sapphsidian eyes seemed to track my every movement, although I had never been able to tell if they were pleased by my presence or silently cursing the fact that I didn’t have enough magic to figure out what, if any, purpose or meaning they had.
In addition to the jeweled eyes, arched doors were also set into the curved wall. The closed doors were varying shapes and sizes—large, small, wide, narrow—and different sigils were carved into the dark stone. I studied the sigils, just like I always did, but I couldn’t make sense of them. Still, I knew what lay behind some of the doors.
Memories—my memories.
I stopped in front of the smallest door, which was just tall enough for a seven-year-old child to walk through. Unlike most of the others, which were closed, this door was wide open, with light, sound, and images flickering on the other side, as though I was watching a gossipcast on a holoscreen. But it wasn’t a gossipcast—it was one of the most miserable moments of my life.
I should be back on Corios. I should be part of the Regals, not rotting away on a useless planet trapped in a useless life with an utterly useless child.
My mother’s voice drifted out from the doorway, and I could see her through the opening, her back to me, her body tense, her fists planted on her hips. Beyond my mother, Liesl threw up her hands in frustration. They kept arguing, and the scene played out just as it had in real life the day the Imperium academy instructors had decided to stop training me.
I’d been hiding on the stairs above and peering down at my mother and Liesl through the railing slats, but the image flickering in the archway was different, as though I had been down in the same room with them. A quirk of my magic I could have done without. Having a crystal-clear view of my mother’s disgust only made it more painful to relive.
Especially since sometime that night, after I had cried myself to sleep for disappointing her yet again, my mother had left.
Liesl had claimed my mother would return soon, but I knew it was a lie, that my mother wasn’t happy with her life, and especially with me, and that she was never, ever coming back.
And it was all because of magic we didn’t have—anymore.
Supposedly, several generations ago, our ancestors had been powerful psions, a catchall term for anyone with extraordinary mental abilities like telepathy or telekinesis. From the stories Liesl had told me, our ancestors had been renowned spelltechs who had been dubbed Quills because they had painstakingly written down many of their formulas and inventions with real ink and feather quills on actual paper. Of course, the whole thing was probably a fairy tale, but I’d liked the stories so much that I’d taken Quill as my surname.
Those Quills had supposedly had a house on Corios where they had hobnobbed with the other Regal families. Sometimes I wondered if that was what I was seeing in my mindscape, the dilapidated castle that had once belonged to my ancestors, although I had no way to tell for sure.
But as time marched on, fewer and fewer Quills had been born with magic, and eventually, their power had seemed to vanish altogether—until my mother had been born.
As a teenager, Nerezza had demonstrated enough psionic potential for the Imperium instructors to offer her a position at a prestigious boarding school on Corios where highborn Regals trained to use their abilities to further their families’ fortunes. But my mother’s magic had seemingly petered out too, and she had been shipped back home—with a baby in her belly, courtesy of an ill-advised affair with some Regal boy.
And so the desperately unhappy portion of my mother’s life had begun in earnest. At least, these were the stories Liesl had told when she visited me at the Imperium academy on Temperate 7 where she’d placed me after my mother’s desertion. Given what I remembered of their arguments, I had no reason to doubt her. Besides, at least Liesl sent me candy and emails and even visited me a few times a year, unlike my mother, who I doubted ever gave me a second thought.
But perhaps the most ironic thing was that I was just like my mother—someone with just enough magic to be considered a psion, a seer in my case, but not enough power to be useful. At least, not in the traditional seer way of having grand visions of the future that would steer a House toward greater prosperity. But seeing how things worked and using that power to fix and make them better had gotten me a scholarship to an Imperium university, and then various lab-rat jobs until I’d started working at Kent Corp.
When I was younger, I’d tried to increase my power, tried to unlock whatever potential I might have, but nothing had ever worked. I’d read dozens of books on psionic theory, in hopes of figuring out what the eyes, flowers, and sigils in my mindscape really meant. But the problem with psionic abilities was just how little was truly known about them and how no one had ever been able to replicate them with science and technology.
To this day, psions remained anomalies, with powers that came from someplace or something deep inside them that no amount of gene editing, manipulation, or therapy could mimic. Which was why so many people, myself included, referred to those abilities as magic.
With their emphasis on marriages, alliances, and bloodlines, the Regals had managed to produce generation after generation of psions, but even some Regals were born without powers or found their abilities fading over time. To supplement that loss, Imperium academies were always searching for psionic children, outliers, to bring into the Regal fold. The Erztonians had a similar system in place. Despite their fanatical devotion to technology, even the Techwavers sought out psions.
A couple of years ago, I had finally given up trying to figure out my own limited magic. Being in my mindscape didn’t hurt me, and most of the time, I just ambled through the castle, admiring the furnishings upstairs, as grimy as they were.
Now I drew in a deep breath, letting the flowers’ sharp, sweet spearmint scent wash away the sour, bitter thoughts of my mother. I moved away from the child-size doorway, although the memories kept replaying inside, caught in the endless loop of my mind and my magic.
I tugged on some other doors, but they remained firmly locked, like always. Eventually, I reached a door in the back center of the room—the Door, as I thought of it, since it was different from all the others.
Blue flowers and black vines snaked up the wall and curled around this archway, forming a crude trellis over it. Unlike most of the other doors, which were plain and featureless, this one was quite beautiful, with intricate sigils carved into the dark stone. Sometimes, if I squinted hard enough, I could make out a few of the symbols—crescent moons and stars, mostly—although I had no idea what they meant.
I focused on the Door’s centerpiece, a large, upside-down, open eye. Just like all the other eyes, this one also looked like it was made of sapphsidian, and the jewel had always reminded me of a sapphire mixed with a black opal but with far more life and sparkle than just a flat, static gem.